Science Fiction

Chapter I

One imagines that one can escape a category by collapsing it, but if one tries to collapse the category, the roof falls on one's head. There a person is, then, having not escaped the category, but having only changed its architecture. Once it was a category with a roof, now it is a category in which everyone is buried in the rubble made of what once was a roof over their heads.


Chapter II

In the history of all hitherto existing societies there is fantasy and there is fantasy. The unpredictable, heaving plurality that is not really men is no fantasy. But the category of men provides the same show every day. Someone says "Would you be better if the show were a little different?" And you say yes yes yes yes yes yes, you are merely bored, you tell him, you are weary, you tell him, you have seen the show so many times, but it's not really too bad, maybe just a few changes—

But you can see some other things, like what they say is a stage is the actual heaving everything of the human everyone. It requires no separate class of actors upon it.

You watch the form of men as they act with each other in ritualized opposition to create the illusion that the actors upon the stage are in fact the scene. They've been playing at the same struggle for a long time: to keep the struggle theatrical fixes power.

But there is another, real struggle: it's not between actor and actor. It's between the actors and the stage.

From Garments Against Women (Ahsahta Press, 2015). Reprinted with permission of the author.