The Virtual

Rob Shields

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134460847
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book looks at the origins and the many contemporary meanings of the virtual. Rob Shields shows how the construction of virtual worlds has a long history. He examines the many forms of faith and hysteria that have surrounded computer technologies in recent years. Moving beyond the technologies themselves he shows how the virtual plays a role in our daily lives at every level. The virtual is also an essential concept needed to manage innovation and risk. It is real but not actual, ideal but not abstract. The virtual, he argues, has become one of the key organizing principles of contemporary society in the public realms of politics, business and consumption as well as in our private lives.

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THE RETURN OF THE VIRTUAL

A whole new lexicon has arisen that seeks to capture the new ways of working … including ‘Web enterprises’, ‘virtual organisations’, ‘virtual teams’, ‘teleworking’ and so on.

(Jackson, 1999: 3)

Do you think that there is anything new about the virtual? If so, you will be surprised to learn that in 1556 Thomas Cranmer was executed in large part because of his affirmation of the virtuality of the Eucharist. Similar charges were levelled against the reformation theologians Luther and Zwingli. Indeed, debates surrounding the virtual and practices of virtuality have a long history. This chapter introduces the historical importance and associations of the virtual as an aspect of cultures in Europe and other parts of the world. Sections introduce historical virtualities and develop the argument for the historicity of the virtual, as follows:

• Key definitions of the virtual include not only the virtual as essence or the ‘essentially so’ but the notion of ‘virtue’.

• Virtual spaces and understandings of virtuality have a long history in the form of rituals, and in the built form of architectural fantasies and environments.

• Examples include: Christian reformation debates on the virtual in the Eucharist; baroque trompe-l’œil simulations and virtualities; liminal zones and rituals.

• Virtualism is the late twentieth-century fad for computermediated, digital virtuality, which draws on and repeats the historical forms of the virtual.

• However, it afforded a utopian moment despite the manifest contradictions of consumer hype and technological optimism.

DEFINITIONS OF THE VIRTUAL

The virtual: Anything, ‘that is so in essence or effect, although not formally or actually; admitting of being called by the name so far as the effect or result is concerned’.

(Oxford English Dictionary)

Dictionaries define the virtual in everyday life as ‘that which is so in essence but not actually so’. Thus we speak of tasks which are ‘virtually complete’. More philosophically, the virtual captures the nature of activities and objects which exist but are not tangible, not ‘concrete’. The virtual is real but not concrete, as we will be arguing in Chapter 2. Dreams, memories and the past are famously defined by Marcel Proust in his correspondence on Remembrance of Time Past as virtual: ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.’ Proust’s comment provides an important historical model for the use of the term today.

The noun ‘virtual’ comes to us from the Latin virtus, meaning strength or power. By the medieval period virtus had become virtualis and was understood in the manner we might understand the word ‘virtue’ today. In this older usage, a ‘virtual person’ is what we might understand in more contemporary usage as a person of some outstanding quality:

‘Virtual: Latin 1.virtus 2. virtuosus. Possessed of certain physical virtues or capacities; effective in respect of inherent natural qualities or powers capable of exerting influence by means of such qualities (rare)’.

(Oxford English Dictionary)

The related term, ‘virtue’, is a personal quality, ‘The power or operative influence inherent in a supernatural or divine being’ (OED). Virtue is ‘an embodiment of such power’ (OED). In the less celestial terms of ethics, virtue is the ‘conformity of a life and conduct with the principles of morality; voluntary observance of the recognized moral laws or standards of right conduct; abstention on moral grounds from any form of wrong-doing or vice’ (OED). Virtue is also ‘chastity, sexual purity and industry, diligence’, or ‘personified moral quality’ (OED). Examples of this usage trace back to 1398. As an adjective, a ‘virtual person’ was what we might today call a morally virtuous or good person: a person whose actual existence reflected or testified to a moral and ethical ideal. Virtue was the power to produce results, to have an effect. Some even argue that ‘the virtue of something is its “capacity” or efficacy’ (Haraway, 1992: 325). But Virtu is more an open, creative potentiality.

