How many times have you been in pain and had all the words needed to tell the story of it? While medical interactions...have produced scales, fixed registers and other appraisers of pain to evaluate its severity, Melzac...seems to say that pain, on some level is a failure of management - that the arsenal does not yet contain the ultimate expression of weaponry. Which is to say, when it comes to pain, we cannot kill it well enough. Held within both the index and the scale is the implicit assumption that, in regards to pain, its not real until its been registered. Either through observation or through the visual register of the wound, or through the medical vocabulary of the standardized scale. Within both of these inventories of pain, the measurement is incommensurate to the measure, as the scale is untethered from the body its attached to. The failure to conduct the body through statistics and therefore to manage pain appears consistently throughout The Undying as Boyer elegantly illustrates pain as a system containing the system, exposing the prosaic legal, financial and domestic through which pain passes in her life. By annotating the boundlessness of pain Boyer foregrounds each system as inadequate, as unable to contain any kind of whole. In The Undying, every system appears as partial...
'...they ask the question: rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10. I try to answer but the answer is always a-numerical'. Sensation is the enemy of quantification...Boyer seems to invoke biometrics as akin to Roland Barthes understanding of language as a system of encoding...language being a system and the aim of the movement being a direct subversion of codes, itself, moreover, illusory - a code cannot be destroyed, only played off. To the OED, a code is described as a system of signs or symbols, any system by which information or instructions are conveyed concisely and a system used for economy or secrecy. Pain becomes the data her body emits as a code which cannot be destroyed. Which, in its quantification, is transmuted into a system of management, insurance, recovery and other kinds of economic power, all obscurities which commit agony into a type of secrecy...pain is the code which cannot be destroyed or written out of the body, only made to seem illusory...
The phenomenon of not being believed by various medical authorities, being itself a type of pain, is foregrounded in punishing, grueling, vicious, killing, unlistened to pain in which Boyer implicates the act of convincing a doctor of her pain is, itself, a form of violence, one that becomes necessary for her survival. The diagnosis and the agony are framed as, at once, inside and outside belief.
Within a condition of illness or pain Gleason asserts that the body is made vulnerable as it is made public. This is not an inherent category - the diagnosis and the necessity of convincing are enacted within a construction of unequal social relations. To be wounded is not a disadvantage but produces one in response to this site, which is to say: it is not my body which included the world, the way power is structured produces bodies at its mercy. To perpetually ask for care, in the same way, is what we might recognize as vulnerable, it is as much a state as it is contingent and responsive to the site of its production.
If a sufficient register for pain is a lexicon outside didactic language, where does that leave us? Somewhere outside of the weight of genre? Genre non-conforming prose? Memoir? Poetry? If the dominant rhetoric for pain is medical then the vocabulary which translates the sensate into language requires the medical as a medium. The clinical space becomes a substrate through which the experience must pass. If we reconsider the value of the index and the scale, would we find more people? Would the community expand? Would the imagination of the unfathomable open to include those who are excluded from institutional vocabularies? In refiguring the register, might we reconceptualize one that centers those in pain rather than those trying to eradicate it?
The pain scale as it operates within bio-medical rhetoric seems self-alienating. From within the capitalist medical universe in which bodies must orbit around profit at all times, the scale is framed in The Undying and Constellations as enacting a form of violence, as a mechanism of pain which corroborates in the creation of medical subjects through a process of quantification and subjugation. The person becomes the data they submit...The process of writing, then, marks a commitment to re-inhabiting the body after it's been doubled away into obscurity...
Cat Chong
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