4.3: Embodied Empiricism and Connection

Without attention to presence, it is easy to ignore our students’ embodied differences. If we expect non-defensive openness from our students as they stretch their learning in our classrooms and begin to question the knowledge claims they import, we must meet them with a flexible mind and also a willingness to be changed by their inquiry. Contemplative knowledge by presence requires this flexibility in the face of change and within the presence of another. What the contemplative suspends, then, is the default move to see students’ personal experiences as reducible to constructions able to be mapped onto cultural grids and chalked up to ideological saturation.

An example of how the refusal of the embodied and situated dimension of personal experience might work in a standard classroom guided by the tenants of social constructivist pedagogy is present in Karen Paley’s analysis of Patricia Bizzell’s writing classroom. Paley sits in on an undergraduate writing class dedicated to training peer tutors. While Paley remarks that the overall tone of the class was warm with “no evidence of confrontational pedagogy,” she does conclude that Bizzell works to reframe students’ comments so as to minimize the importance of personal attachments and maximize the cultural import. She states that Bizzell “welcomed personal commentary [from her students] only when it was explicitly linked to social, ‘representative’ issues” (2001, p. 187). This is evident in an example of the ways Bizzell validates students’ readings of Patricia Williams’ essay Crimes without Passion. Paley transcribes a students’ response to Williams’ essay and then Bizzell’s response to the student during a classroom discussion:

Sarah: I think there’s a connection between all the stories that she tells, a lot of them have … the issues she’s proposing, how those issues came about as part of her development. So there’s a personal aspect of why she’s so engaged in these issues.

Bizzell: I think this is a really important point, that she relates her personal story and the issues; and Sarah’s quite right that one way of doing that is by developing it over time, showing that it’s something that has been an issue for her since she was young. So the stories that she tells about herself are not just personal stories, they are representative … and I think that’s very important. (quoted in Paley, 2001, p. 185)

There is a “submerged disagreement” during this class that remains unnoticed and/ or unacknowledged by the teacher, according to Paley (2001, p. 185). As her quote indicates, Sarah thinks there is a connection between a person’s individual “development” and his/her engagement with certain ideas and this likely is rooted in the ways Sarah experiences the impact of her material reality on her process of making meaning. Paley notes that the subtle disagreement between Bizzell and her student, Sarah, is indicative of the ways in which personal experience tends to be subsumed under the label of “socially representative” in order to stress how the self is a social construct and therefore not personal in the ways students like Sarah might articulate; it contains no material presence and can thusly be linguistically explained away through catergorization. As with Kazan’s dance teacher, the method of instruction sanctions rather homogenous writing subjects, not writing bodies with difference.

Bizzell’s treatment of the personal demonstrates the ways student experience becomes interchangeable when it is divorced from material agency and when students are not allowed to claim interiority through presence. It’s in this context that Spigelman writes Personally Speaking as an attempt to allow students like Sarah a relative hold on their experiences while addressing a general anxiety over experience, displayed by Bizzell in Paley’s study. But, as I indicated earlier, Spigelman’s project purposely emphasizes “the construct that is personal experience” (2004, p. 60), and doesn’t go far enough to reclaim the materiality of experience, and therein, embodied presence. This isn’t Spigelman’s aim anyway, as she is more interested in addressing the potential of personal writing to be a rhetorically-valid form of argument and not a mutt-breed of the writing classroom. But, it is mine. So while I do not take issue with Bizzell’s attempt to teach her students the ways personal stories have cultural resonance, I do count as a pedagogical loss the implicit hierarchy between the social and the individual body as well as the flattening of all individual student bodies that her comments normalize.

Contemplative pedagogy dismantles this hierarchy; it focuses on the relationships between the personal and the cultural in ways that allow the person to stand with and not for the social by calling upon the critical power of his/her embodied experiences, refusing, as well, to ignore the embodied differences of varied bodies. Contemplative writing focuses on the process of knowledge-making as reflecting and analyzing a series of material experiences that reveal the complex construction of the individual as she takes shape in a cultural and social environment, but also as she marks that environment by means of her material embodiment and interconnectedness. It exchanges narratives of authenticity for those of situated positioning and humility. Engaging in contemplative writing practices means that we accept positioning as that which grounds knowledge claims and reclaims the body of the author. The personal is more than representative; it reveals the author’s lived material investments and full corporeal presence. The classroom as well as the page should reflect this.

