By Captain Ruffles
Particularly Esteemed Contributor
Between Here, There, and Everywhere: Fragments of Disorganized Heterotopia
*Best read aloud, preferably to your overworked advisor or a STEM major who hates reading*
You aren’t the person you say you are. You aren’t the person you see in your head. The person you craft in the private corners of your own mind. You go to your parties, your classes, your social events, and you are always a shell of the person you crafted in the corners of your consciousness.
You wonder why. Why can’t the person in here - the brilliant, witty, effortlessly charming person in here - why can’t they be out there? Why is it that the ‘me’ in that room, the ‘me’ talking to him, to her, to them, is drafted out of every offhand cliche I ever saw on sitcom reruns?
That’s the pain isn’t it? Witnessing yourself fumble in real-time, witnessing yourself fuck-up your being in real time as you are both completely aware and yet so utterly helpless.
Why? Why these constructions? Con-struction. Con.
Lines, labels, categories, centers, peripheries, provenance. What would a border-less world look like? A world where we aren’t trapped in the dream of the Other. The author is Dead, and we have killed him.
Who’s we? We, two letters, one syllable, a word, a floating signifier of an imagined community.
It isn’t the mere cliché that we are all products of a society. A capitalist society. A racist, sexist, cisgender, heteronormative, ableist, capitalist society. We are torn asunder into fragmented pieces of an inculcated, ineffectual, ideologically bound state apparatus. It is the fact of existence that cannot be overturned. It can’t be overturned. Can’t be overturned. Can’t be. Can’t.
Words are all that stands between us and the next fall of society. Communication rests on this vague symbolic network of signs. Signs leading nowhere. Signs meaning nothing. Sign-posting oblivion.
Are we merely caught in cycles of our own making? But every repetition, no matter how precise, is not a stagnant action but an opening into a field of multiplicity. A rhizome of radical freedom.
Didn’t anyone ever tell you? Under the corner of the edge of the cliff of despair, lies the boundless brevity of being.
This is the truth. That there is none. Between 1 and 0 lies Infinity.
1+1= 2… but maybe not…
This is the founding myth, the pure ideology, the con-struction of cap-italism.
End.