Dewey and Political Communication in the Age of Mediation (original) (raw)
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John Dewey on Listening and Friendship in School and Society
Educational Theory, 2011
In this essay, Leonard Waks examines John Dewey's account of listening, drawing on Dewey's writings to establish a direct connection in his work between listening and democracy. Waks devotes the first part of the essay to explaining Dewey's distinction between one-way or straight-line listening and transactional listening-in-conversation, and to demonstrating the close connection between transactional listening and what Dewey called ''cooperative friendship.'' In the second part of the essay, Waks establishes the further link between Dewey's notions of cooperative friendship and democratic society with particular reference to machine-age technologies of mass communication. He maintains that while these technologies provide the means for extending communications throughout modern industrial nations, they simultaneously undermine the conditions fostering face-to-face listening-inconversation. It remains an open question, Waks concludes, whether new educational arrangements incorporating interactive digital communication technologies will embody and promote transactional listening-in-conversation and revitalized democratic community.
Sisyphus 8(3), 2020
Dewey's argument for education is predicated on how, as free and intelligent beings, we have the power to develop dispositions. However, in a context where democracy is neutered by anti-politics, reading Dewey now comes with an urgent need to revisit his argument for an experiential and experimental approach towards the world. Revisiting Horkheimer's critique of Dewey, which reveals two opposed notions of instrumentalism, this article argues that unless Dewey is reassessed from the non-identitarian character of his pragmatism, his philosophy of education risks being lost to an alignment with social constructivism. This exposes the Deweyan approach to what Maxine Greene calls a disjunction in the culture between everydayness and reason, where the "integrations" that Dewey achieved with his concentration on experience vanish. Historically framed, this paper draws on Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin's discussion of a democracy that is more akin to a "burning house" than an associated form of living. K E Y W O R D S disposition; instrumentalism; anti-politics; democracy; education; race; the arts. SISYPHUS J O U RN A L O F E DU CA T IO N
Dissertation: John Dewey on the Art of Communication
2001
John Dewey once wrote: “Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful.” For him communication is the highest of the “arts of life,” for it is in communication that society is born and nurtured. It is by communication that we discover the possibilities of nature. And it is through communication that we make our shared experience meaningful. It is no wonder, then, that Dewey would conclude The Public and Its Problems with this provocative statement: Democracy “will have its consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication.” Dewey, however, does not adequately explain what he understands by “the art of full and moving communication” and never tells us how “communication” functions in the varied contexts of practical life. Despite, then, his obvious affection for communication, he leaves many questions about it unanswered. For instance, what makes communication possible? In what kind of situations is communication called for and why? How does an inchoate feeling or idea find concrete embodiment in language? What are the connections among language, communication, thought, feeling, and action? Most importantly, what is the process by which one employs the art of communication to influence the beliefs and behaviors of others? This dissertation addresses these questions by approaching Dewey’s thinking on communication from a distinctly rhetorical perspective. Even though Dewey almost never mentions “rhetoric” in his entire corpus, I argue that it is precisely the absence of the term from his writings that makes a rhetorical reading of his work all the more imperative. Such a reading permits us to understand the practical importance of the “art of communication” in the larger context of his social thought. If, then, the problem with Dewey’s writing on communication is that it often drifts into abstractions, one remedy is take those abstractions and place them into concrete situations, where communication is required to transform some part of the environment through transaction with human thought and action. Because this kind of activity has been the specific domain of rhetoric since the time of the sophists, it is only appropriate to read Dewey’s work through that tradition. In effect, the goal of this dissertation is to explicate Dewey’s theory of communication in the terms of a rhetorical theory. But insofar as his thought went through three distinct “periods” in his lifetime, beginning with his Idealistic period in 1880, moving into his Experimental period in 1903, and culminating in his Naturalistic period in 1925, Dewey can be said to have had three implicit rhetorical theories. To articulate and explain each of these theories, I trace Dewey’s theoretical development through time and construct, through published works, private correspondence, and biographical material. I show that the first theory envisioned rhetoric as a form of eros that helps us grow towards Absolute self consciousness. The second theory views rhetoric as a form of critical inquiry whose goal is the development of phronēsis, or practical wisdom. The third theory treats rhetoric as a productive technē, or a naturalistic form of art that has the power to transform experience, nature, and society through its transactional character. By tracing Dewey’s theoretical development and explicating three implicit theories of rhetoric in his writings, this dissertation not only provides a unique perspective on Dewey’s changing views on language, ontology, and social practice, but also demonstrates how each theory can still be effectively used to interpret and guide the art of rhetoric. This kind of work enables us to grasp different facets of this diverse and vibrant art. At the same time, it shows how Dewey’s work remains an important resource for those who wish to promote and sustain a democratic way of life by educating citizens in the art of full and moving communication.
