CURTIN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

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STUDENT NAME: ANDREW MCGINN

STUDENT ID: 14570652
UNIT NAME AND NUMBER: Reading the City (LCTS3000)
DUE DATE: Thursday 18 June 2015
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TUTORS NAME: DR CHRISTINA LEE
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Signature: Andrew McGinn

Date: 18/06/2015

Reading the City

Technology, Capital, and Virtuality:
The Postmodern Condition of
The Matrix (Final Project)

Andrew McGinn
14570652

Tutor: Dr Christina Lee

Table of Contents

Introduction ..........1

Section One: The Postmodern Condition .............2

Section Two: Science Fiction in Postmodernity....6

Section Three: The Matrix and the Status of the Virtual...7

Coda.............10

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Technology, Capital, and Virtuality:

The Postmodern Condition of The Matrix
This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the
story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take
the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
- Morpheas, from The Matrix
This well-known statement of the character Morpheus from The Matrix (1999) sums up the
films philosophy: reality is an illusion that you must choose to see beyond, but truth is a
bottomless pit. The statement can also be read as an invitation into postmodernism.
Postmodernism is the truth that there is none (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 3). It is a theory of
culture that has triumphed at a historical moment where technology and consumerism have
fused to produce an image-centred experience of reality a simulation that privileges
exchange over use value, or surfaces over substance (Hawkes, 2003, p. 170). In this
environment of techno-capitalism, where the metanarrative of modernity are continually
deconstructed, meaning is destabilised (Baker, 2012, p. 199). The postmodern condition
describes the cultural sense of unease in regards to this uncertain status of meaning, and
outlines the lived experience of fragmentation and alienation. In postmodernity, subjectivity
is indeterminate, and reality takes on the character of virtuality. Cultural texts emerge from
within this context to mediate the postmodern condition (Baker, 2012, p. 8). In particular,
science fiction, with its method of cognitive estrangement, is well positioned to negotiate
the sliding terrain of postmodernism. Cyberpunk science fiction posits virtual worlds
connected to decaying urban environments via technological mega-systems (Freedman, 2000,
p. 196). These narrative constructs logically extrapolate actual contemporary phenomena into
imagined future scenarios in order navigate the hypothetical terrains of technology (Roberts,
2000, p. 168). Films like The Matrix explore the postmodern condition through science
fictions approach of cognitive estrangement in order to critique the ideology of capitalism,
which supports postmodernism.
The Matrix is a science fiction film with iconic status in popular culture (Childs, 2006, p. 11).
Blending martial-arts action and philosophical rumination within a CGI (computer-generated
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imagery) visual spectacle, the film struck a chord with mainstream audiences (p. 12). The
story of The Matrix is well known. The world as we know it is a simulation called the
matrix, created and controlled by machines who have colonised the real world and now
subdue and harvest humans for energy. Within the matrix, the Mega City, dominated by
corporate enterprise, exists only to maintain the illusion of reality and keep its inhabitants
ignorant of their passivity. Neo, the films protagonist, wakes up from this dream, and
joins other unplugged humans in their rebellion against the machines. Following several
trials, he learns to hack the matrix and becomes liberated from its rules, thus fulfilling his
destiny as the One who will free humanity from the machines. Because it problematises
the distinction between the real and unreal, The Matrix has been widely discussed in critical
theory (Herbrechter, 2006, p. 9). It is generally agree that the film is about the postmodern
experience about the loss of substance to surface and that it addresses the crisis of
humanism under a global capitalist technoscientific empire (Herbrechter, 2006, p. 19). It
typifies the cyberpunk genre of science fiction with its exploration into the postmodern
landscapes of cyberspace and virtuality, commodification and urban decay, and technology
and artificial intelligence (Freedman, 2000, p. 196). The film will be used in this essay as a
case study through which to unpack the ideas of postmodernism, and its cultural mediation
through the genre of science fiction. As a science fiction film that explores the postmodern
condition, The Matrix, through its representation of the simulated city, works to mediate
cultural anxieties around the elusiveness of meaning and the regulation of the subject within
techno-capitalism.

