pain, perversion, desire, normal and abnormal

This morning, upon waking, I was thinking about situations in which pain is desired. The erotic relation to pain is exhibited and practiced in athletics, S&M, and by some guitarists who play until their fingertips bleed. In sports and among guitarists, there is a macho response, “playing through the pain,” that is interesting to consider as a cover story for the intense and very kinky, unacknowledged, or at least unnamable desire for pain. Psychoanalytically, this may be quite fascinating. In terms of neuro-evolution, this may be quite boring (our lizard brains incite us to replay melodramas of fear and threat for the sake of running through the motions of fight or flight—hence also horror movies and running for President). What I am interested in is what it tells us about normal and abnormal conscious embodiment.

Is it “normal” to desire pain? This is not the exact question, but could be a place to begin. Note first of all that to a large extent the discourse of modern scientific medicine defines pain in terms of an “abnormal” condition, both relatively and absolutely. In this discourse, pain is also treated as an aversive affect, which obviously makes desire for pain incomprehensible except as pathology.

Athletes desire to “feel the burn” from exertion. I do not see any reason to assume that this is because they take the pain as informing them of their success in extending their bodies’ strength or endurance, rather than because they desire and enjoy the pain itself. But I don’t want to get caught up in their motivations, so much as to understand as far as possible what they experience as pain and as desire, and how this experience fits into their overall sense of consciousness and embodiment as “normal.”

This is a relative-normal, a normal state of things for some individual embodied consciousness, rather than an absolute-normal, if there even is such a thing. In other words, the “normal” embodied consciousness of some athlete who desires to “feel the burn” is not here determined in relation to a statistical population, but only self-reflexively for that person. Even someone who has an “abnormal” desire for pain still experiences some pain as part of the normal course of erotic desire and some as abnormal—good and bad pains. (For many this may be based on what hurts versus what injures, but not all pain-perverts* are averse to injury.)

So we cannot say that pain is in itself aversive, or that it is in itself an abnormal state of embodied consciousness, either in a descriptive or in a normative sense. Perhaps this means that we cannot generate a list of universal, common characteristics of normal or abnormal embodied consciousness. There is no set of specific objectively describable conditions of embodied consciousness that is a set of “normal” conditions.

I’m using “objectively describable conditions” to mean what can be objectified through expression, indirectly shared through description or narrative, as opposed to “subjective” conditions that would have to do with the structures of consciousness and embodiment themselves. What I am trying to mark out here is what I think goes very wrong in so many analyses of pain, even those that call themselves phenomenological.

Elaine Scarry suggested long ago that pain is unshareable because it is absolutely subjective. That’s an overstated claim, but the truth in it is this: pain, and indeed any state or experience of embodied consciousness, entails a subjective dimension, what I called the structures of consciousness and embodiment, that are not “shared” by way of expression among us, not made “public,” but are nonetheless the common and universal structures of consciousness and embodiment. When pain is analyzed in terms of what is normal or abnormal, so often this leads to claims about what is normal and abnormal for embodied persons, not for embodied consciousness. Embodied consciousness of those of us who desire pain still has normal experience, including normal experience of pain.

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* I mean "pervert" in a kind and kindred way, of course.

tenuous

This morning, I'm thinking about my depression and anxiety in relation to my perma-temped job.

I am in my 13th year of teaching at Cow State Santa Claus as a temporary faculty member. I do not have the opportunity for tenure, and have very reasonable assurance that I will never have that opportunity. While the support for humanities education collapses, and while 75% of college faculty nationwide are similarly positioned, my PhD gets staler and staler, and I become more and more un-hirable as a starting assistant professor.

Among tenuous-track faculty (my gag name for those of us in perma-temped positions), CSU "lecturers" enjoy probably the best working conditions, wages, and benefits of anyone. What that does not do anything to resolve is the humiliation we're constantly subject to, and, for me, the added humiliation and despair over my status.

For instance, it is very hard to believe I am really worthy of a tenure-track job, despite having a longer and stronger publication record than several of my tenured colleagues. Psychologically, this is due to my position at the university being one in which I am constantly given that message on a daily basis.

I always worry. I am always concerned that this academic year could be my last, and that, given the landscape of faculty work opportunities, the last of my career. I have a very strong feeling of being temporary, of not being at home, of not being able to have a home, and of having nothing between me and the catastrophic loss of my employment, career, and what I am often rueful to regard as my life's calling.

