a concept of experience - engaging the trash.

For the duration of this project I have been searching for a way to explicitly connect my existing knowledge base or contexts with ones that in many ways are less explicitly familiar to me. Or to put it a different way I've been wanting to connect the depth of critical and cultural theory that I engage every day with the educational theory that I practice but have not always obediently read. I have not wanted to do this in a facicoius or superficial way. This evening I read an article that has finally given me a set of tools to move more confidently within educational theory.

Yasuo Imai, "Walter Benjamin and John Dewey: The Structure of Difference Between Their Thoughts on Education" The Journal of the Philosohpy of Education, vol 37, no.1, 2003. 109-125.

In this beautifully written article Imai unpacks in parallel the educational thought of Dewey and Benjamin and demonstrates how central to both is firstly an understanding of the concept of experience and secondly the application of a concept of media to the classroom environment. Imai begins by highlighting the differences between the two thinkers but it is in the second half of the article where notions of experience and aesthetics are played out that I can find a historical location for my own understandings. I'm gong to summarise and paraphrase badly here, but as this blog is a tool for me to record my late night thinking, I reckon that's ok.

In "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy" (1917) Dewey writes of experience as interaction. This is because he is making an argument against a dualistic understanding of reality in which dreams and madness are separate to the real cognitive world. All are experiences, and "experiencing is just certain modes of interaction"(Dewey cited in Imai 111). "What we experience is what the world can be." (Imai 111) Dewey does not say that there is no such thing as objectivity and subjectivity but that experience and interaction come first.

Benjamin's philosohpical disagreements were with the broader issues of Kantian aesthetics but also with the problems of technological determinism that saw the artwork separated from its means of production, and thus from any auratic content. In "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" he writes about how everyday the urge grows stronger to grasp the image by means of its likeless. We want the to come closer to us, we want to posess it, it is no longer framed and distant, of course this is the fault of cinema and photography, NOT for Benjamin a bad thing. The decay of the aura allowed all sorts of things to occur ... workers could be mobilised by the movies, distraction allowed them time out from their jobs and the ablilty to be able to think. (Ok I'm summarising really badly here). Cultural context is not about subject or object but also about interaction. (Imai 112)

The surprise for me is in the closeness of Dewey's argument about the means of production. Dewey says that the worker has been reduced to hands, they no longer have an aesthetic relationship with the objects they produce. He argues there needs to be a close combination of action and reception in order for there to be an integrated end. Integrated ends and means for Dewey equals aesthetics.

The difference between the two is equally important. Dewey wants to criticise and modify everyday experience based on his understanding of the integrated aesthetic experience. (Imai 115). Benjamin on the other had sought a change in the very nature of this aesthetic experience ... and central to that change was his concept of media.
(we are getting to the classroom really soon).

Imai gives the example of "children finding secrets in everyday trash." Their experience leads them to connect their find to the activity of play. Benjamin "denouncesd the kind of education that is geared to predetermined goals. ... The conception of education that Benjamin offers in contrast is of a space where children can unfold and develop through mimetic activities and improvisation, without being restricted by such restrictive linear methods [that predetermine outcomes or goals]" (Imai 116).

This rings true for me, and then Imai goes a step further in his analysis "When a child's mimetic activities unfold in such a space, the material of the activities - trash, for example - is a medium of activities." (Imai 117). Benjamin has written how a meduim communicates in itself ... this has been taken in all sorts of deterministic directions by theorists like McLuhan, and even contributed to the debates around remediation. But what interests me here is that Imai shows how Dewey also develops a notion of media that is based in materiality. "Media are themselves something material through which immaterial contents are communicated" (Imai 117). I don't actually agree here that the contents are immaterial, but would say that they are a different kind of materiality.

However, the implications of this understanding of media are that if we understand educational materials in terms of methods and ignore the media or the materials we separate the contents from the communication ... that is the "materials appear as mere means through which children should be led to the 'idea'." (Imai 118). However in searching through the trash..."the material itself emerges as the contents of perception or the substance of activities, namely as media." (Imai 118). To put it extremely simplistically, teaching materials are a media not a content. The trash is not engaging because of its content but because of what it might become, of its mediality. By including this notion of media within the classroom environment a sphere is created which is improvisational, and that relies on the experience of those who inhabit it. It is the classroom understood as a sphere of experience.

"The legitimate content of instruction in Dewey's view is constructed from the learner's activities and actions activated by the motivating power of the teaching material, not from teaching material that exists in its own right and has inherent significance independently of the learner." (Imai 120) . Dewey thus defines education as the reconstruction of experience. It is interaction. "The process of interaction is merged into a process of experience"(Imai 120) Further more this experience is aesthetic. "Art works as media are to aesthetic experience what teaching material as a medium is to educational experience" (Imai 121)

Imai goes deeper into the analysis of this relationship between Dewey and Benjamin, but for my purposes it is this idea of media within a sphere of experience that is cricual. As media change so too do the experiences, and the learning environment.

In the senior electronic arts lab we engage the trash everyday.