Get your hands off me! a handcrafted essay question?

Essay questions – choosing one is like choosing your identity.

i’m finding it extremely difficult to seperate my knowledge into weeks, like the questions are listed. I’m also finding it difficult to focus solely on tv texts, because i’ve found the theory useful in any aspect of commodity culture.

I had an idea, an entry point into the theory, and that was an analysis of how ‘the hand’ is a super-commodified object, producing desire in particular, and how this is shown in screen texts. It’s a Digital culture (as in fingers.) The hand without fingers is the equivalent of the body without organs – the fist, the unified action of a flat palm.

It just piled up: all these examples of hands in a single day.

• Starting with ‘eyes wide shut’ - the hands being the only non-cloaked skin shown in the mansions, wedding rings, gloves being warn to hide the hands, leading by the hand, the whole film was like a dance of hands – of homunculus puppets.

                              

• Skins – start of season two, Tony is trying to write after his accident – cannot control his hands.
• J’dilla’s album donuts, and a friend commenting how he has stamped himself all over the record – he has put his little signitures: gestures, re-cueing records, mistakes, scratching.
• scratching itself – hip hop culture – is hands on – getting your hand ON something, stopping the record.

We all desire the authentic other – the non-commodified, ‘real’, which never actually exists but it used as a way of selling the ‘hand made’, as if it somehow bypasses commodity culture.

We all desire contact, real touch - yet we fear the touch of strangers. Zombies are highly corporeal – they pretty much ‘feel around’, sense only by touch, hands held foward. Hand’s outstretched like the feelers of some massive community BwO.

Medical TV always with the ‘doctors life saving hands’ this touching, feeling, tempreture reading, pulse counting, blood stopping (saving private ryan), gloves, getting your hands dirty.

Palm reading (literally reading the hands). Hands as a sign system – waving, shaking, ‘peace’, ‘fuck you’, ‘thumbs up’ that superseeds verbal communication.

Andre Breton wrote:

Tu cuerpo se ajustaba al miouna mano se ajusta a lo que quiere ocultar…

(Your body was consistent with my own, As a hand fits what he wants to hide…)

Our hands are producers of becomings.

There is a commodified ‘hand-made’ aesthetic – used to sell high and low end goods.

Commodity culture serves hands – ergonomic pens, walking canes with shaped handles – these define politics of the hand. The double glove (below) challenges the hand as a single entity.

The hand is a metamachine: nearly all human/machine couplings are mediated by the hand machine.

Only one question left: what the hell kind of essay question does this fit into? If anyone can help, ill promise you a lovely handmade mix cd.

C’mon, give me a hand.