It is strange to think about how you can tell the history of the Americas via the banana, but not one I’ve ever tasted. The Gros Michel, the fruit that drove the banana industry, stopped being sustainable in the 1950s. At some point, no one who tasted this world-changing banana will be alive.

All that will be left is the representation. Banana flavoring is modeled off the Gros Michel, not the Cavendishes I’ve eaten. I have tasted (and hated) a representation of the Gros Michel hundreds of times, although I’ll never eat the genuine article.

That’s how life feels right now, like a representation with an extinct antecedent. Whatever “order” many of us thought we could ascribe to the universe is gone, and may never have existed at all. At least, in my lifetime, it hasn’t appeared to exist in any sincere form.

In the Mouth of Madness, John Carpenter’s trippy 1994 horror movie, is about fiction and truth. In the movie, John Trent, an insurance investigator pulled straight from a noir, is hired to find missing author Sutter Cane, a publishing powerhouse with Stephen King popularity whose works have been said to drive people insane. Sent off with Linda, Cane’s femme fatale editor, John finds himself unraveling, as fiction and reality seem to switch places. As Linda says to John, “[Sutter Cane’s work] is not real from your point of view, and right now reality shares your point of view… A reality is just what we tell each other it is.”

The clip of that moment is available on YouTube, so I’ve watched it quite a bit. The movie, to me, feels prescient. It has things to say about how we co-create our reality and how we use culture to do it; how all-encompassing conspiracy can take over.

If we now live within fiction, why is it so hard to imagine our way out? This should, in theory, be the easiest thing to do.

But, personally, I am unable to see beyond current representations.

For months now, I have been struggling my way through The Order of Things by Michel Foucault. On the hunt for new ideas, it is best to know some old ones, I figure. The Order of Things is an archeology of thought. Foucault is trying to establish that the way we organize our ideas speaks to the ideas themselves. I surmise (although, remember, I truly am struggling, so don’t take this as gospel), you cannot think beyond the structure of your ideas.

He writes of hieroglyphics:

When a people possess nothing but a figurative form of writing, its politics must exclude history, or at least all history other than pure and simple conservation.

He argues figurative forms can only represent the reality already agreed upon. Through figurative alphabets, one will only be able to disseminate new ideas when the figurative representation is established by general agreement. By then, the idea is no longer new.

I don’t know that I believe him, but there’s some compelling evidence to be had.

Much of the internet uses a figurative alphabet, one of memes and emojis. There are memes to communicate making a last-minute or wild decision (of the chaotic or emphatic variety depends on context), masking the pain of loneliness, or to express pure confusion. It is a language of limited emotions, only ones which we have already named. It is perhaps not surprising, then, how much of the internet’s memes, its shared alphabet, originate with white supremacists.

Fascism is an idea which thrives in representation, but tends to disgust in reality. As Judith Butler (themselves the object of a meme) puts it in Who’s Afraid of Gender?, the authoritarians among us attack a “phantasm,” rather than a reality. The authoritarian binds up many concepts into gender. The authoritarians act “as if to be exposed to a word or thought is to be penetrated against one’s will.”

In Male Fantasies, Volume 1 Klaus Theweleit argues much of fascism comes out of male fears of dissolution: “The monumentalism of fascism would seem to be a safety mechanism against the bewildering multiplicity of the living. The more lifeless, regimented, and monumental reality appears to be, the more secure the men feel. The danger is being-alive itself.”

A representation—of gender or the world—is, to those who fear dissolution, less frightening than reality. A representation has clear boundaries, easy answers. It exists outside you and cannot change your interior. It cannot upset your frame of reference. Representations can only repeat what has already been established. By immersing yourself in representation, you bypass the complications and nuances of actual life; you avoid those nuances impinging on your current understanding of self.

How can you create a vision of tomorrow using only the representations of today? I would argue one can’t. Foucault may be right (and Sylvia Wynter righter still) that our ideas are hemmed in by societal forces. As Wynter puts it: “We are, as intellectuals, the agents of [the status quo’s] formal elaboration.” I imagine the same is true for artists, no matter how much we wish to clearly see tomorrow.

In Foucault’s and Carpenter’s work there is the writer’s self-flattering bias that writing, itself, can change reality. Sutter Cane brought about an ancient evil with his books, switching reality and fiction for those who read them. The alternate perspective being that of Vonnegut who said the power of art during the Vietnam War was that of a “custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”

I suspect the answer is somewhere in the middle.

I also suspect the answer will not be streamed. The internet, born from a U.S. military project, never moved far past its own history. It has served as a galvanizing and organizing force for fascists internationally. You can trace right-wing influences across many high-profile shooters’ manifestos. They may not have been organized in the traditional sense, but the internet organized them nonetheless.

Through the internet, far-right representations (mainly of misogyny, many derived from porn) have filtered into mainstream culture. By taking them on, mainstream culture reifies these representations, and reiterates the boundaries of our current conceptions of self, society, and nature.

To see tomorrow, we must move beyond representation, into action and pure emotion. Fascism is incomprehensible and to try to make sense of it adds legitimacy it does not deserve.

If we live in the unreasonable fiction of fascism, perhaps we can only see tomorrow by leaving reason, such as it is, behind. Reason, after all, is just another representation of a reality that I, personally, find intolerable.

Our demands must be “unreasonable.” Our desires must expand beyond what is currently accepted. We must immerse ourselves not in representation but in uncertainty, in the spaces between what is known. It is only in the gaps in our collective knowledge and understanding that we can discover new things which we will one day be able to represent.