FINAL: Part B

Hello, all. I hope your weekend has gone well, and that everybody has managed to produce at least a draft of their response to their chosen question from Part A of their take-home final. Here are the three questions from which you will choose your second response, for Part B. Remember, you are going to be handing in your final exams at the beginning of class one week from Tuesday.

Question One:

Charity Scribner proposes that in Joseph Beuys' Economic Values a collection of objects memorializes a State while Rey Chow proposes that in Lao She's story "Attachment" a collection of objects threatens a State. A work of Stately memory, it would seem, confronts a work of non-Stately priorities; and an uneasy past confronts an uncertain future. But how different, finally, do you think these projects of collection really are, how different do you think the works of collection they are documenting really are, how different do you think their politics really are? Does it matter that in each of these essays the State under scrutiny is at once an example, however flawed, of "actually-existing socialism" as well as a failed or tyrannical state? Substantiate your claim with close reading of the essays themselves.

Question Two:

The paradox of Luis Bunuel's film The Milky Way is that it denounces religious, philosophical, political, and artistic zealotry, but at the same time it embraces religious mystery, philosophical passion, political idealism, and artistic imagination. Does the film provide a clear path or even clues that might help us along the way toward reconciling this paradox? Is it possible in the terms of the film to embrace mystery without feeding tyranny? Provide your answer through close readings of scenes in the film itself or through an examination of what you take to be the film's larger narrative, formal, logical, or tropological structure.

Question Three:

In Mythologies, Barthes claimed "to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth." How does his sarcastic truth differ from the fidelity of "blasphemy" Donna Haraway claims to express in her "Manifesto for Cyborgs'? When Haraway announces in her opening sentence that the project of her Manifesto is "to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism," it would seem that she is using myth in a different way than Barthes does. Or is she? Choose at least two moments in Haraway's Manifesto that seem to you to illustrate how her ironic cyborg mythologizing either is essentially continuous with or significantly different from the demythologizing drive of Barthes's project.

Four Habits of Argumentative Writing

The short guide to the four habits of argumentative writing I mentioned in class last time is available here. This is a document I use in writing classes and so I refer in it to writing "papers," and this should not distress you. Remember, in the exam you are just answering a question you find compelling from the prompts I've provided for you. Your answer is a strong claim you substantiate with the actual text at hand, addressing conspicuous objections of which you've been made aware in lecture or in discussion, but that's it. These questions are far more direct argumentative exercises than a paper would be...

In a longer argumentative paper based on close reading (in one of my classes) you would be producing an engaged critique of some work, locating yourself among its complexities, illuminating some aspect that shows or produces some of the meaning available in the text. In an argumentative exam responding to a given prompt, you are answering a question by making a claim and a case for it, providing textual support for it.

You have plenty of opinions about these works -- quickly figure out what they are, and then choose the ones that actually interest you most as the ones you want to argue for in your final. It's as simple as that.

FINAL: Part A

Two weeks from Tuesday I do believe you'll be handing in your finals for Aesthetics and Politics. You'll be choosing to answer one question from the three I am providing for you here, and then answering a second question from another three I will be providing in a week. This is a take home exam and I would recommend that you get your draft of the first question done before the second group comes online. Each question, as before, is to be 4-5pp. long. This time you are answering these questions at home with all of your notes, texts, and colleagues around you... And so we will expect clearer theses supported by readings of passages from the actual texts this time around.

PART A

Question One:

Bill Brown writes of "the suddenness with which things seem to assert their presence and power: you cut your finger on a sheet of paper, you trip over some toy, you get bopped on the head by a falling nut." Jeanette Winterson begins her own account of an education into visual art by telling a story that seems to complement Brown's in key respects: "I was wandering happy, alone… when I passed a little gallery and in the moment of passing saw a painting that had more power to stop me than I had power to walk on." Brown draws on such experiences to flesh out his sense of the thing as distinct from the object. "These are occasions outside the scene of phenomenological attention that nonetheless teach you that you're 'caught up in things' and that the 'body is a thing among things.'" As for Winterson, it would seem for Brown that aesthetic encounters have something to teach us, especially when we are unprepared for them. What are the politics of this aesthetic education for Winterson and Brown? Do they seem to follow the same route from their initial encounter? Do the politics of this encounter differ or do they resemble the political education attributed to the "realist" art object in some of the Marxist aesthetics we read early on in the term? Assume a perspective on one of these questions, and make a claim that you substantiate with close reading of relevant passages from the texts.

Question Two:

Identify what looks to you like a key difference in the way Simon Frith and Iain Chambers document possible forms of political commitment in popular art practice and popular culture. What political significance attaches to this difference in your view? Substantiate your claim with close reading of relevant passages from the texts. In highlighting this difference you may (or may not -- it's entirely up to you) choose to point to the way in which you find in this difference an echo of a difference between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno reflected in their writings "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and "The Culture Industry."

Question Three:

Name a way in which the treatment of the figure of the Spectator differs in Wilde's "Soul of Man Under Socialism" from its treatment in Debord's Society of the Spectacle. Make an argument about the key political significance that attaches in your view to this differing treatment of spectatorship in these texts and then substantiate your claim through readings of relevant passages from both texts.

Reminder --

The Syllabus has shifted a bit -- I decided that we should just read the essays from the Things volume in the order in which they actually appear in your reader, which means "The Defecating Duck" for today.

Links to the Haraway Pieces We'll Be Reading at the End of Class

Manifesto for Cyborgs

Promises of Monsters

Maya Deren