An Aesthetics and Ethics of Placemaking an Ecological Public Sphere: Dewey and Lippmann's Publics and the Challenge of Ecology

Quotes:

“The prime condition of a democratically organized public is a kind of knowledge and insight which does not yet exist.” (1927, p. 166). dewey

Dewey in 1934, “that of recovering the continuity of aesthetic experience with normal processes of living” (10).

In Dewey’s Experience and Nature (1925), he says art “is the complete cul-mination of nature and . . . ‘science’ is properly a handmaiden that conducts natural events to this happy issue” (290).

“This work of assembly is especially necessary if we now are to imagine the “we” that humans are supposed to feel part of in taking responsibility for the anthropocene. Right now there is no path leading from my changing the light bulbs in my home straight to the Earth’s destiny: such a stair has no step; such a ladder has no rung.” Bruno Latour in waiting for gaia

“I hope (ah, hope again!) to have shown why it might be important, even ur-gent, to bring together all the possible resources to close the gap between the size and scale of the problems we have to face and the set of emotional and cognitive states that we associate with the tasks of answering the call to re-sponsibility without falling into melancholia or denial. It is largely for this reason that we have resurrected this rather out of fashion term of “political arts” for the new program we created in Sciences Po to train professional artists and scientists —social and natural— to the triple task of scientific, political and artistic representation.” Bruno Latour in waiting for gaia

Introduction

While this conference is titled “Culture, Politics and Climate Change,” we know that what brings us here is the crisis of climate change and the various ecological crises more generally, and a recognition that something much more needs to be done and that it's unclear how to go about generating the will, in terms of individuals, states, nations, in terms of the publics, national and international, to address the crisis.

Or as Bruno Latour put the matter:

“What are we supposed to do when faced with an ecological crisis that does not resemble any of the crises of war and economies, the scale of which is formidable, to be sure, but to which we are in a way habituated since it is of human, all too human, origin? What to do when told, day after day, and in increasingly strident ways, that our present civilization is doomed; that the Earth itself has been so tampered with that there is no way it will ever come back to any of the various steady states of the past? What do you do when reading, for instance, a book such as Clive Hamilton titled Requiem for a species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change—and that the species is not the dodo or the whale but us, that is, you and me?1”

In this presentation we would like to suggest that the crisis of climate change is deeply intertwined with a crisis of science and a crisis of democracy. And we would like to propose that these interconnected crises in a crucial respect, be addressed through art. However, here we are not talking about art as a picture that hangs on a wall or an artfully composed photograph or a multi-media production. We are referring to art in the sense proposed by John Dewey in Art as Experience, the active, creative engagement with life and community and the world through experience, which can be seen to be deeply related to what is currently known as participatory art.

Now, we want to explore the proposition that art and science, as form of art2, might assist us in ameliorating our ecosystem, not so that we can all go back to business as usual, but amelioration (or remediation) in the sense of putting the value of human flourishing at the top of the priority list as we continue to make decisions, great and small, in response to these crises. And we want to do this from two vantage points. The first is a debate that took place between statesman-journalist Walter Lippmann and public philosopher John Dewey over the course of several years in the 1920s and the second is a current and ongoing instance of urban participatory art that has found roots in Portland, Oregon and is spreading across the United States and Canada. It is worthy to note that it is even being referenced in climate change discussions in The

1 Latour, Bruno. 2011« Waiting for Gaia. Composing the common world through art and politics », a lecture at the French Institute for the lauching of SPEAP in London, November 2011.

2 Dewey, John. 2008. Experience and Nature. In The later works (Vol. 1). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, p.366. (Original work published: 1925).

European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control climate change initia-tive.3

If we look again at the title of our paper, we see that we are ambitious! We are tying together aesthetics, ethics, ecology, placemaking, the public sphere, and American Pragmatism all in one essay. We are using a collection of terms that are seldom encountered outside of the academy and museums, that is, in the so-called ‘real’ world. We are well aware that the crises we are discussing are well underway and that many thousands of actions, if not more, have already taken place in response to these crises, millions of dol-lars have been spent, and even more engagements are emerging. Take this conference for instance, as an engagement, or events that are happening on the streets: concrete action is being implemented, praxis and meaningful re-sponses to these crises can and are ways to get some ‘real work’ done (think Maker Culture). ‘Real work’ as in rolling-up-our-sleeves, engaging with the material of asphalt, dirt, concepts of green, sustainable, and rational, and reinvigorating fun, meaningful action and 'placemaking.' Let’s bring to our communities of practice a revitalization of place, space, and making, as more than the frame of a static public square to the long-term embeddedness and thriving of planting an old-growth forest TODAY. Instead of only reme-diating our communication technologies, let's remediate our thinking in, around, and about seemingly disparate objects, concepts, and situations themselves.

And to that end, inspired both by experiential philosopher John Dewey and The City Repair Project, we gift to you with openness and communis, sharing in and of community, an American Pragmatism placemaking remix. And with this in body-mind, Dewey’s term recognizing the non-dualist sense of knowing as both felt and thought4, we begin with what’s happening on the ground, redefining and reintegrating the dualism of theory/practice, as theory-practice.

So what is City Repair?

3 Ebi, Kristie, and Jan Semenza. 2008. Community-Based Adaptation to the Health Impacts of Climate Change. American Journal of Preventive Medicine. 35, no. 5: 501-507.4 Dewey, John. 2008. Experience and Nature. In The later works (Vol. 1). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published: 1925), p. 217.

In the spring of 1996, before the City Repair Project in Portland or the term ‘intersection repair’ was even a term neighbors in Portland's Sellwood neighborhood had begun holding neighborhood tea parties in a structure that a local architect had built in his front yard. In that neighborhood this place came to be known as the “The Moonday T-Hows” (teahouse)5. The concept which the neighbors put into action was if you give people the space and opportunity to spend time together, to meet, and drink some tea, people will, in fact, start to build relational dynamics and a living neighborhood.6

What these neighbors found was that a simple idea can work. As described in a recounting by one of the neighbors, and later one of the co-founders of The City Repair Project, dozens and then even hundreds of neighbors began coming together for weekly gatherings. The place and the event developed. Neighbors from all walks of life started playing music, there was dancing, poetry reading, children playing and people continued to drink tea, forming friendships–even people who had lived together for years but never really met.

