The body in pain: the making and unmaking of the world

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTER_PAGE: 3

NOTER_PAGE: 7

INTRODUCTION

NOTER_PAGE: 11

three different subjects: first, the difficulty of expressing physical pain; second, the political and perceptual complications that arise as a result of that difficulty; and third, the nature of both material and verbal expressibility or, more simply, the nature of human creation.

NOTER_PAGE: (11 0.3755868544600939 . 0.2838983050847458)

The Inexpressibility of Physical Pain

NOTER_PAGE: (11 0.7310529845741113 . 0.2775423728813559)

Vaguely alarming yet unreal, laden with consequence yet evaporating before the mind because not available to sensory confirmation, unseeable classes of objects such as subterranean plates, Seyfert galaxies, and the pains occurring in other people's bodies flicker before the mind, then disappear.

NOTER_PAGE: (12 0.1482226693494299 . 0.13241525423728814)

Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language.

NOTER_PAGE: (12 0.7028839704896043 . 0.1461864406779661)

The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her, but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry."

NOTER_PAGE: (12 0.7645875251509054 . 0.18220338983050846)

maybe this is part of what makes Schmidt's sting pain index so interesting

physical pain—unlike any other state of consciousness—has no referential content. It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language.

NOTER_PAGE: (13 0.832102081934184 . 0.559322033898305)

individuals who have themselves been in great pain

NOTER_PAGE: (14 0.3192488262910798 . 0.3379237288135593)

to be present when a person moves up out of that pre-language and projects the facts of sentience into speech is almost to have been permitted to be present at the birth of language itself.

NOTER_PAGE: (14 0.4788732394366197 . 0.16101694915254236)

after gathering the apparently random words most often spoken by patients, began to arrange those words into coherent groups

NOTER_PAGE: (15 0.7176391683433937 . 0.4300847457627119)

that language must at once be characterized by the greatest possible tact (for the most intimate realm of another human being's body is the implicit or explicit subject) and by the greatest possible immediacy (for the most, crucial fact about pain is its presentness and the most crucial fact about torture is that it is happening).

NOTER_PAGE: (17 0.5050301810865191 . 0.3644067796610169)

The Political Consequences of Pain's Inexpressibility

NOTER_PAGE: (19 0.8417169684775319 . 0.1705508474576271)

How intricately the problem of pain is bound up with the problem of power

NOTER_PAGE: (19 0.9242119382964453 . 0.7436440677966102)

"How is it that one person can be in the presence of another person in pain and not know it—not know it to the point where he himself inflicts it, and goes on inflicting it?"

NOTER_PAGE: (20 0.26291079812206575 . 0.21927966101694915)

Thus, for example, torture comes to be described—not only by regimes that torture but sometimes by people who stand outside those regimes—as a form of information-gathering or (in its even more remarkable formulation) intelligence-gathering;

NOTER_PAGE: (20 0.7458081824279007 . 0.11228813559322035)

these verbal strategies revolve around the verbal sign of the weapon or what will eventually be called here the language of "agency."

NOTER_PAGE: (21 0.323943661971831 . 0.1896186440677966)

one of the central tasks of civilization is to stabilize this most elementary sign.

NOTER_PAGE: (21 0.5848423876592891 . 0.649364406779661)

there reappear again and again (regardless of whether the immediate context of the vocalization is medical or literary or legal) two and only two metaphors, and they are metaphors whose inner workings are very problematic. The first specifies an external agent of the pain, a weapon that is pictured as producing the pain; and the second specifies bodily damage that is pictured as accompanying the pain.

NOTER_PAGE: (23 0.28437290409121396 . 0.1832627118644068)

externalize, objectify, and make sharable what is originally an interior and unsharable experience.

NOTER_PAGE: (24 0.10663983903420522 . 0.3199152542372881)

though the phrase "language of agency" refers primarily to the image of the weapon, its meaning also extends to the image of the wound.

