The sediment of embodiment

In using this blog I have come to realize that there are stirrings and strains within my thinking that keep on re-emerging time and time again. When I review past postings, I see my hunches and notions playing out at different periods during this process, often without memory of their previous existence. For instance, claiming the use of my first-person voice as a creative act. When I wrote about that notion within my methodology chapter, I hadn't realized I had considered it months earlier in Living [Maxine] Greene.

This past week I discovered that my interest in embodiment as a function of learning, as a function of coming to know, as a function of consciousness, has been stirring within for some time. During the week I was teaching a one-week intensive in arts education for masters-level students. One of our sessions included a visit from a teaching artist who presented work she had done in a residency at a school of one of my former students.

The impetus for the residency arose out of my student's frustration as a math interventionist. The interventions she was assigned to use consisted of worksheets: paper and pencil.  But the students she was assisting did not excel in paper and pencil approaches. We tossed around ideas about arts integration strategies that she might attempt in the seated-at-desks setting that she and her students occupied. But what became apparent was the kinesthetic tendencies these students had towards their learning. "Get thee to a movement specialist," I advised her, "and let the embodiment of math begin!"

The residency came together and the movement specialist took my recent class through some of the work she did with the students. But the discussions and ruminations I had with the math interventionist occurred long before my literature review where embodiment presented itself to me as a foundation for coming to know the lived life. Clearly, embodiment was been part of the "sediment" I bring to my inquiry. This sediment is not fixed according to Greene:

And we need, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty has put it, to form the events we uncover in the past into an "intelligible series," the events that sediment meanings in us, "not just as survivals or residues, but as the invitation to a series, the necessity of a future" (LL, 1978, p. 119).

Sediment indicates a layering and accumulation of meaning which allows for change over time. The fossils infused in the first strata, while foundational in character, don't prescribe a sameness within the subsequent accumulating layers.

In writing this post I am also connecting back to my own training as an artist which, at one point, was rigorously physical in its approach. My work with Anne Bogart, Kevin Kuhlke, Nina Martin, Wendall Beavers, Mary Overlie, Paul Langland, Torben Bjelke, Maria Consagra and others focused on the idea of physical improvisation to find and sustain character development. Though I did note this in my dissertation, somewhere, I tend to forget this most obvious element in my focus on embodiment. It's what a former roommate would call a "no duh" moment (he's now a full professor of philosophy in the Midwest so I embrace his neologisms with hope).

And so this sediment of embodiment is present within me. It is foundational in how I have come to engage in the arts and in the world. It aligns with the sense of accumulation, where meaning and interpretation can change over time. It is most certainly Merleau-Ponty's "invitation to a series, the necessity of a future" (Themes from the Lectures at the College de France 1952-1960, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970, pp. 40-41). It is also the basis of the aesthetic experience of learning. These connections give me pause, compel me to reflect, find me forgetting to breathe and often on the edge of my seat.

Greene-asserted and Greene-realized

My scanning thus far has actually only accounted for maybe a dozen, at most, instances of lived life/lives in Maxine Greene's writings. One of my earliest hunches in this inquiry was that the term only begins to become part of the Greene vernacular in her later writings. So far, this hunch is playing itself out.

I'm conceiving a series of turning points that each book seems to represent. My focus on Teacher as Stranger (1973), Landscapes of Learning (1978), The Dialectic of Freedom (1988), Releasing the Imagination (1995), and Variations on a Blue Guitar (2001) for this inquiry was borne out of an early notion that these books represent Greene's own voice. Her earlier works, Existential Encounters for Teachers (1965) and The Public School and the Private Vision (1968), struck me as primarily commentaries on other thinkers and writers. While Greene continues to cite and reference other writers and artists in the canon that starts in 1973, her own voice is pronounced in these later works. Perhaps one could perceive of this voice as a recitative; in effect, forwarding the ideas of these other writers and thinkers in a solo voice.
But the voice becomes stronger with subsequent works. Teacher as Stranger and Landscapes of Learning may indeed be a recitative of the works of Camus, Dewey, Kant, Kierkegaard, Melville, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and others. But in her final section of Landscapes titled "Predicaments of Women," I sense a turning point in this coda to the book. Her chapter "Lived Worlds" is focused on the need for women to assert their own interpreted reality in a world that is largely reliant on a male perspective of reality.

My concern is for the release of individual capacities now suppressed, for the development of free and autonomous personalities. It seems to me that these require an intensified critical awareness of our relation to ourselves and to our culture, a clarified sense of our own realities (1978, p. 213).

It is a call to self-hood. As I conjectured in my 7/9 post, this "clarified sense of our own realities" is consciousness. This is a call to consciousness. The lived aspect of the lived world is consciousness. This final section of Landscapes represents, to me, a thrusting outward of Greene's push for social justice. It is Greene-assertive. It is the opening thrust of her voice.

