ABSTRACT
The debate over whether theories of agency or of subjectivity offer the more convincing explanations of how people live within capitalist societies has been central in recent cultural theory. Despite its vaunted victory in the Cold War, the US in the 1990s is a deeply unsettled society. The economic is not the only axis of deprivation along which the power-bloc advances its interests in the production of homelessness: gender and race are never absent from its power plays. Even the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in its 1989 report admits that the use of shelters for the homeless tripled between 1984 and 1988. Popular culture, especially, is organized around the contradiction: the popular forces versus the power-bloc. One of the characteristics of the corporate and multinational capitalism in which we live is the dissolution of any simple relationship between class, capital and power.
