Pain

litost [lee-tosht] (noun) This is an untranslatable emotion that only a Czech person would suffer from, defined by Milan Kundera as “a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.” Devices for coping with extreme stress, suffering, and change are often special and unique to cultures and born out of the meeting of despair with a keen sense of survival.

— “Translating The Untranslatable,” NPR.

I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia a few years ago. Until recently, I had forgotten this. I haven’t had the acute senseless pain in a while, and I forgot how it tires me. According to WebMD, You could call fibromyalgia a copycat condition. Its main symptoms — widespread pain and fatigue —are a lot like those of other health problems. There is no test that can diagnose fibromyalgia¹, so it can be hard for your doctor to nail down what's causing your aches and pains.

Pain is relentless, as McLuhan writes, it introduces a new scale into our affairs by each extension of ourselves.² Everything gets painted by the pain. It demands attention through personal and social consequences. Fibromyalgia is not ‘real’ pain. I didn’t hurt myself skating or fall from a tree. It is the overwhelming of the senses by the brain, or perhaps vice versa.

Media has a tense relationship with feeling — like pain, it too seeks to manipulate the senses. It’s curious to what degree this happens varies with context. High participation versus low participation is culturally relative. In my memory of the past, electrical technologies were relatively more tribalizing. Growing up, watching TV was always a ‘group’ activity, even if we had no interest in the cricket match our grandfather was tormenting himself over. My mother would tell me in the early days, they would use rubylith and cellophane from boxes of sweets to give their low definition black and white television some color.³ She grew up in a communal environment, so everyone on the street would visit her and they would watch Doordarshan together. It was such a huge part of her formative years, that I too, can recite the washing powder Nirma ads by heart even though I don’t recall ever seeing the commercials.

The assimilation of the television in her community was slow and lasted for most of her childhood. I can identify with that pace, for me, the slowly transitioning technologies were the floppy disk, cassette tapes, and then later CDs and DVDs. McLuhan insists the slower speed and the higher costs involved give other countries more time to reflect upon new technologies. Cameron Tonkemwise mentions: product design today exists to erase the mark of the worker, that it was ever made. The slow assimilation is accelerated, The iPhone always was. We can’t remember a time before experiencing it. In some ways, the alienation of the worker suspends the user as well. I’m doing better this week, and I'm already starting to forget what the pain felt like. On the bleeding edge of obsolescence, Wendy Chun questions: “What is new media? we might want to ask what seems to be the more important questions: what was new media? and what will it be? To some extent the phenomenon stems from the modifier new: to call something new is to ensure that it will one day be old.”⁴ McLuhan paid particular attention to the effects of media on our senses since he believed that media affect us by manipulating the ratio of our senses. Based on this, he also formulated the ideas of “hot media” which are media that are high in definition and do not ask high participation of the audience, e.g. film, and “cool” media which ask more participation due to lower definition, like newspapers. McLuhan then talks of hot media becoming cold⁵, yes becoming no. If objects transform at a pace that is beyond our perception, how do we plan to reflect? Is there an environment where the new is still assimilated slowly? Where the new iPhone release is jarring and invites friction, instead of seamlessly melting into what's considered the contemporary moment?

Paul Virilio argues no. Cyberspace has implemented a real-time that is eradicating local spaces and times.⁶ According to Lovink, “because of the speed of events, there is a real danger that an online phenomenon will already have disappeared before a critical discourse reflecting on it has had the time to mature and establish itself as institutionally recognized knowledge.” ⁷ More broadly, McKenzie Wark has argued that traditional scholarship is incompatible with the types of images and events, produced and disseminated along lightninglike speed media vectors, that interrupt the homogenous and abstract formal time of scholarship.⁸  At this dizzying speed, how shall we make space and time to criticise it?

Even if I don’t remember it fully, can someone else dare to describe my pain?

IMAGE: by Hiller Goodspeed. Maybe This Time They Will Understand.

Footnotes

1. Wheeler, Regina. "How Is Fibromyalgia Diagnosed?". Webmd, 2021, https://www.webmd.com/fibromyalgia/guide/fibromyalgia-diagnosis-and-misdiagnosis. ↩

2. McLuhan, Marshall, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel. The Medium Is the Massage. New York: Bantam Books, 1967. ↩

3. Print.K, Hiwa. "A Few Notes From An Extellectual - Journal #65 E-Flux". E-Flux.Com, 2015, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/65/336395/a-few-notes-from-an-extellectual/. ↩

4. Chun, Wendy H.. “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2008): 148 - 171. ↩

5. McLuhan, Marshall, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel. The Medium Is the Massage. New York: Bantam Books, 1967. Print. ↩

6. Paul Virilio, “Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!” CTheory, www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id!72 ↩

7. Lovink, My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition (Amsterdam, 2003), p. 12. ↩

8. See McKenzie Wark, “The Weird Global Media Event and the Tactical Intellectual [Version 3.0],” in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. Chun and Thomas Keenan (New York, 2006), pp. 265–76. ↩