The Postmodern Condition

The postmodern condition refers to the cultural state of society as it exists at the final stages
of modernity. The elusiveness of the concept postmodern means that it is difficult to define
(Freedman, 2000, p. 181). Generally, though, it refers both to the condition of society in the
contemporary era (that is, in postmodernity), and to the aesthetic practices that articulate this
condition (that is, postmodernism) (Hartley, 2002, p. 180). To help clarify the term, it can be
contrasted with the epoch and worldview of modernity. The project of modernity was, and
continues to be, the construction of a capitalist civilisation through the deployment of reason
(McGuigan, 2006, p. 34). The rationalisation of the political, economic, and scientific
domains of social life in the eighteenth century, led, in a process known as modernisation,
to rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, as well as to technological development (Hartley,
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2002, p. 149). Underpinning this shift was an ideology of progress. Enlightenment thinkers
sceptics from this period who challenged the premodern, religious worldview contributed
to a modern worldview: the idea that the rational pursuit of knowledge would uncover
universal truths and emancipate humanity (Hamilton, 1992, pp. 20-21). Despite this faith in
reason, the actual cultural experience of modernity known as modernism was more
ambivalent. Chris Baker (2012) describes the modern structure of feeling as one marked
by ambiguity, doubt, risk, and constant change (p. 188). In contrast to the promise of civil
liberty, technological progress, and urban development, the modern trends of social upheval,
alienation from work, and bureaucratic regulation produced new forms of subjegation (p.
187). Individuals must comply with processes that they have no direct control over, but
which can determine the outcome of their lives, such as the processes of commodification, of
industrial squolar, and of world conflict (p. 187). The shadow of modern progress is thus
the real condition of alienation, which stems from the distancing mechanisms of instrumental
(and institutional) reason and bureaucratic control (McGuigan, 2006, p. 50). The
postmodern condition arises from this modern context of social and epistemological
fragmentation.
The postmodern condition is characterised by a loss of faith in the universality of meaning.
Referring to the state of Western culture in the twentieth century, the idea of a postmodern
condition was introduced into critical theory in 1979 by Jean-Franois Lyotard. Lyotard
(1979, cited in Delanty, 2000) argues that, in techno-capitalism (the global market economy
saturated with information technology) knowledge has entered the mode of production and
thus lost its claim to legitimation (p. 143). Knowledge, Lyotard (1984, cited in Aylesworth,
2015) claims, has been transformed into information by communication technologies, and,
being coded by systems that have specific rules of transmission, it has therefore come to be
constituted by language-games (para. 18). Each domain science, politics, economics,
philosophy, ethics, etc. develops separate discourses that explain the world, but without
reference to any outside authority (para. 19). Without the authorising capacity of grand
(or meta) narratives, the remaining language-games provide no real grounds for legitimating
knowledge, and so truth becomes relative (para. 20). The central problem of postmodernism
an incredulity toward metanarratives is that there remains no viable standpoints from
which to judge the universal truth of anything (Baker, 2012, p. 199). The ideology of
modernity, a belief in the inherent good of rationality, science, technology, and politics to
progress humanity, falls aparts with the postmodern condition, and what remains is
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fragmentation, relativity, and difference (p. 199). Lyotards thesis is thus a commentary on
late modernity. Sociologically, the postmodern is the latest phase of postindustrialism (the
shift into information industries); culturally, it entails the epistemological rejection of the
truth claims of modernity (Delanty, 2000, p. 142). Therefore, the condition Lyotard
outlines is part of the cultural logic of late capitalism (Jameson 1991, cited in Delanty,
2000, p. 143). The cultural issues raised by postmodernism are bound up with the modern
institutions of capitalism.
One of the central components of postmodernism is the alienation of the subject from itself,
which has been traced to the institutional practices of capitalism. Within critical theory,
subjectivity is the term used to designate selfhood, which takes into account that the self is
subjected to various forces (social relations, the unconscious, language, power, etc.) that
continually shape it (Hartley, 2002, p. 221). According to Michel Foucault (1984a, cited in
Baker, 2012), the subject is an effect of discourse and power, and thus also the product of the
processes of modernisation (p. 230). Modern concepts, institutions, and practices converge to
classify, discipline, and regulate modern subjects at a particular historical junction (and
through a particular discourse) known as modernity (Foucault, 1977, cited in Aylesworth,
2015, para. 28). That is, firstly, paradigms of organised information (aka knowledge) order
the structures of reality that classify and produce the self; secondly, hierarchies of positions
within institutions coerce individuals into submission through routine, punishment, and
reward, producing disclipined subject bodies; and, finally, these subjects are regulated via
panoptic surveillance (Foucault, 1975, cited in Danaher, Schirato, & Webb, 2000, pp. 50-51).
In regards to the last, Foucaults conceptualisation of panopticism posits than the awareness
of potentially being the subject of an authoritarian gaze reproduces that gaze internally so that
subjects self-monitor themselves (p. 52). In effect, these three processes of modernisation,
within the context of techno-capitalism, have, within postmodernity, become unsettling. As
Stuart Hall (1992b, cited in Baker, 2012) notes, the postmodern self is a fractured subject,
whose identity is shifting, fragmented, and multiple, and thus lacks coherence (p. 225). The
distancing mechanisms of rationality, which, through capitalist institutions, alienate the
subject by subjecting it to rigid forms of control and surveillance, induce a particular type of
cultural anxiety, a conspirational sense of being powerless against the hegemony of capital
(Hawkes, 2003, p. 176). Hence, in terms of subjectivity, the postmodern condition involves
the social unease that results from a regulated and split self under late capitalism. This
subjectivity is related to the postmodern experience of reality, where images take precedence.
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A second component of postmodernism is the experience of being alienated from reality.

