Nora Bateson, daughter of Gregory Bateson, is touring with a film she herself made, about her father’s ideas.  As she said in her introduction, his ideas are shown through the lens of a father-daughter relationship, it is her own viewpoint. She uses tapes made by Bateson near his death, and the film combines footage from different epsiodes in his life to illustrate some themes, continuity in his academic career as he moved between social anthropology, systems theory, psychology. You learn that, throughout,  he sought patterns that connected things and had the ability to turn things to new angles, indicating relationships between things that  would escape a more partial view.  Apart from this capacity of recontextualisation, he also sought the ‘difference that made a difference’ – asking what makes something distinct.

I have not read his books: I can but comment on the film as a non-specialist. On one hand I was…