Communication Aesthetics

By David Zemmels

Comm 7001, Dr. Jim Anderson

4 December 2003

Abstract

Communication aesthetics can be reasonably defined as the study of human perceptions of meaning as aesthetic experiences. A French artist/philosopher named Fred Forest (1983) describes it thus, “Communication Aesthetics strives to integrate experiences drawn from philosophy, but also from the social sciences, the physical sciences, and anything else, science or otherwise, which can throw light upon its subject: the perceptible.” Perhaps Communication Aesthetics can best be described as a conceptual framework for interpreting and understanding broad artistic forms, popular culture, and public events. This essay reflects a path that moves past the concepts of general aesthetic theory toward a specialized branch known as ‘pragmatic’ aesthetics and on to communication aesthetics as ‘social drama’ as seen through the emerging discipline of ‘performance studies’.

Communication Aesthetics

Aesthetics comes from the Greek word ‘aisthetikos’ meaning "perceptive, especially by feeling." In etymological terms, the word " aesthetics " designates the understanding of that which is perceptible. Despite its Greek roots, the word ‘aesthetics’ was only coined in the 18th Century as part of an attempt to differentiate cultural spheres of the scientific and the artistic, and “gave birth to a modern concept of art as the narrower practice of fine art” (Shusterman, 2000). However, in a post-modern world, the philosophical definition of aesthetics is expanding to include the social and the political spheres, giving rise to the study of pragmatics in aesthetics.

Communication comes from the Latin ‘communicare’, meaning to impart, share, or make common. There is no indisputable definition of communication but it is reasonable to suggest that it makes use of “the medium of perception and develops its meaning through a continuous chain of concrete operations, for example a chain of words” (Thyssen, 2003). Robert Craig (1999) argues for a constitutive model of communication: “a model that conceptualizes communication as a constitutive process that produces and reproduces shared meaning” (p. 125).

Communication aesthetics, then, can be reasonably defined as the study of human perceptions of meaning as aesthetic experiences. But to enter the keywords “communication + aesthetics” in a search function of library holdings or a web search engine reveals little. Together, the terms themselves seem to be used more prevalently in the European intellectual community. Indeed one of the only direct references in a web search comes from a French artist/philosopher named Fred Forest (1983) who describes it thus, “Communication Aesthetics strives to integrate experiences drawn from philosophy, but also from the social sciences, the physical sciences, and anything else, science or otherwise, which can throw light upon its subject: the perceptible.” He goes on to say: “Its more modest claim is an attempt to apprehend what constitutes for a given society (ours), at a given moment in history, the universe accessible to its perception.”

If we can accept that all experience is perception, then it follows that all experience is aesthetic experience. Perhaps Communication Aesthetics can best be described as a conceptual framework for interpreting and understanding broad artistic forms, popular culture, and public events (such as performances of theatre, dance, and art, and presentations such as film and television.) What is clear is that the study of aesthetics in communication crosses many conceptual domains, far too broad to discuss here. In order to narrow the focus, this essay reflects a path that moves past the concepts of general aesthetic theory toward a specialized branch known as ‘pragmatic’ aesthetics and on to communication aesthetics as ‘social drama’ as seen through the emerging discipline of ‘performance studies’.

Aesthetics as Pragmatic

Aesthetic philosophical discourse usually centers on ‘analytical’ aesthetics, which is characterized by an examination of high fine art with distance and disinterestedness. The challenge to this perspective is what has come to be known as ‘pragmatic’ aesthetics, which is best defined in its opposition to ‘analytical’ aesthetics. Richard Shusterman (2000) advocates removing aesthetics from its narrow “exalted cloister, where it is isolated from life and contrasted to more popular forms of cultural expression.” Instead, Shusterman suggests that pragmatic aesthetics embraces a practical view of art by “enhanc(ing) its role and appreciation; the ultimate goal is not knowledge but improved experience.”

Pragmatic aesthetics in philosophical terms was introduced in the writings of Kant in the late 18^th Century: The word pragmatisch “expresses a relation with a human goal, this goal only being determinable within a community” (Parret, 1993). The major problem in aesthetics concerns the nature of beauty. In his Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant mediated between the objective position of Plato and Aristotle and interpretive perspectives of Kenneth Burke and David Hume by showing that “aesthetic judgment has universal validity despite its subjective nature —the objective, which asserts that beauty inheres in the object and that judgments concerning it may have objective validity, and the subjective, which tends to identify the beautiful with that which pleases the observer” (www.encyclopedia.com, retrieved Nov. 2003).

