Final Take-home Exam
Length: (no less than) 1000 words (4 pages) ~ (no more than) 1250 words (5 pages)
(double-spaced. roughly 250 words per page)
Weight: 30 % of the grade
No late exams will be accepted.
Please respond to all of the prompts.
Baudrillard
1. Explain and analyze the following passage from Baudrillard. (20 points, 1 page)
But this cultural use-value, this objective goal, is largely overdetermined by the sociological exchange-value. It is that demand, indexed to increasingly intense status competition, which is met by the vast culturalized material of periodicals, encyclopedias and paperback editions. All this cultural substance may be said to be consumed, insofar as its content does not sustain an autonomous practice, but a rhetoric of social mobility, and insofar as it meets a demand which has something other than culture as its object or rather seeks culture only as a coded element of social status. There is here an inversion, and the strictly cultural content appears only as connotation, as a secondary function. We can say, then, that it is consumed in the same way as a washing machine becomes a consumer good at the point where it is no longer an implement but a luxury, prestige element.
2. Explain and analyze the following passage from Baudrillard. (20 points, 1 page)
Here, and in this sense at least, we have to accept as a fundamental feature of the analysis of consumption McLuhans formula that the medium is the message. This means that the true message the media of TV and radio deliver, the one which is decoded and consumed deep down and unconsciously, is not the manifest content of sounds and images, but the constraining patternlinked to the very technical essence of those mediaof the disarticulation of the real into successive and equivalent signs: it is the normal, programmed, miraculous transition from Vietnam to variety, on the basis of a total abstraction of both.
Raymond Williams (10 points, #3 + #4 = page)
3. What does technological determinism mean? (5 points)
4. What does Williams mean by mobile privatization? (5 points)
Zizek
5. First, paraphrase in your own words Althussers definition of ideology and then explain Zizeks analysis of the ideology glasses in the movie, They Live. (10 points, page)
6. Explain what Ranciere means by politics in the passage below (my summary/paraphrasing of Ranciere). (10 points, page)
For Ranciere, politics is a deconstructive and anarchical operation that comes into being when there is a disruption of the existing juridical order that determines and distinguishes the perceptible from the imperceptible, the sensible from the insensible, and the audible from the inaudible. For Ranciere, politics is actually another word for the more ancient meaning of aesthetics: perception by senses. For Ranciere, like dissensual politics, dissensual aesthetics signifies a resistive reconfiguration or rearrangement of the sensible by confronting the established framework of perception, thought, and action within the inadmissible.
Pulgasari
7. What does the figure of Pulgasari symbolize in the film? There are multiple associations but select only 2 possible interpretations and discuss them in detail. (10 points, page)
Lev Manovich
8. Analyze the following passage. (10 points, page)
.the key operations behind all computer programs (such as search, match, sort, and filter); the conventions of HCI [human-computer interface]in short, what can be called the computers ontology, epistemology and pragmaticsinfluence the cultural layer of new media, its organization, its emerging genres, its contents.
9. Explain what Manovich means by the myth of interactivity. (10 points, page)
