Turning the world to glass: poetic sensibility and the decolonization of imagination

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe rupture between event and meaning has shown itself to be a key issue plaguing collective psychology. This rupture requires as remedy a poetic sensibility that can imagine the central images or root metaphors which make experience qualitatively intelligible, an imaginal literacy that reads images while also making new images from that which is presented. Bachelard’s [(1988).Air and dreams: An essay on the imagination of movement] notion of images as liberatory, disentangling one from superficial impressions by transmuting surface to depth, and Hillman’s [(1975).Re-visioning psychology] move of ‘seeing through’ the archetypal images expressed in events will serve as foundational ideas for the author’s description of poetic sensibility as the capacity to read and make images through ‘deform[ing] what we perceive’ (p. 1). The author will highlight the central function of poetic sensibility as an essential engagement of imagination required by any movement resisting the neocolonial policies and ‘inverted totalitarianism’ [Wolin, S. (2003). Inverted totalitarianism: How the Bush regime is effecting the transformation to a fascist-like state] of the corporate and political state.