"Rhetorics of Mental Disability"

Ch apt 7 “On the Rhetorics Of Mental Disability”

Her point is that there isn’t any – rhetoric of mental disability, at least one that takes into account the rhetoric of the mentally disabled themselves, especially schizophrenics.

Catherine Prendergast wrote this essay in 2000, 12 years ago, on the cusp of the Clinton/Bush presidential election, resulting in an exchange from “liberal” Clinton to reactionary Bush. I mention this, because, as bad as things were for schizophrenics during the 90’s, when she says, mental illness became increasingly criminalized, it must be even worse now. (It’s largely a question of money, isn’t it? Hospitals cost money. Who is going to pay for it? Bill O’Reilly doesn’t want his tax money going to these maligners and neither do Health Insurers). In 1979, I remember the Dayton State Hospital with a physical plant the size of a small college campus, housing 100s of mental patients. It got shut down in the early 80s, nothing remains. This was the era of deinstitutionalization. I think that it was about this time that Axl Rose appeared on the scene, mute testimony to the failure of deinstitutionalization in Indiana. (I kid).

It seems what she is documenting is just more and more penetration by the mean spirit of bureaucracy and corporatization of the mental health profession, exemplified by the use of the DSM - IV for sorting patients into recognizably billable categories. This has to have been on-going.

What most concerns her is the almost absolute repression of all recognition of the language use of SZs by institutional psychiatry. The case of the uni-bomber Ted K is paradigmatic. Teams of psychiatrists poured over his manifesto and other writing in order to decide if these texts revealed an individual, rhetorically competent to defend himself and stand trial, which is what he wanted, even though that exposed him to the risks of execution for capital murder. The team decided that his writings were evidence of his inability to stand trial because of mental disability and were therefore excluded from testimony.

What Prendergast wants is “a rhetoric of mental disability that the mentally disabled themselves will have the greatest part in crafting.”

Can You Tell Me How To Get to Brentwood?

Maria Elwan

Eng 440
September 17, 2012
Journal and Field Log #4 – Film, “Ten Items or Less”

Can You Tell Me How to Get to Brentwood?

This film is the story of the other side of the American Dream. The gritty, real people living in sometimes ugly situations trying to make sense of their place in their world, and trying to find a little joy along the way.

The film’s two main characters Scarlet (Paz Vega) and Him (Morgan Freeman) begin a chance encounter that by the end of the film, helps them both make a decision they were unclear about. Him is a well-known actor who hasn’t done a film in four years and is considering whether to accept a new film project. Scarlett is a Hispanic little firecracker who works as a grocery clerk and  is less than pleased over her new gig, as the “10 Items or Less” checkout girl. Scarlett comments that this is the lane that checkers go to die. It seems Scarlett has been cast aside and relegated to this lowly lane by her ex-husband/boss over a new love interest (another check-out girl). So Scarlett is fuming as she fights with customers who are over their item limit, while the boss’s new squeeze paints her nails in the other check-out lane of this  Mexican/Hispanic supermarket in The Barrio of Los Angeles.

Him is dropped off at the supermarket to do research on the possible manager role he might accept. This is when Him encounters Scarlett and is quite taken back by her skills in glancing at people’s shopping basket and determining at a glance how many items they have. Him can tell at-a-glance that Scarlett is quick, intuitive and witty. He is drawn to her and her situation. 

The conflict in the story comes from Scarlett refusing to let her current life and occupation define her. She dreams of leaving the supermarket and getting a job as a secretary in an office. (She in fact has an interview this day). This attempt to break away is quickly squelched by her ex-husband/boss who tries to keep her in her place by saying that she’ll never leave the check-out booth. His language and demeanor see her as working class and his remarks indicate she’ll never leave the Barrio.

Ten Items or Less is a rhetorical study of the working-class poor of America. Scarlett seems trapped in her social status by her vocabulary and lack of skills.  This is a point that  David Fleming states in Subjects of the Inner City, “Basing social policy on class distinctions contributes to the increasing fragmentation of our society “(REL 215). The social policies in place in our society make it difficult for members to make the transition from one social class to the other.

No where is this more evident than when you see Scarlett driving Him home after he’s been left stranded at the market. She stops and asks the Asian convenience store worker – how to get to Brentwood.  This is a symbolic question. She might as well have been asking how to get to the moon. Both may be equally difficult destinations to arrive at.  Then you see Scarlett and Him get on the LA Freeway. The freeway is a metaphor for the concrete barrier between the two worlds of Brentwood (rich, exclusive enclave) and the Barrio (slums) of Los Angeles.

