| This dissertation investigates meaning in postmodern culture through the interpretive lenses provided by Friedreich Nietzsche and Jean Baudrillard. It consists of two parts: The beginning section sets up the theoretical scaffolding by which to analyze works of contemporary literature in the second, including writings by Kathy Acker, Reese Williams, Clarence Major, and Jean Baudrillard. My readings of these texts concern the disappearance of, among other categories of meaning, "reality," "subjectivity," "identity," and the "body" into simulation models, TV images, and other forms of technological simulacra often constructed by the commercial coding systems of late-capitalism. While Baudrillard offers up the game of "seduction" to the surface play of signs and appearances without depth that define the postmodern moment, other possibilities emerge (and submerge) through reading Nietzsche, such as a Deleuzian (hence "rhizomatic") subject, maneuvering in social, institutional, and technological lines of flight (or "becoming") that recover desire from its (re)production and (re)territorialization within the simulation industries. Here, we confront two methods imbued with Nietzschean philosophy for reading the simulacra of postmodernity: one, as an "implosion"--stressing uncertainty and seduction--as do Baudrillard and Kroker, or its apparent opposite, as "rupture"--stressing multiple desires and rhizomatic becomings--as do Deleuze and Guattari. I do not intend to favor one method for interpreting our present moment over another, but to implement, in Nietzschean fashion, those methods that best contextually serve this important endeavor amidst the seemingly overwhelming postmodern condition of having to interpret simulacra. |
