The Real (Butler's Baudrillard)

Definition

The real, in Rex Butler's reading of Baudrillard (Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real, 1999), is not an external reality that exists before theory writes of it, but the internal limit of any total system — "this internal limit, this difference that makes resemblance possible, that Baudrillard calls the real" (Butler 1999, p. 17). The real is what a system must exclude in order to complete itself; it is therefore what allows the system to have no outside and what the system can never capture. Butler distinguishes two senses of the real in Baudrillard's work: "there is that real which is brought about by the system and that real which is the absolute limit to the system" (p. 17) — the simulated real of the third order of simulacra (the effect of reality the code manufactures as its alibi) versus the real as the system's non-closure. Baudrillard's whole work, on this reading, is a defence of the real against all efforts to speak of it, "including, of course, his own" (p. 17). The real can never be pointed to directly, "but only alluded to metaphorically, through its very failure to be realized" (p. 20) — seen "only through [the system's] slips and lapses, its inability to become totally self-consistent" (p. 18).

Baudrillard himself, quoted by Butler: "The real is not an objective state of things; it is the point at which theory can do nothing… The real is actually a challenge to the theoretical edifice" (BL, 122–3; Butler p. 18).

Disambiguation: this is not the everyday "real" opposed to the image (see simulation-hyperreality for that debate), nor the wiki's other "real" compounds (capitalist-realism, real-existing-suburbia). It is the technical term Butler extracts from Baudrillard — the real as the problem systems share rather than a reality they share.

Key Thinkers

• Rex Butler — the reading's author: the real as what systems exclude to complete themselves; the argument that the standard commentary (Kellner, Gane, Genosko, Levin) misses it by comparing Baudrillard to "some external real which they all share" when "each system creates its own real" (p. 18) — the shared real is instead "the same problem of the real, the real as a problem" (p. 19).
• Jean Baudrillard — the source of the two senses: the "tactical hallucination" ('OS', 117) of the third order's manufactured reality-effect, and the limit he names in his interviews as the point "at which theory can do nothing" (BL, 122–3).
• Slavoj Žižek (referenced, no page) — the Lacanian Real noted by Butler as an analogy: "a surplus, a hard kernel, which resists any process of modelling, simulation or metaphorization" (Žižek 1993, quoted Butler n. 7).

Related Concepts

• paradox-of-the-sign — the real's mechanism: resemblance that is too close abolishes itself, leaving a difference that cannot be crossed.
• simulation-hyperreality — the system whose completion produces both senses of the real: the simulated real and the real as limit.
• doubling — the operation by which theory brings the real to appearance: the statement that adds nothing yet inverts everything.
• double-strategy — the discipline required to speak of the real: naming the outside while knowing the naming is inside.
• seduction — the other name for the limit in Baudrillard's second period: the distance between the same and the other that simulation cannot cross.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

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

Open Questions

• Butler says the real "cannot be directly pointed to, but only alluded to metaphorically, through its very failure to be realized" (p. 20) — can a concept page like this one speak of the real without thereby converting it into one more system-effect?
• Butler proposes the real as the common ground for comparing incommensurable thinkers (each understood through their non-closure, p. 169) — does the wiki's comparative practice (its cross-author pages) presuppose an external real Butler would reject?
• What is the real of architecture on this reading — the non-closure internal to the building-as-system, the difference the design must exclude to complete itself?