4.1: The Presence of the Person(al)

Advocate of embodied writing Hindman uses an expressivist notion of the personal subject to drive her essay, Making Writing Matter: Using “The Personal” to Recover[y] an Essential[ist] Tension in Academic Discourse. She highlights for me both the strengths of an epistemology of presence as well as the reasons why expressivist paradigms cannot fully support the requisite attention to matter. In her essay, Hindman attempts to show how the authority of the expressivist personal self must be reclaimed for embodied rhetorics. Hindman does not suggest we naively return to any essentialized notions of the self that are not aware of our social or linguistic construction—this is an attachment she does not want to lose. Rather, Hindman notes that we need to better hold tension between an expressive, personal self and a cultural, socially-constructed self in order to attend to our materiality as writers (2001, p. 89). Essentially, she argues for a double gesture, claiming that neither subject position alone will work; our attempt to move from one to another evades the real issue of our corporeality. Because she is interested in reclaiming the material person behind the personal, Hindman outlines the consequences of adopting a contemplative approach to composing, one that reattaches the corporeal presence of the writer to her writing.

To be attentive to matter, Hindman advocates writing our experiences and bodies into our prose as impetus and evidence for our arguments. In this way, our writing becomes personal, or evidentially full of its fleshy author. It’s the claiming and self-awareness of this fullness—a fullness that upends a habitual tendency to write over the material—that contemplative pedagogy calls presence. Using her experience to navigate the theoretically thorny issue of subjectivity, Hindman’s main objective is to consider “how [her] personal experience with alcoholism and with the discourse of recovery demonstrates to [her] the futility—indeed, the conceit—of trying to dispel the tension between competing versions of how the self is constructed” (2001, p. 92). Hindman believes that holding onto the expressivist self, because it accounts for personal experience, will invite the body that poststructuralist constructivism has overwritten back “in,” allowing it to count in our writerly quest for understanding and meaning. The expressivist self gives Hindman hope for reclaiming presence.

While I agree with the spirit of Hindman’s struggle, another way of looking at her attempt to resolve expressivist and constructivist notions of subjectivity with each other is to see both as fatally flawed. To follow Hindman, we must see our field as coalescing still around two pedagogical touchstones, that of expressivism and constructivism. That’s an argument I don’t take on here, since many others have, but I do want to address the irony of this pedagogical configuration: it hides the implicit agreement between these two approaches that we earn presence as writers by transcending our flesh, not mindfully claiming it. A careful look at some foundational texts that outline the differences of these approaches shows how the Western tradition of downplaying the body for the mind is evidenced in contemporary constructivist and expressivist pedagogies as both work to detach us from the materiality of our lived bodies and experiences. If critical constructivism promises transcendence from the body through theories of discursive production wherein the subject is always interpolated by a discourse that precedes it, an essentialist-leaning expressivism¹³ does no better as it promises transcendence through an individual mind that can rise above its social environment as well as the limitations of the body (Crick, 2003, p. 257), negating the role of materiality. If nature, and the body in turn, can never be known in itself because culture is always mediating it, then nature is just another word for culture, and our only agency lies in constructivist narratives (Berlin, 2003, p. 76). In both, the only presence writers can fully claim is linguistic.

Bordo names this kind of faith in the rhetoric of linguistic construction to make us “present” the “epistemological fantasy of becoming multiplicity” (1993, p. 145). It is this dream of limitless multiplicity and rhetoricity that Hindman argues against, which is why she places more—perhaps too much—hope in the material attachments of expressivism. For her, constructivist approaches lose the real, even biological ways her body is already an alcoholic prior to the discursive tag and the corresponding rhetoric surrounding this label. Denied matter(ing), the body has no real presence in this dominant pedagogical approach; it becomes the “no body” of postmodernism that Bordo challenges.

Offering something akin to a Platonic “fantasy of authenticity,” expressivism unfortunately gets us no closer to claiming the material presence of the writer despite Hindman’s hope that it might. Expressivist attention to the self has been thoroughly critiqued for forwarding a romantic notion of the mind/ soul because this is an essentialist view of the subject; this view provides the tension Hindman wants in her double gesture. Yet from the perspective of the contemplative, expressivist subjectivity is problematic because it forwards a disembodied notion of the self as reducible to the free floating mind/soul. Despite their focus on experience, expressivists have not only promoted ideas of students rising above the collective in order to express an ineffable personal self, they have also equated this self with the individual’s mind, ignoring the weight of corporeality. A contemplative-minded fullness of presence is denied: the expressivist mind/soul is often identified as the person(al), so that the concrete body becomes a mere fleshy vehicle for the psyche and not an origin of presence for our writing and identity.

The expressive transcendent mind as divorceable from the flesh is a conception that enforces the separation of a consciousness from the body that acts primarily as a vehicle and/or extension of its internal thoughts. In turn, experience is emptied of its materiality, valued as an effect or a memory contained by the intellect and as fodder for personal reflection. Elbow’s classic “movies of the mind” metaphor highlights the way meaning in expressivist epistemology is often seen as removed from the experiencing body. Elbow locates meaning in the individual’s consciousness with his “movies of the mind:”

Meaning is like movies inside the head. I’ve got movies in my head. I want to put them inside yours. Only I can’t do that because our heads are opaque. All I can do is try to be clever about sending you a sound track and hope I’ve done it in such a way as to make you construct the right movies in your head. (1973, p. 152)

In this iconic Western formulation, meaning from experience is something shaped by the mind and remains something that wishes to “get out” through language expression. Like in constructivist pedagogy, presence remains linguistic not material. On both accounts, thoughts exist unchained to bodies. Enacted through our writing, the “I” of expressivist personal writing seems to be more an individual mind’s expression of itself than an embodied “I” that expresses the real presence of a writing body, how we might approach the personal within feminist-contemplative writing pedagogy.

