I’ve been reading a bit more Antonio Gramsci (Marxist Theorist) and John Dewey’s Art as Experience. Although the two have two very different notions of reality, they seem to have the same macro-problem.
PROBLEM: Separation of Thought and Action.
FOR GRAMSCI:
Thought is the theory of contradictions in a society and action is the people’s actual consciousness. Because of a separation between the two, he was interested in how to align the people’s consciousness with the theoretical. For him, there is a crucial issue of freedom at stake. When thought and action are one, this is freedom (he calls this the philosophy of praxis, a.k.a. Marxism).
Ok, this is interesting but what does it mean? Well, Gramsci lived in a time when the Italian populace was more in tune with foreign culture than a national Italian culture. That’s because, according to Gramsci, the intellectuals/elite in Italy weren’t concerned with the lower classes; they were still tied to the caste tradition. He writes,
All this means that the entire “educated class,” with its intellectual activity, is detached from the people-nation, not because the latter has not shown and does not show itself to be interested in this activity at all levels … but because in relation to the people-nation the indigenous intellectual element is more foreign than the foreigners.
(An Antonio Gramsci Reader, p. 369)
He asks, “What is the meaning of the fact that the Italian people prefer to read foreign writers?” For him, with the exception of opera, there was no organic relationship between high culture and low culture. Then what is needed to bridge the gap between thought and action? Well, for Gramsci, he says that organic intellectuals are needed (to help create a counter-hegemony). Organic intellectuals are intellectuals from among the people. This makes sense. These individuals from the people feel tied to them, know their needs, aspirations, and feelings (Isn’t this what we do as interaction designers?).
This particular theme of Gramsci deals with his concern for the lack of a vernacular Italian novel that consists of both the national and popular. Simply put, he was envious of the French who had an Alexandre Dumas. He wanted an Italian Alexandre Dumas.
Gramsci and Design:
Is it possible to create products (whether they be novels, artifacts, services, organizations) that reflect the people’s popular psyche? By “people,” I don’t just mean the majority; people can come to mean subaltern people, especially in the context of a great chunk of Gramsci’s works. For example, can we have a Korean American Alexandre Dumas? (This is the theme of my thesis) Or design for the vision-impaired?
FOR DEWEY:
Unlike Gramsci’s entitative/materialist reality, Dewey has an essentialist reality. He is concerned with man, the “live creature,” and his environment (note: different from “surrounding”). In Art as Experience, he, too, is concerned with the separation of thought and action.
Dewey begins his book by stating that a philosophy/theory of art is an effort to understand the actual experiences. He writes,
For theory is concerned with understanding, insight, not without exclamations of admiration, and stimulation of that emotional outburst often called appreciation. It is quite possible to enjoy flowers in their colored form and delicate fragrance without knowing anything about plants theoretically. But if one sets out to understand the flowering of plants, he is committed to finding out something about the interactions of soil, air, water and sunlight that condition the growth of plants. (p. 2)
Hence, the situation or environment is key to understanding. It is in the action, the actual doing that one experiences life at the fullest and it’s these fulfilling experiences that man is incessantly after.
When he talks about this experience, it consists of both thought (esthetic undergoing, perception) and action (artistic doing, making) – his artistic-esthetic experience. He says that there cannot be a distinction between esthetic and artistic; they must be united for an experience to be an experience. An artist must have both doing and undergoing while creating a product, and a beholder/audience must also do both in order to create his/her own experience.
So how does he relate to Gramsci? Well, he, too, is uncomfortable with how we’ve come to distinguish between high art (placing them in museums) and low art. This wasn’t so in past cultures. His goal is to recover the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living. He says, we need to go back to “experience of the common or mill run of things” (p. 9).
Activities, such as dancing, making music, painting, making drama, were just parts of group life – the significant life of an organized community. In fact, the Greeks formed the idea that art is an act of reproduction/imitation. Art used to have such a close connection with daily life. Now, we must go out of our way to go to a museum, a theatre, etc. Art has lost its indigenous status and great paintings, for example, are secluded in the homes of the wealthy and powerful. Gramsci would not be happy.
Dewey and Design:
Dewey’s pragmatism and works have enormous implications for design. He’s all about interaction. In fact, Moholy-Nagy, when he came to Chicago to start the New Bauhaus (didn’t last long although from what I know, it’s had influence in the creation of IIT’s design school), met Dewey through a mutual friend in NY. Dewey’s treatise on art became a textbook for the New Bauhaus. His chapter, “Having an Experience,” as Richard Buchanan says, is THE text, the foundational piece, for CMU’s interaction design program.
FINAL THOUGHTS:
What does all this mean for the nature of products or even the purpose of the things we create? For example, I think it’s great that the i-pod is in the MOMA as an iconic artifact of everyday life along with Eames’ chair. Taking parts from Gramsci and Dewey, can we start talking more about the products we can make and how they support/shape sub-cultures, groups of cultures, and Culture?
(btw, I’m in no-wise a marxist. I’m taking the parts that are interesting to me in these theories and looking for practical applications for Design)