Doubling

Definition

Doubling is Rex Butler's name — in Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (1999) — for the way language and theory relate to the world when there is no outside left to them: not by describing the world from a pre-existing real, but by repeating the world so exactly that the world can only be explained for a completely different reason once the repetition exists. A statement that doubles a system follows its internal logic to the end, adds nothing to it, and yet inverts it entirely — "it is a statement that is at once a pure description of the system… and a pure prescription of the system" (Butler 1999, p. 120). Baudrillard's concepts are "not empirical descriptions of the world which can be objectively evaluated, but a kind of undemonstrable yet irrefutable doubling of the way things are. After them, everything is the same but reversed" (p. 20). Doubling is therefore neither confirmation nor refutation: the doubled world remains just as it is, but "can only be explained for a completely different reason."

Do not confuse with the wiki's other doubling terms: doubleness (Rice: the interior's constitutive space-and-image two-in-one) and the-double (the psychical double — mirror image, death mask, uncanny revenant). Butler's doubling is a third, separate term: an operation of theory and language upon total systems, not a condition of interiors or persons. (The pages do share genealogy — the automaton of the-double appears in Butler's first order of simulacra as the perfect double whose difference is preserved.)

Butler's examples of the doubling statement across Baudrillard's work (p. 120): in Consumer Society, that endless solicitation is only possible because of anguish; in In the Shadow, that the social is only possible because of the masses; in The System of Objects, that the collection is only completable insofar as its last piece is missing; in 'The Art Auction', that the object only has value insofar as it can be exchanged; in 'The Hostage', that the security of the social is only possible insofar as terrorism remains; in 'Diary of the Seducer', that Cordelia's innocence is only possible because it is reflected by Johannes.

Key Thinkers

• Rex Butler — the concept's analyst and namer: doubling as the operation of Baudrillard's writing, "the saying of something that makes it true" (p. 20); the third term of his book's simulation–seduction–doubling triad, corresponding to Baudrillard's third period, in which he "meditates upon how criticism and theory work."
• Jean Baudrillard — the writer whose practice doubling describes: theory not as evidence and persuasion but "sudden annunciation in the virtual, after which everything is at once the same and completely different" (Butler, p. 138, citing CM I, 215: "Theory does not derive its legitimacy from established facts, but from future events").
• Hegel (referenced, no page) — the first philosophy of closure, to which every later system can only be doubled: Kierkegaard doubles Hegel with irony, Nietzsche with the Eternal Return, Bataille with death and laughter (Butler, pp. 168–69).

Related Concepts

• the-real — what doubling reveals: the real is the system's non-closure, seen only through the doubling statement.
• paradox-of-the-sign — the mechanism doubling exploits: the copy that fully resembles the original is no longer a copy.
• double-strategy — the analyst's discipline that doubling requires: naming the system's outside while knowing the naming is inside.
• seduction — doubling's predecessor concept: seduction doubles simulation (ch. 2); doubling generalizes the operation to language and thought itself (ch. 3).
• simulation-hyperreality — the total system doubling responds to: after the hypothesis of simulation, the world can only be conceived as though it were simulated.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

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

Open Questions

• Butler insists the doubling statement must be "invented afresh each time" for each system while remaining "absolutely universal" (p. 120) — can such a statement be taught, or only performed?
• Does doubling have an architectural analogue — a building or interior that repeats its context so exactly that the context reads as its double? (Candidate register: model-and-series's series that perfects the model to the point of its loss.)
• Is Butler's doubling subject to its own law — i.e., can Butler's reading of Baudrillard be doubled in turn? (His Conclusion concedes it must: "we ourselves would also be subject to this same real," p. 20.)