Enactive Approach to Normativity in Oncoradiology Diagnostics: Communication, Affection by, and Enaction of Modified Experiences

Abstract

This article examines the enactive approach to oncoradiology imaging and the diagnostic process involved. It investigates how diagnostically relevant knowledge is related to the radiologist's (embodied) subjectivity and (professional) intersubjectivity. The supporting data was gathered by way of ethnographic observations, which in turn were informed by front-loaded phenomenology. Besides identifying a number of correlations between the analysis of embodied cognition and image-based diagnostic praxis, the question of normativity in diagnostic praxis includes a social appropriation of biological processes, an urge to achieve optimality in the process of engaging with imaging technology and communication with professionally significant others. Hence, rather than delivering static depictions for inference-based cognition, oncoradiology images open up pathways to pathological findings, as well as guide and activate the radiologist's skills. They facilitate individual embodied diagnostic action (enaction of modified experiences), which necessarily presuppose a sense-giving horizon of professional standards (definition, classification, detection, and communication of pathological findings). Finally, this raises the intriguing question of whether certain imaging modalities present relevant normative phenomena in a more professionally fruitful manner than perceptual, linguistic or other intentions.