ABSTRACT
According to Baudrillard the affluent consumer society (and it was affluent in the late 1960s at the time of writing) is haunted by ‘the spectre of fragility’ (1998a: 174); it is a vulnerable system because it is a superficial one. The vulnerability of the consumer society, and, by extension, of globalisation, is a recurrent theme in Baudrillard’s work (1993b: 81-8, 2002b: 57-61, 2003b: 87-105) and, as with many of his key themes, it is present from the beginning.
