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.

Thin sliced thoughts even thinner

Two footnotes to yesterday's comment on Andrejevic's "Thin Sliced Thoughts" piece:

1. A friend forwarded this Angier piece (in the Times, of course) about filmmaking, pink noise, and the control of attention:

Hollywood filmmakers, whether they know it or not, have become steadily more adroit at shaping basic movie structure to match the pulsatile, half-smooth, half-raggedy way we attend to the world around us. This mounting synchrony between movie pace and the bouncing ball of the mind’s inner eye may help explain why today’s films manage to seize and shackle audience attention so ruthlessly...

She's all, like, gaa, with no awareness of the exploitative potential in the utility of brain scanning efforts discussed by Andrejevic.

2. As regards the very well-described effect of introducing competing narratives into the info-glut, which Andrejevic sums up as:

By multiplying the narratives—and in particular, those narratives that cast uncertainty on one another—the goal is to highlight the absence of any ‘objective’ standard for arbitrating between them.

It should be noted that this strategy has tremendous leverage -- maximal, really -- within a journalistic practice that attempts to present fair and balanced, equally weighted but incompatible judgments (or perspectives) because this sort of cravenly feckless (candyass) approach is precisely what the USian journalistic establishment calls objective.

New from Paris: A virus-eating virus

Virophage

Scientific Exactitude of Hurricane Models

We know one thing for pretty sure: where Fay has been.

Hold the Punch, Pinch

Scientists Feel Miscast in Film on Life’s Origin

By CORNELIA DEAN

Published: September 27, 2007

A few months ago, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins received an e-mail message from a producer at Rampant Films inviting him to be interviewed for a documentary called “Crossroads.”

The film, with Ben Stein, the actor, economist and freelance columnist, . . .
Turns out to be a completely different film entitled “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” with a different producer, a creationist ax, etc.

And downstream somewhere, Ben Stein, actor, economist and freelance columnist is further id'd:

Mr. Stein, a freelance columnist who writes Everybody’s Business for The New York Times, conducts the film’s on-camera interviews.

But you know, as Ben himself tells the Newspaper of Record he gets paid by,

“I don’t remember a single person asking me what the movie was about,” he said in a telephone interview.

And that's fair, isn't it? After all, like Ben, any working journalist knows better than to divulge to his sources, whom he is going to quote and attribute, the authority of the actual story he's getting them to create. Half of them wouldn't agree to speak if
they knew they were tools.

This trick is not unlike the contrivance of simple plots, such as those found in jokes.

"A hard-nosed scientist walks into a Creationist phantasm..."

USian Journalism is the punchline that arrives after the sources have been directed to act as if the story was about them.