Link: https://vimeo.com/277121838/371898fef8
I. Introduction
Plato’s Theatetus is widely accepted as a starting point for a definition of knowledge: true judgment with an account.[1] However, it is important to note that Theatetus’s first answer to Socrates in the dialogue is that knowledge is perception, and the matter is never satisfactorily resolved.[2] This framework is logically prior to a discussion of values, character, and the ways in which knowledge plays out in moral dilemmas. Pain & Becoming is about painful knowing and its logical entailments. What I hope to offer here is a detailed analysis of a true judgment with a personal, perceptual account: that painful knowing is a way of knowing which provides the knower with access to a unique set of perceptions, which, in turn, influences the way the knower thinks about morally salient facts of the world, and this, over time, shapes moral character, and nurtures unique approaches to moral dilemmas.
Throughout this analysis, I will speak of cripping and crip concepts: cripping means that the argument is to be read in the context of disabled, disabling, destabilizing knowledges. How do we distil crip values from experiences of painful knowing ? What about cripping concepts of moral character ? And how can we crip classic moral dilemmas ? I want to provide a starting point to expand, or answer these questions, working from an introspective analysis of painful knowing.
What follows is the textual companion, or conceptual background justification, for a video art project which archives a symbolic interpretation of a condition I have, called fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia is a chronic pain syndrome marked by fatigue, widespread painful sensations in the joints and muscles, as well as an impediment of mental clarity, known as “brain fog”. Flares can last hours, days, or weeks. Throughout the process of making this piece, I experienced three flares, which I have analyzed introspectively as part of my research. The other components of this project involved studying the symbolisms I intuitively invoked to understand their theoretical underpinnings and explore any linkages to embodied ethics. My conjecture throughout this work was that if you are in pain all of the time or most of the time, then you know the world differently, and it shapes your character. Thus, I approached this project experimentally, to clarify my own thinking about a way of being in my body I have come to call, “painful knowing”.
A lot of my thinking is influenced by John Rawls’s Theory of Justice, and especially Justice as Fairness: A Restatement; I make frequent references to his work throughout. I also recognize the impacts of Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr.’s,[3] Alison Kafer’s, Margrit Shildrick’s, and Alyson Patsavas’s works in shaping my own ideas about painful knowing. And, I am also indebted to Joseph Heath, for his explanation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and collective action problems, in my previous coursework.
The elements of design for this project are visual, musical, and textual. The major themes I am working with are: symbolic representations of pain, their connections to adaptive transformations of the psyche, temporality, cripping,and “pure” bodily sensations of pain. These themes are meant to re-contextualize pain as an informative, active modality of knowing, and unlock its psychic significance in developing moral character.
Phenomenologically, painful, embodied ways of knowing are often overlooked as legitimate sources of knowledge. By extension, moral knowledge is reserved for pain-free, idealized knowers. My intention here is to extract from my experience a kind of moral cripistemology, by pursuing personal emblems of pain as tributaries to my unique framework of values.
The experience of painful knowing imprints on me a set of values. These values consist in a patient, pain-oriented, situated, and interconnected way of being. Patience suggests an understanding of time as cripped, or reimagined;[4] it offers a calculus of moral character formation through development over crip time. Fundamentally, pain-orientation repositions the experience of pain in the body as knowledge-yielding and thus, valuable in constructing moral character. Situatedness locates painful knowing within the perspective of the knower, prioritizing the knower’s experiences as foundational for their moral character. Interconnectivity shifts the focus from the individual experience to its more fluid aspects, i.e., the way pain affects socially linked individuals.
I will begin in section II by explaining how “cripping” works, specifically on epistemology, to produce cripistemologies. I will then show in section III how cripping affects notions of temporality. Next, in section IV, I will consider how “glitching” technique theoretically parallels notions of cripping. In section V, I will lay out some of my introspective research on painful knowing, which forms the framework for section VI, in which I discuss how painful knowing affects moral reasoning. Section VII sets out to address crip values, and introduce crip character. Section VIII aims to give a specific theory and application of painful knowing in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and section IX briefly recapitulates the ideas presented in this text.
