Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real

Author: Rex Butler Year: 1999 Source type: book Raw file: raw/books/butler_1999-jean-baudrillard-the-defence-of-the-real.md — SAGE Publications, Core Cultural Theorists series. Quotations below cite the book's printed page numbers (visible in the raw scan's running headers) for Butler's own text, and Baudrillard's own page numbers (as Butler cites them, e.g. "S, 67") for passages Butler quotes from Baudrillard.

Summary

A book-length secondary study of Baudrillard that reads him "in his own terms" — that is, from an internal rather than an external perspective — arguing against the standard picture of Baudrillard as the celebrant of simulation and the end of the real. Butler's central claim is that Baudrillard's entire work turns on one "paradox of the sign" (the copy that completely resembles the original is no longer a copy but another original), and that what Baudrillard calls the real is precisely the internal limit this paradox opens inside any total system: the difference that makes resemblance possible and that the system must exclude to complete itself. Three chapters trace Baudrillard's three periods: simulation (the systems that attempt to represent reality), seduction (the limit to those systems), and doubling (language and thought as themselves that limit, their power to affect and create the real). Baudrillard emerges not as the gravedigger of the real but as its defender — against every effort to speak of it, including his own.

Key Claims

The forced choice of reading. Any approach to Baudrillard imposes a choice between an external reading (judging him by a pre-existing real — Kellner's Marxist verdict, Bertens/Poster's charges of hyperbole) and an internal reading (completing him in his own terms, risking mere repetition). Even not choosing is choosing. Only the internal reading can raise real objections — by following the logic to its furthest point and seeing "as it is not but as it will be" what it cannot say (pp. 15–17).
One paradox of the sign throughout. "There is but one simple paradox of the sign repeated throughout all of Baudrillard's work. It is that, insofar as the copy completely resembles the original, it is no longer a copy but another original; or, to invert this, that the copy is only able to resemble the original insofar as it is different from it" (p. 14; the paradox is first raised by Plato's Cratylus and treated by Derrida in "Plato's Pharmacy," n. 5).
Two senses of the real. The real Baudrillard speaks of is not an external real that exists before he writes of it but "a real that arises within his work, that can be seen only through its slips and lapses, its inability to become totally self-consistent" (p. 18). There are two senses: "there is that real which is brought about by the system and that real which is the absolute limit to the system" (p. 17).
Baudrillard as defender of the real. Against the standard commentary, "Baudrillard emerges as a defender of the real against all efforts to speak of it – including, of course, his own" (p. 17). His problem is "how to think the real when all is simulation" (p. 17).
Simulation is not the loss of reality but its realization. Simulation aims "not to do away with reality, but on the contrary to realize it, make it real" — "the exorcism of the terror of illusion by the most sophisticated means of the 'realization of the world'" (Baudrillard, BL, 184; Butler pp. 23–24). It is not an empirical phenomenon but a hypothesis: "The moment you believe that you're in a state of simulation, you're no longer there" (BL, 166; p. 24). Simulation is "proved in its absence" (p. 24).
Simulation is inseparable from seduction. Seduction is not opposed to simulation "but is rather its limit – a limit that makes it both possible and impossible" (p. 25); seduction "is neither the same as simulation nor opposed to it, but doubles it" (p. 73).
The double strategy. From In the Shadow (SSM, 107): the analyst of a total system "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" (p. 46). Butler judges Baudrillard by his ability to keep both constraints in view (pp. 46–47, 61, 121).
The System of Objects fuses Lefebvre's "anti-abstraction" with Barthes's abstraction (Levin, cited p. 26): function, naturality and culturality are expressed better than ever yet are only "a tactical or rhetorical value within the system of signs" (p. 32) — "function must have the commutability or exchangeability of the sign or it is not function at all" (p. 33). The book's unaddressed failing: the problem of naming an outside to the system and the position of the analyst (pp. 34–35).
'The Orders of Simulacra' (a chapter of Symbolic Exchange and Death): three orders — the counterfeit (natural law of value; stucco and the automaton, which charm through their minute difference from the real), production (commercial law; the assembly line's equivalence, "In a series, objects become undefined simulacra one of the other," 'OS', 97), and simulation (structural law; the referenda, the poll, the duopoly — "a tactical doubling of monopoly," 'OS', 133–4) (pp. 36–40).
'The Precession of Simulacra': the system puts forward an other to itself (the Tasaday, Disneyland, Watergate, Vietnam, the nuclear) that is only possible because of the system and only proves it — "After simulation… we are only able to imagine this other or anterior to simulation in terms of simulation itself" (p. 43). Butler reads the scandalous examples as "both examples of this logic of simulation and evidence of its limits" (p. 41).
