Project: Evaluating analyses and strategies of contemporary French theorists (Baudrillard, Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari) on such critical postmodern cultural issues as resistance to advanced-capitalistic economic organization and marketing practices. What are the effects of the 'generalized exchange of sign-forms' on the culture at large, and on the remains of the individual subject? Have personal identities now become the latest stage of 'colonization' or "internal domination" by the "deterritorializing" forces unleashed by capital as it moves into a new mode of 'ecstatic' promotionalism? What are the simultaneous deterrent effects of this intense saturation by signs of power and floating signifiers? If the 'mirage' of the social is now regulated by a principle of simulation rather than by any surviving principle of 'reality', how does this work to hollow out the center of all previous signifieds and to undermine and deviate all previous narratives of meaning? At the same time, is there a hopeful or not 'disenchanted' way to think around and through such conditions with "some other elusive ritual, more adventurous, and more seductive than the mystery of meaning" (Baudrillard)? Is there any potency in para-logical solutions such as the theory of seduction itself, to political problems? What new social determinations are created in a cultural milieu that is increasingly marked by total indetermination or lack of grounds or certainties? The recent rise of neo-conservative political strength, fundamentalist religious revivals, and nationalist sentiments (all circulating via signs of promotion) seems to indicate an instinctual but desperate and panicked attempt by 'lost' or dispersed subjectivities to reterritorialize some ground of 'meaningful' identity outside the system of economic simulation. If so, are such manifestations antithetical or merely reinforcing to the strength and momentum of capital's organizing/socializing mode as it now exists? Vulnerability to recuperation by the system (the 'code' of simulation) is the common challenge to both reactionary traditionalists and radical theorists. To be an adversarial 'actor' in postmodernity one must be able to decipher poetic and enigmatic discourse which may be able to speak only in 'allegorical' pronouncements of self-parodic truths.