To lend and transform

Maxine Greene often writes of the aesthetic encounter as "lending a work your life." What does it mean to lend your life to a work of art, or for that matter, an experience?

It speaks of  a temporary status as a loan implies a repayment or a giving back at some point. It may speak to the loaner’s giving over and doing without during the period of the loan. Yet at the same time, ownership is never questioned, is never transferred.

Can the act of loaning change the object that was loaned out? In some cases, the loan results in an expansion or increase in the object as when interest is paid. Greene seems to apply a sense of transformation--really, creativity--through the act when she writes:

In some fashion, as one attends, one lends the work one's life. Or one brings it into the world through a sometimes mysterious interpretive act in a space between oneself and the stage or the wall or the text (2001, p. 128).

So perhaps in lending a work of art your life, you are creating through the interpretive act another entity that isn't solely owned or connected to you and yourself or to the artist. It is an added dimension to the work of art and I would think, the loaned life of the attender. It is earnings on the loan, but it's a yield that is specific to the loaner and the work of art.

Just trying to work this through...

Disappointment as validity

I have recently submitted a draft of my dissertation chapter devoted to "data collection and analysis." This is the chapter where my research question is answered--what does Maxine Greene mean when she uses lived life in her writing? And the answer was not what I had hoped for at the start of this process.

It had been my hunch--maybe even my desire--at the start of this journey that lived life in Maxine Greene's writing would designate the time and place in which the individual is fully conscious in the existential sense of coming to be as a result of reflective practice. I had thought and wanted lived life to be the already reflected life that poised the individual to consider alternative realities. But my analysis kept on questioning at what point consciousness/the consideration of alternative realities emerges within lived life. The analysis was showing me that consciousness was occurring after lived life had been established. In the end, lived life was somewhat analogous to the pre-reflective state of Husserl's life-world and Merleau-Ponty's primordial silence. Somewhat analogous.

My interpretive work revealed to me that though lived life occupies the realm of the pre-reflective state, it is distinct from the other sensibilities that name the state life-world or primordial silence. In the end, for me, lived life in Greene's writing is fully connected to the idea of personhood and the essence of being as tied to action. The lived life is distinct to Greene's philosophy.

I stumbled though with trying to comprehend just what the pre-reflective state is in an existential consciousness. I eventually was able to conceptualize physically through a gesture/physical state that is linked to the moment prior to going on stage, to singing a song, to applying paint to a canvas. For me, it is the body lifted out of its gravitational pull into the hips (for women). In this place, the body can go anywhere: forward, backward, upward or downward. It's the moment before the choice of movement or direction has been decided or communicated to the brain.

It was interesting in talking about this process and discovery this week with a colleague at work. When I described to her my difficulty in comprehending the pre-reflective, she stated easily and eagerly "well, that's what most of life is and how we operate--in the pre-reflective." It was then that I realized that I have been living in a hyper-activated state for a few years now. The dissertation has me thinking and reflecting at every moment of repose (my morning showers are especially reflective). My new job has me analyzing and assessing the best course of action with everything I do. Even house chores have me thinking about the most time-efficient way of feeding the cat while thawing the turkey sausages and gathering the recycling for pick up the next morning.

I titled this post "Disappointment as validity." The idea of triangulation with hermeneutical work can be challenging. The researcher has to be cautious in regards to confirmation bias--not allowing the interpretation to play out as I would want it to. And so now that lived life isn't what I had thought and really, wanted it to be, I feel that I have brought a valid viewpoint to bear on my answer. And so my disappointment is my validity.

The action of art: Rosenberg & Greene

I have been reading Harold Rosenberg's "The American Action Painters" (1952). This essay manifests a moment that I take for granted. It's a moment distinguished by a uniquely American contemporary foray into modernism. I have found a couple of gems from this essay that speak to me:

"What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event."
Here Rosenberg might be providing an entry into the idea of the creative act. Notice that I use the word "act" here, a term/idea that is common in 2011 but may have its provenance with Rosenberg. (This startles me. Wow.) This brings to mind the active state that Greene and others ascribe to the doing of philosophy. It is dynamic, engaging, active, something fully realized.

"It is to be taken for granted that in the final effect, the image, whatever be or be not in it, will be a tension."
I'm drawn to this because of the use of tension. In my acting training at the Experimental Theatre Wing at New York City in the mid 1980s, I was mentored by wonderful teachers who applied a physical approach to acting. Many of them spoke of the wonder of tension and its usefulness to an actor. My prior training had been disparaging of tension. The training would focus on being relaxed so as to be open to what a scene partner may be imparting. But at ETW, they recognized the forcefulness, the theatricality, the heightened sensibility that tension afforded an actor. It is the filled stillness that I recounted in my dissertation  of Greene's Monday evening classes. Could this essay be where tension was finally lauded?

