The InVisible Body - The social Construction of the Skin as an Object of Knowledge

Hertha Firnberg Position T 91 The InVisible Body Christina LAMMER 27.06.2000 This project considers how imaging technologies - particularly in medical diagnosis - are not simply representations but contribute to the formation and creation of our bodies as objects of knowledge. The processes of objectification in the clinical field are analyzed. Doctors examine pictures of their patients bodies and its inner parts. The skin draws the line between the directly seen and the visually inferred. It is also the medium of visual projections and the surface where social meaning is negotiated. In the field of medical diagnosis normally invisible parts of the body are confronted - directly in the images, through the particular space of examination with its optical instruments and machines. It will be questioned how the patients bodies are connected with these instruments, how they are filled with different fluids in order to reveal the invisible behind the screen of skin and to highlight the clinically significant shadows. The human body is materialized in all its visible and invisible components. Technological organs of inscription build a mediated skin, which extends the social processes of constructing the body. It is the main goal of this project to link the practices in medical diagnosis, the communtcation and treatment procedures involving doctors, patients and apparatuses with the examination and interpretation of the skin as an object of visualization and knowledge.

In this study I focused on the fieldwork I conducted among radiological personnel and patients at the interventional radiology department at the University Clinic / General Hospital in Vienna. I investigated the embodiment of knowledge in this particular medical field, and questioned how bodies are rendered visible, how they are socially bounded, and how abstract moving fluoroscopy pictures of inner organs and the blood flow are perceived. The visual knowledge of the body`s inside and how this is produced through the diagnostic and therapeutic machinery dominates or even displaces tacit bodily experiences and skills on the side of patients and radiological personnel. I understand the continual invention of new technologies in surgery as well as in radiology - like computer programs which can simulate the body`s interior or robotic limbs which are able to operate inside a living individual - as a socio-cultural and epistemic turn in medicine which is already far advanced. The preliminary results of this research will be continued in the form of a Charlotte Bühler Habilitation-stipend in the following two years. Thus I am particularly interested in the effects this turn causes for radiologists, medical- technical assistants and patients. Boundaries between objectifying and being objectified, making up and being made up, touching and being touched, unveiling and being unveiled, framing and being cinematically framed on monitors permanently are being transcended in diagnostic operating theatres. Drawing up contours of an ontological choreography within the clinical settings of radiology enables me to bring the visual power regime to shine forth, which unfolds in diagnostic and therapeutic practices.