But Him is very astute, when he meets people he knows how to place them and what their role is, so he engages Scarlett to give her the courage to go after her dream. He gives her the motivation she needs to go through with the interview. In this complete fusion, Scarlett then helps Him arrive at the decision he’s been wavering over. Him decides if Scarlett will make a commitment to make a choice, then so will he. The audience learns he will take the film offer.

            The ending brings home the point of  how two strangers can come together and help each other after meaningful verbal exchanges. Their mutual dialogue helped convince the other on the course they should take.

Self-fashioning and the American Dream

“10 Items or Less”:  Learning how to enact the American Dream through role play, and self-fashioning

The film begins with that, by now, common- place of post-modernism, namely, by calling attention to itself as a film. The well-known actor Morgan Freeman is trying to decide to “commit” to an independent film project, low budget, to be sure, which will rely on his name to sell itself. Thus, we are put in the position of watching a movie about a movie, even though the film we see, as it unfolds, is not of course the same movie that Jonah Hill was trying to get Freeman to commit to. In that movie Freeman will play a supermarket manager (and not “himself” as in the one we actually view). It will however be a film featuring the actor, whose presence in both, we understand, is a way of getting this low-budget, indie made.

Playing himself in a movie about a movie means that we are offered two Morgan Freemans, the actor’s representation of himself (has “no friends”) vs. the real personage of Morgan Freeman (probably has lots of friends). However, for the most part, we do see the character of Morgan Freeman as self-identical. After all, he is an actor with an actor’s skills playing an actor with an actor’s skills (mimicry of the old manager, of the prissy Sheldon character (from “The Big Bang Theory”). Thus, we see the ability to play a role, different from himself, through an actor’s work of study and imitation, the ability to put himself into the position of others (empathy), the skills of close observation and its resulting knowledge of other people, skills which he puts in the service of very frustrated young woman who is a checkout clerk. He sees her talent (intelligence), youth and beauty, and he schemes to help her overcome the deadendedness of her present situation (both job and boyfriend, who is a stock creep, and her lack of confidence in herself) and he teaches her how to act, how to simulate self-confidence, despite feeling like throwing up, which is “good,” because it means one is serious about getting a better job, the necessity of self-presentation with the right kind of clothes and make-up and car (although we note that the clothes, etc are inexpensive, from Target, and her old car just needs washing). Like an actor in a role, success is achieved through self-fashioning – all very postmodern.

This is the progressive content of the film: If we are all actors playing roles; then, it might be possible to play things a little differently for a change. In other words, by calling our attention to the constructedness  (artificiality) of our subject positions, we gain insight into the constructedness of social reality and therefore the possibility of changing it.

By the end of the film, the young woman has transformed herself with his help, and she declares, despite not getting the job she interviewed for, that she will never go back to that market. She has been transformed (and, by the way, he too. He now claims that he has overcome his vacillation and has indeed committed to the indie film).

As to the reactionary side, Don is quite right in his class analysis. He claims that the filmmakers seem unaware of the real toil and trouble of the working day for those in dead-end jobs and fails to see the real difficulties of such individuals trying to “better themselves” by rising socially and economically. Or, it underplays it.

To say more, along the same lines -- call it ideology critique -- we find in the film the monomyth of the American Dream. Yes, you too can achieve your dreams, all you have to do is use your natural god-given talents, combined with determination, and you too can achieve all you want. I call this the American monomyth, because it proposes an individual solution (self-improvement and social mobility) for what is essentially a structural problem, namely, the class and hierarchical structure of capitalist society. Seen this way, the story of individual success does not mean that we live in a society open to talent, where if she can do it, anyone can.  No, if the structure remains the same, as it has over the last several decades, where you have roughly the same percentages of the population comprising various economic levels, then, it follows, that any one individual who does manage to rise from a dead-end job to that of a manager, he or she makes it that much harder for other individuals to do the same, on the one hand, or, alternatively, it forces a manager somewhere out of a job, out of the middle-class, down to the working class. (I would claim that belief in the American Dream is required for the whole capitalist system to function. If, instead, people started seeing that they are not responsible as individuals, that, instead, we are all victims, the whole system would come crashing down).

Thus to the extent that this film preaches the validity of the American Dream, albeit with a little help from some Horatio Alger type benefactor, usually an older very successful male, to that extent it is complicit in the desire of the capitalist class to keep things the way they are (structural), while bamboozling workers into thinking that their class position is their responsibility alone. As Joe Clark (Morgan Freeman) tells the students of Patterson High School in Lean on Me (c 1979): “If you fail, don’t blame the white man; don’t blame your parents; don’t blame [class] society. The responsibil- ity is yours!” 