NOTER_PAGE: (24 0.28303152246814217 . 0.503177966101695)

the particular perceptual confusion sponsored by the language of agency is the conflation of pain with power.

NOTER_PAGE: (26 0.505700871898055 . 0.5413135593220338)

The Nature of Human Creation

NOTER_PAGE: (27 0.386317907444668 . 0.3029661016949153)

PART ONE: UNMAKING

NOTER_PAGE: 33

1 THE STRUCTURE OF TORTURE

NOTER_PAGE: 35

What assists the conversion of absolute pain into the fiction of absolute power is an obsessive, self-conscious display of agency.

NOTER_PAGE: (35 0.6539235412474849 . 0.1408898305084746)

being made to stare at the weapon with which they were about to be hurt:

NOTER_PAGE: (35 0.7169684775318578 . 0.6377118644067796)

torture is a grotesque piece of compensatory drama.

NOTER_PAGE: (36 0.18779342723004694 . 0.2616525423728814)

Moral stupidity, then, here as in its less savage and obscene forms, has an unconscious structure.

NOTER_PAGE: (36 0.2260228034875922 . 0.13241525423728814)

First, pain is inflicted

NOTER_PAGE: (36 0.28303152246814217 . 0.6408898305084746)

objectified, made visible to those outside the person's body.

NOTER_PAGE: (36 0.3259557344064386 . 0.4184322033898305)

objectified pain is denied as pain and read as power,

NOTER_PAGE: (36 0.34473507712944335 . 0.2701271186440678)

I. Pain and Interrogation

NOTER_PAGE: (36 0.4647887323943662 . 0.3463983050847458)

Few other moments of human speech so conflate the modes of the interrogatory, the declarative, the imperative, as well as the emphatic form of each of these three, the exclamatory. Each mode implies a radically different relation of speaker to listener,

NOTER_PAGE: (37 0.10462776659959758 . 0.3050847457627119)

For the torturers, the sheer and simple fact of human agony is made invisible, and the moral fact of inflicting that agony is made neutral by the feigned urgency and significance of the question. For the prisoner, the sheer, simple, overwhelming fact of his agony will make neutral and invisible the significance of any question as well as the significance of the world to which the question refers.

NOTER_PAGE: (37 0.6063044936284373 . 0.4565677966101695)

while the content of the prisoner's answer is only sometimes important to the regime, the form of the answer, the fact of his answering, is always crucial.

NOTER_PAGE: (37 0.7464788732394366 . 0.7415254237288136)

a covert disdain for confession.

NOTER_PAGE: (37 0.823608316566063 . 0.4766949152542373)

overwhelming discrepancy between an increasingly palpable body and an increasingly substanceless world, a discrepancy that makes all the lesser discrepancies we normally identify as "ironic" seem as remote and full of dissolution as the world to which they belong.

NOTER_PAGE: (38 0.7867203219315895 . 0.2913135593220339)

Whenever death can be designated as "soon" the dying has already begun.

NOTER_PAGE: (39 0.46277665995975853 . 0.4735169491525424)

As the body breaks down, it becomes increasingly the object of attention, usurping the place of all other objects,

NOTER_PAGE: (40 0.8846411804158283 . 0.22351694915254236)

observed by Karl Marx, "There is only one antidote to mental suffering, and that is physical pain,"

NOTER_PAGE: (41 0.7063172043010754 . 0.2923728813559322)

"The question" is mistakenly understood to be "the motive"; "the answer" is mistakenly understood to be "the betrayal." The first mistake credits the torturer, providing him with a justification, his cruelty with an explanation. The second discredits the prisoner, making him rather than the torturer, his voice rather than his pain, the cause of his loss of self and world. These two misinterpretations are obviously neither accidental nor unrelated. The one is an absolution of responsibility; the other is a conferring of responsibility; the two together turn the moral reality of torture upside down.

