2.4: Lesson 3- Writing Yogis See the World in Terms of Connections

In this way, through situated knowledges we can create “an earth-wide network of connections, including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very different—and power differentiated—communities” (Haraway, 1991c, p. 187).6 Our embodiment can consequently become something of a common ground, even if we all experience it differently. Without a doubt, the meetings and negotiations with different others are what gives this knowledge its power. The web-like structure of situated knowledge is actually more powerful than the hierarchical structure of the past: “[l]ocal does not mean small or unable to travel” (1991c, p. 161) Haraway reminds us. As a critical and reflexive practice, situated knowledge thereby enacts feminist connected knowing.

Connected knowing values the historical and experiential by taking on a relational orientation to what is being studied by those who are doing the studying—meetings matter. Such knowing procedures are characterized by an acceptance of openness and by a recognition of the need to join with others. In contrast to separate knowers who experience the self as autonomous, connected knowers experience the self as always in relation with others (Belenky, et al., 1973, pp. 113-123). The physical and metaphorical figure of the web is telling of the kind of power situated knowledge and the processes of connected knowing entail. Webs stress the connection of bodies and the inter-relatedness of knowledge; they enable that which is small to have a widespread impact as the ripples of a single tug can be felt throughout the entire structure. They also represent how separate bodies can sometimes feel entrapped by communal representation, highlighting the need for individual nodes. Even if notions of the web allow for responsiveness that hierarchies do not, there are risks in this system of power just like any other. And yet in the web, “[e]ach person—no matter how small—has some potential for power” precisely because of the heightened accountability of being “subject to the actions of others” and others being subject to one’s own actions (Belenky et al., 1973, p. 178). This is quite unlike a hierarchical pyramid where one must “move a mountain” to effect substantial change (Belenky et al., 1973, p. 179). Iyengar describes connected knowing similarly in the language of yoga: “In asana our consciousness spreads throughout the body, eventually diffusing in every cell, creating a complete awareness. Asana is the “broad gateway” that teaches us to discover awareness through our bodies and to keep our bodies “in harmony with nature” (2005 p. 11). It is this focus on connection that characterizes the contemplative.

Contemplative pedagogy theorized through Haraway recognizes that difference itself is not the end; rather, difference implies a partiality that necessitates the joining of the subject with others in order to form coalitions based on affinity not identity.⁷ Difference works not just to divide but also to unite. “Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. ‘Epistemology’ is about knowing the difference” (1991c, p. 161). Contemplative pedagogy is about working with difference toward a state of balance, starting with the writer’s connection between her body and the body of the other.

The yogi understands her body as intimately connected with and as part of a larger world of matter, of nature. Thus, in exploring her “own body, [she is] in fact exploring … nature itself” (Iyengar, 2005, p. 22). In the tradition of yoga, we, as individual material bodies are a part of nature; nature, or prakrti, is “all that is practical, material, tangible, and incarnate” (Iyengar, 2005, p. 6). Therefore, as I noted earlier, it is only with and through the body that yogis can reach a greater awareness of ourselves and, paradoxically, the world around us, since matter is the common thread we share with that world and others in it. The yogi’s inner turn to the center is simultaneously an unfolding to the external. A journey that accounts for the personal does not, then, dismiss the cultural but refuses to recognize separations between the two. “Individual growth is a must, and yoga develops each individual” says Iyengar, “[b]ut your body is an image of the world around you: it is a big international club” (2002, p. 11). Yoga’s understanding of the self as prakrti means that not only are we situated in and among the matter of the earth, but that our understanding of the world is always fixed to our placement in it. This doesn’t mean that our understanding or placement is static—quite the contrary. The situatedness of our understanding means that like nature, we too are constantly changing. I’d like to put these contemplative understandings in dialogue with Haraway once more to complete the feminist epistemology I’m building in this chapter for contemplative writing pedagogy.

