3.11.2006
The Body in Pain (History and Theory of the Body)
Title
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
The subject of this book "can...be divided into 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 both material and verbal expressibility or, more simply, the nature of human creation." (3) Pain resists language and "unlike any other state of consciousness - has no referential content." (5) Part of this results in the person having pain to be certain of her pain while the one who hears about pain is always in a state of doubt. Pain is always described by an "as if.." and must be projected outside of the body, analogized and referred outside of the body. As such, "the failure to express pain - whether the failure to objectify its attributes or instead the failure, once those attributes are objectified, to refer them to their original site in the human body - will always work to allow its appropriation and conflation with debased forms of power; conversely, the successful expression of pain will always work to expose and make impossible that appropriation and conflation." (14) The first chapter deals with torture, the use of ordinary objects as extensions of the body, these objects turned away from the mundane, comfortable to weapons. The pain of torture is world destroying, nothing is outside the body, and yet one longs to be outside the body - one loses touch with reality, and death is near - "physical pain always mimes death and the infliction of physical pain is always a mock execution...whenever death can be designated as 'soon' then dying has already begun." (31) In torture, "it is by the obessive mediation of agency that the prisoner's pain will be perverted into the fraudulent assertion of power, that the objectified pain is denied as pain and read as power." (45) Pain throughtorture divides the body against itself - "a pure experience of physical negation" (52) - but "in physical pain, then, suicide and murder converge, for one feels acted upon, annihilated, by inside and outside alike." (53) Scarry goes on in the next chapter to discuss the structure of war. In war, "the incontestable reality of the body - the body in pain, the body maimed, the body dead and hard to dispose of - is separated from its source and conferred on an ideology or issue or instance of political authority impatient of, or deserted by, benign sources of substantiation." (62) Injury is not the by-product of war - "Injury is the thing every exhausting piece of strategy and every single weapon is designed to bring into being: it is not something inadevertently produced on the way to producing something else but is the relentless object of all military activity." (73) "One goes into war and makes the injuries that will somehow be transformed into freedom." (76) "War is relentless in taking for its own interior content the interior content of the wounded and open human body."(81) Scarry asserts that war is seemingly no different that any other contest, except that maiming and killing is how one wins. It may seem that killing is neccessary because it is what determines the end of this contest, but in actuality, "the outcome of war endures long beyond the temporal moment and is translated into disposition of issues because it is believed to and hence allowed to carry the power of its own enforcement." (108) In the second half of the book Scarry goes on to argue about creation as a process of making and unmaking: "It will be clear that creation is not a unitary event but entails various temporal stages of a realization process, and that new problems arise at each successive stage; it will be creal that the moral and aesthetic value of a given creation does not just depend on the content of the fiction but on the nature of the substantiation used in its confirmation in the transitional period when it is between the states of having been already made-up and not yet made-real; and far, far bak in the most atavistic form of substantiation that entails the use of the injured body, it will become strikingly clear that the most fundamental relation between body and self turns on the question of whether a person used his own body in confirmation of a symbolic displacement of that body, or instead used the body of someone outside the benefits of the invented construct in the confirmation process." (150) She begins by working out the relationship between pain and imagining. "The only state that is as anomalous as pain is imagination. While pain is a state remarkable for being wholly without objects, the imagination is remarkable for being the only that is wholly its objects...While, then, pain is like other forms of sentience, the imagination is like other forms of the capacity of self-extension without the experienceable sentience on which it is ordinarilty premised." (162) Scarry then goes on to do a an extensive close reading of passages from the Bible and Marx in a linking of belief, imagination, pain / death and the making and unmaking of the world. "Together the two texts suggest that civilization's task of clarifying the structure of making is ongoing, for the very solution at one moment may become the site of difficulty at another: thus the material solution to the problem of belief itself becomes the problem in nineteenth-century industrialism, and so that site comes to require a new form of repair, as in the multiple strategies of distribution that have, since that time, begun to arise from both capitalism and socialist sources...[Marx and the Bible] are presented as companion texts because of what they together begin to make visible about the interior consistency in the structure of making and again in the structure of unmaking: in conjunction with the very different contexts looked at in earlier chapters, the parallels between them suggest that when the action of creating is occuring, it occurs (regardless of context) along a single path; and again, when its action fails or breaks down, that failure also occurs along a single path." (277) The final chapter is on the artifact and the making un-inanimate of external objects. "The made object os simply the made-locus across which the power of creation is magnified and redirected back onto its human agents who are now caught up in the cascade of self-revision they have themselves authored." (323)
Keywords
Externalize, Objectify, Agency, Language, Identification, Substantiation, Construction, Deconstruction, Metaphor, Analogy.