"A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist."
Could this be the lived life?

Greene notes this essay in Teacher as Stranger (1973). The reference occurs within a chapter that highlights the new art forms of abstractions and happenings in the 1960s. Greene suggests that the spirit of these new art forms forced viewers to take on new perspectives of how they viewed art and the world around them and that the same spirit should be applied to education--students and teachers should also take on new perspectives.

But the essay also provides the gems that I found above as well as a lot of writing about consciousness and the conscious action that the new art had embodied. I can't help but to think that this essay was the tipping point of the break from the post-War/the man-in-the-grey-flannel-suit/Levittown sensibility that had been emblematic of the era.

It also sparks for me a sensation that I experienced in coming to understand these kinds of tipping points in the development of unique American art forms. It was years ago in Philadelphia at a booking conference for youth performances. The Lincoln center Institute had been invited to facilitate the conferences' professional development on the day prior to the conference. I was put in a group that was assigned to study Paul Taylor's "Aureole."

I had seen the dance performed a few months earlier at City Center's "Fall for Dance" series. My colleague and I weren't particularly taken by it. It seemed really balletic. Really traditional and usual and pastoral. We threw up our hands in a "meh" way on our walk down 6th Avenue after the performance. We were more excited by Les Grandes Ballets Canadiens as they had performed works by Ohad Naharin, whose unexpected jumps and cacophonies excited us.

But with the Lincoln Center Institute and my colleagues I cam to understand the significance of what "Aureole" was all about. What I passed off as balletic was actually ballet off-hinged. The dancers weren't traditionally turned out from the hips--their legs were perpendicular to the floor and their hips. The pastoral nature was pure movement of joy--not the tempered balletic sensibility of Tudor and others.

I came to understand that "Aureole" was a turning point in dance. What was "meh" in my uninformed viewing had been sensational in its debut. While I'm still not a fan of the dance, I truly admire what is happening within it.

These are tremendous moments. And these were occurring when Greene was, in my estimation, developing her philosophy, her voice.

Depredations of technique

While waiting in doctors' offices and customer lounges at the local speedy lube joint, I have been perusing Stella Adler's Art of Acting. The book is broken down into the individual elements that comprise the Adler technique. The text is Adler herself documenting what she and her teachers say, talk about, opine, and rail against in their technique classes.

Reading it brings me back, instantly, to my undergraduate days at NYU where I was placed in the Stella Adler Conservatory. Admission into the undergraduate drama program was by application followed by an audition and interview. At the conclusion of my comedic and dramatic monologues, my adjudicator (the head of the Experimental Theatre Wing at the time) spoke at length at how schizophrenic I was in that I could forge a career in a variety of different directions: commercial, classical, musical theatre. He was adamant that I should be placed in the Circle in the Square training program, which was the most commercial of the acting conservatories that provided training to NYU students.

Imagine my surprise when my placement letter arrived in the mail and I found out that I would be going to the Stella Adler Conservatory.

The Adler technique could be described as falling into the category of "classical" training. Classes were geared towards a life in the theatre where the good writing could be found. While I never studied with Stella herself (her classes were reserved to third-year students and I transferred out in the middle of my second year), the language of Art as Acting is nearly verbatim of what I remember of my studies with her teachers Alice Winston, Mario Siletti and Jimmy Tripp.

I'm reading Adler right now as her adage, or how I remember the adage as repeated by her teachers, was "Hamlet was not written about your mother." The adage was in reference to the idea that an actor should never rely on their own emotional memory to create a character. Instead, a character should be created from the actor's imagination as guided by the circumstances provided by the playwright's words and ideas. And it was this adage that seemed to come into stark contrast with what I encountered ten years later and 60+ blocks further uptown in my studies with Maxine Greene (Adler's conservatory was located in Carnegie Hall while Greene's lecture hall was located in Morningside Heights).

While in my mind Greene emphasizes the importance of the lived life in developing understanding and fostering multiple perspectives, Adler was adamant about the importance of technique which ultimately, in my mind, distances an actor from their daily life. I do understand the focus on technique for a performing artist as it provides a grounding to return to performance after performance, city after city. It guarantees a similar quality of experience for the Wednesday matinee attendee as it does for the Saturday night viewer. This distance that technique demands from the actor's own emotional life as provides a bulwark against burning out.

