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The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine, Catherine Waldby

Overview of imaging techniques https://framacalc.org/biomedicalimaginations

Chapter 1 the Visible Human Project

relentless pblic visual access to every organ

computation producing new points of view upon the human body

The computer’s ability to represent and manipulate volume was hence transforming the space of medical thought itself, presenting it with novel ‘points of view’ and new practices of modelling, surgical planning and visual pedagogy. In particular it presented a solution to the problem of moving from two-dimensional images of anatomy (x-rays, drawings) to three-dimensional bodies, a central problem in medical pedagogy as medical students learn the difficult task of envisaging the complex anatomical structure of the body volumetrically. p9

sliced into oblivion

template, normalisation

labour

The task of rendering the data, that is, generating volumetric anatomical images from the cross-sectional data, is highly specialised and labour-intensive, and many sites have focused on rendering one part of the body. p17

differences between treatment of visible human man and woman

tools: 

Its tools cannot be separated out from this imaginary order, and, as I shall demonstrate in the course of this book, the VHP indicates the extent to which medical rationality is driven by confusions between animation and reanimation, life and the illusion of life, medical corpses and uncanny spectres. If medical interest in the project is motivated by pragmatic concerns and applications, it is equally motivated by the kinds of fantasmic mastery promised in the looking-glass world of the virtual screen, where the laws of everyday matter—the irreversibility of time, the inescapability of decomposition, the finality of death—are suspended. p18

technologies of en-framing (Heidegger)

reciprocity of responsibility

all modern technology is extractive (ordering it as an economy) -- Heidegger. Making over of the world (body) as a 'standing reserve'
now they can also circulate, converge with other economies

science + tech: drive towards making the body calculable. bio-value

extractive: visualising is also a form of displacement, violence
telematicity (?)

common code, standard = circulation (?)

The VHP partakes of the general productivity of data economies, an anatomical object which seems to re-present the qualitativity of a volumetric, dense body in its aesthetic, but whose substance is a form of mathematical code. Consequently the terms through which it is made to appear, its quantitative mode of being made present, open it out to all the complex forms of exchange, segmentation, iteration, scale manipulation and transmission that are available in digital economies, forms of circulation only possible when a common code and a standard value are in play. As code it is not merely transmittable but has its being in transmission—the quality of telematicity is always/already inscribed in it, so that each instantiation of the project at a workstation is only an instance of an object which exists in circulation and distribution. p35

calibrating 

Haraway on quantification (1991):
Communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move—the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment and exchange.... The world is subdivided by boundaries differentially permeable to information. Information is just that kind of quantifiable element (unit, basis of unity) which allows universal translation, and so unhindered instrumental power.... The organism has been translated into problems of genetic coding and readout...[understood as] biotic components, i.e. special kinds of information-processing devices, p45

critique of figure of the cyborg: it is anthropocentric (the pure, fleshy body that fell into tech)

biomedics blurs lines of human limits, while at the same time asserting its natural stability

Chapter 3 theatres of violence

no more distinction between inside and outside

anatomy always relying on 'less valuable humans' (= criminals) to save others
redemption

amateur and professional interest -- anatomical theatre

humanism is species specific

Moore and Clarke (2000) Cyberanatomies and sexuality -- 'application of latest technologies does not in itself produce more progressive imagery of gender'

scopophilic: deriving pleasure from looking

anatomy and sacrifice (Nicolas' frogs?)

shift: before VHP anatomy usually summaries of multiple dissections

Placing the body in a geometrical space -- anatomical theatre (from Vitruvian to Euclidian)

Anatomy orients towards medium for bio-graphy.
making the body readble and writable

How to make the wet mess of a body ready for the pages of a book?
Anatomical Atlas = Body as laminar terrain = body as landscape = layers = peeling = gradual abolition of depth (depouillage?)

book: spatiality and temporality of traversing layers -- body as a sequence of systems: body is sum of discreet parts
anatomisation = reading the body, body as a book layed open (spine)

making the body intelligible

Dissection, which is the precision work of making objects visible, is at the same time classifying work. The flesh is dense and compact, stuck together and impenetrable. First, one has to identify something in a crevice opening up, in the depths of a wound or on a bloody surface.... In the case of microsurgery, this identifying work can take hours, in which whitish and reddish cords are identified as particular nerves and vessels and lifted out of their bloody surroundings by slings and numbered clamps.... Dissection aims to present organs in the isolating style of the anatomical atlas. The drawings show neatly separate organs; in the patient-body this state must first be produced by isolating them with the knife. Surgeons call this ‘exposition’ or ‘making anatomy’.... When the exposition is completed, the target organ can be operated on: nerves are anastomosed, prostheses implanted, organs resected, tumours extirpated, bones screwed together. (Hirschauer 1991:300–1)



Questions:

What terms does Slicer negotiate for exchanges between human and machine organs?
How do MRI, CT, even ultrasound rely on digital imaging (none of them photographic, like radiology)?
How does anatomisation as dissection align with discretisation, rendering digital?
Where is the space of the possible here?