2.2: 1.2 Lesson 1- Replace the Modest Witness With the Writing Yogi—Or, Theorizing the Embodied Imaginer

Mairs’ creation of an embodied writing subject is based on her tacit knowledge of being a body in the world. By grounding her writing theory in practice, she advances a central value of the contemplative process. For through practice, the yogi is led to a similar, respectful awareness of her materiality that Mairs attains through the experience of her disability. “The physical body … is not something to separate from our mind and soul. We are not supposed to neglect or deny our body as some ascetics suggest. Nor are we to become fixated on our body” states Iyengar in his book, Light on Life (2005, p. 5), where he documents his philosophies of yoga. His point is that we are our bodies, not just that we have them, and that accepting the vulnerability of the body is both a humbling and liberating experience. Iyengar writes within a contemporary tradition of globalized, international yoga that seeks to blend the teachings from ancient yogic texts like the Yoga Sutras with his own understandings as leader of the Iyengar branch of Hatha yoga. His teachings have great merit within the yoga community because they spring from a lifetime of his own experiences of using his own body as an “instrument to know what yoga is” (2005, p. xx). The body teaches if we listen.

Yoga works toward figurative and literal balance and alignment. The point of practicing yoga, including breath awareness, pranayama, meditation, dhyana, and postures, asana, is to help us integrate and align the layers of our embodied being. Only in their alignment will the yogi reach enlightenment and self-realization: “the practice of yoga teaches us to live fully—physically and spiritually—by cultivating each of the various sheaths” toward the end of integration (Iyengar, 2005, p. 5). Asana not only reminds the yogi of her intimate connection to her body but also teaches her to harness the totality of her awareness by learning to work with and through the body: it becomes the source of her self-realization. And so, in learning her body, she learns the nature of the material world: “If you learn a lot of little things, one day you may end up knowing a big thing” (Iyengar, 2005, p. 14).

Iyengar’s statements regarding the centrality of the body in creating knowledge and developing awareness detail the first lesson yogis learn through their practice, as outlined at the conclusion of the last section of this chapter: our subjectivity is always first embodied. Not only are our bodies part of our integral selves, but they are also intelligent since the mind is diffused throughout our physical being. If Western traditions tend to see our brain as synonymous with the mind or consciousness, yoga sees the mind as diffused throughout our material being and not simply located in the head. To recognize ourselves in this way as body-minds is to see our flesh as a source of power and knowledge. Because the thinking and being sheaths of our bodies have “no tangible frontiers” (Iyengar, 2005, p. 6), the journey of the writing yogi is to become aware of the intricacies of the body and the importance of claiming it. Because of her interest in Indian spirituality and non-Western rhetorics, Haraway advocates a similar awareness that comes from recognizing the body as an epistemic origin. In theorizing the contemplative body with her, we can bring feminist mindfulness to contemplative writing pedagogy.

Haraway fully recognizes that while women everywhere have specifically been the “embodied others, who are not allowed not to have a body,” feminists should neither simply take on the masculinist subject position of the modest witness in order to be heard nor reactively ignore the body (1991c, p. 183). With the objectifying backdrop we have inherited, Haraway argues it is understandable why so many feminists across disciplines have adopted social constructivist thinking, which use the great equalizer of rhetoric to show the historical, contingent nature of truth. With objectivity dismantled, oppressive power structures are revealed and the inherent rhetoricity of the body is questioned. Haraway finds these poststructural narratives of knowledge-making limiting, since they don’t provide adequate grounding for a pragmatic account of the real world (1991c, p. 187). Too many grievously ignore the reality of matter and our flesh in order to secure the epistemological superiority of the modest witness.

Haraway provides an alternative to these narratives by dismantling the modest subject’s source of power: vision. She intentionally reclaims vision as the central metaphor to frame her feminist epistemology, stealing it away from the masculinist “cannibal-eye” (1991a, p. 180) or phallocentric psychoanalytical significations of lack and recasts it so that “we might become answerable for what we learn how to see” (1991c, p. 190). The confusing syntax in Haraway’s formulation subtly reminds us of the simultaneous naturalness of vision and its social character, as we are taught how to see and what to value in our lines of sight (1991c, p. 190). Queering the traditional understanding of vision as disembodied means for her exchanging lofty notions of transcendent vision for grounded ones. Because there is no unmediated sight, no acultural or immaterial means of seeing, the process is never innocent. Haraway points out the obvious—our vision is always connected to a body. This is a body that is not only marked by culture but is part of a material world in which is it locatable, partial and agentive.

