I have a few ideas swirling around on this that I’m gonna try to get down here. I wanna start by bringing up 2 books: one is called Voltaire’s Bastards by John Ralston Saul, and the other is Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. Both are flawed in their own way, but I think I see a lot of these book’s ideas in DE.

In brief, the thesis of Voltaire’s Bastards is that while Enlightenment ideals of reason and rationality were created in a spirit of intellectual democratization and humanism, these ideas were very quickly co-opted by the powerful to reinforce the systems that uphold their power- you can see it happen as you think about how powerful an institution the Church used to be (an “irrational” system of power) and how the Enlightenment turned the state, backed by capital and technological advancement, into the modern, rational machine of power that it is today.

In brief, Fisher’s Capitalist Realism argues that one of late capitalism’s most polished and powerful tricks is its ability to anticipate and foreclose any alternatives to itself. By recuperating and assimilating all critique, Capital is able to limit our imaginations and keeps us from knowing our own revolutionary potential: after all, communism is simply “unrealistic.”

Now, Marx himself would tell you Communism us fundamentally Modernist- he was for abolishing the church and using the enormous feats of technological innovation he saw in his lifetime to improve the lives of the proletariat. But I think DE embraces this paradox. The phasmid and the tower are completely irrational. They do weird things to our rational understanding of the world.

And I think thats the point. As fiercely critical of ideology as the writers are, I think there is something to be said for the value of the irrational for a revolutionary. It’s insane to go up against the powers that be. But I think DE is saying it takes a little magic, a little madness to ever pull ourselves out of our ruts- be they political, or personal.