Haraway, like Iyengar, argues that when we talk about bodies, we talk about the world; “our” flesh is the matter of the world. She calls this “significant otherness” and discusses how it changes our relationship to other species, what we might now perceive as companion species. Haraway says, “I go to companion species, although it has been over-coded as cats and dogs …. I think of the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ and Companion Species Manifesto as bookends around an interrogation of relationalities where species are in question and where posthuman is misleading” (Haraway & Goodeve, 2000, p. 140). Extending her conversation about the interconnectedness of nature and culture and, therefore, of subjects and objects, The Companion Species Manifesto argues for a mode of kinship that joins together the rights and responsibilities of species. Taking as paradigmatic the relations between dogs and humans, she reconceptualizes human evolution from this ecologically-minded trope of “significant-otherness.” Conventionally, we deem those closest to us, our significant others. Suggesting close-bonds between animals and humans, this term enables Haraway to forward a basic argument against anthropocentrism based on a grid of materialism on which humans can be mapped but not independently. Her argument thus extends to include the relational responsibilities of cross-species development and communication. By arguing for humans’ and dogs’ significant otherness Haraway gives us a language to speak back to “[b]iological and cultural determinism [which are] both instances of misplaced concreteness” (2003, p. 6).

Of herself and her dog, Ms. Cayenne Pepper, she says, “We are, constitutively, companion species. We make each other up, in the flesh” (2002, p. 3). These two, human and animal, are “significantly” other to each other because their constitutional makeup depends on their companionate relations. This is a twist on the conventional process of othering which divorces rather than connects. This entails a radical shift inasmuch as each being must now be seen as literally constituted in its relation to others. Of course there are practical reasons for their connected co-constitution including the balance of athleticism and handling both Cayenne and Haraway need in order to compete in the agility competitions they enter together. But Haraway is after something deeper, to which her final phrase attests. Haraway is not merely speaking of identity politics here, of what we align ourselves with and against as a product of our culture and ideological commitments; rather, this is a body identity that encompasses those politics and goes even further. Selfhood is seen here as a fleshy process in which each body is responsive to the other in terms of a materiality that goes beyond even consciousness, all the way to biology.

It is in terms of biology, which Haraway uses to get at nature without reifying it, that she first frames her usage of “companion.” Questioning the effects of her and Cayenne’s interactions within Notes from a Sportwriter’s Daughter from When Species Meet (2008), Haraway details her Australian Shepherd’s quick tongue, which has “swabbed the tissues of my tonsils, with all their eager immune system receptors” leaving her to wonder, “Who knows where my chemical receptors carried her messages, or what she took from my cellular system for distinguishing self from other and blinding outside to inside?” (2008, p. 2). Haraway knows that her questions are purely speculative and that they represent queries most do not think about yet alone pose seriously. But, these questions give her a tangible way to get at her argument that we must be accountable to our materiality and the way that it binds us to others—an accountability our current theories do not provide. Such accountability is forecasted in the etymology of her first term:

Companion comes from the Latin cum panis, “with bread.” Messmates at table are companions. Comrades are political companions. A companion in literary contexts is a vade mecum or handbook like the Oxford Companion to wine or English verse; such companions help readers to consume well …. As a verb, companion is “to consort, to keep company,” with sexual and generative connotations always ready to erupt. (2008, p. 17)

Haraway thus pins her notion of companion species to both material conditions of living and “being with” as well as language, showing how both rest on co-constitution and interrelatedness or on “an ongoing ‘becoming-with’” (2008, p. 16).

If we understand Harway’s figuration of companion species as a means of establishing the centrality of relationships within a feminist materialist epistemology, we not only see the coherence between Iyengar’s discussion of the connectedness of all matter by virtue of its belonging to the state of prakarti but we can see the ways significant otherness in Haraway’s formulations are implicated in contemplative practices’ focus on “reciprocal revelation” (Hart, 2008, p. 236). Contemplative educator Tobin Hart defines reciprocal revelation as the “willingness to really meet and, therefore, be changed by the object of inquiry, whether a new ideas or a new person” (Hart, 2008, p. 236). It is this kind of revelation of our infinite mutability in the face of others that prompts Iyengar to marvel at the openness developed by the yogi who recognizes that “we are a little piece of continual change looking at an infinite quantity of continual change” (2005, p. 7). To understand significant otherness or reciprocal revelation, we must be willing to first acknowledge our interdependence with the larger world of matter, which encompasses but never diminishes us, and second, we must recognize how this requires our full presence in the moment of meeting others, a skill developed by contemplative practice.

