Braining Your Life and Living Your Brain: Cyborg Gaze, Gendering, Chronification, Aging of the Brain

• In Event: 540 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Biomedicine and Health II

Abstract

Images have tremendous power. Images have, therefore, tangible consequences.
Visual coercion implies a strong and usually not very subtle use of force, wherein the interrelations between the image, the decisions, and the consequences are quite explicit. There are, however, many more tacit and ‘softer’ power-plays that images are enmeshed in. Images, as part of knowledge regimes and techno-scientific practices, are persuasive – they legitimize, they justify, and they make knowledges and their objects. In other words, they have the property of possessing epistemic authority.
Images, because they can be powerful (i.e. have/exert power) as much as they can be power, are therefore political, make politics, and/or are made by politics. I don’t think that one can still genuinely hold the belief that images are (politically) innocent.
Here, I am concerned with one particular type of image, a type of image that is produced and put to use in biomedical and health care contexts: The techno-image that is the result of the techno-scientific practices around medical imaging technologies in expert-lay, expert-expert and lay-lay interactions, that involve publication of research results or health care policies, clinical interactions and decision-making, and doctor-patient interactions, as well as situations of everyday life that have become ‘(bio-)medicalized’. Images that are products of medical imaging technologies, I posit, obtain epistemic authority that functions as a persuasive technology to the point of working like propaganda.

Author

• Alexander I. Stingl, Drexel University