How Collective Dreams Can End the Sleep of Reason
WITHIN ENLIGHTENMENT philosophy, the concept of reason, or “sense-making” if you will, tends to be divided into two narrow categories: theoretical reason and practical reason. Other types of possible reasoning – for example, narrative, expressive, interpersonal or compositional reasoning – don’t really factor into the western story of rationality. Some forms of reasoning, like the aforementioned interpersonal, narrative and expressive, are bundled into rationality’s opposite: irrationality.
This has ramifications for how Marxists view rationality. The theorists of the Frankfurt School – Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, et al – clearly intuited the lineage of what contemporary fascists call “the dark enlightenment.” In ways distinct from one another they also picked apart the relationship between instrumental rationality as a logic of capitalism and capitalist capacity to devolve into fascism. But while they were writing about capitalist rationality’s relationship to fascist irrationality in the US and Europe, Martinican surrealist poet Aime Cesaire was working through similar themes in his essay “Discourse On Colonialism.”
While Adorno and Horkheimer were working out the relationship between capitalist techno-science and instrumental rationality, while Habermas was arguing that instrumental rationality had now become a monological totalizing ideology, while Marcuse was arguing that rationality led to irrationality and then that the instantiation of irrationality is rationality, and while Walter Benjamin was giving us a reverse warning that “mystical auras” were also a site of fascist power, Cesaire was arguing that the technologics of capitalist primitive accumulation had led to the destruction of the global south. To Cesaire, fascism was just the return home of the violent logic of dispossession. Rationality’s dual character, being both reason and its own monstrous shadow, at the very minimum complicates its liberatory potential.
Today, we see liberals meme-ing about the absurdity of the Trumpist far-right, but liberal complicity with the detention camps at the US border goes undiscussed. QAnon, a movement of a few million people who believe that the United States is run by Hollywood pedophiles who traffic children and get high off of their blood, is perhaps the most cartoonish figure of right-wing unreason. Though that movement is now fracturing, their existence points to how unhinged politics has become. The liberal clamor for a return to “rational debate” has become, and will remain, absolutely relentless. Centrism itself is being pushed to its own level of absurdity.
But if capitalist rationality itself is the font of such delusions then what is the way forward? Can forms of socialist reasoning be developed to combat capitalism? What would that look like? How do we deal with Benjamin’s insight into the fascistic power of “the aura” and the theatrical aspects of fascist mass delusion? What I would like to do in in the following is tease out some of these problems, particularly those raised by Adorno and Césaire.
In The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer addressed how the rationality of contemporary capitalist technoscience is an ordering towards the desired end of controlling nature. This is best summed up with their comment “enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized.” In other words, fear of nature, fear of the untamed, fear of women, of colonized. Marcuse hits on the core of Marx’s argument (albeit coming at it sideways) when he says that calculations of use values and exchange values reduce life to the production of surplus value. Césaire, meanwhile, describes the means and logic of colonialism as a precursor to capitalism.
I hear the storm. They talk to me about progress, about “achievements,” diseases cured, improved standards of living.I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out.They throw facts at my head, statistics, mileages of roads, canals, and railroad tracks.I am talking about thousands of men sacrificed to the Congo-Ocean. I am talking about those who, as I write this, are digging the harbor of Abidjan by hand. I am talking about millions of men torn from their gods, their land, their habits, their life-from life, from the dance, from wisdom.
This still plays out today. Black arts and culture, Black minds and souls, are permitted to express themselves in ways that are inoffensive to white supremacy. This thereby allows the ruling class to forget racially organized exploitation. In other words, Black literature might be permissible, but Black lives aren’t. In this way, capitalism is once again playing both sides. It owns rationality and produces and controls the spirit of cultural resistance while disavowing the barbarism it produces. It also reincorporates these expressions into its utilitarian logic. Whether it’s the Belgians’ use of the hands of Congolese people as currency or the exoneration of Nazi scientists or investing in obscene displays of militarized police violence, so long as it can produce or at least protect surplus value, barbarism can be recuperated.
