New phenomenologies of pain and the re-conceptualization of health in the digital arts

ABSTRACT

This article explores the involvement of interoception in the multisensorial experience “Seeing is believing” by Australian artist Eugenie Lee. At the center of this piece is the experience of pain in the absence of tissue damage. Through cognitive manipulation, immersive experience, and elucidation, the piece involves the physical, mental, and social levels of experience and dissolves a strict separation between them. The new phenomenologies of pain enabled here, I will argue, challenge our common conceptions of health and well-being through the experience of sensorial processes and processes of sense-making that we are usually unaware of and that do not fit the ideals of healthy bodies as whole, intentional, and secluded from the environment. I will use research from cognitive science on interoception as a lens to understand how “Seeing is believing” offers a counter-conception to the flexible, productive, and medicated body of liberal capitalism. And I will think this alternative further with Gilbert Simondon’s concept of the metastable equilibrium to connect my study to the philosophical and media-theoretical discourse about individuation, our becoming of subjects.

KEYWORDS:

• Interoception
• pain
• body
• critical phenomenology
• virtual reality
• metastable equilibrium

Introduction

This article examines the multisensory experience “Seeing is believing” by Australian artist Eugenie Lee. The artwork intensifies bodily sensations and affective dimensions through extended reality (XR) technologies, perceptual trickery, and suggestive language. Through cognitive manipulation, immersive experience, and elucidation, the piece involves the physical, mental, and social levels of experience and dissolves a strict separation between them. I argue that the piece thereby enables new phenomenologies of pain that ultimately challenge common understandings of health and well-being. Central to this is the involvement of a sense which has gained increasing attention within the cognitive sciences in recent years, but which hardly plays a role in our traditional understanding of our body: interoception. Other than our visual sense, aural or gustatory sense, this sense of our inner-bodily processes does not have one particular organ associated with the transduction of signals from the external world. Rather, interoception is a process of gathering information from various parts of our body in order to monitor the physiological state of the body as a whole, including internal states (heart, gut, etc.) to enable us to adjust our behavior and ultimately, to keep the body healthy. In a further step, I will explore the concept of pain by rethinking interoception with Gilbert Simondon’s concept of metastable equilibrium. In connecting my study to the philosophical and media-theoretical discourse about individuation in this way, I will argue that the new phenomenologies of pain enabled by “Seeing is believing” offer a counter-conception to the flexible, productive, and medicated body of liberal capitalism. By emphasizing the importance of the interoceptive sense, which not only plays a central role in our self-perception and perception of the world but is also a crucial hinge between us and the contemporary media landscape that we are embedded in, this article strengthens the link between sensory studies and contemporary media theory as well.

Is seeing enough to believe?

As Eugenie Lee observes in her piece, “ … attention, distraction, context, and expectation … all impact … the perception of pain” (DeLosangeles 2018). A large part of her aesthetic experience is thus used to get participants into the right mind-set, to make them available to the experience of pain in the absence of tissue damage. Lee calls this process “priming.” Priming her participants for the interpretation of a slight tingling as pain can take between 30 minutes and one hour. Sometimes, it doesn’t work at all. But most times, it does. “Seeing is believing” contains three parts. The first part is the one with the main stakes. Lee must influence the expectations of her participants and has to nudge them toward the expectation of experiencing pain. She also must establish a power dynamic: Being dressed up neatly, with a professional look that gives her the whiff of a scientist or clinician, she recreates the power dynamics we know too well from within doctor’s offices. That said, all participants are informed in advance that the installation addresses pain and that the experience of pain is possible, although no physical harm will occur. The following description of the process is based in part on an online conversation of the author with the artist in the fall of 2022.

