| This thesis seeks to elaborate an effective notion of agency by putting Jean Baudrillard and the Situationist International into dialogue. The primary task of this work is the interrogation of strategies for, as well as theories of, the possibility for radical social change in the contemporary capitalist context. The formal structure of the work provides a separate consideration of each theory, while the concluding remarks compare and contrast the diagnoses and prescriptions presented earlier.;The Situationists offer a neo-Marxist critique of late capitalist society which emphasizes alienation. By working through the various social forms this alienation takes, the thesis provides the foundation for its later critique of the Situationists' orthodoxy.;Baudrillard, who offers a radical revision of Marxism, develops a structuralist homology with Marx's commodity form which allows him to posit this binary form as the foundation for the domination of a new logic in late capitalist society. However, while his structural law of value provides an accurate view of a new system of objects, his theory is unable to account for the rise of this system. And whereas his symbolic exchange appears to constitute a more radical contestatory practice against the project of modernity than the S.I.'s prescriptions, Baudrillard's inability to explain historical dynamics results in an absence of agents altogether.;This work concludes by arguing that the Situationists and Baudrillard have, perhaps, ironically fallen prey to the effectiveness of their own critiques. The totality framed by the "spectacle" or the "code" denies the possibility of knowing what is not alienated or not always already simulated. In spite of these difficulties, Baudrillard offers a more persuasive vision of the contemporary social terrain, but the S.I. offers the more effective political prescriptions. (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