In the United States, a pragmatic approach to aesthetics was championed by John Dewey in his passionate Art of Experience (1934), based on the general philosophical movement of pragmatism originally developed by Charles S. Peirce and William James. John Dewey’s progressive ideas stressed the importance of knowledge through experience and were a major influence on the development of pragmatic aesthetic theory. He was the only one of “pragmatism’s founding fathers” to write extensively on art and to regard aesthetics as central to philosophy (Levin, 1994).

Dewey challenged the dominant aesthetic ideology that identified art with the institution of high fine art and challenged its “separation from life and praxis, its distance from ordinary people and their experience” (Shusterman, 2000, 140). Dewey proposed to define art ‘as experience’, and argued that the common everyday experiences of human life are the roots of aesthetic experience. Dewey’s views are considered too general and have proven to be as problematic of a definition of art as any other. Current pragmatic aesthetic theory has distanced itself somewhat from Dewey’s original ideology but he remains a powerful voice.

The current international reassessment of pragmatics in aesthetics has led to a whole range of thought, although something of a geographical division emerged: Anglo-Saxon and ‘continental’ pragmatics. “These two classes of pragmatics undoubtedly overlap with two intellectual mentalities that are well known in the social sciences: Anglo-Saxon verses ‘continental’, some kind of objectivism (bracketing the speaking subject) verses some kind of subjectivism (refusing to reduce the subjective to a situational or objectifiable position…)” (Parret, 1993). It seems clear that the “analytic hegemony of Anglo-American aesthetics is being severely challenged by continentally-inspired theory based on hermeneutic, poststructuralist, and Marxist philosophies” (Shusterman, 2000, 4).

Pragmatics did not evolve into a ‘respectable’ area of study until the late 1960s in reaction to the strict structuralism of the positivist perspective. Contemporary aesthetic pragmatists argue that the concept of art should be opened to include popular arts and “further a progressive ethical and socio-political agenda through greater critical attention to the ethical and social dimensions of it work” (Shusterman, 2000, 140). It is a conceit to think that aesthetic enjoyment is the privileged endowment of an elite few.

Out of this view of art and aesthetics as practical and experiential grew a new area of discourse known as performance studies.

Communication as Performance

One cannot approach this subject without a nod to the influence of Kenneth Burke and his strategies of using “dramatism” to analyze many kinds of social interactions and cultural behaviors. Burke wanted to establish terms and strategies for “the discussion of human motivation and the devices by which people, consciously or unconsciously, try to influence the opinions and actions of each other” (Carlson, 1996). Placing human action within a “staged” context is what ties Burke most closely to performance theorists.

The idea of ‘social drama’ is at the core of communication aesthetics, and is based on the concept that human social interaction is ‘performance.’ Mary Strine et al (1990) observe that the term ‘performance’ is now “an essentially contested concept” meaning “certain concepts, such as art and democracy, had disagreement about their essence built into the concepts themselves” (Carlson, 1996). Given this, performance can be defined as a wide range of activities in the arts, in literature, and in the social sciences, and is closely tied to the post-modern cultural movement (Benamou, 1977). It is appropriate to note that the idea that human interaction can be considered performances is not necessarily a new one. William Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It: All the world’s a stage | And all the men and women merely players; | They have their exits and their entrances; | And one man in his time plays many parts (2, 7: 139-42).

In the context of communication, however, performance can be defined as socially sanctioned modes of structured behavior (Carlson, 1996). This approach falls squarely in the interpretive perspective of social research, employing almost exclusively qualitative data collection methodologies.

From this foundation, the field of performance studies has developed over the last 20 years as the study of these behaviors. It evolved primarily from an interdisciplinary exchange between traditional theatre studies and anthropology, although it “draws on… a wide variety of disciplines in the social sciences, feminist studies, gender studies, history, psychoanalysis, queer theory, semiotics, ethnology, cybernetics, area studies, media and popular culture theory, and cultural studies” (Schechner, 2002). Richard Schechner, who brings a theatre background to the discourse, is one of the leading visionaries of the performance studies field. Other major figures in the field are the anthropologists Victor Turner and Dwight Conquergood, and the sociologist Erving Goffman. We shall look at each one in turn.

Of Richard Schechner, Marvin Carlson (1996) writes, “No theatre theorist has been more instrumental in developing modern performance theory nor in exploring the relationships between practical and theoretical work in theatre research and in social science research.” Schechner provided a major statement on these converging interests in 1973, in a special issue of TDR: The Drama Review devoted to “Theatre and the Social Sciences.” In the introduction, Schechner, as guest editor, listed “seven areas where performance theory and the social sciences coincide.” They are:

1. Performance in everyday life, including gatherings of every kind.
2. The structure of sports, ritual, play, and public political behaviors.
3. Analysis of various modes of communication (other than the written word); semiotics.
4. Connections between human and animal behavior patterns with an emphasis on play and ritualized behavior.
5. Aspects of psychotherapy that emphasize person-to-person interaction, acting out, and body awareness.
6. Ethnography and prehistory-both of exotic and familiar cultures.
7. Constitution of unified theories of performance, which are, in fact, theories of behavior.

Carlson (1996) points out that the list outlines “a rather broader field than the main line of research has, in fact, followed.” Carlson goes on to argue that an understanding of the term ‘performance’ can ‘usefully’ begin in the writings on the subject in anthropology and sociology.

In Schechner’s book, Performance Studies: An Introduction (2002), he states on the first page: “Performances are actions.” This is a succinct premise for performance studies, which takes actions very seriously in four ways:

First, behavior is the ‘object of study’… Second, artistic practice is a big part of the performance studies project… The relationship between studying performance and doing performance is integral. Third, fieldwork as “participant-observation” is a much-prized method adapted from anthropology and put to new uses… In performance studies the “other” may be part of one’s own culture, or even an aspect of one’s own behavior…Taking this critical distance from the objects of study and self invites revision, the recognition that social circumstances… are not fixed… Fourth, it follows that performance studies is actively involved in social practices and advocacies… a basic theoretical claim is that no approach or position is “neutral.”

He believes there are many ‘instances and kinds’ of performances in our culture, which “must be construed as a ‘broad spectrum’ or ‘continuum’ of human actions ranging from ritual, play, sports, popular entertainments, the performing arts, and everyday life performances to the enactment of social, gender, race, and class roles, and on to healing, the media, and the internet” (Schechner, 2002).

In 1977, Schechner met Victor Turner, an anthropologist and probably the most important contributor to the convergence of anthropology and theatre. It is Turner who coined the phrase ‘social drama’ in the late 1950s as a tool for social anthropologists, a field that has proven particularly rich in discussions of performance. Turner’s work continued to be marked by the use of drama as a metaphor for “non-theatrical cultural manifestations” (Carlson, 1996, 21). As with many cultural anthropologists, Turner focused on the ideas of human rites and rituals, as well as the concept of human ‘play’ in his work as examples of social drama.

Erving Goffman, a sociologist and early pioneer in the field of performance studies, wrote a series of works about performing in everyday life, the most influential of which is his1959, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. It is centrally concerned with performance, which he defines as “all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continued presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on the observers” (Goffman, 1959). What was significant is that Goffman’s definition doesn’t simply limit performance to the study of behavior and allowed that an individual might be ‘performing’ without being aware of it.

The ethnographer Dwight Conquergood had a major impact among performance studies adherents. Conquergood suggested five types of attitudes towards ethnography of performance but called four of them morally problematic for various reasons: the custodian, the enthusiast, the skeptic, and the curator. The fifth, “dialogical” performance, aims “to bring together different voices, world views, value systems, and beliefs so that they can have a conversation with one another” (Conquergood, 1985). In ethnographic terms, a dialogical approach is a dialogue between the observer and those being studied, usually multi-voiced, where as the others are more monologic approaches, which suppresses the voices of those studied.

More recently, in 1991, Conquergood called for a ‘rethinking’ of five areas of performance study in his book Rethinking Ethnography:

1. Performance and Cultural Process. What are the conceptual consequences of thinking about culture as a verb instead of a noun, a process instead of a product? Culture as an unfolding performative invention instead of a reified system, structure, or variable? What happens to our thinking about performance when we move it outside aesthetics and situate it at the center of lived experience?
2. Performance and Ethnographic Praxis. What are the methodological implications of thinking about fieldwork as the collaborative performance of an enabling fiction between observer and observed, knower and known? How does thinking about fieldwork as performance differ from thinking about fieldwork as the collection of data? […]
3. Performance and Hermeneutics. What kinds of knowledge are privileged or displaced when performed experience becomes a way of knowing, a method of critical inquiry, a mode of understanding? […]
4. Performance and Scholarly Representation. What are the rhetorical problematics of performance as a complementary or alternative form of “publishing” research? What are the differences between reading an analysis of fieldwork data, and hearing the voices from the field interpretively filtered through the voice of the researcher? […] What about enabling people themselves to perform their own experiences? […]
5. The Politics of Performance. What is the relationship between performance and power? How does performance reproduce and resist hegemony? How does performance accommodate and contest domination?

As we enter the new century, performance studies has moved from an “almost exclusive preoccupation with the performer and the performative act to a consideration of who is watching the performance, who is reporting it, and what the social political, and cognitive implications…upon the process.” No longer is the fieldworker a neutral observer, but a participant in the performance, and there is movement into the “complex field of intercultural performance.” With modern transportation and communication, cultural performances move easily around the globe, “weaving complex patterns of contact with other cultures and other cultural performances” (Carlson, 1996).

3) Glossary

Aesthetics - the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and expression of beauty, as in the fine arts. In Kantian philosophy, the branch of metaphysics concerned with the laws of perception.

Communication Aesthetics - a conceptual framework for interpreting and understanding broad artistic forms, popular culture, and public events.

Dialogic Interpretation - an interpretation that is a dialogue between the observer and those being studied, usually multi-voiced, or polyphonic.

Ethnography – the study of lived experiences, involving description and interpretation.

Performance - socially sanctioned modes of structured behavior.

Pragmatism - A movement consisting of varying but associated theories, and distinguished by the doctrine that the meaning of an idea or a proposition lies in its observable practical consequences.

4) Personal Note

In searching for a topic for this project, Jim Anderson suggested: Why not something in communication aesthetics? Intrigued I spent a few hours researching the subject, only to find very little. When I broached Jim for more information about the topic area, he responded with: Don't you think communication has an aesthetic dimension?

Of course it does, I thought to myself, and since I have a fine arts background, this is a good project for me. Providing literary support from a social scientist perspective proved more challenging than expected. The concept of Communication Aesthetics is not an organized ‘genre’ or ‘area-of-study’ like interpersonal or mass communication. Apparently, one must define the subject for oneself to a large extent.

The only direct references to these terms I found were European, mostly French. The best North American source I found was Dr. Mary Strine of the University of Utah Department of Communications. With her help and guidance in defining communication in terms of its aesthetic qualities, I was able to identify the concepts of ‘pragmatic aesthetics’ and ‘performance studies’ as key examples of this topic area.

5) Bibliography

Benamou, M. & Caramello, C. (1977). Performance in postmodern culture. Milwaukee, WI: Center for Twentieth Century Studies.

Carlson, M. (1996). Performance: A critical introduction. New York, NY: Routledge.

Conquergood, D. (1985). Performing as a moral act: Ethical dimensions of the ethnography of performance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Craig, R. T. (1999). Communication theory as a field. Communication Journal, 9, 119-161.

Forest, F. (1983). From an aesthetic of communication. Web Net Museum. Retrieved November 2003, from http://www.webnetmuseum.org/

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Levine, G. (1994). Aesthetics and ideology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Parret, H. (1993). The aesthetics of communication: Pragmatics and beyond. Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Thyssen, Ole (2003). Aesthetic Communication in Organizations. Center for Corporate Communication, Copenhagen. Retrieved November 2003, from http://asp.cbs.dk/ccc/research.asp

Schechner, R. (2002). Performance studies: An introduction. Florence, KY: Routledge.

Shusterman, R. (2000). Pragmatic aesthetics: Living beauty, rethinking art, 2^nd Ed. New York: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Strine, M. S., Long, B., & Hopkins, M.F. (1990). “Research in interpretation and performance studies: Trends, issues, priorities,” pp. 181-93 in Phillips and Woods (Eds.), Speech Communication.

Additional Reading

Conquergood, D. (2002). Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research. TDR: The Drama Review 46, 3.

Pelias, R. & VanOosting (1987). A Paradigm for Performance Studies. Quarterly Journal of Speech 73: 219-31.

Phalen, P. & Lane, J., eds. (1998). The Ends of Performance. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Schechner, R. (1988). Performance Studies: The Broad Spectrum Approach. TDR: The Drama Review 32, 3 (T119): 4-6.

Schechner, R. (1993). The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. New York: Routledge.

Turner, V. (1982). From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.