The Best American Infographics 2013

"Artists have always been the real purveyors of news ..." - John Dewey

I've not actually seen this (initial, I think) installment of The Best American Infographics but I intend to track it down. A great idea. Why? Because instruments for communicating quantities are centrally important to both social science and democratic politics. (On this see Dewey, The Public & Its Problems (1927), especially the end of chapter five.) And so, becoming aware of strong practice in this domain is crucial.

An Interview with Vijay Iyer

"The arts are not something separate from us. I think that when we deal with . . . hierarchical notions of culture, we tend to think of the arts as something we go to, rather than something that is a part of us. And I guess my life experience with music has always been the opposite. It’s always been that we are the arts. And I say that with the utmost humility, because when I say “we” I don’t mean “we artists,” I mean we, as humanity. It’s something that has to be continuous with our daily lives, and I’m not interested in creating some kind of distance, or some sort of divide, between the arts and life as we live it every day." - Vijay Iyer

I stumbled across an interview with jazz pianist Vijay Iyer (follow link above) about whom I have posted here before. I picked out this passage mostly because it  seems to me as continuous with Dewey's notion of 'art as experience.' Iyer is from the local area. I've never had the chance to hear him perform live, but very much anticipate getting the chance to do so. And while I am here I will plug the latest in a string of astoundingly good recordings that Iyer has released in recent years.

Recommended Reading: Pragmatic Utopianism as "The Future of Black Politics"

You can find a smart and provocative essay by Michael Dawson (along with a set of pointed responses) here at The Boston Review. I agree with a much of what Dawson has to say about the crucial importance of African-Americans to any viable progressive political mobilization in the U.S.. Yet I am persuaded too by Tommie Shelby's insistence (in his comment on Dawson) on the importance of multi-racial political organizations. (More generally, I wonder if Dawson might craft a reply by building upon the distinction, articulated by Bob Moses and Charles Payne as they channel Ella Baker, between mobilization and organization and on the crucial importance of both for progressive politics.) Finally, and perhaps gratuitously, I wish Dawson had felt less need to rely on the pronouncements of obscurantist leftist "theorists" like Badiou and Žižek. I simply have no patience for them. He should stick with the tradition of African-American political thought from DuBois through King and Malcolm X to Walter Mosley. Reconnect that to the American political theory of pragmatism from Dewey to Unger and Cornel West, and you have more than sufficient resources to spell out the sort of pragmatic utopianism Dawson advocates.

Democratizing Arts Organizations?

I came across a couple of provocative recent columns [1] [2] by Barry Johnson (no relation) in The Oregonian. He first raises and then defends the notion that major arts organizations, many of which are struggling financially, ought to be opened up and democratized. I have to say that I'm pretty sympathetic to his arguments. Around Rochester, for instance, the boards of arts outfits tend to be filled with rich folks. They tend, in my estimation, to be exceedingly risk-averse in their programming. I don't think that convergence is coincidental. More generally, as I argued here in an earlier post, they tend to envision their role as guiding spaces of presentation rather than fostering spaces for creativity. In the former role they hope to tempt suburbanites to venture into the city for an evening or two each year. If they could help provide spaces for creativity they might not only energize the arts for audiences, they might contribute to the social and economic revitalization of the city.

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt is, in my estimation, among a small handful of truly profound 20th century political theorists. Maybe Weber, Dewey, Rawls, Foucault, and Habermas are in the same league. The picture at right is Arendt at the University of Chicago in the mid-1960s. In any case, she was born 14 October 1906 and I missed noting the anniversary this past week. That is ironic because I actually was reading her essay "What is Freedom?" that day in preparation for discussing it in my freshman political theory course.

There are two aspects of the essay that especially appeal to me. The first is her insistence that freedom requires public space in which we can interact and speak. And this leads her to note that in our world freedom is precarious precisely due to a lack of such a public world.

"Moreover, whenever the man-made world does not become the scene of action and speech - as in despotically ruled communities which banish their subjects into the narrowness of the home and thus prevent the rise of a public realm - freedom has no worldly reality. Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance. To be sure, it may still dwell in men's hearts as desire or will or hope or yearning; but the human heart, as we all know, is a very dark place, and whatever goes on in its obscurity can hardly be called demonstrable fact. Freedom as demonstrable fact and politics coincide and are related to each other like two sides of the same matter."