Other Thoughts
The thing I found most exciting and interesting about this book was the way that the most obvious of things (war is about killing) were teased out in the most delicate ways so that I was constantly like, Yes! Why don't people know this! But of course, because part of this is about the making and unmaking of the world through the inexpressibility and objectification of pain, yeah, well, there are reasons why we don't know this and Scarry tells us how those technologies of unmaking (deconstruction and construction) work. Good stuff. Hard to read but good stuff.
Again, though, I have to say, there was some weirdness about the flattening out of all war - Speaking on the defeat of France in Vietnam, the Battle of Algiers, Britain in the Suez, "Although all these may in turn be grouped together as an anomomalous category under the rubric of their won (such as 'colonial wars'), it may be that what occured there can be more accurately understood as a magnification of an ordinary outcome than as an exception." (98)
"The very temptation to invoke analogies to remote cosmologies...is itself a sign of pain's triumph, for it achieves its aversiveness in part by bringing about, even within the radius of several feet, this absolute split between one's sense of one's own reality and the reality of other persons." (4)
"That we ordinarily perceive it [pain] as empty of ethical content is, it will be argued, itself a signal to us of how faulty and fragmentary our understanding of creation is, not only in this respect by in many others. It is not the valorization of making but its accurate description that is crucial, for if it is in fact laden with ethical consequence, then it may be that a firm understanding of what it is will in turn enable us to recognize more quickly what is happening not only in large-scale emergencies like torture or war but in other long-standing dilemmas, such as the inequity of material distribution." (22)
"What is quite literally at stake in the body in pain is the making and unmaking of the world." (23)
"The person in great pain experiences his own body as the agent of his agony. The ceaseless, self-announcing signal of the body in pain, at once so empty and undifferentiated and so full of blaring adversity, contains not only the feeling 'my body hurts' but the feeling 'my body hurts me.'...If self-hatred, self-alienation, and self betrayal...were translated out of the psychological realm where it has content and is accessible to language into the unspeakable and contentless realm of physical sensation it would be intense pain." (47)
"For what the process of torture does is to split the human being into two, to make emphatic the ever present but, except in the etremity of sickness and death, only latent distinction between a self and body, between a 'me' and 'my body.' The 'self' or 'me,' which is experienced on the one hand as more private, more essentially at the center, and on the other hand as participating across the bridge of the body in the world, is 'embodied' in the voice, in language. The goal of the torturer is to make the one, the body, emphatically and crushingly present by destroying it, and to make the other, the voice, absent by destroying it. It is in part this combination that makes torture, like any experience of great physical pain, mimetic of death; for in death the body is emphatically present while that more elusive part represented by voice is so alarmingly absent that heavens are created to explain its whereabouts." (49)
"The body tends to be brought forward in its most extreme and absolute form only on behalf of a cultural artifact or symbolic fragment or made thing (a sentence) that is without any other basis in material reality: that is, it is only brought forward when there is a crisis of substantiation." (127)
"Capital. It is colossal. It is magnificent. And it is the capitalist's body. It is his body not because it has come into being through the solitary projection of his own bodily labor, but rather because it bestows a reciprocating power on him, relieving his sentience, acting as his surrogate. He 'owns' it - which is to say he exists in such a relation to it that it substitutes for himself in his interactions with the wider world." (264)
"It is part of the work of creating to deprive the external world of the privilege of being inanimate." (285)
Other QE Works Cited
Bordieu, P. Outline of a Theory of Practice (History and Theory of the Body)
Foucault, M. History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
The subject of this book "can...be divided into 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 both material and verbal expressibility or, more simply, the nature of human creation." (3) Pain resists language and "unlike any other state of consciousness - has no referential content." (5) Part of this results in the person having pain to be certain of her pain while the one who hears about pain is always in a state of doubt. Pain is always described by an "as if.." and must be projected outside of the body, analogized and referred outside of the body. As such, "the failure to express pain - whether the failure to objectify its attributes or instead the failure, once those attributes are objectified, to refer them to their original site in the human body - will always work to allow its appropriation and conflation with debased forms of power; conversely, the successful expression of pain