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.

Curating a dissertation

Graeme Sullivan's framing of a meta-analytic reflexive methodology approach as a curatorial practice has become a metaphor/anthem for my continuing dissertation work. Though I have never curated a visual art exhibition, I have had experience in curating performance series. When I selected seasons of youth performances for a performing arts center, it was always my dream to be able to consciously curate the season: develop a theme or in the vocabulary of education, an essential understanding, that each show would somehow address. But the selection process had too many moving parts, too many stakeholders, to be able to curate from the front end. Instead, I "backed into" a curatorial process. After all of the shows were booked, I would take a look at the shows, try to find some common themes, and then use those themes in our marketing and resource materials, and in our fundraising activities. It was pseudo-curating.

I have the opportunity now to curate from the front end with my dissertation. Through my literature review I have established three lenses of interpretation through which to approach the "lived life" in Maxine Greene's texts: situatedness, embodiment, and aesthetics. These lenses also shaped my methodology helping me to arrive at a practice that is curatorial in nature and uses reflexive writing in an existential hermeneutic tradition.

When thinking about curating a dissertation, I am reminded of a wonderful exhibition I attended at the Walker Art Center nearly 30 years ago. It was "Hockney Paints the Stage." This was in the early 1980s and I was just then coming into contact with the avant-garde and performance art as an undergrad at NYU. The wonder of the Hockney exhibition was that it was multi-dimensional. The galleries embodied the sets designed by David Hockney. The sensation was to walk into an environment that was wholly distinct from the one you just exited. There were backdrops and set pieces, there was lighting and music; it was fully sensual. The viewer entered Hockney's world.

I want to be able to achieve something similar in my dissertation, but with the limitations of two dimensions. And the primary means of expression is language/text. I am not sure what this will look like. But it is important for the reader/viewer to be able to enter the world of Greene's texts through the interpretation of Shawn's lived life.

A side note. I once traveled to Paris on my own following my cousin's wedding in Zurich. I took the train up to France and spent about four or five days on my own. I met up with friends from time to time, but was on my own for most of the trip. I made sure to visit many of the museums that Paris has to offer, though I avoided the Louvre as it was too big to try attempt in a single day or trip (and I had visited it earlier in my life). In the end, I suffered from a bout of Stendahl's syndrome. I became overwhelmed by the amount of art I was encountering. The bout of Stendahl's syndrome was exacerbated by the fact that I had no one nearby to share in these encounters, a means of processing the aesthetic.

On my final day in Paris I was visiting the Pompidou Centre, one of my favorite institutions in Paris. As I was feeling anxious among the two-dimensional canvases on an upper floor, I remembered the Walker exhibition from ten years earlier. I descended onto another floor that was comprised of sculpture and installations. The works were three-dimensional and I could move around them and through them. The anxiety passed. I found my breath again.

I need many dimensions in my dissertation. I want my readers to be able to move through and around the text.

Knocking on the text

I have been trying to get my head around the methodology I will be using in my dissertation. I have been reading and researching for months now. I've been through books and too many articles on arts-based educational research; I had a foray into ethnography; I spent a lot of time contemplating reflexive methodologies (how reflexive of me!); and now, hermeneutics. At some point, this research has got to conclude. It must come to an end.

I think I know where I'm headed. I believe that what I'm doing with Greene's texts is, at the first level, a curatorial process that Graeme Sullivan mentions in Art Practice as Research (2010). Like a curator, I'm attempting a new perspective on her works of art/texts. The curatorial practice should start from a place of resonance and wonder (Stephen Greenblatt in Exhibiting Cultures, 1991) for the curator/dissertation writer in regarding these works that hopefully inspires the same in the viewer/reader. Within the hermeneutic tradition promoted by Alvesson and Skoldberg in Reflexive Methodology (2000), this resonance and wonder represents what they call "primary interpretation" (p. 261). This is a recognition that "interpretation precedes data in all research" (p. 261). My choice of pursuing the idea of the "lived life" in Greene's writings is my primary interpretation. The "lived life" presents a sense of resonance for me and wonder that triggers my inquiry.

Alvesson and Skoldberg recommend a thorough practice of reflexive methodology where the inquiry undergoes four levels of interpretation. This is to ensure validity of the research product  and, I think, validity of the practice within the research field. There is not enough time for me to enter into these four levels: interaction with empirical material; interpretation; critical interpretation; and reflection on text production and language use. I think I will only get as far interpretation, or second-level reflexivity. The secondary interpretation I have been envisioning is a discursive inquiry into the text that resembles a "horizontal fusion between researcher and text" (Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2000, p. 264). This fusion is how the authors view the existential hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer.

Yet what precedes all of this is a discussion of the postmodern, poststructural viewpoint of the relationship between subject and object. It's an understanding that reality is always subjective and by extension, there is no such thing as pure objectivity. This is why I view it to be disingenuous to limit the narrative voice in research to a distant third-person viewpoint. The researcher is always present.

Another facet of this reflexive practice is the use of writing as inquiry. Writing as a way of coming to know and a way of becoming, as in this blog. This is what Laurel Richardson (2005) refers to as "creative analytical processes" or CAP.

In the end, my dissertation is only a slight digging below the hermeneutical surface of the "lived life" in Greene's texts. To achieve the exhaustive four levels of interpretation of Alvesson and Skoldberg is to enter the domain of post-doctoral work. Nevertheless, I am excited about this fusion of practices. What has become very apparent to me in this arduous journey is how the "lived life" is playing through the methodology. These reflexive methods all take the situatedness of the researcher into consideration through honoring the researcher's lived life in its impact on the research.

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.

Imaginative literature

One of the themes of Maxine Greene's teaching involves the primacy of questions. She states often that she prefers questions over answers and this is why she uses imaginative literature in her teaching. Literature gives us the questions; for the answers we can go to psychology.

A dissertation committee member chafed at the term "imaginative" literature. He rightly asserted that the imaginative quality of literature is in the encounter. It is the reader who is the trigger for the imaginative. Nevetheless, I continue to use the term because Greene and others do. It seems to be accepted in the field of "Greene studies."

Perhaps the term "imaginative literature" is a description of that encounter between reader and text whereas "literature" is merely the text?

Nevertheless, one of the perks of using imaginative literature in teaching is in the glory of that encounter with fiction, with poetic narrative. I am using Toni Morrison's Sula for a philosophy and ethics course I'm teaching. As compelling as Dewey and Greene may be in their writing, the experience of opening the first page of Sula and engage in the description of a place known as the Bottom is exhilirating:

The beeches are gone now, and so are the pear trees whter children sat and yelled down through the blossoms to passersby. Generous funds have been allotted to level the stripped and faded buildings that clutter the road from Medallion up to the golf course. They are going to raze the Time and Half Pool Hall, where feet in long tan shoes once pointed down from chair rungs. A steel ball will knock to dust Irene's Palace of Cosemetology, where women used to lean their heads back on sink trays and doze while Irene lathered Nu Nile into their hair. Men in khaki work clothers will pry loose the slats of Reba's Grill, where the owner cooked in her hat because she couldn't remember the ingredients without it.

This rich description is such a blessed break from the typical academic reading that students and their professors must engage in. This writing compels the reader to enter the world of the Bottom, to turn the page, to learn more. This is what my dissertation writing needs to achieve.

One of the proposed rationales for my dissertation concerns my own teaching practice. The hope is that through my inquiry into Greene's writings that my approach to teaching will transform. The aesthetics of both the inquiry and of teaching will move into a new realm that might create an aesthetic of learning--for both student and teacher.