Imagination as Poiesis: A Materialist Proposal Against Predictive Reason

Abstract

This essay proposes to think of imagination as a power of creation and action based on the encounter of bodies, affects and active agents (poiesis). From a perspective that we encompass under the tradition of poetic materialism, our proposal starts from an analysis of the crisis as an experience of the unimaginable in its three dimensions (uncertain, unbearable and unspeakable) and advances towards the definition of what we present as the politics of encounter. What is at the heart of this journey is the experience of a limit of knowledge, representation and anticipation that is currently dominated by a predictive reason (algorithmic but not only) that seeks to cancel and control the unpredictability of the event. Against the forms that predictive reason proposes as ways of presenting the unimaginable (prediction as control and the announcement of collapse), the poietic imagination presents itself as a power of liberation from the uncanny and its power to transform the situation.