The ‘double bind theory’ idescribes a communication form of simultaneous contradictory messages. In the communicated message, one or several underlying energies flow, pointing in different or even opposite directions. For example, a parent tells their child that they are loved, but at the same time communicates rejection through body language – such situations may trigger anxiety, schizophrenia or paralysing stupor. Postcolonial philosopher Gayatri Spivak borrowed the terminology of the ‘double bind’ to describe our contemporary situation as a painful aftermath of the fundamental paradox of universalism and colonialism of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Enlightenment movement,, promised universal freedom, equality and emancipation through reason. Antithetically, we know today that it also brought about slavery, genocide and other crimes against humanity. To describe this, Spivak speaks of Enlightenment as the legacy that shapes both colonised and colonisers: just as colonisation was justified by the Enlightenment, Enlightenment thinking enabled the colonised to turn against their oppressors and fight for their freedom. For the time being, there is no escape from this dialectic dilemma - only the task of coming to terms with it.

In the face of contemporary European foreign and security policies or election results undoubtedly fascist dynamics are constitutive aspects of European history and as such inscribed in our societies. While the West is deeply implicated in current atrocities against humanity, these convolutions of historical narratives come to the fore – their “productive undoing is a difficult task” (Gayatri Spivak).
AFTER REASON invites artists and thinkers to address the uncomfortable experience of the double bind. Theoretical discussion will accompany artistic practice to shed light on the relationship between current racisms, (settler) colonialism and a universalism-debate that urgently needs an update. To what extent are universalist ideas conceivable today with a postcolonial perspective and what does productive criticism look like in a post-identity-politics world? We will delve into decolonial practices, speculations and worldmaking in order to practice an “imaginative activism” as one of the last available tools against polarising discourses and the discomfort of history.

From October 17th-19th different artists and philosophers will jointly come together for a weekend of discussions, performances, workshops, collective dinners and readings. The program is a context proposal for the performance work One Drop by Sonja Lindfors that traces the historical entanglements of capitalism, coloniality and imperialism and how these form contemporary Western aesthetics. The piece offers a decolonial re-reading by orchestrating a speculative summoning, an autopsy of the Western stage and an exorcism of ghosts of the past. The event will be opened by postcolonial philosopher Nikita Dhawan will speak about her newly published book Rescuing Enlightenment from Europeans reconciling queer and feminist postcolonial theory with ideas of Enlightenment. Among other, Brussels queer BIPoC collective Fatsabbats and She-Dandy Sofia Bempeza will be giving workshops on moving and writing practices as a way to carve out counters-spaces together and cultural researcher Ana Texeira Pinto will present their project Fascism, Unreason and the Paradox of Modernity and link this to thoughts about the current rise of the far right and its aggrieved rhetoric of masculinity.