NOTER_PAGE: (43 0.6036217303822937 . 0.2944915254237288)

as soon as the focus of attention shifts to the verbal aspect of torture, those lines have begun to waver and change their shape in the direction of accommodating and crediting the torturers.

NOTER_PAGE: (43 0.8457411133467472 . 0.19915254237288135)

That not only the torturers but the world at large should tend to identify the confession as a "betrayal" makes very overt the fact that his absence of world earns the person in pain not compassion but contempt. This phenomenon in which the claims of pain are eclipsed by the very loss of world it has brought about is a crucial step in the overall process of perception that allows one person's physical pain to be understood as another person's power.

NOTER_PAGE: (45 0.4057679409792086 . 0.2574152542372881)

2 THE STRUCTURE OF WAR

NOTER_PAGE: 68

like ancients hesitant to permit analogies to God, our instincts salute the incommensurability of pain by preventing its entry into worldly discourse.

NOTER_PAGE: (68 0.49631120053655264 . 0.7425847457627118)

There is no ad vantage to settling an international dispute by means of war rather than by a song contest or a chess game except that in the moment when the contestants step out of the song contest, it is immediately apparent that the outcome was arrived at by a series of rules that were agreed to and that can now be disagreed to,

NOTER_PAGE: (70 0.3628437290409121 . 0.1228813559322034)

the winning issue or ideology achieves for a time the force and status of material "fact" by the sheer material weight of the multitudes of damaged and opened human bodies.

NOTER_PAGE: (70 0.5647216633132126 . 0.6822033898305084)

I. War Is Injuring

NOTER_PAGE: (71 0.8658618376928235 . 0.3940677966101695)

In battle, for example, the soldier's primary goal is not, as is so often wrongly implied, the protection or "defense" of his comrades (if it were this, he would have led those comrades to another geography): his primary purpose is the injuring of enemy soldiers;

NOTER_PAGE: (73 0.8034875922199866 . 0.5)

I don't buy this argument at all

the ease with which human powers of description break down in the presence of battle, the speed with which they back away from injuring and begin to take as their subject the most incidental or remote activities

NOTER_PAGE: (74 0.20321931589537223 . 0.2891949152542373)

The enumeration of the paths by which injuring disappears from view only begins with the one already named here: omission.

NOTER_PAGE: (74 0.28504359490274983 . 0.22033898305084745)

those weapons should have names (e.g., anti-missile missile) and be consistently described in such a way that their only target, or only intended target, or only immediate target, appears to be another weapon: that their effect is to "disarm" rather than to injure.

NOTER_PAGE: (76 0.2870556673373575 . 0.5423728813559322)

II. War Is a Contest

NOTER_PAGE: (89 0.8611670020120724 . 0.3802966101694915)

III. What Differentiates Injuring from Other Acts or Attributes on Which a Contest Can Be Based

NOTER_PAGE: (99 0.3796109993293092 . 0.17690677966101695)

It is national rather than individual consciousness that is at stake and that (in one case certainly and probably to a large degree in both cases) must over the course of events become altered, and cannot be altered by proxy,

NOTER_PAGE: (100 0.4782025486250838 . 0.10699152542372882)

In the course of war at least one side must undergo a perceptual reversal (what Paul Kecskemeti calls a "political reorientation"73) in which claims or issues or elements of self-understanding that had previously seemed integral and es sential to national identity will gradually come to seem dispensable or alterable,

NOTER_PAGE: (100 0.5814889336016097 . 0.1281779661016949)

the capacity to injure, or as it is more typically phrased, the presence of an armed forces, is also integral to an internationally shared conception of 4 'sovereignty" and "nationhood."

NOTER_PAGE: (103 0.20925553319919515 . 0.1652542372881356)

a military contest differs from other contests in that its outcome carries the power of its own enforcement; the winner may enact its issues because the loser does not have the power to reinitiate the battle, does not have the option further to contest the issues

NOTER_PAGE: (104 0.505700871898055 . 0.5434322033898306)

actual war is often far removed from the pure concept postulated by theory.

