These are also times when many are gradually coming to the realization that reason may well have reached its limits. Or, in any case, it is a time when reason is on trial – we are, in other words, in a sort of Dark Enlightenment. Reason is a faculty we used to recognize in humans and in humans alone. In the Western tradition we have all, willingly or not, become the inheritors of reason, always seen as the highest of all human faculties, the one that opened the doors to knowledge, wisdom, virtue and, most importantly, freedom. Although unequally redistributed among them, it was the prerogative of humans alone. It distinguished the latter from other living species. Thanks to their superior capacity to exercise this faculty, humans could claim to be exceptional. Today, reason is on trial in two ways. First, reason is increasingly replaced and subsumed by instrumental rationality, when it is not simply reduced to procedural or algorithmic processing of information. In other words, the logic of reason is morphing from within machines and computers and algorithms. The human brain is no longer the privileged location of reason. The human brain is being “downloaded” into nano-machines. An inordinate amount of power is gradually being ceded to abstractions of all kinds. Old modes of reasoning are being challenged by new ones that originate through and within technology in general and digital technologies in particular, as well as through the top-down models of artificial intelligence. As a result, techne is becoming the quintessential language of reason. Furthermore, instrumental reason, or reason in the guise of techne is increasingly weaponized. Time itself is becoming enveloped in the doing of machines. Machines themselves do not simply execute instructions or programs. They start generating complex behaviour. The computational reproduction of reason has made it such that reason is no longer, or is a bit more than, just the domain of human species. We now share it with various other agents. Reality itself is increasingly construed via statistics, metadata, modelling, mathematics. Second, many are turning their back to reason in favour of other faculties and other modes of expression and cognition. They are calling for a rehabilitation of affect and emotions for instance. In many of the ongoing political struggles of our times, passion is clearly trumping reason. Confronted with complex issues, feeling and acting with one’s guts, viscerally rather than reasoning, is fast becoming the new norm.

Mbembe