How to Do Things with Pain?

Mirjana  Stošić

doi:10.25038/am.v0i18.300

Authors

Mirjana Stošić

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i18.300

Keywords:

pain-act, speech-act, diagnosis, performative, ex-citable pain, pained

Abstract

Speaking of the monstrous or ‘foreign’ body archivally inscribed in culture, one notes a surfeit of imagery at play, a slideshow of supplementary images which both circumscribe and stultify any attempt to write or speak about the body outside of this code of foreignness. This paper argues that such an archive of etiolated body is shadowed by a similarly circumscribing archive of pain. Archives of pain, whether medical, cultural, literary, or ontogenetic, have long been conceived in terms of montage, a series of ‘signs, images, or ciphers’ belonging to the language of diagnosis. This code of diagnostic expertise constatively works to describe and inscribe pain as a supplement to inscriptions of bodihood which are themselves supplementary. This paper seeks to affectively map a shift away from constative taxonomies of pain and body image, towards an approach that ethically and aesthetically privileges the performativity of pain, the pain-act that speaks its suffering without recourse to image or inscription.

Article received: December 12, 2018; Article accepted: January 23, 2019; Published online: April 15, 2019; Original scholarly paper

How to cite this article: Stošić, Mirjana. "How to Do Things with Pain?" AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 18 (2019): 1–7. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i18.300

Author Biography

Mirjana Stošić

Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade
Serbia

Mirjana Stošić is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University (Belgrade, Serbia) where she teaches media theory, academic writing and critical theory. She holds a PhD in media and cultural studies with special focus on monster theory. She is also a PhD candidate at the Department for Transdisiplinary Arts and Media at the Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i18.300 DOI: https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i18.300