Estimaci´ on de la direcci´ on de llegada y la frecuencia

Dark Adaptation at the Interface

Taking things at interface value means that [computer] programs are treated as social actors we can do business with, provided that they work.

(Turkle 1997, p. 104)

The search command “looking at x-rays” resulted in 187 x-ray images out of a 1000. Most of the other images concern ‘technicians’ or ‘doctors’ looking at x-ray images and the x-ray image is not central to the picture.

Studies in visual culture identify that all images are interrelated and enable discourses that in their variation are dependent on context. As Sturken and Cartwright point out, even “scientific looking does not occur in isolation” (Sturken and Cartwright 2001, p. 279). The act of looking is not innocent and, they argue, has an impact on that which is ‘looked upon’.

The ‘eyes’ made available in modern technological sciences shatter any idea of passive vision; these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building in translations and specific

ways of seeing, that is, ways of life.

(Haraway 1998, p.697)

Bauer and Olsén argue that it is the concept of “[n]on-invasive medicine”, which has been promoted as the altruistic enterprise of x-ray imaging to “disrupt the body as little as possible” and it is this motivation which has led to the

“sophisticated vision systems, multiplex images of the body interior [which are then] projected on computer screens and video monitors” (Bauer and Olsén 2009, p. 118). Studies in visual culture, however, reveal visualization per se, cannot be deemed to be either ‘non-disruptive’ or ‘non-invasive’. Theorists such as José van Dijck and Ian Hacking point out that this misconceived assumption, allows for

reasoning such as “we can always take a look and if we don’t see anything, nothing happens” or “bodies remain untainted if we only touch them with our gaze” (van Dijck 2005, p. 8). Hacking goes even further in acknowledging, “seeing is intervening” (Hacking 1995, p. 192).

It therefore becomes established that it is the activity of looking or seeing that directly generates, or maintains, ways of life. Western European visual and literary culture, having strongly influenced the ways that x-ray images have come to be viewed and discussed in the scientific theatres, also enabled the easy

transgression of these images — for them to be co-opted from the alleged scientific and objective scenario by the popular media of the day, thereby

transforming and extending the meanings of x-ray images through its own cultural implications. These new cultural understandings came through inherited wisdoms of envisioning the body illuminated and shaded, and were facilitated by the surge of enthusiasm for new imaging technologies. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lithographs and prints became a popular form for displaying the body under x-ray examination, although obviously not with a scientific agenda. The advertising industry was also enamoured of this new imaging technology and the x-ray ‘brand’ was born. Edwin S. Gerson provides one explanation for the marketing phenomenon that expresses the feeling of the general public about these new “dazzling and fascinating” rays (Gerson 2004, p. 546).

[G]iven a brand-new technology that could see through living human flesh and even promised to be the first effective nonsurgical response to cancer, the notion that x-rays might give golf balls an extra life or bring quicker relief to a headache was not all that far-fetched. The public was simply astonished with x-rays, and advertisers played off this spellbound attention by adding the name to almost any type of product.

(Gerson 2004, p. 546)

From the array of products that Gerson documents in his article we get a clear idea the enormous impact that x-rays were having as the most desired ‘thing’. Just a few examples of products that were branded with the X-Ray logo included golf balls, stove polish, ointment, oil, batteries, furniture polish, soap, razor blades, sheet music, coffee grinders and light shades. The public perception of x-

rays was being engineered by a market that knew that the “powerful unseen truth and strength” of x-rays could only work for them (Gerson 2004, p. 247).

Nevertheless, genuine x-ray images were also subject to popular consumption and not only re-established, or extended, existing cultural readings of how shadows and light play primary roles in aestheticising the body, defining class, wealth, status and gender roles, but they also highlighted conceptual understanding of life and death, truth, morality and desire. A vital part of this conceptual

understanding depended on where these profoundly traumatic images were available to be viewed and how they were socially managed. Within a year of their invention these images had turned into products, and “products into socially constructed images” (Stafford 1999, p.217). As gifts or evidence, x-rays showed the human body in ‘consumable chunks’, and as ‘consumable chunks’ they were ‘collected’, organized and laid bare by “professionals forging exacting

taxonomies” (Stafford 1999, p. 218). These graphically dismembered visions of the human body reflected not only the apparent efficacy of an interdisciplinary scientific world that was anatomical, biological, chemical and physical. They also revealed, through imagery, the mechanics of the body made manifest, an

interiority externalized through projection. This was the epitome of modern viewing, a “scientific attempt to render the body and the perceived object in terms that conform to the instrument and its modes of representation” (Cartwright 1995, p. 90). The time had arrived for the ‘disenchantment’ of the world, a time

allegedly for breaking down the ‘myths’ of a pantheistic world where ‘man’ was at one with nature, in the name of ‘progress’ and civilization.