This has enormous impact on artistic expression. Rationality tends to be sutured to the concept of realism, so instrumental rationality in particular presupposes a proper epistemological mapping of the territory of “the real,” for the goal of controlling it. Mark Fisher’s idea of “capitalist realism” describes the totalizing phenomenon, that form of aesthetic and intellectual dominance.
Realism has a role in disciplining insurgent populations. Instead of realist forms of art (including revolutionary ones) that we’ve seen through history, that seek to cut through capitalist mystification in order to see things as they really are, realist forms have become disciplinary. Through realism, capitalists can show off the violence done to us as a reminder of their future plans for violence.
The other problem is that reality under capitalism, especially in the US, already looks like a parody. This robs us both of the ability to parody and to develop work with gravitas. How do you describe in earnest a society where Steak-umm puts out radical tweets in support of Black Lives Matter, and where Teen Vogue is the most prominent revolutionary voice, where Donald Trump is Donald Trump and where his opponent Joe Biden’s campaign slogan is “No more malarkey”? How do you describe a world where a portion of the population sees disease prevention as tyranny while cities are shrouded in tear gas over BLM protesters, and while QAnon followers are elected to national office?
If we are saying then that critical irrealism is the answer to this, then how do we account for conspiracy groups like, for example, QAnon? Are they just a form of right-wing irrealism, or conservative irrealism? How is its logic any different from, say, the surrealists?
I would argue that QAnon is not an irrealist project at all, but actually a hyper-rationalist one. Its claim that cosmopolitan elites are drinking the blood of children isn’t any less rational than, say, requiring toddlers to defend themselves in court against deportation – which, it should be born in mind, people argue for all the time in the United States. QAnon is in fact a rationalizing project. It makes arguments. It inverts the scientific method by starting with a conclusion and combing the world for confirming evidence. It operates through extreme pattern recognition. It’s a deductive puzzle with no answer, where people are just thrilled and exhilarated to be engaged in a cooperative project.
If Adorno and Horkheimer describe instrumental rationality as a gigantic analytic judgment project, then grand conspiracy projects certainly fit that bill. That’s why proponents of the conspiracy theory refer to themselves as “researchers,” that their common refrain is “do the research.” QAnon, therefore, isn’t grounded at all in irrealism. It’s grounding itself in rationality and then twisting towards its aims. Instead of mapping its terrain accurately, we end up with a map that replaces the terrain. It is a kind of cult-like rationality that seduces and distorts. This is what I call rational stupefaction.
The left isn’t immune to rational stupefaction. We’re not immune to arguments that rely on pattern recognition, weak association, and confirmation bias. I would argue that critical irrealism is a way to counteract rational stupefaction. Instead of tracing patterns to jump to conclusions, we can take the strangeness of capitalist realism and reorganize its trash and its monsters into something new.
Writers like Cesaire were attracted to surrealism’s life-giving potential, its democratization of brilliance, how it made the comfortable uncomfortable, how it broke down binaries and produced new syntheses. Against the rationalist nightmare of colonialism and capitalism, 20th century Black surrealism argued for a commitment to the marvelous, and to dreaming a collective future.
I’ll end with a quote from Suzanne Césaire, a surrealist writer and theorist who is less well-known in part because of her social reproductive tasks as Aimé Césaire‘s wife.
Millions of Black hands, across raging clouds of world war, will spread terror everywhere. Roused from a long benumbing torpor, this most deprived of all people will rise up, upon plains of ashes.Our surrealism will then supply them the leaven from their very depths. It will be time finally to transcend the sordid contemporary antimonies… Colonial idiocies will be purified by the welding arc’s blue flame. The mettle of our metal, our cutting edge of steel, our unique communions – all will be recovered.Surrealism, tightrope of our hope.
Holly Lewis is the author of The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection (2016), part of the editorial board of Spectre journal, and an associate professor of philosophy at Texas State University.