The room is dark, and three lights highlight the three stages of the project: the table with two chairs on which Lee and her participant are sitting, another table with a box on top, and a large, human-sized box with the door slightly open. During the following conversation, the participant turns into a patient, answering questions, and listening to expertly presented information on the difference between pain and persistent pain. The so-called “intake interview” serves Lee to access how receptible the participant is to pain. Through evoking memories of painful experiences, she aims at fueling the participant’s availability for feelings of fear and a sense of discomfort. In this way, Lee begins to subtly manipulate the feeling and perceptions of her participants. Once the participants have become open to the expectation of painful experience, the next step involves creating a fundamental distrust about their own perceptions. Lee guides her patient/participants through a couple of body illusions in order to make their perception of their own bodies more malleable by introducing a sense of distrust into their bodily perceptions. For this, she uses a tool from the clinical context of pain management: the mirror box. Mirror therapy is especially known for treating phantom limb pain (Kim and Kim 2012). Phantom limb pain is persistent pain experienced in the body part that has been amputated. The believed reason for this is nerve cells that keep on signaling in order to move the muscles in the missing body part. If the muscles do not signal back, the brain signals can overreact, creating a sensation of pain in the phantom limb. In the mid-1990s, Vilayanur Ramachandran first described mirror therapy to relieve phantom limb pain. By positioning a mirror in such a way that the remaining limb is mirrored and appears in place of the missing one, the nerves often quiet down. Lee turns the mechanism behind this trick on its head. Using the mirror box, she manipulates the appearance of her patient/participant’s hands and fingers. Throughout a couple of demonstrations, they see their fingers elongate or shrink, have sensations of objects in the palms of their hands where there are none, and ultimately, are led to distrust their perception of bodily sensations.

This marks the end of the priming phase, and the patient/participants are led into the large human-sized box that turns out to be an anechoic chamber. The padded walls are gray, the room is empty except for a chair, a Virtual Reality headset, and gloves. Lee puts the goggles on the patient/participant’s head and slips two pairs of gloves over their hands: the first layer is a glove used for the treatment of arthritis pain by sending pulsing signals through the skin and the second layer is linen gloves that help to create tied pressure. Once again, Lee uses a technology intended for the treatment of pain in a reverse manner: instead of easing pain, she changes the context and manipulates the patient/participant’s expectations in such a way that they will interpret the signals as painful. Lee informs them that she will not be able to hear them once the door to the chamber is closed. No sound carries out, but she monitors them through a camera. If the pain becomes too strong, they will have to lift their left arm.

Once she leaves the chamber, the VR experience begins. Invisible subwoofers behind the walls create a swinging sensation, which remains subconscious for most and creates a feeling of motion sickness for some. All the while, the patient/participant sees inside the headset a representation of their hand, but the hand begins to morph, starts to swell, and pump. Barbwire appears and closes in on the hand, severs the skin, and pierces through the hand. This marks the pinnacle of the VR experience. It ends, Lee picks them up, leads them back to the table, and sits them down. What follows is a debriefing between the patient/participants and Lee, in which they both can return to their roles as participants and artist. Lee interviews the participants about their experience and converses about persistent pain experiences as such. Because a central concern of Lee is to bring awareness to people suffering from persistent pain and the social as well as psychological dimension of living with pain, she introduces new conceptualizations of pain to the participants during this conversation.

How is it that most participants indeed feel pain during the VR experience even though the electric signals sent by the glove are a mere tingling on the skin? One important step is the creation of anticipation of pain in the first stage of the artwork in which trigger language is used to evoke emotions and memories connected to past pain experiences. The use of particular terms and the evoking of pain memories primes her participants to expect a painful experience to follow. What follows is the manipulation of the visual sense in making the participants believe that their hand size changes when it does not. And finally, in the third part, manipulation happens through tactile stimulation and visual simulation in VR that together suggest tissue damage where there is none. I will argue in the following that the sense that holds all these sensations together and enables a perception of pain, is interoception. Interoception is involved in qualifying what we perceive and feel, whether positively or negatively. After briefly introducing recent research on interoception, I will demonstrate how interoception, as the sense that processes other sensory stimuli in relation to our physical well-being, can be actively stimulated and incorporated into multisensorial artworks such as “Seeing is believing” in order to manipulate experience.

