The Age Of Unreason

Below, find a new commentary from Notes From Disgraceland’s Bjarne Knausgaard who regular readers will recall pens some of the best political/economic color around.

25. VII 2018

The village of Hollywood was planned according to the notion

 people in these parts have of heaven. In these parts

 they have come to the conclusion that God

 requiring a heaven and a hell, didn’t need to

 plan two establishments but

 just the one: heaven. It

 serves the unprosperous, unsuccessful

 as hell.

(Bertolt Brecht, Hollywood Elegies)

According to Foucault, the basis for civil society is the idea of  a redistribution/ recentering of the governmental reason. In pre-modernity, the idea of regulating, measuring, and so limiting the indefinite exercise of power was sought in the wisdom of the person who would govern. Wisdom implied governing in accordance with the order of things, with the knowledge of human and divine laws. But, as modernity entered the historical scene, roughly from XVI century on, exercise of power was no longer adjusted in accordance with wisdom, but according to calculation of force, relations, wealth and factors of strength. The modern forms of government technology could be described as control of government by pegging it to rationality.[1] Modernity, since the nineteenth century, is marked by the emergence of four modes of governmental rationalities, which in subsequent two centuries overlap, lean on each other, challenge each other, and struggle with each other. They represent art of government according to: 1) truth, 2) rationality of the sovereign state, 3) rationality of economic agents and 4) rationality of the governed[2].

It is the fourth mode — the rationality of the governed as the regulating principle of the rationality of the government – that was responsible for the rise of neoliberalism and Homo Oeconomicus as the new political subject and, with it, the emergence of economics as the ideological metalanguage in the second half of the twentieth century.

The trap of rationality and the search for unwisdom

Neoliberalism disseminates market values into every sphere of human activity. People are seen as specs of human capital which needs to appreciate and get reinvested by making proper choices (mate, education, job,…). It provides direction without meaning in directionless environment of postmodernity. (Wendy Brown)

Rationality is a wonderful thing. However, when coupled with competition and when the two are elevated to the highest principle of human existence – when everything in life is reduced to rational decisions in a competitive environment – it becomes a spectacularly efficient mechanism of exclusion. Sooner or later, the symbiosis of the two create a winner-takes-all environment where every failure to make a right decision has dire consequences.

With competition, the number of right paths is shrinking and the number of wrong ones proliferates. Every wrong turn is punitive and potentially fatal. In the kingdom of rationality, bad decisions become self-reinforcing. One wrong turn reduces subsequent maneuvering space and forces another suboptimal choice until there are only wrong choices, all the good and rational ones had been taken by competitors.

The number of those who have failed rationality test grows exponentially with time. They are the excess of population. They hate rationality passionately and resent reality they have been served. The real problem is the unforgiving aspect of progress, the persistent depletion of the safety net and the ultimate absence of cushion. Yet, the excluded are lured into an ideological trap that supports the narrative of systematic removal of that very safety net and, in that process, they continuously undermine themselves. They prefer anything, any alternative to what they have now, no matter how elusive, dubious, and unpalatable the reasoning behind it.

This self-sabotage is at the base of the frustration of a large segment of the population. From the political side this is perceived as an irresistible source of rage capital that is begging to be deployed and reinvested. For the excluded, refusal to yield to the forces of reason is the ultimate act of resistance, a sign of desire to liberate themselves from the tyranny of rationality.

The great U-turn and the politics of performative speech acts

Performative utterances are sentences which not only describe a given reality, but also change the social reality once they are pronounced, like “I pronounce you husband and wife”, or “The court finds the defendant guilty”.

When the number of those who have failed the rationality test is so large that there is no more place for them in the enclosure of prosperity and when they begin to present a significant political body whose voice can be heard in the ballot box, rationality, as a way of governing, has already exhausted itself – its toxic effects have taken over. At that point, the excluded will seek to abandon reason and, with a dash of nostalgia and a help of identity politics, elect a new prince. And this prince will be unlike any other before him. He will govern with unwisdom, and will have the courage to wear his unreason unabashedly as an ultimate virtue. He will create a new order of things, define new reality, and construct the world of unreason with rules that only he and his base will understand. The new fictions will become their articles of faith. Facts and truth will no longer have their old values and the wish for a coherent fictitious world will be satisfied.

In the kingdom of unreason, power will derive from a way of using language rather than from a system of ideas[3]. The first phase of the uprising will consist of a linguistic revolution. Performative speech acts — the pronouncements that change reality by their mere utterance — will enter the vernacular and shape political and social reality. This is where self-intoxication begins. By repeating and ritually solidifying lies, those who tell them and hear them may, after a while, embrace them as articles of faith. As soon as falsehood has become part of a group identity, it generates new obligations which can be neglected only at risk of showing weakness or, worse still, a treasonous attitude. [4]

In a strange twist of fate, emancipation, which marks transition from wisdom to rationality and gives rise to enlightenment as the public use of reason, in the late stage of neoliberalism, it creates conditions for its own demise that lead to its forced unwind and a historical U-turn. With the rise of unreason, populism takes over and becomes neoliberalism’s counterpart in its afterlife.

Unreasonable people cannot be governed by reason. They require a leader who appeals to their irrational side and who, therefore, has to display unreason himself. A different principle is required for governing such masses, a mirror image of neoliberalism’s “governing through freedom”. Unreasonable people are governed through unfreedom.

But this, like any other, detachment from reality cannot be anything but short-lived. The question is not if, but when. The leader will sit in his big car, get on a highway and drive against the traffic. His car will have only one pedal: gas. Like his followers, he believes that everyone else is driving in the wrong direction. Many drivers will move to the shoulders to avoid the collision, but, as he continues to accelerate, there will be a slow-moving trailer trucks that will not be able to maneuver fast enough and, at the end, the fanaticism and the speed will consume their creator. There ain’t no way around it.

[1] Michele Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978—1979, Picador (2010)

[2] Ibid.

[3] Albrecht Koschorke, Adolf Hitlers “Mein Kampf”: Zur Poetik des Nationalsozialismus, Berlin (2016)

[4] Ibid.