Paper short abstract:

In this age post- and trans- modes of being, it is worth asking how much is lived experience, and how much analytical flight of fancy. The paper discusses how and why the postulate of a borderless Europe contributes to the destruction of a European vision, not least through Europeanisation itself.

Paper long abstract:

An obvious pun on Heidegger's "building-dwelling-thinking", the paper also plays with semantics to illuminate processes of both everyday lived experience, and the ways in which we as theorisers of culture (whatever we may call ourselves in terms of discipline) analyse that experience. In this age of increasingly diagnosed post- and trans- modes of being, it is worth pausing to reflect on how much of this actually is lived experience (and whether that experience is always such a positive one), and how much is merely an analytical flight of fancy. Europe is predicated on the free mobility of persons as labour. Taking the postulate of a borderless Europe as a starting point, the paper discusses how and why it is contributing to the destruction of a European vision on two counts - not only through globalisation, but through Europeanisation itself.