Producing Publics: Dewey, Democratic Experimentalism, and the Idea of Communication

Abstract

In a volume dedicated to celebrating and interrogating pragmatic - and especially Deweyan - roots of democratic experimentalism, this essay explores some of more elusive aspects of Dewey's ideas of communication. It argues that for Dewey, question of communication was not how speakers should make their interior thoughts and desires transparent and understandable to others but how they could produce shared social contexts - that is, publics - and with them new forms of democratic self-governance. The essay thus suggests that Dewey's understanding of communication diverges from one that is more familiar in popular problem-solving discourses in law. For example, in predominant strands of alternative dispute resolution communication is understood primarily as a neutral technique used to bridge mental properties of individuals whatever their aims, rather than, as Dewey would have described it, a means and end of a good society and thus a deeply normative and political practice. By comparing divergent ideas of communication in law, essay aims to open up for analysis and debate whether and how democratic experimentalists understand communication not like traditional models of popular legal problem solving, but rather like Dewey: as a method of social life that calls publics into being.1. IntroductionIn his article for this volume, William Simon observes foundational overlaps between Deweyan political ideals and contemporary field of legal problem solving often called new governance or democratic experimentalism. Simon argues that many of practical implications of Dewey's ideas have remained elusive. But he also suggests that new institutional innovations in business and policymaking, which he describes under sign of democratic experimentalism, make more concrete the key aims and insights of Dewey's vision.1 In this short essay, I consider one of questions that Simon argues Dewey left unanswered. The question, in Simon's words, is this: How do we organize deliberative engagement to produce productive collaboration among people with diverse interests?2 This is a pressing question for democratic experimentalists who propose to restructure institutions of public governance through communicative acts of bottom-up problem solving and lawmaking.Drawing on analyses of Dewey from within field of communication studies, I explore whether and how democratic experimentalists offer a distinctively Deweyan model of communication. For Dewey, communication was a very particular - and political - social good. It was both a means of producing publics and activity that made those publics meaningful. Or to put point a bit differently, for him, communication was a means of creating social feeling and binding people together that could not be separated from questions of a good society. In this sense, essay argues, Dewey's understanding of communication diverges from an idea of communication that is more familiar in popular problem-solving discourses in law. Rather than a neutral technique used to resolve disputes and join interior thoughts of individuals by generating transparent understandings and agreements, Dewey understood communication as a shared social and political endeavor that creates new possibilities for democratic self-govemance. To illustrate this difference between Deweyan conception and a more familiar legal model, essay briefly compares Dewey's ideas of communication with some of predominant ideas of communication that have developed in alternative dispute resolution (ADR) - an important and perhaps most institutionalized practice of popular problem solving and decision making in law. It does so in order to open up for analysis and debate ways in which democratic experimentalists understand communication not like traditional ADR theory, but rather like Dewey: as a method of social life that calls publics into being.2. Dewey and Democratic ExperimentalismTo begin, let me sketch how scholars of democratic experimentalism build upon Dewey's model of public problem solving through deliberative means. …