The city of Portland decided the teahouse was a violation of city building codes and ordered it taken down. The neighbors having enjoyed this gathering place decided to challenge the order. Their new plans called for the gathering place to take to the street intersection. The group of neighbors designed a plan to claim the street intersection as a shared space by painting a mural directly on the intersection. Dutifully they approached the Portland Office of Transportation (PDOT) about the project and PDOT dutifully rejected the idea, ironically telling the residents, as recalled by one of the early participants, “that's public space–––you can't use it!”

Some empathetic individuals from inside PDOT suggested to the residents that the only way to get the Portland City Council to consider such an unusual request was to proceed without authorization and force a

5 Lakeman, Mark. <http://marklakeman.wordpress.com/about/>6 This review of the City Repair Project comes from Leis, Jenny, and Daniel Lerch. 2003. City repair's placemaking guidebook: [intersection repair]. Portland, Or: City Repair Project.; Lakeman, Mark, 2008. “A Chronology of City Repair,” produced by Common-Good Media. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DGE9BtSK4Q; and Semenza, Jan. 2003. The Intersection of Urban Planning, Art, and Public Health: The Sunnyside Piazza. American Journal of Public Health. 93, no. 9: 1439-1441.

confrontation. The neighbors then decided to go forward with their plan, refined their design for painting the intersection, what they call an “intersection repair,” organized a legal block party, and then during the block party implemented their repair. Naming it “Share-It-Square,” a colorful painted circle connected the four corners of the intersection and included prototype installations, including an information kiosk, tea serving station, benches, and other amenities conducive to participation in a shared space.

The City of Portland immediately sent notification for removal of the installations and threatened legal action. The neighborhood group set out to engage the City Council and PDOT in a dialogue about the project. The consummation was that the neighborhood convinced the city regarding the positive outcomes of their efforts. The City Council then passed a series of ordinances that not only granted permits to this project, but set out guidelines for similar projects throughout the city.

As neighbors continued to refine their effort at intersection repair, Share-It-Square continued to flourish as an emerging public, whereby a number of residents created an “organized group action” called The City Repair Project (CRP). As a nonprofit organization, CRP “educates and inspires communities and individuals to creatively transform the places where they live.” Their mission statement reads, “we facilitate artistic and ecologically-oriented placemaking through projects that honor the interconnection of human communities and the natural world.”7 By the summer of 2012 nearly ninety intersection repairs projects had come to fruition in the City of Portland with the embodiment of this idea spreading to communities across the U.S. and Canada8.

CRP has grown to include the Village Building Convergence (VBC) which is an “annual ten-day placemaking festival that combines crowdsourced ac-tivism, creative community development, hands-on education and celebra-tion.”9 Other noteworthy projects include “Depave,” which is dedicated to removing unnecessary asphalt and concrete from urban areas, creating po-tential for new green spaces, community gardens and gathering places.10

7 Leis, Jenny, and Daniel Lerch. 2003. City repair's placemaking guidebook: [intersection repair]. Portland, Or: City Repair Project.8 City Repair, http://www.cityrepair.org. 9 Village Building Convergence, http://vbc.cityrepair.org/10 Depave, http://cityrepair.org/projects/depave/

CRP’s Placemaking Guidebook: Neighborhood Placemaking in the Public Right-of-Way is a non-commercial remixable Creative Commons licensed book11 posing the question what makes a place great? The answer they pro-vide is that

Public places are the geographical glue that binds the community to-gether. These spaces are friendly, secure, distinctive and well inte-grated into the community fabric; they are places for democracy, so-ciability, gathering, collective memory, communication, connection and local economic vitality. Enriching people’s experience of public life and providing a platform for activities where people have a sense of community ownership, great places evoke a sense of identity and provide a focal point for cultural exchange and transformation.12

The on-the-ground work of intersection repair combined with the facilitation work of CRP is continuing to inspire local, engaged urban activism through the lived experiences of people in neighborhoods who wish to enhance com-munity by the conceptual and self-reflective vision of neighbors working to-gether. The dualism of abstract thinking and hands-on labor are clearly chal-lenged.

CRP’s Placemaking Guidebook lists reasons participants gave for engaging in an intersection repair. These include wanting “to get to know neighbors,” “make a statement of neighborhood culture,” “to slow traffic,” “to align our daily lives into relationship with local natural cycles and make the physical environment more ecologically friendly,” “to reclaim public gathering spa-ces,” “to provide a reason for kids to play in their own neighborhood,” “to beautify and create a safer, more livable neighborhood,” “to create stronger connections between local schools, businesses, organizations and neigh-bors,” “to demonstrate the power of a small group of neighbors to create the place with a want to be living.”

The guide notes a number of hidden benefits in creating an intersection re-pair. These include the “opportunity to learn or practice a new skill,” “a chance to share a personal passion or interest with the world,” create “strong 11 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5.12 Leis, Jenny, and Daniel Lerch. 2003. City repair's placemaking guidebook: [intersection repair]. Portland, Or: City Repair Project.

personal connections with people who live around them,” and to create “strong personal connection to the place where they live.” The guide posits intersection repair as “a transformation of internal as well as physical land-scapes.”13

How does an aesthetics and ethics of placemaking, like CRP, engage John Dewey and Walter Lippmann's notions of publics and the challenge of ex-panding the embodiment of an ecological public sphere?

In essence, we are suggesting that the grounded theory-practice of CRP’s in-tersection repair can contribute approaches to the academy’s abstract think-ing, while the academy can offer CRP and other local actions embodied con-ceptual frameworks to consider in future action-engagement-repairs, thus as-sisting in the repair of the split between useful and artful.

The debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey will assist in clarifying the crisis of climate change as also a crisis of science and a crisis of democracy. By reconsidering the theory-practice of CRP as both a representation and enactment of contemporary experimentation, the concepts of amelioration/remediation along with community/public fuse together as an emergent aesthetic practice.