Haraway’s notion of situated knowledge, or the material-discursive meanings we create from our experience, gives feminist contemplative writing pedagogies a means of articulating the importance of presence for embodied empiricism. Contemplative pedagogies forward a view of experience as much a material reality as a narrative construct. It is true that “‘experience is not—indeed, cannot be—reproduced in speech or writing, and must instead be narrated’” (Brodkey, 1987, 26, as quoted in Spigelman, 2004, p. 11), but the process of shaping goes both ways, and so needs to include the ways our bodies and experiences beget our interpretations. I believe a feminist attitude of humility is best when approaching these issues in order to counter the tendency to mastery which often leaves us illogically claiming that our narration of experience somehow voids its materiality or that the sharing of emotion or agency disallows the intent of either (Amhed, 2004; Cooper, 2011). In order to realize fully contemplative writing, we need to see it as engaging in situated knowing and thus producing situated knowledge. If knowledge is always attached to the knower, we need to be wary of deeming the narration-reflection of experience a ventriloquizing act on students’ or author’s parts, one that is merely representative of the social. Indeed, the practice of material mapping is arguably a more responsible practice of viewing knowledge-making as it does not elide difference at the level of our bodies.

Situated knowledge is a feminist epistemology based on “particular and specific embodiment” (Haraway, 1991c, p. 190) which produces “partial, locatable, critical knowledge sustaining the possibility of webs of connection” (Haraway, 1991c, p. 191). These webs privilege attachment through “passionate construction” and “resonance, not … dichotomy” (Haraway, 1991c, pp. 194-195). Based on these definitions, we can first see how situated knowledge highlights the ways materiality and discursivity are tangled in our webs of meaning, making it impossible and particularly senseless to separate them. Nor does it behoove us to overwrite matter as a function of the social insofar as it is reduced to nothing more. Situated knowledge consequently places the writing yogi in the center of the meaning-making process and refuses to ignore how her body is implicated in her knowing as materially placed and connected to her experiences. These experiences spatialize the writer in the world, literally positioning her in definite yet dynamic ways. And, “[s]ince yoga means integration, bringing together, it follows that bringing body and mind together, bringing nature and the seer together, is yoga” (Iyengar, 2002, p. 48). Situated knowing is itself therefore an enactment of yoga.

Put differently, situated knowing within contemplative pedagogy is an epistemological practice that changes our understanding of how we come to know by locating knowing within individual, writing bodies not a transcendent realm of truth or a social “body” motored by language. Because experience is a product of this mutual, interdependent composition, and not just linguistic, writers “do not simply ‘reinterpret’ [their] experiences through a new discourse; experience also enables reinterpretation … experiences are discursive, but they come, at least in part, from somewhere else, not ‘just’ from discourse in an endless devolution” (Hirschmann, 2004, p. 327). We accept the idea that experience can be understood entirely through discourse when we read it exclusively as a text. Taking on a contemplative viewpoint means we acknowledge that there is more to material reality than discourse and that a position of openness which validates our ultimate lack of mastery over a material world to which we belong but can in no way ever comprehensively view is a strength not a limitation. Contemplatively, language cannot fully capture our embodied realities even if we use it to explore our place in the world: “[t]hat such experience can only be shared through language is important to recognize. Indeed it may be a crucial dimension of the standpoint notion of shared experience that we communicate about it through language, but discourse cannot exhaust the ‘reality’ of experience” (Hirschmann, 2004, p. 327).

In other words, situated knowledge requires writers to exhibit mindfulness of themselves, others and their environments. When engaged in building situated knowledges, we are exercising mindfulness by contextualizing what we or others are experiencing within how and why we are experiencing it. That situated knowledge engages us in a practice of mindful knowing has a second implication: situated knowledge is metacognitive, asking us to be reflective of our thinking and to monitor it by investigating: 1) what we are experiencing; and 2) how we are experiencing it. This metacognitive process of investigating our thinking about what we know and how we got to those knowledge claims is at the heart of contemplative mindfulness. In their operational definition of mindfulness, Bishop et al. agree that mindfulness is itself a metacognitive process and can be used to develop the practitioner’s reflective skills: “the notion of mindfulness as a metacognitive process is implicit in the operational definition that we are proposing since its evocation would require both control of cognitive processes (i.e., attention self-regulation) and monitoring the stream of consciousness” (Bishop et al., n.d., 11). The following interchapter will take up these ideas and will explore this link between mindfulness and metacognition in greater detail. But, at present, it is important to recognize how metacognition through mindfulness necessarily entails acceptance of an interiority of thinking that invites acceptance of a writer’s “center” in line with contemplative theory.

In sum, situated knowledge can be used to develop contemplative writing pedagogies to make them not only more theoretically sound but also more pedagogically generative when enacted in the classroom. This kind of knowledge rejects traditional modes of detachment and seeks to relate the material and discursive at the level of meaning and enact it at the level of our bodies. “To a yogi, the body is a laboratory for life, a field of experimentation and perpetual research” (Iyengar, 2005, p. 22). Situated knowledge is consequently what gets made on the page and in the classroom when we engage in contemplative writing and teaching practices.

Contemplatively, embodiment is a necessary condition of meaning making, fixing the body as the origin of knowledge. Its inseverable connection to the body is what makes this knowledge “partial” as well as “locatable.” What we know accordingly changes too. If the process of knowing is primarily experiential, we must entertain seriously our personal experiences and work to interpret them critically without losing their embodied reality. In this feminist epistemology, “[d]iscourse and reality are in close relationship, but they are, nevertheless, distinct” (Hirschmann, 2004, p. 327). Indeed, we can understand the relationship between discourse and material reality as one of companionate composing. Understanding can come from interpreting an experience not just having it so that we can connect to each other even when we experience our embodiments and material-discursive worlds differently (Hirschmann, 2004, p. 329). In short, we can situate ourselves within the context of an experience through our imaginative interpretation of it without having experienced the actual context ourselves; the meeting of discourse and matter is a generative one that enforces the companionate relations between the two.

As such, situated knowledge is an interested practice of knowing through connection, partly because we use language to communicate with others and partly because we are always connected to others through our shared materiality. The commonality of our materiality, which can be seen as a dynamic common ground even if it is experienced or embodied differently, gives situated knowledge a relational, “webbed” orientation that establishes it as a method of connected knowing. Connected knowing values the historical, social and experiential and is characterized by its stance of openness, a continuous deferral of closure, and by the recognition of our need to join with others (Belenky et al., 1973, pp. 113- 123). It understands difference through connection, not distance. In contrast to separate knowers who experience the self as autonomous, connected knowers experience the self as always in relation in “webs of connection.” This is what Hart may mean when he argues that contemplative pedagogy is founded on 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, emphasis added).

Intimacy easily gives way to loving care. The worldview of interrelatedness required by situated knowledge entails “the loving care people might take to learn how to see faithfully from another’s point of view” (Haraway, 1991c, p. 190). The position of interrelatedness and attachment to other matter—people as well as other objects—is what makes this knowledge responsible where responsibility is seen to stem from a understanding both of the interest of all knowledge claims as well as the perspectival limits of personal, experiential knowledge. This notion of connected responsibility as giving weight to knowledge claims contrasts with the distance from the self other methods of knowing suggest. Here, one can be critical and personal and present at the same time since it is impossible to rise above the self. And neither does this connection to the knower invalidate the public use value of her knowledge claims: as stated above, the map cannot exist without the map maker, but it can be read and followed by others.

Situated knowledge is therefore not the same as subjective knowledge. It recognizes multiple standpoints and not just one. It is interested in a dialogue between the personal and the social that doesn’t collapse the integrity or importance of either. Situated knowledge accommodates a multiplicity of embodied standpoints since “differences in experiences produce differences in standpoints” (Hirschmann, 2004, p. 320). Recognizing difference is part of the contemplative knowing process for, “if knowledge is developed through experience rather than an abstract world of ‘Truth,’ then different experiences will yield different bodies of knowledge” (Hirschmann, 2004, p. 320) which can be strengthened by being placed in relation to each other—bodies mean in relation to other bodies even if they retain individual integrity. So even though lived moments are accessed through the social filters of language and cultural histories, the stories we develop to explain and capture these moments are always threaded to the moments themselves and the “having” of the experience. Certainly “the stories we tell ourselves of our experiences come filtered through the collective subjectivities of our social and cultural relationships, so that our interpretations of experience are not simply individual” (Spigelman, 2004, p. 63) or personal, but they are also not simply social or textual—interpretations of material realities presuppose those lived realities without exhausting them. These material acknowledgements fly in the face of our pedagogical tendency, following from cultural studies theory, to discredit our students’ ordinary experiences as naïve or interchangeable. Experiences of the student (and teacher) instead need to be both validated and analyzed.

