Sketches for a new sociology of intelligenz: About Tiziana Faitin´i´s ABOUT Shaping The Profession

Resumen

Professional Experiences. Not a Ritual Formula
In Chapter VII of Kafka’s (1925, p. 286) Trial, Josef K. finds himself exhausted in front
of the “court painter,” Titorelli, who goes on at length to explain to him how his paintings
depicting moorland landscapes, all identical, are liked or disliked by buyers. In the
usual vitiated air of the entire novel, sweating and anguished in the painter’s small room,
K., the author tells us, “did not have the head to listen to the professional experiences of
the beggar-painter” (für die beruflichen Erfahrungen des Bettelmalers). Curiously, Kafka
uses a lemma such as “professional experience” and associates it with an outcast social
figure, the Bettelmaler, whom we would hardly identify at first glance with a “worker”
capable of listing his professional background. Both roles attributed to Titorelli are, in
fact, far from the ordinary conception of work framed and declared on the basis of skills
and studies. Art and begging are hardly identifiable with “professions.” They represent
moments of otium rather than negotium. And yet Kafka, with subtle irony, connects
them—pointing to a beyond of professionalism precisely in the experience of the idler,
of the artist who asks, “prays”, for some compensation for his street works. Perhaps it
is precisely this interweaving of idleness, precariousness, and judgments on the works
of those who make idleness and precariousness a way of life that can provide a starting
point for tackling a reconstruction as complex as the one that Tiziana Faitini tackles on
a philosophical-political level, but armed with extensive historical documentation, of
the concept of “profession,” in Shaping the Profession: Towards a Genealogy of Professional
Ethics (Faitini, 2023).

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