Fall2015-Danner

Zielinski’s Ultrasound: Values of/and Anticipatory Time Media

Patrick Danner

Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media explores in equal depth artistic and medical technologies. However, using what he terms “anarchaeological” methods, questions of institutionalization and the social dimensions of such media technology remains glossed over. The sweeping methods of variantology, in other words, complicate a definitional and social view of Zielinski’s Deep Time by forgoing sustained critiques of media types. Thus this essay takes up his definitions first, proposing a critical view of “time media” in particular, and suggests some discrete socio-political implications that may not be avoidable.

This felt de-socialization of specific media sites appears to be a result of Zielinski’s methods. Zielinski emphasizes sprawling maps rather than local

Deep Time of the Media explores in equal depth, and gives equal treatment to, both aesthetic and scientific media technology. However, using “anarchaeological” methods, the text only glosses questions of institutionalization and the social dimensions of such media technology. The broad sweep of variantology, that is, complicates both definitional and social views of Zielinski’s Deep Time by forgoing sustained critiques of media types. In this essay, I privilege a definitional approach, proposing a critical and functional view of “time media” and suggesting some discrete socio-political implications that—if we take the idea of time media seriously—may not be avoidable.

Zielinski’s anarchaeological methods engage sprawling maps rather than local critique, concluding with a broad, spatial view of media development. He is against narratives of unilinear evolution, the general “progress narratives” that populate histories, writing,

The notion of continuous progress from lower to higher, from simple to complex, must be abandoned, together with all the images, metaphors, and iconography that have been—and still are—used to describe progress. Tree structures, steps and stairs, ladders, or cones with the point facing downwards [...] are, from a paleontological point of view, misleading and should therefore be discarded.”¹

Here, Zielinski suggests complete abandonment of popular heuristics that to date have characterized media history.² He de-emphasizes narratives of the relationships between cultural and technological progress; there is no consistent parallel between social and technological advance and no correlation between “civilization” and “geological or biological evolution.”³ While opposition to narratives of progress reasonably underlies Deep Time’s methods, these latter claims—those that eschew correlation between cultural and media change—extend such methods to weighty implications. However, in the absence of parallelism between the social/cultural and the technical, there remains a complex connection between the social and technical spheres, identifiable in how certain media are used.

Here, I explore implications for Zielinski’s vocabulary of media through a single technology: obstetric ultrasound.⁴ Specifically, I explore two moments of ultrasound’s history: first, the static, 2D ultrasound imaging, and second, the recent introduction of 3D, HD technologies. These technologies are, by Zielinski’s definition, time media: “techniques for reproducing existing worlds and artificially creating new ones.”⁵ Of course, I lean here on the creation of the new, the mediated creation of a future reality through the visualization of the fetus. In particular, I evoke the sense of anticipation inherent in this definition, and ask what political, or politicized, dimensions exist in each iteration of ultrasound over time.

Feminist theoretical traditions push against Zielinski’s dismissal of correlations between civic and technological trajectories. To take one example, Anne Balsamo explores several social dimensions of medical imaging in Technologies of the Gendered Body, most directly concerned with ultrasound and projective imaging in cosmetic surgery.⁶ For her, obstetric medicine constructs a surveillance society; social institutions strive to track the development of the anticipated mother-and-child pair, rendering both in visual media. Once imagined, the anticipatory reality created by the image provides the physician the ability to imagine new constructions of medical interest:

An equally significant consequence is that these monitoring devices also construct new bodies to watch. The most obvious is the body of the fetus, which is visualized through new imaging technologies. This leads some obstetricians to claim that the fetus is actually the primary obstetrics patient.⁷

Balsamo’s obstetric encounter is incredibly value-laden. The construction of the “patient” is intertwined with granting the fetus a certain innate patient-hood, mapping its development within the social construct of power: the clinical scene. This, Balsamo says, is an act enmeshed in the potentiality of motherhood. She continues,

Less obvious is the creation of new identities for the female body. As a potentially ‘maternal body’ even when not pregnant, the female body is also evaluated in terms of its physiological and moral status as a potential container for the embryo or fetus. Clearly the use of technology in the service of human reproduction and maternal health has political consequences for all participants.⁸

The body as a site of “surveillance” follows the temporal logic of Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. There the shift in medical science in the twentieth century, coinciding with rapid ultrasound development, is a shift to logics of cost-benefit analysis, management tracking, investment, and reproduction.⁹ Such logics are both future-directed and anticipatory.

However, in its first form ultrasound hardly presented vivid depictions of potential realities. Balsamo and Haraway both write for a context where 2D was the default ultrasound technology, and as such the media representation of the anticipated reality was merely a tool for approximating medical measurement; it presented shapes more than bodily forms. In fact, a major breakthrough in 2D technologies for obstetrics was characterized in terms of accurate measurements of fetal growth within three centimeters and 300 grams in a majority of patients.¹⁰ The temporal dimension of this “time media” then is more about static intervention, tracking over time, than a single future reality.