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2016
This article engages the work of John Dewey to outline a pragmatist philosophy of communication that is adaptive to the undemocratic effects of extreme partisanship in belief and argument. Using his aesthetic theory, I sketch out an account of the phenomenological motions of communicative experience of self among others. I then examine the ways that partisan habits of thinking can warp our communicative activities. Drawing upon Dewey’s writings on logic and ethics, I examine his account of the habits of intelligent communication. Building on this ideal, I propose “sympathy” as both a feeling and a cognitive method to decrease the pull of distorting partisan habits of reasoning in communicative situations. Linking mindful receptivity to conversational others and an explicit method of charity becomes a viable way to instill true communicative respect in democratic communicators.
John Dewey's aesthetics of communication
2004
Discussion of John Dewey within the discipline of communication is often restricted to his “ritual view” of communication or his youthful hope in the democratic potential of mass communication technologies. However, both of these approaches neglect the importance of his aesthetic theory for understanding both his philosophy of communication and his overall social thought. This essay takes a developmental perspective on Dewey’s philosophy and traces how his concepts of experience and communication evolved over three decades and finally came to be unified in his concept of aesthetic experience. I argue that a developmental perspective on Dewey’s aesthetic philosophy contributes a broader and more flexible understanding of communication that leads to the view that communication, at its best, is a form of art in which poiesis and praxis are united within a single, consummatory experience.
Education & Culture: The Journal of the John Dewey Society , 2016
This article presents a novel account of a key concept in John Dewey’s reconstructionist theory specifically related to the nucleus underlying his idea of democracy: intersubjective communication, what Dewey called the “democratic criterion.” Many theorists relate democracy to a form of rule. Consequently, discussions of democracy tend to be limited to functionalist theories. Dewey’s idea of democracy establishes an important distinction from conventional theories by developing its radical, critical, evolutionary, and intersubjective potential. I argue that Dewey anticipated Jürgen Habermas’s Paradigm of Communication in his reconstructionist social theory with potential to de-reify institutions and to empower human beings democratically.
Democracy education, 2015
Democratic Education (Routledge, 2015), by Hess and McAvoy, is a book far bigger than its 247 pages. It is a significant work that insightfully contributes to the mainstream body of literature about citizenship education in schools and its relationship to civic life in American society. It is an evidence-rich extension of Hess's earlier work, Controversy in the Classroom: The Democratic Power of Discussion (Routledge, 2009). The questions that weave in and around both of these studies come from a concern regarding the development of engaged, tolerant, and empathetic citizens in an era of increasing social inequality and political polarization. This work draws on an extensive longitudinal study (2005-2009) that included 1,001 students and 35 teachers from 21 midwestern high schools. The authors quite rightly point to the unique nature of this study in the field of social studies in terms of both its size and its use of quantitative and qualitative data. The study that informed The Political Classroom drew on the voices of both teachers and students and, importantly, included efforts to gain insights on students' civic attitudes and behaviors following high school.
The Internet and the Democratic Imagination: Deweyan Communication in the 21st Century
Contemporary Pragmatism 10.2, 2014
There is a broad consensus in liberal democracies that deliberation and political communication are vital to ensuring healthy democracies. The Internet has become increasingly become a commonplace feature of everyday and democratic life, in particular in shaping political deliberation and rhetoric. Its impact on political life has been hotly debated, with some theorists viewing the Internet as replacing and damaging traditional means of communication, and others viewing the Internet as a perfect medium of expressing alternatives modes of discourse and identity. I argue that these conceptions of the Internet fail to understand the Internet as a communicative medium and have an overly deterministic view of technology. Against these views I argue that we need to understand communicative tools such as the Internet as a 'problematic situation', where Dewey's insights on communication, technology, and education converge to help us better understand how the Internet can be utilized as a tool for political deliberation and communication.
Dewey's Cosmic Traffic: Politics and Pedagogy as Communication
Given the appearance and reappearance of notions of transaction, interaction, and comrnunication across his writings, John Dewey can be said to be an irnportant and early contributor to discourses on 'traffic,' both as event and medium. His wide-ranging and gradually-evolving thought offers an opportunity to see how various issues can be configured in terrns of dynarnic flow and circulation, including the development of technical media that were profoundly reshaping nearly all aspects of everyday reality in Dewey's time. This chapter traces the trajectory of 'traffic' in Dewey's thought, linking it to developments in 'media theory,' both before and after Dewey, and particularly as it is related to education.
Artful Discussion: John Dewey's Classroom as a Model of Deliberative Association
Political Theory, 2005
This essay uses John Dewey’s understanding of classroom discussion to construct a model of democratic deliberation that stresses the importance of the formal aesthetics of dialog. It claims that qualities such as the rhythm and direction of face-to-face political talk affects interlocutors’ effectiveness in persuading others and stimulating interest. Because participants primarily focus on responding to the substance of individual utterances, the model employs Dewey’s understanding of the teacher as a moderator who regulates the spatial and temporal quality of the entire deliberation. Although some might claim the presence of such an authority figure endangers the deliberators’ autonomy, Dewey stresses that good teachers assist students in constructing their own solutions to their own problems, and therefore a moderator could actively intervene and respect the normative principles of deliberative democracy. Finally, the essay discusses the distinctive role implied by such an association in a larger theory of deliberative politics.