From transaction to transformation

One of my committee members recently commented on my embodiment post. In my response I started to focus on the idea of transaction. The focus arose out of a desire to promote and enhance the concept of the quality of transaction in Greene's writing. It occurred to me that the way in which we interact with the world deepens this sense of embodiment and differentiates Greene from other thinkers and writers who have commented on embodiment.

I noted that embodiment is about the constant reflection of how we view ourselves within the context of our perceived world. It is my sensibility that we are witness to transactions with the world that continue to operate within the realm of a mind/body split. I am thinking in terms of educational practice and in how we define success. We continue to assess the success of our students (and our practice) through a predominately retention/regurgitation framework. And though I'm critiquing policy with this example, policy is a means of how we transact with the world. 

Of course, this can all be viewed as a transactional dilemma: our misguided practices are fundamentally poorly conceived transactions with the world. However, does how we transact connect directly to something more profound than mere practice options? Is this why we struggle with social justice? Is this why social justice isn't just the soil (per Dewey's discussion of embodiment in Nature and Experience) but points to a more profound split? How do the bottom-line-must-dominate CEOs and the just-say-no legislative representatives and their practices sleep at night? I conceive of these practices as poor transactions. I conceive of these transactions as a fundamental split between mind and body. With that split, the transactional can never become transformational.


With Greene, I can start to chart a process by which the transactional becomes transformational. In transacting with the world, we become situated in our understandings, our processes, our angle of repose. Through reflection this situatedness becomes embodied. Our understanding signifies that union of mind and body, even relinking what once may have been split. This is what represents the lived life: the embodied situatedness of our being. It is the lived life that primes us to encounter the world through an aesthetic experience. The aesthetic represents the embodied encounter, an encounter that has the ability to be transformative because of the reflective practice that enables us to notice the new. It is the act of writing and rewriting our lived world (Releasing the Imagination, 1995, p. 147).