The Aesthetics of PainSemiotics and Affective Comprehension in Music, Literature, and Sensate Experience

This essay 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, 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."