We this context in mind, we can then return to reconsider the urban activism of the city repair Project because we think it both represents and enacts a contemporary experiment in how we simultaneously fix a broken world, bring a community or public into a consciousness of itself, do this in a way that is 1) aesthetic, in the sense of being joyful and imaginative and useful action, 2) ethical in the sense of developing a deeper understanding and appreciation for the quality of our interconnectedness and interdependence and respecting and valuing that interdependence, interconnectedness, and the diversity of that interdependence and, 3) embodied, giving us a sense of what a new science of knowing might look like which is wedded to a democratic and aesthetic sense of community.

The Lippmann-Dewey Debate

First, let's consider the debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey which took place during the 1920’s. This debate continues to be of

13 Ibid. p.18.

significant importance for political theorists and Pragmatists because it charts out two divergent views of the nature and character of democracy in relationship to science, art and political engagement. There was, of course, no actual debate, no face-to-face meeting between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. Instead there was a series of written efforts on the part of both men to address the role of the public in guiding a democratic society in challenging times. Lippmann wrote two books during this time, Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, while Dewey wrote short reviews of both books and then a sustained response published as The Public and Its Problems in 1927.

A crude characterization of the exchange was that in the 1920’s Lippmann saw a crisis of democracy, the unexamined belief in the existence of a public capable of engaging in rational self-governance. Lippmann argued that there was no evidence for the existence of such a public. It was an unsustainable fiction. Given this fiction the only reasonable solution to the crisis of democracy would be to turn to the intelligent guidance of the scientific community. A caricature of Dewey's position was that the surrender of leadership of society to a scientific elite was as potentially dangerous as surrendering control to any ruling elite. The solution for Dewey, in this caricature, was the advocacy a participatory democracy through the means of a reformed educational system and a reformed media.

While this caricature of the debate has some validity, it also misrepresents the more distinctively divergent views of these two men over what the nature of the problem was and, in a sense, continues to be, with respect to the intersection of science, democracy, public engagement, and activism. The climate change crisis can be viewed as one disastrous outcome of this misrepresentation.

They both agreed that democracy was in a state of crisis, and believed that an increasingly complex industrial, capitalist world had made the possibility of meaningful citizen engagement with governance more and more of a fiction. Lippmann’s question was, is democracy possible given the dubious proposition of a rational and informed public? His attention was focused on the viability of this ideal of liberal democracy. Dewey on the other hand, while deeply concerned with the public, began from a different starting point. His question was, given the empirical evidence of humans’ intrinsic and ongoing interdependence with each other and with the world around them, how do we construct a society which allows for the flourishing of

individuals, their ongoing relationship to each other, and the world? Where Lippmann was primarily concerned with the fiction of the public and the promise of science, Dewey was concerned with what had become, in his view, the unfortunate, yet operative definition of science and its relationship to an inadequate definition of democracy. To understand the problem of the public, Dewey argued, it was necessary to understand the problem of how we define democracy and science as ways of knowing.

These questions, we think, are at the very forefront of the climate crisis debate.

There is a growing view in the scientific community that science has provided all the evidence we need to be very confident, in a probabilistic sense, of humankind's contribution to an array of environmental disasters, in process, and yet to unfold. In this view, data is not the problem. The problem is how to translate that data into political action. And for some in the scientific community, the belief in the strength of the data and the assessment of the lack of will in democratic societies to respond, is evidence of a need to set democracy aside while science solves the problem.14 What's missing in this review is a recognition that the same science which is helping us to discover the extent of humans’ negative impact on the ecosystem is the same, unexamined view of the relationship between science and nature, and of the relationship between science and democracy, that brought us to this point of crisis in the first place. We are in the ironic position of this dominant, value-free science essentially claiming the moral high ground and authority for action, in terms of determining how we should respond.

Even Lippmann understood the moral dilemma of value-free science. He recognized that value-free science not only has done an excellent job of dismantling beliefs in traditional metaphysical systems, but he also realized that given the logic of this kind of science, it had turned its fragmenting, deconstructing, analytic force on science itself. By revealing that all knowledge even positivist scientific knowledge is human-made and self-interested, it has consequently become relativistic and without a moral basis.

14 Hulme, Mike, 2012. “What sorts of knowledge for what sort of politics?“What sorts of knowledge for what sort of politics? (20 June) Copenhagen Sustainability Lecture at the University of Copenhagen. Transcript at <http://mikehulme.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/12_05-Copenhagen-script_web.pdf>.

Lippmann gave up all hope for government guided by its citizenry. He wrote,

The individual man does not have opinions on all public affairs. He does not know how to direct public affairs. He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen. I cannot imagine how we could know, and there is not the least reason for thinking, as mystical Democrats have sought, that the compounding of individual differences in masses of people can produce continuous directing force in public affairs. 15

He referred to the Enlightenment idea of reason (science) stating that man

…was showing the history of his ideas and his customs and he was driven to acknowledge that they were bounded by time and space and circumstance. He was shown that there is a bias in all opinion, even in opinions purged of desire, for the man who holds the opinion must stand at some point in space and time and can see not the whole world only the world from that point. 16

Lippmann’s philosophy of liberalism was supposed to set humankind free, but instead undermined all moral authority, metaphysical or scientific. The only course of action left, he argued, was to maintain the illusion of “the public,” an illusion of the rule by the people which “tends to weaken the milder spirit; it softens the hardness of action.” For Lippmann, the role of the public could only be as “spectators of action” helping to minimize violent conflict among the ruling elite.” 17

Lippmann’s analysis not only anticipates the dominant worldview of positivistic, value-free science, but also the emergence of postmodernism, which drew on work both in science and the deconstructionist wave in the humanties to attack the idea of a foundational, objective science. Lippmann also anticipated the malaise of contemporary moral relativism captured by Jurgen Habermas in his famous statement “modernism is dead but

15 Lippmann, Walter. 1925. The phantom public: a sequel to "Public opinion". New York: Harcourt, Brace.16 Ibid.17 Ibid.

dominant.”18 Dewey’s exchange with Lippmann can help chart a course out of this malaise, articulating an ethics, aesthetics, and enactivism of democratic inquiry and action with the climate change crisis pointing to CRP’s placemaking as an exemplar.

