Pain is socially structured through learned practices, not essentially private.
Evidence
Physical pain is of course the object of passion—but also of action. In Paul Valery’s Monsieur Teste we have a remarkable account of the attempts by an ailing subject to control his bodily pain mentally. This includes the use of metaphors. The most pervasive of these is the dark image of pain as a hostile alien thing within the body. Jean Starobinski points to the fact that Valery employs musical tropes, as when he writes that “Pain is due to the resistance of the consciousness to a local arrangement of the body.—A pain which we could consider clearly, and in some way circumscribe, would become sensation without suffering—and perhaps in this way we could succeed in knowing something directly about our deeper body—knowledge of the sort we find in music. Pain is a very musical thing, one can almost speak of it in terms of music. There are deep and high-pitched pains, andantes and furiosos, prolonged notes, fermatas and arpeggios, progressions—abrupt silences, etc… . ” Starobinski observes that here the musical metaphor is closely connected to a plan for control because “every metaphorization implies an interpretation, and every interpretation involves a distance between an interpreting power and an object interpreted—even if that object is an event taking place in ‘my body.’ … For Valery, ‘pain has no meaning,’ hence its indefinitely interpretable nature.” … I offer, tentatively, a slightly different conclusion. Using musical metaphors (or indeed music itself ) to fix the body’s pain might be seen not exactly as giving meaning to brute experience but as a process of structuring that experience. I knew someone who found herself using numbers to anticipate and categorize her experience of pain. Although, unsurprisingly, severe pains were numbered higher, a less obvious structuration was also at work: only acute, irresolvable pains appeared as prime numbers. Furthermore, the numbering varied according to the social context she was in: prime numbers were more likely when she was alone. Such structuration doesn’t necessarily make pain “meaningful”; it is simply a way of engaging with it. So the conclusion I offer contrasts with Elaine Scarry’s position in her influential study The Body in Pain, according to which “the utter rigidity of pain itself” is universally reflected in the fact that “its resistance to language is not simply one of its incidental or accidental attributes but is essential to what it is.” For although musical or mathematical structuration (both of which have to be learned) may not constitute “language” in the ordinary sense, it problematizes the idea of pain-in-itself as necessarily a private, thought-destroying event. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 388
Categorization
- XREF: Counterpoint to the vaulted silence work—pain is experienced as parallel to sound/silence in being structured by learned cultural frames; relates to how suffering gets coded or refused meaning in the secular-modern frame. — connects to: Only collective practice, not individual therapy, can address socially-caused distress — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1947
- DEFINE: Asad redefines pain as a cultural/learned structuration rather than Scarry’s paradigm of private certainty—a definitional contrast with the secular reading of the body.
- QUESTION: The anecdote about prime numbers in private pain invites checking whether the structuration-as-engagement framing is general and testable or just illustrative.