How art functions within a society?
In the final chapter of Art as Experience, John Dewey develops the theory that art can help us appreciate and understand otherness. People's experiences that differ from our own, other cultures, and other time periods. In particular, Dewey starts this argument describing the way that art encodes the experiences of a civilization. As we follow this logic, he suggests that the artist is constantly viewing and interpreting the world around him or herself. And through imagination and a process of sort of digesting the events and circumstances of the day, makes products that represent in some important ways the time he or she lives in.
When we then see works of art from another culture, or from another time period, we might understand something of its people. We can begin to imagine the lives, the circumstances, the cultures, of the people through seeing the works of art. And beyond that, we can develop not simplistic or simply factual ideas of a culture and how it functions. But a deeper and maybe even a more personal understanding of the way people think, act, pray or believe. He says, the art characteristic of a civilization is the means for entering sympathetically into the deepest elements in the experience of remote and foreign civilizations.
The arts effect broadening and deepening of our own experience, rendering it less local and provincial as far as we grasp, by their means, the attitudes basic in other forms of experience.
He goes on, works of art are means by which we enter through imagination and the emotions they evoke, into other forms of relationship and participation than our own. Dewey's choice of that word, sympathetically, is important here. Through the imaginative, the emotional, the felt connection possible in a work of art, because of the logic of art that is about more than usefulness. Dewey suggests we have a unique opportunity to engage in with a work of art, to come into relationship with, or into feeling with, sympathetically, the experience of a person or culture distinct from ourselves. And then we can move past our own local or provincial understanding into a broader understanding of the world we live in. This is of course one of the great benefits of setting history, knowing what came before in different cultures, or different contexts.
But Dewey claims a special status for the arts as a way knowing otherness. Through the arts it's a more personal individual kind of knowing, like having sympathy with a friend. And Dewey describes the kind of sympathy we feel with a friend in this way. We don't necessarily form friendship because we accumulate a knowledge about another person. But because of a feeling of shared experience or of seeing the world through their eyes. He says friendship and intimate affection are not the result of information. Right, information about another person, even though knowledge might further their formation.
But it does so only as it becomes an integral part of sympathy through the imagination. It's when the desires and aims, the interests and modes of response of another, become an expansion of our own being that we understand her. We learn to see with her eyes, hear with her ears, and their results give true instruction, for they are built into our own structure.
He says friendship and intimate affection are not the result of information. Right, information about another person, even though knowledge might further their formation. But it does so only as it becomes an integral part of sympathy through the imagination. It's when the desires and aims, the interests and modes of response of another, become an expansion of our own being that we understand her. We learn to see with her eyes, hear with her ears, and their results give true instruction, for they are built into our own structure.
As a good philosopher he acknowledges that this kind of communication, finding what he called a continuity of experience with another person, is a huge issue that philosophers have wrestled with. I can't help while I read Dewey excitedly talking about this potential of the art. I can't help but think what would he make of Facebook and Twitter and the internet in general, as a way of connecting people and sharing communication? But at the same time, I don't think this point has lost relevance in today's world. He describes a kind of death of human emotional experience, a kind of personal identification to this kind of communication we have through art. He goes on to suggest there's a kind of mind opening that can happen for us, when we identify with another experience, not just intellectually. But through a true sympathy, that our own ways of seeing, our own attitudes even begin to shift.
He says, the effect of all genuine acquaintance with art created by other peoples, is that we understand it in the degree in which we make it a part of our own attitudes. Not just by collective information concerning the conditions under which it was produced. To some degree we become artists ourselves as we undertake this integration, and, by bringing it to pass, our own experience is re-oriented. Barriers are dissolved, limiting prejudices melt away. This insensible melting is far more efficacious than the change effected by reasoning, because it enters directly into attitude. So there's a question here, if art has the power to change our perspective, to make us open to others, to incorporate the experiences of other into our own, is this a simple formula? Take the intolerant, add art and arrive at a cooperative and understanding perspective. The answer is obviously not as pure as this, nor as simple.
But I think Dewey in his own discussion of art helps us understand this. And that is he talks about the energy with which a person needs to apprehend art. It's not just about strolling through a museum, glancing at the pictures, memorizing the dates of the painter's lives. And walking out of the museum with a great understanding of a far off people or culture. No, Dewey has already advocated that aesthetic experience, the true experience, requires a personal commitment and a devotion of attention, a personal and really emotional involvement. I'd like to think of this as an effort to identify with a work of art or an artist.
How do we relate a moment in our own lives to that piece of music, that painting, that sculpture? Can we identify with it by actively looking inside ourselves for a relatable experience that we've had? It's only then, I think, that we begin to have the kind of receptivity that allows us to then have sympathy beyond the sort of intellectual understanding, with that other person or other culture that's represented. Before we move on into a discussion of society and what we mean by participating in our societies with art. Let's pivot to another important point that Dewey makes about art and its role in our civilization. Dewey considers how art plays a role not only in connecting us with people of the past but, in fact, in the ongoing process of forming societies in the present and, in fact, in the future. He contends that art is more moral than moralities. That the basis of what is right and wrong, what is good and bad, where we assign praise and blame. That this is too often fixed, not in a kind of living and changing awake vision of the world, but in the rules and religions of the past. Art Dewey says, is the domain of imagination and imaginative perception, of considering the true patterns of our lives, and envisioning new possibilities in the world. In his words, art is more moral than moralities. For the latter, for moralities, either are or tend to become consecrations of the status quo, reflections of custom, reinforcements of the established order.
