A Justice Site
Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP
Practice Module on Aesthetics as Communication
California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created August 15 2002
Latest Update: August 15, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
The Logo as Expression and Communication
Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, August 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.This essay focuses on the aesthetic component of communication. It was prompted by my first visit to the Culture of Peace News Network, as I put together our class materials for this Fall:This is actually an animated gif for the Culture of Peace News Network. The two colors come together to form one image that bears a resemblance to a flag. Consider that the downward slash is a flag pole, and the upward slash doesn't take away from that interpretation. I altered the colors to blue and green, because they fit better with the page on which I wanted to display it. The two figures are identical, just transposed. So are hands identical, just transposed.
I can see a human figure in each of the parts, a head, and legs. As they come together in the animated gif, they also look like hands coming together. A handshake? A promise of good faith? In the Culture of Peace News Network logo, the icon is captured thus:
and the animated gif in white with a grey outline runs just once above the logo. The animated gif is done with Flash, and though I do have the Flash program, I have literally no time to play with it, and I couldn't download the animated gif to show you. Go to the Culture of Peace site and watch it run. You can cause it to rerun by ckicking the refresh or reload button on your browser. Some of you have programs with which you can do an animated gif. Experiment. Play.
As you do so, recall Rosemary Radford Reuther's theory on how human communication developed: First there was God, then the song, then the text (theology). (From Reuther, Sexism and God-Talk. (Check accuracy of citation and insert page number. Nag me with e-mail if I forget to do this.) What I interpret from Reuther's statement is that the rational aspect of our world is just one part of our ability to understand and communicate our knowledge. I like her suggestion that the non-cognitive lived experience may very well be the first step in our acquisition of awareness. The song, or the aesthetic expression of that awareness: the drawing, the painting, the sculpture, the poetry, the song, the example of a life lived (St. Francis of Assisi) may be the second step. And finally we go back over that experience to tell of it, to explain it, to bring awareness to others who have not lived it. It is this third phase that we encounter philosophy, social theory, political theory, theology: the text.
One of the major questions of our pedagogical technique arises here: Since we seem to build textual material from the ground up, from lived experience through aesthetic expression of that experience, through cognitive analysis and interpretation of the whole process into what we today call text, perhaps we are approaching education from the wrong end. Dewey thought so. He insisted that we should learn by doing. Focus on lived experience. Freire thought so. He insisted that the learner have an active say in what he needed and wanted to know, that we might avoid the arrogance of assuming the colonial position of being sure that we know what is best for the "other," assuming also that we are somehow superior to that "other." Focus on respect and dignity for the "other." Habemas thinks so. He insists that the legitimacy of a democracy depends on the hearing in good faith of the validity claims of all citizens. Focus on legitimation, self determination, self realization in puralistic soscieties.
You can see that in the last year, as we groped for effective ways to reach large groups of students (60) with widely divergent backgrounds, ages, ethnicities, we heightened our focus on the aesthetic step of expressing our reactions to our lived experiences. In this aproach to aesthetics there is no right or wrong, no good or bad. There is expression, meaning as we grapple with it out of our lived experience. The bringing together of expressions of lived experience with texts as we try to write them, is what Marx called praxis.
And praxis seems to me a better way to introduce you to new theories, new methodologies, becauase it has a direct connection to your lived experiences. That suggests that we honor and respect your lived experiences, and that you are not asked to strip yourself to a "student" with no personal and human characteristics when you enter into discussions with us. Once we've engaged on this level of praxis, once we've shared lived experience, it seems easier to us to then adapt that awareness to texts.
