on pain, real, and virtual

some quotes from a discussion I had with Sandy Baldwin - we need to continue the discussion -

In relation to pain:

Inexpressibility occurs because of the difficulty of expressing interior

states that might not have a clearcut symptomology (as thirst does, for

example) - and also because severe pain derails speech and language and

thought, as the internalized horizon of the flesh is muted or screams in

abeyance. All of this touches on the _pain of the signifier_ and its

inexpressible relation to death - (Alan)

Hi Sandy, this is certainly useful for me. I'd say when you say 'the
signifier as something read,' it's a perception, an incision, that you're
making; with severe pain, there is no signifier for me at all, not even
incision; I'm emptied of it, even to the extent that "I feel your pain"
wouldn't be heard, wouldn't be a received communication - there might not
even be a "you" that is speaking those words to me. When my mother was
dying and in severe pain, she could utter, mumble that, it was her feet,
but there was only minimal recognition I was present, and I was literally
dumb-founded - i.e. found dumb, and transformed into one whose foundation
was dumb, mute - almost an erasure. I couldn't possibly feel her pain, I
wouldn't know where to begin with either that act or that sentence, that
inscription. Pain turns to groans, moaning, as if the sound might assuage,
and perhaps sound does play a role, which later mantra built on; I don't
know...


Might one go so far as to say that the 'reader of the signifier of pain'
does not feel pain, he or she is in such a state that reading is still
possible? Or that the pain he or she feels is encapsulated, not
sufficiently severe to cancel out, thwart, communication?


Thinking of my mother (she died a few days later, under morphine, given to
her to assuage the pain, she never woke through that period, we were all
waiting... The parentheses remains open, as I await my death in a sense,
this is as close as I've been...


So I'd say we didn't share in the signifier, my mother and I - she was
emptied of that, what was left was pain and the dark horizon she must have
known, all along, was part and parcel of it...


The boundary, too, disappears...

==========

On Wed, 17 Aug 2011, Charles Baldwin wrote:


I suppose I wonder now on what conditions can I say "I feel your pain."
Is this phrase even possible? But also, we say it and mean it. (It would
be interesting to pursue "I feel your pleasure" as well, which would be
different, though present some related issues.)


"I feel your pain" is indexical"; a moan is ikonic; we're thinking through
the language of ikons here. (Alan? Sandy?)


I suppose it is at least in part a matter of when and where and who
utters this phrase.


There is also pain that is *managed* or lived through. Though I think
this is already a problem with this as I write it: wouldn't all pain be
shattering, in its time however brief, as a kind of obduracy within? And
yet we're constantly living with it. At least I mean that in this case
there are available conventions for signifying its presence. I feel your
pain because it is like other pains in I have felt in the past, pains I
have had, with the sense of *having* pain as an object possessed and
controlled, as an experience catalogued and available to telling. I have
had a toothache or a broken toe or a sore muscle. I lived through each
and can now speak of it, can share it with you, can point to the scars.
I am certain that here the pain is encapsulated - as you put it - or in
a kind of vesicle within me. (Sandy)


This is true to an extent, but only once for example have I had such bad
toothache that I could do nothing but scream (and did); I had to be rushed
to an emergency dentist. Now I 'remember' the pain, but I'm not sure if
this is the same kind of memory reconstruction that occurs, for example,
when I 'remember' my childhood home... (Alan)


Then, thinking about your mother: a setting with no communication, no
exchange of commonplaces about where it hurts. No signifier of pain, or
rather the signifier is framed and held by the setting. No "pain index,"
no seven words to describe it, from flickering and pounding through
nagging and torturing, or in between. In this way, pain is a problem for
indexicality as such (and differs from similar problems e.g. the
punctum). Gesture falls short: the witness - and there might need to be
another term? the "vigilant" works in a way, but isn't right for the
pain-sharer - consoles and soothes to no avail, the sufferer utters and
moves but conveys nothing of the internal anguish. (Sandy)


Yes, absolutely, this is it, which is why I think of pain as ikonic, an
internal ikon operative and witnessed only by the subject who bears it.
Which brings up a closely related concept, that we are ikonic to ourselves
and that this is a closed transmission (not even sutured in the sense of
the construction of the subject). (Alan)


