OzDragon's Essays- Essay 1

Pain, Postmodernism, and Piercing

Note: This essay is, if you like, a first draft of a scholarly essay. It presents my analysis of the body modification 'craze' by placing it clearly within the culture of Generations X and Y, the postmodern worldview. I believe my analysis is compelling and will at some point rework the essay referencing appropriately all the material I use to make the analysis. For now I simply assume the accuracy of my view of modern and postmodern cultures and of the place of pain within the human psyche.

Why has body modification, particularly the piercing of the skin with the addition of either ink or jewellery into the skin, taken such an important place in the (pop) culture of the end of this century? There are a number of explanations made for this phenomenum. The freeing up of social mores and taboos during the 1960s has opened up a variety of new ways of self-expression. Perhaps the sexual revolution of the same period has encouraged sexual expression to take more extreme forms. This explanation, of course, assumes that piercing and tattooing are primarily a sexual activity. Or maybe the narcissism of the current culture takes more and more extreme forms as individualism becomes ever more entrenched. The deeper the cultural narcissism the more extreme the expressions of that narcissism have to be to remain 'real'. Another explanation revolves around the assumed cultural poverty of the Western world in combination with unparalleled access to other cultures. In an attempt to enrich the (personal expression of) modern culture many elements of other cultures including religion and spirituality, dress, and language have been borrowed ad hoc from other cultures. As clearly demonstrated in 'Marks of Civilization', body modification is a common and vital part of many, perhaps even most, other cultures.

While I don't wish to deny any of these possibilities I want to offer a perspective that may, indeed, incorporate much of the above. My thesis is that primarily body modification is a growing part of our culture because pain is the last remaining 'absolute' when all else has been relativized and trivialized. In our postmodern age pain has an objectivity we no longer grant to anything else within or without ourselves.

There are many analyses of our modern Western world and the fundamental shift that is occuring within our culture. The shift is from Modernism, a paradigm where the subject is paramount and therefore experience is the definer of knowledge and truth, to a paradigm the shape of we do not yet know.

The consequences of modernism and the technological changes made possible by it have included trivialization, fostered especially by television; and a loss of community. Firstly television, indeed much of modern technology, has resulted in a cultural shift away from work and its tangible fruits in products, a shift towards entertainment as the arbiter of taste and value, a globalization of view at the expense of any context for the vast majority of the information we receive, and consumerism as the abiding aim of life. If anything the loss of community, somewhat resulting from technological advances, is more profound. For in the loss of community not only the context for information has been lost but the very context for life has disappeared. 'No [one] is an island' may be a quaint aphorism but is also expressive of a fundamental human trait. Indeed, not only human but a trait almost universal in nature. We know, at some level, that indeed the whole earth is a complex web of interconnectedness, we even have a word to describe this (ecology), yet in our loss of community our narcissism has become so absolute that this context for human existence becomes, at best, optional.

In the midst of this paradigm change from modernism to something else those of us called Generation X and the generation following are the heirs of a shifting cultural landscape where even the subject's experience has become mutable. Knowledge and truth, even experience, have been 'absolutely' relativized. Reality has become nothing more than the choice of the individual from an infinite range of possible realities made in the now with little or no reference to past or future. So, added to a trivialization of experience and knowledge, and the loss of community or a fundamental shift to narcissism, has been added a loss of reality. If reality is little more than what an individual makes of it then reality has become a very ephemeral thing with little to recommend it.

It is in this context that I believe we must view the body modification phenomenum. What body modifications offer the postmodern person, especially modifications that involve the piercing, cutting or burning of the body, is pain.

While the experience of pain is an intensely personal thing, and its intensity and description will very often markedly from person to person, pain is an absolute. When a needle is pushed through a person's nipple the experience is one of pain (amongst several possible additional experiences). And indeed pain will be a recurring aspect of the experience of a piercing during the healing process and anytime the piercing is excessively handled. Further, each person with their nipple pierced is immediately initiated into a community of people with nipple piercings. This is not to say that each person's experience of the pain of the needle pushing through the nipple is the same but certainly the experiences are comparable and linked through that thing called pain.

As pain is one of the most basic physical responses of the human body and one very closely associated with the special imperative to survive it also has a character that is not easily trivialized. With the possible exception of the piercing gun used on a person's ear lobe and even with the current fashion status of piercings that includes the production and use of fake piercing jewellery and fake tattoos, the very act of being pierced, inked, cut or branded is fundamentally non-trivial. You may seek to drug yourself to a point where the process of body modification is relatively painless but that very decision belies the importance of what is to take place (and its permanence).

A further aspect of the importance of seeing body modification in this context is highlighted by looking at the role played by pain in various cultural contexts. As a generalization the pre-modern cultures viewed pain as a liminal experience. The deliberate infliction of pain was nearly universal as one aspect of the change in status of a person from childhood/adolescence to adulthood. Accidental pain, illness or injury, was most likely to be also liminal in a change of status from 'alive' to 'dead', or from 'alive' to 'blessed by the gods' or 'miracle recipient' if you survived the pain! In modernism pain became associated with that marvelous 'four-letter word' disease. Pain, therefore, was simply wrong and consequently evil. It is instructive to carefully view TV advertisements for pain relievers. One that especially comes to mind is the Children's Motrim advertisement where the mother is portrayed as being dismayed at her daughter's fever (pain). What is then treated is the pain, the fever, and when that is gone the following morning all is well. No mention is made of the reason for the pain/fever when pain is always a symptom and not a cause.

What pain has become again for the postmodern is something more approaching a liminal experience. Pain need not be something wrong and therefore evil but may indeed mark, or participate in, a change of status out of the absolute relativism of postmodernism into a particular and shared reality that has a context both within and outside the individual. Again this highlights both the basic nature of pain, temporarily submerged within modernism, and its capacity to transcend the triviality of our culture.

One final note concerning the relationship between pain and sexuality. I conjecture that one of the results of the trivialization rampant in our culture is a loss of language able to describe the intense. This is most clearly seen in the (post)modern propensity to use words like 'fuck' in any and all conversation, even the most trivial. Historically such words were reserved for only the most intense experiences with a grading of words and phrases for a variety of experiences from the less intense to the most intense. Despite the trivialization of sex on television and elsewhere it, like pain, has an intensity that resists trivialization. In relegating pain to the status of undesirable and even evil, modernism diminished both the experience and the language to describe the experience of pain. (Pain is simply bad, perhaps described on a scale of 1 to 10, but otherwise needing nothing further descriptively). Therefore, for the postmodern experienceing the intensity of pain deliberately chosen in being pierced, inked, cut or branded the only language left to describe the experience, and the closest analog to the experience, is sexual. I recognize, of course, that the other side of this issue is that the body itself is intensely sexual and many of the primary piercing sites are directly associated with the sexual (nipples and genitals).

It is, then, the very pain associated with body modifications including piercings, inking, branding, and cutting that provides a basis for the recent flourishing of such body modifications in the West. Postmodern culture as the inheritor of modernism's subjectivity and loss of community, and technology's trivialization of experience and knowledge, as well as being the ultimate culture of relativism finds in the objective reality of intense pain an absolute otherwise unavailable and sorely missed. This intensity of experience is further highlighted by the consequent liminality of pain for the postmodern. A liminality which links the postmodern experience with the pre-modern. With little other language to describe the intensity of this experience, the language of sexuality is commonly drawn upon to describe the experience. Pain returns ourselves to ourselves in a liminal and community building way that is profoundly resistant to trivialization and relativism.