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Often life and pain are made to be at odds. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cBut women have survived. As poets.
And there are no new pains<\/em>.\u201d^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - See Audre Lorde, \u201cPoetry Is Not a Luxury,\u201d in Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde<\/em>, ed. Roxane Gay (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020), 6, emphasis added.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so we carry on. I hear Audre Lorde\u2019s words bellow in Lazard\u2019s Pain Scale<\/em> (2019), a work that does not settle for the critique of Western medicine and its foundational anti-Blackness: it unravels it wholly. Pain Scale <\/em>consists of six identical cartoon-like faces in a row. Cut to the size of an LP, these brown vinyl faces wear a quiet expression of contempt, their mouths held in a cynical smile. Those familiar with the assessment rituals of the pain clinic will recognize the work as an appropriation of the Wong-Baker FACES Pain Rating Scale.^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - See the Wong-Baker FACES Foundation website, accessible online.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"FACES_English_Blue1\"$
Wong-Baker FACES<\/em>, 1983.
Photo: \u00a9 1983 Wong-Baker FACES Foundation<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Conceived to facilitate the communication of pain in children, the FACES scale has become a medical standard for the evaluation of pain across all ages. Its design is simple: a series of six white sketched faces whose expressions gradually worsen to mirror an increase in pain (the last of which, titled \u201cHurts Worst,\u201d even has tears drawn across it). Lazard\u2019s Pain Scale<\/em>, however, is stagnant. Its faces do not evolve\u200a\u2014\u200ain the face of pain, they are resolute. Shielding their wounds from the voyeuristic gaze of institutionalized medicine, what Lazard exhibits in Pain Scale<\/em> is neither the object of their pain, nor its intimate insides. Instead, what emerges are the conditions of (im)possibility of the artist\u2019s pain within a medical metaphysics of measure that carries Black pain as its baseline. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Pain Scale<\/em> tends to the wounding of Black pain itself\u200a\u2014\u200aat the hands of measure, in the name of medicine. Through this careful work, the pain that Lazard works no ceases to exist. In its wake lies no longer a pain scale, but a window into an anticolonial science of pain that has yet to come.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n* * *<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
In the series of mixed-media collages titled Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors <\/em>(2004\u200a\u2014\u200a05), Wangechi Mutu investigates the alienation of Black women in US-based globalizing media circuits through the assemblage of diverse registers of visual representation stemming from Western science, visual art, and fashion.^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 4 <\/a> - The works in this series may be viewed on the website of the National Galleries of Scotland, accessible online.<\/span> Found material in the form of nineteenth-century medical illustrations of the female reproductive system serve as Mutu\u2019s canvas, on which she cuts, folds, and tapes amputated models from a variety of printed sources, creating grotesque faces contoured by fields of jet-black ink and specks of glitter. Each of the twelve profiles born of this process bears a unique medical title that refers to its anatomic or pathological backdrop. Discussing the utilization of aesthetic and epistemic registers of scientific taxonomy within Histology<\/em>, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson offers the following analysis: \u201cHistology<\/em> is not simply, or exclusively, an interrogation of how black female forms are measured but more pointedly, Histology<\/em> underscores how sex difference, which is always raced, more generally, gathers legibility and materializes in the entangled relational field of racial domination.\u201d^{5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 5 <\/a> - Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World<\/em> (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 188.<\/span> For Jackson, measurement is never just<\/em> empirical but always already entangled in an intra-active process of world-making where measure and its matter\u200a\u2014\u200ametric and its object\u200a\u2014\u200aco-constitute themselves in a choreographic push and pull of scale and attention.^{6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 6 <\/a> - See Karen Barad, \u201cDiffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart,\u201d Parallax 20<\/em>, no. 3 (2014): 168\u200a\u2014\u200a87.<\/span> This is a dance in which Lazard\u2019s Pain Scale <\/em>and Mutu\u2019s Histology<\/em> share footing, redressing titular garbs of medical science in the process of offering for interpretation nothing less than the \u201cprocess of interpretation itself.\u201d^{7<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 7 <\/a> - Jackson, Becoming Human,<\/em> 164.<\/span> Whereas Mutu defiles the taxonomical legacies of racializing (which is always sexuating) medical violence through cutting and folding, Lazard offers a more subtle\u200a\u2014\u200abut equally loud\u200a\u2014\u200aintervention: they smile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Carolyn-Lazard_PainScale_detail\"$
Carolyn Lazard<\/strong>
