I liked Frances Bolton's post in response to Louis' reaction to the woman cop.
Frances Sunday Aug 30,98: "Isn't funny that we're all assuming that she was seriously interested in Louis? Doesn't this say something about gender roles and expectations."...
Frances same posting: "So, I guess I wonder why we would assume this wasn't just an arbitrary assertion of cop power. No offense meant (although I suspect it will be taken), but this truck me as a bit locker room-ish, with the assumptions that "yeah, she wanted me."
Doyle That is how this strikes me too. A credulous account by Louis of what on the surface appears to be straight forward to him. But we have to take into account that Louis describes himself as 'unattractive', so we are left with a more in depth guess that she was possibly just asserting a sense of female power. In other words if she thinks of herself as beautiful as a movie star which is likely given the cultural stereotypes, she would be using that sense to impress upon some guy her power. It also brings up that how does one really determine the truth of such things as intimacy between people. I mean Louis does ask the question when is this class collaboration? Michael Eisenscher responds in kind to Louis.
Michael Saturday Aug. 29,98: "Scabs are also part of the working class. You would not have to cross any class lines (real or imagined) to ask one out, but would you simply because she is young and beautiful and offers you a complement in Central Park?"
Doyle Again we are confronted with how intimacy conflicts with class consciousness in some ways. The Grapes of Wrath has a scene where the Okies go into a fruit picking camp (if I remember correctly) and Tom Joad goes out to see what is happening with picketeers at the entrance. They discuss what scabbing is. At any rate there is a dramatization of the process of deciding which side you are on. The same goes for the recent "Men With Guns" by John Sayles. Some deserting member of the army in a Guatemala like country hooks up with a wondering association of national country men. No doubt Sayles is trying to show that a process of redemption is happening for the deserter.
Doyle So this is a serious questions moving back and forth across membership between us and them. The power this woman had is the power of intimacy. Somehow that exceeds the boundary in Louis' mind concerning class. In some ways it could be collaboration, but a question lurks there that it might be something else. It is what I think of as the gray areas of belonging and why these boundaries exist. Intimacy is an area where working class people can move out of their class. See the movie with Montgomery Clift, and Elizabeth Taylor "A Moment in the Sun", (if I remember the title correctly).
Doyle Marx thought of capitalism as making a group or class with the same or universal interests. Yet Marx couldn't address directly this central question of the consciousness. Class can seem mutable, reversible, especially if intimacy comes up. But only in special circumstances. And these special circumstances hardly reverse the large scale economic processes which more and more bind the workers together. I'll give some boundaries that illuminate how Louis wouldn't worry at all about his inner "collaborator", an old woman cop who is really lusting after him. Then he wouldn't feel any pull. Or a gay male cop lusting after him. So only those special cases which exactly fit the definition of what Louis would want in intimacy, i.e. a woman as beautiful as a movie star is truly risky in the sense that he could possibly lose his internal stable sense of class. What does this mean?
regards, Doyle Saylor