Double Strategy

Definition

The double strategy ('la double stratégie', from Baudrillard's In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, SSM, 107) is the discipline Butler identifies as necessary for any analyst who would contest a total system — a system of simulation that "has no outside": the analyst must simultaneously (1) name what the system excludes, and (2) know that this naming is itself only possible because of the system, that the named outside is an effect of the system it contests. As Butler puts it: "On the one hand, he has to name this outside, something they actually exclude. But, on the other hand, he must realize that he cannot name this outside, that any outside is only an effect of the system itself. He has to think… not so much what is outside or other to the system of simulation as what is excluded by the very fact that it has no outside" (Butler 1999, p. 46). The double strategy is also Butler's criterion of judgement for Baudrillard — "a judgement that Baudrillard cannot avoid because it is a judgement in his own terms" (p. 46): Baudrillard's lapses are the moments where he "forgets" one arm of the strategy (e.g. saying of the system's remanufacture of the real that "it is too late" — 'PS', 44 — when the system never actually collapses).

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the practice's origin: the term 'SSM', 107; the alternating analyses Butler cites (the masses as both "the only referent which still functions today" and "only a simulation of the social" — SSM, 19–20 — without choosing), and the three indistinguishable hypotheses of In the Shadow which Baudrillard rightly does not choose between (Butler, p. 61).
• Rex Butler — the concept's extraction and elevation to a criterion of reading: the double strategy as what Kellner and Levin both miss about Baudrillard (p. 121), and as the discipline Butler's own book attempts ("reading closely and perhaps even against Baudrillard," p. 66).
• Roland Barthes (referenced, no page) — adjacent via the-neutral: the doubled position that neither asserts nor negates, which the mass as "ne-uter" occupies (see the-masses).

Related Concepts

• doubling — the operation the double strategy enables: the statement that follows the system to its end and inverts it.
• the-real — what the strategy tries to reach: the exclusion internal to the system, not an outside beyond it.
• paradox-of-the-sign — why the strategy is needed: the copy that completes its resemblance loses it.
• the-masses — the case study: the masses as both what the social produces and its limit; "It is the very completion or perfection of the social that corresponds to its end" (Butler, p. 62).
• simulation-hyperreality — the total system that makes the strategy necessary: after it, "there is no other measure by which [systems] can be judged" except their own criteria (Butler, p. 17).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999)

Open Questions

• Butler judges Baudrillard by the double strategy — where are Baudrillard's own failures to maintain it? (Butler's candidates: 'PS', 44's "too late"; the alternation between "the masses precede the social" and "the masses are only a simulation" without their simultaneity, pp. 61–62.) A fuller audit of these "necessary flaws" is outstanding.
• Does the double strategy survive application beyond Baudrillard — to the total systems of the wiki's other registers (the spectacle, semiocapitalism, iconic architecture)? What would a double-strategic architectural criticism look like?