Egalitarian Dialogue - Egalitarian Dialogue and Creation of Meaning

Egalitarian Dialogue and Creation of Meaning

Habermas (2004a, 2004b) has stressed the need to recover the lifeworld from its systemic colonization by the “steering media” of power, law and bureaucratization. The systemic decolonization is a way of reinventing democracy in public spaces and institutions and for recovering meaning. Habermas’ concept of lifeworld refers to the everyday contexts where people relate to each other and create meaning and structures to organize themselves. In Habermas’ view, and also from a dialogic learning perspective, subjects create meaning through intersubjectivity or the interaction among subjects engaged in egalitarian dialogue.

Any person can engage in such meaning making dialogue because humans have epistemological curiosity, which when expressed in egalitarian dialogue can criticize and end with what Freire (2001) called the bureaucratizing of the mind, an invisible power of alienating domestication. Such debureaucratization process can be seen in Dialogic Musical Gatherings (CONFAPEA, 2005), where people develop their epistemological curiosity listening to classical music and later engaging in a dialogue about the instruments that were playing, about the composer, his life and his position in a historical context, the style of the music listened to and its relationship with the cultural claims of each participant belonging to the Music Gathering, etc. In this process, meaning is created and recovered because music escapes the system and goes back to people’s lifeworld tearing down the walls of cultural elitism.