Today, ‘the virtual’ is still redolent of its barely masked links to the concept of virtue (with which it shares a root in the medieval Latin virtus – from vir, ‘man’). Few remember that an order of angels was said to be called ‘The Virtues’. However, women’s chastity is still mentioned in dictionary definitions of ‘virtue’, a difficult matter to verify empirically, which has long been the essence of patriarchal preoccupations. This strange twist in definitions in which we have ended up at ‘chastity’ points to the mixture of ambiguity and high stakes in social definitions of the virtual:

no matter how big the effects of the virtual are, they seem somehow to lack a proper ontology. Angels, manly valor, and womens’ (sic) chastity certainly constitute, at best, a virtual image … the virtual is precisely not the real; that’s why ‘post-moderns’ like ‘virtual reality.’ It seems transgressive.

(Haraway, 1992: 325)

VIRTUALISMS IN HISTORY

The virtual certainly has been controversial in the past. Where today’s users of virtual reality or members of online virtual teams complain of carpal tunnel syndrome, in earlier epochs other notions of the virtual could carry the punishment of death. The argument here is that the virtual has long been significant as a cultural category, as part of the human mental toolkit. Furthermore, two brief examples suggest that we could learn a great deal about the social actualizations of the virtual from historical cases. The virtual has long existed in the form of rituals, and in the built form of architectural fantasies and environments.

In fact, if the virtual has meanings of ‘virtue’, of being ‘almost-so’ or ‘almost-there’, one does not need to look far to find virtual worlds which surround us or their historical counterparts. Virtual worlds are simulations. Like a map, they usually start out as reproducing actual worlds, real bodies and situations; but, like simulations (see following section and Chapter 2), they end up taking on a life of their own. Somewhere along the way they begin to diverge, either when it is realized that no map can be so complete that it represents an actual landscape fully, or when they become prized as more perfect than messy materiality. As virtual worlds, they become ‘virtuous’, utopian. Virtual worlds become important when they diverge from the actual, or when the actual is ignored in favour of the virtual – at which point they are ‘more real than real’, as Jean Baudrillard, a theorist of the ironies of late twentieth-century cultures, has pointed out. An example is found in the way representations of the health of stock-markets, as expressed in, say, the charts and econometrics of a computerized news service, routinely stand in for the actuality of the economic life of nations half a world away. This ‘hyper-real’ quality implies that the virtual has to be taken into account on its own terms, because it is no longer simply a reflection of the actual (see Chapter 7).

Historical impacts of ‘the virtual’: the Reformation

Rather than a matter of angels or other virtual beings, the debate concerned the mystical transubstantiation at the centre of the Christian Eucharist – the conversion of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Actually real, material body and blood, insisted the Church. ‘Virtually real’, argued Reformation theologians.

In October 1517 Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. At the heart of his objections was the catholic doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Mass as a sacrifice or as a good work which could be charged for was anathema to Martin Luther and one of the key errors to which he objected (Luther, 1523: 441, 32n). Reformers viewed theories such as transubstantiation as an unnecessary detour to explain the miracle of the ‘Real Presence’ of Christ at each and every re-enactment of the Last Supper in rational terms, when any miracle by definition defies any such explanation. The substance of the Eucharist ‘is, and remains, bread’ (Luther, cited in Brooks, 1992: 20; see 1Corinthians 10.16). Accordingly, the faithful need only believe.

As Protestantism spread, controversy arose over the status of the Eucharist. One famous trial for heresy took place in September 1555. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was examined for heresy in the Church of St Mary at Oxford. Seated ‘in the East end of the said church, at the high altar’, on a chair set on a ‘solemn scaffold … ten foot high … under the sacrament of the altar’ (Cranmer, 1846: 212; cf. Foxe, 1877, VIII: 44, cited in Brooks, 1992) the Archbishop was cross-examined on his teachings regarding the reality or virtuality of the Eucharist. Orthodox Catholics held that it was ‘necessary to be believed as an article of faith, that there is the very corporal presence of Christ within the host and sacrament’ (Cranmer, 1846: 246). ‘Transubstantiation’ as a belief and doctrine had its origins in the theology of St Thomas Aquinas. In each and every Mass, Christ was present. In each and every Mass, a sacrifice took place.

