| Chapter : | Introduction |
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Kinski, questions the relationship between the design of his home and its price:
In this passage, the sheer extravagance of the amenities that make up Eric's home underscores their uselessness. Nonetheless, Vija assures him that utility is beside the point. His home exists primarily as a sign of its own value, one hundred and four million dollars, and the main reason Eric must own it is to prove that he can own it.
From Baudrillard's perspective, the only way to alter social relations for the better is to reveal all forms of value as illusory. Such a revelation, he argues in his early works, will inevitably trigger the collapse of consumer ideology and, in so doing, allow individuals to regard themselves not as objects but as subjects. While this theory may not explain what ambivalence is or what forms it might take, it does demonstrate what ambivalence should do: serve as a catalyst for the destruction of consumer ideology. Nonetheless, Baudrillard's failure to provide a consistent definition of ambivalence or to offer compelling examples of ambivalence in action reveals one of the many limitations to his argument. As Douglas Kellner notes in Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond, Baudrillard presents neither a theory of the subject as an agent of social change nor a theory of class or group revolt (18). One reason Baudrillard cannot present such theories is that his argument denies agency altogether insofar as individuals, in his estimation, can only behave as objects within the confines of consumer culture. In other words, individuals are incapable of causing social change because they can only behave in a