Charlie Hynes

My Life is a Metaphor

            We all go through life comparing our situation, whether it is our socioeconomic status, or health related, even in terms of our relationships with others.  Are we single, have a girlfriend/boyfriend, or are we married?  I am a married man who struggles to keep his small business afloat, works a second job, and goes to school with the hope of improving my economic situation.  While watching the Democratic National Convention for instance I related to President Obamas’ acceptance speech because I could relate statistically to those people who he was trying to reach.  My life is a metaphor for many of those causes the President spoke of.  I need medical insurance, and sometimes I cannot afford it.  The economy has hit trade contractors such as myself very hard as we survive off of the well being of those around us. 

            When I see a dog running off his leash near the road I go to help him, but when I am lost and struggling to find my way in this world it is my family that helps me to find my way.  Often they can only be encouraging and maybe advise me in the proper direction.  I have found a couple dogs in the past year that all I could afford to do was to get them to a shelter, it is the lucky ones who have held on to their tags and have an owner on the other end of a phone number, anxious to find and help their dog. 

            Sometimes it’s as simple as seeing a stop sign when I am in a hurry to be somewhere.  The sign is a reminder to “stop” and take in what is going on around me as much as it is a traffic signal to stop and literally look around before proceeding.  It is these symbols that bring metaphor to my world.  Metaphor comes when we identify an analogy, something that is not total likeness, like with “simile”.  Metaphor can have a total different construct like the lost dog and my being lost in my career.  What is applicable is the noting of help from another source outside of myself, just as the dog finds help from me.

            Today the weather was crisp and cool and sunny when I woke up, as was I after I had my coffee.  I noticed my cat was in the yard on an early morning hunt as I looked through the window of our living room.  At that same moment I was scouring the cupboards and the refrigerator in search of a snack.  Life is full of metaphor when we consider the trials and tribulations of others paving their own ways through the same complex world.  My life is a metaphor to whatever I take notice of that I can relate to on a personal level.

   

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.

Excerpts from journal # 2

"Fixed." It is a word as double-edged as "partiality." In this sense, I suppose it means "unchanging." But suppose it meant "repaired." This is my struggle. I attempt to fix (repair) the perceptions of the world around me by imposing my "fixed" (somewhat unchanging) view of how things are on others. I am referring to the perceptions of the two cultures I straddle. I work very hard to keep an open mind. This does not mean that I do not have some views from which I will not be moved. It does mean that I allow others to have their own opinions, even if I do not agree. Though this sounds contrary to what I stated above, I work very hard not to force my ideologies on others. I believe that force is the most difficult and least effective way of changing minds. Rather, I intend to erode the (in my mind) erroneous perspectives of others with open, loving acceptance and by acting as a living example. When I do attempt to vocalize my views, rather than imparting my insights, most often I am just viewed by strangers as a bigot. Not so by the people who know me. To them, I float cultural and ethnic boundaries freely. For these, my very existence challenges their formerly "fixed" world view. But others hear my personal rhetoric and accuse me of racism against all, including the race to which I belong.

Allow me to explain. I am white. Yes, I said it: "White." Pale-faced. A cracker. Yes, those are racist terms. No, I won't be more politically correct. I will not apologize for the term. I will not apologize for "my people" (whatever that means). While I am a white American, I grew up as a minority. I think this gives me a unique insight into "the way things are" in cultures across this country. I went to high school on the reservation, where I was the only white kid. I sat in classrooms as my peers berated me for what "my race" had done to theirs. I was told I didn't belong. I was told to go back where I came from. I was told to go to a white school with "my own kind." I heard a lot of things about how "white people" are. I quietly went about living my life and my classmates decided I was different. Eventually, they labeled me as "one of us" and "a rez girl." When they would talk about "white people" and I'd snicker or smirk, they'd look at me and say, "Oh, not you. You're not white."

On the other side of the chasm my constructed identity bridges is my white family and my non-Native friends who know nothing of reservation life. These people are as ignorant and generalizing about Natives (Yes, I am using the term Natives. That is the term my rez friends and I use in conversation. Deal with it.) as Natives are about whites. And, again, all I can do is try my best to quietly use my life and experiences as an example to the contrary. This has resulted in non-Natives also seeing me as something other than "white." My family wondered if I would be able to "reintegrate into white society" after high school. Friends (again, without reservation experience) have referred to me as "the most Native person they know."