II. Cripping Epistemology: Cripistemologies
Grounding principles of painful knowing in this way inevitably involves a cripping process, to crystalize the experience as located within a wider political discourse about disabled bodies. Alyson Patsavas, in her 2014 article, “Recovering a Cripistemology of Pain: Leaky Bodies, Connective Tissue, and Feeling Discourse”, vocalizes an account which is in counterpoint to traditional cultural narratives. “[A] cripistemology of pain makes several key interventions into knowledge produced about/through pain: tracing the discursive systems that materially produce and structure experiences of pain, laying out a corporeally infused cultural analysis of pain, excavating the felt experiences of cultural discourses, and situating those experiences within a broader cultural politics of ableism[.]”[5] Cripistemologies, as morally and epistemically situated accounts, are necessarily multivocal, and woven into the conceptual structures of embodied ethics, feminist epistemology, queer discourses, and disability discourses: they potentially unhook pain from narratives of suffering and unfold richer interpretations of these lived experiences.
To say cripistemologies are multivocal is to affirm that they are necessarily pluralist accounts. John Rawls’s concept of “reasonable pluralism” is the best analog of this feature. “[A] democratic society is not and cannot be a community, where by a community I mean a body of persons united in affirming the same comprehensive, or partially comprehensive, doctrine. The fact of reasonable pluralism which characterizes a society with free institutions makes this impossible. This is the fact of profound and irreconcilable differences in citizens’ reasonable comprehensive religious and philosophical conceptions of the world, and in their views of the moral and aesthetic values to be sought in human life.”[6] By extension, this allows for differences in how people experience pain, and extract cripistemologies from those experiences.
III. The Temporal Dimension
Pain & Becoming orients the spectator towards a redefinition of time and its connection to painful knowing. Alison Kafer, in her book Feminist Queer Crip, examines how notions of temporality are often intrinsic to conceptualizations of disability.[7] In chapter one, she inquires how one might experience, create, or understand “crip time”: “[c]rip time is time not just expanded but exploded; it requires reimagining our notions of what can and should happen in time, or recognizing how expectations of “how long things take” are based on very particular minds and bodies[.]”[8] Painful knowing can amplify temporal perception through its insistence on mental attention to bodily sensations.
John Rawls’s conceptualization of time in Justice as Fairness could be another lens on painful knowing. For Rawls, temporality is a feature of society at large. He posits “the idea of society as a fair system of social cooperation over time from one generation to the next[.]”[9] Time is necessary to the process of social cooperation; time is necessary to sustain society from one generation to the next. How does this apply to an individual painful knower ? Painful knowers are interconnected and situated within society, and they participate in and cooperate in society over time. But, for the painful knower, time is a more salient feature of life, because it is cripped.
IV. Glitching: Lessons from Art
This piece incorporates a glitchaesthetic and methodology: by glitching I (digitally) deconstruct and reconstitute a series of images into an alternate, reimagined knowledge. Glitching employs and embraces the “buggy-ness” or the “leakiness” (to borrow Margrit Shildrick’s term[10]) of software and hardware “error” in an effort to redefine truth as associated with the machine-body that produces it. Glitching happens when software and hardware malfunction, when they are purposely pushed to their limits, or when they are ‘hacked’.
For Pain & Becoming, I used Audacity (free open-source music creation software) to glitch my video footage. I had to view the video data as an audio file in order to glitch it, manipulating parameters in order to achieve the effects I wanted. I understood that there was a chance that things would not turn out the way I liked; a lot of experimentation was needed. This process was another reminder that in order to exist as a crip you have to be a bit of a hacker: you have to find workarounds, backdoors, or alternative methods for performing normal everyday activities non-crips would take for granted. Thus, to glitch is, ultimately, to crip: the parallel between the two processes creates a new timeline, a futurity which is formed in the intertwined realities of pain and knowing.