NOTER_PAGE: (105 0.6060402684563758 . 0.1292372881355932)

The defeat of the United States by North Vietnam did not entail the loser's inability to continue

NOTER_PAGE: (106 0.48088531187122735 . 0.3961864406779661)

refusal to indulge or even to acknowledge the notion that it is dangerous, absurd, or even odd to include West Germany in the program for European economic recovery.

NOTER_PAGE: (107 0.22334004024144868 . 0.6440677966101694)

Rather than locating the image of its own victory in the impotence of its former opponent, or even basing its postwar confidence in its economic superiority to that opponent, a plan is being brought about to encourage the full recovery of the opponent's strength and, even more startlingly; its already existing strength is with open admiration pointed to as a source of assurance that the plan will be for all participants a success.

NOTER_PAGE: (107 0.5419181757209927 . 0.4830508474576271)

even if there have been historical moments in which war carries the power of its own enforcement, it is not essential to its structure that it do so.

NOTER_PAGE: (107 0.6867873910127431 . 0.6949152542372882)

not only do wars not include genocide (with few historical exceptions), but the approximation of this act (when it has occurred) has been perceived to be outside war and in the realm of atrocity.

NOTER_PAGE: (108 0.721663313212609 . 0.20233050847457626)

In war as in peace, the seductiveness of physical and political power is in nothing so apparent as in its ability to oblige observers to redescribe it as a moral superiority.

NOTER_PAGE: (113 0.7236753856472166 . 0.5222457627118644)

The outcome of war endures long beyond the temporal moment and is translated into the disposition of issues because it is believed to and hence al lowed to carry the power of its own enforcement.

NOTER_PAGE: (116 0.4828744123572868 . 0.3082627118644068)

IV. The End of War: The Laying Edge to Edge of Injured Bodies and Unanchored issues

NOTER_PAGE: (116 0.8609805238415044 . 0.2044491525423729)

long after all other cultural habits (language, narratives, celebrations of festival days) have been lost or disowned, culturally stipulated expressions of physical pain remain

NOTER_PAGE: (117 0.7048960429242119 . 0.5466101694915254)

It is precisely because political learning is, even in peacetime, deeply embodied that the alteration of the political configuration of a country, continent, or hemisphere so often appears to require the alteration of human bodies through war.

NOTER_PAGE: (120 0.20590207914151576 . 0.375)

the damage does not objectify or specify who was the winner and who was the loser but only that there was a war,

NOTER_PAGE: (122 0.4279007377598927 . 0.1461864406779661)

Thus a Southern boy who may have believed himself to be risking and inflicting wounds for a feudal system of agriculture, and until the end of the war will have suffered much hardship and finally death for those beliefs, will once the war is over have died in substantiation of the disappearance of that feudal system and the racial inequality on which it depended.

NOTER_PAGE: (125 0.1651006711409396 . 0.19809322033898305)

V. Torture and War: A Difference Between Them

NOTER_PAGE: (147 0.4460093896713615 . 0.2065677966101695)

it is always the most powerful country that is "peace loving"; the disposition of issues and boundaries perpetuated by the reigning peace over whelmingly favor that country.

NOTER_PAGE: (149 0.5063715627095908 . 0.24364406779661016)

PART TWO: MAKING

NOTER_PAGE: 167

3 PAIN AND IMAGINING

NOTER_PAGE: 169

The only state that is as anomalous as pain is the imagination. While pain is a state remarkable for being wholly without objects, the imagination is remarkable for being the only state that is wholly its objects.

NOTER_PAGE: (170 0.48490945674044267 . 0.13241525423728814)

pain and imagining are the "framing events" within whose boundaries all other perceptual, somatic, and emotional events occur; thus, between the two extremes can be mapped the whole terrain of the human psyche.