On the other hand, art has been the means of keeping alive the sense of purposes that outrun evidence and of meanings that transcend indurated habit. Outrun evidence, he says, and meanings that transcend habit. Or in other words, the artist can generate the meaning of things in the world beyond where we already have evidence, and beyond where we already operate in habitual, hardened ways. That with an imaginative or creative way of seeing the world, we can make judgements that are more relevant responsive to the world around us. Than we would simply by following conventions or standard ideas of right and wrong. And considering the future, Dewey contends that the true futurists, the true ideas about the future, come from the imaginative, the imaginative visions introduced in art.
Only imaginative vision elicits the possibilities that are interwoven within the texture of the actual. I love that metaphor, like the tapestry of life here. The first stirrings of dissatisfaction and the first intimations of a better future are always found in works of art. Change in the climate of the imagination is the precursor of the changes that affect more than the details of life. We'll return to this later, but I think Dewey here sets us up for a consideration of the social imagination. Or as Maxine Green says imagining things as if they could be otherwise.
A contemporary political theorist John Keane, refers to the interaction of democracy and civil society as being interdependent. They're not one and the same, but two components of a free society. The way he says it is, a civil society is a category that both describes and envisages a complex and dynamic ensemble of legally protected non-governmental institutions that tend to be non-violent, self-organizing, self-reflexive, and permanently in tension with each other. And with the state institutions that frame, constrict and enable their activities. So, this idea of legally protected but non-governmental, that the government allows this space, but this is not formally government business in this kind of arena. And the key here is that, people have multiple viewpoints in a civil society. Multiple backgrounds, multiple interests. And the space of civil society is where people can organize together and promote these, teaming up with like minded people. People have the opportunity to pursue their goals.
Going back to Hegel, he speaks of the individual as the particular person, and says, that people need one another to fully express their needs in the word. The particular person is essentially related to other particular persons, in such a way that each gains validity, and finds a satisfaction through the others. So there's a sense of mutuality, that in order to pursue my goal, I may need others with me to do that, and there's a kind of satisfaction that we can achieve together. At the same time, the multiplicity of viewpoints can lead to this, as Keane had said, this inherent tension.
Right, and how do we deal with difference? How do we deal with the idea that two groups may have opposing ideas, that people, we're trying to work towards the same, within the same democracy, within the same overall system, but have different viewpoints? So how do we deal with difference?
In one sense in the civil society, the right to pursue your interests, and the freedom to pursue your interests is tampered by the knowledge that others have the same rights. I like to think of the idea as property, and property as a metaphor, to understand the dynamic of having freedom within a society. How people come to respect a collective sense of rights? And how people can be part of a collective, a community, while acknowledging difference, while acknowledging pluralities, while acknowledging multiplicity? How does a society mediate the needs of many people, and have them coexist.
Having considered idea of the structure of civil society, let's turn now to Maxine Greene's thinking on the subject. That civil society is not the domain of laws or the state, as we were discussing with but rather a place of relationships and of people information. What is civil society? I think it's a society in part that creates it's community by means of dialogue, by means of felt connection among consciousness and the world. A civil society is not necessarily a society defined by law or written scripts. I think a civil society, like community, emerges and it's never achieved. It's never achieved because people are never complete, and I don't think the society can be complete. It wouldn't be what we cherish if it was, well now we've got it, we got the Constitution. We've got everybody and it has to be always in the making.
And then what is civil? Civil, it comes out of the idea of community, of something in the making, of acknowledging each other as citizens, whatever citizens mean. And citizen is somebody who has regard for the integrity of other people. And out of that regard and out of that feeling of kinship a community or civil society may take shape.
It's never finished, never on the way. What is education in an incomplete society? You have to engage children or young people in a constant effort to find themselves and to define their society. Fixing is what scares me. You know it's done. For me, it may not be for you, the heart of social justice is a real understanding of other people's worth and integrity. It depends upon a regard for other people's significance and to change reality that's what I was doing to change reality. I mean, the idea of a society where each person feels himself on the way, on the way to what it is to live in a place where each person has to be regarded. And the complication is that each person Is not necessarily in your world. Like maybe I should I have regard for certain pop music players even though I don't like their music.
I have to say, well, they're trying. It has something to do with their feeling of themselves, like Lady Gaga. I wouldn't dismiss Lady Gaga, even though I can't stand listening to her or her look. But the good thing about a democracy is we learn to accept the Lady Gagas' and admire them. You ever see her talking about incompletion and I believe in incompletion. Because if you have, like I always say, all my questions are incomplete, and my answers are equally incomplete. Because if they were finished I'd have no place to go. The trouble fundamentalism or all these things, they feel they have the answer which is so frightening.