But it's interesting to read Adler in association with my close readings of Greene. In Landscapes of Learning Greene writes about the "depredations of technique" in relation to positivism and objectivity in cognition. She writes:

It must become clear again that reflection is not only rooted in experience, its entire purpose is to inform and clarify experience—or the lived world. If we add to this a conceived possibility of remaining in touch with our perceptual backgrounds and thus remaining present to ourselves, we may be better able to ward off the depredations of technique (1978, p. 17).

These "depredations of technique" were recently touched upon by Antony Tommasini in his New York Times article "Virtuosos Becoming a Dime a Dozen." In the article Tommasini writes about the numerous musicians these days who possess impeccable technique that enable them to perform the most difficult of works. He likens it to sports where records are made to be broken. This represents a new paradigm in the classical music performance world where "the first several decades of the 20th century are considered a golden era by many piano buffs, a time when artistic imagination and musical richness were valued more than technical perfection." While Tommasini never denigrates technique, you can sense a yearning for imagination and richness.

This new paradigm of the virtuosic might be rendering this quality to becoming commonplace. There is an audience demand for it. What is the impact on the art form? What is the impact on the experience of the viewer of the art form? Does the virtuosic leave space for the viewer/listener to enter into the work of art, as emphasized by Greene? Is the virtuosic an example of the depredation of technique?

Choice in lived life

This weekend has been devoted to some final notes on Maxine Greene's use of lived life in Variations on a Blue Guitar. The book is a series of lectures that Greene has given over the years at the Lincoln Center Institute where she is philosopher-in-residence. It is fitting that the writings/lectures are focused on aesthetics and teaching as the Institute is devoted to a particular kind of arts education developed under her guidance and the target population is K-12 teachers.
I think I may be finding a different sensibility regarding the lived life in these lectures/writing but more on that in a later post.

In reviewing this anthology, I was reminded this weekend of the tenet I held as an actor living and working in New York City in the 1980s and '90s. The tenet--or perhaps, justification--was the importance I placed in having a job outside of acting. It was necessary to be working in any capacity in order to pay the rent but it was also necessary to be working consistently in an institution so that I could get health insurance. I also held that it was important to work outside of acting in order to have experiences with the "real world" and with "real people" from which to draw inspiration for my acting. But then again, maybe it was just a ruse to excuse myself from not working harder at becoming a commercially successful actor.

No matter the reasons, I worked. And I worked for about eleven years as the supervisor of the TKTS booths in New York where you could buy a discounted ticket to a Broadway or off-Broadway show on the day of the performance.
It was spring of 1987. I was rehearsing a production of Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata, directed by Travis Preston (now of CalArts). It was a huge, wild production. I played the Fiancee, a mute part that was on stage for more than half of the play. The Fiancee is essentially waiting, for decades, for her betrothed to marry her. She is only seen and never heard.

With this, the physicality is paramount and I was working on developing a movement life for the Fiancee. Early one matinee Wednesday morning as I was readying Duffy Square for the matinee onslaught of Long Island/New Jersey/Connecticut/Upstate ladies who lunch, I couldn't help but to stare at a woman--who many years later I determined was trans--making her way down 7th Ave.
She was tall, gaunt, with a full face of makeup that looked like it was left over from the night before. She wore a lime-green polyester pant suit and high-heeled strappy sandals. She was smoking a cigarette in slow motion. She moved down the street without looking at where she was stepping. She was slightly unsteady, the look of a drunk trying not to look drunk. She was trying to avoid the piles of horse manure that littered the street (NYPD often used mounted police in that area) and was mostly successful but would occasionally catch the edge of a clump in her strappy sandals resulting in a near stumble.

It was the Fiancee. I had found my muse.

Though my body type was quite different from this lime-green vision, her walk and carriage became the body for the Fiancee. Her slow motion smoking became my focus of an act-long party scene that was seated around a six-foot slab of ice that slowly melted under the stage lights.

I come back to all of this because my assumption in thinking about the lived life within the aesthetic experience led me to conceive of my lime-green muse as part of my lived life as an actor. Those movements and people who serve as inspiration are the lived life I am exploring in Greene's work.
But after reviewing Variations, I'm shifting. I think it is the act of choosing I took in focusing on that woman making her way down 7th Ave. in spring 1987 that is the lived life. The lived life is how I go about making those choices, not the actual choice itself. What isn't clear to me, yet, is whether the recognition of those choices is considered part of the lived life or if lived life is the platform on which recognition and reflection can occur but only through follow-through; that reflection may not be a guaranteed element of lived life. In Variations, lived life is always presented as the "background" against which viewers/attenders/teachers/students can encounter a work of art. It is through these encounters with works of art that alternate realities can be considered and ultimately, lived lives can be transformed.

Lived life is certainly nuanced.

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).

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.

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...

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.

