According to Jason Kosnoski, modern social life is profoundly disorienting. We are unable to “locate ourselves” in the midst of increasing fragmentation, social acceleration, complexity, and interdependence. The temporal and spatial qualities of modernity are, in Zygmunt Bauman's term, “liquid.” This liquidity undermines our ability to make moral and intellectual connections between our lived experiences and the social forces that structure our larger environments. How should we confront this challenge? Kosnoski develops an answer in his ambitious book John Dewey and the Habits of Ethical Life: The Aesthetics of Political Organizing in a Liquid World. By placing John Dewey's aesthetic thought into conversation with neo-Habermasian political theory, Kosnoski's goal is to theorize the discursive practices and strategies that can “constitute a concrete ethical life” (postconventional Sittlichkeit). Expanding these practices will help individuals “sustain a flexible, expansive, and democratic understanding of justice that could inspire a truly active, global public sphere” (p. 5). While the book has great promise, it is less successful in articulating political strategies to counteract the social liquidity that Kosnoski finds so troubling. The book is worth reading, however, both for its unique interpretation of Dewey's social philosophy and its important contributions to deliberative theory.
The book begins with a diagnosis of our current predicament. The first chapter draws primarily on Jürgen Habermas and Zygmunt Bauman to document increasing social fragmentation and “social liquidity.” Kosnoski claims that such conditions have created a “crisis in Sittlichkeit.” Because we cannot form “trustworthy cognitive maps” that connect our lived experiences with larger environments, we cannot discern the “immediate ethical import of events” (p. 27). So how do we address questions of global democratic justice in the context of radical disorientation? In chapter 2, Kosnoski turns to the work of neo-Habermasians such as Seyla Benhabib, Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, and Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson. Kosnoski reads this group of theorists as making progressive corrections to Habermas's theory of discourse ethics. Kosnoski argues that while neo-Habermasians provide a fuller and more realistic account of the content and process of democratic deliberation, they fail to explore the actual lived experiences of such discussions. For Kosnoski, Dewey's aesthetic theory best addresses this omission.
In chapter 3, Kosnoski presents a Deweyan account of the lived experiences of communication, emphasizing its noncognitive, aesthetic, and mediatory dimensions. He argues that through reconstructive communication, groups can develop new cognitive maps of and new relationships with their larger environment” (p. 111). In chapter 4, reconstructive communication is formalized via Dewey's concept of thinking. For Kosnoski, the habits of curiosity, deep suggestion, and judgment represent normative guides to discursive practice. Chapter 5 considers Dewey's understanding of associational life as a communicative space that simultaneously protects us from and enables us to engage our liquid social environment. Because Dewey does not theorize the internal structure of associational life, in chapter 6, Kosnoski presents the “teacher/organizer” as a guiding figure for communication.
John Dewey and the Habits of Ethical Life presents a vital contribution to Dewey studies. Kosnoski offers an important alternative to participatory readings of Dewey's political thought (e.g., those of Robert Westbrook, William Caspary, and Judith Green). Instead, he focuses on the aesthetic dimensions of communication. This displaces the instrumentalism of problem solving with cooperative meaning making. Kosnoski does an excellent job tracing this process: Starting with pre-cognitive experiences of felt difficulties, individuals do not know the nature of their problematic situations. This confusion and ambiguity propels individuals to communicate with others. Dewey's aesthetic theory highlights the temporal, spatial, somatic, and emotional dimensions of communication. Through a progressive and reiterative process of expressing meanings, listening to others, and reconfiguring perceptions, groups are able to reformulate problematic situations, understand larger social dynamics, and form cognitive maps of their social worlds.
Kosnoski argues that this attentiveness to the lived experiences of communication makes two important additions to neo-Habermasian political thought. First, he carefully describes how feelings of vagueness represent an alternative pathway to discourse. Rather than entering deliberation on the basis of interests or clear problems, we may also enter into deliberation because we don't know what to do. Second, Dewey presents a thicker account of the actual conversational practices that produce an “enlarged mentality.” Specifically, “habits of thinking” highlight the competencies that both motivate individuals and help them learn through communication. Kosnoski argues that norms of autonomy, reciprocity, and solidarity are not located in abstract procedures but in “habits that underlie a particular moral conception cognizant with democratic justice” (p. 124). Thus, this book shows how Dewey can be put into productive conversation with contemporary deliberative theory. Instead of standing as a precursor, Dewey, as Kosnoski effectively shows, can be a vital participant in current debates.
This book advances the ambitious aim of constructing a concrete ethical life of democratic justice in the face of social liquidity. Such ambition raises the stakes. In my view, Kosnoski falls short on two counts. First, I was not convinced that social liquidity represents a crisis in ethical life. While the pace, scale and scope of change are unsettling, it is unclear if these developments “inhibit individuals from forming ‘cognitive maps’ they might use to negotiate their fragmented, constantly shifting public environment” (p. 10). Moreover, Kosnoski's claim that Dewey's social analysis of social dislocation and acceleration bears “a striking resemblance to Bauman's descriptions” (p. 167) begs the question: How has social liquidity changed between the time of Dewey and today? Indeed, we might see the ways in which our cognitive maps are always partial. We draw on ethical values precisely because of incomplete information. So rather than a crisis, our partial maps might be a constitutive feature of ethical life.
Second, while the emphasis on aesthetic dimensions represents an important corrective to participatory readings of Dewey, Kosnoski's expansive concept of aesthetics does not seem to have the political or critical traction to counteract social liquidity. For Kosnoski, the end of reconstructive communication is “mutual understanding concerning meanings within situation” (p. 110). While mutual understanding may help us develop better cognitive maps, I was not convinced that this, in turn, will “lead to more active citizenry … that demands a large sphere of democratic control encompassing areas of economy and society” (p. 243).
Kosnoski points to associational life as the location for this transformation from cognitive maps to democratic control. He looks to Dewey's educational writings to flesh out how such a process occurs. In the penultimate chapter, Kosnoski offers a convincing account of schooling as “aesthetic geography.” He looks to Dewey's original design of the Laboratory School as a way to walk us through the aesthetic, geographic, and collective experience of reconstructive communication. This process requires the assistance of a teacher to guide these experiences. Kosnoski then argues that we can translate the model of a teacher/classroom into an organizer/community association. This translation needs to be articulated more fully. Schools and community organizations are qualitatively different institutions. It is also difficult to see a proliferation of organizers across associational life.
There are several important shortcomings in this book. They do not, however, take away from its central insights. Kosnoski's innovative reading of Dewey and analysis of the lived experience of communication are highly valuable for anyone interested in democratic theory.
