Your free download is here: https://www.humandymensions.com/product/poetics-and-risk-feeling-into-being/
Poetics Podcast: https://safetyrisk.net/podcast-audio-series-on-poetics-and-risk-14-episodes/
Poetics Video Series: https://vimeo.com/showcase/11892328
The idea of Poetics captures all forms of creative knowing that are non-measureable, non-quantitative, yet are essential to the experience of living. We live our life in the in-between and rarely in the extremes. We daily experience the unresolved
tensions between: finitude and infinitude, love and hate, forgiveness and revenge, entanglement and isolation, being and doing etc. In Socialitie, these tensions and discords are expressed in text by a hyphen (eg. i-thou). We write about this often in the Social Psychology of Risk (SPoR) as being in ‘dialectic’.
When we find ourselves in moments, when we cannot express, experience, our emotions, feelings or understanding, we turn to Poetics. Poetics is often expressed in: song, dance, poetry, literature, art, music, prayer, metaphor, semiotics, para-linguistics and metaphysical expressions eg. meditation. These often help us in
suffering to maintain the tensions in our being. In moments of ecstasy or deep depression we often turn to Poetics to try to say what we cannot say. We often experience this when we are at a wedding, birth or funeral. Our knowing in such moments is tacit, we look for expression of what we know but cannot say.
In the face of a risk and safety tradition that privileges engineering and mathematics, where is the discussion of all that is Poetic? Where is it that the safety industry understands the Poetics of language and semiosis. When things are unsafe and when things go wrong, what can engineering and mathematics say to us? Zero? Why is Poetics not a part of discussion in risk management?
When Safety most often speaks, it is about loss, pain and harm? Isn’t it odd that Safety counts loss, pain and harm and then hands the problem on to someone else to deal with? What a strange conundrum. And when things do go wrong, who would ever turn to Safety for comfort, when all it speaks is: ‘safety is a choice you make’, ‘all accidents are preventable’, ‘blame fixes nothing’ and ‘zero’? When in the depth of trauma why would one turn to someone with no skills in trauma management or empathy?
This is why Safety never speaks of being a ‘helping profession’ and yet it loves the word ‘professional’, it just doesn’t want to ‘help’, because it doesn’t know how. It doesn’t know how because it is preoccupied with metrics, measurement and the ideology of behaviourism. And, thus the need to write this book.
Without a sense of Poetics in Risk, the industry of risk and safety will remain in the world of Quanta not Qualia. It will be stuck in the myth of ‘you cannot manage what you cannot measure’ rather than understanding that we cannot count what counts.
Many might see the word Poetics and think of Poetry but this is not the case. The idea of Poetics encompasses all that we make and create, particularly in language and symbols.
Understanding the human person as ‘text’ is critical for engaging in the world of Poetics. We can read much more on this in the works of Paul Ricoeur. Through such an understanding, we engage in how and why people create, discover, learn, move, are motivated and how they create meaning (semiosis) in living.
When we understand human persons as embodied beings, intercorporeal. interconnected, intersubjective and interaffected, we see language as a non-conscious, embodied and unconscious creation of meaning and engaging between persons.
The best way to read this book is Poetically, Semiotically and Lyrically. It is not a book of propositions or arguments as much as it is a book of experiences and metaphors on life, living and being. A Poetic understanding of the world is essential if we are to tackle the wicked problem of risk.
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