Interoception and pain experience

Interoception is a sense that remains ambiguous in our lived experience. Unlike our visual, aural, or gustatory senses, interoception does not have one particular organ associated with the transduction of signals from the external world. Rather, interoception is a process of gathering information from various parts of the body in order to monitor the physiological state of the body, including internal states (heart, gut, etc.) throughout continuous actions. As the “sense of the physiological condition of the body” (Tsakiris and Critchley 2016, 1, emphasis in original) interoception allows us to adjust our behavior and ultimately, to keep the body healthy, the relationship between our body and its surroundings stable enough to survive. This can happen through physical sensations, such as the feeling of being hungry when sustenance is needed. It can also impact our perception. If we perceive a physical task as too much over our head because we lack energy, interoception is involved. It might also be involved in the release of stress hormones and modulation of blood vessels (Critchley and Garfinkel 2017, 4), making us for example avoid a possible source of undesired sensations if our pain or chemoreceptors respond to an object in our peripersonal space, say a heated oven plate. If our interoceptive sense does not work properly, we might overeat or eat too little. Or we might feel anxious whenever our heart rate goes up because it is interpreted by our nervous system as a response to a negative impulse. When it comes to pain, interoception is central as well. If a signal, say, a twist in the gut or stone that found its way into our shoe pressing into our sole, is felt as painful, depends highly on a complex communication system that involves specific nerves (nociceptors), spinal cord, brain – but also the social context and psychological state we are in. If I am already feeling a bit under the weather or feel distressed, the stone in my shoe might feel particularly sharp. These preconditions to the experience of pain are what Lee takes advantage of in her artwork. After all, what most of her participants experience as painful is little more than a tingling on the skin surface.

Interoception has gained traction in recent years, partially due to the rise in popularity of the predictive coding model in cognitive science. This model views the brain and the peripheral body as a system of prediction and control, aiming to minimize variational free energy and maintain equilibrium. But how could the integration of all these different signals ranging from exteroceptive senses like vision, hearing, as well as chemoreceptors and nociceptors that receive and send signals from both inside and outside of the body, be accounted for? This is where interoception comes in:

(I)nteroceptive signals are predictions made by internally generated models, and sensations are hypotheses based on sensory evidence. Interoceptive perception is the synthesis that best explains, or most greatly reduces surprise with regards to, interoceptive sensations. These interoceptive representations – or inferences – are updated on the basis of ascending prediction errors, where descending predictions provide setpoints (target values for error-controlled regulation) for motor and autonomic reflexes. (Hulme, Morville, and Gutkin 2019)

To say this in broader terms, interoception serves as a sense that monitors internal processes to keep the body functional, but it also takes into account the environment in which the organism exists. I should pause and note that I do not intend to use evolutionary arguments to explain current cultural phenomena – and I am arguing that pain is a cultural phenomenon. But for the sake of my proposition that interoception is the sense that allows Lee’s installation to “work,” let us consider the evolution-biological explanation of the function that stress has in the effort to keep a species alive. Accordingly, bodies elicit hormones that create a stress response in the body if this body is confronted with a potentially harmful situation. What does that exactly mean in biological terms? Our adrenal glands release hormones that cause the heart to beat faster, our respiration rate to increase, and our blood vessels in the arms and legs to dilate, in order to respond to the emergent situation with fight or flight. The coordination of these processes would not be possible without interoception, without this particular sense which monitors these chemical processes in relation to the overall state of our body in the world.

If interoception has something to do with how we evaluate incoming percepts, it seems obvious that this sense is also involved in Lee’s priming efforts. In order to make someone perceive the vibration on the skin surface as painful, interoception must have assessed the bodily state in a way that puts the whole organism on edge. What Lee does in her priming stages before the VR experience, is evoking the expectation that the body will be confronted with a potentially harmful situation. As a response, a set of chemical processes starts off in the body to prepare for this impending danger, independently of the fact that the participant knows deep down that they will not really get hurt. Lee elucidates stress in the participants and “stress affects interoceptive awareness by altering the intensity of the internal cues as well as their perception and interpretation” (Price and Hooven 2018, 3). To understand how manipulation of our emotional state can evoke pain perception in Lee’s work, we have to acknowledge the motivational-affective dimension of interoception. Interoception plays an important role in how stimuli from the environment are interpreted: “Affective experiences are

(…) the result of an elaborate and complex integration of various peripheral (i.e., activation of mechanoreceptors and nociceptors), multisensory (e.g. visual information), and contextual cues (e.g. social cues), and cognitive and emotional processes, which provides us with a rewarding, relaxing, and calming experience in the case of affective touch (…) cutaneous pleasure and pain share more characteristics with interoceptive rather than exteroceptive modalities, given their homeostatic and affective nature. (Crucianelli and Ehrsson 2023, 228)