NOTER_PAGE: (173 0.10596914822266934 . 0.2807203389830508)

there is one piece of language used—in many different languages—at once as a near synonym for pain, and as a near synonym for created object; and that is the word "work."

NOTER_PAGE: (177 0.5647216633132126 . 0.611228813559322)

4 THE STRUCTURE OF BELIEF ANDITS MODULATION INTOMATERIAL MAKING

NOTER_PAGE: 189

5 THE INTERIOR STRUCTURE OFTHE ARTIFACT

NOTER_PAGE: 286

NOTES

NOTER_PAGE: 335

INDEX

NOTER_PAGE: 381

Notes that link to this note

About

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

three different subjects: first, the difficulty of expressing physical pain; second, the political and perceptual complications that arise as a result of that difficulty; and third, the nature of both material and verbal expressibility or, more simply, the nature of human creation.

The Inexpressibility of Physical Pain

Vaguely alarming yet unreal, laden with consequence yet evaporating before the mind because not available to sensory confirmation, unseeable classes of objects such as subterranean plates, Seyfert galaxies, and the pains occurring in other people's bodies flicker before the mind, then disappear.

Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language.

The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her, but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry."

physical pain—unlike any other state of consciousness—has no referential content. It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language.

individuals who have themselves been in great pain

to be present when a person moves up out of that pre-language and projects the facts of sentience into speech is almost to have been permitted to be present at the birth of language itself.

after gathering the apparently random words most often spoken by patients, began to arrange those words into coherent groups

The Political Consequences of Pain's Inexpressibility

How intricately the problem of pain is bound up with the problem of power

"How is it that one person can be in the presence of another person in pain and not know it—not know it to the point where he himself inflicts it, and goes on inflicting it?"

Thus, for example, torture comes to be described—not only by regimes that torture but sometimes by people who stand outside those regimes—as a form of information-gathering or (in its even more remarkable formulation) intelligence-gathering;

these verbal strategies revolve around the verbal sign of the weapon or what will eventually be called here the language of "agency."

one of the central tasks of civilization is to stabilize this most elementary sign.

externalize, objectify, and make sharable what is originally an interior and unsharable experience.

though the phrase "language of agency" refers primarily to the image of the weapon, its meaning also extends to the image of the wound.

the particular perceptual confusion sponsored by the language of agency is the conflation of pain with power.

The Nature of Human Creation

PART ONE: UNMAKING

1 THE STRUCTURE OF TORTURE

What assists the conversion of absolute pain into the fiction of absolute power is an obsessive, self-conscious display of agency.

being made to stare at the weapon with which they were about to be hurt:

torture is a grotesque piece of compensatory drama.

Moral stupidity, then, here as in its less savage and obscene forms, has an unconscious structure.

First, pain is inflicted

objectified, made visible to those outside the person's body.

objectified pain is denied as pain and read as power,

I. Pain and Interrogation

Few other moments of human speech so conflate the modes of the interrogatory, the declarative, the imperative, as well as the emphatic form of each of these three, the exclamatory. Each mode implies a radically different relation of speaker to listener,

while the content of the prisoner's answer is only sometimes important to the regime, the form of the answer, the fact of his answering, is always crucial.

a covert disdain for confession.

overwhelming discrepancy between an increasingly palpable body and an increasingly substanceless world, a discrepancy that makes all the lesser discrepancies we normally identify as "ironic" seem as remote and full of dissolution as the world to which they belong.

Whenever death can be designated as "soon" the dying has already begun.

As the body breaks down, it becomes increasingly the object of attention, usurping the place of all other objects,

observed by Karl Marx, "There is only one antidote to mental suffering, and that is physical pain,"

as soon as the focus of attention shifts to the verbal aspect of torture, those lines have begun to waver and change their shape in the direction of accommodating and crediting the torturers.