Pain Scal<\/em>e, detail, 2019.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & Maxwell Graham \/ Essex Street, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Six sick smiles. In a row.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lazard\u2019s Wong-Baker faces are all brown and all smiles. Marshaled in a straight line, they form a horizon that refuses (de)gradation according to a racial logic of measure inherited from colonial fantasies of evolutionary taxonomy and typology. Consent not to be a single being; consent not to feel a single pain. All the pains unfurled in a single pane and what we are confronted with is the very impossibility of their just difference, that what is really<\/em> going on is unavailable to the unpained eye, imperceptible to its untrained nerve. This is activity at the supra-empirical<\/em> level: a measure of measurement undone in the (smiling) face of Black pain.^{8<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 8 <\/a> - Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, \u201c\u2018Theorizing in a Void\u2019: Sublimity, Matter, and Physics in Black Feminist Poetics,\u201d South Atlantic Quarterly<\/em> 117, no. 3 (July 2018): 621.<\/span> Choosing the statistical margin as a space of radical openness, Pain Scale<\/em> consciously shifts its scale from individualized harm\u200a\u2014\u200athe onus of which is borne by the hurting body\u200a\u2014\u200ato systemic violence\u200a\u2014\u200athe infliction of pain, through measure. In so doing, the work reveals its foundational and strategic paradox: Black pain cannot appear against a horizon which holds it in its threshold.^{9<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 9 <\/a> - My thinking here is indebted to Max Liboiron\u2019s generous and insightful work on the threshold, particularly on threshold theories of pollution as a technology of colonialism. See Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism<\/em> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).<\/span> At the risk of repeating what cannot be pained enough: if to measure is to always measure against<\/em>, what appears through measurement is only ever difference<\/em>, which in colonial science\u200a\u2014\u200aof all disciplines, including medicine\u200a\u2014\u200ais always created by way of what Jackson refers to as \u201cthe matter of black womanhood, as universality\u2019s nullified referent.\u201d^{10<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 10 <\/a> - Jackson, Becoming Human<\/em>, 208.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Six sick smiles in a row, given the name pain<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
And of course, this cannot be unmet. So the choir of philosophy sounds: But can pain even be meaningfully articulated? <\/em>To which medicine antiphonally responds: But what if this is all just a bad case of thick skin syndrome, North African syndrome, le syndrome m\u00e9diterran\u00e9en or worse, [gulp] b\u00eate machine syndrome?<\/em>^{11<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 11 <\/a> - These are only a few of Western medicine\u2019s pseudoscientific terminologies denoting the belief that Black people and people of colour physiologically feel less pain than white people. For an introduction, see Frantz Fanon, \u201cThe \u2018North African Syndrome,\u2019\u201d in Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays<\/em>, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 3\u200a\u2014\u200a16.<\/span> These questions digress from the painful matter at hand; that of making Black pain matter within a regime of colonial medicine that dispossesses it and reassigns it as white property. It\u2019s what\u2019s the matter with a Western medicine built on the studied and studious maiming of Black (female) flesh in the name of pain and its accurate naming, selective healing, and violent redistribution along the colour line. It\u2019s a matter of wounds and weapons, wounds in weapons, and wounded weapons wound up in the business of wounding. Watch your finger, it\u2019s a sharp edge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
* * *<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhen you cut your finger, bandage the knife.\u201d ^{12<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 12 <\/a> - Elaine Scarry discusses the significance of Joseph Beuys\u2019s sculpture When You Cut Your Finger, Bandage the Knife<\/em> (1962) in the Introduction of her book, The Body in Pain<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 16.<\/span>
\u2014 Joseph Beuys<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cA fancy man a fancy man
He\u2019s pointing with the fingers that are left on his hand.\u201d^{13<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 13 <\/a> - Lyrics from \u201cNeverland\u201d (2006) by the electronic music duo The Knife (Karin and Olof Dreijer) released on their 2006 album titled Silent Shout<\/em>.<\/span>
\u2014 The Knife, \u201cNeverland\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Elaine Scarry is in the business of expressing pain. Hers is a philosophical world of agency where the question (requirement?) of pain\u2019s expression reigns supreme: How do we objectify that which is inherently de-objectifying, put into language that which undoes sophrosynic discourse and reduces the individual to an ante-lingual state of cries and groans? Pain\u200a\u2014\u200afor Scarry\u200a\u2014\u200ais total and totalizing: a world-destroyer. Those who believe worlds to be made of words often misconstrue the philosophical problem of pain within language for the brunt of pain\u2019s burden borne by the afflicted. As an intentional state that does not take an object, pain just is<\/em>, and this\u200a\u2014\u200ain a cosmogony bookended by absolute language\u200a\u2014\u200ais never enough.^{14<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 14 <\/a> - Absolute language, a term I borrow from Italian philosopher Federico Campagna, is used to describe our metaphysical present: a cosmogony of technic where there is no \u201coutside\u201d to language, no existence permitted beyond its confines. See Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality<\/em> (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 65\u200a\u2014\u200a70.