Walking the City in Pain

​

Elaine Scarry has theorised the unique ‘objectlessness’ of pain (1985: 162). She argues that, unlike other ‘psychic, somatic, and perceptual states’, pain lacks an object in the world to which it might attach itself. In this paper, I seek to explore the manner in which the body in pain finds its object. As an introduction to my wider work on the mediated experience of urban space through ageing and infirm bodies, this is an autoethnographic piece which focuses on the experience of walking the city in pain. I theorise the affective connection drawn between space and body by thinking through joint pain as a mediatory experience which inscribes the landscape with meaning. As the body hurts, the city takes on different affective qualities which become important to the subject’s understanding of their place within the world – socially, politically, and ecologically. By considering the ugliness of pain – that is to say, its nature as a source of ‘obstructed agency’ (Ngai 2005: 3) – and the manner in which this ugliness attaches itself to sites of experience, I explore the ways these attachments shape and distort pre-existing worldviews, producing in their subjects new kinds of socio-political feelings. Furthermore, I consider the potential of this kind of bodily thinking for an understanding of obstructed urban experience which goes beyond dichotomies of able/disabled or mobile/immobile.