Shusterman: Dewey's Aesthetics and Beyond

John Dewey's aesthetics and beyond
(Trecho do depoimento de Richard Shusterman)

Pragmatist aesthetics began with John Dewey and almost ended there. Dewey celebrated aesthetic experience, making it the very center of his philosophy of art. His goal was to break the stifling hold of what he called "the museum conception of art," which compartmentalizes the objects of "high art" from real life. For Dewey, the essence and value of art are not in such artifacts per se but in the dynamic and developing experiential activity through which they are created and perceived. By rethinking art in terms of aesthetic experience, Dewey hoped we could radically enlarge and democratize the domain of art and integrate it more fully into the real world.
Dewey's influence in American aesthetics was significant but very short-lived; it was submerged already in the 1950s by the rising current of analytic aesthetics. To help revive pragmatist aesthetics for contemporary culture, I have tried to deal with two problems in John Dewey: first, his conservative taste, which even in 1934 did not really extend to modern art that was later than early post-Impressionism; and second, his oftentimes problematic theory of art as experience.
Dewey vaguely gestures toward a revalidation of popular art, complaining that popular arts were not thought of as art because they obtained no literary attention. Yet he himself fails to give popular art more than the most fleeting mention. While his text does contain aesthetic analysis, with illustrations of works of high art and of non-Western folk art, there is no real discussion of contemporary popular arts.
Moreover, Dewey's passing references to movies, jazz and comics ends by associating them with "the cheap and the vulgar to which the frustrated aesthetic hunger of the masses is directed." Without concentrated aesthetic attention to the popular arts, how can they escape their image as cheap and vulgar? And why does Dewey not provide this attention when they need it far more than high and folk art, which have already achieved aesthetic recognition?
Dewey's likely answer here would be to appeal to his theory of art as experience--powerful transformative experience. If art is defined as such experience, then simply experiencing that experience could establish an object of popular culture as a work of art. But how can aesthetic experience claim so much?


Since Dewey defines aesthetic experience in terms of immediate, nondiscursive quality, it remains essentially mute, no matter how powerful its impact. It therefore cannot, in itself, provide adequate legitimation for critical judgments. For legitimation is social and justificatory, and thus requires discursive means of consensus formation. In short, art criticism is needed not simply to sharpen perception for experience but also to provide the social preconditions and practices necessary for proper aesthetic appreciation.
This points to the second difficulty in Dewey's aesthetics: his global revisionary definition of art as experience is extremely problematic and thus tended to discredit his whole aesthetic theory in the eyes of analytically trained philosophers. Much art, particularly bad art, fails to engender Deweyan aesthetic experience, which, on the other hand, often arises outside art's institutional limits. Moreover, though the concept of art can be somewhat reshaped, it cannot be convincingly redefined in such a global way so as to be made coextensive with aesthetic experience. No matter how powerful and universal is the aesthetic experience of sunsets, we are hardly going to reclassify them as works of art.
There are other reasons that analytic philosophy tended to be extremely critical of Dewey's concept of aesthetic experience, often eschewing its use and condemning it as a chimera. While Dewey defines art as an aesthetic experience, he also defines that experience as indefinable and ineffable through its immediate, nondiscursive quality. Moreover, he seems to treat art too much as a universal ahistorical essence rather than highlighting its inevitable historical inflections and cultural structurings.
However, the claim that aesthetic experience must involve more than phenomenological immediacy and vivid feeling does not entail that such immediate feeling is not crucial to aesthetic experience. Likewise, the claim that aesthetic experience requires cultural mediation does not entail that its content cannot be experienced as immediate. Much of my current work in pragmatism is to defend both the concept of aesthetic experience and the concept of experience in general by making a case for the presence and value of the nondiscursive dimensions of art, life and experience.
Pragmatist aesthetics not only seeks a greater and more embodied appreciation of art's diverse forms but also enhances our experience of life. So in my latest work, Performing Live, my aesthetic explorations range from rap and country music to techno, cyberspace and urban flânerie, culminating in my theory of somaesthetics, which shows how the rich palette of contemporary body disciplines can best be mobilized for our improved fitness, awareness and quality of life.