  Baudrillard is perhaps most important as part of the postmodern turn against modern society and its academic disciplines. His work cuts across the disciplines and promotes cross-disciplinary thought. He challenges standard wisdom and puts in question received dogma and methods. While his early work on the consumer society, the political economy of the sign, simulation and simulacra, and the implosion of phenomena previously separated can be deployed within critical philosophy and social theory, much of his post-1980s work quite self-consciously goes beyond the classical tradition and in most interviews of the past decade Baudrillard distances himself from critical philosophy and social theory, claiming that the energy of critique has dissipated.