Reimagining the source-codes of the consumer culture through the treatment of language is a long-term political project. This is precisely why it is essential to both the critical project and to what Paulo Freire (2004) called the pedagogy of hope, rooted in the boundless human imagination to re-conceive a social spectacle that has fallen, in Henry Giroux’s (2008) words, upon dark times. To enact change through critical and aesthetic literacy practices by reintegrating poetic openness and ambivalence as a source of the discovery of personal values is fundamental to learning how knowledge/power structures embedded in language function politically (Rancière, 2004, 2006, 2007). Language may be one of the few areas, like education, where long-range visions of the future can be seeded, particularly at a time when dominant ideologies and practices are focusing on increasingly short-term, profit-motivated, anti-intellectual agendas (Jacoby, 2008; Mission & Morgan, 2006). Often, things that take time are seen as less worthy, deficient, or impractical; and yet, for all the speed and efficiency of modern life, we are more desperately in need of slow, hopeful, sustainable, compassionate and positive means of attending and existing.