Abstract
The crisis of the European Union is explained to us as a political crisis, as an economic crisis, and as a humanitarian crisis. These descriptions are accurate, but they seem to bypass a more structural crisis that underlies them: the crisis of the imagination. In art discourse it is a reoccurring tendency to describe the importance of art in a political sense in terms of the imagination. If we cannot imagine a different future, how could we ever act upon such future politically? In this line of reasoning, artistic imagination might even precede political action. But there seems a second dimension to the crisis of the imagination that is less often invoked, namely the lack of imagination when it comes to understanding how devastating our present actually is, how little change the stakeholders of our reality are willing to accept, no matter how many alternative imaginations we confront them with, and no matter how “realistic” or “democratic” these alternatives might be.
Highlights
The crisis of the European Union is explained to us as a political crisis, as an economic crisis, and as a humanitarian crisis
The other side of the dichotomy is defined by the Remain camp, led by the Eurocratic elite, who propose the continuation of what they consider to be the proven formula of brutal austerity politics, in the guise of liberal democratic reform
In order to reclaim not our borders but our political imagination, it seems essential to reject both options and stand firm on the demand of a third, fourth, or fifth option to come. Both the Leave and Remain camps address the crisis of the European Union, either through a prolongation of the present (Remain) or as a return to a mythical national sovereign past (Leave)
Summary
The crisis of the European Union is explained to us as a political crisis, as an economic crisis, and as a humanitarian crisis. There seems a second dimension to the crisis of the imagination that is less often invoked, namely the lack of imagination when it comes to understanding how devastating our present is, how little change the stakeholders of our reality are willing to accept, no matter how many alternative imaginations we confront them with, and no matter how “realistic” or “democratic” these alternatives might be This dual crisis of the imagination—a lack of imagination to understand our disastrous present as much as to project our desired future—is best illustrated through the Brexit dichotomy. In order to reclaim not our borders but our political imagination, it seems essential to reject both options and stand firm on the demand of a third, fourth, or fifth option to come Both the Leave and Remain camps address the crisis of the European Union, either through a prolongation of the present (Remain) or as a return to a mythical national sovereign past (Leave). How can we stand firm in the face of Brexit and say, “I prefer not to,” while instead engaging a propositional future—the third option, or “third space”?2 Is a Parallel Union, a Transcontinental Union, or a Transdemocratic Union not within the grasp of our imagination? And if the imagination is the site of struggle for artists and cultural workers, what propositions have they contributed in order to imagine our disastrous present, as much as desired futures?
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