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.

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.

Embodiment

I'm reading, reading, reading. Hoping that the reading, reading, reading is going to elicit a literature review. A literature review of what? I'm still not sure. I have written about using the review as an opportunity to investigate the writers who have impacted Maxine Greene as a means towards defining key concepts/words/ideas. I liked that idea but somehow it seemed overwhelming to me. Readers and students often respond to Greene as being extraordinarily well-read, extremely literate. And as readers and students we often feel incapable of matching such an well-read, literate mind.

Another idea is to review what others have written about Greene in an effort to get a glimpse from elsewhere as the origins and meanings behind my search of the "lived life" in Greene's works. Naturally, I am having difficulty finding anything that touches on the phrase either within Greene's canon and elsewhere in philosophy, literature, education.

But I did come across some essays that explore Merleau-Ponty's le corps vecu in Baldacchino's "Education Beyond Education." The lived body or "embodiment" was the existentialist reconciliation of the mind/body split. It promotes an active stance towards philosophy and knowledge and helps us to understand Greene's promotion of doing philosophy.

In thinking about this, I was reminded of my own corps vecu training in acting. Training at the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU, I encountered a number of physical approaches to creating and doing theatre. Jerzy Grotowski was a god on the 2nd floor of 721 Broadway. Grotowski wrote:

"The rhythm of life in modern civilization is characterized by pace, tension, a feeling of doom, the wish to hide our personal motives and the assumption of a variety of roles and masks in life (different ones with our family, at work, amongst friends or in community life, etc.-). We like to be 'scientific', by which we mean discursive and cerebral, since this attitude is dictated by the course of civilization. But we also want to pay tribute to our biological selves, to what we might call physiological pleasures. We do not want to be restricted in this sphere. Therefore we play a double game of intellect and instinct, thought and emotion; we try to divide ourselves artificially into body and soul. When we try to liberate ourselves from it all we start to shout and stamp, we convulse to the rhythm of music. In our search for liberation we reach biological chaos. We suffer most from a lack of totality, throwing ourselves away, squandering ourselves."

There was a great deal of shouting and stamping in those ETW studios. As actors we were embodying the text, the action, the story. Nancy Lesko in "Feeling the Teacher" writes about her own embodiment of Greene's teachings as a result of her sabbatical sojourn to Teachers College in 1996. As a yoga devotee, Lesko felt a lightness in her step and a realignment of her body every Monday evening as she exited the lecture space in Main Hall to return to her student family housing in Morningside Heights.

The lived life versus the lived body? I'm sure where this may be taking me but le corps vecu is very attractive to me as an Odin Theatre/Grotowski trained/Bogart influenced actor.

The journey continues...