Returning to the Lippmann-Dewey exchange, Bybee writes “At the heart of Dewey's argument was that Lippmann, and the Democratic realists in general, were calling for the replacement of democracy with science without understanding either.”19 And we might add, without understanding the meaning of art and its relationship to both democracy and science.

Democracy

For Lippmann, the liberal theory of democracy was flawed from the start because it presupposed a public capable of forming a will, based on the rational deliberation of relevant information, to arrive at a collective public opinion capable of directing its representative government. Lippmann argued that while this was a noble idea, scientific evidence was establishing that people tend to distort their perceptions in accordance with their self-interest and are faced with overwhelming amounts of information pertaining to increasingly complex affairs produced to capture their attention as consumers. How could one expect such ‘citizens’ to be able to direct policy in a complex world?

His answer was simply that they couldn’t. Worse, as long as the fiction was maintained that the people ruled, such a public would need to be invented and manufactured by a ruling economic and political elite. Lippmann wrote,

The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. And so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a

18 Habermas, Jurgen, 1989. “Modernity – An Incomplete Project,” in Foster, Hal. 1989. Postmodern culture. London [u.a.]: Pluto Press.19 Bybee, C. 1999. "Can democracy survive in the post-factual age? A return to the Lippmann-Dewey debate about the politics of news". Communication Abstracts. 22 (6).

corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power. 20

Better, he argued, to accept the nonexistence of the public and provide for a more suitable, more progressive alternative, which could still serve the public interest if not be directed by the public. The creation of a network of intelligence divisions supporting the work of various agencies of government could be the answer. Lippmann realized that this proposal would radically change the position of social scientists, by placing them “in front of the decision instead of behind it.” 21

Lippmann understood that he was proposing a new, ‘realistic’ vision of democracy. But he believed that this redefinition made sense, given that traditional democratic theory had expected too much from its citizens and also misunderstood the point of democratic government anyway. The point of democratic government was not to give people the pleasure of governing, but to clear the way for them to go about fulfilling their own individualistic desires.

His solution, however, did not address or solve his deeper concerns expressed in The Phantom Public published three years later, that science itself, as a practice, was not simply discovering objective truths, but was creating knowledge inevitably tainted by unrecognized human values and interests. Lippmann could have asked ‘whose values and interests?’, but he didn't. Dewey, unafraid of the link between knowing and human interests, between science and values, did.

As Bybee wrote, “For Dewey, the movement to democracy is built into the social character of existence. The need then, Dewey argued, is not to invent a definition of democracy, but to discover its definition as a practice.”22 Dewey saw democracy as the outcome from the lived actions of the public. In this sense, the existence of the public was never in question. It could go into “eclipse,” but never disappear. 23

20 Ibid., p. 248.21 Ibid., p. 375.22 Bybee,"Can democracy survive in the post-factual age? A return to the Lippmann-Dewey debate about the politics of news". p. 49. 23 Dewey, John. 2008. The Public and Its Problems. In The later works (Vol. 2). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published: 1927). p. 313.

Dewey’s description of the general meaning of democracy highlights this living quality of the public and leads him to reconstruct the liberal meaning of individualism held by Lippmann. Dewey writes, in his definition of democracy:

From the standpoint of the individual, it consists in having a responsible share according to capacity in forming and directing the activities of groups to which one belongs and in participating according to need in the values to which the groups sustain. From the standpoint of the groups, it demands liberation of the potentialities of members of the group in harmony with the interests and goods which are common. Since every individual is a member of many groups, this specification cannot be fulfilled except when different groups interact flexibly and fully in connection with other groups… There is a free give-and-take: fullness of integrated personality is therefore possible of achievement, since the pulls and responses of different groups reinforce one another and their values accord.24

We see that for Dewey, the individual is only an individual in relationship to a group. And it is the work of the group to create the conditions for the flourishing of the individual in ways that also support the common good. This interrelationship is not just a good idea (ideal) but the basis for the continuation and healthy development of any community. Democratic practice is in the living structure of community. As Bybee wrote “Dewey was offering democracy not as one among many alternatives to our social life could be carried out. Rather he viewed it as the embodiment of community life itself. But he did not consider it an ideal toward which society was moving. Instead he saw it as a tendency built into the very structure of social activity.” 25

Given this view, it is clear why Dewey would have little empathy with turning the administration of society over to any elite: metaphysical, economic, political and/or scientific.

24 Dewey, John. 2008. The Public and Its Problems. In The later works (Vol. 2). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published: 1927), pp. 327-328.25 Bybee,"Can democracy survive in the post-factual age? A return to the Lippmann-Dewey debate about the politics of news". p. 49.

What does democracy mean save that the individual is to have a share in determining the conditions and the aims of his own work; and that, upon the whole, through the free and mutual harmonizing of different individuals, the work of the world is better done than when planned, arranged, and directed by a few, no matter how wise or how good intent that few? 26

How then does Dewey answer Lippmann’s argument that the collective is ill-equipped to serve as a public in any but a symbolic way?

Science as Social Inquiry and Public Intelligence

The answer for Dewey, lies, in part with how the public is defined. He wrote:

Conjoint, combined, associated action is a universal trait of the behavior of things. Such action has results. Some of the results of human collective action are perceived, that is, they are noted in such ways that they are taken account of. Then there arise purposes, plans, measures and means, to secure consequences which are liked and eliminate those which are found obnoxious. Thus perception generates a common interest; that is, those affected by the consequences are perforce concerned in conduct of all those who along with themselves share in bringing about the results. Sometimes the consequences are confined to those who directly shared in the transaction which produces them. In other cases they extend far beyond those immediately engaged in producing them... Those indirectly and seriously affected for good or for evil form a group distinctive enough to require recognition and a name. The name selected is The Public.27

The meaning of the public is intertwined with not only the inevitable associated action of its members, but also with the consequences of those actions. Knowledge of these consequences not only allows the community to have self-awareness, but allows it to continually reorient its actions promoting both individual and community well-being. Growing awareness

26 Dewey, John. 2008.”Democracy in Education,”. In The middle works 1899-1924. Volume 3: 1903-1906, Essays. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published: 1905). p. 233.