On Arendt's view, freedom is not a characteristic of thought or conscience or choice, but of action, where the latter, when free, involves the capacity "to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which therefore, strictly speaking, could not be known." It is, in other words, essential to our ability to make (although that is a word Arendt herself would not allow in this context) and sustain the world. This sounds as though Arendt would see politics as akin to art and she does in a somewhat unsatisfying way. She insists that politics resembles the performing arts, but not the creative arts. That is because, on her view, the former require continues performance if they are exist, while the latter reify thought and action in some object. This, it seems to me, is a mistaken - overly narrow - view of the creative arts and that, if we were to turn to Dewey and see that it is a mistake to conflate art and its objects. (This is a lesson, as I noted here, that we need to keep in mind if we want to think of photography and its uses instead of about photographs.) That, of course, would require an argument that I am not prepared to make here.

The second theme in the essay that I find appealing comes toward the very end where Arendt makes the following comments on the miraculous dimension of free action.

"Every act, seen from the perspective not of the agent but of the process in whose framework it occurs and whose automatism it interrupts, is a 'miracle' - that is, something which could not be expected. If it is true that action and beginning are essentially the same, it follows that a capacity for performing miracles must likewise be within the range of human faculties. This sounds stranger than it actually is. It is in the very nature of every new beginning that it breaks into the world as an 'infinite improbability,' and yet it is precisely this infinitely improbable which actually constitutes the very texture of everything we call real."

Having spent extended parts of my childhood in Catholic schools, I am almost viscerally averse to talk of miracles. Add to that the recent vogue for such talk among new age types and I'm usually ready, when someone mentions miracles, to back my way toward the door so that I might escape without taking my eyes off the crazy folks. That said, I think it is important to be able to think seriously about the truly unexpected both in art and in politics. What else, after all, do we have in mind when we think about surprise and creativity and innovation and reform?

Game theorists, for example, talk of unforeseen contingencies - occurrences to which we do not merely assign minuscule probabilities, but that we truly do not anticipate at all. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that one cannot exclude such events from formal models. That is part of what makes them useful and provocative. Similarly, pragmatists rightly stress the indeterminacy of social and political interaction in all sorts of ways. Roberto Mangabeira Unger, about whom I've posted here several times, speaks of the place of miracles in ways that echo Arendt too. Where those affinities might lead us, though, is a subject for another post. I was interested only in noting that Arendt directs us to ponder the same difficult subjects.

Convergences

I have always found it intriguing that Alfredo Jaar's web page opens with this verse from William Carlos Williams: "It is difficult to get the news from poetry, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." Here is a bit of context from Williams:

". . . Look at / what passes for the new. / You will not find it there but / in despised poems. / It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die every day / for lack / of what is found there."*

Oddly enough, while searching for something else today, I came across this passage from John Dewey's The Public & Its Problems (1927):

"Artists have always been the real purveyors of news, for it is not the outward happening in itself which is new, but the kindling by it of emotion, perception and appreciation."

Dewey is preoccupied at this point in his argument with the vicissitudes of disseminating reliable information to members of the public for use in their political deliberations and, especially with the crucial aesthetic dimensions of the task. He himself invokes Whitman at this point; perhaps Williams may have done just as well.
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* From: Asphodel, That Greeny Flower (1955) in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume II- 1939-62 (New Directions, 2001), pages 310-337, at page 318.

Reflections on Burma, Democracy & Faith

"For what is the faith of democracy in the role of consultation,
of conference, of persuasion, of discussion, in the formation of
public opinion, which is the long run self-corrective, except
faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common
man to respond with commonsense to the free play of facts
and ideas which are secured by effective guarantees
of free inquiry, free assembly, and free communication? I
am willing to leave to upholders of totalitarian states of
the right and the left the view that faith in the capacities
of intelligence is utopian." ~ John Dewey

A group of monks sit in protest after being halted
by riot police and military officials as they headed
towards the Shwedagon pagoda.
Photograph: STR/Reuters.

Riot police block a monk's path to the Shwedagon
pagoda in Rangoon. Photograph: Stringer/Reuters.

