The Realist Underground: Referential Practices at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century 1 Christophe Den Tandt Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) (2006) Abstract This paper examines the conditions of possibility for realism in several fields of contemporary culture—literature, painting, film, and TV news. It is argued that contemporary texts mobilize novel resources for the representation of the real. Realism in these works no longer takes the form of a seemingly self-evident mirroring of the world. Instead, the work of representation unfolds along several axes—fact-finding, meta- discourse, contractual negotiation, and praxis. Accordingly, contempo- rary realist texts display a hybrid make-up, mingling elements of classi- cal mimesis and postmodernism. The essay indicates how this complex set of representational strategies informs alternative film-making (David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art), live TV news coverage of the 2003 Iraq campaign, and Michael Moore’s doc- umentaries. 1. Playing the reality game: the corpus of contemporary mimesis Influential currents of twentieth-century art and theory—formalism, structuralism, (post)modernism—have articulated a harsh yet often pointed critique of realist aesthetics. Postmodernist theory, in particular, has compellingly highlighted the problematic nature of such concepts or practices as literary truthfulness or the imitation of life through art. Working on the principle that even “natural facts are […] discursive facts” (Laclau and Mouffe 103), postmodernism has questioned the nature of fact itself: it has challenged the simplistic belief that texts can effortlessly access a common ground of objective truth. Against this anti-realist scepticism, I propose to explore the hypothesis that realism has survived the strictures of twentieth-century cultural theory. Indeed, the radically antirealist stance of orthodox postmodernism is too coun-