Integral to the signifying logics of postmodernity is the shift from the discursive to the
figural (Lash, 1990, cited in Baker, 2012, p. 205). The rise of the visibly of images through
the media of popular culture contests and displaces the traditional boundaries of modernity,
which have depended on maintaining a distance between subject and object (Baker, 2012, p.
205). However, the immersion into images has potential consequences. In one extremely
postmodern view, philospher Jean Baudrillard (1975, cited in Delanty, 2000) proposes that
social reality itself has been replaced by a world of signs, which are only themselves real (p.
143). Drawing on Lacanian theory, Baudrillard (1976, cited in Aylesworth, 2015) claims that
the real and imaginary have been absorbed into the symbolic: the empirical experience of
reality has become an operational effect of symbolic processes, and the technological
production of images precedes the perception of them (para. 42). According to Baudrillard
(1994), we live in an age of simulation, where the loss of boundaries between the real and
unreal signals the rise of the hypperreal, the generation by models of a real without origin or
reality (p. 1). The impact of commodification on the emergence of the hyperreal is central
to Baudrillards critique. Human needs are increasingly determined within a market sign
system, where authenticity beyond sign-driven commodity exchange is giving way to prepackaged cultural codes received as a duty to consume (Luke, 1991, p. 362). Furthermore,
the individual subject is reduced to a productive unit of capitalism, while the free-floating
meaning of signs enforce this actual state via deterrence to realities of freedom and leisure (p.
362). This represents a shift. In postmodernity, the disclipling of the body in the industrial
era (Foucaults modern subject) has developed into the manipulation of the soul, where the
constitutive desires of the subject are already aligned with dominant ideology (Hawkes, 2003,
p. 164). Consumption within techno-capitalism has, therefore, produced a schizophrenic
postmodern subject, which is over-exposured to images that collapse the boundaries of the
self and reality in a complete submission to ideology (Baudrillard, 1983a, cited in Baker,
2012, p. 221). The postmodern condition names this state of existence, which is the
increasingly felt alienation from reality and selfhood in contemporary society within technocapitalism. Science fiction as a literary and film genre articulates these themes in its
exploration of the postmodern condition.

