John Dewey's aesthetics of communication

Abstract

Discussion of John Dewey within the discipline of communication is often restricted to his “ritual view” of communication or his youthful hope in the democratic potential of mass communication technologies. However, both of these approaches neglect the importance of his aesthetic theory for understanding both his philosophy of communication and his overall social thought. This essay takes a developmental perspective on Dewey's philosophy and traces how his concepts of experience and communication evolved over three decades and finally came to be unified in his concept of aesthetic experience. I argue that a developmental perspective on Dewey's aesthetic philosophy contributes a broader and more flexible understanding of communication that leads to the view that communication, at its best, is a form of art in which poiesis and praxis are united within a single, consummatery experience.