Since I have left the reservation for school, however, I feel like my acceptance there has begun to wane. Likewise, my non-Native friends have tried to persuade me to leave the reservation in my past. Yet, I feel alienated out in the "real world." It is discouraging for me. While I feel like I am a window between the two cultures through which they peer at each other, I also largely feel like I'm falling in the crack and not succeeding to belong to either. When I talk to others from my high school who have pursued higher education, they seem to slightly relate. They get brow-beaten by their tribes for being traitors because they leave the reservation and "try to be white." On top of feeling put down by their own people, they feel completely out of place being away from their tribes. They struggle with breaking the stereotypes non-Natives have for them. They try to convince their own people to be more accepting of outsiders and other ways of life without feeling like the tribal culture is being threatened. Essentially, they are the other side of my coin. When we talk, our views and goals are the same for what we would like to see for their tribes and how we plan to go back to give back to the communities that made us who we are. There is this sense of mutual understanding between us that we do not feel either among our college classmates or with our friends back on the reservation....

The Fecundity of Living

I am reminded of the African concept of "ubuntu" (resonant of the classical Greek construct of "nomos").  Both concepts reflect the inherent codes (grammar of belonging) of language and rhetoric that promotes coherence.  My husband has often commented that my huge Irish Catholic family operates on "herd instinct."  "They don't talk. They migrate." I think he is right. This quality of language and culture has always fascinated me. It what promotes the fecundity of living together in community.

On "Subjects of the Inner City"

Chapt 8 in REL, “Subjects of the Inner City”

David Fleming, going against W J. Wilson’s thesis in The Declining Significance of Race (1978), argues, on the basis of the example of Chicago, the most segregated city in the world, that it’s race, not class, which has the most significance, and not just for this situation, but all over the country (world?). Race trumps class, according to David Fleming.

What’s his evidence? He cites a negative example of racist whites who use class as a way of avoid or even deny the racial question by insisting that it’s not race; if a “negro” doctor wants to move in next door, fine, but keep out the trash, low income types from across the racial divide. Fleming claims that this shows that racist whites use class to disguise their racism.

But don’t those whites have a point?

Aren’t they telling the truth when they say that they don’t want to live next to poor people, no matter what the color?

I think that it has been thoroughly demonstrated, at least in the Marxist tradition, that class is the cause, yes, cause, of racism.  Before racism, i.e., before western contract with people of color, and certainly before the slave trade, before the scramble for Africa of the 1890’s, before western colonialism and subsequent economic imperialism, before that, there existed “racism” in the sense that the exact same hatreds towards and subhuman categorizations against, say, the Irish, as lazy, shiftless, promiscuous, criminal degenerates, known as the Irish, prevailed.

Slavery was of course especially pernicious in branding slaves as inferior and therefore deserving of their fate, aided and abetted by all the institutions which benefited from the massive profits, reinvested in industrial-ization, until a civil war had to be fought to put an end to a hideously immoral super-exploitation of hapless human beings, who just happened to be black. But then came Jim Crow and Apartheid (segregation).

Fleming seems to want more of the reforms necessary to wage a war, to use the language of such broad plans, against segregation, legally, financially, morally -- make it a national priority; it’s the only thing that will help.

Let’s all work for a racially integrated society, completely integrated; then, this other problem, concerning public housing will, if not go away, at least be ameliorated, even though, we will have to admit, this Anti-segregationist Marshal Plan, would further divide the working class, along racial lines, whites resenting this new affirmative action, as they always have, perhaps even inciting racism in some.

Another objection to the more-affirmative-action-in-low-income-housing is that liberalism is bankrupt. There’s literally no money for such projects or even the recognition of the need for them, In the present political climate, there is no way such funds would be released in this way (more than 10 years after this article was written). Not gonna happen. An Obama second term will be equally useless in this regard. Money is there, maybe, but its expenditure would require a radical reprioritization of national tax revenue. 

   

Fleming is also able to downplay the significance of class by reducing it to income, in the fashion of bourgeois sociology. But class is about who owns the economy versus the rest of us, who work for them, directly or indirectly, indirectly by such as David Fleming, who performs the service of attacking Wilson and hypostatizing the concept of racism as possessing more explanatory power than class, limiting our definition of the problem to a reformist solution only, requiring only more 60s-style liberalism.

No, racism is perpetuated by a capitalist economy with its winners and losers; it thrives on the divisions it opens up between workers (alongside other divisions on the basis of nationality, gender, and of course money).

I am reminded of Marx and Engels' observation (Manifesto, 1848) that there comes a time when capitalism fails and the capitalist class has to take care of workers (subsidized housing, food stamps, etc) instead of being taken care of by them. For Marx and Engels, this was evidence of the unfitness of the capitalist to rule; they cannot even manage successfully their own system.