Dewey's artistic remedy to the ills of modern society

In this entry I wish to entertain a thesis about how John Dewey’s passion for art and aesthetic experience provided him with a certain prognostic stance towards alleviating what he found to be the ills of modern society. Allow me to frame this reflection on John Dewey by briefly referencing Michel Foucault’s own philosophical project first to show how they similarly diagnose modern society, and again later to demonstrate their contrasts in terms of solutions to our modern ills.

Foucault spent his life detailing the ills of modern society through his analysis of power relations – specifically the ways in which power privileges and thus marginalizes various discourses, values, beliefs, norms, and so forth. The power relations of our time Foucault reported are not the concentrated power of a king as in times past where people fit neatly into the roles of the oppressed and the oppressor, but rather are the distributed powers of the nation-state that privileges individuation, regulation, and normalcy over individuality, freedom, and uniqueness through the record-keeping and disciplinary functions of institutions. Other theorists of our consumer society have reached similar conclusions but framed their diagnoses more simply by declaring that our society is driven by the values of efficiency, predictability, punctuality, and control as evidenced by the principles of scientific management found in institutions, factories, and the not-so-local McDonalds. Sometimes these values are given fancy names such as rationality or freedom as in freedom of choice, but those suspicious of the privileging of these values offer their own set of names such as freedomism, scientism, or any phrase compatible with neo-Marxist thought on the nature of alienation.

Dewey’s own diagnosis of society’s ills, however, predates these theorists. Dewey published The Public and its Problems (1927) the year after Foucault was born and this work built on previous projects in Dewey’s thought that worried about the influence of modern technological practices on society, democracy, and humanity. I am reminded of this current in Dewey’s thought as it crops up in his “Art as Experience” whereby he refers to “this hurried and impatient human environment in which we live,” and more dramatically in his portrait of the over-doer who has come out of balance with his state of undergoing (as in reflection and receptivity to one’s actions and their consequences on the world (or vice versa: attention to the one’s world and its consequences on one’s actions). Describing this over-doer who is too busy to be bothered in the modern environment Dewey writes that for this individual, “Resistance is treated as an obstruction to be beaten down, not as an invitation to reflection. An individual comes to seek, unconsciously even more than by deliberate choice, situations in which he can do the most things in the shortest time.” Here we see the values of efficiency and utility showing themselves in terms of dispositions and practices.

Dewey’s passion of art, I believe, led him to describe an alternative characterization of practices that constitutes the individual who has a balance between his doings and undergoings. Some of these dispositions are nicely presented in Hetland et al. as studio habits of mind which include the capacity to engage and persist through problems, to use ones imagination, to attend to the world around oneself and to reflect on one’s own thinking. Here we notice a balance between practices of doing (working one’s way through problems) and undergoing (stepping back to reflect) both of which involve imagination and observation – two central capacities to Dewey’s notion of experience. Art Education champion and theorist Eisner likens these dispositions to those useful for sports and other activities that demand vigor and mature skill (I quote in full):

“Consider once more how children become competent in Little League or in playing the piano. Competence in these activities is never treated as a one-shot affair; children work at them, they try to move up on the scale of performance, they are not treated casually, and they have models of excellence to guide them. In the visual arts in the context of schooling this continuity is all too rare.”

Some critics of society might modify Eisner’s last sentence to read “in modern society this continuity is all too rare.” One such critic, Albert Borgmann, relates how modern society privileges devices over what he calls focal things and practices. A device is simply an object that has some button, switch, or cord that when pushed or plugged in produces a commodity seemingly effortlessly. Thus the stereo produces music, and the heater procures heat, and the telephone communication. These are contrasted to focal things and practices such as guitars, and fireplaces, and letter-writing which do not produce their commodity readily and effortlessly but rather require great skill and concentration – or perhaps many of these dispositions – to complete. The reward comes not from the music produced or the heat of the fire or the message of the letter but from the act of cultivating one’s own skills and relations to others to better do these things. Hence Little League is not just about winning, but about the competence gained through continual and persistent effort and perhaps the friendships made along the way, and the same could be said of art, which Eisner, with Dewey in mind, clearly does say about art:

“Dewey’s emphasis on the importance of creating communities of learners so that children could learn from each other was one of the hallmarks of good progressive education practices. Indeed, the opportunity to work in a group on common tasks was a way to help children not only to find practical meaning in academic ideas but also to learn what democratic life entails. Discussion and deliberation and consensus were a part of that life.”

Eisner goes on to remark that the Reggio Emilia preschools are one such place where these practices can be found, and believes that when these ideas are taken seriously “Classrooms would look different than they do now, roles for students would differ, and students would use one another as resources. There would be a sense of community and cooperation, a shared enthusiasm in which the language of the field—in this case the language used to discuss the arts—would become the educational coin of the realm.” Such a setting would privilege not efficiency, regulation, individuation, control, etc, but rather community, continuity, craftsmanship, and collaboration. This I believe is Dewey’s contribution to our current state of affairs – a prognostic vision that is grounded in the practices and settings of the arts.

To illuminate (or reflect on Dewey’s proposal more deeply through the process of ‘undergoing’) allow me to present Foucault’s philosophical project once more, this time with reference to Foucault’s own solution to our troubled relations of power. Foucault near the end of his life began studying or more accurately practicing the dispositions held by the Stoics, Epicureans, and Cynics – the ancient philosophers for whom philosophy was not an abstract contemplation but a day-to-day art of living. Foucault found relief in the Stoic practices of not caring about material things, and the Epicurean insights of being content with what one already owns, and the complementary Cynic philosophy of controlling one’s self-desire. Above all Foucault sought to tell the Truth however unfashionable the truth is when popularity and convention are the main power-setters. Foucault dared to forge his own life and not to be disciplined by the institutional values and techniques of efficiency and utility.

Although these practices offer tranquility as one’s desires are kept in check and one’s self no longer feels repressed by the habits of optimization and scientific management, they are sorely lacking in something Dewey’s artists offer: community. Further discrepancies: Although self-control and self-restraint may be lovely practices, they are already ensured by the artist’s dispositions of perseverance and thoughtful reflection. Furthermore the practice of detaching oneself from affinity for the material runs counter to artists and especially constructionists who love working with the material, for whom they are in regular dialogue with the material. Rather than construing the material as fleeting and unworthy of attention and affinity, the artist respects the material – as what Borgmann might call a focal thing calling forth focal practices – and tries to make him or herself adequate to the material by crafting their skills over time, and thus crafting themselves. But this task is not taken for self-aggrandizement, but rather fits into larger communal identities and democratic purposes - two values oddly absent from Foucault’s Neo-Stoicism approach to society’s modern ills. In short Dewey offers a valuable contribution to the prognosis of alleviating society’s ills by reference to art and the kind of dispositions, skills, and communities that support artistic development and aesthetic experience.

Or phased differently if tranquility and community is to be found it is not through avoiding that which is material or prone to desire or seemingly fleeting and outside of one's control (as the stoics philosophy dictates), but rather it is through demarcating what is a device and what is a focal thing and then engaging in the practices that animate the focal thing rather than adopting the practices of control, predictability, and efficiency that go hand in hand with the use of devices.

I suppose in reference to Jeff's post I could have titled this entry, Dewey vs. Stoicism.