Art, Imagination, Politics & Gender

This research line centres on the aesthetic, emotional, discursive, and rhetorical-narrative dimensions of the imaginary construction of socio-political practices.

Specifically, this research line connects different disciplines such as philosophy, literary, gender, and cinema studies, in addition to politics, to diagnose the crises of modern societies and to imagine alternative futures. 

We understand imagination first as the capacity to discover forms of interpreting the world different from those which are offered as normative and naturalised, as occurs with relationships of power, regardless of whether these are the result of preconceived notions about gender or any other type of idea. As art utilises the intuitive dimension of the imagination, we believe that it has a radical potential that is capable of questioning discourses and institutions, unveiling their imaginary origin and thus constituting an open space that stimulates critique and transformation. By questioning the inevitable or necessary character of the status quo, the utopian thinking that is often implicit in works of art, whether literary, cinematographic, pictorial, or other, opens a path to try out different ways of living. As it departs from the notion of verisimilitude and broadening the limits of the truth, the creativity of the imagination implies a novel form of agency compared to the convictions of the agents involved in it since it creates worlds that not only differ from how things are, but even from how we believe they could be from a realistic perspective. The mere fact of coming up with a new idea often leads to the possibility of carrying it out and making it become real. It is in this sense that the mediation inherent to the aesthetic experience or the different artistic forms to explore alternative worlds has a destabilising potential and the capacity to illuminate silenced aspects of the society we live in and the possibilities that this society contains, whether positive or dangerous, making it a highly valuable diagnostic tool.

Second, we also conceive of the imaginary component inherent to the discursive constitution of subjects and social bonds. In other words, we believe that the fact that our grasp of the world and of what we are (our social identities and political configurations) carries with it an imaginary dimension that is intimately intertwined with the conceptual or purely symbolic. The imaginary component captures and gives form to reality by creating constructions and units where there is only fragmentation and disassociation from any other point of view. It carries the expression of desires of fulfilment and perfection where there is precariousness and fragility, and it provides coherent and comprehensible narratives where otherwise there would only be disjointed pieces and fragments. Under all these modes, the emotional plane accompanies the different characteristic formations of the imaginary dimension.

Third, we view imagination also as the source of an entire series of pictorial languages with varying levels of sophistication (coming from artistic expressions that are more tightly or loosely anchored in traditions or rather dedicated to avant-garde innovation) which are articulated to offer an entire alternative vocabulary of compositions, messages, and discursive vanishing lines concerning ourselves and our societies.

Finally, we consider imagination as a manner through which the conceptual fields of identities (gender or national identities, for instance) or class compositions are redefined, and as a source for transforming subjectivities and cultural and political relationships. The imaginary component is also at the foundation of the repertoires of collective action and of numerous poetic and artistic movements that have spread across regions, countries, and continents.

Consequently, we take the constituent and creative capacity of imagination as our core idea in different senses: its capacity to grasp, capture, and give meaning to the world; its calling to create scenarios that involve new notions of coexistence; its potential to create “artificial paradises” that allow us to flee from the problems of the present; and its ability to introduce potential vanishing lines with respect to the established paradigms in the present. Therefore, we aim to research into the nuances that artistic creation, as an incarnate language, contributes on our past and present reality and how it projects it to the future.

Methodologically, this research line is based on the trans-disciplinary nature of Critical Theory defined in a broad sense. We combine theoretical approaches and case studies both of current socio-political phenomena as well as representative thinkers and artists from a variety of cultural areas to generate new poetics of knowledge that can shed light on novel futures as responses to current problems. Our integrative approach connects a variety of disciplines, but we also work on the comparative analysis of diverse movements with their respective histories. By focusing on artistic works from different backgrounds, contexts, and movements, we also aim to establish a more complex concept of the universal in literary and philosophical studies in terms of literary theory and the literary history of the poetics of knowledge.