27 Ibid., Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, p. 257.

of the consequences of community actions, thereby enhances the ability of individuals and the community to flourish.

For Dewey, science as a form of inquiry with its primary goal as the control of nature and a quest for certainty creates the pretense of an absolute and discoverable order. This ‘mere reason’ can be revealed only through a “superempirical” logic understood by a mind divorced from a felt, bodily experience of the world--- for Dewey, the source of values.

Where Lippmann feared the relativity of perceptions, Dewey welcomed this insight. For Dewey, we could be rid of the misleading question, “what are the facts,” and instead focus on the more central question of “by what right do we act?” Science’s search for ‘facts’ had sidetracked it from why we search for what we search for–a deeply value-based question. As Bybee stated, “Dewey argued that society must abandon the claims of reason and replace them with the judgment of intelligence. Science, set free from any social context and focused only on control, had produced reason.”

Dewey used the term ‘intelligence’ to refer to social inquiry guided by the concerns of a community into the consequences of actions which are deemed to be of relevance to the health and well-being of a community and its members.28

The application of science based only on mere reason, focused on abstract reason and separated from felt experience, has grown steadily since the scientific revolution and, as Dewey wrote:

In consequence, man has suffered the impact of enormously enlarged control of physical energies without any corresponding ability to control himself and his own affairs. Knowledge divided against itself, a science to whose incompleteness is added an artificial split [between science and art], has played its part in generating enslavement of men, women and children in factories in which they are animated machines to tend inanimate machines… The instrumentality [of science] becomes a master and works fatally as if possessed of a will of its own–not because it has a will but because man has not.29

28 Bybee, C. 1999. "Can democracy survive in the post-factual age? A return to the Lippmann-Dewey debate about the politics of news". p. 53. 29 Dewey, John. 2008. The Public and Its Problems. p. 344.

Dewey recognized the most important question is in whose interest does science operate? He wrote that the hidden interests behind ‘value–free’ science were those of economic and political elites. On the other hand, science based on intelligence is interwoven with the aims of democracy: free inquiry, toleration of diversity, freedom of expression, a commitment to the common good, shared collective knowledge and the recognition that knowledge always refers to the active process of ‘knowledging’ that grows out of experience and reflection. Intelligence, as both a social inquiry and a social product of community life, would be directed by “common understanding and thorough communication which is the precondition of existence of a genuine public.” 30

Restated, that is, Dewey redefines science away from a fixation on ‘objective facts’ to the consequences of actions and reflection on those consequences which guides future action. Intelligence heightens our sense of the role judgment and social interaction plays in identifying questions for inquiry and how inquiry is to be carried out. If our goals are to continue the promotion of human flourishing in interactions with an ever-changing environment, he is also redefining the meaning of knowledge itself.

Knowledge is an active process of bringing into being the world driven by the interests of community open to revision and readjustment as it is processed and reflected on. To achieve the status of knowledge, a contingent knowing consensually held by a community must be public. What is not public is not knowledge.

Knowledge cooped up in a private consciousness is a myth, and knowledge of social phenomena is peculiarly dependent upon dissemination, for only by distribution can such knowledge be either obtained or tested. A fact of community life which is not spread abroad so as to be a common possession is a contradiction in terms. 31

Science, as intelligence, recognized as social inquiry with the community judging the quality of the answers received, enriches life by growing knowledge of the interdependency between humans and their environment. It becomes a kind of public intelligence, an ethics grounded in the interconnected consequences of actions judged by those who experience the consequences themselves. Everyone: the plants, the animals, and human 30 Ibid., p. 344.31 Ibid., p. 345.

beings live downriver, downwind. The planet is a circle, a sphere, it re-circulates, it lives downriver, downwind from itself.

…the Great Society is to become a Great Community; a society in which the ever-expanding and intricately ramifying consequences of associated activities shall be known in the full sense of that word, so that an organized, articulate Public comes into being.32

Or in other words, a self-conscious ecological public sphere.

Rethinking Science, Art, Place and Democracy

Dewey writes in The Public and its Problems:

Meanwhile the technological application of the complex apparatus which is science has revolutionized the conditions under which associated life goes on. This may be known as a fact which is stated in a proposition and assented to. But it is not known in the sense that men understand it. They do not know it as they know some machine which they operate, or as they know electric light and steam locomotives. They do not understand how the change has gone on nor how it affects their conduct. Not understanding its ‘how,’ they cannot use and control its manifestations. They undergo the consequences, they are affected by them. They cannot manage them, though some are° fortunate enough—what is commonly called good fortune—to be able to exploit some phase of the process for their own personal profit. But even the most shrewd and successful man does not in any analytic and systematic way—in a way worthy to compare with the knowledge which he has won in lesser affairs by means of the stress of experience—know the system within which he operates.33

What Dewey recognizes is that while positivistic value-free science gives us a certain kind of knowledge valuable for the accomplishment of certain purposes and for the structuring of the material world, it does not give us access to the experience of that knowledge in practice. Consequently it makes it more difficult for us to see the value component that it carries or see our potential agency in redefining the knowledge or its material manifestations. Skill allows for some degree of control over the 32 Ibid., p. 350.33 xxxxx

implementation of scientific knowledge but it does not necessarily allow for a fuller understanding of the purpose or direction of knowledge or open up a space for deliberation over the course of action to follow. That is, deliberation which is guided by community values and our ongoing transactions with the world. Dewey writes, “The prime° condition of a democratically organized public is a kind of knowledge and insight which does not yet exist.”

Art and the practice of art, the aesthetic experience, may be, Dewey argued, that kind of knowledge.

Dewey is concerned with the logic of inquiry, not because he is concerned with arriving at some empirical truth about an object or event, but because he is concerned with how we arrive at knowledge which enhances our enjoyment of each other, the world, and our imaginative and ‘feeling’ capacity to be in the world.

