Positive Psychology visits Peta Tikva, Israel

Maria Elwan

Eng 440
October 2, 2012
Journal & Log 7

The Band’s Visit –  “Positive Psychology Visits Peta Tikva, Israel”

In the film, The Bands Visit I initially saw Dina as the Positive Psychology figure. She was very optimistic and friendly to the band members. She empathized with their situation and was the one who arranged for the band members to be taken in for the evening. Then as the film progressed the director reveals her loneliness and feelings of inadequacy when she tell Tawfiq, “There, I thought tonight would be a special Big Arab Words night, and I’ve screwed it up again.”  But all in all I thought she was the most Positive Psychology figure.

The overall feeling of the film was that of an unconscious loneliness amongst most or all of the characters. It was a window into very personal relationship issues with the Israeli couple (birthday girl) and their problems over the husband being out of work for a year. The film also had a Freudian hint of homosexuality and the “return of the repressed” when Tawfiq tells Dina that his son had done some very foolish things, and Tawfiq couldn’t understand how gentle his son was, causing the son to commit suicide. Tawfiq then felt guilty that his actions had also killed the wife.

The film also brought out the ‘Archetype’ showing the similarities of these two perceived enemies, the Egyptians and Israelis, and how there is actually a kinship and bond formed from “an alleged collective unconscious found in all people (Berger 124).

Freudian sublimation is also present in Tawfiq who rechannels his sexual desire for Dina to conform to his societal (Egyptian) demands. He feels that he is a representative of Egypt, and does not want to do anything to soil the Egyptian reputation. Tawfiq also demonstrates ‘positive psychology’ he is pretty optimistic and accepting of his situation, and believes the band’s troubles will be resolved in due time.

Condensation (“the representation of a single word or image which takes one many different meanings” was used with the reference to the American musician Chet Baker (Berger 11).  Discussing Baker was bonding the two nationalities in music, even though they may have enjoyed different things about the music, and their minds held different images of it.  Their love of music and these musicians transcended the hostilities between them. Dina even commented how years ago her Israeli village street would be empty on Friday afternoon because that’s when the TV played Egyptian movies. Music and movies was used as a symbol of many different thoughts that brings pleasure.

Last but not least there was Khaled, sweet, narcissistic, sexual Khaled. He had what Freud would call a healthy dose of narcissism. He loved himself as much as he loved women. This film was very endearing and heartwarming. You come away with the positive psychology that there is yet hope for the world, if they two enemies can sit down at a table and break bread together. I guess that’s spoken also in a true positive psychology mode.

Barry Schwartz: Using our practical wisdom

What are these filmmakers trying to do? The intentionalist fallacy!

On the intention of the author or authors (filmmakers).

While it is of course true that we usually cannot know the intention of the author(s) – unless they are living and can tell us (have told us) what they intended – but even here, they are often an unreliable source, since there is a large unconscious component that goes into artistic creation of which the author may not be aware  – in other words, the author aimed at one thing but the work produced is something else – and, finally,  knowledge of an author’s intention is useless for evaluating a work – yes, he may have intended this and achieved it but what has that to do with our judgment of the work as good or bad, etc? The author may have intended to write a fluff piece for money and achieved fully his intention, but it’s still a fluff piece.

The concept of intention is indeed problematic, even though it is key in legal thinking and writing. Determining the intention of someone is what the law is largely about. Call it a legal fiction, if you will, but it is used all the time. If a defense attorney tried to claim that we cannot know, in principle, the intention of the accused, he would be reminded that he is basing himself on a principle, not recognized as valid by the court.

I propose using the intention of the author as a kind of “legal fiction,” and allow talk about intention into the conversation about a work of art, a film, say. Even though we cannot know it, let’s talk about it anyway, if we want, and then look at our answer to the question, How do the filmmakers want us to respond to the character played by Morgan Freeman? Our answer will always be provisional and a kind of collectively negotiated guess. Thus for all practical purposes, ie, for the purpose of discussion, we will regard as definitive this group’s consensus of opinion (with of course minority opinion acknowledged as well).

Why do this? Why insist that talk of the filmmaker’s intention be legitimized?

Because it helps us clarify our answer to the question, What do we think that we are responding to?

If someone says, eg, In this film Morgan Freeman is an obnoxious rich man, using his money, power and influence, to try to seduce a checkout girl.

