End of the real and the social

I got asked today what I'm working on right now (the person knew I had a bunch of stuff due in the next ten days). I'm researching theory for a paper for my senior contemporary social theory course (This would have been a required sociology course had I actually stayed around another year to do an honours degree so I took it because, well, I'm weird...nahhh just a self-professed theory geek).

The question:

Baudrillard talks about "the end of the real". What is the importance of this idea in for modern social theory?

As I delve into various Baudrillard writings and look at some of the analysis and critiques of his ideas, I find that the original notion I had on how to answer this question may hold up but there is another, more interesting way to approach it, albeit potentially more dangerous in terms of getting a good mark.

I know that the stock answer for this is that the death of the real is a standard postmodern position. The pomo view sees the real as Reality, an objective bit of fiction posited by the Enlightenment project. Along with the death of truth and subjectivity a la Foucault, the grounds on which the real was advanced were based in the desires and agenda of the E project: the need to establish a rational, liberal set of values that humans could strive to embody in their lives. Thus, along with Truth, Reality and Subjectivity comes Reason, Logic and the big one, Science. The latter work together to create and maintain the ultimate metadiscipline that wraps up all of these into a nice logical metapackage of thought and practice.

Postmodernism argues that the Holocaust is an example of how the modernity project never really got off the ground. The overt rationality and aims of science are illogical and irrational. In the strong pomo position, the argument is that the Real never was real; there is no objective reality, there is only situated and contingent subjectivity. Therefore, attempting to understand and describe that reality is simply an exercise in promotions of second, third and fourth order simulations and interpretations of simulations.

But! I see a more interesting explanation within Baudrillard for the question. Given that the question asks me to relate the death of the real to modern social theory, the more intriguing response would be to ground it in the illusion that there is a social around which one can theorize. Baudrillard argues that the social doesn't exist, never existed. Given this, the inferiority complex that the field of sociology suffers as it attempts in vain to scientize itself becomes understandable. Because not only is science not really scientific, but the social isn't really anything anyway. If there is no actual science around which to theorize, nor a society within which to situate analyses and arguments, then any attempts to create social theory as master narratives, as both environments and tools of scientific discourse, are deeply and profoundly deluded.

So the death of the real means not only the death of the social, but a complete negation of the social. If the real never was, then any theorizing about a society within it is useless posturing and dreaming. No society = no theory possible about it. It all becomes a collective and collaborative dream/nightmare.