Noah
Posts: 1660
Joined: 7/5/2005
Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: ididabadbadthing
Intense physical pleasure and intense physical pain do not simply resist language but actively destroy it, bringing about a reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.
"Destroy" is a little dramatic. You're welcome to it, of course. Do you think it serves here better than, say, inhibits, interrupts, temporarily supplants, or some other potential alternative?
Do you think humor destroys language too, laughter being not-very-linguistic and available before verbal behavior? I don't think so, myself, certainly not necessarily. So much of our laughter is the result of understanding a punch line or something comparable. Even when laughing too hard to talk (reverting to a state anterior to language, externally) we might very well be processing and reprocessing the joke in ur heads, seeing yet more humor and laughing ever harder.
And awful lot of pain is comparable in impotant ways. News of the very bad fortune of a loved one can instantly inspire "pre"-verbal teeth-gnashing, sighs, moans and cries. Maybe sometimes we do disengage from our linquistic abilities in cases of this kind--and in soem cases of straightforward physical pain too.
So I suspect that sometimes your description is apt, I think the various sorts of exceptions can be interesting too.
quote:
Unlike any other states of consciousness physical pleasure and physical pain can exist without referential content.
You can use words any old way you care to, so please go ahead. That said, the way you've used some here has hidden rather than revealed your intended meaning from me.
Is pain a state of consciousness in any familiar sense? I understand the assertion that pain (or pleasure) is a sensation. But State of Consciousness to me points toward something more wholistic. While in a given state of consciousness (awake, asleep, comatose, for instances) we may have sensations of pain or pleasure. I don't know what else yhou would want to rule in as states of consciousness. Being alert? drowsy? stoned? sober? Again, pain and pleasure seem available in all of these states and so discussing pain and pleasure as states of consciousness themselves seems to lead immediately into an unhelpful thicket of Nested States of Consciousness, or something.
Enough pain for enough time can activate body chemistry which will impact state of consciousness. That's for sure.But I can't understand sensations, or categories of sensation in this case, as states of consciousness. Maybe you can help me see it that way.
As for states of consciousness exisiting only with referential content, well I don't follow at all. Awake is a state of consciousness, right? What is the referential content of awake? Asleep? Some transcendental meditator in the so-called Alpha state ... what is the referential content of this state? I can't offer any comment until I have some idea of what you mean by these curious applications of familiar terms.
quote:
Neither physical pleasure nor physical pain need be of or for anything
Okay. But, as opposed to what? I'm not disputing here. I just don't see what you're trying to highlight. Does "calm" need to be of or for anything in whatever sense you intend those terms?
quote:
Often, intense physical pleasure will, if deprived of an object, begin to approach the neighborhood of pain.
Again, maybe I'm being dense but I don't know what you mean by something being the object of a pain. Can you elaborate, maybe with examples?
I've heard people say things like: "It feels so good it almost hurts" but I haven't ever been inspired to say this myself, that I can remember. I can sort of imagine something like a physical sensation so pleasant that it inspires someone to, I don't know, feel unworthy and therefore emotionaly conflicted in some way. Emotional conflicts are intelligibly described as painful sometimes. But does physical pleasure start to hurt?
Or maybe you're referring to some sort of overstimulation. One might not want to be touch just *there* anymore in the moments following orgasm, say. I can understand that as pleasure approaching the neighborhood of pain. Is that the sort of thing you had in mind?
All the while though, I think it ignores a whole lot too invest more than a little in the metaphor of pleasure and pain as exclusive neighborhoods. I don't even see the two words as naming a dichotomy except in certain ways which must be stated pretty carefully in order to hold up under scrutiny.
quote:
And intense physical pain, when indissolubly bound to an object of great attachment, can flow into and out of the greatest pleasure.
Do you mean something other than "strongly" by indissolubly? I mean after the instance of pain ends and the couple go to sleep; go off to work the next day; meet new people; drift apart and eventually break up, mightn't that bond be dissolved?
If instead you're trying to describe an instance of pain which has as part of its own immediate architecture the relationship in which it is evoked, then I think you're right. And I think a few sorts of inverse-ish casles also obtain. The physical pleasure of sexual contact, occuring in a criminal rape, will not be felt unaffected by the context. What must meet one very circumscribed definition of pleasure will nevertheless be felt as something very far from pleasant.
Of course no indisoluable bonds to objects of great affection are required for the pain-as-pleasure alchemy. Some people love getting walloped by strangers. With the right sort of humiliation kink it might take someone repellant laying on the hands in order to transmogrify the pain to pleasure, wouldn't you think?
|
RE: Pain and Pleasure - 
Profile
RE: Pain and Pleasure - 
I had to look up [indissolubly] in the dictionary; too bad it was a superfluous repetition of words!
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread