[Notes] Elaine Scarry's Eight Attributes of Pain

Notes from The Body In Pain

I’ve never read anything quite like Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain. Scarry, herself, is a remarkably unique person. She’s the professor of “Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value” at Harvard. She’s written about war, dreams, justice, beauty, thermonuclear weapons, and human creativity, and she also wrote a 12,000 word treatise on the possibility of electromagnetic interference in the case of TWA 800. Her work is not easy to reduce.

The Body in Pain is a discussion of physical pain that is part philosophy, part political theory, part literary criticism. People frequently cite its fundamental assertion that intense physical pain destroys language, ultimately reducing people to a primal scream and destroying the ability to think or speak. While this is certainly a central idea in The Body in Pain, it also appears in the first ten pages; what follows is an intense spiral into that idea’s far-reaching implications. The Body in Pain is academic in nature, but it stands on its own two feet; this is true philosophy, not philosophology.

Scarry uses torture and war as vehicles for exploring her idea of pain. While my interest in physical pain leans more towards the personal/medical lens, many of Scarry’s ideas have obvious applications in a disability context.

Scarry loves structure, and her ideas have lots of subparts, subdivisions, lists and elements. In the fourth part of the first chapter of The Body in Pain, Scarry argues that the structure of torture has three basic parts: (1) the infliction of pain, (2) the objectification of the subjective attributes of pain, and (3) the translation of pain into a symbol of power. In the second point, Scarry defines eight subjective attributes of pain. These attributes, she says, “belong equally to the felt-experience of patient and prisoner”—they are true not only in the context of torture, but for every person in pain, whether that pain comes from cancer or a cold. I found these attributes to be profound and thought-provoking.

Here are Scarry’s eight attributes of pain:

1. Pain is sheer aversiveness.

Pain is a definitionally negative experience. If the person in pain does not feel averse to their pain, it is not pain. Pain’s experiential nature is fundamentally harmful and undesirable.

“Pain is a pure physical experience of negation, an immediate sensory rendering of “against,” of something being against one, and of something one must be against. Even though it occurs within oneself, it is at once identified as “not oneself,” “not me,” as something so alien that it must right now be gotten rid of.” (Scarry 52)

This description was immediately recognizable to me from conversations I’ve had with other chronically ill people. One of the strangest psychological aspects of having an autoimmune disease is knowing that my body has somehow turned “against me,” despite also being me. This “againstness” leads to a deep sense of alienation from my own body.

2 & 3. Pain is a double experience of agency.

“Agency” in Scarry refers to a use of language that mischaracterizes the literal nature of pain. For example, a person with a headache might say “it feels like something is crushing my head.” This is a use of agency: there is not literally an object crushing that person’s head, yet referring to an imaginary external object allows for a description of internal pain that can be otherwise impossible to explain. Because the agential object has “shape, length, and color, because it either exists or can be pictured as existing at the external boundary of the body, it begins to externalize, objectify, and make sharable what is originally an interior and unsharable experience.” (Scarry 15-16)

Agency can appear in two ways during physical pain.

In one case, when there is an actual weapon present that is causing harm, the person in pain may not feel or describe the object itself, but instead describe their pain as an internal act of the body—“one’s own body hurting one” (Scarry 53). This person does not experience pain primarily through the attributes of the external object of a knife or a foot, but through the internal object of skin splitting or a bone breaking.

On the other hand, “in the utter absence of any actual external cause, there often arises a vivid sense of external agency.” (53) When the true cause of pain comes from inside the body, it is often described as though it is being inflicted by an outside object: it may be called knifelike, stabbing, searing, or crushing.

The misdirection of agency means that the boundaries between “inside” and “outside” are dissolved. “In physical pain, then, suicide and murder converge, for one feels acted upon, annihilated, by inside and outside alike.” (53)

4. Pain is a conflation of the private and the public.

Pain “brings with it all the solitude of absolute privacy with none of its safety, all the self-exposure of the utterly public with none of its possibility for camaraderie or shared experience.” (53)

Pain is both isolating and exposing. It is solitary—it cannot be shared with other people—but it is viewable—other people know we are experiencing it. Because of this, artistic expressions of pain frequently highlight its humiliating nature.

The public and the private are inverted. What is ostensibly private (the intimate experience of interior pain) is seen and heard by others. What is ostensibly public (the ability to communicate our experience to other people through language) is difficult or impossible, further isolating the person in pain.