What struck me particularly about this this morning is how difficult it is for me to sit down and read a book. I'm best at it around 9-10 am, sitting quietly in my work room at home in a blue armchair from Ikea (grad student furniture). But there's always something else I feel I should be doing, something that I have to do in order to try to save, or resurrect, my career. I cannot just sit there and read, not when tomorrow the university could begin disciplinary proceedings against me over a trumped-up charge, and nothing can stop them, because I don't have tenure.

(That's not a paranoid thought, by the way. I've seen it happen several times to temporary faculty, and as a faculty rights rep, I've had no way to do anything about it.)

need a break

Well, ladies and gentlemen, Doc Nagel is in a bad way. I blame a large part of this on the confluence of recent events - the department tenure-track search, looming budget cuts to the CSU (yet again), daily news of the unconscionable exercise of power. I blame another large part on the unrelenting propaganda demonizing organized labor, in particular in public higher education. It feels lately as if everything I care about is threatened or under attack. No exaggeration: the ideal of education, my own job, my loveliest, the cat, my favorite hockey team...

On the other hand, obviously the largest part of my terrible, doomed mood is sui generis. Everything I care about seems to be under attack because I feel truly terrible about myself these days. A few people who regularly read this have known me long enough to know that that had been a constant until Lauren came into my life. And although it is very hard to feel terrible about myself with her around, somehow I'm managing it.

For me, this often takes the form of a sort of voice constantly telling me the same thing, no matter what happens: "You're a terrible person." I've checked a book out of the university library, but it's been sitting on my shelf unread. "That's because you're a terrible person." A class session went poorly. "That's because you're a terrible person." A class session went well. "That doesn't change the fact that you're a terrible person." I committed a typo in an email I sent. "That's because you're a terrible person."

It gets old after a while.

But hey, do you wanna know why I get depressed, and why I feel this way despite how wonderful Lauren is, and how basically good life is right now? I'll give you a hint: It's because I'm a terrible person. That's what I've heard, anyway.

Taking a break from this is kind of a weird task, because this delightful partner in dialogue is, of course, me. (Hey, wanna know why I'm so cruel to myself? I'll give you a hint...)

a hand - up?

Partly found art, partly unaccountable inspiration.

weekend & cross-posting& kittens kittens kittens

In one of my classes, I'm requiring students to participate in an online threaded discussion board. We'd been reading about Foucault and surveillance, and a question came up about the adjustments people have made that allow them to relax about the constant surveillance we're under, especially in social networking sites.

I took it in this direction:

I'm not usually a fan of trend-thinking (identifying and analyzing passing trends), because it often seems to be either a kind of futurism, or else devolves into fairly obvious commentaries on something essentially already passé. In the case of social-networking sites and the mode of self-disclosure, there does seem to be a change in the way we deal with matters we keep secret and those we disclose.

An example of this is journal or diary keeping. The electronic language of on-line journals alters relationships between self and others, both known and unknown, both intimate and anonymous.

We could interpret this as a genre of narrative, as well, and track how online self-disclosing expressions operate as performances or constructions of self or of identity. I keep an online journal, in the form of a blog. It's fairly self-disclosive, but in the shape of a narrative of personal events, world events, ideas, and so forth, that are genuinely expressive of certain shapes of my identity. I even have a name for this identity (as do many online diarists - their handles or screen-names): Doc Nagel.

Am I Doc Nagel? At least provisionally, at least in some respects. That identity is located somewhere between/among my instructor-identity, my academic-identity, my activist-identity, my philosopher-identity, my gourmet-identity, my hockey-fan-identity, my kitten-obsessive-identity, and my private life. All those intersect, are played out, and are shaped and addressed through the journal. I'm careful about how I write in it, though not all that careful. (Then again, I'm not all that careful about what I say in any public forum or in any university venue.)

Exposure, surveillance, and discipline are decidedly at issue. At one point, I was asked by a university official to either take down or to eliminate a link to my online journal, because its contents were printed off and mailed to the university in order to try to get me into trouble (it's a long story, and no, I'm not telling). Some people have been fired for criticizing their employers in online journals, and a good friend of mine has changed journals three or four times to evade being identified as the blogger in question (though not because she's particularly critical of anybody).

In other news, I have completed 4 weeks of non-stop work, stress, and craziness. I am taking the (vast majority of the) weekend off. Penguins-Rangers in just over an hour. Woohoo!

Kittens kittens kittens kittens. Alexander is now 2.12 pounds, and Alex is 2.07. Pictures to come soon. Stay tuned. They'll get nipped in 3 more weeks. Meanwhile, total kitten insanity reigns.