The Techno-Ontology of Prognosis

• In Event: Platform Practices and Predictive Seeing 2

Abstract

This paper considers a means of looking towards, and living with the future, ambivalently positioned between past, present and future concerns: the techno-ontology of prognosis. I will investigate a range of prognostic apps, currently used in Australian and other Western medical practice. By inputting age, sex, life style and medical history, doctors are presented with the possibility of calculating the risk of their patients developing a heart condition, or other potentially life-threating diagnoses in the next 5, 10 or 20 years. These apps are increasingly used to regulate patient health advice and treatment, creating a health profile that is based as much on the future, as on present and past physical realities. My paper will consider the type of affective relationship that appears between doctor and patient (mediated through the app), and the sense of self such temporally complex physicality produces.

As Catherine Malabou argues in Before Tomorrow (2016) the future-facing technologies of contemporary life are constructing a new multi-temporal ontology. This paper will refer to Malabou’s construct of temporality and self alongside Marie-Luise Angerer’s (2014) and Rebecca Coleman’s (2017) work on temporality, ontology and affect, to articulate the affective economy that makes up the prognostic self.

Author

• Karin Sellberg, University of Queensland