Rationality, Irrationality and a-Rationality: The Legacy of the Frankfurt School on the Debate in Contemporary Society

Still nowadays Frankfurt School inspires a variety of insights for social theorizing.The crucial wound in modernity embedded in the division between rational and irrational is still to be recovered and probably one of the most rich and promising insights for contemporary social conditions.In Eros and Civilization Marcuse writes that increased progress seems to be linked to an “increasing restriction of freedom” and included in this repressive form is the Western distinction between reason and emotions, between rationality and irrationality. Moreover, in One-Dimensional Man: “What could be more rational than the suppression of individuality in the mechanization of socially necessary but painful performances”(Marcuse, 2007:1). On closer inspection, in contemporary society,emotions are not only what clearly distinguishes the human being from the machine, but also what seems to be most reliable in social relationships.Rationality in many relationships, especially institutional ones, has an uncanny aura of manipulation in contemporary societies, from which emotions seem unscathed. Emotions feed on memory and experience.Moreover, emotions are social and political facts,because they are inscribed in the memory of the body and therefore give rise to forms of acting.In a society dominated by rationality or the exactness of machines,emotion becomes a form of rationality that is part of social issues to be faced.

How do social phenomena manifest contemporary contradictions by incorporating previously unseen forms of dialectics between reason and emotion?

In this context, the role of social sciences is to investigate the jointly rational and emotional nature of the social processes in which the Frankfurt School was already strongly engaged and to grasp their potential future repercussions. This article intends to take up the Frankfurt School's observation on those collective activities and practices that through expressive media convey forms of resistance and social critique, revealing their crucial importance for understanding contemporary society and its dynamics of change.