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.

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...

Panic & Spiraling

I was scanning "Teacher as Stranger" yesterday looking for the term "lived life" in Greene's text. I'm up to chapter 5 and haven't come across it. Oh dear. And the Amazon "search inside" feature of "The Dialectic of Freedom" also didn't find any occurrences of the term. Yikes.

My concern/panic/hive-inducing-dilemma is that I had thought the term appeared in these texts. My research methodology (I call it "practice") also assumes this.

But I did come across the term "life-world" in "Teacher as Stranger." It's a term I don't recall hearing or reading before in Greene's works. Maybe "life-world" developed into "lived life" in Greene's later texts? Another reason may be that Greene's later texts ("Releasing" and "Variations") are more closely aligned with aesthetic practice. So perhaps "lived life" is rooted in Greene's aesthetic philosophy?

And if so, can I still find a bridge between Greene's use of "lived life" and her focus on social justice? Or is "lived life" distinctly and discretely contained in aesthetics without a bridge into social justice? I hope not. Nor can I imagine such discrete applications in Greene's thinking and writing.

I had a conversation yesterday with a student. She's a distance learner in my Critical Perspectives course. We were talking about Dewey's definition of the aesthetic experience as having a conclusion or end. Yet aesthetic practice sees instead a spiraling that occurs. There is no end to the aesthetic experience. Questions beget questions. Inquiry branches into inquiry. There is a spiraling that occurs where the circulating movement of questions and inquiry expands wider and wider.

I'm spiraling.