Political Imagination, Otherness and the European Crisis

Europe's Journal of Psychology, 2015, Vol. 11(4), 557–564, doi:10.5964/ejop.v11i4.1085 Published (VoR): 2015-11-27. *Corresponding author at: Department of Communication & Psychology, Aalborg University, Kroghstræde 3, 9220 Aalborg, Denmark. E-mail: vlad@hum.aau.dk This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.


Political Imagination
What do we define as political imagination? In a broad sense, this concept is meant to designate all those imaginative processes by which collective life is symbolically experienced and this experience mobilised in view of achieving political aims. Almost all the concepts above require some qualification.

Imaginative Processes
What do we mean by imaginative processes? They refer to those psychological mechanisms that allow us to bring into the present, the here and now, other experiences (Glăveanu, Karwowski, Jankowska, & de Saint Laurent, forthcoming). These experiences can be spatially or temporally distant, but also impossible or improbable. Through this move, we transform our understanding of the present and how we act towards it.
This kind of approach resonates with sociocultural definitions of imagination put forward in recent years (Pelaprat & Cole, 2011;Zittoun & Cerchia, 2013), definitions that escape the narrow understanding of this process in terms of imagery alone. It also invites us to reflect on who engages in such processes. By considering them as primarily psychological, we propose to study political imagination at the level of the individual; however, this is always an individual that exists within a collective or social context. In this sense, the products of political imagination are never, themselves, individual in nature.
What scaffolds, then, political imagination? We postulate that a wide range of social and educational experiences offer individuals the resources to imagine, in line with Vygotsky's emphasis on the cultural roots of imagination (see Vygotsky, 1994Vygotsky, , 2004. In other words, the collective life this form of imagination is directed towards also offers people the concrete means to imagine.

Collective Life
What do we understand by collective? Broadly speaking, 'collective life' designates all aspects of life that are the product of people acting as part of a group. Benedict Anderson (1983) made an important contribution to this discussion in his book on imagined communities. A popular idea in sociology and politics, his argument is that big social groups, particularly nations, are always imagined since "even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion" (p. 15). Thus, experiencing the social world necessarily involves, at least in part, imagination. However, we would like to emphasise the fact that imagination should never be reduced to our relation to an absent other.
On the contrary, political imagination is political precisely because it informs if we accept or not, understand or not, engage or not with very concrete others.

Symbolic Experience
Then why talk first and foremost about symbolic experience? Does political imagination not have a material, embodied side as well? It certainly does. But the notion of symbolic highlights the construction of imaginative experiences with the use of images, language, social representations, etc. This doesn't mean that such symbolic means don't have both concrete referents in the world or take materialised forms (in writing, drawing, talking, acting, and so on), but that their efficiency lies in their ability to connect what is here and what is not in a specific situation, to be a symbol of something else.

Political Aims
Last but not least, the key notion of 'political aims' needs to be clarified. As briefly mentioned before, we are not concerned here only with those manifestations of imagination within the socially defined and institutionally enforced area of the political. For us, political aims concern others and how one 'deals' with otherness (and, through this, with oneself in relation to this otherness). What political aims are pursued in relation to others? To assimilate, exclude, control, dominate, emancipate, empower… and the list goes on. We therefore take 'political' in its double meaning, referring both to general matters of public life and to the 'policing' of social groups.

Imagination and Politics
In his paper, 'Politics at its best: Reasons that move the imagination', Ferrara (2011) offered not only a good, simple definition of politics, but also explicitly and convincingly related politics with imagination. In his words: "First, no human being exists who does not act and whose action does not fit, albeit only in a merely mental sense, within a larger human collectivity. Second, no action can be envisioned without reference to some notion of ends and means. Third, no preestablished harmony exists between all the ends pursued by human beings and the social unions within which they live. Hence the need for politics: politics sinks its roots in the unavoidable necessity of coordinating the ends of one's own action with those underlying other people's actions when we live in a shared world" (p. 39).
Imagination is, for him, an essential part of any political process: "Only a human form of association to which unlimited resources were available and which could equally satisfy all the ends striven after by all of its members could dispense with politics. The important role of imagination becomes manifest here: by enabling us to project an image of the world, the imagination allows us to perceive certain ends as deserving more or less priority over others and, more particularly, to envisage new ends" (p. 40).
Importantly for Ferrara, and for our concept of political imagination, not all prioritisation of ends falls within the domain of politics. Choosing ends that concern personal life, for instance, doesn't require political deliberation. In other words, they belong to the private rather than the public domain. For Ferrara (2011, p. 41), "only that deliberation on the priority of ends is political which -either on account of the nature of the controversy, or on account of the large number of people entitled to participate, or on the account of the mode of deliberation, or on account of all or some combination of these elements -produces outcomes which are binding for everybody" (p. 41).
These comments help us define the realm of political imagination; however, they tell us little about its processes.