Hers is a “feminist writing of the body” in which “[t]he moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objective vision” (1991c, pp. 189-190). Just what kind of objectivity this entails, I will turn to in a moment. Haraway takes pains to insist that what we can see is limited by our body’s composition even if, at the same time, the meaning we can make of our worlds is limited by the cultural and ideological apparatuses we have internalized. “What we learn how to see” stresses to readers that it is just as important to accept the corporeal construction of our visual images, and thus the agentive status of our bodies, as it is to acknowledge the cultural conditioning that enables us to makes sense of what our eyes see. As artists know well, the camera constructs as much as it records. But as those who wear glasses or contacts know just as well, sight is contingent on the body’s own agency.

Thusly recasting the metaphor of vision, Haraway’s mutated modest witness exchanges the self-effacement of previous versions for self-awareness of her partiality and non-innocence. This new modest witness “insists on situatedness, where location is itself a complex construction as well as inheritance … [t]he modest witness is the only one who can be engaged in situated knowledges” (1991a, pp. 160-161). Her modest witness is not modest because she is able to view the subject world from a transcendent, disembodied position; rather, her mutated witness is modest precisely because she can only appeal to knowledge from a particular personal, embodied location, a certain material placement of being in/with the world, never above it. From a contemplative perspective, Haraway roots the modest witness in the realm of the material, so that knowing is anchored equally in the cognitive and the material and is brought together through the medium of experience. In sum, Haraway’s take on feminist vision helps to bring the fleshy knower into view and testifies to her role in the construction of what is (and can be) seen. It further affirms the responsibilities inherent in understanding the process of seeing as associative, social and relational. Literally and metaphorically, this is a kind of connected seeing.⁵ That is, it replaces detachment with engagement, connection and interaction.

As Haraway’s quote indicates, the location of the writer-knower must be understood dualistically: both as a “complex construction” as well as an “inheritance.” That is, situatedness, the condition of literally being placed somewhere in the world, rests not only on deconstructing and understanding the linguistic web of construction that gives meaning to our historical and cultural placement but also on recognizing our inheritance, our birthright. This includes the material conditions into which we are brought, the real world that supports our organic bodies and the legacy of our flesh. The immediate implication for contemplative pedagogy is the recognition of how the body is instrumental to knowledge, for it is only with and through it that we can come to know or create meaning at all. This is our material heritage as human beings. And while this process affirms the integrity of the individual, it is also a process that connects the individual to other bodies. As we begin to see, the embodied imaginer who engages in local knowledge-making is differentiated by her place in the world as she self-consciously locates herself within it and is inextricably tied to it by awareness of her organic matter, her flesh. Contemplative pedagogy energizes this awareness by understanding it as mindfulness so that the writing yogi does not only maintain focus on her immediate experiences but also faces those experiences openly and with curiosity not hasty judgment.

Replacing transcendence with an embrace of the real does not mean that truth is dismissed in knowledge-making, just redefined. As Haraway states in her autobiographical interview in How Like a Leaf, her “modest witness is about telling the truth—giving reliable testimony—while eschewing the addictive narcotic of transcendental foundations” (Haraway & Goodeve, 2000, p. 158). The loss of transcendence is precisely what figures in Haraway’s mutated version of the modest witness as she later goes on to explain:

I retain the figuration of “modesty” because what will count as modesty now is precisely what is at issue. There is the kind of modesty that makes you disappear and there is the kind that enhances your credibility. Female modesty has been about being out of the way while masculine modesty has been about being a credible witness. And then there is the kind of feminist modesty that I am arguing for here (not feminine), which is about a kind of immersion in the world of technoscience where you ask a hard intersection of questions about race, class, gender, sex with the goal of making a difference in the real, “material-semiotic” world. (Haraway & Goodeve, 2000, p. 159)

Modesty here is defined in opposition to the arrogance of closure and in tandem with understanding one’s limits and one’s partial perspective. This is a modesty brought on by humility not mastery. Haraway is quick to point out that this kind of sensitivity to situatedness, of partiality of perspective, is powerful because it remains accountable to the material world and to real people. It is this kind of modesty that may help us to redefine our goals of social responsibility within composition to include the conditions of corporeality.

