ABSTRACT
French sociologist Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929) has established himself as an influential and highly original theorist of postmodernity. His writing is characterized by a‘fatal strategy’ of pushing his analyses to an extreme, so that his work becomes less a representation of reality than a transcendence of it. Emerging out of a Marxist tradition, yet also registering a psychoanalytic impulse, Baudrillard relies on a semiological model to understand the world of the commodity. Against more traditional measures such as use-value, Baudrillard emphasizes the sign value. Our present society, according to Baudrillard, is a media society, a world saturated by images and communication, a world where Marshall McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ comes true. Culture is now dominated by simulation. Objects and discourses no longer have any firm referent or grounding. Instead the real has been bypassed. The image has supplanted reality, inducing what Baudrillard has termed a condition of hyperreality, a world of self-referential signs.