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Science Fiction in Postmodernity

Similar to the concept of postmodernism, a critical definition of science fiction film is
difficult to achieve (Kuhn, 1990, p.1). A general outline of science fiction is provided by the
Oxford English Dictionary (2015), which describes the genre as, fiction based on imagined
future scientific or technological advances and major social or environmental changes,
frequently portraying space or time travel and life on other planets. Although, as Adam
Roberts (2000) clarifies, this popular definition usefully delineates science fictions posited
worlds from the actual worlds of realism, and its scientific uses from fantastic or magical
devices, the categories these divisons pose are too broad (p. 2). Drawing on the work of
Darko Suvan (1979, cited in Roberts), Roberts suggests that the definitive feature of science
fiction is its balance of cognition and estrangement (p. 16). Cognition refers to the
rationality of the text that propels the reader to understand the logic of its unfamiliar
landscape, while estrangement refers to the element of difference within the text which
alienates the reader from the familiar and everyday (p. 8). This dialetic of cognitive
estrangment is the generic tendency of science fiction texts, which take a rational attitude
to the estrangement they perform (Freedman, 2000, p. 22). Science fiction, then, is a
symbolist genre, wherein the novum (the scientifically plausable intra-text innovation)
symbolically represents something specific about the world we live in, and thus connects the
unfamiliar to the familiar through a plausable logic (p. 16). As Roberts notes, science fiction
recofigures narrative symbolism for our materialist age, and thus the genre is tied to the
conditions of postmodernity (p. 18).
As a textual practice, science fiction culturally mediates the postmodern condition through
constructions of virtual reality. For Freedman (2000), the science fiction subgenre of
cyberpunk is key to postmodernity (p. 195). Best typified by Williams Gibsons novel
Neuromancer, cyberpunk narratives typically take place in a commodified postmodern
environment, where the deacying urban landscapes of postindustrialism are supplanted by the
landscapes of cyberspace (p. 196). In Neuromancer, megacorporations have colonalised the
physical terrain, turning it into a wasteland, while the viritual terrain of the internet becomes
the privileged domain of experience (p. 196). Hence, as Roberts (2000) suggests, the
environments of cyberpunk materialise the information spheres of technology and
cyberspace, providing a concrete link to metaphors of otherness and alterity (p. 168). The
cognition element of cyberpunk science fiction is the plausability of these virtual
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extensions of reality, which produce near infinite possibilities, while the estrangement
portion is the alienating combination of technology and commodification, which reduces
humans to bits of information whose worth is determined by their exchange-value (p. 169).
Cyberpunks cognitive estrangement is, therefore, paradoxical. There is, on the one hand,
the enjoyment of the new possibilities of experience and identity birthed within computergenerated models of reality, whose offerings of transcendence and emancipation takes on a
religious character (p. 174). On the other hand, however, cyberpunk expresses the paranoid
fears of artificial intelligence (AI), as technology seems to become autonomous and threatens
to subsume human consciousness into itself (p. 178). For Freedman (2000), cyberpunks
relationship to this paradox is conservative (p. 198). Cyberpunk, he argues, accepts the
postmodern condition, because ultimately the actions of individual characters within the
overly determined totality of postmodernity are rendered inconsequential (p. 198). The
virtual structures of postmodernity are presupposed within cyberpunks narratives, and this
limits furthering the critical attitude towards them to include serious possibilities of resistance
(such as collective action) (p. 198). This failure of cyberpunk, Freedman continues, is itself a
sign of the totalising effect of the postmodern condition (p. 199). It is, he claims, becoming
harder and lonelier to imagine a social organization [sic] beyond alienation and exploitation,
or to imagine sociopolitical forces more decisive than the regime of exchange-value (p.
199). The cultural work of cyberpunk science fiction is, therefore, to interoggate but also to
pacify the anxieties that arise in postmodernity. The tension between technology,
commodification, and the human being within techno-capitalism can be seen in the film The
Matrix, which performs the cultural work of cyberpunk.