Later, in Dialectic, the recitative is pianissimo. Greene comes back to the predicaments of women, calling  upon the unique, social, intertwined and situated realities of women as a just and valid point of view and source of knowledge:

A free act, after all, is a particularized one. It is undertaken from the standpoint of a particular, situated person trying to bring into existence something contingent on his/her hopes, expectations, and capacities. The world in which the person creates and works through a future project cannot but be a social world; and the nature of the project cannot but be affected by shared meanings and interpretations of existing social realities. John Dewey wrote, for example, that "while singular beings in their singularity think, want, and decide, what they think and strive for, the content of their beliefs and intentions is a subject matter provided by association” (1927/1954, p. 25).  If that association is conceived of as one among autonomous, rational beings who are convinced that reliable knowledge (being largely formal and rule-governed) does not vary among them, the very notion of singularity summons up a troubling relativism that makes suspect situated knowledge claims. This may partly explain, not only the lack of respect for women's thought processes on the part of men, but the efforts of certain women to suppress their own lived experiences in order to claim an equality in the domain of formal reason identified with the public sphere.

Dialectic represents a turning point, for me, of Greene-realized. My interpretation is finding the use of the qualifier lived in Greene's writing to be in direct correlation to an assertion of a distinct, political voice. In Markie Hancock's documentary, Exclusions and Awakenings (2001), Greene talks about the perils of of a Jewish woman finding a teaching job in higher education. She was told she was "too literary" which for her was code for "female." In Dialectic she writes about the struggle she experienced in how she pursued understanding:

From the beginning of my career, trying with some difficulty to be accepted as a philosopher of education, I found myself moving back and forth between imaginative literature and philosophy. Troubled by the kinds of positivism that identified existential questions (about birth and death and commitment and anxiety and freedom) with "pseudo-questions," with a domain of meaninglessness, I kept on stubbornly seeking out those questions in fictive and poetic worlds, in personal narratives. Troubled by impersonality, by abstract vantage points, I wanted people to name themselves and tell their stories when they made their statements. I came to believe (or I was taught) that "reality" referred, after all, to interpreted experience (1988, pp. xi-xii). 

 There might be a linkage between this practice of interpreted experience and the particularization/situatedness of women. It might be that the qualifier of lived is particular to the female experience. I'm not ready to affirm this as Dewey's influence in his accounting for experience is reflected in Greene's reading and writing. Yet experience, for Greene, takes into account the gaps/lacks/deficiencies that can only be recognized through reflection. The reflected life isn't always optimistic, and neither is Greene (Hancock, 2001). Wendy Kohli and others see this as a distinction between Greene and Dewey (Hancock, 2001). Greene's pessimism is situated to her own lived life as a woman in a man's world.

The "lived" as emergent

I am looking at Maxine Greene's The Dialectic of Freedom (1988). I remember the first time I read it was on the Amtrak platform in Hartford, CT waiting for the train back to Grand Central. I had misread the train schedule and found myself with a couple of hours to kill before boarding. So I opened up Dialectic. I was in grad school, studying with Greene, and thought it a good idea to read some of her works. I picked up an idea or two from the book but for the most part, I couldn't make a connection. I just wasn't "there" yet; "there" being situated for discussion about how freedom and new possibilities are created through consciousness and reflection.
I think I'm approaching "there" now.

In looking at Dialectic, I am finding a clearer sensibility, for myself, about what goes into creating a lived life, a lived world, a lived situation, a lived experience. It is an active, reflective process that is foundational to consciousness. I had come to this understanding the connection of reflection with consciousness in my reading of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre and certainly Dewey, who distinguishes consciousness as “the continuous readjustment of self and the world in experience” (Art as Experience, 1934, p. 270). Greene notes in Dialectic,

There is a difference between those who unquestioningly accede to the given and those who find refuge in that way. In both cases, however, there is an incapacity to look at actualities as if they could be otherwise, as there is an unwillingness to try to transcend determinacy or surpass facticity. Consciousness, it so happens, involves the capacity to pose questions to the world, to reflect on what is presented in experience. It is not to be understood as an interiority. Embodied, thrusting into the lived and perceived, it opens out to the common. Human consciousness, moreover, is always situated; and the situated person, inevitably engaged with others, reaches out and grasps the phenomena surrounding him/her from a particular vantage point and against a particular background consciousness (1988, p. 20).

From this I take "lived" as a qualifier that is only achieved through the act of consciousness. What's more, Greene makes it clear that consciousness is not an internal mechanism, but an outward one. This presents for me an interesting contrast to Stella Adler and "Hamlet was not written about your mother." The lived life, though it necessitates an inward process of reflection, it is only achieved through the active pursuit of engaging with the "common" or the world in which we're situated. Where Adler may have rightfully been concerned about an actor turning inward in their craft making engagement with the audience difficult, the reflected life requires the actor to turn outward, to consider their experiences in contrast to that of others.

This also aligns with the active idea of doing philosophy or doing history. It aligns with learning as an active process, not a situation with the student as vessel to be filled by the accepted, rule-formed world of reliable knowledge. For Greene the lived life is an emergent entity that is always changing as the indiviudal changes. It is not static. And neither is learning. It is never complete. It needs to always be emergent.

