4: Chapter Two- Personal Presence, Embodied Empiricism and Resonance in Contemplative Writing

We teach in a culture that simultaneously obsesses about and
disregards bodies and in an academic culture that still views
teachers and students as ‘minds’ and ‘intellects’ only …. Our
theories of pedagogy cannot afford to neglect the dancing
bodies in our classrooms.
—Tina Kazan, Dancing Bodies in the Classroom

Tina Kazan’s reevaluation of “dancing bodies” in my epigraph is rooted in her visceral experience as a body who navigates the pedagogical spaces of both ballrooms and writing classrooms. Kazan bridges her embodied experiences as a writing teacher to hers as a student of ballroom dancing in order to illuminate how all writing teachers are dually implicated in a process of reading bodies and—because we maintain positions of power in the classroom however much we attempt to eschew our authority—sanctioning them. Like the dance instructor who (mistakenly) reads Kazan and her lesbian friend as a couple but cannot transcend the heteronormative ballroom dancing language on which she relies, teachers sanction how bodies are allowed to speak in the classroom. Sanctioning takes place via the ways teachers literally see the bodies before them and the corresponding ways they gesture to bodies in language.

Here, the eye confers location and space to the process of situating and reading embodied others. Indeed, Kazan uses Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the “surplus of seeing,” or the idea that because each body is necessarily opaque to itself, can literally only see outward, to argue for the relationality of bodies to each other and the need to understand situatedness as stemming literally from the point of view of the fleshy body. Understanding situatedness as arising not just from discursive placement but also from the “situated nature of perspective” (Kazan, 2005, p. 385) invites an understanding of how composition teachers “teach writers, bodies who aspire to write” (Kazan, 2005, p. 392). In ways akin to contemplative writing pedagogy, Kazan defines the process of (teaching) writing as one that always already involves the body and therefore as one that could be strengthened if explicit attention were paid to material relations in teaching and learning.

In sharp contrast to Kazan’s concept of dancing-writing bodies is what Worsham has termed the “wild subject,” the prevalent constructivist concept used to denote the writing subject in composition studies (2001, p. 247). Worsham’s term highlights a state of detachment that makes the subject unrestrained or “wild,” as it is permitted and encouraged to rise above its body. The wild subject is a rhetorical subject, to be sure, making it highly useful for analysis, but this picture of subjectivity has come at the cost of valuing materiality in the ways both Worsham and Kazan hope we might. When given space in language as a subject and not approached as a writing body, the writer remains rhetorical because she can transcend her material composition, placing value on her consciousness over and above (as removable) from her flesh.¹² As this hierarchy is normalized in our pedagogical and professional writing, it follows that it becomes part of the hidden curriculum, or as Worsham might say, part of the dominant pedagogy, we teach our students. We need only to look as far as the students discussed in Interchapter One to see the consequences of this dominant pedagogy. Students there couldn’t recognize the ironies of seeing writing only in terms of thinking, even when their bodies screamed for attention, because they were so well schooled to rise above the gross body when attending to matters of the mind. In dominant schooling systems, it is difficult to affirm the importance of the material relations between writing bodies, a difficulty my students had to confront in their body blogs outlined there.

This difficulty is what Kazan hopes to address. Her article can be placed within a new wave of scholarship on what might be called “embodied writing pedagogy” which has begun to restore focus on the individual writer as a means of reclaiming her materiality. Despite developing interest in materiality (Hawhee, Fleckenstein) and positionality (Kazan), however, embodied writing remains a somewhat scattered approach. I argue in this chapter that contemplative writing represents a more sustainable and interdisciplinary (and, therefore, writing-across-the-curriculum friendly) learning approach and praxis that captures the importance of our felt experiences without denying the responsibility of critically investigating our embodiment and connecting with others in ways responsible to our (and their) flesh.

As previous chapters have illustrated, I seek to maximize the coherence between the feminist and the contemplative in my work. Giving contemplative writing studies a feminist edge through the feminist epistemology theorized by Haraway, in particular, adds to its strengths and provides a different method of knowing for our field—and, therein, a different picture of subjectivity. The union also generates a new means of writing instruction, what I’ve been referring to as feminist contemplative writing pedagogy. If my last chapter explored how a writing subject might reconnect her “wild” mind with her organic, intelligent body by understanding herself as a writing yogi, a body-heart-mind, then this chapter will follow the consequences of this shift for the meaning-making process of writing itself and the knowledge construction that occurs as a result of this process; both are consciously located within their material contexts in contemplative pedagogy. Rather than valuing third-person knowing to the effect of erasing the knower’s body, contemplative pedagogies work to better understand the dynamics of first-person knowing and seek to find resonance between varied sources of embodied, felt knowledge. They forward a picture of knowing as advanced by the skill of embodied imagining, as outlined in my introduction.