We are quite used to thinking about the ‘logic of inquiry’ in relationship to science, but the idea of the ‘practice of art’ or ‘aesthetic experience’ being a kind of ‘logic of inquiry,” a social logic of inquiry, is for the most part, foreign to us. This is a crucial part of the ‘repair’ of science and its connection to a living democracy that is Dewey’s project. A ‘repaired’ science, a social logic of inquiry, has the capacity to bring a public into being which resembles an ecological public sphere and moves us to toward a “great community.” It is in this sense that Dewey sees ‘aesthetics’ as a living practice, as a kind of ‘science-art,’ [could throw in Latour’s “science of arts” and/or Reid and Taylor’s “aesthetic ecological public”] which puts us into touch with our immediate embodied experience of joy and suffering, of communion and community, of enriching consummatory experiences and enhances our vision of our complex interdependence with our community and the wider world while also enhancing our capacity for empathic understanding of these interdependencies.

As Gouinlock [Gouinlock not in bibliography yet] writes, Dewey regularly drew connections, as logics of inquiry to:

the continuities in the nature of art and science. Both are a function of practice. In each, the beginning of activity is occasioned by a problem in the relation° between the human organism and its environment. Both the artist and the scientific inquirer in their respective activities

are° engaged in reconstructing their situation, and imaginative plans are required in each instance. They must select, manipulate, and

reorder elements in the situation; and they aim for a new integration of the constituent elements. As so often elsewhere, Dewey wants to emphasize that inquiry is an activity. p. xxi

For, Dewey, they were both clearly forms of intelligence. However, Dewey argued in his later work Art as Experience, it is the aesthetic as the logic of inquiry that best captures the sense of the work needed to be done and redone in bringing a public to self-awareness capable of continuing to move toward the “great community” or what we are calling an ecological public sphere.

Why?

The answer has two interconnected parts. First, the character of the aesthetic experience itself and second, the relationship of aesthetic experience to place and community life and ultimately, democratic practice.

The character of the aesthetic experience

While art and science share much as logics of inquiry, art as practice, as aesthetics of experience, helps best to keep us focused on the intelligence needed to contribute to human flourishing in an ever-changing environment, human flourishing that recognizes that the dualism between human and nature is yet another conceptual remnant of scientistic, fragmenting reason.

Drawing on Dewey, Gouinlock frames the problem as ““Inquiry and aesthetic experience are thought to be wholly discontinuous with each other. Hence science is regarded as something remote and aloof from experience; and° aesthetic experience is thought to occur only in highly specialized environments, such as the art gallery or the concert hall. The split between the cognitive and the aesthetic plagues not just° theory, but practice as well. We have a conception of neither art nor intelligence such that intelligence can be used to enrich° experience, and this failure is felt in our daily life.” –p.xxi

As Gouinlock puts it, “Dewey urges that we learn habits of artistic/ intelligent behavior that will enable us to find the aesthetic in all experience.” P.xxii Or as Dewey puts it, “art, the mode of activity that is

charged with meanings capable of immediately enjoyed possession, is the complete culmination of nature, and that science is properly a handmaiden that conducts natural events to this happy issue.”

The aesthetic experience itself is “charged with meanings capable of immediately enjoyed possession.” Like dancing, it is the body experiencing joy, now. Art is a process not a thing. Is the intensification of experience. It is imaginative, both being in the world experientially and capturing a kind of knowledge that is also cognitive and emotional all at the same time.

Dewey’s position in Art as Experience is elaborated by Leddy, “The difference between art and science is that art expresses meanings, whereas science states them. A statement gives us directions for obtaining an experience, but does not supply us with experience. That water is H20 tells us how to obtain or test for water. If science expressed the inner nature of things it would be in competition with art, but it does not. Aesthetic art, by contrast to science, constitutes an experience.”

Leddy goes on to write, “On Dewey's view, the sense of increased understanding in art comes from the fact that knowledge is transformed both in production and in experience by being merged with non-intellectual elements. Life is made more intelligible by art not through conceptualization but through clarification and intensification in experience.”

The act of aesthetic experience, as sensuous experience, inevitably is infused with meanings and value. Aesthetic experience, expressed as an art object or a performance, carries with it the potential for “the most profound insight.”34

Further as Dewey writes, quoting his friend and colleague Albert Barnes, “What is called the magic of the artist resides in his ability to transfer these values from one field of experience to another, to attach them to objects of our common life, and by his imaginative insight make these objects poignant and momentous.”

Aesthetic experience, place and community life

Drawing from The Public and its Problems, Gouinlock frames the challenge posed for aesthetic intelligence:

34 Leddy,

Dewey turns to a brief analysis of the events and ideas that led to the actual emergence of the democratic state. This emergence, he says, was marked by the liberation of the individual in theory and by his submergence in fact. The vast forces spawned by the industrial revo-lution have led to a regimentation of the ordinary individual. Human association is increasingly impersonal, and its forms are dictated by the demands of industrial production for private profit. Modern indus-trial life, that is, has had a° profoundly damaging effect on the local, face-to-face community. Traditional communities have been largely disintegrated, and new forms of personal association have not emerged to replace them. Government is not used as the means to an "inclusive and fraternally associated public,"»11 but functions primar-ily to° preserve the capitalist way of life. Any improvement must await the formation of a democratic public. P.xxvii-xxviii

What makes art, in Dewey’s view, such a powerful form of intelligence as a practice capable of engendering a “great community”? What does all this have to do with place?

Experience happens in specific moments in time in specific places. This is always the source of aesthetic experience. This is the connection, the link, which science as a practice must forget, to engage in abstraction. But we are arguing, in what we see as the spirit of Dewey, that this is the link that cannot be completely forgotten without grave consequences for the kind of knowledge science produces and the kind of world that it, in practice, brings into being. This is not to say that science knowledge has no role to play in our lives. It is to say that science knowledge must be aware of its power, and have a humility about it that recognizes that it must always be reconnecting to the full embodied experience of knowledge Dewey calls the aesthetic experience in order to reconnect with the value of being in the world, being, as a self interconnected and interdependent with community and place. The global is always the outcome of a living local.

