4.2: Material Resonance Through Personal Presence

In contemplative practice, learning to be fully present (presence) is a practice mastered by learning to find our center as well as to recognize our integration within a larger world of material others (resonance). The yogi practices moving meditations, asana, and breathing meditations, pranayama, to develop her skills as an embodied imaginer. These practices help her to experience herself holistically as mind, physical body and emotional body and to see herself as embedded within a larger community through which she finds resonance by virtue of her shared materiality. Similarly, within feminist contemplative writing pedagogy, a fullness of personal presence must include both the social and the material. Because presence is both embodied and enacted, it is a skill that can be developed by contemplative writing and learning practices which train writers to both respect their inner lives and (in doing so) their connection to an external world that enfolds them. The heuristic for this kind of writing-learning is attachment. That is, the contemplative relates the embodied personal and the culturally enacted, which come together under the full rubric of embodiment, and requires us to leave behind both the wild subject of postmodernism as well as the personal subjectivity embraced by early expressivism. It is no coincidence that the contemplative leads us to a fuller, more incorporative understanding of the personal by way of its emphasis on resonance.

Haraway theorizes a notion of the personal that presents the possibilities inherent in the integration of the contemplative with the feminist; at the same time, she underscores for me the importance of resonant attachment central to both epistemological viewpoints. Her notion of the personal presents itself as one that can be used within feminist-contemplative writing pedagogy to denote presence. Specifically, Haraway supports an understanding of the person(al) as the “particular and specific embodiment” (1991c, p. 190) that makes meaning-making possible. As its etymology suggests, the personal in contemplative pedagogy is about the fleshy person, relating to one’s body, which is understood within language but maintains presence beyond it as more than the simple object of our inquiry. By learning to accept our bodies as agentive and resistant to our attempts to overpower them with mental directives, yoga teaches us to approach ourselves as embodied and to be self-aware of the consequences of our materiality. Respect for and awareness of our materiality are equally important. A contemplative notion of the personal is therefore opposed to the expressivist notion of the personal as the psyche as well as the postmodern notion of the “personal” as an epiphenomenon or rhetorical construct, indicated by the offset quotations. The body, and so the personal, is always mediated by language but never overwritten by it.

Incorporating notions of the personal as embodied presence into composition pedagogy means accepting our students as “bodies who aspire to write” (Kazan, 2005, p. 392), or as writing yogis who use the skill of the embodied imagination to create a diverse body of knowledge that integrates the intelligence of the material. I use the term, “writing yogis,” to press the similarities between the process of writing and yoga and to stress the usefulness in integrating these processes. I present the characteristic skill of writing yogis as the “embodied imagination” to forward a notion of how the writer becomes part of her text as she both writes herself into being by reflecting, reliving and rewriting her experience—we are written through language—and also finds lived reality and material meaning in the experiences that bring her to the act of composing—our bodies press language into shape.

Presence, or a materially-inclusive sense of situatedness, places us in the physical body as much as it situates us in discourse communities and social, ideological systems. The conception of resonant presence upon which contemplative writing rests thus refigures agency as a product of the harmonious interaction and co-constitution of the person and her environment—without losing the person to this environment through a diffusion into it. As such, contemplative writing is embedded in a figuration of agency as springing from our material attachments and the body’s status as agentive in forming these. The knower-writer’s material placement, her “specific and particular” body in relation to other bodies, guarantees her epistemic potential; without it, she could neither connect to others nor create meaning. This notion of embodied agency as stemming from a fullness of presence stands in stark contrast to standard performative definitions of agency wherein agency is seen as an extension of our social situatedness, disconnected from the material and completely discursive.

