CHANSE Call Partner Search Tool

General Information

• Project title: Limits of Political Imagination. Ecology, Economy, Human Nature
• Type: Project looking for partner
• Organisation: Faculty of "Artes Liberales", University of Warsaw
• Country: Poland (PL)

Research area

• Call theme: Crisis - Perspectives from the Humanities
• Keywords:

  imagination political environmental humanities technohumanities

• Brief description of your expertise / expertise you are looking for:

  I am a philosopher and member of the Techno-Humanities Lab at the Faculty of "Artes Liberales", University of Warsaw. My interests - relevant for the project - include environmental philosophy and philosophy of technology. For the project, I am looking especially for people who are either interested in imagination (both of the kind found in literature/arts and areas more closely relating to politics), or one of the key themes of the project itself (economical or environmental theory).

• Brief description of your project / the project you would like to join:

  Imagination 06.23 At least from the 1980s, there have been many voices in Western theory that deplore a crisis of political imagination (Jameson, Pomian, Levitas, Rosa, Habermas etc). This suggests that exploring the nature of the limits of political imagination and conditions for their overcoming is a valid concern for political philosophy and the humanities in general. While such statements sometimes do refer to concrete political circumstances, they are meant to provide a more general diagnosis of reality, at least in the sense that it covers much of the Western, capitalist world. This would mean that the crisis of political imagination is not (or not just) a crisis of political vision, as seen in, for example, the trouble that established democratic parties have with countering populist agendas or the crisis of traditional leftist parties in Europe. The wide-ranging nature of the supposed crisis equally encompasses the social and the individual perspective. Similar proclamations of unimaginability have been uttered in reference to the ecological crisis, for example within analyses of the problem of the Anthropocene (e.g., by Timothy Morton). Framed thusly, the “crisis of political imagination” yields, at least, the following questions: 1. What is the “political imagination” that we seem to be lacking? 2. How does this “political imagination” refer to other types of imagination (e.g., imagination as a cognitive faculty, literary imagination, empathetic imagination; see below)? Is it an individual, social or collective faculty? (How) does it refer to, e.g., the notion of social imaginaries? 3. (How) can the limits of political imagination be overcome? The originality of the proposed research would lie in its framing as a problem of imagination and its frontiers. The idea would be, then, not to engage in “futurology” which abounds in academia (e.g., in the form of “Futures studies” or “Utopian studies”) and outside of it, but rather to propose a “metafuturology” for the current historical moment. I strongly believe that such a task can only be undertaken by the humanities, where qualitative reasoning and bold, historically-informed theoretical projects can more easily find their place. Three intertwined areas of analysis seem most promising: economy, ecology and human nature. The first one directly engages with the unease about imagining economic futures that lie outside of capitalism, as expressed, for example, by Jameson. It is framed by the questions of the supposedly “natural” character of capitalism as well as its current seeming unavoidability. The second area concerns the questions of climate change and the “Anthropocene” — it seems that while the natural sciences have achieved a general consensus as to the current planetary crisis, any manner of its solving (or even framing) lies outside the current political imagination. The third area covers the complicated links between our ideas about the basic nature of the human being and possible politics (i.e., every theory of human nature offers possibilities and limits to the thinking of the political). While the three areas are closely linked, the current hypothesis is that it is our convoluted beliefs about human nature which will prove to be the biggest obstacle to widening our political imagination. Torn between lofty humanist ideals, naturalization of capitalism as the political effect of inborn greed or “selfishness”, (post)constructivist denial of any human nature and the posthumanist complication of it, this notion seems at the very center of the current crisis of political imagination.

Krzysztof Skonieczny

• Organisation: Faculty of "Artes Liberales", University of Warsaw
• Position: Assistant Professor
• E-mail: k.skonieczny@al.uw.edu.pl