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.

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.

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."

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...