Performances of contemporary culture

Abstract

This paper intends to reflect upon the possibility to understand the effects of the images of cultural education in educational practice, in order to build contextualized significance with the world of life. Through Adorno’s diagnosis of cultural education, Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action, and the incorporation of the contributions of aesthetics, semiotics and hermeneutics, the work resulting from theoretical and bibliographic research proposes granting a new framework to the pedagogical discussion, given the performances of the current culture. The pragmatics of language, anchored in the intersubjectivity of comprehension, can help the subject to free him/herself from metaphysical constraints, from market conditioning, from rationalization and to unveil the senses, values and meanings that guide his/her ethical action in the world. In this perspective, it is possible to achieve, on the one hand, an education oriented towards communicative understanding and committed to the public use of reason; and, on the other hand, the refinement of the student’s aesthetic taste about imagery communication. It is believed, therefore, that educational action, through contextualized interventions with the lived world, opens the possibility for plurality, for alterity, and for the recognition of the other, in the sense of promoting respect for differences and taste, considering the singularity of the values arising from everyday life.