When Haraway’s concept is placed within the framework of feminist contemplative writing pedagogy, I suggest that the feminist modest witness becomes the writing yogi who utilizes the skill of embodied imagining. As a tool for inquiry, the embodied imagination is an introspective skill that directs the writer’s awareness to the ways knowledge of the external world is linked to self-knowledge. It also insists that mindfulness of bodily sensations and feelings can increase our reflective and reflexive capacities. Iyengar states that yogis are transformed in their contemplative practice of asana and pranayama which “does not just change the ways we see things; it transforms the person who sees” (2005, p. xxi). In turn, the writing yogi who self-consciously claims her embodiment is transformed by a mindfulness of matter that begins with her own body and extends toward other bodies in the world. I outline the consequences of this process for the first-year writing student in the following interchapter. Here, I stress that the writing yogi begins to respect and to take into account how the construction of present realities and future possibilities is based on the knowledge she constructs from experience as well as her affective positions toward other bodies as a result of these experiences. The writing yogi respects her practice as one that creates “knowledge and elevates it to wisdom” by exercising her embodied imagination (Iyengar, 2005, p. xxi). She recognizes intimately that imaginings always occur in the context of material environments and within the frame of her flesh. Our bodies must embrace and enact the dreams and ideas of our intellect for them to mean and to be acted upon.

Through her integrated practice of yoga and writing, the writing yogi recognizes that different bodies produce varying bodies of knowledge and that the expression of a pose or idea may look quite different from one mat to the next, from one paper to the next. Rather than separating, these differences join the embodied imaginer in a humility “that enhances [her] credibility” (Haraway & Goodeve, 2000, p. 159) to others and to nature since, like any one fleshy body, any one body of knowledge is essentially unfinished. Importantly, like Haraway’s mutated modest witness, the writing yogi is modest because she recognizes her intimate connection with the world of matter and the relationship between spirit and nature in which neither are rejected even as they are seen “inseparably joined like earth and sky are joined on the horizon” (Iyengar, 2005, p. xxiii). If in Haraway’s version of feminist modesty we reclaim the body and refuse transcendence, in kindred spirit, the “modest” writing yogi remains connected yet refuses to lose her center like any other experienced yogi: “In a perfect asana, performed meditatively and with a sustained current of concentration, the self assumes its perfect form, its integrity being beyond reproach” (Iyengar, 2005, p. 14).

The stress I place on the integrity of the self, based on Haraway’s theories and the tradition of yoga, differentiates my concept of the writing yogi from the somatic mind as it has been theorized previously in our field. In “Writing Bodies: Somatic Mind in Composition Studies,” Fleckenstein asks compositionists to work toward embodied discourse by accepting the concept of the somatic mind, which is to view the mind and body as resolved into a single entity with permeable boundaries. Fleckenstein draws from cultural anthropologist Gregory Bateson to define the somatic mind as “tangible location plus being. It is being-in-a-material place. Both organism and place can only be identified by their immanence within each other” (1999, p. 286). I am arguing for a similarly embodied and connective, but not identical, concept here.

Fleckenstein attempts to get at the writing body through the somatic mind, so that the experience of embodiment she targets is embodiment as placement in external place and time. As she states, “[s]urvival—ecological, psychological, and political—does not depend on the fate of a discrete, atomistic reproducing organism (or subjectivity) because such an organism does not exist. Instead, what exists (and what survives or expires) is the locatedness of somatic mind” (1999, p. 286). Rather than placing the writer in her body, Fleckenstein defines the writer in the contact between her being and her environment, a kind of spaceless space in the union of these permeable substances. Because Fleckenstein’s concept is complex, an example here is helpful. Like I did earlier, Fleckenstein uses Mairs to exemplify her concept:

From the perspective of a somatic mind, the delimitation of Mairs’ being-in-a-material-place includes the person, the wheelchair, and the doorway she struggles to enter. Corporeal certainty is not the human being in the wheelchair (the illusory “I”), but the body, the chair, and the doorway simultaneously. (1999, p. 288)

Corporeal certainty is really uncertainty.