The methods of visualizing such potential, of anticipating a distinct construction of a future, is key in parsing out the character of anticipatory time media in representations of the fetus. The shift from static, 2D ultrasound to “real time” imaging (developed through several trials in Germany, Japan, the U.S., France, and elsewhere from the 1960s to 1980s) plays this out. Part of the problem of real-time imaging was the imprecision of picture quality itself; the approximation of a human figure through ultrasound is intimately woven in the approximation of movement. Tony Wittingham, an English physician, reached a breakthrough in real-time imaging by representing “finer and finer [visual] elements and get[ing] more lines into the array.”¹¹ Similarly, a U.S. breakthrough came with the development of “focus rays” and “focusing techniques.”¹² In other words, “real time” technology was considered dependent on a clearer representation of anticipated realities, precisely because the technology requires the appearance of realism or believability.

The desire for “real time” imaging helps hone the means for 3D/HD imaging in ultrasound. Distinctions between 2D and 3D practices rest at the convergence of visual and temporal logics, and precisely what the temporal dimension represents for obstetric practice. Beyond the practical goal of precise fetal measurement—those considerations of medical surveillance involved in the 2D techniques—3D and HD imaging technologies produce new, particularly institutional, concerns. At its introduction, 3D ultrasound imaging was, in fact, controversial; some doctors went as far as to characterize 3D imaging as a consumer luxury, or referred to the images with dismissive terms like “entertainment scans” and “reassurance scans.”¹³ The medical community saw it as a nuisance or a mere novelty, prioritizing something other than specific, medical concerns.

Beyond this immediate backlash to 3D obstetric ultrasound, however, one begins to see the consideration of it as a new media, presenting new concerns. Indeed, Dr. Stuart Campbell perhaps confirmed and countered the dismissal of the “reassurance scans” in his own studies of their efficacy, noting in particular the connection between the scanning technology and the bond between mother and child.¹⁴ Campbell’s study, despite showing thorough knowledge of the other, more “scientific” benefits to 3D image technology, was groundbreaking not in its technical rigor but, instead, in its positing of a potential future, an affective and social future, formed in the image itself.

I do not fault Zielinski’s drive to draw distinct maps for social/cultural developments and those of media; the scale Zielinski takes up is not comparable with the discrete media history addressed here. Yet the consumer, affective, and politicized realities that attend each individual technology trouble Zielinski’s resistance to conceived, popular correlation between technological and cultural advancements. As Balsamo makes clear in Technologies of the Gendered Body, imaging in the context of anticipated bodily or medical realities is slippery; medical science is not designed to tell the future. Further, I propose that the future-oriented, creative, anticipatory time media must be value-laden and, potentially, politicized;¹⁵ it is, after all, the suggestion of what could be. It is anticipatory personhood in ultrasound imaging (particularly of the 3D/real-time variety) that, as Balsamo suggests, echoes the drive to create new patients and the drive to recast the woman first as a “potential,” anticipated, mother.

In sum, while ultrasound imaging has a long history in obstetric practice, the introduction of 3D, HD imaging holds particular sway in understanding the role of media in medical practice. By relying on anticipatory time media, and, in particular, one that is derided by obstetric professionals as mere “reassurance” imaging, the field of obstetric ultrasound betrays its prospective, and thus politicized, nature. Only by better defining what a potential future for the patient(s) could be does ultrasound take on its political dimension, and advances in the field appear to continually touch on this definitional goal.

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1. Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. 5.

2. Wysocki does a thorough explication of Zielinski’s methods in the context of UseNet elsewhere in this issue.

3. Zielinski 6

4. Here, I ask for a generous read. While I don’t purport to have complete control over these scientific concepts and terms, ultrasound technology is a site ripe for recognizing a critical intersection of the development of visual media and technology and social dimensions of the very same.

5. Zielinski 31

6. Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

7. Balsamo 90

8. Balsamo 90

9. Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991, 57-66.

10. Thompson Horace E. “Studies of fetal growth by ultrasound.” In Grossman GC, Holmes JH, Joyner C, Purnell EW, eds. Diagnostic Ultrasound: Proceedings of the First International Conference, University of Pittsburgh, 1965. New York: Plenum Press, 1966.

11. Woo, Joseph. “A short History of the development of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology.” Humbul Humanities Hub. 1998-2002. Web.

12. Woo.

13. Woo.

14. “Womb view boost for expectant parents.” BBC News. July 6, 2001. Web.

15. We could look toward current laws and court orders for abortion seekers to be required to submit to ultrasound imaging (as of 02/2016, such laws and orders are in effect in Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Virginia, and North Carolina [see: http://www.guttmacher.org/statecenter/spibs/spib_RFU.pdf]). In some states, these laws stipulate certain conditions under which women are allowed to look away from the image; and as of this printing, Kentucky has recently introduced a similar law to the state Senate.