261
This ethic is the inescapable behavioral poetic that, in true kinship with the evolutionary purpose of such anatomy, must perforce engage in the noblest of actions:
succumbing to the imagery in such fashion and rigor as to protect and uphold the
autonomy, anonymity, and sacrosanct grounds from whence such images have been
created. Every National or Royal Geographic cover convenes upon this photographic
credo. The dangers, of course, are that one’s celebrity becomes its prolific undoing.
A problem naturally arises under the aegis of so august a manifesto of logic. In
the early 1900s radiologists were troubled. Pathologists were rendering inaccurate
diagnoses based upon any number of misreadings of X-rays. As Lorraine Daston
and Peter Galison explore, mechanical images in medicine at once demanded a
discerning scientific reception; objectivity became dependent on subjectivity. The
core of machine intelligence, for example, photography, was no autonomous truth,
but the “interpretive judgment” of observation. “Trained judgment came increasingly to be seen as a necessary supplement to any image the machine might
produce.”
32
And if this were the case for scientific instrumentation, what about landscape aesthetics? Write Daston and Galison, “Judgment by the author-artists joined
the psychology of pattern recognition in the audience.”
33
Hence the de facto second
opinion, when an MRI suggests either a “mass” or some “narrowing” in the bones.
Beyond the infinity and pathology of photographic longings, devolving into the
normal or abnormal, remains the steadfast iconic, the selfie, a preamble to whatever
else philosophy or science might have to say about it. Or, the lone whisper, the last
gasp, even a monumental arousal, simply disintegrating to a digitally catalogued
nothing, dust beyond that, in which we recall the words of the late political theorist
Jack Schaar, who once told us, “I love the mountains. That’s why I never go there”
(Fig. 27.3)
32 See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, Zone Books, New York, 2007, p. 314.
33 ibid., p. 315.
27.5 Mortality and Memory
This ethic is the inescapable behavioral poetic that, in true kinship with the evolutionary purpose of such anatomy, must perforce engage in the noblest of actions:
succumbing to the imagery in such fashion and rigor as to protect and uphold the
autonomy, anonymity, and sacrosanct grounds from whence such images have been
created. Every National or Royal Geographic cover convenes upon this photographic
credo. The dangers, of course, are that one’s celebrity becomes its prolific undoing.
A problem naturally arises under the aegis of so august a manifesto of logic. In
the early 1900s radiologists were troubled. Pathologists were rendering inaccurate
diagnoses based upon any number of misreadings of X-rays. As Lorraine Daston
and Peter Galison explore, mechanical images in medicine at once demanded a
discerning scientific reception; objectivity became dependent on subjectivity. The
core of machine intelligence, for example, photography, was no autonomous truth,
but the “interpretive judgment” of observation. “Trained judgment came increasingly to be seen as a necessary supplement to any image the machine might
produce.”
32
And if this were the case for scientific instrumentation, what about landscape aesthetics? Write Daston and Galison, “Judgment by the author-artists joined
the psychology of pattern recognition in the audience.”
33
Hence the de facto second
opinion, when an MRI suggests either a “mass” or some “narrowing” in the bones.
Beyond the infinity and pathology of photographic longings, devolving into the
normal or abnormal, remains the steadfast iconic, the selfie, a preamble to whatever
else philosophy or science might have to say about it. Or, the lone whisper, the last
gasp, even a monumental arousal, simply disintegrating to a digitally catalogued
nothing, dust beyond that, in which we recall the words of the late political theorist
Jack Schaar, who once told us, “I love the mountains. That’s why I never go there”
(Fig. 27.3)
32 See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, Zone Books, New York, 2007, p. 314.
33 ibid., p. 315.
27.5 Mortality and Memory