Digital bungling: realism in an unreal world

‘Reality’ has been called into question so frequently of late that one is tempted to insist on it all the more dogmatically. But of course it is not reality (without quotation marks) that is being discussed. It is ‘Realism’ or ‘the Real’ that is repeatedly the subject of dispute. In such quarrels ‘reality’ is variously understood as the foundational concept, the fictive assemblage, the representational system, the philosophical agonising, the social construction, the rhetorical device, the repressed trauma. The incredibly banal conclusion is reached with tedious repetition that there is no longer, if there ever once was, any unmediated access to what is really real. Such repetition has the effect of presenting an actual ideological consensus as a matter of ritualised contention.