In addition to two roundtable talks(!), I gave a panel presentation on pain in computers and composition and how we teach with and through pain at Computers and Writing 2019.
Access copy of the talk below.
The Pedagogical Value of Pain in Anatomies of Writing
Vyshali Manivannan, Pace University – Pleasantville
Computers & Writing, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI
“What does painless writing look like?” I’ve had fibromyalgia so long I genuinely don’t have an answer, but my students think it’s a trick question. They view writing as an unconditionally consensual marathon of physical strain. I get this. I preach self-care before and after but not during the labor of writing, when pain customarily surfaces, because we’re trained that intellectual labor has no physiological origin. Neoliberal academic culture and writing technologies promise pain relief and enhanced productivity by compelling conformity to a standardized ergonomic “neutral” posture that emphasizes neck flexion, finger placement, and self-discipline exemplified through protracted bodily stillness; however, pain mutates to occupy these setups too. Discomfort is a feature of scholarly writing we aren’t so easily rid of, and maybe we’re squandering our energy on expunging it when we should be accepting it and harnessing its affordances for corporeal and textual attunement.
This talk explores the links between “becoming-academic,” anatomies of computer writing, bodily literacies, and the pedagogical dimensions of writing-related pain. Academic culture is arguably characterized by the presence of a self-inflicted chronic pain that must be conquered as evidence of scholarly, writerly capability. This chronic pain is configured as either stigmatized disability identity or consequence of neoliberal productivity. Traditional academic disregard for bodily literacies and physiologies of composition paves the way for the pathologization of posture, ergonomic technology, and “able” disability, and we might begin to unsettle this through incorporating writing-related pain into the first-year writing curriculum.
Scarry describes physical pain, acute or chronic, as anterior and antithetical to language, unsharable, unavailable to sensory confirmation, and therefore always subject to doubt. Although pain is sometimes hidden from view, it may be created through language and biological, social, and cultural beliefs, and is thus always intersubjectively constructed and bioculturally understood. In Morris’ biocultural understanding, acute pain refers to transient, curable, or ameliorable aches or injuries of known origin, and chronic pain consists of pain that is so persistent it no longer signals danger. Where acute pain teaches avoidance of the offending stimuli, chronic pain syndromes instruct sufferers to rewire their beliefs about experiencing and responding to pain. Biocultural understandings of pain in a first-year writing classroom are shaped by all the positionalities and experiences present. They are also informed by the university’s lingering American Puritan ethos that prioritizes work-ready bodies and designates pain as a physical flaw and a moral failing. Pain isn’t the only reason that makes us aware of our bodies, but bodies must be noticed by writers when writing incites pain. Domesticating pain thus becomes an implicit part of the academic enterprise, which is detrimentally preoccupied with the disappearance of bodies, particularly non-normative ones. Endurance, however, is an embodied phenomenon; in academic culture, which valorizes Cartesian mind/body dualism, it must be framed as the consequence of nurturing the life of the mind.
From a fibromyalgic perspective, the constant experience of pain sometimes makes productive, traditionally painful activity, like typing, insurmountably painful, signaling an inadequate writer too yoked to her corporeal needs to commit to the immersive deep focus required of research. By contrast, the chronic pain of writing is configured as scholarly aptitude, stamped with the motif of triumph over the body, in keeping with the frontier mentality and Puritan ethos embedded in the American character. We are trained, and we train our students, that deadlines won’t wait. It’s common for students to fidget in their seats, shake out hand cramps, roll their heads on their necks with a grimace, and soldier on. I myself, despite the subject of this talk, buddy-taped my fingers, used a support harness, and alternated between a split gaming keyboard, a chiclet keyboard; horizontal, then vertical, then trackpoint mice; foam wedges; foam rollers; bolster pillows; an ergonomic chair. I had a deadline I was forcing my body to meet through multiple ergonomic devices that wouldn’t stop my pain so much as reduce it long enough to get the job done.