The Matrix and the Status of the Virtual

The Matrix represents the cultural state of society as it transitions from modernity to
postmodernity, and shows how old and new forms of power work simultaneously in their
construction of the subject. The postmodern thoery of Michel Foucault illuminates how The
Matrix can be read as a critique of the regulation of the subject under a techno-capitalist
regime. Modernisation, as argued in Section One of this essay, produced particular
institutions and practices that, through power-knowledge, construct the modern subject
(Foucault, 1977, cited in Aylesworth, 2015, para. 28). The Matrix can be read as representing
this notion that the institutions of the city exist to discipline subjects into obedience. The
CBD is constructed as a corporate empire: its spaces are plain, grey, straight, and logical;
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Neos workplace, Metacortex (implying neocortex), is systematised, and hierarchical; Neo

as worker is an anonymous corporate subject (disempowered, non-individual); and his
existence is tied to his work (if he does not comply, he starves). Hence, Neo is a passive
subject without agency, a statistical entity completed embedded in a greater system. He is
impelled to accept this arrangement through reward (prestige) and punishment (expulsion).
In the relation to surveillance, the Agent Training Program scene in The Matrix is
important. The lesson that Morpheus imparts to Neo in the training program is that, when
inside the matrix, any person can potentially be an agent (for an agent can override the code
of any subject), and so it must be assumed that everyone is a watchful enemy. The policeofficer is a clear example of an authority figure, but less so is the woman who walks by Neo
but then transforms into an agent. The scene, read in light of Foucaults idea, is a
representation of panoptic surveillance; part of the mechanism of the matrix is the city as a
space of regimented social norms, where subjects of ideology unconsciously reproduce their
subjugation by policing the behaviour of others. This is a distinctly modern process,
which, in The Matrix, morphs into a new regulatory environment under the conditions of
postmodern simulation.
As part of its investigation into the postmodern condition, The Matrix ties simulation together
with the shift from modernity to postmodernity. Baudrillard (1976, cited in Aylesworth,
2015) proproses that, in postmodernity, reality has become a hyperreality, and is composed
wholly of simulacrum: copies of images without references to an original (para. 42). The
central city of the matrix (named Mega City) is represented as a giant-simulacrum,
functioning to deter its inhabitants from realising that their reality does not exist. All
activities within this city primarily work and consumption serve a double function to not
only order social reality, but also to assure experiencing subjects that this order is real. To
subjects within the matrix, their experience is empirically true, but, in terms of a
postmodernist analysis, this is because the reality principle has been preserved within the
simulacrum to create the meaning of real experience. Because of the totality of
hyperreality, Baudrillard (1994) critiques Foucault when he suggests that the panoptic
mechanism of surveillance has, in contemporary times, been switched to a system of
deterrence that erases the distinction between active and passive (p. 29). Subjects of
culture no longer submit to a gaze to be interpellated into ideology, but rather find themselves
already made of the structures of control: the subject disappears into information in a
blending of the medium and the message, so that it is open to absolute manipulation (pp. 31Andrew McGInn (14570652)
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33). That reality and subjectivity is a type of illusion is abundantly clear in The Matrix. The
very foundations of contemporary existence are a revealed as false: the ontological status of
reality is that it is a computer program used to sedate real human beings. Social and
institutional power is subsumed to the level of code. Power in hyperreality, confirms
Timothy Luke (1991), derives from controlling the meaning of simulation, dominating the
codes of representation, and managing the signs of meaning that constitute what hyperreality
is taken as being at any particular time (p. 362). Within The Matrix film, subjects of the
simulation are powerless because they are totally constituted by it: their consciousness knows
only the matrix (and so is limited to its structure); however, within the hyperreality, they are
further constituted by the corporate empire and by consumption. Therefore, in a critique of
