'I feel like a witness to my own absence'

The 'reality' of modern life is drained of meaning, according to the late philosopher and pop-culture inspiration, Jean Baudrillard, writes Brian Boyd

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard died on March 7th. The cartoon superhero Captain America died on March 8th. For most media outlets, the latter's demise was more important.

In a perverse way, this turn of events demonstrated one of Baudrillard's key tenets: the power of the "hyperreal" over reality. As a simulation of reality, the death of Captain America in a comic book was deemed more important than the death of a real person.

The author of over 50 books and a frequent contributor to newspapers, Baudrillard was a philosopher with an "edge" who engaged directly with popular culture - however rarified his tracts were. He is best known for his concept of hyper-reality - the theory that we live in a world where simulated feelings and experiences have replaced reality.

He looked at the world of shopping malls, amusement parks and mass-produced images from the news, television shows and films and contended that the "reality" they proffered was drained of all authenticity and meaning. He spoke about a sports drink with a flavour that didn't exist ("wild ice zest berry"), how a plastic Christmas tree could look more real than a natural one, and about how a picture of a model could be so transformed by technological trickery that you simply couldn't attest to its "realness". Since illusion reigned, Baudrillard proposed that we give up the search for reality. "All our values are simulated," he once said. "What is freedom? We have a choice between buying one car or buying another car? It's a simulation of freedom."

He crossed over from being just another almost impenetrable "homme serieux" into mainstream notoriety with the publication of his book, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, in 1991. Contrary to the title, Baudrillard believed that the first Gulf War actually took place, but he argued that because of the one-sided nature of the conflict (fewer US soldiers were killed in the war than would have died in traffic accidents had they stayed at home), the US had waged a "virtual war" that was all to do with how the images were processed on TV screens and nothing to do with hand-to-hand conflict.

He argued that while the US was fighting a virtual war, Iraqis were fighting a traditional war, so it was best considered as "an atrocity masquerading as war". He went on to describe the US reportage of the war as a "masquerade of information: branded faces delivered over to the prostitution of the image, the image of an unintelligible distress". CNN coverage of the war, for Baudrillard, was so heavily edited that what Americans saw were not images of war (as we traditionally understand the term) but a video game with CNN graphics.

Such theories endeared him to postmodernists, but Baudrillard was far too idiosyncratic to belong in any theoretical category. What distinguished him from his contemporaries was his mordant sense of humour and his clever use of aphorisms. He once described the sensory flood of modern media culture as "the ecstasy of communication".

Utterances such as "I feel like a witness to my own absence," and "the sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice, and therefore intelligence", either helped establish him as a provocative thinker or as a pretentious charlatan, depending on how you viewed his work.

Born in 1929, he was a sociology graduate who renounced his early Marxist leanings, saying that Marx's theory of political economy was irrelevant to the 20th century. He also renounced any belief in structuralism in his book, Forget Foucault, in 1977.

Arguably, his most important theoretical work was Simulacra and Simulation (1981), in which he said that in today's society what is real is no longer of importance. The hyperreality of a Disneyland or a Las Vegas now carried much more of a sensory punch and events such as natural disasters only became "real" to us when they are interpreted as such through the media.

His greatest philosophical challenge, he always said, was no longer the Leibnizian question of "Why is there something rather than nothing?", but rather: "Why is there nothing rather than something?" His provocative nature, sharp wit and outlandishness made him a cult hero in the arts world, with musicians, visual artists and film-makers all paying homage.

His theory that modern reality consisted of little more than "simulacra" seemed to justify the theory that art has no purpose beyond its own promotion, and artists such as Peter Halley began producing works of "simulation". When Baudrillard appeared at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1987, it was reported that "collectors, dealers and artists turned out in droves, as for the Messiah".

His most lasting contribution to popular culture, however, was in the film world. His work featured in the hugely popular The Matrix film of 1999, when the film's hero is seen opening Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, which turns out to be only a simulation of a book, hollowed out to hold computer discs. Characteristically, Baudrillard was not enamoured of the film, telling the London Times newspaper that references to his work in the film "stemmed mostly from misunderstandings".

His last major controversial work was a 2002 collection of essays called The Spirit Of Terrorism: And Requiem for the Twin Towers, which dealt with the events of 9/11. Working on the same template that inspired his earlier The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, he argued that the attacks on the Twin Towers were a "dark fantasy" manufactured by the media. While acknowledging that terrorists had committed the atrocity, he said they were only putting the finishing touches to "the orgy of power, liberation, flows and calculation which the twin towers embodied". More controversial and damning still, he wrote that "the horror for the 4,000 victims of dying in those towers was inseparable from the horror of living in them".

The essay outraged many, with one critic, Walter Kirn of the New York Times, tartly replying: "It takes a rare, demonic genius to brush off the slaughter of thousands on the grounds that they were suffering from severe ennui brought about by boring modern architecture."

Even many of Baudrillard's followers couldn't get beyond such a horribly crass statement to consider his more central thesis in the essay that: "This [ the events of 9/11] is not, then, a clash of civilisations or religions, and it reaches far beyond Islam and America, on which efforts are being made to focus the conflict in order to create the delusion of a visible confrontation and a solution based on force. There is, indeed, a fundamental antagonism here, but one which points past the spectre of America (which is, perhaps, the epicentre, but in no sense the sole embodiment, of globalisation) and the spectre of Islam (which is not the embodiment of terrorism either) to triumphant globalisation battling against itself."

Whether regarded as a purveyor of fashionable nonsense or as a prescient iconoclast, Baudrillard himself was not unaware of how difficult his work was. "What I'm going to write will have less and less chance of being understood," he said, "but that's my problem."