In the era of neoliberal self-responsibilization, academics are increasingly accountable for managing both their work output and pain, not least because deliberately, chronically self-inflicted discomfort is the provision of being-academic. Davies and Petersen define neoliberal self-responsibilization as a praxis of governance organized around the continual surveillance, auditing, and evaluation of performance, measured in timeliness, quantity, and quality of deliverables. In the managerial equation of becoming- or being-academic in the writing classroom, stoicism and resilience are integral. How we experience and respond to pain becomes a neoliberal performance metric, and writing-related pain, framed as acute despite its propensity to burgeon into chronicity, is calibrated in terms of personal responsibility and the pathologization of posture, and therefore preventable through ecologies that increase our stamina. As Hensley Owens and Ittersum observe, “the purchase of a discrete item, such as an ergonomic keyboard, presents a more straightforward choice for alleviating pain than a more open-ended somatic approach.” Ergonomic devices promise self-care and maximal productivity by eliminating writing-related pain for longer stretches of time.
Writing bodies become depathologized when they occupy the ergonomic “neutral” or “natural” position, which presumes an ideal subject who can comply. Ergonomic accessories that exist in support of achieving this “neutral” posture posit a false equivalence between output and time spent sitting still and typing. Put differently, the longer you embody neutral typing posture, the less discomfort you allegedly experience and the more words you consequently produce, transforming the onset of pain into a sign of excess productivity. Writing-related pain offers visible proof of what Mitchell calls “able”-disability, where impaired bodies are supplemented to complete or transcend their limits to stave off pathologization. In the corporatized university, we are tacitly encouraged to buy ergonomic devices to become ably disabled, to remain work-ready. Essentially, writing technologies trap our postures into an industry standard tailored to able bodies, compelling disabled and non-normative bodies to embrace neoliberal ableism. My thigh is internally rotated and I have a limited range of mobility in the neck and shoulders. I have students with rotator cuff injuries, tennis elbow, tendonitis in the thumb, post-concussion syndrome. We aren’t built for “neutral,” or for neoliberal regimes that value us by our ability to produce deliverables in disciplinary postures within specified timeframes. The implication of traditional pedagogies and tools, then, is we aren’t built to be writers.
Attending to posture, movement, and interoception, or interior somatic processes, through pain-related contemplative practices unsettles the ubiquity of these technologies and the beneficence of their purpose, and challenges the neoliberal regime of thought in academia. Somatic instruction founded on inward noticing, easily adapted to suit multiple forms of embodied activity, teaches us that the body not only creates knowledge but also informs our patterns of thinking and writing through potentially reflective pausing, fidgeting, and stretching, and through self-attuned composure in the face of interior distress. The disembodiment of writing and the compulsory ergonomic “neutral” directly impacts the modes of thinking available to us when we compose. Dumit suggests that fascia, an “organ of form” comprised of connective tissue that covers and contains our muscles and bones, is a kind of second brain that enables us to “think in our edges.” Fascia changes to accommodate and memorize our habitual movements but becomes denser and shorter through repetitive posture and motion, creating adhesions below skin and above muscle. “Thinking in our edges” occurs when we attend more closely to our interoceptive senses to ascertain the source of a given sensation, like discomfort, through “inner touch,” which Heller-Roazen describes as the sensory power by which we perceive we are perceiving, by which we grasp our interior and exterior boundaries simultaneously. At its simplest, inner touch activates when we touch two fingers together, and is linked to meditative practices that seek to cultivate inner awareness and outward attentiveness.
As a cultivation of myofascial awareness, then, inner touch is a way of unblocking the additional brain that can become “blocked” or inaccessible in the act of trapping us in our physical habits. Wenger suggests that contemplative practices like yoga that ground us in minor forms of discomfort, strain, and fascia awareness aid in creating pedagogies that take up the rhetorical primacy of the body and meaningful learning transfer. To extrapolate, pain as an epistemic origin—that is, attending to interoceptive states in a discomfort-based meditative practice—becomes a physical analogy for the tactics of academic argument by teaching students to, literally, dwell in and navigate discomfort and cultivate external and interior equanimity. Poses like tree pose or warrior pose, which Wenger describes bringing to her classroom, are balancing acts that require intense inward focus and concentration. Disabled, untrained, injured, or non-normative bodies might have difficulty performing unfamiliar physical contortions, so I adopt more accessible contemplative practices like mudras or acupressure massage of the hand-valley point. These activities can be performed seated in any chair, or seated cross-legged as in traditional meditation, or while standing. Mudras consist of finger-to-finger touches believed to redirect flows of energy throughout the body, held and adjusted for a minimum of ten to fifteen minutes, during which the body senses itself through its fleshy tactility, remaking perception of the body’s exteriority and interceptive processes, and grounding our thinking. Where the neoliberal ableism imbricated in ergonomic devices additionally benefits academic culture by discouraging the writing body from coming into contact with itself, mudras transform the hands into sensory keyboards by establishing a corporeal circuit between connected fingers. As with yoga, this meditative practice tolerates and accommodates biomechanical idiosyncrasies; by contrast, ergonomic technologies reject notions of “functioning freely” and with more self-awareness in favor of functioning longer with increased output and market value.
