Medical Humanities | The Aesthetics of Pain

This presentation examines the extreme experience of pain in relation to the aesthetic experiences of music, poetry, and discursive prose. It argues that experience in general is conditioned by schemas of experience that direct attention and expectation, and for this reason, while it feels immediate – with the immediacy of experience being its defining quality – nevertheless experience, as such, is mediated. Semiotics – and the human sciences more generally – analyze such mediations. Furthermore, it argues, following the philosopher of music Victor Zuckerkandl and the neuroscientist David Huron, that experience as such cannot be understood as the epiphenomenon of (and thereby reducible to) either physics or psychology: that is, that it cannot be understood solely as a “natural fact” or solely as a “cultural construction.”  Here, then, I argue that the very phenomenon of experience itself is a social institution, and that the institutional nature of experience is most readily discernible in aesthetic experiences of art – which the French novelist Stendhal described as “the promise of happiness” – and particularly the art of music insofar as music, in its focus on sense experience, emphasizes what is part of the other arts and everyday experience as well: the temporality of expectation, the future-oriented “promises” that shape experience in general. The extreme experience of pain, I suggest however, erases the promise of experience; it collapses expectation into simple unabating attention. This, I take it, is why Elaine Scarry and others have argued that pain is profoundly antisocial. Thus, the issue I address in this presentation is the manner in which such “unsocial” experience can be taken up by another profoundly social institution, the representations of discursive aesthetics.