The situatedness of Dewey

In reviewing the literature for my dissertation I took a look at writers writing about Maxine Greene and writers who Maxine Greene looks at. I zeroed in a few themes to try to create a framework for thinking about Greene and the lived life. The themes that emerged were embodiment, aesthetics and situatedness. As my committee reviewed my review, one member expressed a kind of distaste for "situatedness" as a  "reified nouny sort of reference." I completely heard this distaste. This is one of the features of academic writing that make collective eyes roll. It's partly why I am using first-person in my writing. It's also why I am madly attempting to not use a subtitle in the dissertation title. Get to the point with the title. It's enough.

But as for "situatedness" this is the reference used in the literature about Greene and is used by Greene by herself.  It might come from my theatre background where I did a lot of work adapting non-dramatic texts for the stage (black box recordings, Watergate hearings, HUAC testimony, “Price Is Right” dialogue, etc.) but these nouny words provide me a tactile experience that moves me to use them. It's the mouth feel of the word that moves me to use it. This is what my roommate (now a tenured philosophy prof in the Midwest) meant by “mmm, texty…”

I came across situatedness again as I'm re-reading Dewey's Experience and Education. Dewey writes how people live in the world, in situations. And the word "in" reflects an interaction happening between "people and objects and other people" (p. 43). Dewey acknowledges that situation and interaction are inseparable. This is the stuff of experience.

Dewey goes on to say that a "fully integrated personality, on the other hand, exists only when successive experiences are integrated with one another" (p. 44). Could this be a foundation for Greene's "lived life"? The integration of successive experiences that are situated/integrated? The same committee member who disliked the nouny thing happening with "situatedness" also recommended that I tip my hat to Dewey in the literature review (at that point I was only looking at continental and mostly French philosophers--perhaps I'm a Gallophile at heart) (the things you learn about yourself in this dissertation process are fascinating). I did tip my hat, but I may need to bow more deeply with this discovery.