The beginnings of the Anglican tradition lie in Cranmer’s attempt to tread a fine line between the Protestant influence of Martin Luther and Zwingli and his own convictions that the truth of the Eucharist be judged independently, empirically and with ‘discrimination’ (Robinson, 1846–1847: 13). But persuaded by dissenting preachers, this stout defender of Catholicism came to agree that ‘the Scripture knew no such term of “transubstantiation”’ (Foxe, 1877, V: 501). ‘Transubstantiation’ was the transformation of mundane bread or a host into a piece of the body of Christ. The essence of the debate was the question of whether this occurred literally and superstitiously. The Calvinists espoused a doctrine of ‘Virtualism’ – of Christ’s virtual presence in the Eucharist. Cranmer’s understanding gradually changed away from a belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the bread and wine towards a position favouring the symbolic and virtual presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

Although the result was actually disastrous for the Archbishop, a hundred years later in 1654 a source cited by the Oxford English Dictionary could publicly proclaim: ‘We affirm that Christ is really taken by faith … [although] they say he is taken by the mouth and that the spiritual and the virtual taking him … is not sufficient.’

The doctrine of virtualism raised questions concerning the way we understand presence – must it be concrete and embodied or was ‘essentially present’ good enough? Was there anything there if it was virtual? The same questions are raised today concerning online environments and virtual reality, and are treated in the chapters that follow. Are they real? Should they be given the same regard and dignity as other spaces of interaction?

Baroque cyberspaces

One of the most interesting historical uses of the virtual anticipates the way in which people now refer to virtual realities or virtual teams. This is found in the discussion of mirror reflections as ‘virtual images’ and of the way we experience dreams as ‘virtually real’. In optics, a ‘virtual image’ is formed by the apparent, but not actual, convergence of light rays to make an apparent but not exact counterfeit of the real. This is not simply a matter of perfect resemblance, however, for the image is reversed left to right. The image is virtual in that it suggests a potential mirror-world on the other side of the glass, an early precursor of the power of simulation. Illusions, mirrors to extend the space of a room (such as the Palace of Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors) and trompe-l’œil decoration fascinated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers.

If cyberspace is a ‘consensual hallucination’, in the words of the novelist who coined the term, William Gibson (1984: 67; see Chapters 3 and 4, this volume), then cave paintings might well count also. But skipping backward only 200 years, and much closer to our time, another historical moment celebrated the virtual to produce the first elaborate virtual environments – often in the form of the interior decoration of churches. This indulgence in trompe-l’œil contrasted with the dislocation and wars of eighteenth-century Europe, the first state powers asserting a harmonious, ecstatic world, in part as an expression of their power. These simulations were made to appear to defy gravity.

The heady lure of these mystical works is based on their elaborate continuities of human and fictive space… . They pair techniques involving the creation of a dreamscape, and the provision of [human] figures for identification that call the viewer to enter fictive space, changing with their movements, inviting their co-authorship. They are fundamentally navigable … ‘spaces of persuasion’.

(Maravall, 1986: 74–5, quoted in Cubitt, 1998: 75)

Baroque architecture and decoration rendered a dramatic space of swirling movement beyond the cares of the subluminary world into paint, plaster and marble. Not only did painted scenes of heavenly delights on vaulted ceilings trick the eye; the buildings were celebrations of forced perspective both in their floor plans and sections. Dominant lines of cornices, and rows of columns were shifted off of a right-angled grid to converge slightly, giving an impression of grandeur and distance.

At its pinnacle, the Baroque offered the thoroughly mediated interactivity of audience participation in the spectacle of its own rule… . [It] ‘was, like postmodernism today, at once a technique of power of a dominant class in a period of reaction and figuration of the limits of that power’ … we need to understand the culture of spectacle in the first Baroque as the beginnings of our own. To understand that the vertigo of imperial expansion, the terrors of absolute power and the morbid fascination with decay and mortality have been transformed into these virtual architectures is to catch a glimpse of the emergence of our own obsessions with the universe as our object of possession, our anxieties about absolute commodification.

(Beverley, 1993: 64, quoted in Cubitt, 1998: 75)

Virtual environments have been less spectacular in their treatment of space due to technical limitations. However, they share the concern of the baroque church ceiling to draw the viewer into a spectacle which transcends the everyday spaces of the temporal world, at the same time pushing that participant away as a ