In the first days of teaching at a university I would take an art print and tape it to the barren walls of the classroom — in particular a room that was tiered like a medical school arena — cold and clinical like an operating theatre. Overtime, the paintings served to generate dialogue which could then be related to the course’s topic, although that had not been the original intent. More, the picture broke the boredom and sterility of the classroom; remembering as I rolled out the scotch tape, that John Dewey deplored the artificial space of the American classroom. Indeed, Dewey made a connection between developing the capacity for self-governance and the existence of complex learning space filled with the provocative effects of nature and art. Like his contemporary Frank Lloyd Wright, who refused to build the Marin County prison because it offended his democratic principles (Green, 1990), Dewey felt American schools were too much like bureaucratized, efficient prisons to be proper space for learning from the experience of democracy (Dewey, 2005, p. 21).
To finish the story - - each night after class, the janitor would take down the print; replacing it with a sign that said ‘no posting.’ Next class, the students would put up another print, but leave the janitor’s sign in place. This went on until all the prints were gone and the walls were papered with ‘no posting’ signs. The students were amused with the determination of the maintenance staff to stay in control of the situation, as I realized that the janitor had been a helpful, if unwitting, participant in an object lesson on the adaptive dynamics of regulatory government. The lesson? Overtime, the administration of democracy endures even at the cost of emerging elements of a social system that may actually transform the conditions that limit the evolution of democracy.
The ‘sign’ story, therefore, begins this manuscript because it illustrates two ideas that are central to the arguments here about the nature of democratic civic space and correspondingly democratic public administration. First, it is argued that civic space does not pre-exist the relationships of individuals. Rather civic space is the pattern of relationship that emerges from the interaction in time among two or more individuals. Additionally, these interactions occur in the presence of a ‘third’-- in the case of the opening story, for example, art and, in particular art in the context of bureaucracy. From the theory in development here, therefore, democratic culture is not merely constructed in empty space as a manipulation of citizen behavior or the inculcation of abstract values, but rather emerges as a co-adaptation of social relationships within the conditions in which they occur. Indeed, over time, space ceases to exist only as a place or a container, but rather is identified by a specific pattern of relationships that is the result of the co-evolution of individuals within the context of the ‘third.’ These relationships create (self-organize) the regulating social dynamics (here civic architecture) by which society transforms and sustains itself.
Secondly, the story illustrates the intimate connection between aesthetics and democracy. However, aesthetics is concerned here, not with how the Arts or music convey certain values or political ideas, rather it is concerned with the emotional/sensory nature of aesthetics, those which draw an individual toward an interaction with another (Adorno, p. 160). These attractors may indeed be art or music, but for the purposes here the attractor is human relationship which, like art and music, has a destabilizing effect on habitual patterns of thought — a liberating pre-condition of human learning and which therefore is a foundational element of equalitarian democracy. (Dewey 1980, p 21, 41)
These citizen aesthetics can be problematic for administrators who see their responsibility only as the implementation or reform of the rule of law without regard to what is already emerging in the adaptive dynamics of social relationships. Whether public administration is able to act on the positive potential of this ‘self-organization’ depends on whether administrators perceive democracy as it is happening or whether they simply, like the janitor, see non-compliance.
In this sense, the term architecture of civic space is used with a specific intent to describe both the opportunities (those bounded by initial conditions) to transcend existing sociopolitical states through aesthetic interactions and the subsequent democratic pattern of relationship that emerges from those attractions — an architecture that public administration is already a powerful component of, if not a very self-conscious one. Further, the draw of relationship that attracts/ provokes interactions is seen as the means by which stable, inclusive, patterns of relationships may emerge. These aesthetics can be illustrated with principles from the emerging sciences of complex adaptive systems as well as the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, American political philosophy and Anti-Federalist sentiments.
For the whole paper, go to:
http://www.blueberry-brain.org/winterchaos/Linda%20Administrative%20Third%20Dennard.htm