Whereas in the United States x-rays had become the symbol for all things

powerful and painless quickly appropriated by advertising and trade, the rhetoric that accompanied the discovery of the body under x-ray technology’s perception in Europe not only alluded to progress in science and the clinical world, but also to the language of colonisation and conquest. In her analysis of the earlier role that surgery played in the project of “nation building occurring through British colonial expansion” JulieDoyle argues that surgery was the central discourse of colonization and imperialism. “British surgery therefore sought to legitimize it practices by deploying the discourse of imperialism to gain support from the

British government” (Doyle 2008, p.22). With the power of the x-ray the rhetoric of the penetrating vision into darkness, worked to legitimize further exploration of the body and, more importantly, the bodies of others.

Moira Gatens employs the term “imaginary bodies” to discuss the “construction of various forms of subjectivity” through “images, symbols, metaphors and representations” that is extended to the “imaginaries of a specific culture” (Gatens 1996, p.vii). These specific cultures, she argues, work to determine ‘in part’ the value, status and appropriate treatment of these now imagined “social bodies” (Gatens 1996, p.vii).

This is carried to another level in Charles Martin’s account of how early x-ray technologies were being employed in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. It was already common knowledge that radiation on white skin had been shown to eradicate blemishes or “unwanted or unhealthy” dark patches and by December 1903, the New York Herald announced “Negroes Made White by X-

rays” (Martin 2002, p. 150). The newspaper article reported the findings of Dr. H.K. Pancoast, of the University of Pennsylvania, who “has discovered that it is possible, by means of X-ray, to so bleach the skin of a negro that to all intents and purposes the subject becomes a white person” (Martin 2002, p. 150).29

The aesthetics of light and dark, along with any metaphorical meanings that had established their place in the collective imaginaries of the European and

Eurocentric vision, meant that the perception delivered by these new x-ray technologies produced symbolic representations of the project of colonisation, through the medicalised body. Empirical vision of the body dismembered had already been initiated through the practice of surgery (Doyle 2008) and here was the potential for the black body to be ‘cured’ of the ‘disease’ of blackness. “To have the skin of a white man or woman,” said the article in the New York American, “is a thing infinitely desired” (Martin 2002, p. 150). This new

technology was a ‘gift’ for “hopeful racial scientists” but it was recognised that a complete body transformation would over-expose the body to radiation. Dr.

29 _{Various versions of this article were printed and re-printed by the New York American 28/12/03}

Dieffenbeck, a Philadelphian physician, excited by these new possibilities recommended therefore that the patient could “have his face and hands changed in colour with perfect safety” (Martin 2002, 150). This was just one of the ways that x-ray technologies became embroiled in the eugenics and the medicalised body, a topic too extensive for the limits of this thesis, but shows clearly the way that darkness and light had taken a firm hold on the imagination of the white man and maintained a racial prejudice which already had a firm grip.

The clinical body and the language of disease is still rife with these convoluted allusions that become their own narratives. In an ever growing globalized culture through the World Wide Web, these allusions get more blurred by the metaphoric uses of identical languages in, for example, the notion of computer viruses.The clinical body of information has generated an ‘information’ technology that is susceptible to the pathologies of the human body.

Don Slater describes modernity’s project as one of ‘disenchantment’ or ‘de- mythification’. He defines disenchantment, in this case, as the ‘reduction of the knowable world’ through visual technologies, to ‘discrete, observable, measurable

facts’ (Slater 1995, p.220-221). He provides a useful summary of how modernity

embraced photography for scientific purposes and how photography affected the position of subject and object.

Scientific methods of observation, experimentation, evidence and

verification/falsification all operationalise [sic] the primary notion that ideas (subjectivity) must be anchored in materiality (the object as clearly perceived in itself) […] Most crucially, the criterion of visibility places meanings and values on the side of subjectivity: unlike such things as colour, weight and mass, the meaning of an object is not an observable property and therefore not a proper object of positivist thought.

(Slater 1995, p.221)

For want of a better word, ‘post-modernity’ has embraced ‘materiality’ as

extending beyond the object as ‘clearly perceived in itself’. It considers the object as itself extensive in meaning within specific domains which include illumination and darkness, as well as ‘colour, weight and mass’ (Bal 2003). The discourses emanating from the body as information do not interest the body as material:

“discourses and material practices are fundamentally different” (Tilley 2002, p. 23). The embodied experience of looking at x-rays is not to be confused with the ‘meaning’ of them or how they lend themselves to language through metaphors of progress.

As Slater highlights, in the discourse of science, observable ‘facts’ were being taken as empirical evidence and rated above ‘meaning.’ In other words, there emerged a “reduction of the world to facts on the basis of the hypervaluation of vision” (Slater 1995, 221). Meaning was only to be extracted from the visual evidence, rather than by questioning the feasibility of the study. This meant that specific conditions of viewing were for a long time not taken seriously, in favour of the more ideological ‘scientific’ united vision. The scientific lecture and the professional still present an ideological vision of empirical evidence that distinguishes the image by relegating it to information, rather than ‘magic’ or ‘spectacle.’

