BLUE MAG

Death came as it does to all things real or imagined to French philospher Jean Baudrillard Tuesday night in Paris at the age of 77. He was one of France’s leading postmodernist thinkers and a fierce critic of consumer culture.

[C]rucially, political economy is no longer the foundation, the social determinant, or even a structural “reality” in which other phenomena can be interpreted and explained. Instead people live in the “hyperreality” of simulations in which images, spectacles, and the play of signs replace the concepts of production and class conflict as key constituents of contemporary societies.

The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

There is a misunderstanding of course, that is the reason why I previously hesitated to talk about The Matrix…. What we have here is essentially the same misunderstanding as with the simulationist artists in New York in the 80s. These people take the hypothesis of the virtual as a fact and carry it over to visible fantasms. But the primary characteristic of this universe lies precisely in the inability to use categories of the real to speak about it.

Baudrillard in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, 2003.