John Dewey's eloquent citizen: communication, judgment, and postmodern capitalism.

• Author: Greene, Ronald Walter

Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful (Dewey, 1925).

Perhaps no philosopher since Aristotle has more to offer the rhetorician than does John Dewey. (Burks, 1968)

The quest for "universals of communication" ought to make us shudder (Deleuze, 1995).

John Dewey provides a fertile point of departure for imagining democracy as a form of communicative action. For Dewey, "a democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated life, or conjoint communicated experience" (1916, p. 101). James Carey (1997), one of the strongest representatives of a Deweyan inspired view of communication, argues: "what we mean by democracy depends on the forms of communication by which we conduct politics. What we mean by communication depends on the central impulses and aspirations of democratic politics" (p. 234). While Carey (1989) uses Dewey for the purpose of normative critique, rhetorical studies puts Dewey to work on the subject who speaks, argues, and judges. For rhetorical studies, Dewey provides both concrete methods and abstract concepts for manufacturing more democratic citizens who might reasonably deliberate on the public issues of the day. According to Christopher Johnstone (1983), Dewey's emphasis on the attributes of democratic inquiry offers a modern translation of phronesis or practical wisdom. Within the orbit of this Deweyan vision of phronesis, rhetoric and argumentation theory provide the tools for the moral development of the eloquent citizen. The purpose of this paper is to challenge the efforts to underwrite citizenship with such aesthetic-moral theory of communication.

After a fifteen-year hiatus from serious discussion, Christopher Johnstone harnessed John Dewey's thought on "aesthetics, ethics, and the philosophy of knowledge" (p. 186) to the project of building the eloquent citizen. For Johnstone, Dewey's work contributed to making citizens by cultivating the faculty of phronesis. (1) To imagine the eloquent citizen though the faculty of practical wisdom means to think of good citizenship as an ability to deliberate without appealing to general or abstract principles. As Johnstone notes, however, Dewey did not write from the perspective of someone self-conscious of the rhetorical tradition nor did Dewey speak about the classical concept of phronesis. Dewey did write about art, he said many things about communication and his emphasis on moral selfhood and "creative intelligence" offers Johnstone an opportunity to translate Dewey's conceptual heritage into the rhetorical idiom. Johnstone reads Dewey for the purpose of adding him to the rhetorical canon, and rhetorical stud ies, in return, gets a "contemporary vision of wisdom" (p. 185). In other words, Dewey offers rhetorical studies a critical vocabulary to begin the philosophical modernization of phronesis. This essay will take Johnstone's emphasis on inculcating the rhetorical subject with the attributes of phronesis to explore the emergence of an aesthetic-moral theory of communication. The primary claim advanced in this essay is that Dewey provides a modem solution to democratic crisis that may no longer be relevant for a post-modem understanding of capitalism. Put as simply as possible, the tendency to translate communication into an aesthetic-moral theory of eloquent citizenship puts argumentation studies to work for, rather than against, new forms of bio-political control. To unpack this claim I want to pinpoint two crucial processes: the emphasis on rhetorical studies as part of education's role in cultivating the citizen and the aesthetic notion of communication that re-writes rhetoric as contributing to the moral dev elopment of the subject.

RHETORICAL EDUCATION: PHRONESIS, MODERNITY AND THE ELOQUENT CITIZEN

The initial reason for Christopher Johnstone's appropriation of John Dewey requires an appreciation of how Dewey's approach to the relationship between community and communication contributes to the process of an ethical pedagogy. We can witness this process by unpacking how Dewey's emphasis on communication begins with its contribution to organizing the interaction between self and other. This emphasis on communication as the glue that binds self and other is made manifest in his idea of community. The normative value of communication resides in the interplay between communication and cooperation, the result of which promotes the value of community as shared action. The cooperative nature of communication was indexed, for Dewey, in its role in generating a shared sense of meaning. From this perspective, to recognize oneself as a subject who communicates is the first step toward accessing the communal bonds that make possible the democratic governance of self and other, or in Dewey's more public language, the ability to overcome the fragmentation of multiple publics and partake in the Great Community (1927/1954).