V. The Phenomenology of Painful Knowing: An Introspective Account
The body, as a porous conduit, is one way of framing moral cripistemology. Shildrick describes the body as “leaky”: “[w]hat I have in mind is both the especial immanence of the female body, as it is frequently represented in ontological theory, such that it enmeshes women themselves; and its putative leakiness, the outward flow of the body which breaches the boundaries of the proper. Those differences – mind/body, self/other, inner/outer – which should remain clear and distinct are threatened by loss of definition, or by dissolution.”[11] The body, so constructed, is permeable to experiences and knowledges. Membrane-like, the body not only figuratively but physically bleeds and secretes beyond the boundaries of its fleshly material.
I have analyzed my pain introspectively to understand how it affects my perception, and my relationship to the (external) world. Pain affects my perception of time, my movement, and strikes to the core of my consciousness, affecting my internal representations. My pain grinds time to dust; it weighs heavily with every extension of my limbs, every flex of my fingers, every act of mentally grasping the forms external to me. It draws these forms inward, coloring them with pain. It burns, tingles, and punctuates. It adds gravity to each perception which would otherwise appear neutral. It enhances the phenomenal character[12] of these experiences beyond representational, pure imaginings, and burdens them with corporeal strain. The character of my experience is thus pain-laden. Pain reminds me of my physicality, my existential position; it cements my conception of the body I live with as a spiritually-infused material on a trajectory towards death.
Pain also has a way of muting, or numbing, elements of the surrounding world which would otherwise make me lost in a sea of stimuli. I, as knower, cling to finer details, observing the intricacies of the objects of my perception, to keep my consciousness afloat. These latches of consciousness help articulate my reality, and directly connect to painful sensations. These sensations map onto specific elements of my external environment. Pain leaks from body to mind, mind to body; the boundary between them dissolves.
VI. Algorithms of Painful Knowing: Moral Reasoning
Painful knowing means that the experience of consciousness is pain-informed. Pain may fade to the background of consciousness, but it is always present. How does this affect my perception of morally salient features of the world ? How does the experience of pain affect moral reasoning ?
The mind operates according to two major mechanisms: one “slow”, and cognitive; the other “fast”, and emotional.[13] Arguably, pain blurs the boundary between these two mechanisms, but leans more towards the slow mechanism. Fibro pain distorts, or enhances, my sense of time. Pain is connected to a set of emotions which activates the “fast” mechanism – but, due to the temporality of pain, the “slow” mechanism activates as well. There is a greater preference for slow thinking in my moral reasoning processes as a result. These experiences of prolonged, mentally numbing pain impinge upon the faculties of moral reasoning in a way that develops moral character with a preference for slow, cognitive thinking, versus fast, emotional thinking.
John Rawls’s concept of “reflective equilibrium” is another way to examine moral reasoning processes. Faced with considerations which do not fit together, knowers work both up and down: given principles which don’t gel with judgments, we work up from the judgments to create new principles, while in other circumstances we work down from principles to judgments, making new judgments if necessary.[14]
Painful knowing reinforces this process in two ways. First, it draws attention to the universally shared human experience of pain, as a general principle from which to work. Second, it particularizes the pain to the current bodily experience. I can judge from my pain, generalizing that others must experience pain, and, I derive from this universal law that pain is a morally salient feature of human life. Painful knowing diffuses through all experience, highlighting morally salient facts in a way that simple acts of idealized knowing do not. Painful knowing also forces me to revise judgments in light of additional considerations. It brings more morally salient features of a scenario to the forefront, because of the extension of empathetic awareness to the universally shared experience of pain.
Thus, we have two ways of understanding moral reasoning in the painful knower: a preference for “slow” thinking, and facility in working both from first principles to judgments or revising judgments in light of new considerations. I, as painful knower, have greater access to slow thinking mechanisms, and greater access to a Rawlsian “reflective equilibrium”.