The "lived" as active

I am looking at Maxine Greene's The Dialectic of Freedom (1988). I remember the first time I read it was on the Amtrak platform in Hartford, CT waiting for the train back to Grand Central. I had misread the train schedule and found myself with a couple of hours to kill before boarding. So I opened up Dialectic. I was in grad school, studying with Greene, and thought it a good idea to read some of her works. I picked up an idea or two from the book but for the most part, I couldn't make a connection. I just wasn't "there" yet; "there" being situated for discussion about how freedom and new possibilities are created through consciousness and reflection.

I think I'm approaching "there" now.

In looking at Dialectic, I am finding a clearer sensibility, for myself, about what goes into creating a lived life, a lived world, a lived situation, a lived experience. It is an active, reflective process that is foundational to consciousness. I had come to this understanding the connection of reflection with consciousness in my reading of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre and certainly Dewey, who distinguishes consciousness as “the continuous readjustment of self and the world in experience” (Art as Experience, 1934, p. 270). Greene notes in Dialectic,

There is a difference between those who unquestioningly accede to the given and those who find refuge in that way. In both cases, however, there is an incapacity to look at actualities as if they could be otherwise, as there is an unwillingness to try to transcend determinacy or surpass facticity. Consciousness, it so happens, involves the capacity to pose questions to the world, to reflect on what is presented in experience. It is not to be understood as an interiority. Embodied, thrusting into the lived and perceived, it opens out to the common. Human consciousness, moreover, is always situated; and the situated person, inevitably engaged with others, reaches out and grasps the phenomena surrounding him/her from a particular vantage point and against a particular background consciousness (1988, p. 20).

From this I take "lived" as a qualifier that is only achieved through the act of consciousness. What's more, Greene makes it clear that consciousness is not an internal mechanism, but an outward one. This presents for me an interesting contrast to Stella Adler and "Hamlet was not written about your mother." The lived life, though it necessitates an inward process of reflection, it is only achieved through the active pursuit of engaging with the "common" or the world in which we're situated. Where Adler may have rightfully been concerned about an actor turning inward in their craft making engagement with the audience difficult, the reflected life requires the actor to turn outward, to consider their experiences in contrast to others.

On being within and without

I've been reviewing Maxine Greene's Landscapes of Learning. I was surprised to not see more instances of lived life/lives within the text, yet the term is present. What I think may be its variant, lived worlds, is especially prominent as it assumes the title of the final chapter of the book.

I am recognizing that within Landscapes, lived life is almost always connected to discussion regarding emancipation. This is an area that one of my committee members recommended I pay attention to when thinking about the lived life. And sure enough, there is a connection. Greene uses lived life within her discussion of emancipatory education, which signals the need for teachers to educate based on the lived lives of their students. This is supported through her sustained argument for the primacy of the students' lived lives over the benchmarks of empiricism and scientism, and our reliance on technique (a very interesting contrast perhaps to Stella Adler's adherence to technique?).

But the term, or its variant lived worlds, is also foundational to her discussion of the emancipation of women, especially women who teach. So the theme of emancipatory education is more than a focus on the students, but also on the teachers. Her discussion of the importance of recognizing the lived worlds of women is a charge for women to assert their own lived worlds, their own perceptual reality instead of donning a mask to assume another's sense of reality, another's sense of what everyday life is or should be. The power in asserting these lived worlds and lives is partly embedded in the power of giving symbol to these entities. Whether it be language or another form of expression (cue the arts here), giving a name to the perceived reality, to the lived life, is to give it form and to recognize it as substantial. It also provides the opportunity to then consider alternatives to a reality that may be full of lacks and deficiencies.

But how is the lived life achieved or assumed? To have a lived life one needs to be reflective Greene says. It is an act of consciousness.

In a sense, transcendences and interrogations provide a leitmotif in human experience as persons become increasingly able to thematlze, to problematize, to interpret their own lived worlds. Merleau-Ponty says that what defines the human being "is not the capacity to create a second nature--economic, social, or cultural--beyond biological nature; it is rather the capacity to go beyond created structures in order to create others." To me, this has enormous relevance for teaching--the kind of teaching that moves persons to reflection and to going beyond. Only, however, if educators can remain in touch with their own histories, their own background consciousnesses, can they engage with others who are making their own efforts to transcend (1978, p. 103).

So the lived life is an act of consciousness evoked by the individual. Right now I'm working with the idea that the lived life might also need to include the act of recognition by another for it to culminate. That the power of the lived life can only be achieved when one recognizes the value of another. It rests in the ability to of one to reflect/understand and the other to recognize.

On a side note: last night we saw a production of Smudge, a play by Rachel Axler. The story centers on a couple who give birth to a severely underdeveloped child; the baby is just a stub with a single eye, no limbs, no form of expression. The father works for the U.S. Census and starts reading  philosophical treatises on being-ness and consciousness while at work. His ponderings about the mass of grey that seems to now pervade his once black-and-white/binary/census-tract world erupts in a hysterical showdown between him and his brother/co-worker. I was laughing so hard the tears were streaming down my face. It was the perfect comic interlude for someone questioning "objectivity" in research.