LIFESCIENCE: Normal & Pathological

[Eugene Thacker <maldoror@eden.rutgers.edu>]

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ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 99
LIFESCIENCE
Linz, Austria, September 04 - 09
http://www.aec.at/lifescience
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melinda rackham wrote:
> 
> illness doesnt really = suffering .. its become so because of morality -the
> foucauldian imperative of health if you like, and pain is an interresting
> thing which some people see as pleasure and go out of thier way to engage
> in sexual practices, scarrification, piercings etc which cause pain.
> childbirth im told is incredibly painful but most of the planet keeps on
> doing it..  yet simple practices like breathing in certain ways can releive
> physical suffereing.

This is an important point because, if i'm understanding you, it's _not_
that if we somehow undo the constructed link between illness &
suffering, that we'll all be able to have disease & not have it bother
us, but rather that medicine in the West has always had this complicated
and (for it) frustrating task of matching an objectivizing scientific
gaze with a range of subjectivizing testimonies from patients. All of us
have had experiences at one time or another where a doctor said one
thing but we "felt" another, and of course w/in the context of official
medicine the former tends to often win out ("ok, I'll take this
prescription for a drug-with-a-long-name that may possibly have side effects...").

> artistic and philosophical suffering are easily aviodable, dr melinda
> sez..take a large dose of trash tv, regular junk food,  do not engage in
> conversations are likely to contain big words, and have a health cure at a
> dimly lit gambling establishment.

I take this completely seriously - except for the big words part, since
they're sometimes pleasurable - but reading Canguilhem recently brings
this type of self-regulation up, when he suggests that the "normal" is
not opposed to the "pathological" (as health is to disease), but every
given biological state (whether concevied of as illness or not) has its
own mode of operating, its own way of normally carrying on (which is why
knowledge of cell proliferation in cancerous cells has been re-utilized
for instigating cell growth, & why emtpy viral carriers/vectors have
been used in gene therapy)...

eugene


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