VII. Painful Knowing as Moral Cripistemology: Extracting Crip Values and Crip Character
In the previous section, I referred to Rawls’s concept of reflective equilibrium. “Justice as fairness regards all our judgments, whatever their level of generality—whether a particular judgment or a high-level general conviction—as capable of having for us, as reasonable and rational, a certain intrinsic reasonableness. Yet since we are of divided mind and our judgments conflict with those of other people, some of these judgments must eventually be revised, suspended, or withdrawn, if the practical aim of reaching reasonable agreement on matters of political justice is to be achieved.”[15]
When considerations conflict, we must revise, suspend, or withdraw our judgments. Painful knowing provides ample opportunity to do all of these things: painful knowing slows thinking, and it enhances the emotional quality of morally salient facts – when faced with conflicting considerations I am most likely to retreat and reflect than to rush into a judgment. All reasoning happens in light of painful knowledge – pain tempers impulsive thoughts and emotional states because it drains energy. It extends moral reasoning processes over time, including more considerations which shed light on morally salient facts. Thus, slow thinking, or, what I term patience, is a crip value I could derive from painful knowing.
Pain is a universal law of human experience: prolonged experiences of pain have developed my moral reasoning in such a way as to build a value of pain-orientation.I view the world through the lens of painful knowing. I think in terms of how pain affects me, and I extend this thought: pain amplifies empathetic inference.
I am proceeding from the features of my own experience of painful knowing, to construct an account which supports my framework. Thus, my account is necessarily from a situated perspective. I have called this crip value situatedness, to circumscribe my knowledge, as what I know is limited. It is consistent to say that cripistemologies, so situated, are reasonable pluralist accounts.
Interconnectivity can also be derived from the universal human law of painful experience – all human life has the capacity for pain. When in the presence of someone in pain, pain bleeds over into us; it leaks, reframing our experience of the world in terms of their pain. Pain is necessarily then an interconnected experience – pain is contagious: emotionally, perhaps physically.
My moral character is defined by this constellation of values, which is shaped over time due to the chronic, intermittent nature of my experience. Each time a flare happens I operate as a painful knower. With each flare, these crip values have further solidified into my moral character.
VIII. Painful Knowing, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and Collective Action Problems: Theory and Application
It should be clearer now that cripping moral epistemology, bringing forward cripped values, and sketching a cripped account of moral character entail a cripped perspective of classic dilemmas. This has implications for behavioral economics-influenced ethics. We can crip models of “rational” behaviour in collective action problems to produce novel insights: painful knowers count as rational agents.
The paradigm case of collective action problems is a two-player game called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, there are conflicting incentives: each player can either cooperate or defect. If they both defect, they get the worst outcome. If one cooperates and one defects, the defector gets a highly desirable outcome, while the cooperator gets a mildly undesirable outcome. If they both cooperate, they each get a mildly desirable outcome. However, their incentives conflict: self-interest is pitted against collective-interest. The only way to ensure that both players cooperate is to externally impose a rule that says they must cooperate; the outcome in which both cooperate is called the pareto-efficient outcome.
How might painful knowing affect the outcome of this scenario ? If we think of the painful knower as a player in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, crip values lead to a specific configuration of player behaviours.
Rawls describes rational agents as rational “in the way familiar from economics [...] the parties are rational in that they can rank their final ends consistently; they deliberate guided by such principles as: to adopt the most effective means to one’s ends; to select the alternative most likely to advance those ends; to schedule activities so that, ceteris paribus, more rather than less of those ends can be fulfilled.”[16]
I accept that a painful knower is rational, in the Rawlsian sense. However, they are also patient, pain-oriented, situated, and interconnected. Thus, they might take more time mulling things over, they might be more fixated on certain morally salient features of a scenario, they would have access to more morally salient features which set them apart from idealized knowers, and they are conceptualized as socially embedded (whereas idealized knowers operate in isolation).