Without interoception, the installation “Seeing is believing” would only be about “seeing,” there wouldn’t be any “believing.” The interoceptive sense is thus just as crucial for the aesthetic experience in Lee’s installation as the visual and tactile sense. It is what holds the experience together, it is the sense that is engaged from the beginning of the experience, from the moment, expectations form in the participant, until the end when they are debriefed by the artist. It is due to interoception that the experience becomes one’s own. “Seeing is believing” is thus not just a multi-sensorial artwork. It engages, through interoception, the whole organism. It does not only engage visual and tactile senses but all those inner-bodily workings and psycho-social dimensions that are involved in anticipatory experience. I have elaborated on interoception as the sense crucial for building up the anticipation of pain in Lee’s work. Now, a closer look at the experience of pain itself and how it is rendered in our everyday life is in order. The role that pain plays in our everyday lives and the extent to which it is understood as part of our physical being in the world are closely linked to the socio-cultural production of health and the ideology of ableism that underlies it. As is the case with many categories of experience that are more easily mobilized for ideologies than others, such as happiness or fear, pain is a rather ambiguous one. Pain can be addressed as a physical event as well as a phenomenological experience – but while the phenomenological experience, being conscious of it, is mandatory for pain to become a category of experience, the status of a physical event is less clear. Pain can have ambiguous origins or, in the case of phantom limb pain, no origin at all. As Leder put it, pain is at the same time sensation and interpretation, which gives it a liminal structure (Leder 2016, 40). Pain impacts our attention. As Parisi draws out in his reading of Weber’s theory of psychophysics, pain was considered a “trickster,” an ambiguous and ambiguity factor with disruptive tendencies: For Weber, “pain interfered with touch’s capacity to make accurate judgments about the external world” (Parisi 2018, 126). Pain disrupted the project at the time of “rendering touch rational, knowable, and ultimately suitable to be used as a reliable information-processing channel,” it “proved particularly distracting, precisely because its activation called attention from the exterior to the interior world, and by so doing, short-circuited the capacity for rational, detached, and autonomous perception” (Parisi 2018, 131). This distracting quality of pain that resists the increased standardization through the rational application of science to everyday life, what Foucault termed biopolitics (Lock 2004, 117), is answered with an increased medicalization of health which has turned the experience of disease and pain into a private affair, or, in particular cases, lead to the institutionalization of those being deemed too sick or too mad to remain a part of society.

What does this experience of pain and ambiguity in the body offer us to counter the appropriation of bodies in neoliberal capitalism? Bodies in pain obviously produce less, consume less, and at a time when chronic pain is known as a so-called “volkskrankheit,” a sickness of the masses, pain is an unwelcome disturbance of the capitalist system. Since the invention and commercialization of pain medication, pain has largely been deemed as a false response to the environment that can easily be managed. Thinking back to the liminal structure of pain, it being at the same time sensation and interpretation (Leder 2016), offers alternatives to the reduction of pain to be a manageable part of a systemic feedback loop, which lends itself so nicely to the capitalist appropriation of bodies. The quality of pain to call attention away from the exterior to the interior world brings with it a speculative capacity that becomes creative in Lee’s work. As I have laid out above, the shifting of attention toward the interior world in Lee that ultimately leads to “false” sensations, that is, sensations of pain where there is no tissue damage, is enabled by interoception and its function to maintain a balanced relationship between the organism and its environment. In the following, I want to argue that we can understand this balance between the organism and the environment not as according to a stable equilibrium but instead as a metastable one. This allows me at once to reconceptualize the role interoception has in the enabling of experience and to argue for pain as a central part of the process of our becoming of subjects: a becoming-with changing environments, a process-relational becoming, in which both organism and environments evolve continuously and intra-actively.