Mouth feel, Pt. II

I have been using speech recognition software to transcribe the oodles of citations that I have highlighted in various texts regarding Maxine Greene, existentialism and phenomenology. I'm presently attempting to organize the pages of citations into data fields using a framework that assigns to them subject areas of situatedness, embodiment and aesthetics.

Not surprisingly, the speech recognition isn't perfect in transcribing what I think I'm reading aloud into accurate text documents. This is due to a number of factors: my misreading of the text (some of which includes Greek and French references); my increasingly twangy speech patterns (the western twang I was born into is intensifying with age); and the unreadability of the text itself.

This "unreadability" is embedded in the fact that some of these texts were not written to be spoken aloud. You may think that this then makes the texts "unspeakable." But I think it ultimately makes them unreadable as well. Shouldn't all writing take into account readability and speak-ability? Shouldn't writing have an awareness of where the breath should occur? Shouldn't writing take into account the "mouth feel" of the language? Shouldn't writing be a soliloquy?

Interestingly, the speech recognition software accurately transcribed all of the Greene references within the citations I dictated. Greene's writing can be spoken. This comes as no surprise as I had recently unearthed from the cellar my notes from the graduate courses I had taken with Maxine. Reading those notes from 1994-96 was like reading a draft of "Releasing the Imagination," which was published at the same time. Her lectures are readable and her writing is worthy of a soliloquy.

In my prospectus for my disseration I wrote that I wanted my work to be readable. That determination has not waned!

Mouth feel

The other morning as I waited for the espresso to make its gravity-defying journey into the upper chamber, I paced the kitchen in despair. My literature review was allowing me to delve into many pockets of insight regarding Maxine's work but not one bit of the reading mentioned the "lived life." I've been making my own connections with terms like "life world" and "situatedness" but the "l-l" grail was out of reach.

In a recent comment to Allan DiBiase, I noted that I have found myself "linking arms" with the word "embodiment." Likewise with "situatedness." As with the "lived life," these are words/terms that prick up my ears (to borrow from John Lahr and Joe Orton).

This past summer I had a theatre artist in a graduate arts education course that I teach. In my teaching--which utilizes an approach developed by the Lincoln Center Institute based on Maxine Greene's philosophy--there is lots of reflection and sharing. When words or phrases emerge that prick up my ears, I write them down on the whiteboard, or chart paper. It's not unusual for the walls to be covered in words and phrases by the week's end. My student was excited by the word tent we were living in. "It's because I'm a theatre person," she explained. "I LOVE words."

As my roommate in Queens (and now a philosophy professor in the Midwest) used to say, "mmm, texty!"

"Lived life," "embodiment" and "situatedness" are mmm, texty. They have mouth feel for me. It may indeed be a theatre thing, but they represent a sensibility that can be physicalized in my mind/body. While "embodiment" is low in my anatomy, around the hips and my center of gravity, "situatedness" is all about the mouth and its articulators--the lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue.

I have decided to use "embodiment" and "situatedness" as part a framework for how I will present my review of the literature. And because odd numbers are more interesting than even ones, I have added "aesthetic." This third term is important given the uniqueness with which Maxine approaches the term.

And while imagination is a theme that comes up over and over again in the writings of others on Maxine's work, I want to make sure that my work on Maxine Greene is aligned with "aesthetics." There has been a tendency to equate "imagination" with "aesthetic" and it is simply wrong.

Besides, "aesthetic" has a far more interesting mouth feel than "imagination."

The lived-through versus the lived life

I am scouring Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception" in an attempt to understand Maxine Greene's development of the "lived life." Though I haven't come across the "l-l" paradigm, I have used the occasion to try to find the origins of le corps vecu or, "the lived body," as mentioned in Baldacchino. After running around in circles, I have come across discussions in papers posted on the Internet about Merleau-Ponty and Husserl and their views on "le corps vecu" or in the case of Husserl, "Leib." I will now take a look at Husserl to try to come to terms with "Leib." (Thank goodness for holiday gift cards redeemable at book retailers.)

In my quest for "le corps vecu" in Merleau-Ponty, I came across instances of the "lived-through." In closing the mind/body split, Merleau-Ponty proposes that it is a synthesized and unified body that grasps meaning and that the body is a "grouping of lived-through meanings."

Later in the book, the "lived-through" takes on qualifiers such as "purely" and "merely." Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that the lived-through in and of itself is not an experience without the possibility of expression: "Moreover, there is no experience without speech as the purely lived-through has no part in the discursive life of man."    

So now I ask, is the "lived life" in Maxine Greene a more fully realized concept of experience than the merely "lived-through"? Is the "lived life" a fuller embodiment that takes into account expression? Time will tell...