Baudrillard, Simulacra, and Hyperreality

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) began his academic career as a sociologist strongly influenced by Marx and by the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, publishing The System of Objects (Le Système des objets, 1968) and The Consumer Society (La Société de consommation, 1970), studies of how consumer goods function as a system of signs conferring social status rather than merely satisfying material needs. Over the 1970s, Baudrillard moved progressively away from Marxist political economy, arguing in Symbolic Exchange and Death (L'Échange symbolique et la mort, 1976) that the classical Marxist categories of production and labor value had been superseded, in advanced media societies, by a new order organized around the circulation of signs and codes rather than material goods and needs.