The movement toward integration here is harmonious with the practice of yoga, since the meditative moments of asana and pranayama teach the yogi to “transcend duality” and “to live with equanimity” (Iyengar, 2005, p. 16). Our attempts to understand the categories of writing-language and bodies-matter separately within our pedagogical practices tells us more about ourselves and our preference for “the politics of closure” instead of “differential positioning” than the nature of cultural construction or things themselves (1991c, p. 196). Closure is the opposite of presence, since presence necessitates openness to our environment, its changes and our dynamic position within it. Bodies become more than mere texts in contemplative approaches and material experiences literally matter even as they are also (re)written in the act of language expression. Corporeality is therefore neither “about fixed location in a reified body,” challenging notions of authentic embodiment, but nor is it about “the body as anything but a blank page for social inscriptions” (1991c, pp. 195-197). Our fleshiness instead points to a material presence existing both within and beyond our linguistic representations and rules, primarily accessible to us via our linguistic mapping practices but also materially-situated and located within a larger world of matter to which we are accountable in the flesh. Understanding comes just as much from the body as the mind, since they are companionate composers in this epistemological picture. And because we can never experience the world from another’s exact location, in another’s body, the personal highlights a felt material integrity that even language cannot supersede, even if we can only make “sense” of this through language, and, through language, share our embodied experience with others. Contemplative writing pedagogies exchange words like “unique” and “authentic,” which have previously tagged along with the personal, for words like “located,” “mindful,” “flexible” and “responsible.” These are words that invite resonance and connection.

Once we view the personal as an expression of our bodies as well as our minds, we are dually required to rethink and expand our notions of situatedness. Because it views the body as more than a house for the mind or empty stage on which cultural scripts can be performed, the full (material-discursive) presence called for in contemplative writing differs from the more popular postmodern versions of social situatedness that constructivist writing pedagogies typically promote. No more can we simply refer to situatedness as a metaphor for socio-cultural placement; now we must also see it as about specific embodiment, about presence.

Butler’s notion of the “constitutive outside” is an example of how situatedness and thus agency is typically construed through language, rather than through matter, and represents the limits of this view. Butler’s construal is significant within composition studies since her theories of performativity, which rest on this notion, have been normalized within our disciplinary scholarship. Of the constitutive outside, Butler states,

[t]here is an “outside” to what is constructed by discourse, but this is not an absolute “outside,” an ontological thereness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of discourse; as a constitutive “outside” it is that which can only be thought—when it can—in relation to that discourse, at and as its most tenuous borders. (1993, p. 8)

The constitutive outside carves out a space for excess within language by way of marking the unintelligible against the intelligible, bringing the other about. Importantly, this theorization allows Butler to argue for the social construction of gender while also questioning the inherent tie between sex and gender. The result, however, is that “[s]ex is resourced for its representation as gender, which ‘we’ can control” (“Haraway, 1991c, p. 198). To take this to writing itself, the writing body is resourced as subject, which teachers can similarly control.

While it may initially seem to be a liberating deconstruction, dismantling the biological category of sex (synecdoche for the writing body) forces the body to be the handmaiden of culture, or worse yet, an empty puppet waiting to be controlled by cultural, historical and semiotic forces. This view of language’s total encapsulation of reality limits the potential for change and our potential to change as Fleckenstein remarks. For,

[w]ithout bodies—those instances of flesh that disrupt the consistency of style and that point to a signification before and beyond language (Gallop 14-20)—no resistance of systemic transformation can be effected … nor can individuals cast themselves as agents of change because the uncertainty of deconstructed positioning erodes the embodiment necessary for agency. (Fleckenstein, 1999, pp. 284-285)

Kazan illustrates how these paired acts of immersion and emergence can be mapped onto our classrooms. She claims the necessity of exploring how bodies mean in educational spaces like the writing classroom. If we think of immersion as “feeling out” bodies, we begin to see how this is pedagogical work we always do but rarely reflect upon as teachers. Kazan urges us to recognize these immersive practices and argues that as different bodies come together to comprise the corporeal text of the classroom, they begin to appropriate meaning in particular ways based on how their embodiments play off one another. The writing classroom is a situated space of learning because of the ways bodies are physically related to each other, meaning that bodies emerge in particular ways because of the social space of the classroom itself. For instance, the physical placement of the teacher at the front of her classroom materializes her authority and differentially positions her as removed from her students even if her body shares certain physical characteristics with those students, such as young age or popular dress (Kazan, 2005, pp. 380-381). Embodied writing pedagogy is always a mix of language and matter interacting together, meaning together. Contemplative writing pedagogy asks us to be mindful of this mix.