Arguably, the painful knower is more likely to cooperate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, because they are more collective-interest-oriented. Pain operates as a kind of external rule for cooperation: a painful knower understands that pain is a universal human condition because they are socially embedded. They can work down from the general principle which contributes to collective interest. A painful knower also has access to more considerations in the game than an idealized knower, and they can “work up”, adjusting judgments to match each consideration. The painful knower fixates on morally salient features of the game to have a clearer picture of the collective implications. And finally, the painful knower takes more time to reach final judgments, which further increases the likelihood of cooperation. Extended to a collective action problem, this means that painful knowers, so construed, contribute to pareto-efficient outcomes.
IX. Conclusion
Pain & Becoming aims to articulate a personal account of pain as a way of knowing, which, based on my introspective investigations, has consequences for the formation of moral character. Over time, the experience of pain has become integral to the way I know myself, others, and the surrounding world. Painful knowing involves a reimagining of my self in relation to pain, to others, to external environments, and to time. It involves an attunement to the embodied nature of my self, and a fundamental shift in awareness of my self as material/spiritual composite. The embodied, painful-knowing self is defined by a juxtaposition of fragility and strength: it is cripped, and therefore, glitched.
The painful knower is more intensely aware of certain morally salient features of the world than idealized knowers. The repeated process of analyzing these features of the world in relation to pain therefore produces certain kinds of moral knowledge only accessible through painful knowing, likely producing distinguishable moral characters with particular clusters of values. These values I have described from my own lived experience as patient, pain-oriented, situated, and interconnected. I have explored how these values might play out in a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma game, however, my understanding of behavioral economics is limited. I suspect that conceptualizing players as “painful knowers” might yield certain insights into various kinds of collective action problems.
Bibliography.
Chalmers, David J. The Representational Character of Experience. URL = http://consc.net/papers/representation.html.
Kafer, Alison. Feminist Queer Crip.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.
Patsavas, Alyson. “Recovering a Cripistemology of Pain: Leaky Bodies, Connective Tissue, and Feeling Discourse.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. 8 no. 2 (2014): 203-218.
Plato, trans. Levett, M. J., rev. Burnyeat, Myles, ed. Cooper, John M. “Theatetus.” Complete Works.Cambridge/Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997.
Pohlhaus, Jr., Gaile. “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance.” Hypatia 27 no. 4. (2012): 715-735.
Rawls, John, ed. Kelly, Erin. Justice As Fairness: A Restatement.Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.
Richardson, Henry S., ed. Zalta, Edward N. "Moral Reasoning." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition). URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/reasoning-moral/.
Shildrick, Margrit. Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, postmodernism, and (bio)ethics.London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
Endnotes.
[1]Plato, trans. Levett, M. J., rev. Burnyeat, Myles, ed. Cooper, John M. “Theatetus.” Complete Works.(Cambridge/Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997). 189-223.
[2]Ibid., 168.
[3]Pohlhaus, Jr., Gaile. “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance” Hypatia 27 no. 4, 2012. 715-735; her emphasis on the experiences of marginally situated knowers broadly informs my approach to cripistemologies.
[4]Alison Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 25.
[5]Alyson Patsavas, “Recovering a Cripistemology of Pain: Leaky Bodies, Connective Tissue, and Feeling Discourse” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8 no. 2, 2014. 207.
[6]Rawls, John, Justice As Fairness (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001). 3.
[7]Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip, 25-26.
[8]Ibid., 27.
[9]Rawls, Justice As Fairness, 5.
[10]Margrit Shildrick, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, postmodernism, and (bio)ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). 10.
[11]Ibid., 16.
[12]David J. Chalmers, The Representational Character of Experience. URL = http://consc.net/papers/representation.html. Part 2.
[13]Richardson, Henry S., ed. Zalta, Edward N., "Moral Reasoning," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/reasoning-moral/, 1.2.
[14]Ibid., 2.5.
[15]Rawls, Justice As Fairness, 30.
[16]Rawls, Justice As Fairness,87.