real and imagined pain and our complicity

The one thing i remember about pain in my own experiences is that pain cannot be 'reenacted'. One can recall the experience of pain, but never really feel that pain again..perhaps one can even remember the turmoil in the heart and mind when experiencing pain, but beyond these symptoms of pain, the actual experience of pain does not repeat itself in its exact form. (interestingly, pain, a physical condition, has symptoms that are psychological -- fear, tension etc. whereas most of the time, it is some deeper, internal cause that brings about physical and obvious symptoms.) In the same way, witnesses of pain, much as they are within the same time and space as he who suffers, never really experience even a fraction of that sensation of pain.

Hence the objectification of pain, as Scarry puts it -- the making it easier for third parties to glimpse at the possibility of pain. In fact, it is the objectification of pain that supplies the object for imagination; without pain being objectified, there is nothing to feed the imagination, and the experience of pain will then not be able to be passed on to a third party, the spectator. Probably that's why it's only in torture that pain is deliberately objectified; often the one being tortured is raised as an example, a deterrent to all other third parties so that they would not disobey a particular regime, and hence the need for these third parties to imagine pain, hence the need for objectification. As in our first article, "Though indisputably real to the sufferer, it is, unless accompanied by visible body damage or a disease label, unreal to others." (56)

Initially i thought that the position of power will then be rather simple -- the torturer has power over the tortured, yet the tortured in a way has some kind of power over the spectators? In that he has an experience that the spectators do not have control over, and is viewing without a tangible, closer relation to. The inaccesibility of pain to the spectators, despite their observation of it, seemed to me to render them 'helpless' in a way -- unable to stop it from happening, yet unable to participate and avoid guilt. But as Scarry continues, it is really the fact that the one in pain is so broken in connection to everything and everyone else that almost makes him cease to exist in reality :
"the lack of acknowledgement and recognition (which if present could act as a form of self-extension) becomes a second form of negation and rejection, the social equivalent of the physical aversiveness. This terrifying dichotomy and doubling is itself redoubled, multiplied, and magnified in torture because instead of the person's pain being subjectively real but unobjectified and invisible to all others, it is now hugely objectified, everywhere visible, as incontestably present in the external as in the internal world, and yet it is simultaneously categorically denied." (56)

The denial or inability to truly relate to the pain of another makes that pain heightened for the person who is already hurting, and yet it increases the power of the one inflicting pain, and the one watching. So the third party is really complicit in the infliction of pain too? The knowledge of the inflicted pain of another, yet doing nothing about it, makes one guilty also of inflicting that pain. And it seems like the only way to extend sympathy for the one in pain is really to participate in that pain as well. Often it would not be possible, nor make any sense to volunteer oneself for pain, but perhaps in being so struck in the conscience and consciousness of pain, one experiences the turmoil of the soul and heart, and that is also an experience of pain on a different plane?

Remembering then Grosz's point about society's inscriptions on the human body...torture and pain are very obvious and literal inscriptions on the body that are obviously 'bad'. A third party would know immediately that physical torture ought not be condoned. Yet in many other ways all of us are willing third parties, and hence complicit in insribing on the bodies of our fellow people -- society's treatment of those who are other from us. We cringe when we talk about torture, but in racial and gender prejudice, or even economic prejudice, we write on the bodies of fellow people by marking them out as different, and as less. So some of us are in fact not third parties, but torturers. People who assign themselves power by their "blindness [and] willed amorality" (Scarry, 37). Not hard to imagine, because there are so many objectified instances around us already.