Medical images and the optical unconscious: A sociology of visual language.
Item
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Title
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Medical images and the optical unconscious: A sociology of visual language.
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Identifier
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AAI3037413
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identifier
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3037413
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Creator
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Lemmon, Nadine Ann.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Stanley Aronowitz
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Date
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2002
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Sociology, General | Art History | History of Science
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Abstract
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The moment in which an individual looks at a medical image of his or her own body is a charged moment. The moment is entwined in a vortex of personal, cultural, social, and historical phenomena that construct the image as meaningful---a vortex, referred to as the optical unconscious, that is coded into the signifiers of visual language itself. Analyzing selected examples from visual history, this dissertation hypothesizes about how that optical unconscious is formed by social desire and how it informs the way medical images are constructed and read today.;Early Daguerreotype and x-ray images were widely embraced by popular culture. The physical form of these images created an aura associated with vague innuendoes of sensuality, identity, death, and truth, especially in books like Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. The public learned to fantasize about the relationship between these images and self-definition, thus establishing a way of "reading" photographic images that lingers today.;Medical images stray far from the world of science and facts; some are astoundingly beautiful, others psychologically compelling. Aesthetic theories from the 18th and 19th centuries reveal how beauty functions ideologically in the system of capitalism. As seen in Todd Hayes movie [Safe], American alternative health philosophy also has a clear function in capitalism---for example, emphasizing personal responsibility in the etiology of disease not universal healthcare, stressed work environments, or dumb luck. Both aesthetic theory and alternative health proliferated at times of chaotic, social upheaval and both work symbiotically to produce the fantasy of an autonomous individual, separated from the social, and in control of their world. This fantasy reveals certain social desires that effect the way we read medical images.;Through the work of Jacques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault, the final chapter analyzes the psychological and interpersonal effects of medical images: specifically, how a visual language relates to our construction of the self and our fear of damage to the body. Medical images often allow us to simplify, to clean up chaotic and contradictory information, and to imagine that we can see the boundaries of knowledge.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
