Perhaps the entire point of politics is to restrict creativity and imagination. As one scholar wrote:
“The tension between politics and the Romantic impulse belongs to the larger tension between what can be imagined and what can be lived. The attempt to resolve this tension into a unity that is free of contradictions can lead to the impoverishment or to the devastation of life. Life is impoverished when people no longer dare to imagine anything beyond what they think they can live. And it is devastated when people insist on living an idea at any cost, including destruction and self-destruction, simply because they have imagined it. In the first instance, life is impoverished because imagination is sacrificed in the interests of peace; in the second, life shatters under the violence deemed necessary to realize the imagined without lowering one’s sights. In neither instance is there any tolerance of the contradiction between what can be imagined and what can be lived. One wants life to be all of a piece. But such a life is surely only a Romantic dream.”
It follows: “‘Power to the imagination’! – that was surely not such a good idea.” Yet, and to conclude: “On the other hand, we cannot afford to let go of Romanticism, for political reason and a sense of reality are not enough to live by.” Romanticism amounts to “the value added, the surplus of a beautiful worldly innocence, the surplus of meaning.” And above all else, Romanticism “gives us the room for play that we need” and necessarily so, given that “we don’t feel very secure at home, within our interpreted world.”
A dilemma and a paradox, to say the least.
Adam A. Azim 