CorporealSemiotics:TheBodyoftheText/theTextoftheBody 375
words, once webegin to speak of acceptance,toleration,plausibility,or
similar terms derived from interpersonal exchange, the pain under
description ceases to be the sufferer's very own pain. Discursive
mediation marks the entry of a third party into the relation between a
person and "his" or "her" suffering: language, and, by extension, the
community of speakers and the cultural archives of a given social
formation. These then become the agents which transfer, perhaps even
translate, intensely felt personal anguish, taking it from the intimate
recesses of the somatic into what Lauren Berlant has called "a world of
public intimacy" (Qu eenofAmerica 1)..But there is a price to be paid
for this cultural constructivst solution to the problem of representing
painandotherformsofbodilyanguish:ifnotonlythebodybutalsothe
body in pain is conceived of as structurally positioned and lived in
intersubjective, interpretive contexts, then the investiture of this body
with culturally acceptable meanings also marks the moment when the
ability of a person to control her or his own bodily representation
becomesprecarious.
The entry of discursive mediation effectively changes the terrain in
which the somatic-semantic dualism plays itself out: the key question
now is no longer that of giving as adequately as possible a
representation of bodily affliction but rather whether a given
representation is acceptable, can travel easily from person to person in
the discursive universe of a culture. Even while it has become
technically possible to measure by visual apparatuses the physiological
processes actually going on in a human body suffering from, say, acute
pain,^71 suchevidence-baseddefinitionsofphysicalsufferingaretakinga
back seat in culture-critical contexts. Medical professionals usually
distinguish between different types of "pain-descriptors" (sensory,
(^71) Consider, for example, the McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ) which allowed
acorrectmedicaldiagnosisinover70percentofcasesofpatientssufferingfrom
acute pain; cf. also the detailed discussion with regard to visualizations in
Holzzmann-Kevles, Betty Ann.Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the
TwentiethCentury. NewBrunswick:Prentice-Hall,1992.Print.Visualexamples
canalsobefoundinUteHoll'sessay"weltschmerzimkopf.Technischemedien
und medizinische bildgebung [sic]."Schmerz, Kunst und Wissenschaft. Ed.
Blume,Eugen,AnnemarieHürlimann,ThomasSchnalke,andDanielTyradellis.
Berlin:Dumont,2007.40-54.Print.