I do not consider myself a religious man, having had any illusions regarding divinity and holiness beaten out of me in the course of a half-dozen years in Catholic schools. My support for the opposition among Burmese monks and others stems not from faith in God, but from faith in democracy. I admire the courage the monks are displaying and identify with their commitment to democratic reform. Is that enough to restore something of my faith in religious conviction? I tend to agree with Richard Rorty's assessment of the role of religious leadership in politics. Here is Rorty in an interview:

"Whether the possibility of rearing new Martin Luther Kings is worth
the risk of rearing new Jerry Falwells is a matter of risk management.
To my mind the advantage of getting rid of the Falwells is worth the
risk of getting rid of the Kings. But I have no knock-down argument
to bring to bear. I suspect that the continued existence of the churches
is, by and large, more of a danger than a help to the rise of a
global democratic society."

The prevalence of religious intolerance and fanaticism throughout the contemporary world seems, to me, to represent a standing hindrance to the operation of democratic practices and institutions since the latter truly require a commitment to fallibilism, the idea that even our most deeply held and cherished commitments will turn out to be false or mistaken. It may turn out that my own faith in democracy is mistaken. To the best of my knowledge, no religious faith embraces such a basic commitment to un-certainty.

John Dewey (20 October 1859 - 1 June 1952)

John Dewey © David Levine/NYRB

One of my philosophical heroes, John Dewey, died 55 years ago today. I have posted on various topics here from a broadly "Dewey-esque" perspective; see [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] and probably, less directly, others posts as well. Dewey himself is not a terribly good writer, but I recommend The Public and Its Problems (1927) in which he advances a remarkably sensible and smart analysis of American democracy. He specifically accords art a crucial role in democratic politics (even though, oddly, he only rarely and in passing so much as mentions photography). I also would recommend a terrific book by my friend and colleague Robert Westbrook John Dewey & American Democracy (Cornell UP, 1991). Dewey endorsed what in technical philosophical language is called pragmatism.

Dewey - Art as Experience

I am teaching parts of John Dewey's Art as Experience (1934) in my undergraduate course this spring. I had been a while since I'd read the book and I'd forgotten how it opens. Here are the first paragraph and a half:

“By one of the ironic perversities that often attend the course of affairs, the existence of the works of art upon which formation of an esthetic theory depends has become an obstruction to theory about them. For one reason, these works are products that exist externally. In common conception, the work of art is often identified with the building, book, painting or statue in its existence apart from human experience. Since the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience, the result is not favorable to understanding. In addition, the very perfection of some of these products, the prestige they possess because of a long history of unquestioned admiration, creates conventions that get in the way of fresh insight. When an art product once attains classic status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience.

When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in existence, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which esthetic theory deals. Art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from that association with the materials and aims of every other form of human effort, undergoing, and achievement. A primary task is thus imposed upon one who undertakes to write upon the philosophy of fine arts. This task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.”

This, I suspect, is where I first absorbed the notion that in thinking about art generally, and photography in particular, we ought to think first and foremost not about objects - "photographs" - but more about the ways individuals and organizations produce those objects and the purposes for which they do so. It may be that Dewey is insufficiently critical in this regard, that his preoccupation with "consummatory experience" diverted his attention from the diverse, sometimes objectionable uses of visual representations. And, of course, he barely mentions photography anywhere in his writings. But the general notion that we ought to approach art in consequentialist ways is, to my mind, an invaluable insight.

Forging Spaces for Imagination

"A city of presentation without creation defeats the central purpose of radical art: to make art an invitation to join in rather than just to look on, to give voice to the unheard, to engender conversation about the meaning of the lives being led all around us, to build a vital relationship between artists and public." ~ Rebecca Solnit

Warning, this will be a rambling, inconclusive post. I want to trace some loose and tentative connections between possibilities, public space, artists, communities and urban vitality. In part, the proximate impetus for the post is this anthology Participation edited by Claire Bishop that just appeared in a new, joint MIT Press/Whitechapel series called "Documents of Contemporary Art." I picked up a copy yesterday. The anthology is a bit parochial in the fairly predictable sense that it contains contributions occupying the intersection of European cultural theory and art history. It will be useful to me because that is a forbiddingly inscrutable terrain where I generally fear to tread. But the underlying thurst of the book is to see how the boundary between artist and audience has been understood and intentionally subverted in various ways in modern/contemporary art. That John Dewey, Jane Addams, Randolph Bourne, among others, had been articulating this agenda in the U.S. early in the 20th C seems to have been lost on the editor and contributors to the volume.