will always work to expose and make impossible that appropriation and conflation." (14) The first chapter deals with torture, the use of ordinary objects as extensions of the body, these objects turned away from the mundane, comfortable to weapons. The pain of torture is world destroying, nothing is outside the body, and yet one longs to be outside the body - one loses touch with reality, and death is near - "physical pain always mimes death and the infliction of physical pain is always a mock execution...whenever death can be designated as 'soon' then dying has already begun." (31) In torture, "it is by the obessive mediation of agency that the prisoner's pain will be perverted into the fraudulent assertion of power, that the objectified pain is denied as pain and read as power." (45) Pain throughtorture divides the body against itself - "a pure experience of physical negation" (52) - but "in physical pain, then, suicide and murder converge, for one feels acted upon, annihilated, by inside and outside alike." (53) Scarry goes on in the next chapter to discuss the structure of war. In war, "the incontestable reality of the body - the body in pain, the body maimed, the body dead and hard to dispose of - is separated from its source and conferred on an ideology or issue or instance of political authority impatient of, or deserted by, benign sources of substantiation." (62) Injury is not the by-product of war - "Injury is the thing every exhausting piece of strategy and every single weapon is designed to bring into being: it is not something inadevertently produced on the way to producing something else but is the relentless object of all military activity." (73) "One goes into war and makes the injuries that will somehow be transformed into freedom." (76) "War is relentless in taking for its own interior content the interior content of the wounded and open human body."(81) Scarry asserts that war is seemingly no different that any other contest, except that maiming and killing is how one wins. It may seem that killing is neccessary because it is what determines the end of this contest, but in actuality, "the outcome of war endures long beyond the temporal moment and is translated into disposition of issues because it is believed to and hence allowed to carry the power of its own enforcement." (108) In the second half of the book Scarry goes on to argue about creation as a process of making and unmaking: "It will be clear that creation is not a unitary event but entails various temporal stages of a realization process, and that new problems arise at each successive stage; it will be creal that the moral and aesthetic value of a given creation does not just depend on the content of the fiction but on the nature of the substantiation used in its confirmation in the transitional period when it is between the states of having been already made-up and not yet made-real; and far, far bak in the most atavistic form of substantiation that entails the use of the injured body, it will become strikingly clear that the most fundamental relation between body and self turns on the question of whether a person used his own body in confirmation of a symbolic displacement of that body, or instead used the body of someone outside the benefits of the invented construct in the confirmation process." (150) She begins by working out the relationship between pain and imagining. "The only state that is as anomalous as pain is imagination. While pain is a state remarkable for being wholly without objects, the imagination is remarkable for being the only that is wholly its objects...While, then, pain is like other forms of sentience, the imagination is like other forms of the capacity of self-extension without the experienceable sentience on which it is ordinarilty premised." (162) Scarry then goes on to do a an extensive close reading of passages from the Bible and Marx in a linking of belief, imagination, pain / death and the making and unmaking of the world. "Together the two texts suggest that civilization's task of clarifying the structure of making is ongoing, for the very solution at one moment may become the site of difficulty at another: thus the material solution to the problem of belief itself becomes the problem in nineteenth-century industrialism, and so that site comes to require a new form of repair, as in the multiple strategies of distribution that have, since that time, begun to arise from both capitalism and socialist sources...[Marx and the Bible] are presented as companion texts because of what they together begin to make visible about the interior consistency in the structure of making and again in the structure of unmaking: in conjunction with the very different contexts looked at in earlier chapters, the parallels between them suggest that when the action of creating is occuring, it occurs (regardless of context) along a single path; and again, when its action fails or breaks down, that failure also occurs along a single path." (277) The final chapter is on the artifact and the making un-inanimate of external objects. "The made object os simply the made-locus across which the power of creation is magnified and redirected back onto its human agents who are now caught up in the cascade of self-revision they have themselves authored." (323)
Keywords
Externalize, Objectify, Agency, Language, Identification, Substantiation, Construction, Deconstruction, Metaphor, Analogy.