Haraway shows us how reciprocal revelation rewrites the history between dogs and humans and in so doing, illustrates what revisionist accounts that forward mutual responsibility and respect might do to “produce a female symbolic where the practice of making meanings is in relationship to each other” (Haraway 1995, p. 56). She details the history of the transformation of wolves into dogs, the first domesticated animals. Attracted by the waste dumps of human settlements, wolves moved ever closer to contact. “By their opportunistic moves, those emergent dogs would be behaviorally and ultimately genetically adapted for reduced tolerance distances, less hair-trigger fright … and more confident parallel occupation of areas also occupied by dangerous humans” (Haraway, 2008, p. 29). The interrelation was further defined when humans began controlling these wolfdogs’ means of reproduction and slowly bred out aggressiveness.

But this is not a one-sided story. As much as people had a part in this story, this is one about co-evolution, not about the mastery of domestication. Haraway argues that humans may have capitalized on the many benefits of the would-bedogs including their skills at herding and hunting but the animals were certainly agentive as well. Testifying to the limits of our notions of consciousness, Haraway’s against-the-grain analysis draws on a study of Russian foxes to argue that these “wolves on their way to becoming dogs might have selected themselves for tameness” (2004, p. 305). Not to be overlooked is wolves’ opportunism and “choice” to interrelate in this story; humans, after all, provided food and shelter. To ignore these species’ entanglements is to refuse to respect meetings between selves and others—whether they are animals and humans, humans and humans, or minds and bodies. And to acknowledge these entanglements, we must attune our ability to be contemplatively present in the world so that we might respond to it and not simply react.

Haraway uses her discussion of companion species to refine her understanding of subjectivity within her feminist epistemology; in doing so, she brings us even closer to a contemplative subject understood through the lens of prakarti. Because the body is part of a material world that extends far beyond our powers of discursive construction, it refuses to be dominated or written entirely by our narratives and is storied by nature itself. The self she defines can be understood as a yogi: “[s]ince yoga means integration, bringing together, it follows that bringing body and mind together, bringing nature and the seer together, is yoga. Beyond that there is nothing—and everything” (Iyengar, 2002, p. 48). How we get students to begin to see themselves in such integrative ways, as writing yogis, is the subject of my first interchapter.

To reflect companionate duality, Haraway calls subjects material-semiotic agents. By highlighting the material and the linguistic in one term and hooking agency on both, Haraway reminds her reader that this is a subjectivity built on a fundamental dynamic in which we humans have a role in constructing the world, certainly, but not the role. This generative limitation can begin to explain why matter exceeds our discursive constructions and respects the agency given to matter in Eastern philosophies like yoga. The contemplative insight here is that rather than limiting our ability to understand, this web-like approach to knowledge is precisely what allows us to seek situated truth and situated knowledges. For, epistemological meaning rests just as much on materiality as it does on language.

Mairs claims as much in Waist-High in the World when she notes that it is impossible and dangerous to represent her mind as superior to and separate from her failing M.S.-stricken body, as if her body were a mere object that could be divorced from her self. Mairs so interweaves her subjectivity with her body that when speculating about who she would be without her chronic disease she answers, “Literally, no body. I am not ‘Nancy + MS,’ and no simple subtraction can render me whole” (1996, p. 8). While she recognizes that she can chose to write about topics that don’t include her health or explicitly refer to her body, Mairs argues that writing without her body is impossible, that her writing identity is entangled with her material reality (1996, pp. 9-10). Mairs is mindful of the ways she is her body largely because she has to be; she simply does not have the luxury of divorcing her subjectivity from her material reality because her material positing affects the literal, not just figurative, position of her perspective. Importantly, embodied subjectivity is to Mairs constructed as much by her brain chemistry as by cultural configurations of her semiotic tags and biological realities as a “depressed MS sufferer” (1996, p. 42). Calling herself a “creature” of her “biochemistry” (1996, p. 42), Mairs see bodies as more than mere objects of knowledge or that which is merely marked by the discursive, thinking subject. By using Mairs as an instructive example, we can begin to investigate how refusing to give up our fleshiness opens up new avenues of rhetorical power and options of making meaning through the union of language and the body. These are the options feminist contemplative writing pedagogy secures.