Internal and External Readings

Definition

Internal and external readings are, in Butler's Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (1999), the forced alternative every approach to a total-system thinker must negotiate. The external reading judges the work "in terms of some pre-existing real" it does not share — measuring Baudrillard by Marxist criteria (Kellner), by empirical counter-evidence (Bertens/Poster), or applying his concepts to new examples (Levin's Canada) — and thereby "risks merely begging the question, criticizing it in terms that it would not recognize or that it would reject in advance" (Butler 1999, pp. 15–16). The internal reading takes the work only in its own terms, "completing it as it were and risking giving it a wholeness and coherence it might not have had before us" — the risk of mere repetition, "of having nothing to say about him, achieving no critical distance" (p. 16). The choice is forced: "even if we do not choose, even if we are not aware of the choice, we have already chosen, we have already offered an interpretation" (p. 16). Butler's wager is that the internal reading is nonetheless the only position from which real objections are possible: "It is only by running the risk that we repeat him that we are finally able to differ from him" (p. 17).

Butler's methodological corollary: comparison between thinkers is not grounded in a shared external real ("each system creates its own real") but in "the same problem of the real, the real as a problem" — each system's non-closure (pp. 18–19, 167).

Key Thinkers

• Rex Butler — the framework's author: the choice "which implies a certain decision and risk" (p. 15); the survey of existing commentary (Kellner 1989, Gane 1991, Genosko 1994, Levin 1996) as so many failed negotiations of the choice; Meaghan Morris's 'Room 101' (1984) singled out as "still perhaps the best piece written on Baudrillard" — the internal reading that knows the real is "precisely only to be seen through him" (p. 164).
• Jean Baudrillard — the object of the readings and himself a reader of systems: Butler reads Baudrillard's own critiques (of the system of objects, consumer society, Marxism, Foucault, the social) as a series of internal readings that take each system's own logic to extremes rather than comparing it to an outside (p. 17).
• Douglas Kellner, Mike Gane, Gary Genosko, Charles Levin, Meaghan Morris, Hans Bertens (all referenced, no pages — see log) — the reception whose positions the framework typologizes.

Related Concepts

• double-strategy — the internal reading's working discipline: naming the outside while knowing the naming is inside.
• the-real — the non-external ground the reading seeks: the real as problem, not as shared reality.
• doubling — the internal reading's ideal output: the statement that repeats the system and inverts it.
• paradox-of-the-sign — why the external reading fails: any outside to the system is already an effect of the system.
• simulation-hyperreality — the paradigmatic total system: after the hypothesis of simulation, examples can "only be perceived from the beginning because of it" (Butler, p. 18).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

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

Open Questions

• Does the internal/external framework transfer from Baudrillard to the wiki's other theorists — is there an "internal reading" of, e.g., the spectacle debate or semiocapitalism that the wiki's syntheses have not yet attempted?
• Butler's internal reading produces a different Baudrillard ("a certain 'Baudrillard effect' within sociology," p. 171) — what would the wiki's equivalent be: a Baudrillard effect within architecture or interior theory?