Intangible Materialism: The Body, Scientific Knowledge, and the Power of Language

5. Pain, Memory, and Religious Suffering: Materiality and the Subject of Poetry

127 Pain always arrives with a hidden narrative. Science prefers the same thing to happen, in the same way, over and over, but pain is subjective, invisible, multifaceted , and individual. This is why science and pain have been uneasy bedfellows, whereas the shifting valence of suffering is a central theme in literature. —Marni Jackson, Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign In the realm of suffering, affliction is something apart, specific, and irreducible. It is quite a different thing from simple suffering. It takes possession of the soul and marks it through and through with its own particular mark, the mark of slavery. . . . —Simone Weil, “The Love of God and Affliction” In this chapter, I describe the relations among pain, memory, and religious suffering. In doing so, I take up, in another register, the physiology of voices I examined in Tourette syndrome, the communality and semiotics I examined in the evolution of the work of our hands, and the hierarchy of materialism I am tracing throughout Intangible Materialism altogether. This is clear in the particular nature of pain, which, as Ariel Glucklich says, “is conscious by definition” (2001, 96; see Jackson 2002, 18, 148) even while, as Roselyne Rey notes, the “anatomical and physiological foundation” of pain makes it in 5. Pain, Memory, and Religious Suffering: Materiality and the Subject of Poetry 128 Pain, Memory, and Religious Suffering important ways a material and “not an historical subject in the same sense as fear, or hell, or purgatory”; pain, she says, is “certainly [the] one experience where the human condition’s universality and the species’ biological unity is manifest” (1993, 5). If Tourette syndrome is unconscious (or at least wholly unintentional) and the work of our hands is often intentional but not fully conscious, then pain—and especially its form comprehended under the categories of suffering and religious suffering—presents a remarkable instance of consciousness fully imbricated, as it is, in the materiality of its physiology and its adaptiveness. And because it is necessarily conscious, it is intimately tied up with any notion we might have of self or personhood, and tied, as well, with the senses of subjectivity that literature creates in its discourses. The experience of pain, and especially religious suffering and that other ghostly phenomenon, phantom pain, might well be a clear and defining moment of consciousness that can help us comprehend its materiality. Indeed, it is my hope that the three topics of this chapter—pain, memory, and suffering—themselves encompass the material physiology, biological adaptiveness, and semiotic explosions of meaning I examine throughout this book. The Memory of Pain It seems to me that we cannot examine memory, including the memory of pain, without also examining anticipation—which hints at that “law that will govern the future” Peirce talks about (1931–35, 1:23)—as both a physiological fact and a phenomenological experience . Patrick Wall, who (often along with Ronald Melzack) helped shape the study of pain in the twentieth century, nicely describes the physiological fact of anticipation in the chapter on “The Placebo Response” in his book Pain: The Science of Suffering. He cites a number of animal and human experiments in which the “expectation” of certain effects led to measurable physiological changes in the subjects . “If a rabbit has experienced a series of small insulin injections that decrease the blood glucose and is then given a saline injection in the same conditions, the animal reacts by raising its blood glucose. The animal has learned to counteract the effects of the drug by raising its blood sugar. With a saline injection, it reacts as though it has received the insulin” (1999, 160). In people, a parallel experiment demonstrated a similar “placebo response,” but when participants were told that the stimulus was being manipulated (parallel to the Pain, Memory, and Religious Suffering 129 saline replacing insulin in the case of rabbits), no placebo response was recorded. This result suggests to Wall that the placebo response is not simply a Pavlovian “conditioned response” (168) but also, on some level, a cognitive response. Moreover, it leads Wall to define pain in relation to anticipation: “Pain,” he proposes, “occurs as the brain is analysing the situation [that gave rise to pain] in terms of actions that might be appropriate” (169; see also 177); “Pain,” he says, “is then best seen as a need state, like hunger and thirst, which are terminated by a consummatory act” (183). That act, however...