Lately, I’ve been thinking about embodied, situated knowledge. What does it really mean? How do I explain it? How do I relate it to the information literacy instruction sessions I am accumulating on my docket for the upcoming fall semester?
I have bits and pieces, here and there. Arranging and rearranging them in order to form a coherent picture is the task before me at the moment.
The body is not an oracle. Anger can be wrong. Anxiety can lie. Comfort can lie, too. But the body is an instrument, and instruments require practice. How else are you going to learn your range? We have to. Not just range. The distortions, the particular sensitivities of the instrument. We have to become capable of distinguishing the alarm that says fire from the alarm that says you have never been here before.
That is interiority. Not endlessly monitoring ourselves for symptoms. Developing the capacity to interpret what we feel. Is this injury? Overload? Fear? Resistance? Contradiction? Generative friction? What is my body perceiving, and what else do I need to know before I decide what it means?
Of course, not all discomfort is growth. Let’s not be stupid about this. People are not obligated to remain where they are being harmed just because someone else has decided their suffering is educational.
My point is not all discomfort is harm either.
When every difficult feeling becomes a symptom to manage, to eradicate, we sever ourselves from forms of knowledge that lead beyond themselves—toward other bodies of knowledge, other people, other relations, others. Worse, we relocate authority over that knowledge somewhere else—the clinician, the analyst, the self-help influencer, the wellness inventory, the institution offering a breathing exercise instead of asking what conditions produced the distress in the first place.
Yes, you are hurting. Here is how to regulate yourself.
That is not always care. Sometimes it’s dispossession.
The capacity to sense danger, contradiction, relation, possibility, and the approach of a threshold is a kind of wealth. It is accumulated in bodies, histories, cultures, and communities. It does not become knowledge only after someone cleans it up, translates it into approved language, and carries it into recognition and legitimacy.
The body brings knowledge. It is always telling us something.
We should learn to read it before somebody wipes it clean and calls that health.
Leave a Reply