Mudras interrupt the neoliberal-ableist “neutral” posture and academia’s neutralization of embodiment because they do not seek cure; instead, they accept discomfort as a part of life, and therefore also serve as a useful departure point for engaging in academic argument. A classroom repertoire of mudras might include gyan, which reduces tension and depression; vayu, which controls restlessness; prana, which energizes the body; and rudra, which increases willpower and energy. It’s impossible to hold these positions for ten minutes without making minor postural adjustments, without sending mind and breath to the places where inner touch is activated, without experiencing those points of contact as the entire body, distilled. Beginning classes with this practice, employing it during established writing breaks, or asking students to perform a mudra of their choosing during class discussion promotes “bodymindful” writing that accounts for the ways in which the body and mind make meaning as a single entity.
Acupressure during the physical labor of writing similarly accepts that discomfort is unpreventable and that the discomfort of sensing discomfort can yield self-aware relief. The hand-valley point, in the web of flesh between the forefinger and thumb, is easy to locate and to manipulate with varying degrees of pressure and supposedly relieves stress and tension; it’s also a physical area prone to myofascial tightness from habitual writing and typing postures. Acupressure of this point generates inward attention and highlights the mutability of discomfort as massage modifies and shapes it anew. Inner touch revolves around the fleshy textures of the body’s interiority, the contour of the finger bones, the twitch or crunch of a muscle letting go. This is the corporeal shape of the struggle and labor of writing. Where ergonomic technology facilitates an embodied performance that complies with the academy’s neoliberal leanings, somatic techniques such as these inflect disciplinary structures at the crossroads of technologies of domination, techniques of the self, and the subject’s agency within structures of coercion, returning agency, individuality, and the possibility of non-normative embodiment to writers.
Fleckenstein, Hensley Owens and Ittersum, Rifenburg, and others have observed that students cannot fully benefit from literacy acquisition if the practice itself erases and damages their bodies. There’s a whole hidden curriculum we ignore about pain when we don’t teach our students or ourselves to attend to how to be while writing. As long as we ignore uncomfortable movement-based and tactile practices of writing, we fail to treat pain as a complex feature of the writing ecology that could, if framed appropriately, transcend neoliberal academic practices.
Works Cited
Davies, B. & Petersen, E. B. (2005). Neoliberal discourse in the academy: The forestalling of (collective) resistance. Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences, 2(2), 77-98.
Dumit, J., & O’Connor, K. (2016). Sciences and senses of fascia: A practice as research investigation. In L. Hunter, E. Krimmer, & P. Lichtenfels (Eds.), Sentient performativities of embodiment: Thinking alongside the human (pp. 35-54). Lexington Books.
Fleckenstein, K. (1999). Writing bodies: Somatic mind in composition studies. College English, 61(3), 281-306.
Heller-Roazen, D. (2007). The inner touch: Archaeology of a sensation. Zone Books.
Hensley Owens, K. & Ittersum, D. (2013). Writing with(out) pain: Computing injuries and the role of the body in writing activity. Computers and Composition, 30(2), 87-100.
Morris, D. (1991). The culture of pain. University of California Press.
Rifenburg, J. M. The embodied playbook: Writing practices of student-athletes. Utah State University Press.
Scarry, E. (1985). The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world. Oxford University Press.
Wenger, C. (2015). Yoga minds, writing Bodies: Contemplative writing pedagogy. WAC Clearinghouse.