I also am reading a book Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg collaborated on a few years back about the role of art and artists in vital (and decaying) urban centers, Hollow City: The Seige of San Francisco & the Crisis of American Urbanism (Verso 2000). I was prompted to read this by a conversation with one of the smart graduate students in our PhD program in Visual and Cultural Studies here at Rochester who is interested in issues of public space and redevelopment. I lifted the passage at the top of the post from this book. It seems especially germane to the blinkered redevelopment vision in the City of Rochester which seems to me to be focused on making this a city of presentation and to neglecting or even eliminating the sorts of spaces needed for processes of creation. Actually, our extant spaces for creation typically seem to be connected to elite theatre, arts and music insititutions that carefully manage any opportunities for participation. By way of contrast I will call attention (again) to the much more progressive Project Row Houses in Houston about which I posted a short while ago.

The Houston project might well serve as inspiration for similar undertakings in places like Rochester where relatively inexpensive, appropriately zoned spaces like this are on the market.

In the right hands a converted church could provide modest but vital gallery and studio and performance space in a community that is marginalized within a city that itself is becoming increasingly marginalized politically and economically. And the imaginative projects that might incubate in such a space could, in turn, help foster the capacity of community members to envision ways of resisting the pressures beseiging them that might not be otherwise apparent. Just a thought.

Solnit and Schwartzenberg punctuate the notion:

"How do you face a time that, with new technology, new globalizations, new hybridizations of art, entertainment, race, politics, media, genes, new economic principles, can't be described in old terms but demands a response before its too late? With imagination. That's one reason art matters."

I warned at the outset that this post would ramble and it has. It also remains inconclusive. Whose are the right hands? Where might funding come from? What legal and political and social obstacles might emerge to threaten such an undertaking? Who knows? Creating spaces for imaginative practices requires diligence and imagination too.

Project Row House

It is Christmas Eve. Two of my sons, Doug & Jeff just phoned me to say they are on their way over to the house for dinner (which is in the oven). My youngest son August is spending his first Christmas Eve with his mother and grandparents in Eugene, Oregon. He will be here tomorrow evening. The boys are my joy. I came close to simply writing about them tonight. But I also want to write about something hopeful out there in the world; after all this is the world in which they are coming of age. So I will go ahead and write about a sign of hope. This post is for Doug, Jeff, & August.

**********

Let's begin with a passage from Dewey's Art & Experience:

"Works of art that are not remote from common life, that are widely enjoyed in a community are signs of a unified collective life. But they are also marvelous aids in the creation of such a life. The remaking of the material of experience in the act of expression is not an isolated event confined to the artist and a person here and there who happens to enjoy the work. In the degree in which art exercises its office, it is also a remaking of the experience of the community in the direction of greater order and unity."

This passage came to my mind because my friend Susan Orr called my attention to this article from The New York Times (17 December 06) reporting on a truly inspiring development taking place largely outside, and more or less directly challenging, the familiar institutions of the elite "art world." Despite that locus, The Times reporter Michael Kimmelman suggests that Project Row House "may be the most impressive and visionary public art project in the country." From the sound of things, I would tend to agree. The project, founded in 1993 by artist Rick Lowe and still coordinated by him, aims to defend and extend social and cultural traditions in Houston's African American Community. In describing the venture Kimmelman refers to Joseph Beuys' "enlarged conception of Art,” which aims to integrate art and life, to tap the creative aspirations and capacities of each individual. I don't know much about Beuys (but intend to find out more). Kimmelman also might have invoked pragmatists like Dewey for whom art and experience were inseparable. In answer to the question "Is the work Mr. Lowe and his collaborators are doing art?" Dewey might respond: "the work of art has a unique quality ... that of clarifying and concentrating meanings contained in scattered and weakened ways in the material of other experiences." This, it seems to me, affords the basis for an indisputably affirmative answer.

Regardless of its sources, Mr. Lowe's vision should provide hope well beyond Houston's Third Ward. I will close by citing an appropriate remark from Rebecca Solnit's wonderful Hope in the Dark:

"Problems are our work; we deal with them in order to survive or to improve the world, and so facing them is better than turning away from them, than burying them and denying them. To face problems can be an act of hope, but only if you remember that they're not all there is."