Other Thoughts
The thing I found most exciting and interesting about this book was the way that the most obvious of things (war is about killing) were teased out in the most delicate ways so that I was constantly like, Yes! Why don't people know this! But of course, because part of this is about the making and unmaking of the world through the inexpressibility and objectification of pain, yeah, well, there are reasons why we don't know this and Scarry tells us how those technologies of unmaking (deconstruction and construction) work. Good stuff. Hard to read but good stuff.
Again, though, I have to say, there was some weirdness about the flattening out of all war - Speaking on the defeat of France in Vietnam, the Battle of Algiers, Britain in the Suez, "Although all these may in turn be grouped together as an anomomalous category under the rubric of their won (such as 'colonial wars'), it may be that what occured there can be more accurately understood as a magnification of an ordinary outcome than as an exception." (98)
"The very temptation to invoke analogies to remote cosmologies...is itself a sign of pain's triumph, for it achieves its aversiveness in part by bringing about, even within the radius of several feet, this absolute split between one's sense of one's own reality and the reality of other persons." (4)
"That we ordinarily perceive it [pain] as empty of ethical content is, it will be argued, itself a signal to us of how faulty and fragmentary our understanding of creation is, not only in this respect by in many others. It is not the valorization of making but its accurate description that is crucial, for if it is in fact laden with ethical consequence, then it may be that a firm understanding of what it is will in turn enable us to recognize more quickly what is happening not only in large-scale emergencies like torture or war but in other long-standing dilemmas, such as the inequity of material distribution." (22)
"What is quite literally at stake in the body in pain is the making and unmaking of the world." (23)
"The person in great pain experiences his own body as the agent of his agony. The ceaseless, self-announcing signal of the body in pain, at once so empty and undifferentiated and so full of blaring adversity, contains not only the feeling 'my body hurts' but the feeling 'my body hurts me.'...If self-hatred, self-alienation, and self betrayal...were translated out of the psychological realm where it has content and is accessible to language into the unspeakable and contentless realm of physical sensation it would be intense pain." (47)
"For what the process of torture does is to split the human being into two, to make emphatic the ever present but, except in the etremity of sickness and death, only latent distinction between a self and body, between a 'me' and 'my body.' The 'self' or 'me,' which is experienced on the one hand as more private, more essentially at the center, and on the other hand as participating across the bridge of the body in the world, is 'embodied' in the voice, in language. The goal of the torturer is to make the one, the body, emphatically and crushingly present by destroying it, and to make the other, the voice, absent by destroying it. It is in part this combination that makes torture, like any experience of great physical pain, mimetic of death; for in death the body is emphatically present while that more elusive part represented by voice is so alarmingly absent that heavens are created to explain its whereabouts." (49)
"The body tends to be brought forward in its most extreme and absolute form only on behalf of a cultural artifact or symbolic fragment or made thing (a sentence) that is without any other basis in material reality: that is, it is only brought forward when there is a crisis of substantiation." (127)
"Capital. It is colossal. It is magnificent. And it is the capitalist's body. It is his body not because it has come into being through the solitary projection of his own bodily labor, but rather because it bestows a reciprocating power on him, relieving his sentience, acting as his surrogate. He 'owns' it - which is to say he exists in such a relation to it that it substitutes for himself in his interactions with the wider world." (264)
"It is part of the work of creating to deprive the external world of the privilege of being inanimate." (285)
Other QE Works Cited
Bordieu, P. Outline of a Theory of Practice (History and Theory of the Body)
Foucault, M. History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
# posted by SMRT : 11:38 AM