In a keynote talk at the conference Imaging Art and Social Change, Maxine Greene talks about the notion of regard and its opposite, or invisibility, where people are not seen, or not regarded as having significance. But regard, this notion of regard, as the basis of civil society, suggests that the most important aspect of a diverse set of people coming together into a community is each person's ability to really see one another. She says one of the things I think we have to combat, one of the things that stand in the way of fulfillment is exactly that invisibility. Looking at people in terms of their ethnicity, in terms of their gender only. Forgetting that each one is a person. Each one is indescribable. One of the things we have to imagine, what it would be like to have a dialogue among diverse people each of whom is a person. Each of whom has something in them that needs expression. The trouble with fundamentalism or all these things, they feel they have the answer which is so frightening. It's like what tyranny is like, people burst in. It's not just the idea of the Nazis. It's the idea of any kind of authority that takes you over, prevents you from thinking for yourself. Tying this perspective back to Dewey's question is, is it that capacity to see, to imagine, to sympathize, to identify with that comes from making and perceiving art? Is it that this can transfer to our capacity to live in a pluralistic world? Beyond relating to civilizations in the past, can art serve as a modality to see and imagine possibilities in the present? To see and relate to people living in our world?
Maxine Greene says, if there is to be social change, there must indeed be those who design, project, strategize. But humane and courageous and audacious change must be made by persons who know what it means for spaces to be opened and what it means for imagination to meet other people's imagination. And for windows to open and remain ajar.
WHAT IS CIVIL SOCIETY? http://archive.communitymusicworks.org/images/SymphonyInTheMaking_AGoldbard.pdf
Today, the phrase often denotes society’s third sector, the aggregate of voluntary social structures that, together with the state and the market, form society as a whole. In the intervening twenty centuries,“civil society” has been used in many different ways to characterize the social contract human beings enter into when we form societies.
In his opening remarks, Michael Steinberg, co-convener of the symposium, both a professor of history and music and the director of the Cogut Center, rooted the concept in Hegel’s thought, noting that Hegel’s attitude in the 1820s was that things that happen in civil society—involving institutions, the press, publications, societies, dinner hours—that all of this is a kind of preparation for the state to come in and take over and set the example of true enlightenment, and take responsibility for cultural life.... As the category develops, it became clear to people, especially to Germans, especially in the mid- 20th century, that the state either was not going to take responsibility for this kind of level of culture and conversation, or if it did take responsibility for it, you wouldn’t really want it to take responsibility for it. So in later postwar thought, civil society comes to mean an autonomous discussion of how culture works, a conversation about affairs that actually involve the state, but a conversation that actually happens autonomously from the state.
Whether civil society is defined as a countervailing force to governments and markets, or it is seen to subsume both, the term seems here to stay.
Civil society refers to the associations of citizens (outside their families, friends and businesses) entered into voluntarily to advance their interests, ideas and ideologies. The term does not include profit-making activity (the private sector) or governing (the public sector). Of particular relevance to the United Nations are mass organizations (such as organizations of peasants, women or retired people), trade unions, professional associations, social movements, indigenous people’s organizations, religious and spiritual organizations, academe and public benefit non- governmental organizations.
source: We the peoples: civil society, the United Nations and global governance: Report of the Panel of Eminent Persons on United Nations–Civil Society Relations, United Nations General Assembly, June 2004.
WHAT CAN MUSIC DO?
Three themes emerged repeatedly: music can be the vehicle or container for personal and social growth; it can serve as a model of how to be a citizen in the larger community; and it can provide an experience of deep equality, a simultaneous encounter with active listening and total presence, with learning and teaching.
A VEHICLE FOR PERSONAL AND SOCIAL GROWTH
Stanford Thompson, a trumpeter, conductor, and former New England Conservatory Abreu Fellow, is Executive Director of Play On, Philly!, an El Sistema-inspired “out-of-school music education program” that began in West Philadelphia and is now branching across the city. Stanford Thompson described his program as serving “kids that are in many ways from the lowest common denominator of society, now having access to the same resources that I had, so that we now end up helping to reshape lives and communities. These kids have access to learning high-level executive functioning skills.” On its website, Play On, Philly! aggregates this individual learning into four goals for community development:
Promote social progress through music
Build a foundation for a prosperous and sustainable society
Improve and nurture children’s social-emotional well-being, behavioral development, academic motivation, achievement, and school attendance
Build pride within the communities we serve, while bringing them together, through developing orchestras, bands, choruses, and instrumental ensembles.
Based on the other side of the Atlantic, Pamela Rosenberg, Dean of Fellows and Programs at The American Academy in Berlin, described the aim of The Musikkindergarten Berlin, a preschool program shaped by conductor Daniel Barenboim’s educational ideas, this way:
It’s not about creating a lot of little musicians. It’s about helping children learn about life through music. If at the end of their time at the Kindergarten, they’ve taken up an instrument, that’s lovely, but that’s not actually what it’s about. It’s about
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