MDSC62H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Institute For Operations Research And The Management Sciences, Cultural Turn, Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Document Summary
Scientific images are grounded in a cultural context. Positivism is the idea that the world is best understood through observation or experimentation. It informs law, science, medicine, and the social sciences, which strive for objectivity. The instruments of visualization in multi-nationalist, postmodernist culture have compounded these meanings of dis- embodiment. (haraway 677) A central aim of science and is to see the unseen. The practice of visualization has escalated to encompass the acoustic and tactile world. The paradox is that visual images represent all kinds of sensory information. In medicine, the eye has been elevated over other senses as the way to know, so that looking and seeing confirms whether or not disease is present. The eye has been elevated to arbiter in the medical gaze. Imaging technologies, including x-rays, ultraviolet rays, electronics, and digital computers, can see without opening the body. Doctors can observe the opened body from a distance: to see the unseen.