Dominated of the Dominant Class-Field Log 4

The Dominated of the Dominant Class

Journal and Field Log #4

Pierre Bourdieu alleges "that artists and writers...are a dominated fraction of the dominant class" (145).  Thus it wouldn’t be much of a semantic stretch to say that film directors and actors are likewise the dominated of the dominant class.   So, in discussing, 10 Items or Less, I want to, at first, look at it from a Marxist perspective because I think the movie brings up numerous class issues.  

The story roughly is Morgan Freeman’s character, “Him,” doing research for a small film role he’s being offered after being “out of the game” for a while.   As part of that research he visits a working class market in Carson, California.  There he becomes intrigued by a cashier, named Scarlet, played by Paz Vega.   In a way the movie is sort of city mouse/country mouse premise.  Him is in no way prepared to be unceremoniously dumped in Carson, and comes only equipped with his Diner’s Club card.   Paz takes pity on him and they set off on a series of small adventures.

From a certain perspective, it can be argued that the director, Brad Silberling, is trying to cast the regular folks of Carson as funny, quirky, and noble.   Paz Vega’s role is certainly the most dominant one, and she is cast as someone who’s merely been dealt a bad hand and has sort of given up “at 25.”   Thus, it’s up to Him to sort of coax her on, restore her confidence as she tries to move on from a bad relationship in which she failed because she didn’t produce off spring (while her exes next girlfriend—who also works at the market—does).   She’s clearly cast as aspiring and worth more than being the only who works at a very slow supermarket.  

Morgan Freeman’s role is cast as a likeable, however bourgeois, successful actor who doesn’t even know his own phone number, carries nothing more than Diner’s Club, and is in awe of the world of retail work.   His fascination with the East Indian manager who moves at an animated snail’s pace, Scarlet’s ability to know the prices of the items before they are even unloaded from the basket, the dance of the cleaning crew at the car wash, the pitch and nuance of a mop sales woman, and the office receptionist suggest that while he wants to be sympathetic to their experience he will never have to live their experience.   His experience mimics the audience’s viewpoint as the film maker stages these shots under the full glare of Hollywood lights.   They’re staged, however fascinating, and while they “uplift” the people performing them, they also point out how different “him” is from the people in Carson. 

Yet, Him’s relationship with Scarlet seems to be the real highlight of the film.   Morgan Freeman, who is usually cast in roles where he has to display a lot of gravitas, is charming and playful.   The chemistry between him and Paz Vega seems genuinely authentic, and I bet some of the exchanges were improvised.   While I think the director was wise to cast someone with the same sort of “wattage” as Morgan Freeman, their chemistry and ease with each other made it seem a little unbelievable, which brings up the obvious flaw in the movie.   Paz Vega is expected to play this undervalued worker at a store and at the same time be able to go toe to toe with a famous actor who dances through life as if nothing concerns him.  While I don’t think the director means any disrespect to working class people, he applies the usual Hollywood gloss as if displaying them as sort of the downtrodden nobility.   There may indeed be people who through bad circumstances are not living up to their potential, but to cast the whole world of the retail worker as sort of fascinating suggests that people, real people, want nothing more than to work the check-out line at a supermarket or enjoy the actual work of washing cars or the mindless drudgery of office work.   Had the director actually talked with people who work retail/office jobs he may not have been so easily enamored with the job duties but with, perhaps, the relationships people forge with their co-workers that provides some sort of payoff for working a mindless job. 

Work Cited

Bourdieu, Pierre. In Other Words, Essays Towards A Reflexive Sociology. Stanford University  Press, 1990.

Immersed in a Virtual World

Immersed in a Virtual World

Journal & Field Log #3

                 Every morning the first thing I do is check my e-mail, perhaps check in on Facebook, and generally orient myself to my virtual life before I go through the task of orienting myself to my physical life.   It’s a sort of dance between virtual and physical.   Pressing e-mail here, sip of coffee there; some piece of news from the world here; some physical detail of my life in Albuquerque here.   In both cases I am immersed in a world:  physical or virtual.

                Judging by the time I spend on the computer, the virtual world seems more real than my physical one.  My partner and I’s discussion seem to trend toward the virtual world (though it may be reflecting a physical world, it is mediated through the virtual world).   The computer, and its ever present eye, seems to dictate what the flow of the day is going to be like.   I keep a calendar online, structure my day around a schedule that is planned to the minute and managed by a set of reminders that pop up (with an accompanying sound) when I log in at work, or open up a web page.   Without this virtual calendar I may not make many of my appointments.  But am I busier than my father (who didn’t have these sophisticated tools at my disposal)?