This is a view of knowledge as local and embodied that contemporary cognitive neuroscience has begun to validate. Neurophenomenology, a new, integrative branch of neuroscience, has sought to theorize consciousness from a paradigm of embodiment. Coined by the late scientist Francisco Varela, neurophenomenology argues for an enactive or embedded approach to cognition, one that seeks to position experience as embodied and intersubjective and to understand cognition as including factors such as the body and the world and not just the brain (Rudrauf, Lutz, Cosmelli, Lachaux, & Le Van Quyen, 2003, p. 33). Two main consequences of this scientific approach include a valuation of our flesh, now seen as “the root of our experience” as well as a valorization of first-person, subjective knowledge (Rudrauf et al., 2003, pp. 33; 37). These reclamations of the individual have recently led Cooper to argue that neurophenomenology can help us navigate responsible rhetorical agency (2011, p. 420). As intimately tied to neuroscience, contemplative pedagogy presents us with the opportunity to explore these developments within our field, giving us new means to explore the embodied and experiential nature of writing and writers, and Haraway gives us a feminist topos from which to do this work.

Contemplative embodiment might yet remain an underexplored paradigm for knowing and writing in our field (though not others), but the experiential has a long history within our scholarship: most notably, through its entanglement with expressivist approaches. As a learning methodology geared to the whole person, it’s (too) easy to read contemplative pedagogy as nouveau-expressivism. Expressivism, understood as a pedagogy of “the personal,” shares with contemplative writing pedagogy a desire to centrally locate the writer and to validate her experiences. The advantage of such a reading is its effect: how the contemplative is thusly brought into the historical fold of composition studies and into dialogue with existing approaches to the personal and the experiential. The disadvantage is that to engage with expressivism at all is to risk assuming its massive emotional and historical baggage. However, dialoguing contemplative pedagogical approaches with others more established in our field is important work if we hope to establish a lasting place for the contemplative in our theory and practice—exactly why I briefly go to expressivist theory in the pages that follow. Even so, while the dialogue is useful, the comparison between these two pedagogical approaches reveals more crucial differences than similarities. Contemplative writing pedagogy, with its focus on lived, social responsibility and embodied situatedness doesn’t entertain expressivism’s perceived solipsism or its essentialist conception of the autonomous self understood outside of the community; it exchanges the closed system of meaning within Romanticism for more worldly, connected systems within contemplative theory, such as the Eastern philosophies of yoga, which balance inner- and outer-directedness.

Contemplative writing reanimates the personal by keeping the embodied presence of the writer visible at all times while simultaneously attending to a corporeal-cultural situatedness that accounts for resonant connections with embodied others and a larger material world of which we are a part. Additionally, contemplative pedagogies expand our learning approaches to include:

• “an epistemology of presence that moves past conditioned habits of mind to stay awake in the here and now.
• a pedagogy of resonance that shapes our graciousness and spaciousness toward meeting and receiving the world nondefensively.
• a more intimate and integral empiricism that includes in the consideration of the question a reflection on ourselves and on the question itself” (Hart, 2008, p. 237).

All together, these approaches and corresponding skills, outlined by contemplative educator Hart, assert the materiality of the knower, of knowledge and of the meaning-making process of writing. With Hart, I approach contemplative pedagogy through the three lenses of presence, resonance and embodied-connected empiricism by asking three corollary questions, pertinent to the field of rhetoric and composition studies, in particular:

• Presence: How do we understand the “personal” in written texts and in relation to the embodied writer in feminist contemplative writing pedagogy? How exactly do we validate her presence and agency?
• Resonance: How might the contemplative writer mindfully approach and receive her attachments and connections to the world of matter, including her physical environments, her material writing process and habits and other bodies in the world?
• Embodied Empiricism: While maintaining the need for outer-directedness, how can we simultaneously validate lived experience as a form of local knowledge and a valuable source of evidence for writing produced within contemplative pedagogies?

In what follows, I bring these three queries of contemplative learning to bear on our field by exploring the cost of denying the writing body as an epistemic origin and by addressing the benefits of situating the person and her experiences at the center of our theories of writing within contemplative pedagogy.