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.

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.

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.

Social justice

I am in the midst of a deep reading of "Teacher as Stranger," Maxine Greene's 1973 volume of educational philosophy for the "contemporary age." In reading it one can't help but to imagine the world of 1973 when issues of social justice were raw and writ large in protests and rallies and riots. In the 2001 bio-documentary, "Exclusions & Awakenings," Greene speaks directly to the excitement that the 1960s brought to higher education. She applauds the protests happening in the hallways of Teachers College at the time (lots of guitar playing) and across 120th Street on the Columbia campus. She wishes she was younger and could join the students.

Reading "Teacher as Stranger" in 2010 has a certain surreal aspect to it. It is surreal in that I both remember very fervently the times in which it was written (though I was quite young, but as a middle-class, suburban family we sometimes ventured to the University District in Seattle to "see the hippies") and I can approach the time from a vantage point of forty years in the future. This propels me to ask what has changed in the intervening years? What have we learned? What does social justice mean to us today?

In many circles there is a discomfort associated with the term, "social justice." There are dozens of websites that disdain the practice and more specifically, the practitioners. William Ayers is a common target. Ayers is the former Weatherman who is now a retired education professor from the University of Illinois. Because he and Barack Obama served on a couple of nonprofit boards together in Chicago, his name exploded in the press during the 2008 presidential election. And because he studied with Maxine Greene and has edited a book of essays about her, Greene is commonly targeted as well for her progressive, liberal, social justice-laden work.

And yet, the "philosophy" behind No Child Left Behind can be interpreted as an action for social justice. The accountability measures are in place, supposedly, to ensure that no child is denied an adequate education due to socio-economic and developmental issues. To me, these efforts speak loudly to the definition of social justice. But I don't think this is the spin or branding that was sought after by the policy makers. I imagine that policy makers would want to distance themselves from such a liberal ideal.

Another thought entered my mind while reading and that is the idea of progress. To consider the progress that our society has made towards social justice in the past 40 years. The election of President Barack Obama is certainly an aspect of progress. But then there are questions regarding his birth, his faith, and other conspiracies. I am heartened and amazed by the greater acceptance that homosexuals experience in the public sphere but then I read about the horrible murders in the Bronx a week ago. Trend spotters report that women will soon become the primary earners in their households but the pay gap between the genders still persists.

Yes, there is progress in evidence but the action of vanquish is still a long ways off. I sometimes fear that our fear of terms, like "social justice," "progressive," "liberal," can make the work more difficult. Too much effort is devoted to cloaking the task at hand.  So much energy is spent on spin. Call it what it is and get on with the work.