At the heart of Johnstone's recovery of Dewey is the "role of the subject, the person, in the activities of knowing and acting" (p. 185). Thus the "wisdom-generating power of rhetoric" (p. 185) is registered in how it takes the speaking subject as an object domain of criticism, pedagogical intervention and ethical transformation. It is Dewey's vision of moral selfhood as a process of growth that provides the initial warrant for offering Dewey as a contemporary theorist of practical wisdom. For Johnstone "Dewey emphasizes the significance of intelligent methods of deliberation and choice in determining conduct, and finds the foundation of moral value in the growth of the self, the author of judgment" (p. 187). At the center of Dewey's approach to practical wisdom is the "method of intelligence," a process that contributes to the use of communication "to stimulate and guide the development of individual mind and character, that is, of the self" (p. 186). Two separate issues reveal themselves: a "set of factors to guide practical deliberation; and second ... the habits and attitudes to be cultivated in the individual" (p. 188).

A Deweyan view of practical wisdom begins with "practical judgments [as] predictions or anticipations of consequences" (p. 188). This consequential view of judgment has a close affinity to Dewey's idea concerning how a public forms as a felt need to address the consequences of action. The emphasis on consequences is also a standard rhetorical vision that often underwrites normative theories of public argument (Goodnight, 1989). The importance for communication of this consequential view of judgment is that it invites the student to nurture communication's role in generating the attributes of foresight and empathy (Belman, 1977). The second factor to guide practical deliberation is the ability to account for the multiple consequences of actions Johnstone, 1983, p. 188). The moral value of this claim is that debates over the relationship between ends and means must be re-figured to take into account the complex and multiple consequences of practical judgment. Since practical judgment must always stay open to th e consequences of actions, the relationships between ends and means are transformed into a more singular process or "transitional points between two phases of experience" (Johnstone, 1983). Thus all conduct must be, for Johnstone, "appraised in terms of how they will serve the "continuum of action" (p. 189). The primary goal in practical deliberation is both the immediate satisfaction of a felt need and the creation of "conditions that will make future satisfaction more likely and extensive" (p. 189). The decision-making process, therefore, can never be closed down, neither by an appeal to an abstract principle to guide all judgments nor by an appeal to instrumental success. Dewey's pragmatic standard of utility provides an immanent, as opposed to transcendental, approach to practical judgment. An immanent approach suggests that no judgment can appeal to some moral authority outside of human history to determine right action. In other words, "the only ultimate value which can be set up is just the process of living itself" (Dewey, 1944, qtd. in Johnstone, p. 189). Practical wisdom, for Johnstone, is the "capacity for living in such a way" as to make the experiences of life "enduring, satisfying, and inclusive of its enjoyments" (p. 189).

In order to maintain the conditions for practical judgment it will be necessary for the subject to cultivate good habits of deliberation. For Dewey, the consequences of an act include the effects those acts have on moral character "confirming and weakening habits, as well as tangibly obvious results" (Dewey, 1930, qtd. in Johnstone, 1983, p. 190). All acts of judgment, a process that requires speaking and thinking, form the character of the subject that judges. Similar to the classical idea of ethos, or the literary idea of persona, the consequences of any act of decision making must be registered in the ways those acts form the character of the subject. One must be aware, therefore, of the "growth of the self: the cultivation of habits and dispositions that will sustain the capacity for intelligent choice" (p. 190). Since judgments take place in an interactional environment, the moral self envisioned by Dewey's project must respect the "opportunities for continued growth for all who are affected by one's con duct" (p. 190). For Johnstone, then, Dewey's concern over the evolutionary dynamic of moral growth leads to the need to nurture four habits of practical judgment: creative intelligence, responsibility, freedom and the expansion of mind (pp...