And someone else says, But you don’t really think that the filmmakers intended us to conceptualize and respond this way to Morgan Freeman in this movie, do you?

I don’t care about the intention of the filmmakers and, besides, we can’t really know it anyway.

Well, the question still stands. What is it that you think that you are responding to then? It seems to me that you are responding to the film, as if it were real life. But, obviously, that can’t be the case. (No sane person is incapable of telling the difference between Donald Duck and a picture of Donald Duck). It must be that you are responding to a fictional character, ie, a literary character fashioned in such a way by the filmmakers’ conscious intentions (including the real actor himself). In the creation of the screen image of this character, decisions have been made about how to select and arrange the actor’s behavior, so that he represents the kind of character the filmmakers want.

If we are allowed to ask the question, How do the filmmakers intend us to respond to this fictional character?, and if we have the answer to this question (provisionally, to be sure, as a result of class discussion and negotiation, then we can get a handle on how our responses differ from each other’s and even begin to get a handle on why they differ, this latter question answerable by the respondent who wishes to negotiate his response with others. In other words, he will need to search himself for the subjective factors which “caused” him to respond in the way he did. Perhaps he will understand that he is resymbolizing the character of Morgan Freeman on the basis of his image of his father, whom he hates for oedipal reasons, whatever!

What I am saying is that the image (symbol) of the character created by the filmmakers is motivated (intended) and one’s interpretation (resymblization) of this image is also motivated.

The alternative is to slough ahead insisting on one’s sovereign subjectivity: This is the way I see it, and I don’t care if it’s the way I’m supposed to or not, cause we can’t know how we are supposed to respond. I also don’t care how others see it either. We all respond differently, period. And I am not at all interested in negotiating my response in relation to that of others. This is the way I see it and that’s an end to it!

Pussyfooting round "what 'we' study and how we label it"

Sloop, John, &* Mark Olsen. “Cultural Struggle: A Politics of Meaning in Rhetorical Studies.” At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies. Ed., Thomas Rosteck. 1999: 248-265.

Begins with the observation that everybody seems to want to get on the “CS” bandwagon. If you ask an English teacher at MLA what he or she does, “rhetoric and cultural studies” is what you’ll probably hear, according to this article written more than 13 years ago. Even though I personally haven’t kept up with the struggles over “what ‘we’ [English teachers] study and how we label it” (last sentence in article), I know that I was hired back in 1994 to teach composition in a program, which the director was calling the first cc cultural studies writing program in the US. I never did figure out what that was supposed to mean. The program was progressive in a sort of conventional way. We could select to teach from one of 4 anthologies with the usual sociological- oriented type articles therein. I still have the book somewhere. I remember an article (I had them read) about advanced industrial societies and the apparent necessity for some form of state sponsored welfare for some of its citizens. I liked this essay because it directly and factually contradicted what most Mormons (it seemed) held, regarding their own history, which they saw as independent of government subsidy. (This was in Salt Lake City, by the way). Mormon ideology celebrated an in-group coherence, independent of government subsidy, which took care of its own (Mormon charity, etc). It turns out, according to the article, that the western states of the US received and continue to receive the most government money. The West always needed, eg, the garrisoning of federal troops to pacify the Native population. They needed water projects.  To me the program seemed to be pretty much along the lines of Bartholomae (and Petrovsky’s) Ways of Reading, which put reading and writing from sources (sociological essays, Foucault, eg) at the center of the curriculum, but I still don’t understand what made our program there CS, other than just calling it such gave it the prestige and cachet of the new and up-to-date. This same head of the writing program there also wanted to us to inaugurate a “writing center,” another new and prestigious add-on, at the time, being acquired by almost all colleges and universities throughout the US.

As to the article by Sloop and Olson, it seems as though the authors want to preserve the critical political edge of each and avoid the “harm” that comes to both when one is conflated with the other, something which seems to be happening due to the [inexplicable] rise in popularity of cs some 12 years ago.

So what do they want? To answer this question, they study the use of the world “culture” in journals devoted to the study of rhetoric (have the word “rhetoric” in their titles). They decided that there are 3 ways the word is used, each of which merits a subheading in the essay as follows: 1) culture as logic, 2) culture as critical context, and 3) culture as the circulation and production of meaning in use.

Culture as logic is the study of persuasion within, more or less closed, rhetorical communities: egs, political culture, scientific culture, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Useful studies.

