Writing about pain (and pleasure)

Emerging from the cracks...or in this case.......

‘Noises from the creaking and cracking of ‘Painful’ consumption experiences’

This brief polemic is not from the head, the heart or even from the soul....more from the nerve endings!

Pain and suffering

I am destruction

I am angry

I am total

Lyrics Courtesy of Iggy Pop

Pain and suffering are often thought of as being much the same; they can be experienced separately..... 

Pain is fundamentally unpleasant sensation.

Suffering is something we do with our pain.

New research shows that more than a quarter of us suffer daily pain, ...the BMA (an inherently conservative body) estimate that approximately 6 million people in the UK suffer chronic pain – I am one of those people

It does not mean an always alienated presence in the sense that my experience is disconnected from the surrounding social world, but it does mean acceptance of a loss .....for example loss in ‘quality’ of life.

And, given this notion of quality is in part culturally defined.....it follows that in a consumerist culture not only is there is a cultural appropriation in the experience of pain but that some of it is meshed-up with acts of consumption.

Given the apparent ‘greater agentic primacy being afforded to the consuming subject’ consumer & marketing research has the nerve to largely ignore this notion of pain

Where is it? Where do we hear it, feel it and see it? Those in the no make pain related consumer purchases...from ‘Merton elite’ tables and TENS’ machines.... (Yes of course ...there is an array of consumables built up around the practice of treating pain) .....But I am alluding here to ‘painful consumption’ beyond the walls of the specialist consultants & therapists.

Ok, Holbrook and Hirschman – when talking about consumer fantasies, feelings and fun - did refer to the difficulty of using ‘’available indices of chronic hedonic energy in the context of explaining acute and volatile, sensory-emotions’’. In so doing they introduced core language from understanding pain; acute and chronic....

This specific example is part of a louder movement: insights from the world of health care to help generate fuller, richer, deeper understandings of the human condition...being co-opted by those studying consumers. Materially we see this with, for example, the growth of quasi-phenomenological consumer research and notions - ranging from ‘the active interview’ through to ‘positional shifts’ of the participant - becoming more apparent. One highly pertinent strand of consumer research that originates in health & medical disciplines considers mortality and how this shapes our ‘embodiment practices as consumers’.....this area of enquiry does give concrete form to the consumer body; a feature often treated only in the abstract.

And here I use the term abstract in both its academic sense but also to signify remoteness.

So I ask:

Where is the appreciation of routine practices revolving around pain and our response to it, the paradox of both the extraordinary-objectifying quality it brings to our relationship with our body and, at the same time an ever present (sometimes razor sharp) reminder of our subjective isolation.

Where is the performative character of consuming (and researching) with and in such conditions?  

To use John Law’s work on mess in social research - Part of the taken-for-granted hinterland, the sediments of our ‘natural state’ means pain all too easily disintegrates as either manifest absent (on the part of those experiencing it) or ‘othered’ by those who don’t.

As an aside it is interesting to note how the very idea that some phenomena (in this case pain) are treated quite differently by individuals (made absent or ‘othered’) yet produce a similar shared outcomes... (in this case pain free data, pain free analysis, pain free understanding).

Time to move pain from the background to the fore: to evocate the more visceral

So what is this polemic other than a cry for us all to all offer a little more empathy, or, if that’s too difficult, a dose of sympathy to those in & with pain?

No, I am saying enough talk about immersion we need to better tune accounts of immersion.

Chronic pain challenges many people’s enactment of consumer scripts, it also generates challenges for some in their practice as researcher....beyond this it can act as a catalyst to challenge ...in this case to challenge our way of co-constructing the vital relationships between consumer actions, the marketplace, and cultural meanings.

With passing reference to Daniel Millers ‘The little black dress is the solution. But what’s the problem? We need to add to the list of ‘crimes of consumption’ its development and preservation of a belief in perpetual remedy, fueled by widespread dissemination of promotional texts about the perfect life....

At a simple level this requires the portrayal of pain to go much further than ....something that with the help of a magic pill call aspirin can be overcome to get back to ‘normal’.....

At a more reflective level, given that as consumer researchers, we need to wrestle with the impact of our work upon the people and culture we study... we need to be concerned about the widespread existence of consumers ‘with’ pain & the void in what we have to say or feel or do about it.

 I offer two glimpses of the potency of mixing pain and consumption.......both stem from the lived experience of chronic pain and exhibit strong parallels with existing work on consumption practices.

The first is a sense of perpetual dilemma ......needing to be extra well prepared and yet knowing that all is contingent on ‘how you are feeling at the time’

The second - particularly evident in the literature from health studies - is articulated in a number of enlightening ways that revolve around the notion of ‘rhythms’

..........Rhythms of feeling connected and separated, of searching & praying, of engaging & retreating, of hope and despair......

More practically this affords transformative potential for marketing and consumer research that might focus on......

...both cognitive and affective distraction

... offering narratives beyond the dominance of restoration and quest

...spaces in consumption that ‘get it’, that at least overtly make efforts to bridge the gulf created by pain being an essentially private experience.

...ways for consumer practices to become the pseudo-morphine injection ...to enact psychosurgery!!

Imagine for a moment, life - as described in a recent novel entitled The Illumination – where pain manifests itself as light, where cuts and bruises blaze, arthritic joints glow....where we all wear a badge not of our honour but of our debilitation........where we have no choice but to look at and be known to be seeing other people’s sorrow.

That was ‘Noises from the creaking and cracking of ‘Painful’ consumption experiences’