Consumer Society: waste/dépense (via Bataille and Mauss) becomes metaphysical — tax comes "before the very consumption it taxes" (p. 51); production's byproducts are counted as production; anguish and solicitation form the same circle ("The very fact there is no anguish is only possible because of anguish," p. 56); "the 'discourse of anti-consumption is now part of consumption itself'" (CS, 315; p. 53). "It is not so much a matter of thinking the limits to the system of consumption as of thinking the consequences of it having no limits" (p. 53).
In the Shadow: the masses are "at once that limit posited by the social and that limit which allows the social to posit its own limit" (p. 61) — "not an external limit to the social… but an internal limit… brought about by this very overcoming" (p. 61). Their conformity is indistinguishable from simulation's circular questionnaires; "there are no masses, we never see the masses" (p. 63); they are "a pure creature of representation, the power of language to change or double the world" (p. 63).
The collection (System of Objects, Part B): the collection's unity is the collector's subjectivity, itself only constituted by the objects; the last piece — "the person of the collector" (SO, 91) — is always missing, which is why the collection can never be completed and why its pleasure is inseparable from risk (pp. 86–90). The La Bruyère anecdote: completing the collection kills it (p. 87).
The art auction (For a Critique): value arises from the "reciprocal wager" (PE, 116) of bids that take the place of a first exchange that never existed and defer a last exchange that must never arrive; symbolic exchange is "not simply the negation of economic value but rather its limit" (p. 81). The medium of exchange — money or the painting — is "the true aristocrat of exchange," and "perhaps another name for this medium of exchange… is the real itself" (p. 87).
Terrorism ('The Hostage', Fatal Strategies): the social and the terrorist each take the other hostage; the security system's third stage of "proliferation and saturation" produces "panic and terror" (FS, 37). The paradox: at the moment the hostage is most exchanged he is most inexchangeable — terrorism reveals "the inexchangeable" that grounds every exchange, and seduces the social: "It is by appearing not to follow the social that terrorism makes the social follow it" (p. 93).
Death (Symbolic Exchange and Death): death is the reversibility of life and death — "It is life that reaches the end and death that is immortal, never-ending"; "Death – the impossible exchange between life and death – doubles life" (SE, 133–40; pp. 98–99). Freud, Mauss and Saussure each intuit this fundamental reversibility and repress it (p. 99).
Seduction (1979): the mirror of Narcissus and Echo cannot itself be represented — "Seduction cannot possibly be represented because in seduction the distance between the real and its double, the same and the other, is abolished" (S, 67; p. 102); the fox's-tail tale and 'Death in Samarkand' (the attempt to escape fate is fate, p. 103); pornography and the "vaginal cyclorama" as the obscene attempt to abolish the distance that provokes it (S, 31–32); "One cannot be free of seduction, and the discourse of anti-seduction is but its last metamorphosis" (S, 42–3; p. 105).
Kierkegaard and Calle: Johannes's seduction of Cordelia works by becoming her "mirror" — a doubling without evidence, where she can never be sure whether it happened; the same structure governs Baudrillard's 'Please Follow Me' on Sophie Calle's Suite vénitienne: "it is the shadowing itself which is the other's double life" ('FM', 104; p. 112) — an asymptotic game of taking the other's strategy into account in which Calle is a figure of the analyst (pp. 107–16).
Doubling (Chapter 3). Language and thought are themselves the limit of systems: "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" (p. 20). Theory does not describe but prescribe: "We do not – or not only – offer a description of the way things are, but a prescription of the way they will be" (p. 138). Baudrillard's writing "doubles" the world — "It only repeats the world and the world does not exist before this repetition" (p. 122).
The Evil Demon of Images: Baudrillard's Descartes comparison (the evil demon as the difference between image and reality that is lost as images perfect their resemblance) cannot escape repeating Descartes' move of turning doubt into certainty: "Doubt, illusion, the evil demon – we might say the difference between things – is anterior to certainty, reality, resemblance" (p. 146) — and the ability to name the demon implies a power greater than it, representation itself (pp. 146–47).
'The Year 2000': three indistinguishable hypotheses of the end of history (events too fast; history unable to reach its end; history lost in the perfection of its reproduction, like stereo's "high fidelity"); the struggle between ceremonial (cyclical, everything complete in the beginning) and linear (endless deferral of the end) time, read through Zeno: "The paradox of time… is neither simply the linear deferral of the end – too slow – nor the cyclical end already in the beginning – too fast – but both" (p. 156). The end of history "takes place at once at a real point…, at the very beginning of history… and never takes place" (p. 157).
Reception. Kellner's Marxist reading begs the question; Gane compares without thinking the ground of comparison; Genosko stops short of the sign in Baudrillard; Levin is not systematic enough about the form of the writing; Meaghan Morris's 'Room 101' is "still perhaps the best piece written on Baudrillard" (p. 164) — but her apocalypticism misses that the real is the system's non-closure: "It is exactly in the inconsistencies, contradictions and illogicalities of his argument that we might see what the real, the resistance of the real, might mean" (p. 166). Baudrillard belongs with the post-structuralists as thinkers of "thought as doubling" — after Hegel, each system that has no other can only be doubled, not refuted (pp. 168–69).