the compliance between industrial development and postmodern techno-capitalism, the film
actually unites two forms of subjectivity: modern and postmodern. The world has become
like a simulation because the institutions of modernity (the machines), as productive and
dehumanising, have produced compliant subjects who uncritically accept the virtual reality of
consumer culture. This representation of subjectivity and simulation can be read as
symptomatic, and not just critical, of the postmodern condition.
As a reflection as well as a representation of the postmodern condition, the cultural work of
The Matrix can be understood as reinforcing dominant ideology. The postmodern ideas of
Baudrillard have been criticised for being nihilistic. As Luke (1991) contests, Baudrillard
rejects any concreteness to reality and instead sees it being totally exploited by a coherent
mega-system (capitalism) (p. 352). According to Baudrillard, because theres no outside, the
system can only be defeated by pushing it into hyperlogic, by total compliance so that the
structure breaks down (p. 352). Hence, The Matrix is Baudrillardian in the way is portrays
resistance occurring at the level of code, rather than within the so-called simulation.
However, another critic, Slavoj iek (1999), suggests that the whole notion of virtuality
comes from our perceived separation from the Real. The Real, explains iek, is the
voidness from which language arises, and which, consequently, being impossible to
represent, makes reality incomplete and inconsistent (p.13). Alienation from the Real
produces, within the symbolic order, the dimension of the big Other, which is the projected
feeling of otherness onto an imagined set of social mechanisms (p. 13). For iek, the
hyperreal of postmodernism is the same as the big Other of The Matrix: the fantasy of
autonomous representation (the simulation) (p. 13). Gaps in the big Other of postmodern
experience require reconstitution, and this is achieved through films like The Matrix, which
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sustain the narrative of passivity by positing liberation through unreal means (p. 13). Neos
quest out of illusion into reality reproduces a false binary of real vs unreal, and covers up the
truth that our natural state is already one of freedom and agency (p. 26). The argument that
simulation-theory is ideological is in alignment with a certain strand of postmodern thought,
which claims that postmodernism is commodity fetishism: it is the reification of
consciousness achieved through the deference to the logic of capitalism (Delanty, 2000,
p.142; Hawkes, 2003, p. 176). In a society where technologically mediated processes of
commodity exchange have become so embedded in the everyday, the postmodern condition
laments the loss of the real without critically challenging it. The Matrix closely reflects this
condition, for it privileges the determinate structure of simulation. In reality, the construction
of the virtual can be traced back to the subject, who retains agency but refuses to accept it. In
The Matrix, the construction of the virtual is beyond the subject, who learns agency by
accepting (albeit also breaking) the rules of the virtual order. Hence, The Matrix reinforces
the dominant ideology of postmodernism, and, by extension, techno-capitalism.

Coda
The cultural work of the science fiction film, The Matrix, is its mediation and articulation of
the postmodern condition, and associated problems of representation, power, and subjectivity
within techno-capitalism. The postmodern condition describes the cultural mood of
uncertainty towards the universality of meaning in the historical period of postmodernity.
Characterised by the ever-increasing commodification and technological mediation of
everyday life, the postmodern experience is one of fragmentation and alienation. Within
consumer culture, identities are fractured and multiple, and reality takes on the appearance of
simulation. The science fiction genre reflects and negotiates this experience through
constructions of urban life and virtual reality. The Matrix, as an example of cyberpunk
science fiction, posits a world of urban alienation, corporate subjegation, and radical
simulation. The film critiques the institutional practices of modernity as well as the totality
of postmodern infrastructure by problematising the notion of agency. The subject is
represented in The Matrix as completely constituted by the dominant ideology of capitalism.
In terms of institutional regulation and the passive acceptance of simulacra, the individual is a
non-subject. However, the film itself is an example of the postmodern condition. By
referring resistance to the determinate structures of the experience of simulation, The Matrix

