Session Notes

Opening Question

What’s at stake here? Dewey’s final statement in this book is that art is a mode of prediction not found in charts and statistics, and it insinuates possibilities of human relations not to be found in rule, precept, admonition, and administration. In chapter 1, he notes his impetus for writing was to reconnect art with common human experience, to take it back from the museums and palaces of the rich who have acquired artifacts of other cultures and used them to mark their own value. Given the final statement and his impetus for his writing this? What’s at stake – and why is it so urgent for Dewey to explain what an experience is, and how that connects to a living creature, and how that connects to an expressive object,and ultimately how that connects to civilization?

We began by diagnosing the problem Dewey shares with a constellation of 20th century philosophers: Heidegger, Ellul, Guénon, Fromm. The diagnosis is that something about the way our social structure currently exists constrains or enframes or forces things into boxes, and through this enframing we’ve been disconnected from the actual touching of human life with experience itself. We’ve caught experience up into little boxes that are pedestalized, rarefied, objectified, and once those boxes are there, we don’t experience experience itself. We experience experience as it is constrained or foreclosed by these boxes. Dewey applies this specifically to the aesthetic, but the argument extends way beyond art to literally all of human experience. The aesthetic is when, instead of instrumentalizing or foreclosing experience, we follow experience where it goes, we have that actual openness towards the meeting of experience. What we see as art is the genuine expression of that experience. That’s both the diagnosis and the intervention.

The conversation turned towards our contemporary experiences of art. We discussed how the topics that art deals with these days largely feel distal rather than proximate: abstract social concepts like climate change or systemic oppression rather than the feeling of walking into a meadow or portraying grief. Dewey’s examples (Cezanne painting napkins and apples, a musician capturing the sound of wind in a flute) felt a little antiquated precisely because they came from direct experience, whereas we’re mired in half-imaginary abstractions most of the time. The materials themselves are also implicated in our aesthetic experiences. For example, we create with paints manufactured by Blick, canvases from Amazon, using smartphones mined by children in the Congo. All these degrees of separation from actually experiencing something and then having to express it feel a bit overwhelming. Modern art has also become unapproachable and alienating, often made with a bit of elitism baked in, where you don’t get it unless you know the very specific backstory (cultural, conceptual context rather than emotionally expressive). The bricks from a building that an artist painted in having intrinsic value versus the painting made inside that building, as an example. It seems as though there’s an abundance of “insider art”. Maybe Dewey’s goal is still eager for fulfillment.

We then wrestled with where the aesthetic experience actually exists. Is it intrinsic to being human, or does it require certain external conditions? Dewey seems to be saying it’s intrinsic: when two lines meet, there’s something uniting about our full experience of certain things, even though the minutiae of the aesthetic experience will differ between people. Waking up in a tiny shitty room with a stained mattress on concrete versus waking up in a palatial gilded room with a clawfoot tub and 10-foot windows letting in sunlight. Obviously that’s better, we all know it, but underneath that is this amazing concept that the minutiae of the aesthetic experience is intrinsic and fundamentally human. And what’s more, we can’t really talk about it, it has to be expressed. Art can’t tell you what it is (though, science, Dewey remarks, can tell you what science is), it has to just express what it is. But the problem is that we are increasingly surrounded by anesthetic objects, and we talked about how capitalism (enhancing  Dewey’s claims about Capitalism) has been and continues to be a powerful influence in promoting the idea that art is apart from common life, how the mobility of trade and populations due to the economic system has weakened and destroyed the connection between works of art and the genius loci of which they were once the natural expression, that is, us.

To shed light on how, say, our government, contractors/builders and tech sectors (for example) surround us with anaesthetic objects and the knock on effects of that, we used talked a bit about the prince of foods, pizza. To clarify the “foreclosure mechanism” that we spoke about at the beginning of the session: if someone tells you pizza is terrible, subhuman food, it all tastes the same, and you really believe that enframing, then it wouldn’t be surprising if every pizza tasted like the same sub-human slop to you. Not because pizza actually all tastes sub-human, but because you’ve already foreclosed whatever value or expression you might have gotten from it. This is what happens when art is pedestalized: if someone tells you art is only that which is by Renoir or in a museum or sold for $10 million, then people come to other experiences and say, “I’ve already been told what art is, so whatever I am feeling for this thing cannot be of art.” It forecloses the potentiality of aesthetic experience. Not because someone doesn’t have the capacity to feel, but because this preconception of what something must be is a sketch you now put on top of everything, and your only concern is does this fit the sketch, instead of openness to the experience itself. Western music theory and classical music as the standard was offered as another example, as was modernist architecture’s purely functionalist stripping away of aesthetic elements in favor of engineering and science; hence the “embeige-ification” of our surroundings.

We eventually arrived at what felt like Dewey’s central ontological and metaphysical argument about what we are as living creatures (experiencers). He’s not just saying we have a psychical preference for the aesthetic. He’s saying we are, as the type of beings we are, always inherently embedded within a relational environment, and the reason this matters is because we are being changed by what we are experiencing, and what we are experiencing is what we then put out into the world. It’s always this recursive process: we take in through experience, and then when we have a truest aesthetic, internally generated desire to express, that is a creative act which puts artifacts, that is, expressive objects, in the world, which are then experienced by others, which get taken as an experience, and then cause or act as a source of generative ability. Through this emergence, meaning arises, which is pretty damn cool. This undercuts atomistic, scientific, biological reductivism and implies an ecological metaphysics of “embeddedness”. Things matter because experiencing matters (it’s the source of what our understanding of life is, our life is the experiences we are having moment to moment, so they are real), and they matter because what we experience implicates how we act in the world, which will affect how other people experience as well. Maybe we should have used spaghetti as an example instead of pizza; hopefully you’re still following!

Imagination then emerged as the key faculty, and we rescued it from the “McDonald’s ball pit” of child-like diminishment that people so often refer to it with. Maybe imagination is more important than just some thing or faculty that kids have and seem to lose as they get older. Dewey seems to be telling us that imagination has a direct impact on your experience in the world and the intimacy you experience with the objects around you, and ultimately your appreciation of living your life. If those stakes weren’t high enough, imagination also seems to have the tack-on effect of furthering it to the next people: future you, your children, your friend’s children, future civilization… When we ask ourselves what artifacts of ours future civilizations will find,  it has a chilling effect (plastic forks, lol). In this context, Imagination has left the ball pit and entered this metaphysical arena of what is urgent and critical about being alive. 

Naturally, the question of how to actually effect change came up at multiple points in our conversation: some collective realignment to our humanity (to our imagination, collectively) to change for the better the way the world is expressed. The application of imagination actually changes the future. Space and architecture are critical to this mission. Take, for example, that rooms with high ceilings seem to make you think bigger thoughts, churches are tall because you can access the divine by being in a space that reaches up, living in a house with all circular walls changes your brain, one member noted. Mexico was offered as an example of liberal building codes which in turn foster genuine creativity, counter to the sterile minimal vibes of our modern buildings. But making change at the public space and architectural levels requires organization and government involvement. As such, we’re  seemingly caught in a chicken-and-egg situation: we need organization of the proletariat into the social system, and the access to doing that is through imagination, but we’re deeply embedded in the industrial system we need in order to do radical acts at scale. If you create your own “Mexican circular building” here, the comptroller will fine you or sue  you and shut you down for not abiding to the codes. If we were to choose to remain lawful and abide by codes and work within the system, the process of effecting meaningful change seemed to us largely a mystery. The question of robotics and cheap labor enabling detailed, intricate buildings was raised: if beautiful buildings could replace ugly buildings at scale within capitalism, would that improve our experience? We don’t know yet.