The derivative temporality of suffering

In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault describes an epistemological break between those who suffer and do not know, and those who know, but do not suffer. Today, a new clinical invention called “predictive medicine” further rupture the rupture of “knowing” in regard to suffering. This is a branch of health care that aims at predicting and diagnosing an illness before it occurs and then make interventions in a clinical decision in order to prevent it from happening. An example could be that an array of trans-sectorial data is harvested – ranging from a person’s civil status, social benefits, work-status, exercise levels to previous medical history – and is algorithmically analyzed in order to give an approximate in percentage to potential near-future acute illnesses. Based on this outsourcing of knowing to data and algorithms, this presentation will read predictive medicine as a data derivative practice, the logic of a financial instrument, which disregards the body and reassemble a dividual from fragments of data into a diagnosis, actualizing the person as sick in an incorporeal transformation before the occurrence of suffering. Within the temporality of the data derivative, what happens to the knowing, the rhythm, the tempo of the (not-yet) suffering body?