  In the final analysis, Baudrillard is perhaps more useful as a provocateur who challenges and puts in question the tradition of classical philosophy and social theory than as someone who provides concepts and methods that can be applied in philosophical, social or cultural analysis. He claims that the object of classical social theory — modernity — has been surpassed by a new postmodernity and that therefore alternative theoretical strategies, modes of writing, and forms of theory are necessary. While his work on simulation and the postmodern break from the mid-1970s into the 1980s provides a paradigmatic postmodern theory and analysis of postmodernity that has been highly influential, and that despite its exaggerations continues to be of use in interpreting present social trends, his later work is arguably of more literary interest. Baudrillard thus ultimately goes beyond philosophy and classical social theory altogether into a new sphere and mode of writing that provides occasional biting critical insights into contemporary social phenomena and provocative critiques of contemporary and classical philosophy and social theory. He now appears, in retrospect, as a completely idiosyncratic thinker who went his own way and developed his own mode of writing and thought that will continue to provoke contemporary and future students of philosophy and critical theory.