5. Pain is language-destroying.

Language, which Scarry also calls “verbal objectification,” is “a major source of our self-extension, a vehicle through which the pain could be lifted out into the world and eliminated.” (54)

But pain resists elimination through language in two ways. First, it monopolizes language and becomes its only subject through complaint. When a person in pain can still speak, complaining about pain will begin to consume the content of their speech. Second, pain destroys language by becoming so intense that “the coherence of complaint is displaced by the sounds anterior to learned language,” like a scream. (54)

Scarry calls complaint “the nonpolitical equivalent of confession,” which is fascinating in the context of the discussion of torture. Earlier in The Body in Pain, Scarry argues that the political structure of torture creates a false sense of betrayal in the prisoner’s confession. In the eyes of outsiders, political prisoners become even more detestable when they confess and betray themselves and their cause during torture. But, Scarry argues, for the prisoner who is being subjected to torture, there is no longer any such thing as the outside world, and any real concept of the prisoner “betraying” people outside of his immediate body is meaningless because, for him, there is no world outside of his body. (Additionally, the idea that torture produces useful information is a false motive; prisoners under torture can be made to say anything their captor wants, regardless of its truth.)

In the same way, complaints about pain frequently earn a negative connotation of “self-betrayal.” Complaining about pain is seen as a personal failure, an inability to keep a positive attitude or cope with one’s circumstances. This “betrayal” mindset ignores the fact that the person in pain is experiencing world-destruction.

6. Pain is consciousness-destroying.

Similar to the last attribute but not identical, pain destroys the things that typically make up our consciousness. It destroys thoughts, memories, associations, and even senses. Scarry says, “Pain annihilates not only the objects of complex thought and emotion but also the objects of the most elemental acts of perception,” like sight and sound; think of the phrase “blinding pain.” (54) When the objects of our consciousness, the things that usually constitute our lived experience, are removed from us, a person can be said to no longer have access to the world outside of their body.

7. Pain is total.

“Pain begins by being “not oneself” and ends by having eliminated all that is “not itself.” At first occurring only as an appalling but limited internal fact, it eventually occupies the entire body and spills out into the realm beyond the body, takes over all that is inside and outside, makes the two obscenely indistinguishable, and systematically destroys anything like language or world extension that is alien to itself and threatening to its claims.” (54-55)

(Yeah, The Body in Pain is not light reading. Do not recommend as a fun summer beach read.)

Pain is total—not only emotionally, but physically. Scarry cites scientific sources who claim that there is no ‘pain center’ in the brain, but that pain is a complex phenomenon that engages every part of the brain and body. When certain pain pathways are cut off, “the body quickly, effortlessly, and endlessly generates new pathways” (55). The mental and physical components of pain are indistinguishable and all-enveloping. Eventually, a person in extreme pain can grasp nothing outside of the fact of their pain.

8. Pain resists objectification.

Pain resists objectification. “Though indisputably real to the sufferer, it is, unless accompanied by visible body damage or a disease label, unreal to others.” (56) Thus, pain doubles its annihilating power: it destroys the person’s world who experiences pain and it destroys the ability of other people to recognize that world-destruction. This leads to social negation and rejection—“the social equivalent of the physical aversiveness.” (56) After all, each of these eight attributes of pain are subjective attributes and require obstacle-clearing to exist in any form outside of a person’s body.

---

Scarry’s work is so comprehensive and self-assured that it gives off the impression of having reached a culmination point. Right now, I feel like I’m playing catch-up in my own thinking about pain. These eight attributes of pain are thought-provoking and seem fertile for agreement or disagreement, distinction or elaboration. As I’ve already said, I also see immediate applications to the experience of chronic illness.

Interestingly, Scarry goes on to argue that these subjective attributes of pain are forcibly objectified through the structure of torture. Objectification makes pain legible to people who are not experiencing it. It appropriates pain into political power.

The opposition of pain and power is fascinating. To me, there are obvious implications for disabled and chronically ill people. What does it mean if our pain is unable to be accessed, if the increase of our pain leads to a similar reduction in power? If we can find a way to objectify pain through language, to lift it out of the realm of inexpressibility, will it help? Is it possible to do so?

I think it’s worth trying. I think it’s possible to try and reduce some of the alienation, from ourselves and from others. We just need a new vocabulary.

[All citations from Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 1st edition, 1987.]