<\/span> Setting out to solve pain\u2019s fix, Scarry notes: \u201cThe feeling of pain entails the feeling of being acted upon, and the person may either express this in terms of the world acting on him [weapon] or his own body acting on him [wound].\u201d^{15<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 15 <\/a> - Scarry, The Body in Pain<\/em>, 16.<\/span> According to Scarry, pain\u200a\u2014\u200athough it may elude descriptive language\u200a\u2014\u200acan be expressed associatively through images of the wound and the weapon. The former is made to signify the experience of passive bodily damage; the latter, that of bodily agency. This is the customary dualism within which Scarry operates, the wound and the weapon having been made into polarizing entities. When tacit porosity does show itself to her, Scarry is quick to dismiss it: \u201cThe mental habit of recognizing<\/em> pain in<\/em> the weapon (despite the fact that an inanimate object cannot \u2018have pain\u2019 or any other sentient experience) is both an ancient and an enduring one.\u201d^{16<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 16 <\/a> - Ibid., 16.<\/span> Scarry\u2019s rehabilitation of wordless pain hinges on the ontological separation of the wound from the weapon, one which can only be breached through contamination from mental habits, ancient beliefs, or worse\u2026 art.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Carolyn-Lazard\"$
Carolyn Lazard<\/strong>
Pain Scale<\/em>, 2019, installation view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2020.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & Maxwell Graham\/Essex Street, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Enter Joseph Beuys and his gauzed-up knife. The German artist\u2019s readymade becomes, for Scarry, an example of how an object can be imbued with sentience. In her thirst for a rational violence that runs downstream from cause (weapon) to effect (wound), Scarry is incapable of grasping that Beuys\u2019s knife is not in<\/em> pain, but in fact, pain itself\u200a\u2014\u200a<\/em>as both wound and<\/em> weapon. In this, Scarry is not alone. The purity of this separation lies at the heart of a white supremacy which replicates itself through the erasure of pain as process\u200a\u2014\u200aor, rather, pain as its<\/em> process, meticulously crafted into a science we call colonialism. Wound and weapon are the names given to a single Janus-faced violence\u200a\u2014\u200awhiteness\u200a\u2014\u200awhich manufactures its weapons from the wounds of the colonized so as to not only wound their flesh but, more perniciously, wound their wounds. Because to maim will not suffice. For the wound of whiteness to be effective, it must inflict its lesion on colonized pain itself, its material and virtual conditions of existence. And so it cuts deep: across skin, past sinew, through muscle, until it reaches the very nerve endings which make pain possible\u200a\u2014\u200abecause, as Lorde warned us by way of poet Mary McAnally, \u201cpain teaches us to take our fingers OUT the fucking fire.\u201d^{17<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 17 <\/a> - Lorde, Selected Works<\/em>, 27.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
* * *<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Against the anesthetic agenda of whiteness, Lazard scales us back to pain. Pain Scale<\/em> does the work of visualizing the (Black) wound in the (white) weapon which wounds (Black) pain: measurement. In displaying a string of identical smiling faces, Lazard\u2019s work performs the impossibility of a Black pain scale within a colonial science of medicine that continually obscures its foundational violence with separation myths of wound from weapon, pain from measure. In this regard, Lazard, like Beuys, exhibits a knife\u200a\u2014\u200aexcept theirs cuts not their finger, but their pain, into discrete indivisible units\u2026 and carries with it the slightly revised instructions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When you cut your finger, rip the bandage off the knife.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
And let it bleed out.<\/p>\n
Carolyn Lazard, Rouzbeh Shadpey, Wangechi Mutu<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I can exhibit pain, as I exhibit red, and as <\/br>I exhibit straight and crooked and trees <\/br>and stones.\u200a\u2014\u200aThat is what we call<\/em> \u201cexhibiting.\u201d
<\/br>Ludwig Wittgenstein,
<\/br>Philosophical Investigations<\/em><\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":173344,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[3686],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[3712],"artistes":[3714,3713],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[195,319],"class_list":["post-173411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-106-pain","auteurs-rouzbeh-shadpey-en","artistes-carolyn-lazard-en","artistes-wangechi-mutu-en","type_post-principal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173411"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":271278,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173411\/revisions\/271278"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173411"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=173411"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=173411"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=173411"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=173411"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=173411"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=173411"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=173411"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=173411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}