Hunched backs

Almost always the books of scholars are somehow oppressive, oppressed: the "specialist" emerges somewhere—his zeal, his seriousness, his fury, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunched back; every specialist has his hunched back. Every scholarly book also mirrors a soul that has become crooked; every craft makes crooked.…Nothing can be done about that. Let nobody suppose that one could possibly avoid such crippling by some artifice of education. On this earth one pays dearly for every kind of mastery.…For having a specialty one pays by also being the victim of this specialty. But you would have it otherwise—cheaper and fairer and above all more comfortable—isn't that right, my dear contemporaries. Well then, but in that case you also immediately get something else: instead of the craftsman and master, the "man of letters," the dexterous, "polydexterous" man of letters who, to be sure, lacks the hunched back—not counting the posture he assumes before you, being the salesman of the spirit and the "carrier" of culture—the man of letters who really is nothing but "represents" almost everything, playing and "substituting" for the expert, and taking it upon himself in all modesty to get himself paid, honored, and celebrated in place of the expert. 

No, my scholarly friends, I bless you even for your hunched back. And for despising, as I do, the "men of letters" and culture parasites. And for not knowing how to make a business of the spirit. And for having opinions that cannot be translated into financial values. And for not representing anything that you are not. And because your sole aim is to become masters of your craft, with reverence for every kind of mastery and competence, and with uncompromising opposition to everything that is semblance, half-genuine, dressed up, virtuosolike, demagogical, or histrionic in litteris et artibus—to everything that cannot prove to you its unconditional probity in discipline and prior training, [The Gay Science, sec. 366] Cited here.

#occupywallst

It's not about articulating demands - that comes much later, after a new sort of cultural form actually stabilizes - this takes time. At the moment, we don't know what this is. But we can hope.

Why here, why now - one possible reason:

What the Germans lack:

4 ...

Culture and the state — one should not deceive one-self about this — are antagonists: "Kultur-Staat" is merely a modern idea. One lives off the other, one thrives at the expense of the other. All great ages of culture are ages of political decline: what is great culturally has always been unpolitical, even anti-political. Toti

If #ows is an actual cultural birth-thing,it would be absurd to present the newborn with a demand that it present a list of demands. #bloomberg #ows

WHAT THE GERMANS LACK

I put forward at once — lest I break with my style, which is affirmative and deals with contradiction and criticism only as a means, only involuntarily — the three tasks for which educators are required. One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speak and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture. Learning to see — accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what, unphilosophically speaking, is called a strong will: the essential feature is precisely not to "will" — to be able to suspend decision. All unspirituality, all vulgar commonness, depend on the inability to resist a stimulus: one must react, one follows every impulse. In many cases, such a compulsion is already pathology, decline, a symptom of exhaustion — almost everything that unphilosophical crudity designates with the word "vice" is merely this physiological inability not to react. A practical application of having learned to see: as a learner, one will have become altogether slow, mistrustful, recalcitrant. One will let strange, new things of every kind come up to oneself, inspecting them with hostile calm and withdrawing one's hand. To have all doors standing open, to lie servilely on one's stomach before every little fact, always to be prepared for the leap of putting oneself into the place of, or of plunging into, others and other things — in short, the famous modern "objectivity" — is bad taste, is ignoble par excellence. @#$@#$

Class Consciousness arrives by train

There's an extraordinary moment in Possessed (1931) when Joan Crawford has just dumped her ambitious but dull suitor, informing him that she's not about to become the distaff side of him in their small town featuring careers at the Acme Paper Box factory.

Crawford is walking away from him when a large dark train pulls in, slowly moving across her path.

Every train window unveils a scene. We are voyeurs over her shoulder as she steals a look at labor and its fruits: Black bartenders in one:

 a black maid ironing in another:

a waiter:

A woman in lingerie:

A couple in evening clothes dancing.

At the caboose is Skeets Gallagher, a St. John-like spirit of the train in a tux, drinking champagne. He pours her a glass and tells her, "Only two kinds of people: the ones in and the ones out."

He expresses no interest in her -- he's a boozy, gay or asexual device for getting Crawford from Paperboxville to New York, where she meets Clark Gable and undergoes a metropolitan paideia of the 20th Century USian female. In a wonderful cut, she goes from puzzlement at the menu in a French restaurant to ordering wines in French for a dinner party she and Gable are throwing. Four years have passed: 1928-31.

The marked irreality of the train is very fine. It's all media in one: film, radio, newspapers, television, web, twitter. It is the unveiling of class, romance, and access to power. It's also the locomotive means of moving to the city. Might as well have eyes on its wheels.

I don't know whose idea the train was --  the screenplay was by Lenore J. Coffee and Edgar Selwyn; the film was directed by Clarence Brown, produced by Harry Rapf, Brown and Thalberg.  if anyone knows, I'd be curious, tho' it's not hugely important -- no IP rights on allegorical images.

Skeets tells her the only way for a woman to make it in the big city is to "find a rich man to help her, keep a cool head, peek at his pocketbook, and never tell him anything." "Men like to think they're Christopher Columbus discovering America."

True to the traditional bumpkin peasant type, Crawford is disarmingly blunt, telling Gable that it's important that he's rich, because she wouldn't waste her time with him if he weren't.

For a splendid contrast to this MGM heroine, see Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face, Warner Bros.' 1933 study in female ascendance. There Stanwyck is living in a nightmare; when it goes up in flames thanks to her drunken father, she hops a train to New York with a black girlfriend, sleeping with a railroad worker to avoid getting thrown off.

Her education had begun at her father's bar, where one of the customers introduced her to the works of Nietzsche, featuring a large screen shot of the cover of The Will to Power. Neither the seduction of the worker nor Nietzsche made it past the censors even in that pre-code era.

In Possessed, Crawford ultimately saves Gable's political viability (he's a Union League man) by being silent, then by speaking out. In Baby Face, Stanwyck has no mercy on the series of males whom she rides to the top. They pine, lose all compass, and a few of them kill themselves. George Brent's failed suicide brings her around in the end. Darryl F. Zanuck was a writer and producer.