What remains? A phenomenology that is blinded and muted in many ways.
The tableau of sufferer and vigilant conveys only distance and numbness.
It also conveys waiting (vigilance). Mute and blind waiting the sufferer
is not dead, nor are they undead (in a monstrous sense), but they are no
longer a subject, no longer speaking and asserting. You write "there
might not even be a 'you' that is speaking those words to me," which
makes it impossible for you to say "I feel your pain." This is a tableau
of nothingness, of an open gap in being. It is not yet mourning. It is
traumatic in advance, marking a trauma to come, in the sense that trauma
is dream, is something displaced in experience and time. The
phenomenology of the gap is tied to the time of waiting and not to any
other perception. Duration, waiting, vigilance: these may be bodily
relations beyond alterity ... (Sandy)


Yes, again, and the waiting for the observer is also tied to the
possibility of recover; for the person in pain, it is timeless, and I'd
think even the potential of temporality or a temporal horizon is absent.
(Alan)


Is it not here that I might say *I feel impossible pain*? At least, this
was where I ended my last reply, except now I would say that every word
in that phrase, "I feel impossible pain," is broken in the tableau of
nothingness I'm writing of: the subject that might utter the phrase (the
vigilant) is dumbfounded, as you say, troubling "I" and "feel" and so
on. Perhaps *I feel impossible pain* is absurd, impossible, not even
worth saying. It is philosophically absurd ... (Sandy)


It would seem almost an egoism, no? Since (feel)and(imossible pain) as
locutions are contradictory, but yet the observer insists on saying
_something_ since he or she is reduced to silence by the other's moaning.
A doctor on the other hand, would see all of this as symptom, and
hopefully act accordingly, doing whatever she or he can to assuate the
pain which she knows by proxy is _there._ (Alan)


I keep returning to Lingis: in one of his books, can't remember which,
he describes his own vigil by his dying mother's bed. She has cancer,
she's in a hospital near Chicago. He describes his own inarticulateness
and hers as well; but - as I recall - he also sees a bravery in the
scene, a dignity in both the mother and the son facing death. Without
being able to dig up the reference - I may be wrong in recalling it? - I
have to say I find it a bit forced, but also I see it fitting the
general refusal of real abjection in his work, his sense of the glory or
wonder of being in every situation. *Forced* as a way of philosophically
or pedagogically making a point about imperatives that bind us beyond
being. Yet I wonder if it's too much on his part: how can it be so sure
that I'm able to hear and answer the imperative? I'm not sure I believe
that in the presence of a dying loved one it is so easy, except
philosophically and perhaps only after. Again, I'm being unfair: it
could not have been easy for him, and yet it becomes easy to
philosophize, and to achieve a passivity and even enlightenment. Lingis
focuses on the extreme, the rending and transforming of suffering and
encounters, but there's a sense of certainty, of philosophical clarity
that he brings to these. (Sandy)


I like your description here and the notion of refusing real abjection,
but then I wonder how he approaches situations of real torture or pain
before its 'time.' But the philosophizing itself is a way of dealing with
it; when my mother died I played shakuhachi, and when I recently wrote
about my father's being in hospital (on Facebook), I talked about playing
zurna - it's a way of dealing, a kind of expressivity against everything,
including the potential cessation of expressivity of course. (Alan)


Perhaps this relates to your final points about Buddhism or
*philosophy*. I'm left wondering if dialogue in the presence of death,
if description of the tableau of vigilance - as above, as here - is, can
possibly be, *philosophical*? How can it be? Surely philosophy fails? We
are, as you say, dumbfounded. I'm pretty sure that I'm unsure about what
I'm writing of here, that I'm in no way certain about your pain or the
pain of others, that I'm in no way certain about the nothingness of the
vigil. How could I be? It is obscene to philosophize on pain. (Sandy)


Another turn here, however - perhaps that is the only philosophizing that
isn't obscene; one is speaking for a body that's no longer capable of
speaking, one is simultaneously within the intense privacy of that
inexressible pain, and the intense privacy of writing itself, Vygotsky's
inner speech, Blanchot's writing of the disaster, Scarry's introductory
material on pain (the best part of her book, at least for me), and so
forth... (Alan)

110816_008: Difference between fissure and inscription; pain tends towards

fissure; if fissure is same and same, there's no geography, no topography,

no topology; the result is the crack / wound, everywhere and nowhere.

110818_001: Pain relates to the body as cosmology to the universe. (?)

110819_001: Pain in relation to virtual worlds: in circumlocution of the

subject who may remain impervious, the degree zero of phenomenology.

110821_001: What happens when users exchange their avatars? Our histories,

inventories, are no longer our own.