Rupture and Hospitality

Abstract

If liberation psychologies begin with wandering in the desert attempting to break with dominant modes of consciousness to create new possibilities for community life, we need to identify and name the “stations of the cross” of this type of pilgrimage. In this section on habitual thinking, we are addressing how people living in relatively stable circumstances transform the ways they think in response to environmental surprises or discrepancies that challenge their current paradigms. How do we learn to change the sedimented ways we understand the world, and how do we evolve new and more creative responses when unexpected events interrupt a settled way of life and override our defenses? Can we become aware of how much of what we do is an automatic acceptance of surrounding habits of “normal” social life in our own communities? How flexible can we be in considering those things that do not fit within our expectations? How might it change our thinking to consider human beings not as freestanding individual units but as embedded in, defined by, performing, and co-creating structures (or vortices) of cultural discourse, practice, and assumptions?

It is also about transforming language, creating alternatives, asking ourselves questions about what types of images subvert, pose critical alternatives, and transform our worldviews and move us away from dualistic thinking about good and bad. Making space for the transgressive image, the outlaw rebel vision, is essential to any effort to create a context for transformation. And even then little progress is made if we transform images without shifting paradigms, changing perspectives, ways of looking.

(bell hooks, 1992, p. 4)