                Perhaps.   Yet, the computer has sort of interposed itself between the language and the thing it references.  On a practical level, the word itself no longer points exactly to the thing it signifies but points to a series of binary codes, which are then translated to letters, which then light up on a screen.   The process of understanding meaning becomes sort of mediated through the experience of the computer.   Indeed the very act of typing it out on a word processor adds another layer because I can instantly correct the grammar, double check the spelling, even have common words auto-corrected.   This allows me to juggle even more task than my father was capable of, yet with this added efficiency, there is also the risk that the tool itself requires a whole series of steps to keep it running.  How much time is now dedicated to my “checking in?”  How much of my daily tasks are dictated by my keeping track of my virtual life?  

                If anything, Baudrillard uses too strong of a term, by saying that the proliferation of terms has “imploded” the distinction between real and simulated.   For one, if my own reading of Saussure’s theories are correct, our understanding of the world, since it is done through words, is already “simulated.”   We are not really seeing the “real” world, if there is even such a thing.   And while the “simulated” world may indeed have the same draw and require as much maintenance it merely adds another layer of interface between “reality” and us.   More complicated and mediated for sure, but not really sure if I agree with the term “imploded,” which suggests a sort of chaotic mess that can’t be understood.  It can be understood, to the degree that anything can be understood, but is just much harder.

Figured out how to blog.

I wish to apologize to the young woman for my unthinkingly rude challenge to her father’s quality of memory, it was as if I was calling him a liar.

What I should have said is that Lembeke’s argument in his “Spitting Image” is not that every alleged instance of spitting was false but that the totality of such numbers of reports, taken together, has become more of an urban legend than anything resembling historical and empirical reality (b/c of total lack of evidence from newspapers and television reports, police records, etc, total lack of any documented evidence – where and when -- of a single instance of spitting). What he concludes is that these men felt spit upon, when they came home, felt used and discarded. No parades was the least of it.

I also wish to thank the young woman for taking back the nationalist/patriotic card, tearing it to pieces, and throwing it away. I have not been witness to such a generous, gate-opening move in a long time, especially coming after what she had every right to think of as an insult to her father.

 

Plato and Aristotle's Gnarly Adventure

Reading Log 3

Matthew Tougas

I think it’s fair to say neither Plato nor Aristotle would adapt to modern technology as seamlessly as Socrates did in the pivotal eighties classic, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.  If we could, however, bring them up to speed instantly by downloading the past two millennia directly into their brains Matrix­-style, I think we’d see two radically opposing views on the “ethopoetical” nature of modern technology, though not necessarily in the obvious ways.  Plato, as Miller notes, would no doubt find cause for alarm in the text-based nature of the internet: instant messaging, blogs, tweets, consumer reviews.  The opportunity anonymity provides to exaggerate, misrepresent and flat out lie would be chief concerns of his.  Skype, however, might just be the greatest invention of all time to Plato.  To be able to see and hear the person with whom you are interacting would, for Plato, ensure the ideas being exchanged are accurate, in terms of how the communicator intended his message to come across.  Of course, the moment Plato stopped concerning himself with the mode of communication, he’d start worrying again about human impulses—but that’s just Plato.

Aristotle, the “hipper” of the two, might at first embrace the notion of text-speak, assuming he thought brb and lol were words people actually spoke (to be fair, I’m hearing the latter pronounced more and more), or at least captured the truest essence of what the speaker meant.  As Miller reminds us, Aristotle thought “Authors should compose without being noticed and should seem to speak not artificially but naturally” (75).  So for him the problem might not be whether someone really laughed out loud or not, but if a known dullard (Plato, for example) in text typed out lol in response to someone’s comment, even though it’s well known Plato never laughed (lol).

All jokes aside, where these two ideas become relevant in the world of Artificial Intelligence is at the intersection of what gives someone credibility and what are the dangers of “simulating” credibility online.  The real risk both of them would likely agree on would be that risk of simulating virtue from an artificial agent (like Agent Smith, for example).  To be fair, both would probably doubt the ability for true AI to ever accurately simulate human virtue in the first place.

To bring all this back to the classroom, this discussion gives me an idea for an assignment about ethos and digital rhetorics.  I could have my students read tweets from political contestants and compare them to how those same politicians orate the same idea or message.  What differences, rhetorically, are there between the two?  Which medium seems to more accurately represent the ethos of the politician? Why?  What does this say about Plato’s argument that written word risks misrepresenting the speaker?  Can a speaker code-shift between both mediums and still accurately represent himself?