"Great Works of Art are Thugs" (2)

I posted yesterday on this quote from Simon Schama for whom the use of art is to unsettle our established perceptins and judgements rather than to placate or sooth us. All day this has bugged me a bit, not because I disagree, but because it seemed so obvious. And I knew I'd seen others make the same, or at least a very similar, claim. Eventually, I recalled this remark by John Dewey (1927): "The function of art has always been to break through the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness." This seems to me to be largely correct, even if more or less completely un-Marxist in the sense that it doesn't assume that the function of art is somehow (usually unspecified however vigorously asserted) to sustain the established political-economic order. So perhaps the Schama view seems innovative insofar as we are under the sway of some sort of functionalist view (of whcih Marxism is only one version) of social arrangements?
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PS: [Added later that same day] And here is a remark from James Baldwin (1962) that I might've used instead of the Dewey. For Baldwin the artist is an "incorrigible disturber of the peace" ironically because she is responsible. As he explains:

"A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven. ... The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the quesiton the answer hides.
... I am really trying to make clear the nature of the artist's responsibility to his society. The peculiar nature of that responsibility is that he never cease warring with it, for its sake and his own. For the truth, in spite of appearnaces and all our hopes, is that everything is always changing and the measure of our maturity as nations and as men is ow well prepared we are to meet these changes and, further, to use them for our health."

All this talk of responsibility and maturity and health surely will make the postmodernists among us sit up and take notice. But the point here is that, again, Schama's broad point about the function of art being to unsettle taken for granted expectations and judgements hardly is a new one.

Williams and Dewey on the News

I came across this apparently quite well-known passage from the concluding lines of "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" (Book I) by William Carlos Williams on a recent visit to Alfredo Jaar's web site:

"It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."

Last evening, while re-reading Dewey, I discovered this intersecting observation:

"Artists have always been the real purveyors of news, for it is not the outward happening in itself which is new, but the kindling by it of emotion, perception and appreciation."

The Mathematics-Photography Analogy: A Perspective on Knowledge, Creativity & Politics

For pragmatists (like Charles Peirce and John Dewey) knowledge and creativity are collective endeavors, the product of interactions among individuals who make up various communities of inquiry. This point is brought home in this story from The New York Times today about Russian mathematician Grigory Perlman who has "refused to accept the highest honor in mathematics, the Fields Medal" for his work. This is not simply an instance of idiosyncratic, self-effacing genius - although Perlman may fit that type - but about the way knowledge is generated. In his description of Perlman's paper George Johnson (no relation), the author of The Times story makes the following observation:

"Those intent on parceling out credit may have as hard a time with the intellectual forensics: Who got what from whom? Dr. Perelman’s papers are almost as studded with names as with numbers. “The Hamilton-Tian conjecture,” “Kähler manifolds,” “the Bishop-Gromov relative volume comparison theorem,” “the Gaussian logarithmic Sobolev inequality, due to L. Gross” — all have left their fingerprints on [Perlman's accomplishment]. Spread among everyone who contributed, the [awards] might not go very far."

Just so. It may seem clear what this has to do with "theory" - this is a claim about how we think, how our minds work. What, however, has this got to do with photography? Or politics? Well, it has a lot to do with photography. Consider (again) Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment in which the central theme is that influential and creative photographers regularly produce 'the same' pictures. I think he is correct and that he has identified something about communities of inquiry.Or, consider too the topic of my recent post on the current exhibition of digitized reproductions of Walker Evans photographs. The show highlights the ways in which the production of images is a collaborative enterprise, a point brought home by the practices of wonderfully creative contemporary photographers like Burtynsky and Salgado.It also is relevant to politics insofar as photographers too operate in a star system with all sorts of prizes and awards being dispensed in all sorts of categories. Burtynsky, for instance, won the 2005 TED Prize with its attendant "3 wishes". Likewise, Robert Adams, won the Deutsche Borse Prize last year and donated his $52K cash award to Human Rights Watch. It would be naive to think that there are no internal politics involved in the decisions about who receives such awards. But the politics is not simply internal. And they extend even into such rarefied fields as mathematics; so, why, instead of declining awards altogether, should those like Perlman not take the proceeds and (following Adams) distribute them in useful ways? You could even distribute them in mathematically appropriate ways. What would The Algebra Project do with such funds? Or, what would individuals struggling against gender inequalities in mathematics and science education do with such funds? Here we return to photography.