At the same time it is hard to hear or understand or relate to science knowledge which has forgotten its aesthetic connectedness to everyday life. And it is hard to relate or understand others who are living in a fragmented, grid-like world which has been cut off from a participation in, recognition of, and valuing of aesthetic experience.

For Dewey, it is the aesthetic experience that creates the link between the immediate and the future, the local and extended space, the individual and community, the enactment of individual imagination/enrichment/action, but always linked back to the community from which the art/language of expression is drawn and then in return, contributes.

Dewey/AE:

Dancing and pantomime, the sources of the art of the theater, flourished as part of religious rites and celebrations…But the arts of the drama, music, painting, and architecture thus exemplified had no peculiar connection with theaters, galleries, museums. They were part of the significant life of an organized community.

Dewey/AE continues,

The collective life that was manifested in war, worship, the forum, knew no division between what was characteristic of these places and operations, and the arts that brought color, grace, and dignity, into them. Painting and sculpture were organically one with architecture, as that was one with the social purpose that buildings served. Music and song were intimate parts of the rites and ceremonies in which the meaning of group life was consummated. Drama was a vital reenactment of the legends and history of group life. Not even in Athens can such arts be torn loose from this setting in direct experience and yet retain their significant character. Athletic sports, as well as drama, celebrated and enforced traditions of race and group, instructing the people, commemorating glories, and strengthening their civic pride.

At the same time, Dewey argued that the forces of modernization, the advance of industrial capitalism linked with both the legitimating ideology of scientism and the applied capacity of that knowledge to apparently ‘control’ nature in accordance with the technocratic values of mere reason, also had a crippling effect on the expression of aesthetic experience. The designation of ‘art’ became reserved for the products of artistic practice separated from everyday experience.

As Dewey/AE wrote:

Objects that were in the past valid and significant because of their place in the life of a community now function in isolation from the conditions of their origin. By that fact they are also set apart from common experience, and serve as insignia of taste and certificates of special culture. Because of changes in industrial conditions the artist has been pushed to one side from the main streams of active interest. Industry has been mechanized and an artist cannot work° mechanically for mass production. He is less integrated than° formerly in the normal flow of social services. A peculiar esthetic "individualism" results. Artists find it incumbent upon them to betake themselves to their work as an isolated means of ‘self- expression.’ In order not to cater to the trend of economic forces, they often feel obliged to exaggerate their separateness to the point of eccentricity. Consequently artistic products take on to a still greater degree the air of something indepen-dent and esoteric. Put the action of all such forces together, and the conditions that create the gulf which exists generally between producer and consumer in modern society operate to create also a chasm between ordinary and esthetic experience. Finally we have, as the record of this chasm, ac-cepted as if it were normal, the philosophies of art that locate it in a re-gion inhabited by no other creature, and that emphasize beyond all reason the merely contemplative character of the esthetic.

For Dewey, for those concerned with climate change, for scientists practicing a science split from experience and disconnected from the public, for artists practicing an art split from everyday life, for the public who crave aesthetic experience in work and community, how do we begin to put back together a wholeness of experience which celebrates the individual, the individual in community, and a democratic community that is self-aware of its interdependence with the living and non-living world?

Dewey’s answer is art as experience. Living and inquiry infused with aesthetic experience. Dewey writes, “In the end, works of art are the only media of complete and unhindered communication between man and man that can occur in a world full of gulfs and walls that limit community of experience.”

Dewey wrote:

Only when we start from a community as a fact, grasp the fact in thought so as to clarify and enhance its constituent elements, can we reach an idea of democracy which is not utopian. The conceptions and shibboleths which are traditionally associated with the idea of democ-racy take on a veridical and directive meaning only when they are construed as marks and traits of an association which realizes the defining characteristics of a community. Fraternity, liberty and equal-ity isolated from communal life are hopeless abstractions. Their sepa-rate assertion leads to mushy sentimentalism or else to extravagant and fanatical violence which in the end defeats its own aims. Equality then becomes a creed of mechanical identity which is false to facts and impossible of realization. Effort to attain it is divisive of the vital bonds which hold men together; as far as it puts forth issue, the out-come is a mediocrity in which good is common only in the sense of being average and vulgar. Liberty is then thought of as independence of social ties, and ends in dissolution and anarchy. It is more difficult to sever the idea of brotherhood from that of a community, and hence it is either practically ignored in the movements which identify democracy with Individualism, or else it is a sentimentally appended tag. In its just connection with communal experience, fraternity is an-other name for the consciously appreciated goods which accrue from an association in which all share, and which give direction to the con-duct of each. Liberty is that secure release and fulfillment of per-sonal potentialities which take place only in rich and manifold as-sociation with others: the power to be an individualized self mak-ing a distinctive contribution and enjoying in its own way the fruits of association. Equality denotes the unhampered share which each individual member of the community has in the consequences of associated action. It is equitable because it is measured only by need and capacity to utilize, not by extraneous factors which deprive one in order that another may take and have. A baby in the family is equal with others, not because of some antecedent and structural quality which is the same as that of others, but in so far as his needs for care and development are attended to° without being sacrificed to the supe-rior strength, possessions and matured abilities of others. Equality does not signify that kind of mathematical or physical equivalence in virtue of which any one element may be substituted for another. It de-notes effective regard for whatever is distinctive and unique in each, irrespective of physical and psychological inequalities. It is not a natu-ral possession but is a fruit of the community when its action is di-

rected by its character as a community. – DEWEY PUBLIC AND IT PROBLEMS p. 229-230

What can City Repair, re-pair?

We are not suggesting that the City Repair Project (CRP) will solve the climate change crisis. What we are suggesting is that CRP may offer insights into how a public can come into consciousness of itself as an ecological public sphere, capable of engaging in the work of urban as well as ecological repair that enacts a new logic of social inquiry. This new logic of social inquiry

As the participants of the first intersection repair project reflected on the felt problems that they were experiencing and the historical context that had contributed to the creating of the mechanical place they realized that the science logic of early empire building, nature as raw material to be controlled and commodified had left them living on a grid designed for bureaucratic and commercial efficiency, not fulfilling human association or appreciation of the aesthetic quality of neighborhoods and convivial urban-nature relationships. It was no accident, that the first intersection repair included the painting of a large circular street mural over the squared-off space of the intersection.

