>The other side, looking at animation, is that you get a speeded up
>(sometimes called 4-d) view of development that blurs anatomy and
>physiology. When you overlay other sorts of categories at different time
>scales it can be extremely odd and obscuring power-wise. So in some
>anatomy programs using "virtual cadavers" for med students, you can just
>push a button and get the race of your choice. That feels intutively wrong
>to me.
>
>L*
Perhaps an unconscious example for me as I just wrote about the need to
focus more on immediate community as a source of discourses and silences,
rather than on macro-social patterns. (Obviously you need both, but I feel
a dangerous imbalance in emphasis in theory today.)
I mentioned aside that I worried how new technologies might develop, absent
the humane communities from which humane discourses (and meaning systems
generally) arise.
So here we have the promise (animations that help us conceptualize dynamics
in development, across timescales) and then a 'wrongess'. Push a button to
get the race of your choice. A trivialization of race-relations, a way of
relating to a cadaver of another race, totally disconnected from the issues
of how we relate to people of another race. (No, I don't believe in race
intellectually, but I live in a society where we all still learn to see
through the constructed lens of 'race'.) A trivialization that is made
perfectly reasonable for some people by a vast discursive formation (much
of it thought to be socially progressive) in which cadavers are not people
who have recently died, not bodies that recently had a role in the
community, belonged to social communities of caring. In which computer
representations of a cadaver are not images made from thin-slicing
someone's son, someone's daughter (I assume there is also a button for
anatomical sex; can I get a hermaphodite if I want one? think 'twisting'),
or in which x-ray thin-slicing is less ghoulish than microtome slicing.
Back to discursive origins in the body-snatching days of the Edinburgh
anatomists, praised for their forward-looking heroism in desanctifying the
human body to make possible modern patient-as-commodity, "the enlarged
ventricle in Room 1635B" medicine.
Wonderful discourses that sustain and are supported by communities most of
us don't really want to live in.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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