If the felt-attributes of pain are (through one means of verbal objectification or another) lifted into the visible world, and if the referent for these now objectified attributes is understood to be the human body, then the sentient fact of the person's suffering will become knowable to a second person. It is also possible, however, for the felt-attributes of pain to be lifted into the visible world but now attached to a referent other than the human body. That is, the felt-characteristics of pain - one of which is its compelling vibrancy or simply its "certainty" - can be appropriated away from the body and presented as the attributes of something else (something which by itself lacks those attributes, something which does not in itself appear vibrant, real, or certain). This process will throughout the argument of this book be called "analogical verification" or "analogical substantiation." It will gradually become apparent that at particular moments when there is within society a crisis of belief - that is, when some central idea or ideology or cultural construct has ceased to elicit a population's belief either become it is manifestly fictitious or because it has for some reason been divested of ordinary forms of substantiation - the sheer material factualness of the human body will be borrowed to lend that cultural construct the aura of "realness" and "certainty."
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
