Some Other Time, Inc.
Just another WordPress.com weblogArchive for May, 2008
Excess demands to be read…
When my grad student Jon Cluck alerted me to the appearance of this video on YouTube a month or so ago, it was almost enough to start me blogging then and there. But deferral is my habit: some other time…
But now that I’m done deferring it deserves some pride of place, so watch it now if you haven’t already — it’s had quite the viral existence:
If origin and intent is your thing, then my best guess is that it was created under the auspices of the producers responsible for Expelled, the film which attempts to give intelligent design a good name and face. But this video exceeds any origin or intent it had. Just read any of the comments on YouTube, or on PZ Myers’s Pharyngula blog discussing this, or on RichardDawkins.net and it’s clear that origin and intent are profoundly limiting frameworks: some scientists love it, some hate it, some think its pro-ID, some pro-Darwin, pro-science, antiscience, bad rap, great rap, brilliant, stupid, and pretty much everything in in between and outside these tags. It’s an excess, a riotously rich ecosystem of images and words that demands to be read, and read again. And each reading, as a creative act, only adds to the excess. The video is a tangled bank — a formation Darwin was hip to…
Reading Faces
Roger Gathman’s excellent blog Limited Inc was one of the “hey you can be a derridean and blog and not be a jerk” moments that eventually led to me creating this blog. Via this post of his I came to this fascinating interview with psychologist Paul Ekman, who describes how he became a reader and researcher of faces: to decide between Gregory Bateson’s and Margaret Mead’s reading that facial expressions are primarily cultural, and Darwin’s reading of faces as “universal,” although I suggest “an expression of biological systems” as a better…expression. It’s a great interview, and showcases why UC Berkeley’s Conversations with History is such a good venue for learning about science and the people who practice it –the interview with Richard Lewontin is also very nice…