Culture as critical context, as dominant meaning. Jungian archetypes in Star Wars. George Schultz’s revisionist historicizing of Vietnam. It’s “readings of struggles [across time] over dominant meaning at the level of popular culture.”

Finally, cultural as the circulation and production of meaning in use. Here, they rely on the definition of cultural studies offered by Gilbert Rodman (Elvis after Elvis 1996) as: 1) entailing a radically contextual approach to scholarship, 2) a commitment to theory in that theory must be travelled through to deal with ‘real life’ problems, and 3) politics and political struggle. “Any serious discussion of popular culture must include questions of politics and attempts to carry out political projects through critical activity.” They go on to claim that neither (1) “culture as logic” (political culture, scientific culture) nor culture as (2) a space to study meaning (popular culture), [neither of these] “specifically entails a project contextualized in time and space (subgroup usage) nor explicitly pursues a political agenda.” These authors, above all, seem concerned to want cultural studies to entail a [leftist of course] political agenda or to at least preserve a place for that in cultural studies.

Conclusion: cultural and rhetorical studies. The conflation or partial conflation of rhetoric and cultural studies “endangers the potential of a critical practice.”  He wants a new generation of critics trained to “focus on meanings in specific acts of consumption and to take on proactive political projects.” Thus Cultural Studies ought to be an interdisciplinary space for critique, which can draw upon the discipline of rhetorical studies in the implementation of its [political] project.

What these guys are pussyfooting around about? It seems to be about how not to allow the conflation of rhetorical and cultural studies or the partial conflation of the latter within rhetorical studies. It harms both because, in the eagerness to jump on the cs bandwagon, we risk depoliticizing both. I’m not sure how.

It must have something to do with their refusal to discuss the why of this cs bandwagon phenomenon. It must have to do with a somewhat already depoliticized cs, how else could it be so popular? They insist on a kind of political critical cultural studies, qualities with which it was supposedly born [with Stuart Hall’s Birmingham school?], and they fear now it’s being defanged by reducing its interdisciplinary space into merely “a generalizable phrase employed in the study of culture.”

My guess is that these guys think of themselves as Marxists but are afraid to declare themselves so openly. They would like to inaugurate some version of a Marxist study of culture or even critical cultural studies, but know they could never get it endorsed by the powers that be (university governance, etc.), so they are pussyfooting around, trying to sneak in and maintain what they call “an interdisciplinary space” [cultural studies] for their practice, viz., if not of Marxism per se, at least a space where they can reproduce a new generation of critics trained to “focus on meanings in specific acts of consumption and to take on proactive political projects.” They remind me of myself, trying to practice Marxism under the guise of Freirian critical pedagogy, except that they wish to influence institutional change, something I was never in a position to do.

Regarding my own knowledge of the disciplines of rhetoric and cultural studies, as a graduate student in the late 1970s [comp. lit. at Univ of Arkansas], neither “rhetoric” nor “cultural studies” ever appeared on my academic horizon. Rhetoric was a subject studied by classicists (Greek and Roman) and had something vaguely to do with language use and especially its use in the art of persuasion. This was sometime before the explosion of composition studies leading to advanced degrees in writing instruction, in professional writing, in writing across the curriculum, and in writing program administration [or, as James Sledd, called them “composition bosses” (during the 80s and up to the present)].  My first exposure to so-called cultural studies was in the writings of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School, which presented itself – I could be wrong about this --  as a kind of corrective to the original work by Adorno and Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School, The Culture Industry, which was an unforgiving indictment of capitalist or commoditized mass culture, as it was called. Cultural studies coming out of Birmingham took the position that “mass culture” by itself was only half the picture, and that one had to study its consumption as well, for which the term popular culture held sway. Mass culture was what got produced by, say, Hollywood, but popular culture was what consumers made of it and emphasis was put upon the relative autonomy of consumers to make what they made of it. The debate was similar to that surrounding the reception of a book by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), which developed the correspondence theory between what schools did and the needs of an advanced industrial capitalist economy. Henry Giroux and others, calling themselves proponents of “critical pedagogy,” attacked it as insufficiently attentive to the relative autonomy of what actually went on in schools, where, despite rigid top-down control, enough space was still available for the practice of critical pedagogy. It’s the same (rather tired) debate between the (determinate) economic base/ super-structure model in orthodox Marxism, with postmodern Marxists such as Louis Althusser arguing for the relative autonomy of the superstructure.