Connections

Concepts: doubling, the-real, paradox-of-the-sign, double-strategy, internal-and-external-readings, medium-of-exchange, ceremonial-and-linear-time, simulation-hyperreality, seduction, reversibility, the-masses, the-neutral, consumption, sign-value, political-economy-of-the-sign, use-value, model-and-series, orders-of-simulacra, precession-of-simulacra, symbolic-exchange, possession, techneme, transpolitical, the-hostage, obscenity, beaubourg-effect, the-double, doubleness, being-toward-death, system-of-objects, mirror-of-production, fatal-strategies

Authors: butler-rex (author of this study), baudrillard-jean (its object)

Debates: truth-and-illusion, structuralism-vs-poststructuralism

Direct Quotes

"It is that, insofar as the copy completely resembles the original, it is no longer a copy but another original; or, to invert this, that the copy is only able to resemble the original insofar as it is different from it." (p. 14)

"There is always a kind of internal limit – that paradox of the sign we spoke of before – which means that, if the system is able to expand forever and nothing is outside of it, it is also never entirely closed, something is always left out of it. And it is this internal limit, this difference that makes resemblance possible, that Baudrillard calls the real." (p. 17)

"In a surprising twist, then, Baudrillard emerges as a defender of the real against all efforts to speak of it – including, of course, his own." (p. 17)

"But I hold no position on reality. Reality remains an unshakeable postulate towards which you can maintain a relation either of adversity or of reconciliation. The real – all things considered, perhaps it exists – no, it doesn't exist – is the insurmountable limit of theory. The real is not an objective state of things; it is the point at which theory can do nothing." (Baudrillard, quoted, BL, 122–3; p. 18)

"It is only by running the risk that we repeat him that we are finally able to differ from him." (p. 17)

"And the 'realizing' of the world, through science and technology, is precisely what simulation is – the exorcism of the terror of illusion by the most sophisticated means of the 'realization of the world'." (Baudrillard, quoted, BL, 184; p. 24)

"The moment you believe that you're in a state of simulation, you're no longer there." (Baudrillard, quoted, BL, 166; p. 24)

"This is why seduction is not opposed to simulation but is rather its limit – a limit that makes it both possible and impossible." (p. 25)