Outside the dance studio, Fleckenstein in her recent book, Embodied Literacies, similarly points out the way we neutralize student bodies in academic discourse and the resistance this promotes. In this book devoted to increasing the scope of literacy to include the embodied nature of imagery, Fleckenstein argues that teaching academic writing is not just about developing a successful psychological identification to a middle-class life and value system, as represented by Bartholomae’s discussions of appropriation, but is also about adopting a physiological identification since the act of writing “imposes on students the bodies of white, heterosexual, middle-class males,” (2003, p. 49) an argument well-made by feminists from Virginia Woolf to Helene Cixous and Jane Tompkins. The stakes are much higher than discursive reconstruction. Fleckenstein’s analysis is meant to give us a greater understanding of student resistance, but it also highlights how our narrow application of social situatedness tends to hide these embodied consequences of learning to write.

To authorize student experiences, we must explore how they come from a body self-reflexively affirmed and differentially positioned. This will be the subject of my next interchapter. Because our bodies as sites of knowing are embedded in culture and language, our experiences are not self-evident but they are where we must necessarily start. To ignore them is to “pretend to disengagement” (Haraway, 1991c, p. 196). To work toward engaged analysis, the situated knower is the first to examine how her experiences are not solely her own, and how she must accept her partiality and join with others through language; nonetheless, situated knowing does not reduce materiality to discourse since our materiality can actually function as a challenge to discourse (Hirschmann, 2004, p. 325) since it is agentive. As a result, situated knowledge presents a third space of rhetoric-cum-referentiality.¹⁴

If we use situated knowledge as a guide, we begin to see the ways we can discuss personal stories and experiences that reveal writers’ attachments while allowing them the material integrity they deserve. To promote critical thinking, we can teach writers to look for and analyze the incongruences that arise in these stories because writers are situated in ways they cannot fully recognize due to their embodiments, their specific placement and presence in the world. Students can begin to see dissonance as a result of not only competing worldviews but also different configurations of felt materiality. I explore in the next chapter the ways we can discuss how the writer is materially, culturally and ideologically situated and how we might approach these dynamics of being a body in the world simultaneously as strengths of writing and knowing and also signs of our need to join with others. I show how in strong contemplative writing, authors tend to recognize the partiality of their knowledge claims even as they validate them as a product of their experiences and feelings.

Teaching students to think critically about their embodied experiences typically presents a challenge. In contemplative writing pedagogies, this is a challenge that can be met at both the material and discursive levels through the lens of situated knowledge. Situated knowledge can be used to develop embodied pedagogies of writing to make them not only more theoretically sound but also more pedagogically generative when enacted in the classroom. Situated knowledge as an epistemology becomes a way to rethink our current writing approaches; situated knowing as the connected practice of generating meaning can help us to work toward changed writing practices—ones that recognize fully students’ agentive embodiment as writers and the material weight of their experiences. As it rejects traditional modes of detachment, relates the material and discursive at the level of meaning, and enacts it at the level of our personal bodies, situated knowledge is what gets made on the page and in the classroom when we engage in contemplative writing and teaching practices.

The process of metacognitive reflection within feminist contemplative writing pedagogy also maintains connections between thinking and feeling. Writing yogis, who are situated, connected knowers, integrate personal knowledge with knowledge from others and weave together reason and emotion, using the insertion of the self in knowledge production as a way to generate reflection and analysis, a process I will show the workings of in the next interchapter. As a result of the complexity of this localized process of making knowledge, writing yogis who employ connected knowing with mindfulness have a high tolerance for openness and ambiguity (Belenky et al., 1973, p. 137). This is why situated knowers are after “resonance” and not hierarchy. Viewing situated knowledge through the lens of connected knowing allows us to see how it is both a process of situated knowing as well as situated feeling. This means we must begin to recognize the critical power of our feelings as they are a part of the knowledge we create. I will turn to the ways contemplative writing suggests the futility of divorcing situated thinking and feeling in Chapter Three.