What is Embodied Expression

What is Embodied Expression? By Gregory Stephens (Jan. 2016) Note: This paper lays out the terms of inquiry for my Spring 2016 seminar “Embodied Writing and Rhetoric,” at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez. It grows out of release time granted by UPRM for “A Comparative Inquiry on the Role of University GE Courses.” While giving grad students an overview of rhet-comp debates, I want to facilitate embodied learning, and integration of non-academic genres into their FYW courses. I also aspire to move with students towards a more philosophical overview, a la Lyotard’s “report on knowledge.” The turn towards the body, and embodied knowledge, is a dominant feature of current-day scholarship (and its epistemic crisis), I argue, as “incredibility towards metanarratives” was in Lyotard’s era. Embodied expression could be seen as a variant of communicative action—although it is often far from the sorts of disembodied discourse practiced within critical theory, or most forms of academic writing. Behind the question—what is it?—lies an effort to re-envision a larger “epistemic crisis”—i.e., debate about how we acquire and communicate knowledge. Old models which assume that the impersonal, citational styles of academic writing are superior are breaking down. This is the view philosopher Thomas Nagel critiques in The View From Nowhere. Alternatives are numerous, and include the self-reflexive turn in ethnography, positionality (or situated research), and a larger shift in Writing Studies towards non-academic genres. (This includes modes such as writing for the media, technical communication, and creative nonfiction). When I was looking for a one-word umbrella word to join to “embodied” (as a sort of updated “three R’s”), none of the available terms seemed adequate. Let’s look at three: Knowledge gestures to domains in which “embodied knowledge” is a body of inquiry. See Lawrence Shapiro’s Embodied Cognition (2012) and the hype about this “hot topic” as “sweeping the planet.” It’s also been applied to ethnography and cultural studies, as in Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge (2012). That study’s emphasis on martial arts “as a culturally embedded form of self-cultivation” seems adaptable. As a body of knowledge martial arts expresses perspectives beyond the reach of rationality. These East Asian performative traditions have been taken up by international bodies; martial arts has migrated into the realm of intercultural relations; commodification, etc. The body is seen as a conveyor of that culturally embedded philosophy, as a site of competition, contestation, commodification, etc. Similar arguments could be made about “muscle memory” in sports. Studies of performing arts (Daniel 2005; McCaleb 2014) and performative religious expression (Mellor 2010; Barsalou et al. 2005) often start with embodied knowledge. It is not a stretch to place the “lore cycles” of the blackface/minstrelsy tradition (Lhamon 1998) within this trajectory. But knowledge tends to connote something we possess or can access—in our heads, or in libraries, databases, etc. rather than a way of being that we express in various manners. Pedagogy tends to have a musty smell; some people will shut off on hearing that. The work of Henry Giroux comes to mind: much of it laudatory, but preaching to the converted in left-wing educational circles. I also think of an oral “body of knowledge” about a senior professor who teaches Pedagogy of the Oppressed every semester, for every purpose. Rhetoric (in the Burkean senses) has many applications, but the term itself is rather ghettoized. However, the concept of the “rhetorical situation” retains wide relevance for developing forms of academic writing that can “travel.” Key terms developed by Kenneth Burke such as identification remain crucial to understanding of how the many variants of embodied expression negotiate or maintain a relationship with particular audiences. Let us first define what embodied expression is not. Embodied expression infers an opposition to “disembodied knowledge.” The concept contains a critique of the “scientific method,” and how research is often written up: in a human-less, often humorless “unpopulated writing” (Billig, 95) that Geertz (1993) called “author-evacuated” prose (in Hindman 2001: 89). Teachers of freshman composition are expected to move students swiftly (perhaps after a personal ice-breaker) towards the disembodied style, which is enforced with “stern discipline” in peer-reviewed journals.1 The few who read such disembodied prose rarely gain pleasure from it, or practical application. This self-marginalization constitutes an epistemic crisis in academia, whose scholars rarely can make themselves understood in the public sphere. However, the critique of disembodied writing and knowledge, along with the practice of more attractive alternatives, has a multi-disciplinary history. The theory and practice of “embodied writing” is acquiring weight in rhetoric and composition and allied fields, not to mention its proliferation in non-academic genres, including popular psychotherapy,2 and creative writing.3 Let us proceed to available definitions. Embodied learning is a satisfactory starting point. “Traditional schooling forces us to check our bodies at the door, requiring us to sit at a desk and raise our hands, focusing primarily on cognition to the exclusion of other ways of knowing. By the time we reach adulthood, ‘being in our bodies’ is a foreign concept and a source of discomfort for many of us.” (Lawrence, 2012, my emphasis) This is consistent with rhet-comp’s counter-discourse about the need to integrate personal voice, non-academic genres, etc. The specific notion of “embodied writing” or “embodied reading” articulated by Hindman (2003) is one part of the required reading for my grad students. However, I’m after a broader understanding of “embodied knowing” which is not limited to pedagogical purposes. For purposes of inclusion, a legal definition seems useful: “Information our bodies know and use without conscious thought. Executed as routines, habits, and tasks. Also known as Instinctive Knowledge.” [Black's Law Dictionary] That sense of acts we perform without being conscious of them reinforces Edward Hall’s view that culture is “largely invisible”; Raymond Williams’ concept of culture as “everyday,” and Geertz’ view of culture as patterns that repeat themselves.4 Expressive culture (communicative action) is thus embodied: not only in human bodies, but in cultural artifacts, institutional bodies, embodied expressions such as dance, martial arts, staging and performance, worship, etc. Specifically in