Part A
Directions: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. (40 points)
My objective is to analyse certain forms of knowledge, not in terms of repression or law, but in terms of power. But the word power is apt to lead to misunderstandings about the nature, form, and unity of power. By power, I do not mean a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizenry. I do not mean, either, a mode of subjugation that, in contrast to violence, has the form. of the rule. Finally, I do not have in mind a general system of domination exerted by one group over another, a system whose effects, through successive derivations, pervade the entire social body. The sovereignty of the state, the form. of law or the overall unity of a domination are only the terminal forms power takes.
It seems to me that power must be understood as the multiplicity of force relations that are immanent in the social sphere; as the process that, through ceaseless struggle and confrontation, transforms, strenghtens, or reverses them; as the support that these force relations find in one another, or on the contrary, the disjunction and contradictions that isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies.
Thus, the viewpoint that permits one to understand the exercise of power, even in its more "peripheral" effects, and that also makes it possible to use its mechanisms as a structural framework for analysing the social order, must not be sought in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent for/ns of power emanate but in the moving substrate of force relations that, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender local and unstable states of power. If power seems omnipresent, it is not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. And if power at times seems to be permanent, repetitious, invert, and self-reproducing, it is simply because the overall effect that emerges from all these mobilities is a concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in torn to arrest their movement. One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular society.
The author's primary purpose in defining power is to ______.
A. counteract self-serving and confusing uses of the term
B. establish a compromise among those who have defined the term in different ways
C. increase comprehension of the term by providing concrete examples
D. avoid possible misinterpretations resulting from the more common uses of the term
In history books, objective information about the political life of a country is presented; that is, facts about politics are given, but opinions are not expressed. Art, on the other hand, is subjective: it reflects emotions and opinions. The great Spanish painter Francisco Goya was perhaps the first truly "political" artist. In his well-known painting The Third of May, 1808, he criticized the Spanish government for its misuse of power over people. Over a hundred years later, symbolic images were used in Pablo Picasso's Guernica to express the horror of war. Meanwhile, on another continent, the powerful paintings of Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros-as well as the works of Alfredo Ramos Martinez-depicted these Mexican artists' deep anger and sadness about social problems.
In the same way, art can reflect a culture's religious beliefs. For hundreds of years in Europe, religious art was almost the only type of art that existed. Churches and other religious buildings were filled with paintings that depicted people and stories from the Bible. Al though most people couldn't read, they could still understand biblical stories in the pictures on church walls. By contrast, one of the main characteristics of art in the Middle East was (and still is) its absence of human and animal images. This reflects the Islamic belief that statues are unholy.
More can be learned about a culture from a study of art history than general history because art history ______.
A. shows us the religious beliefs and emotions of a people in addition to political values.
B. provides us with information about the daily activities of people in the past
C. gives us an insight into the essential qualities of a time and a place
D. all of the above