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refuses to postulate a form of agency beyond the coordinates of postmodernism. Hence, the
film addresses and reflects the postmodern condition as the cultural logic of late capitalism.
If postmodernism is to be critically revised, then it is helpful to recover the project or ethos
of modernity in cultural texts, including works of science fiction. The ethos of modernity can
be summed up as the practice of scepticism and communicative rationality, with the aim of
critiquing all uses of reason without succumbing to the postmodern tendency of denying any
underlying reality (McGuigan, 2006, p. 36). If postmodernism is the reification of
consciousness as exchange-value and, subsequently, the systematic erasure of the subject
into the ruling ideology of capitalism then modernism would reconceptualise use-value as a
way of returning the dimension of substance to surface. In order to truly address the
postmodern condition, and not simply mediate it, then films like The Matrix would need to
re-evaluate the relationship between the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. Instead of
escaping the all-encompassing Symbolic in a return to the Real, both must be recognised as
what they are: imaginary constructs of the human mind. They can be discarded as much as
an authentic production of use-value can be worked towards. And science fiction is well
positioned to perform this task. As Freedom concludes, it is in the generic nature of science
fiction to confront the future, no matter how unpromising a critical and utopian activity that
may seem (as now) to be. As way of understanding the relationship between technology,
capital, and virtuality, science fictions remains a viable method of charting a course through
the pleasures and perils of the postmodern condition.

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McGuigan, J. (2006). Modernity and Postmodern Culture. Berkshire: Open University Press.
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(Producer). United States: Warner Bros.
Zizek, S. (1999). The Matrix or Malebranche in Hollywood. Philosophy Today, 43, 11-26.

Andrew McGInn (14570652)

Reading the City

Final Project

Reading the City

Project (45%)
Students Name: Andrew McGinn
Needs
Attention
Argument: central argument and
originality of thought, cohesion of
project, depth of discussion and critical
engagement, mobilising cultural studies
theory

Satisfactory

Good

X
Over-reliance on
research (esp.
Sections 1 and 2);
Section 2 too
short; anchor
ideas down e.g.
examples

Research: appropriate reference to unit

texts, extension of scholarly research
material, focus on case study

Writing skills: clarity of expression,

correct punctuation and grammar,
sentence structure (syntax) etc.

Presentation: referencing, complete

bibliographic details, frontispiece, table
of contents, binding, absence of
typographical errors, pagination, within
word limit etc.

Excellent

X
Many
typographical
errors

Grade: Credit (67%)

Comments: Andrew, a great effort on the final assessment. The research base was solid, you demonstrated
excellent cultural studies knowledge and worked very closely with the case study. Your observations on The Matrix

Andrew McGInn (14570652)

Reading the City

Final Project

were astute and insightful well done! There are a few key points Id like you to focus on for improving in future
assessments: firstly, there was over-reliance on the research in Sections 1 and 2 (the majority of sentences
seemed to be the ideas of other authors). As a result, your authorial voice and argument disappeared. It was not
until Section 3 that I thought, Yes, Andrew is back in the drivers seat! it was definitely the strongest part of your
assessment. Secondly, Section 2 was extremely short in comparison to the others (aim for balance). Thirdly,
whenever you are discussing abstract concepts anchor them down with examples that illustrate. Lastly, do edit
more rigorously. There were typographical errors that could have been easily picked up.
On the whole, a solid result Andrew. Thank you for being a part of Reading the City, and well done on completing
the final project. All the best of luck in your future endeavours enjoy your international studies next semester!
Tutor: Dr Christina Lee

Andrew McGInn (14570652)

Reading the City