a classroom context, there is plenty of work, especially by feminists, on embodied learning as “the learning that can take place only through transactions with literal others in authentic communities of inquiry” (Emig 2001: 273). This begs the question of what constitutes “authentic” communities of inquiry. Can they be on-line? Emig argues: “The embodied classroom is a place to learn tolerance while coping with the shock of diverse and alien opinions tightly held, eloquently defended, and to attend to the other who will not go away with the press of a button, who stays relentlessly, inescapably, there” (279). There may be arguments about that. But the case for the importance of human bodies in learning is persuasive. This way of thinking about embodied knowing as transferable only through (or primarily through) direct human contact is at the root of Vygotsky’s concept of the “zone of proximal development” (Artemeva, 40-43). In common-sense terms, the notion that knowledge is embodied, in ways that can never be entirely rational, or entirely objective, has deep roots, and wide dissemination. One could start with Bob Marley, who in his song “Running Away” repeats the following as a refrain: “who feels it knows it”… One academic translation of this aphorism is Raymond Williams’ work with the notion of “structures of feeling” (1977). Or one can dig deeper. Blaise Pascal famously opined that “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of... We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart." That this has been reproduced on posters for decades does not reduce its truthfulness. Pascal originated the notion of a “god-shaped hole” (Rushdie 1990: 26). There is a thought-provoking body of scholarship about religious practice, or spirituality, as embodied forms of knowledge (Barsalou et al, 2005; Mellor, 2010). I am persuaded by Susan Babbit’s claim (2014) that “disembodied reason, not religion, should be the target of secularists promoting freedom of enquiry and human community.” My argument against disembodied writing has sanction in many disciplines. In The View from Nowhere (1986), Thomas Nagel distinguishes between “material objectivity,” and “mental objectivity.” But material objectivity (empiricism) is culturally constructed, as Kuhn showed (1962). For Nagel, material objectivity was “centerless”—i.e. disembodied knowledge, the view from nowhere. By contrast, mental objectivity is centered: embodied. Nagel offered a framework for seeing the two forms of knowledge as complementary. To balance the theories of would-be empiricism, we need positioned, centered, embodied perspectives. This is a way “to move us beyond our individual subjectivity” (Avramides, 231), as well as move us beyond the pretence of the scientific method, or theory, as a superior knowledge. To exclude embodied knowledge and personal experience is to be “false” to true empiricism, Geertz argued (Olson 1991). My teaching and writing about embodied expression draws on ethnographic approaches arguing that a) students are treated like colonial subjects, and b) by excluding lived experience and embodied knowledge, the academy marginalizes those whose talents and culturally embodied knowledge it most needs. Those of us who draw on other, embodied cultures (what Burke called “paralogics rhetorics”) cannot excise them without betraying our culture.5 In a larger sense, many of us are tired of living in "the little closet between our ears."6 I encourage student writers to find ways to get outside their head, and reconnect with their embodied knowing, whether located in the physical body, culturally embodied traditions, etc. Students will do ethnographic research in their own classes, and report on how embodied learning might best be conducted, or actualized. I hope to put rhet-comp’s work on embodied writing and reading into dialogue with wider discourses about embodied knowledge. For example, Ignatow argues that social theory has been “out of step” with the “bodily turn” in several disciplines. Parallel to similar arguments in rhetcomp, this constitutes a critique of “disembodied and enotion-free information” (116). Embodied expression provides a starting point, theoretically sophisticated and rich in practice, to move beyond disembodiment in academic research, writing, and knowledge production. ENDNOTES 1). The allusion is to Ralph Ellison, “A Very Stern Discipline.” First published in Harper’s (March 1967); reprinted in Callahan, ed., Collected Essays (1995): 726-54. Like Kenneth Burke, Ellison never finished a university degree. Yet both were members of a generation who brought lived (embodied) experience, and independent research, into influential forms of writing. In short, it is not only specialized academic scholarship which submits to a “stern discipline.” 2). Psychotherapeutic uses: Gaye Abbot, “Embodied Writing: An Introduction to A Writer’s Guide to Transformative Writing”; Afrose Fatima Ahmed, “Dancing on the Page: Moving into Embodied Writing”; Rosemary Anderson, “Seven Qualities of Embodied Writing”; Heather Dawson, “Expressive Arts Therapist”; L.L. Ellingson, “Embodied knowledge: writing researchers' bodies into qualitative health research,” Qual Health Res, 16(2) (Feb. 2006): 298-310. 3) There is considerable cross-over between Embodied Writing as a thereapeutic tool, and as a form of creative writing. In the latter category, see the MFA seminar in “Embodied Writing” taught by Rebekah Zhuraw at the University of Pennsylvania (Fall 2014); and a Facebook page for “Embodied Writing Retreats”: https://www.facebook.com/embodiedwriting 4).Culture is our matrix, an “invisible structure of life” (Reynolds & Valentine, Guide to CrossCultural Communication, 2011: xvii). As a constellation of “acquired habits” [Edward Hall in Understanding Cultural Differences (1990)], culture largely “exists outside the range of people’s conscious awareness, a ‘silent language’ that is usually conveyed unconsciously” (Edward Hall, in Cross-Cultural Communication, p. xix.). Clifford Geertz in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) writes that “cultures are distinguished by patterns that repeat themselves. These patterns can be noticed, studied, and explained.” Raymond Williams’ description of culture as “ordinary” and as a “whole way of life” is in: Raymond Williams, “Moving from High Culture to Ordinary Culture.” Originally published in N. McKenzie (ed.), Convictions (1958). 5). See especially comments by Carol Boyce Davies in Joseph A. Boone, ed., "Forum: The Inevitability of the Personal." PMLA 111 (October 1996): 1152-54. 6). As John Lee says in Writing From the Body. 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