Skip to main content

Pain as Private

In thinking about the notion of pain as private verses intersubjective (as put forward in scholarly dialogue between Crawford and Mowat), I recalled my last trip to the emergency room (about 2 ½ years ago) with what I would describe as serious pain that later resulted in an appendectomy. In my entrance interview, I was asked to rate my pain on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 equaled fleeting and dull and 10 equaled the most pain I’ve ever experienced. I can’t remember what my response was, but in conceptualizing the experience of pain as private and personal, it seems as though it was the need for the biomedical system to place my pain in the context of a shared language for the experience (such that the appropriate treatment could be prescribed, in the form of medication or further physical evaluation) that ultimately left me feeling disheartened and poorly served. I’m left questioning, was I really able to describe my pain? Did the measure truly capture my experience?

It seems as though the intention behind the pain scale (as was the intention behind the MPQ per Mowat’s perspective) was to provide something that would establish credible evidence of the perceived, subjective qualities of my pain, when in fact the experience was composed of ‘‘an endless variety of qualities that are categorized under a single linguistic label.” While such a scale may have given me a language to which I was able to describe the intensity of my pain (a benefit of such a measure) in a way that would permit “proper” treatment (for benefit of the biomedical system), perhaps coining my own words would’ve given the physician a more objective account of what I was feeling.

Such a descriptor was likely constructed under the guise of being sound based on the administrator’s perception of my experience. While Crawford may argue that the MPQ (and other measures permitting a description of pain) “function to construct the qualitative dimensions of a language of pain,” I see little qualitative in the co-opting of my experience per the biomedical system’s language. Perhaps I’m a phenomenologist in this light, such that the lived embodiment of pain may perhaps preclude a shared language for which we’re able to describe what any one individual experiences. This doesn’t mean that “pain” is unsharable. Rather, in valuing the voices of those who live painfully, rather than imposing a particular discourse (whether that be biomedical, social scientific, literary critique, or otherwise) to describe their experience for them, we may cross our disciplinary boundaries to develop an intersubjective understanding of the private.

Popular posts from this blog

The whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa

When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga...
Read more

Zionist hate mongering, the race/terror trope, and the Free Speech Union: Part 1

March 15, 2019. It was a day of terror. Unleashed by a white supremacist far-right terrorist. Driven by hate for brown people. Driven by Islamophobic hate. Earlier in the day, I had come across a hate-based hit piece targeting me, alongside other academics, the University of Auckland academic Professor Nicholas Rowe , Professor Richard Jackson at Otago University, Professor Kevin P Clements at Otago University, Dr. Rose Martin from University of Auckland and Dr. Nigel Parsons at Massey University.  Titled, "More extremists in New Zealand Universities," the article threw in the labels "terror sympathisers" and "extremist views." Written by one David Cumin and hosted on the website of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the article sought to create outrage that academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid are actually employed by universities in New Zealand. Figure 1: The web post written by David Cumin on the site of Israel Institute ...
Read more

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit...
Read more