Invisible Internal Geography
Today I learned about pain and diagnosis.
"The Body in Pain: The making and unmaking of the world," by Elaine Scarry, 1985.
The difficulty of expressing pain, especially physical pain, to others leads to questions about the nature of material and verbal expressibility, or, the nature of human creativity.
This means that physical pain and human creativity are related.
Physical pain usually has no voice, but when it finds a voice it begins to tell a story. This story is related to expressibility and creativity.
Listening to a description of another's physical pain is entering into an invisible geography of another's body. According to Scarry, this description of pain has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth.
Pain could be inches away from us, but unknown to us if it's in another's body.
Pain cannot NOT be grasped if it's in your own body, that is, you can't ignore it. But there is an astonishing freedom to deny the existence of other's pain. Deriving from this, then, having pain means having certainty, and hearing about pain means having doubt.
Pain is resistant to language, and destroys language because it brings about a state anterior to language, one of sounds and cries.
Of this reading I am most interested in the ideas of 1) an invisible internal geography, and 2) the possibility for a proximity of pain that can never be known. The distance between what others feel and what we sense is far, even if they are in the same geographical place. This second one, then, questions the homogenaity of geographical place, and even the connections between subjects and objects that make a place like a thick web. Pain is an example that not everything can be connected in a place - that some things lie invisible, internal, yet have their own geography in the body-prison of expression.
This begs a general question about diagnosis, and a specific one: how did Kellogg diagnose patients in the sanitarium? He went inside, requiring geographical knowledge of the invisible. His method of diagnosis was to make the invisible quantifiable and measurable.
"The Body in Pain: The making and unmaking of the world," by Elaine Scarry, 1985.
The difficulty of expressing pain, especially physical pain, to others leads to questions about the nature of material and verbal expressibility, or, the nature of human creativity.
This means that physical pain and human creativity are related.
Physical pain usually has no voice, but when it finds a voice it begins to tell a story. This story is related to expressibility and creativity.
Listening to a description of another's physical pain is entering into an invisible geography of another's body. According to Scarry, this description of pain has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth.
Pain could be inches away from us, but unknown to us if it's in another's body.
Pain cannot NOT be grasped if it's in your own body, that is, you can't ignore it. But there is an astonishing freedom to deny the existence of other's pain. Deriving from this, then, having pain means having certainty, and hearing about pain means having doubt.
Pain is resistant to language, and destroys language because it brings about a state anterior to language, one of sounds and cries.
Of this reading I am most interested in the ideas of 1) an invisible internal geography, and 2) the possibility for a proximity of pain that can never be known. The distance between what others feel and what we sense is far, even if they are in the same geographical place. This second one, then, questions the homogenaity of geographical place, and even the connections between subjects and objects that make a place like a thick web. Pain is an example that not everything can be connected in a place - that some things lie invisible, internal, yet have their own geography in the body-prison of expression.
This begs a general question about diagnosis, and a specific one: how did Kellogg diagnose patients in the sanitarium? He went inside, requiring geographical knowledge of the invisible. His method of diagnosis was to make the invisible quantifiable and measurable.
posted by Nick at
2:03 PM
1 Comments:
This is great:
"Pain is an example that not everything can be connected in a place - that some things lie invisible, internal, yet have their own geography in the body-prison of expression."
Really fascinating thought.
By
Timur, at 6:56 PM
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