Consider this image from from Phil Borges' forthcoming project "Women Empowered":

© Phil Borges

The caption Borges attaches to this picture reads - "Fahima 37, Kabul Afghanistan: My current project ‘Stirring the Fire’ highlights women heroes in the developing world who are breaking local convention to empower themselves and their communities. Fahima secretly held math and literacy classes for 120 young girls in her home during the Taliban. She was raided several times by the Religious Police and physically threatened. She kept a sewing machine on hand to pretend that she was only teaching sewing—a Taliban sanctioned activity for women."

Fahima will never win the Fields Medal. But some future winner of that award (or others like it) could donate their winnings to projects like hers (assuming, of course, that that would not get her killed). The point, I hope, is obvious. Communities of inquiry, like all other sorts of community, are not pristinely apolitical either inside or out. Let's not pretend otherwise.

Ed Tufte on Truth & Beauty .... and Consequences

I have posted about Ed Tufte's work on data graphics before. Here is a story about Tufte from npr prompted by the appearance of his most recent book Beautiful Evidence. Tufte's work is really wonderful and important. In his home discipline (and my own) of political science, as well as in the social sciences more generally, it unfortunately has fallen more or less on deaf ears.

In my earlier post I noted the connection between Tufte's concerns and those of pragmatists like Dewey. I will take the opportunity to reiterate that point here. You can find the following passage in Dewey's The Public & Its Problems (1927) where he mounts a forceful challenge to elitist and technocratic skepticism regarding the scope of democratic politics:

"It is often said, and with a great appearance of truth, that the freeing of inquiry would not have an especial effect. For, it is argued, the mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation. Unless these are read, they cannot seriously affect the thought and action of members of the public; they remain secluded in library alcoves, and are studied and understood only by a few intellectuals. The objection is well taken save as the potency of art is taken into account. A technically high-brow presentation would appeal only to those technically high-brow; it would not be news to the masses. Presentation is fundamentally important and presentation is a question of art. A newspaper which was only a daily edition of a quarterly journal of sociology or political science would undoubtedly possess a limited circulation and a narrow influence. . . . The freeing of the artist in literary presentation, in other words, is as much a precondition of the desirable creation of adequate opinion on public matters as is the freeing of social inquiry. Men's conscious life of opinion and judgement often proceeds on a superficial and trivial plane. But their lives reach a deeper level. The function of art has always been to break through the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness."

I am unsure how far Tufte would push his own views about accurate presentation of data and information - whether, that is, he is concerned primarily about influencing policy-makers or about having an effect on the public more generally. But that is of little concern since there is no reason to think that his point lacks a more general application. Dewey would surely applaud!

Gapminder

One of the problems that prompted me to become "seriously" interested in photography was the difficulty of depicting aggregate phenomena (war, famine, migration, economic growth, and so forth). Typically this is a problem of conveying quantitative intformation. Since many people are ill-equipped (not innately, but due to lack of trainng) to grasp the mathematics and statisitics behind such information, figuring out how to communicate it in accessible ways is an especially pressing problem for democrats, committed as they are to the rule of citizens. So, for instance, in The Public & Its Problems Dewey is preoccupied with the need to integrate social and political inquiry into democratic debate. He rightly (I think) inisists that this is as much a task for art as science. But he says very little about how we might approach the (admittedly daunting) problem he identifies.

One obvious place to start when thinking about such matters is the analyses of Edward Tufte - a political scientist whose work, while incredibly provocative, has unfortunately had scant impact on the social sciences. Here are the final lines of his first book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information: "What is to be sought in designs for the display of information is the clear portrayal of complexity. Not the complication of the simple; rather the task of the designer is to give visual accesss to the subtle and the difficult - that is, the revelation of the complex." This observation, of course, makes direct contact with Dewey, who thought the primary problem of the public is that it has difficulty "finding" itself in the complex welter of demographic, technological, economic, etc. changes characteristic of the contemporary world. Tufte's work might well provide some of the tools needed by a Deweyian view of democracy.