2 THE STRUCTURE OF WAR

like ancients hesitant to permit analogies to God, our instincts salute the incommensurability of pain by preventing its entry into worldly discourse.

the winning issue or ideology achieves for a time the force and status of material "fact" by the sheer material weight of the multitudes of damaged and opened human bodies.

I. War Is Injuring

In battle, for example, the soldier's primary goal is not, as is so often wrongly implied, the protection or "defense" of his comrades (if it were this, he would have led those comrades to another geography): his primary purpose is the injuring of enemy soldiers;

the ease with which human powers of description break down in the presence of battle, the speed with which they back away from injuring and begin to take as their subject the most incidental or remote activities

The enumeration of the paths by which injuring disappears from view only begins with the one already named here: omission.

those weapons should have names (e.g., anti-missile missile) and be consistently described in such a way that their only target, or only intended target, or only immediate target, appears to be another weapon: that their effect is to "disarm" rather than to injure.

II. War Is a Contest

III. What Differentiates Injuring from Other Acts or Attributes on Which a Contest Can Be Based

It is national rather than individual consciousness that is at stake and that (in one case certainly and probably to a large degree in both cases) must over the course of events become altered, and cannot be altered by proxy,

the capacity to injure, or as it is more typically phrased, the presence of an armed forces, is also integral to an internationally shared conception of 4 'sovereignty" and "nationhood."

a military contest differs from other contests in that its outcome carries the power of its own enforcement; the winner may enact its issues because the loser does not have the power to reinitiate the battle, does not have the option further to contest the issues

actual war is often far removed from the pure concept postulated by theory.

The defeat of the United States by North Vietnam did not entail the loser's inability to continue

refusal to indulge or even to acknowledge the notion that it is dangerous, absurd, or even odd to include West Germany in the program for European economic recovery.

even if there have been historical moments in which war carries the power of its own enforcement, it is not essential to its structure that it do so.

not only do wars not include genocide (with few historical exceptions), but the approximation of this act (when it has occurred) has been perceived to be outside war and in the realm of atrocity.

In war as in peace, the seductiveness of physical and political power is in nothing so apparent as in its ability to oblige observers to redescribe it as a moral superiority.

The outcome of war endures long beyond the temporal moment and is translated into the disposition of issues because it is believed to and hence al­ lowed to carry the power of its own enforcement.

IV. The End of War: The Laying Edge to Edge of Injured Bodies and Unanchored issues

long after all other cultural habits (language, narratives, celebrations of festival days) have been lost or disowned, culturally stipulated expressions of physical pain remain

It is precisely because political learning is, even in peacetime, deeply embodied that the alteration of the political configuration of a country, continent, or hemisphere so often appears to require the alteration of human bodies through war.

the damage does not objectify or specify who was the winner and who was the loser but only that there was a war,

V. Torture and War: A Difference Between Them

it is always the most powerful country that is "peace loving"; the disposition of issues and boundaries perpetuated by the reigning peace over­ whelmingly favor that country.

PART TWO: MAKING

3 PAIN AND IMAGINING

The only state that is as anomalous as pain is the imagination. While pain is a state remarkable for being wholly without objects, the imagination is remarkable for being the only state that is wholly its objects.

pain and imagining are the "framing events" within whose boundaries all other perceptual, somatic, and emotional events occur; thus, between the two extremes can be mapped the whole terrain of the human psyche.

there is one piece of language used—in many different languages—at once as a near synonym for pain, and as a near synonym for created object; and that is the word "work."

4 THE STRUCTURE OF BELIEF ANDITS MODULATION INTOMATERIAL MAKING

5 THE INTERIOR STRUCTURE OFTHE ARTIFACT

NOTES

INDEX

Notes that link to this note

The outcome of war endures long beyond the temporal moment and is translated into the disposition of issues because it is believed to and hence al lowed to carry the power of its own enforcement.

it is always the most powerful country that is "peace loving"; the disposition of issues and boundaries perpetuated by the reigning peace over whelmingly favor that country.