Conceived of ambiguously, Fleckenstein’s somatic mind remains problematic for contemplative writing pedagogies. A more contemplative perspective would see Mairs as possessing an experience of corporeality that is as much internal as external. If we see Mairs as a somatic mind, we risk denying her the integrity of individual embodiment, and we lose the complexity of the double gesture I take following both Haraway and contemplative practice. Hypothetically, based on the ways Fleckenstein equalizes Mairs with her environment, we could imagine another woman in a wheelchair positioned in the same doorway at the same moment having the same frustrating experience of inaccessibility. There is a move toward corporeal interchangability and dissipation into surroundings here—a move Mairs herself would discredit, I think. Although Fleckenstein’s concept is certainly more complicated than such a simple scenario implies, the fact remains that once we remove the subjectivity of the “I,” what Fleckenstein calls “illusory,” we lose the integrity of the individual body. And whether or not we lose it to the swirling postmodern mass of discourse or to a vortex of intertextual materialities, we lose the unique experience of what it means to be humanly embodied. What it means to be integral or whole is not to be of one inviolable piece so much as it means, in both Iyengar’s and Haraway’s paradigm, to be undiminished by our interconnectedness with other subjects and objects. Being differentially-positioned in the world means that as bodies we are in a constant flux with our material environments and with other bodies (a kind of dynamic, material-semiotic situatedness I will turn to in the next section), which is not the same as losing the subjectivity of the embodied “I.”

Because we experience materiality as a complex relationship between exteriority and interiority, we cannot simply glide over the fact that being positioned by a doorway, even incorporating that too-small doorway into our sense of self at the moment of struggle is different than losing our autonomy or corporeal certainty to the doorway or merging our agency with it. As Haraway states, our embodiment is not simply fixed “in a reified body” but neither is it a “blank page” for other inscriptions, be they material or social (1991c, pp. 195-197). So while I agree that our body boundaries are permeable and our experiences of embodiment include our material environments and are most certainly shaped by our situatedness, I wish to keep a space for body integrity and interiority in my understanding of contemplative writing yogis. For me, this is a more responsible conception since the door cannot experience Mairs as she can it.

Marilyn M. Cooper addresses this problem of agency in her recent Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted when she argues, “[w]e experience ourselves as causal agents, and any theory of agency needs somehow to account for that experience. And we need to hold ourselves and others responsible for what we do” (2011, p. 437). In this article, Cooper argues for an interactional model of causation, one that accounts for the ways

an orator does not coerce; he merely puts words into the air. In the brief moments of conscious or unconscious reflection that occur while we listen to a sales pitch or a campaign speech, an active process of evaluation and assimilation occurs in our minds …. When someone sits back and decides, “All right, you have persuaded me,” he is not merely describing something that has happened to him. In spite of the grammar, he is describing something he has done. (2011, p. 437)

What this scene gets at is Cooper’s desire to construe agency as “emergent” (2011 p. 421), as a product of relations and actions, whether conscious or unconscious, and not of simple causation wherein a certain action causes a particular effect in linear fashion. Cooper’s understanding of agency as emergent is congruent with a contemplative emphasis on the agency of movement; however, her assumption that if agency is emergent and mobile, it can never rest in an individual is not harmonious—for the same reasons the somatic mind is not—with the contemplative approach I present here.

For in this contemplative approach, the objects and subjects of positioning are not reducible to each other, but are rather always embracing each other as the yogi simultaneously embraces her center and her environment. In his postmodern study of yoga and Buddhist philosophy, George Kalamaras notes that

[p]aradoxically, the yogi, through various meditative practices, withdraws consciousness from the periphery of the body in ways which heighten the inner sensorium; in total intimacy with a “center” of awareness, then, the advanced mediator’s consciousness expands to embrace the immensity of the universe, moving beyond all awareness of limitation, psychological borders, or psychic “circumference.” (1997, p. 9)

This never diminishes the integrality of the individual or her ability to consciously act in the world—even if she recognizes her ability to produce effects on that world is as much imaginative as it is real. I will take this argument up once more in my third chapter when I discuss how the acts of extension and expansion allow us to understand embodiment as both an experience of interiority as well as exteriority. In this chapter, I will revisit the concept of integrity once more in the final section by attending to Harway’s notion of companion species. But first, I explore the connections between the embodied imagination and Haraway’s concept of situatedness.