Project the Future: Temporality and Subjectivity in Chronic Pain Rehabilitation

• In Event: Becoming Otherwise: STS Inroads into Techniques of the Better Self - II: Limits and Agency

Abstract

This paper traces how becoming otherwise is staged in a rehabilitation clinic for chronic pain in the Netherlands. I argue that despite the chronicity of their symptoms, patients learn to ‘project’ their future in a double sense: rehabilitation stages a horizon where things might be better, and lays out the future as a project of working towards a better self. The idea of this clinic is that pain does not just affect people’s daily lives; pain may partly be an effect of the way patients live their life. Treatment therefore focuses on changing the routines that sustain the pain. The motto of the clinic is ‘not 100% the old you, but 100% the new you’. Complete personal transformation is the goal. While ethnographically detailing the everyday life scenes in which this frail process of change unfolds, I focus on how treatment enacts self-transformation as a temporal order. On the one hand, daily life is temporally restructured as patients learn how much energy tasks such as cooking and cleaning take and try to balance these with their restrictions. On the other, clinicians present transformation as a life journey that surpasses the rehabilitation trajectory, in which ‘taking steps’ constitutes improvement and ‘being stuck’ is the ultimate bad to be warded off. Moreover, patients are strongly encouraged to formulate personalized goals, in ways that are specific, achievable and overseeable. The success of treatment thus hinges on patients being able to actively position themselves in time, approaching their ‘new you’ as always becoming.

Author

• Else Vogel, Department of Thematic Studies - Technology and Social Change, Linköping University