The politics in/of pain

Abstract

Pain, pain talk and pain ascriptions seem to be universal features of human experience and to have little to do with politics. It is often assumed that pain is always bad, a sign of a malfunctioning machine, that pain talk describes this malfunction and that the humane thing to do is to seek to ameliorate or excise pain. I argue that this viewpoint is one-sided at best and imperialistic at worst. In section I, I outline what I term the ‘prima facie model of pain’ and adumbrate later Wittgenstein’s criticism of it. In section II, I marshal ethnographic evidence that deepens Wittgenstein’s reimagining of pain and acknowledgment. In section III, I link this to ‘progressive’ politics and its normative understanding of the self. Finally, in section IV, I turn to Martin Luther King’s writing and discuss a use of pain that undermines this normative conception of the self and aligns with Wittgenstein’s account.

Pain cannot (just) be whatever the person says: A critique of a dogma

“…Specifically, the subjective account contends that the meaning of 'pain' derives solely from its reference to a sensation generated by a pathophysiological substratum. In turn, this suggests that pain-talk describes an inner sensation in the same way that pin-talk describes thumb tacks (e.g., DJORDJEVIC | 5 of 8 Djordjevic, 2020;Wittgenstein, 2009, § 290). In both cases, the point of utterances is informing someone of how things stand in the 'inner' or 'outer' world.…”