Pain and metastable equilibrium

To discuss the potential of conceptions of health and well-being through the lens of interoception outside an automatic system view, I turn to Gilbert Simondon’s critique of cybernetic homeostasis. At the heart of this critique is the idea of progress envisioned in the homeostasis model of cybernetics. Cybernetic theory was developed by Norbert Wiener in 1948 in order to renew the modernistic concept of homeostasis, which designated it as a stable equilibrium. Wiener wanted to replace this stable equilibrium with a dynamic one. Wiener argued that the idea of a stable equilibrium cannot explain how systems adapt to changing information from their environments. The question driving his critique was, how we can explain that organisms evolve within changing environments if there is a finite set of response mechanisms that a system recursively mobilizes to maintain a stable state in the face of incoming signals? To offer a different perspective, Wiener introduced the concept of feedback to cybernetics. Following this idea, the organism changes alongside its environments because of an existing feedback cycle between them. Organism and environment are understood as intertwined.

While Wiener took aim at the deterministic view of the organism or system being separated from its environment, Simondon argued that determinism infiltrated cybernetics through the backdoor. Because, ultimately, “the concept of homeostasis (…) does not allow any questioning of a system’s conditions of stability and goals, it only allows for a ‘dynamic’ preservation of stability within the given conditions of possibility and established goals” (Bardin and Ferrari 2022, 253). Simondon identified in Wiener’s dynamic equilibrium a tendency to understand the way in which feedback is integrated into the system according to an inherent goal. According to Simondon, understanding homeostasis as inherently progressive in this way – as in progressing toward a predefined end state – falls back into a teleological and deterministic understanding of becoming, that ultimately assumes a “primacy of being over becoming:”

The idea of progress is, in short, as teleological and deterministic as the mechanical world picture it is rooted in: it depicts a fixed development towards a prescribed end-state which excludes the possibility of any radical change and invention. Simondon’s own suggestion that this misplaced understanding of progress – rooted in the scientific depiction of the natural order as “uniform, necessary, universal and analytical” first elaborated in the “deterministic age.” (Bardin and Ferrari 2022, 249)

For Simondon, Wiener’s cybernetics falls back to the deterministic assumption of a stable state of the organism that forgoes all systemic or environmental change. Cybernetics thus implements a mechanism in the concept of homeostasis that makes the organism constantly return to and restructure a state of stability. Simondon’s critique of cybernetics and his counterproposal is well documented and recent publications have advanced this discourse to draw consequences for contemporary issues like Artificial Intelligence systems and the impact of digital technologies on our emotions (Bunz 2019; Hayward and Geoghegan 2012; Tucker 2022). Scholars largely agree that Simondon’s theory is particularly well suited to thinking anew about the relationship between culture and technical objects and the consequences of adhering to their separation, which seems to emerge with renewed urgency today. For the context of my phenomenologically motivated exploration of pain experiences enabled by artworks like Lee’s “Seeing is believing,” I will be guided by two questions: How does the concept of a stable equilibrium oust experiences like pain and illness and why? And how can the idea of a metastable equilibrium bring into perspective the disruptive and productive qualities of pain and illness for the acknowledgment of non-normative bodies?

Before paying closer attention to Simondon’s concept of metastability, I will focus on the first question. As Bardin and Ferrari point out in their paper, the mechanisms that are thought to organize dynamic equilibrium are mirrored in the neoliberal understanding of government. Central here is the idea of progress in the form of growing capital, under which all other aspects of society are subsumed. Within such a system, the individual takes on the role of the labor force and consumer at once, and in both functions, it has to be flexible enough to respond to changes in the market and yet controllable enough to keep the feedback cycle between production and consumption vital. One mechanism of this system that Bardin and Ferrari identify, is data extraction:

An incessant work of data extraction through ever perfected algorithms sets the conditions of possibility of the subjects’ behaviour—economic actors, ideally selfemployees—and orients it towards the preservation of the system’s dynamic stability. Social change is thus governed and reduced to the hyper-modern idea of progress, conceived as a variation within the parameters deemed necessary for the reproduction and survival of the system. (Bardin and Ferrari 2022, 255)

Under the umbrella of the ideology of progress, economic, individual, and social mobility becomes a function of market stability. What role then does pain play within this hyper-modern idea of progress? The following quote offers a perspective on pain that sheds some light on how the reconceptualization of pain in the 20^th century until today can be understood as a consequence of this ideology. In particular, it highlights how this ideology underpins the push toward the medicalization and control of pain where it stands in the way of production as well as the neglect and often irrationalization of chronic pain that renders its sufferers as surplus:

All the “irrational” noise that is not immediately reducible to progress thus conceived is either silenced or—once neutralized—included in the pattern as a risky and unforeseen opportunity to perfect the system’s survival. More radically, these elements are normatively integrated in the system’s core dynamics in the form of an ethics of flexibility establishing the “good” functioning of governmentality. (Bardin and Ferrari 2022, 255)

Pain, especially chronic pain, as the irrational response of a body that disrupts the productive idea of progress does not fit into a view of the organism according to equilibrium, nor into the idea of a neoliberal society. But its role in productively reconfiguring the organism-environment relationship becomes thinkable with Simondon’s metastable conception of systems. With metastability, Simondon opposes the idea of a stable (modern science) as well as dynamic (cybernetics after Wiener) equilibrium. He proposes instead a stability that is far from equilibrium that appears due to the disharmonious relationship between an organism and its milieu. In the following, I will expand on this concept of metastable equilibrium and relate it to the perception of pain.

Simondon (1992) assumes a pre-individual reality out of which each individual forms. This pre-individual reality is a realm of plurality. This realm is not stable, there is no equilibrium – instead, it is composed of energy and matter, two complementary dimensions that are in tension. It is in response to this tension that the individual forms. But not as an ideal, stable or finite state. Rather, the individual takes on the form of the response, it is the solving of tension. The individual is the answer to a tension, a momentary resolution, a metastable state about to be de-phased again as soon as tensions between energy and matter reach another unbearable intensity. Within the context of my analysis, Simondon’s concepts of individuation and metastability allow reintegrating pain and disease into the process of becoming without the need for a presumed harmonic state of the organism. To understand how pain and disease can be explained as part of the ongoing process of individuation, we can take now a closer look at the organism’s ways of responding to tension and the way Simondon understood “symptoms” as part of this response. As explicated above, for Simondon, every system or organism finds itself in tension with its environment and within itself. Tensions are what catapult individuation forward, force the system to resolve conflicts, and thereby have new structures emerge as a response. Pain, usually understood as a symptom of some kind of imbalance, can then be understood as part of this process of resolving tensions. I would argue that the processual account of symptoms of mental disorders that the following quote refers to can be extended to pain as a symptom:

Understanding the living being as holding inherent generative tensions fosters a change in our perspective on the meaning of symptoms. Symptoms are no longer understood as deviations from an optimal state, or difficulties in recovering a homeostatic stationary state, but as mechanisms to maintain the tensioned integrity of the individual and as demands for further changes and individuations. We suggest that symptoms and disorders are related to excessive tension and problems or blockages to transform them. (García and Arandia 2022, 2)

What Garcia and Arandia ultimately argue for here is for clinicians to pay attention to the temporal dimension of mental disorders, rather than focusing mostly on the set of symptoms and acknowledging that “many subclinical disorders and affective episodes can be viewed as processes that a person undergoes rather than fixed and static properties (e.g. stress, anxiety, or non-chronic depression)” (García and Arandia 2022, 8). To justify this claim, the authors turn to Simondon’s writing about anxiety. Anxiety, in Simondon, results from a tension between the pre-individual and the constituted individual and it is, importantly, a tension that would require the collective to resolve. Here the role that the social dimension plays in Simondon’s theory becomes central. Individuation does not happen in a private exchange between the pre-individual and an individual in its becoming. In terms of the human individual and how they deal with affective tensions, it is the missing participation in a social dimension that leads to the emergence of anxiety, because it is here that “emotion becomes amplified and internalized; the subject continues to be and operate an ongoing modification within itself, but without acting, without being inserted into or participating in an individuation” (Simondon (1964), 284). Garcia and Arandia conclude that “emotions and psychic life in general, for Simondon (and for the enactive approach), cannot be reduced to private states of the individual and demand participation in the collective” (García and Arandia 2022, 12).

If we understand similarly pain not as a private state of an individual but in fact as co-constructed by the social dimension that takes part in the process of individuation, Lee’s work helps to highlight the different steps through which the individual is led to express the unresolved tension by way of the experience of pain. The revoking of memories of pain experience, the alienation from their perceptive judgment of sensations, and the isolation within the anechoic chamber create stress in the individual that heightens their interoceptive sense, preparing the organism to react to impending danger. The openness toward the experience of pain is here enabled in part by the withdrawal of the social dimension, made unavailable for the release of tension created throughout this process.

