Abstract
By revisiting some of the main concepts surrounding the rationale of our work, this introduction further explores the topic implicit in our book’s title. In other words, this introduction develops the argument that, given its authoritative voice, biomedical knowledge not only has been influential with cultural producers but that it also plays a major role in creating expectation and meaning for the general public. Video games, TV series, novels and even art: all those products can, in a way, be affected by biomedical and scientific knowledge. As such, the consumption of those artefacts, coupled with the anticipation created by it, may serve as a proxy for how people comprehend and understand this particular area of scientific production. Here we also emphasise that the influence of biomedicine on culture is not a one-way process. Given that specialists and researchers are also consumers, the opposite is also true: cultural products, then, may also inform biomedical knowledge. Finally, at the end of this introduction, we discuss our chapter’s threefold division. Since this book intends to introduce our topic to a wider audience, we present it from a multidisciplinary point of view whilst providing our reader with particular examples in the form of focused case studies and larger historical and social perspectives.
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Notes
- 1.
“cultural techniques are (a) operative processes that enable work with things and symbols; (b) they are based on a separation between an implied ‘know how’ and an explicit ‘know that’; (c) they can be understood as skills that habituate and regularize the body’s movements and that express themselves in everyday fluid practices; (d) at the same time, such techniques can provide the aesthetic and material-technical foundation for scientific innovation and new theoretical objects; (e) the media innovations accruing in the wake of changing cultural techniques are located in a reciprocity of print and image, sound and number, which, in turn; (f) opens up new exploratory spaces for perception, communication, and cognition; and (g) these exploratory spaces come into view where disciplinary boundaries become permeable and lay bare phenomena and relationships whose profile precisely does not coincide with the boundaries of specific disciplines.” Kramer and Bredekamp (2013: 27).
- 2.
In contrast, for example, to the German expression Wissenschaft, which includes the humanities and the social sciences.
- 3.
The object of semantics (from gr. sema = sign) is the study of the contents designated by linguistic signs, i.e. the meaning of words, sentences and texts. It is, in turn, a part of semiotics, the study of sign systems in nature and culture. It plays an important role where communication takes place. Communication does not necessarily have to take place with linguistic signs, though. Even non-linguistic signs such as in music, painting, architecture or in the movie can be examined and analyzed by semiotics.
- 4.
This perception accepts that scientific objectivity is also perceived as a normative value. Therefore, science cannot be value-free.
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Görgen, A., Nunez, G.A., Fangerau, H. (2019). The Medicalization of Popular Culture: Epistemical, Ethical and Aesthetical Structures of Biomedical Knowledge as Cultural Artefact. In: Görgen, A., Nunez, G.A., Fangerau, H. (eds) Handbook of Popular Culture and Biomedicine. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90677-5_1
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