Dr Alex Rowe
COMMUNICATING CHRONIC PAIN: CAN CHRONIC PAIN BE COMMUNICATED AND UNDERSTOOD THROUGH FINE ARTS AND CREATIVE PRACTICES?
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Abstract
The goal of this research has been to understand our inability to adequately communicate to others the devastatingly subjective experience of pain, a condition that, according to the French novelist Alphonse Daudet (2002) drives out language. And yet it is clear that feeling pain can be disclosed and, in some sense, conveyed: if language fails in the face of the locked-in interiority of chronic or acute suffering, then shared interpretable experiences must be realised in some form when seriously ill artists like Robert Pope (1995) produce evocative paintings about the physical discomfort and mental disorientation of illness. What is happening here? How can pain be both inexpressible and expressed? As a maker of animated-installation artworks who has a chronic illness and a son with a genetic condition that requires regular medical care, this paradox has been only too apparent when the doctors that treat us measure pain, as they are taught to do, on a scale of one-to-ten. Thus the underlying proposition of this research is that an artist ought to be able to offer a fuller and more creative alternative to this arithmetical simplification.
Crucially for the development of this project and the writing of this thesis, the cognitive psychologist Nicholas Humphrey (1999, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2011) has established a five-step explanatory system that maps the shifting, transformative stages in between private feelings and public representations. Humphrey’s steps join the sufferer’s bodily-located pain to her identity-building ‘paining’, a term coined by Humphrey to designate the outward social and cultural face of being conscious of pain. These steps, with their analytical force and thought-provoking phenomenology, provide the platform on which this thesis places the paining of artists alongside broader theories of communication. As a result, two of the most significant names in semiotics, the nineteenth century philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and the twentieth century literary theorist Roland Barthes, guide the discussion in the central part of this thesis. Using concepts such as ‘Dynamical Objects’ (Peirce) and ‘punctum’ (Barthes) I then extend the debate about ill artists to include Charles Darwin’s view, articulated in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1858), that remission from illness generates, in the shift from pain to paining, a highly productive state of extra-health. With support from contemporary philosophers such as Caroline Korsmeyer, writing on the cognitive efficacy of disgust (2008), an entirely positive definition of an ‘ill artist’ develops in the research. Our inability to communicate subjective pain turns out to be, once the emotional and intellectual power of extra-health takes hold, a summons to artists to heighten their scope as creative practitioners. This positive redefinition of artists who are ill is the main finding of the doctoral project.
As a practice-led researcher based in the visual arts, the process of writing a thesis entitled ‘Communicating Pain’ has relied throughout on the opportunities I have had to pause to consider what is happening as I animate images or edit a video, the sort of methodological procedure that Donald Schön (1983) calls reflection-in/on-action. However, once the redefinition of the ill artist was in place, it was possible to make cross-references at a more general level to artists using pain as a spur to communication (for example, Bill Viola’s transformation of grief into grieving in his Nantes Triptych). Thus I conclude the thesis by addressing the broadest cultural values associated with artists who experiences chronic or acute pain. In the end the concept of the ill artist will, I speculate in relation to Northumbria University’s partnership with Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, help doctors ‘tell something [about a patient’s suffering] that is seldom told solely from listening to narrative’. (Pither, 2004)
www.painingandfinearts.weebly.com
The goal of this research has been to understand our inability to adequately communicate to others the devastatingly subjective experience of pain, a condition that, according to the French novelist Alphonse Daudet (2002) drives out language. And yet it is clear that feeling pain can be disclosed and, in some sense, conveyed: if language fails in the face of the locked-in interiority of chronic or acute suffering, then shared interpretable experiences must be realised in some form when seriously ill artists like Robert Pope (1995) produce evocative paintings about the physical discomfort and mental disorientation of illness. What is happening here? How can pain be both inexpressible and expressed? As a maker of animated-installation artworks who has a chronic illness and a son with a genetic condition that requires regular medical care, this paradox has been only too apparent when the doctors that treat us measure pain, as they are taught to do, on a scale of one-to-ten. Thus the underlying proposition of this research is that an artist ought to be able to offer a fuller and more creative alternative to this arithmetical simplification.
Crucially for the development of this project and the writing of this thesis, the cognitive psychologist Nicholas Humphrey (1999, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2011) has established a five-step explanatory system that maps the shifting, transformative stages in between private feelings and public representations. Humphrey’s steps join the sufferer’s bodily-located pain to her identity-building ‘paining’, a term coined by Humphrey to designate the outward social and cultural face of being conscious of pain. These steps, with their analytical force and thought-provoking phenomenology, provide the platform on which this thesis places the paining of artists alongside broader theories of communication. As a result, two of the most significant names in semiotics, the nineteenth century philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and the twentieth century literary theorist Roland Barthes, guide the discussion in the central part of this thesis. Using concepts such as ‘Dynamical Objects’ (Peirce) and ‘punctum’ (Barthes) I then extend the debate about ill artists to include Charles Darwin’s view, articulated in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1858), that remission from illness generates, in the shift from pain to paining, a highly productive state of extra-health. With support from contemporary philosophers such as Caroline Korsmeyer, writing on the cognitive efficacy of disgust (2008), an entirely positive definition of an ‘ill artist’ develops in the research. Our inability to communicate subjective pain turns out to be, once the emotional and intellectual power of extra-health takes hold, a summons to artists to heighten their scope as creative practitioners. This positive redefinition of artists who are ill is the main finding of the doctoral project.
As a practice-led researcher based in the visual arts, the process of writing a thesis entitled ‘Communicating Pain’ has relied throughout on the opportunities I have had to pause to consider what is happening as I animate images or edit a video, the sort of methodological procedure that Donald Schön (1983) calls reflection-in/on-action. However, once the redefinition of the ill artist was in place, it was possible to make cross-references at a more general level to artists using pain as a spur to communication (for example, Bill Viola’s transformation of grief into grieving in his Nantes Triptych). Thus I conclude the thesis by addressing the broadest cultural values associated with artists who experiences chronic or acute pain. In the end the concept of the ill artist will, I speculate in relation to Northumbria University’s partnership with Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, help doctors ‘tell something [about a patient’s suffering] that is seldom told solely from listening to narrative’. (Pither, 2004)
www.painingandfinearts.weebly.com