Tensions that lead to pain or disease are then not different from tensions that enable emergence and becoming. They are part of individuation: “As a consequence, tensions should be considered as inherent aspects of life, rather than as negative situations arising in a broken, out of balance or malfunctioning body” (García and Arandia 2022, 11). This insight is brought back into the aesthetic experience in the final conversation that Lee has with her participants. Interviewing them about their experience, she offers the space to release the tension that she helped to induce. She also converses about pain and persistent pain and how our common ways of talking about them exert additional hardship on people experiencing persistent pain. Understanding pain, and persistent pain, not as a physical state different from the one they are in if they are free from pain, but instead as a phase of experience they might enter (and exit) any moment and by way of changing degrees, might then ultimately allow the participants to reframe their conceptualizations of pain as well. This rethinking of how we think and speak about pain or health and disease, in general, highlights another role the social dimension plays in the experience of pain. The social dimension impacts pain experience not only through its withdrawal that leads to a turning inwards of the individual but also as a constitutive force. Our social world shapes the assessment, treatment, and collective understanding of health and disease and thus also of pain. And it is the social construction of health and disease as part of neoliberal systems and alongside it the constructed division between the “worker” and the “surplus” that continues to support capitalist hegemony (Adler-Bolton and Vierkant 2022, 45).

Conclusion

Pain, as I have pointed out throughout this text, is part of our embodied experience, it can affect and be affected by organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective processes as we have seen in Lee’s work – and it shows thus how deeply entangled these dimensions are, in a Simondonian sense, how the process of individuation works through these different planes. In conclusion, I want to propose with my reading of Lee’s work through interoception and Simondon’s theory of metastability that interoception, as the sense that brings together inner-bodily processes and exteroceptive sense perception, enables the experience of pain in “Seeing is believing.” The experience of pain results here as a response to a tension that builds up as part of the participant’s individuation through the different stages of the artwork. At the heart of this tension lies the infliction of a fundamental distrust toward the participant’s perceptions of their own body. This distrust allows for new phenomenologies that render symptoms such as pain as part of an understanding of bodies as arising from a permanent involvement with biological, psychological-social, and environmental constraints. The experience of pain can then be re-situated into a body that is not separated from its environment, society, or from psychic states but in fact, embodies all those dimensions in an ongoing process of individuation. This idea of the body disrupts the conception of the body organized around a teleological principle or as part of a closed system loop, which is necessary for it to function as a node within the neoliberal capitalist system. In this context, Simondon’s emphasis on the importance of the social realm is remarkable when thinking about the absence of pain and illness in public discourses within neoliberal societies. But what role can new phenomenologies, enabled by art and design, play in this context¹? The question remains in how far new experiences of pain enabled by new digital technologies can change the way we think, behave, and make sense of our bodies, and, in how far such an experience can become relevant beyond the subjective experience. Which form this could take as part of aesthetic work is indicated in the last part of Lee’s “Seeing is believing.” When Lee and the participants get the chance to put into language what they have just experienced, critically reflecting on how we are used to speaking about chronic or persistent pain, the experience of the installation becomes meaningful in a broader, everyday context. Through the dialogue, the experience can become part of the participant’s individuation. The tension is carried onward into the community. Artworks like Lee’s “Seeing is believing” might ultimately bring the experience of pain back into the public sphere, making it sensible and addressable. It is here that I see the potential of new phenomenologies of pain to reconceptualize bodies in a process-relational way. Furthermore, the idea of a metastable equilibrium brings into perspective the disruptive and productive qualities of non-normative bodies within a system driven by the ideology of progress. The experience of the objectification of the body throughout the stages of the artwork, the felt loss of agency over their experience, not only marks the body as the place of inscription and potential medicalization but also as the place of resistance.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Eugenie Lee for meeting with me and detailing her artwork “Seeing is believing.”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Desiree Foerster

Desiree Foerster is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Media and Culture Studies in Utrecht. Her research interests are Aesthetics, Media Ecologies, Sensory Studies, Phenomenology, Process Philosophy, Immersive Environments. Further information: dfoerster.org.

Notes

1. For an elaboration on the impact of and alternatives to the teleological view of progress toward modern medicalized society see Nguyen and Peschard (2003).