The seeming need to choose between such models is so difficult because I am someone who does intellectual work within the art world and as such thinks of her terrain as the meeting point between the philosophical, the political, and creative practices. So why, I think to myself, must I choose? This text is an attempt to figure out whether such choices need to be made and how the tension between the two models recasts the operative notion of we. Discussions of the we, the plural personal pronoun at the of all identification models, are currently suspended between the pull for declaring a collective identity grounded in a shared belief system and a set of common aspirations, and the push of defining this collectivity by drawing a defensive boundary around it, so as to separate itself from whatever it holds as dangerous challenges from the outside. Over the past 25 years, since the end of traditional Cold War divisions between the so-called East and the so-called West, it has become an increasingly empty task to try and think of these entities as having been divided along the lines of fully articulated political and ideological identifications. Not because one side has succeeded and one side has failed but because the worn-out distinctions that separate them have been overwritten by much more urgent contemporary ones. Indeed two years of ever more visible and ever more desperate migration from both the Middle East and Africa have breached these contemporary divisions between the global north and the global south, while freedom of movement for people across the European Union has sharpened the boundary between those who are inside, close to the provision of some minimal support, and those who are outside and bereft of it. What we have been able to recognize is that the lack of such minimal support is not
The seeming need to choose between such models is so difficult because I am someone who does intellectual work within the art world and as such thinks of her terrain as the meeting point between the philosophical, the political, and creative practices. So why, I think to myself, must I choose? This text is an attempt to figure out whether such choices need to be made and how the tension between the two models recasts the operative notion of we. Discussions of the we, the plural personal pronoun at the of all identification models, are currently suspended between the pull for declaring a collective identity grounded in a shared belief system and a set of common aspirations, and the push of defining this collectivity by drawing a defensive boundary around it, so as to separate itself from whatever it holds as dangerous challenges from the outside. Over the past 25 years, since the end of traditional Cold War divisions between the so-called East and the so-called West, it has become an increasingly empty task to try and think of these entities as having been divided along the lines of fully articulated political and ideological identifications. Not because one side has succeeded and one side has failed but because the worn-out distinctions that separate them have been overwritten by much more urgent contemporary ones. Indeed two years of ever more visible and ever more desperate migration from both the Middle East and Africa have breached these contemporary divisions between the global north and the global south, while freedom of movement for people across the European Union has sharpened the boundary between those who are inside, close to the provision of some minimal support, and those who are outside and bereft of it. What we have been able to recognize is that the lack of such minimal support is not
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