A conversation with the text

In my earlier post today I mentioned that I scanned Maxine Greene's Teacher as Stranger (1973) to locate instances of lived life in the text. There were none.

This was a hunch that I had prior to the data collection and knowing that, I made sure to also scan for what I might interpret as variations on lived life. And sure enough I was able to locate life-world which originated with Edmund Husserl. I also have a hunch that life-world becomes less frequent in Greene's later writings when lived life starts to make a presence. This may be a situation of coincidence, but it is possible that Greene abandoned Husserl's "Umwelt" for lived life.

With the scanning, I found myself talking to the text. Because lived life wasn't presenting itself, I started to take notice of other qualified "lifes" in Greene's writing: social life, family life, instinctual life, to name a few. I asked aloud if I would find these "lifes" in her later books. If I was to find that they're not present in her later books, would it be a fair deduction for me to think of these other "lifes" as being subsumed by lived life? Could lived life be a repository for the social, family, and instinctual aspects of life? If lived life is such a repository, could this mean that what once might have stood as a clear distinction among these other qualified "lifes" becomes blurred in Greene's later writing and thinking? Are these qualified "lifes" too intersubjectve/interconnected to be distinguished from one another?

I might be in line for a hermeneutic hat trick here...

Hamlet was not written about your mother

The title of this blog post is the subtitle for my dissertation rationale. "Hamlet was not written about your mother" refers to a adage that I remember from my days as an acting student at the Stella Adler Conservatory.

My interpretation of this adage was the Adler idea that the actor should not bring their own emotional background into the creative process of developing a character. A character was to be created solely from the circumstances provided by the playwright. No matter how much my adolescent sensibility might ascribe Gertrude-like qualities to my own mother, the fact was simple: Shakespeare did not write Hamlet about Maureen Dotsch Powers.

I recently presented this rationale to my dissertation committee during my proposal defense. They accepted it. They also suggested that I spend more time looking at artists and philosophers who share in the Adler focus of creativity that is divorced from the artist's background, emotions, experience--their lived life.

I spent time yesterday scanning Greene's Teacher as Stranger (1973) for instances of lived life and other possible variations on its theme. I came across her chapter, "Truth and Belief" where Greene uses Hamlet to differentiate between the perspectives of the pragmatist and the phenomenologist. She begins this discussion by identifying the situatedness of Hamlet:

He nevertheless perceives the court from a distinctive point of view. After all, he is the son of the dead king; he was in line to inherit the throne. His peculiar biography is bound to make his interpretations somewhat different from Horatio's, say, or Laertes', or even Claudius's. These men all belong to the same cultural matrix; they participate, without much thought, in the same ceremonies. But having had different subjective experiences, each of them is in a distinctive situation and bound to interpret novel events in his particular fashion. What each one comes to "know," therefore, will have much to do with the way he locates himself and with the relevance of what is happening to his own concerns (1973, p. 133).

With this focus on situatedness we can assume that Hamlet's sense of "mother" is likely to be different than Laertes', and Laerties' is likely to be different from his sister's Ophelia's. Greene makes her case that the phenomenologist never takes a passive approach to making sense of their world; nothing is taken for granted. For the phenomenologist,

Not only is the observer's subjectivity involved; so are the subjectivities of his contemporaries, and the intersubjective reality they mutually create...intersections, zones, and horizons are significant in the knowing process (1973, p. 134).

Greene's use of "observer" here immediately brings to my mind "audience" with her use of a theatrical artwork as her reference. Replacing "observer" with "audience" and I think about the viewer's experience of a production of Hamlet. The audience is likely to bring with them their own situatedness in attending to the performance. They are likely to forge "intersections, zones and horizons" between their prior experience and the production they are viewing. And here I come across an interesting question: did Stella Adler expect the audience to bring their own subjectivities, their own situatedness, in coming to know and understand Hamlet? Or was their understanding only begotten by what the actors provided?

Because I have been studying and practicing Greene's approach to aesthetic education and inquiry for so long, I have to work hard to de-couple myself from her sensibility. As such, my immediate response to this question is that Adler would have had to expect the audience to come to the theatre with their own subjectivities. Yet, if I pause, I can also understand how Adler might have chafed at an audience that allowed their subjectivities to influence their understanding. Just as she urged actors to "be in the moment" I can imagine that she would have advocated the same of an audience. That moment is comprised of the world of the play, not the traffic encountered on the way to the theatre or the long line outside the women's restroom in the lobby.

But can we really expect such isolation of experience? Again, I am hugely influenced by my own background and horizons that understand experience to be part of a continuum. As a member of that group of believers, I cannot fathom experience not colored by subjectivity.

Or for that matter, research that is purely objective.

Text? as exhibition

In today's New York Times Holland Cotter had a featured article "Modern Is Modern Is..." concerning two current museum exhibitions taking place in San Francisco. Each focuses on Gertrude Stein as their subject of  inquiry. "Fantastic!" I thought to myself as I settled in with a big bowl of cafe au lait hoping to discover how one might go about creating an exhibition based on a writer.

I was interested because I am attempting to present a "curatorial" practice in my dissertation work about Maxine Greene. Right now the curatorial idea is serving as a hook of a metaphor as I go about the data collection and analysis. I don't know how the final product will be impacted by a curatorial sensibility. I don't know that this hook will even be apparent to the reader/viewer.

Maybe this way of working is more akin to all of the background research and source material gathering that would happen in our theatre productions back at Tiny Mythic Theatre Company. We would gather images and literature and read, read, read. When I was creating the character of Kirilov for our production of Dostoevsky's The Possessed, I was reading Nietzsche, Notes from the Underground, the gnostic gospels, and The Book of Revelations.

It was intense stuff and who knows if anyone could "read" my reading in my performance. But it didn't matter as this was the stuff of character building. I was attempting to embody the intellectual curiosity of Kirilov.

And I wonder, worry even, that this curatorial practice I want to invoke may not be seen by the reader/viewer of this dissertation/exhibition. Maybe I need to use this hook as I did with the source material of theatre. Mostly, I probably shouldn't even think about it. Just see what happens.

Those exhibitions in San Francisco that Cotter discussed didn't provide me with any new insight as to how a curator might present a writer. It seems the shows relied on lots of visual imagery to re-assemble our sensibilities of Stein. There were photographs of her, some of the paintings from her collections. The lens employed seemed to be biographical in nature--though the biography was a new interpretation. The visual elements seemed to support the biography.   

I still don't know what this exhibition/dissertation will look like in the end. I'm okay with that. I just hope that my committee can support my not knowing how this will all play out.