At the same time, the discipline of Aesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had taught that the subject or viewer was the pivotal point of contact for Art appreciation and therefore there could be said to be no observable ‘facts’ within the plastic arts. Nevertheless, Art History over the centuries had devised and recognized codes of reading images that incorporated symbols, icons and metaphors that, depending on one’s religion, nationality and education, could be understood. Between these seemingly irreconcilable viewpoints of a scientific analogous empirical vision and a methodically constructed picture, the European psyche needed a convergence for the manifestation of the body under x-ray technology’s perception to have meaning; for observable facts to exist in every single body. As has already been discussed, this emerged as a project in

‘normalising’ a united vision, of identifying the ‘normal’ body by organising a cultural infrastructure that engendered not only trust in vision, but power in the ‘right’ vision.

The story of visualising in the Clinic is part of the long and complicated discourse of the imaging of sciences. Foucault’s hugely influential Birth of the Clinic

work of theorists Lisa Cartwright (1995), José van Dijck (2005), Donna Haraway (1998), Catherine Waldby (2000), Barbara Marie Stafford (1993) and Bruno Latour (1990). This literature provides anecdotal and documented examples of historical and contemporary viewing practices directed at x-ray images and other medical technological perceptions, as well as the spectacle available on cinematic film of the body after scientific investigation, when it is re-animated. Together, they show the profound emergence of an ideology of the clinic in which

envisioning plays a central role in the ‘life’of the human body.

Early records show that, in the clinic of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the experience of being imaged by x-ray technology was not as

alienating an experience as it is today. The clinician maintained a proximity with the technology and thus with the patient, that enabled a visual empathy that tragically cost many clinicians their lives. As the reality of the dangers of over– exposure to radioactivity became undeniable, the practice of radiology changed dramatically. The patient and the clinician grew increasingly distant, their professional relationship increasingly mediated by the image.

Figure 2.1 appears just once in the gallery of thumbnail images on the Internet conjured up by my specific command “looking at x-rays”. It is part of an

exhibition held in the museum of photography and film based at George Eastman House in New York. George Eastman was the inventor of Kodak film, which very quickly became the film commonly used for printing x-ray images. Although the dates of the displayed x-ray images themselves are unclear, I have surmised from the little information available on the web page, that Hoffman’s photograph dates back to 1968. The date actually given for the photograph on the web site of the Eastman Gallery is 1868, which predates the invention of x-ray photography. It was not until 1889 that George Eastman invented the flexible transparent film, a version of which we are now familiar with, which is often the medium through which an x-ray image is available to us as hard copy.30 I mention this to re-iterate

30

Issued by the Health Sciences Dept at the Eastman Kodak Company, Screen Film Processing Systems for Medical Radiography: A Historical Review (1989) by Arthur G. Haus and John E. Cullinan provides a comprehensive history of x-ray photography and the move from glass plates to film, along with the experiments and results of using various emulsions. Published in

the gap that begins to emerge between fact and visual representation in such technologies as the World Wide Web.

Figure 2.1 displays multiple levels of engagement between the full x-rayed body in the viewing box, the imaged viewers, and the reflected photographer. In addition, we are made aware of the fact that Life Magazine, at one stage, bought the image from Hoffman and it has now be replicated on-line by the archivists of

Fig. 2.1 Men [sic] looking at an x-ray of a skeleton by Bernard Hoffman

George Eastman House, where I found the image and am now re-appropriating it for my thesis. No doubt, there are strict copyright laws regarding any further publication of this image.

Retrieved 3/10/10 from: http://radiographics.rsna.org/content/9/6/1203.full.pdf.

Our first subject of the image, situated solidly in the centre of the shot, is the illuminated skeletal form that seems to greet the viewer with open arms. The male and female exhibition goers, their backs to us, stand firmly in their apparently designated places. Yet, noticeably, their proximity to the full-length x-ray image would not enable a full-length vision of the x-rayed body without the onlooker physically either moving their eyes or their body. Whether by accident or by design, and I suspect the latter, the on/off switch that activates the illumination of the image, is set just at the right distance for the viewer to have to bodily

negotiate the full image. In the background, we can see the shadowy figure of Hoffman crouching behind his tripod, with just a dot of light denoting his camera flash. The adventurous switch monitor, it may come as no surprise, is the male viewer. His hand is pictured as seemingly attached to the light switch. Hoffman catches him in the act that brings the entirety of the image to its fruition. In short, it is Hoffman and the switch monitor’s action that bring about the viewing event enabling the experience of revelation. The relationship between the skeletal form and the female on-looker appears not to be one of subject and object, but rather object and object — both objectified by the male presences in the room, neither of them seemingly in control of the event that they have become explicitly part of. Some years later, photographer Helmut Newton took a remarkably similar image of himself seen in a mirror reflection photographing a naked model, with his wife looking on.

Just in case we are under any misconceptions about whether the skeletal form, devoid of flesh, is male or female, we are given sufficient signifiers to clearly demarcate ‘femaleness’, not just through jewellery but also we notice that ‘she’ has donned a pair of high-heeled shoes. As an antithesis of the archetypal scene of fantasy involving the shadowy woman changing behind the screen so often seen in the cinema, this inversion offers something much more troublesome. Her illuminated skeletal form stripped of skin and clothes, confrontationally emerges as a ‘mirror’ image for the female viewer, through the dark screen and into her visual field. Rather than keeping the reassuring veil of mystery and seduction