#disablity

Introduction

[feelings] are "a consistent affirmation of the human being’s capacity to move out beyond the boundaries of his or her own body into the external, sharable world."

**can this relate to Donna Haraway's porousness?

"physical pain—unlike any other state of consciousness—has no referential content. It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language."

"if pain had a goal, it would be to be felt and known exclusively in its intensity."

Five sources for ways of knowing pain:

Individuals in pain themselves

Doctors attempting to diagnose and treat pain

Public, non-medical contexts of accounts of the pain of others (e.g. Amnesty International documents on torture)

Courtroom documents ("the lawyer, too, becomes an inventor of language, one who speaks on behalf of another person (the plaintiff) and attempts to communicate the reality of that person’s physical pain to people who are not themselves in pain (the jurors).")

Art

"the assumption that the act of verbally expressing pain is a necessary prelude to the collective task of diminishing pain."

"even the artist—whose lifework and everyday habit are to refine and extend the reflexes of speech—ordinarily falls silent before pain."

"the relative ease or difficulty with which any given phenomenon can be verbally represented also influences the ease or difficulty with which that phenomenon comes to be politically represented."

"It is not simply accurate but tautological to observe that given any two phenomena, the one that is more visible will receive more attention."

Part I. Chapter 1 is about torture ("uncovering the perceptual processes that permit this misdescription" of torture as information-gathering). Chapter 2 is about war.

"To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt. But we will see that the relation between pain and belief is even more problematic than has so far been suggested."

"The failure to express pain—will always work to allow its appropriation and conflation with debased forms of power;"

"Because the existing vocabulary for pain contains only a small handful of adjectives, one passes through direct descriptions very quickly and (as V. C. Medvei noted in his 1948 treatise on pain11) almost immediately encounters an “as if” structure: it feels as if . . .; it is as though. . . . On the other side of the ellipse there reappear again and again (regardless of whether the immediate context of the vocalization is medical or literary or legal) two and only two metaphors, and they are metaphors whose inner workings are very problematic."

Part II. "The discussion of civilization’s ongoing modifications of “agency”"

"Physical pain—[...] is language-destroying."

"because “the structure of war” and “the structure of unmaking” are not two subjects but one."

"Chapter 3 attends specifically to “mental imagining” (or what was a moment ago called the phase of “making-up”), and Chapters 4 and 5 together examine the action of creating verbal and material artifacts..."

"The vocabulary of “creating,” “inventing,” “making,” “imagining,” is not in the twentieth century a morally resonant one: “imagining,” for example, is usually described as an ethically neutral or amoral phenomenon;"

** the politics of imagining**

꒰ ◞ ◟ ꒱ㅤㅤㅤ dissociation flag

━╋━━━━ ㅤㅤㅤ a flag — created by me based on my own experiences — intended to represent dissociation. ㅤㅤㅤ ◞◟ ㅤㅤㅤ the appearance is intended to reflect the feeling of dissociation itself — the colours primarily representing the " dullness " or lack of " realness " of the world , and the blurriness primarily represents the feeling that the world or yourself are " blurry. " i see no issue with different interpretations based on the user's personal experiences , though. ㅤㅤㅤ ✶