I am teaching a feshman seminar this coming fall that will try to make the connection I just sketched more explicit. An anonymous commenter just brought to my attention a web site Gapminder.org that I suspect will prove quite useful for my students (and me too!). I have only just begun to poke around on the site but it looks quite cool (Thanks!). Here is a one sentence description of the organization lifted from their page: "Gapminder is a non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualise human development. This is done in collaboration with universities, UN organisations, public agencies and non-governmental organisations. " The focus of the organization seems to be on development issues. The notion that we need to appreciate the difficulties of visualizing these matters is brought home when contemporary pragmatists like Richard Rorty, the heirs of Dewey, complain that the populations of the developing world and their problems "are becoming increasingly unthinkable." If we think with works of art (as Rorty would acknowledge) we can and surely should be thinking about the artistic presentation of statistical information of just the sort that Gapminder.org seems to offer.

Political Hope on Independence Day

"The significance of ideal ends and meanings is, indeed, closely connected with the fact that there are in life all sorts of things that are evil to us because we would have them otherwise. Were existing conditions wholly good, the notion of possibilities to be realized would never emerge." - John Dewey (1934)


Well before I had any idea who Robert Mapplethorpe was, indeed before his name became common currency in American cultural politics, I'd seen this image as part of the the cover art on his friend Patti Smith's album Easter.

That was 1978, shortly after I graduated from college, during years when questions of patriotism hardly were on anyone's lips, surely not on mine. These days there are "patriots" all around. It bears asking however what it means to be patriotic. This image by Mapplethorpe is a good way of focusing such reflections. (I must say that insofar as any of the 'my country right or wrong' crowd will read this, I find it quite delicious to invoke Mapplethorpe as a point of departure.) Being a patriot does not mean unswerving loyalty to any particular government or administration. It does not mean love of this or that place. It means that one is inspired by and committed to some set of ideals and to the possibilities they embody. And it means taking that inspiration as a basis for action (an imperative that is not satisfied by, for example, driving a flag-festooned SUV).

Mapplethorpe's image has stuck with me over the years. Perhaps oddly, and perhaps contrary to his intent, I find it inspiring. And in the current political circumstance I find this picture of a frayed and tattered flag especially relevant. I am committed to the liberty and equality for which the flag stands. I worry, though, that the policies of our current government may tear it beyond repair or recognition. I hope that that is not the case. And as evidence of possibilities I will point to just two rececnt, relaated examples. The first is the stand taken by First Lt. Ehren Watada (U.S. Army) who has refused orders to deploy to Iraq on the grounds that the war is illegal and that, as an officer, he is bound to refuse orders to partake in illegal actions. The second, is the decision this past week by the US Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Runsfeld in which the majority of a very conservative court held that equality before the law (as embodied in international agreements to which the US is signatory) applies to the prisoners being held at Guantanamo, after all. This, I thnk, is a momentous decision.

Lt. Watada and the Court majority are not just mouthing principles; they are doing things with our principles. They are calling the Bush administration to account, insisting that our government must acknowledge freedpm and equality and build them into its policies. In the process they are mending the frayed and tattered flag. They are holding out possibilities that are truly patriotic. That is a basis for hope. Have a peaceful 4th of July.

Meaning and Use in Photography, II

As a follow-up to the last post here is a comment from John Dewey:

"The heart of language is not "expression" of something antecedent, much less expression of antecedent thought. It is communication; the establishment of cooperation in an actiivity in which there are partners, and in which the activity of each is modified and regulated by partnership. To fail to understand is to fail to come to an agreement in action; to misunderstand is to set up action at cross purposes. ... Meaning is not indeed a psychic existence; it is primarily a property of behavior,and secondarily a property of objects. ... Primarily meaning is intent and intent is not personal in a private and exclusive sense."- Experience & Nature (179-80)

So this would be a reminder to those who might want to follow Sontag and take a too narrow view of intention or to imagine that "use" is somehow governed entirely by convention. Dewey warns against the first tendency. And everything we know about the pragmatics of language suggests that conventions hardly determine use; any convention can be exploited in unforeseen ways. The late philosopher Donald Davidson went so far as to suggest that the ubiquitous opportunities for generating neologisms (unanticipated, unconventional usages) calls into question the very idea that language is conventional. And while sometimes such exploitation is accidental, sometimes it must be intentional and creative - hence the possibility of art.

So, a topic for discussion: what is the "meaning" of the lynching photographs collected in Without Sanctuary? Those who initially took them - or who posed for them or who purchased them from those who initially took them - had some set of uses in mind. But what of James Allen, the man who has collected these images and created the exhibition? What sort of communication is involved in those very different instances?