Elbow’s “movies of the mind” may be an older configuration of expressivist meaning making systems, which expand beyond Elbow himself, but it remains a classic feature of expressivist thinking. Earlier talk of “movies of the mind” has now shifted to talk of language itself, in part due to contemporary efforts to bring this pedagogy in dialogue with social constructionist pedagogy. Developing what has been called social expressivism (Gradin), compositionists such as Ann Berthoff have moved expressivist meaning into the paradigm of social constructionism. Yet, new versions are still rooted in a basic, untenable relationship to matter that overwrites it with language, even if they now find meaning in the interaction of a social language and the individual psyche and not the latter alone. Berthoff’s discussion of how meaning is made in this relational process may mediate tension between the individual and the cultural, but it does little to alleviate tension between the body and mind: “By naming the world, we hold images in mind; we remember; we can return to our experience and reflect on it. In reflecting, we can change, we can transform, we can envisage. Language thus becomes the very type of social activity by which we might move towards changing our lives” (Berthoff p. 751; quoted in Gradin, 1995, p. 115). Her explanation shows how social expressivism still supports a devaluation of matter by advancing a dichotomy between body and mind that draws on the immaterialism of both traditional expressivism and constructivism. Echoing back to Elbow’s movies of the mind, the embodiment of experience in Berthoff’s explanation seems to matter much less, if at all, than the way language is used to shape it or memory is used to store/ configure it. Expressivism remains largely disembodied—surprising for a pedagogy based in experience.

As Berthoff shows, the power of personal experience in classic and contemporary expressivism rests neither with having the experience nor the physicality of our meaning making in writing; instead it rests with the power of naming or intellectualizing experience through language. Contemplative pedagogy would agree that naming experience is indeed a shaping activity, an important one at that, but would argue that it isn’t the end, or isn’t exhaustive of meaning and that we mustn’t ignore the fullness of embodied presence. Whether viewed through classic formations or new ones indebted to constructionist understandings of the self as socially written through language, expressivism empties experience of its material connection—why updated notions of the personal plucked from expressivist theory have not yet claimed the material body’s presence. Extending Berthoff’s work in new directions, Candace Spigelman seems to recognize this dilemma. She attempts to move the personal out from the jurisdiction of expressivism in order to give it viability and show how it can be a social concept and not just a synonym for the psyche. In Personally Speaking, her book-length treatment of this complex term, Spigelman states, the “personal involves a particular way of conveying information that seems to represent an autonomous writer’s unmediated reflection on his or her ‘authentic’ lived experience” (2004, p. 30). This is the essence of the critique against expressivist pedagogy. Her effort in reclaiming the personal is to “detach” it from these limited conceptions by understanding it instead as a rhetorical construct, as fully mediated by a social language (2004, p. 30). Spigelman’s move to rhetoricize the personal is one that could finally bring it under the postmodern rubric by questioning its autonomy and the “free” or “private” space this concept seems to invite.

Spigelman does realize that such a move necessarily cuts the personal away from the fabric of the material. But, she is committed to rhetoricizing the personal in order to give it new viability, so this author notes her choice to table a discussion of materiality (2004, p. 33). She doesn’t linger over corporeality lost in her model because she sees no way of asserting material presence without engaging in the binary between matter and discourse and ultimately supporting one term over the other. In refusing to engage the complexity, however, Spigelman may implicate herself in those discussions of materiality she claims to find inherently reductive (2004, p. 33). Her concern over binaries, along with the “anxiety” (2004, p. 60) that she claims accompanies the debate over the personal, leads her to see this epistemological term as a representative label within her pedagogy, valued for the space in language it guarantees. This semiotic space allows her to reassert the academic value of personal writing within a field turned largely constructivist; personal writing as argument is her focus. But, embracing the personal as more than a discursive label neither means necessarily unmooring it from its anchorage in the body nor does attention to materiality need to be reductive. In a professional environment that has moved closer to addressing the importance of the material than it had when Spigelman was writing, we have more options than this.

Offering a hopeful alternative, feminist contemplative writing pedagogy restores our focus on experience while attending to the personal body not as ineffable but as embedded and present. The body is what gives us an anchor through “subjective factual truth while the mind generat[es] imaginative ideas” (Iyengar, 2005, p. 162). Here, the embodied imagination shapes experience into knowledge by helping to construct meaning and to stretch it in new directions. Contemplative practices like asana teach writers the skill of embodied imagining, or how to balance having the experience with processing it because “it is the precise, thorough measuring and adjustment of a pose [or action], bringing balance, stability and equal extension everywhere that hones this faculty of discrimination …. Intelligence … becomes muscular”; imagination becomes embodied (Iyengar, 2005, pp. 162-163). Indeed, the agency of the writing yogi who exercises her embodied imagination is tied up with her ability to put thoughts into action: tapas, such as the physical action of asana, is key to embody the imagination and “transfor[m] the shapes of mind into reality” (Iyengar, 2005, p. 157). This is a discerning action, one that moves mindfully in directions dictated by our intentions and not reactive habit. Actions and agency, therefore, rest on presence in contemplative writing pedagogy.