"Signs only refer to the real, we might say, through their difference from it." (p. 36)

"From now on, function must have the commutability or exchangeability of the sign or it is not function at all." (p. 33)

"Henceforth, after simulation – this is its real effect – we are only able to imagine this other or anterior to simulation in terms of simulation itself." (p. 43)

"Tax does not levy a consumption that exists before it, but consumption comes about as an effect of this tax. Tax comes before the very consumption it taxes." (p. 51)

"It is not so much a matter of thinking the limits to the system of consumption as of thinking the consequences of it having no limits." (p. 53)

"It is the limit that allows the system to have no limit." (p. 56, on anguish/waste)

"The masses are not an external limit to the social, which the social would overcome, but an internal limit, a limit the social could never overcome, because it is a limit brought about by this very overcoming." (p. 61)

"For, in a sense, there are no masses, we never see the masses." (p. 63)

"The masses here are unrepresentable… they are not simply real, a sociological or even theoretical phenomenon, but a pure creature of representation, the power of language to change or double the world." (p. 63)

"The medium of exchange – apparently the most low, the most lacking in value – is the true aristocrat of exchange. And perhaps another name for this medium of exchange – at once the lowest and the highest, infinitely compared and incomparable, the limit to the system of simulation and what the system endlessly displaces – is the real itself." (p. 87)

"It is by appearing not to follow the social that terrorism makes the social follow it; it is by appearing not to take the social into account that it accounts for it. Terrorism seduces the social." (p. 93)

"It is life that reaches the end and death that is immortal, never-ending." (p. 98)

"'Seduction cannot possibly be represented because in seduction the distance between the real and its double, the same and the other, is abolished' (S, 67)." (Baudrillard, quoted; p. 102)

"One cannot be free of seduction, and the discourse of anti-seduction is but its last metamorphosis." (Baudrillard, quoted, S, 42–3; p. 105)

"Baudrillard's concepts, like those systems he analyses, 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." (p. 20)

"We do not – or not only – offer a description of the way things are, but a prescription of the way they will be." (p. 138)

"It only repeats the world and the world does not exist before this repetition." (p. 122)

"Doubt, illusion, the evil demon – we might say the difference between things – is anterior to certainty, reality, resemblance. Every certainty – even the certainty of doubt – is open to a further doubt." (p. 146)

"The paradox of time, what is required for it, is neither simply the linear deferral of the end – too slow – nor the cyclical end already in the beginning – too fast – but both." (p. 156)

"We will never know what history was before its exacerbation in the technical perfection of information or its disappearance in the profusion of commentary – we will never know what anything was before its disappearance in the completion of the model … Such is the era of simulation." (Baudrillard, quoted, '2000', 22–3; p. 152)

"It is exactly in the inconsistencies, contradictions and illogicalities of his argument that we might see what the real, the resistance of the real, might mean, why a theoretical text can never become totally self-consistent." (p. 166)

"Baudrillard's writing is neither unrelated to the world nor unexplained by it, but doubles it." (p. 10)

Open Questions

Butler names "a certain politics or ethics of the unrepresentable" as the question Baudrillard's work leaves for political re-invention (p. 167): what would this politics look like, and is it compatible with the "indifference" Baudrillard elsewhere counsels?
Butler's Baudrillard is a methodological Baudrillard — the theory of how to read total systems. Can the wiki's architectural registers (interior, iconic architecture, spectacle) absorb the doubling framework, or does it dissolve the object-level analysis into metacommentary?
Butler reads Baudrillard's commentators (Kellner, Gane, Genosko, Levin, Morris) as each stopping short of the internal reading; the wiki's own Baudrillard pages have so far been built from Baudrillard's primary texts — does Butler's study change how those pages should be structured?
The book's endorsement by Baudrillard himself (per the publisher's blurb) as something that "sees what I see and at the same time what I am unable to see" raises the question of whether the internal reading is a completion of Baudrillard or a subtle correction of him — Butler's own answer ("we are finally able to differ from him" only by repeating him) is deliberately undecidable.