What they were facing was the many dualisms embodied by science logic in urban planning, the organization of everyday life and the relationship of work to community.

Dewey was the great American philosopher of non-dualisms. As Reid and Taylor write, “Dewey describes most specifically the central importance of the aesthetic dimension of public culture to overcoming crippling dualisms of Western modernity that vitiate participatory engagement– individual/world, nature/ culture, ends/means, leisure/work, art/science, aesthetic/ordi-nary.”35 Or as Hook wrote modernism “whose categories to some extent have entered our language, have generated insoluble problems, introducing unbridgeable dualisms between subject and object, the real and the apparent,

35 Reid, Herbert, and Betsy Taylor. 2003. John Dewey’s Aesthetic Ecology of Public In-telligence and the Grounding of Civic Environmentalism. Ethics & the Environment. 8 (1).

the physical and the mental, man and nature, things of experience and things in themselves, the individual and society. This has resulted in consequence in making man a stranger in the world and the operation of human intelli-gence a mystery.”36 Dewey’s project of such vital relevance to contemporary ecological consciousness, and to engagement with a kind of ecological ac-tivism which both heals the environment while simultaneously healing the activist and the community, can be seen as repair of a vision of modernity gone badly awry. The ‘re-pairing’ is not the work of suturing together these dualisms, but in calling attention to how the illusion of the dualisms were historically created, the damage this illusion has perpetuated measured in hu-man happiness and environmental degradation, and the mapping out of a path to re-appreciate their intertwinement both for a kind of immediate liber-ation as an invitation to be present in community in the whole living world, now, and to guide deliberations as to future actions.

Was this the original intent of the first intersection repair placemaking? Or the growing projects that followed. Yes and not necessarily.Yes, in the sense of their efforts to bring to awareness very real, unmet, felt needs. And to address them in community and in appreciation for and valu-ing of the diversity of that community. And to continue to enact the goals in the means by which those goals were sought. The music and dancing and sharing of food and sharing of knowledge and sharing of work, do not come later, they are built into the process. As Emma Goldman famously remarked, “if I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.” Here, dancing, the aesthetic experience, is the revolution. It is not only part of the process of so-cial inquiry, it is part of the test of the outcome of the consequences of ac-tions taken by the community. Or as Gouinlock put it, “democracy means both community and the method of experimental intelligence.” – p. xxxiv-xxxv

Was the initiative, is the initiative, of CRP all just experimental fumbling and experiment through action? Of course not. All participants brought their own unique experiences and knowledges together into a kind of collective intelligence, a public intelligence. The references in the CRP’s Placemaking Guidebook to the work of Jane Jacobs and her The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Sil-

36 Hooks intro to E and N in collected works.

verstein’s A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction are no acci-dent.37

Dewey, ends The Public and its Problems with a call to the importance of community action to global change that we believe has an acute relevance today’s the challenge of the climate crisis:

It is said, and said truly, that for the world's peace it is° necessary that we understand the peoples of foreign lands. How well do we un-derstand, I wonder, our next door neighbors? It has also been said that if a man love not his fellow man whom he has seen, he cannot love the God whom he has not seen. The chances of regard for distant peo-ples being effective as long as there is no close neighborhood experi-ence to bring with it insight and understanding of neighbors do not seem better. A man who has not been seen in the daily relations of life may inspire admiration, emulation, servile subjection, fanatical parti-sanship, hero° worship; but not love and understanding, save as they radiate from the attachments of a near-by union. Democracy must be-gin at home, and its home is the neighborly community. It is outside the scope of our discussion to look into the prospects of the reconstruction of face-to-face communities. But there is something deep within human nature itself which pulls toward settled relation-ships. Inertia and the tendency toward stability belong to emotions and desires as well as to masses and molecules. That happiness which is full of content and peace is found only in enduring ties with others, which reach to such depths that they go below the surface of con-scious experience to form its undisturbed foundation. No one knows how much of the frothy excitement of life, of mania for motion, of fretful° discontent, of need for artificial stimulation, is the expression of frantic search for something to fill the void caused by the loosening of the bonds which hold persons together in immediate community of experience. If there is anything in human psychology to be counted upon, it may be urged that when man is satiated with restless seeking for the remote which yields no enduring satisfaction, the human spirit will return to seek calm and order within itself. This, we repeat, can be found only in the vital, steady, and deep relationships which are present only in an immediate community.

37 Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein. 1977. A pattern language: towns, buildings, construction. New York: Oxford University Press.

The psychological tendency can, however, manifest itself only when it is in harmonious conjunction with the objective course of events. Analysis finds itself in troubled waters if it attempts to dis-cover whether the tide of events is turning away from dispersion of en-ergies and acceleration of motion. Physically and externally, condi-tions have made, of course, for concentration; the development of ur-ban, at the expense of rural, populations; the corporate organization of aggregated wealth, the growth of all sorts of organizations, are evi-dence enough. But enormous organization is compatible with demoli-tion of the ties that form local communities and with substitution of impersonal bonds for personal unions, with a flux which is hostile to stability. The character of our cities, of organized business and the na-ture of the comprehensive associations in which individuality is lost, testify also to this fact. Yet there are contrary signs. "Community" and community activities are becoming words to conjure with. The local is the ultimate universal, and as near an absolute as exists. It is easy to point to many signs which indicate that unconscious agencies as well as deliberate planning are making for such an enrichment of the expe-rience of local communities as will conduce to render them genuine centres of the attention, interest and devotion for their constituent members. “ –Dewey Public and it problem, p. 368-369.

We see the City Repair Project as a “contrary sign” part of the necessary work of “conjuring” up a new paradigm for being in the world, for healing ourselves and our environment, and for building an engaged ecological pub-lic.

Kaprow

Crp as part art

Get out of the museum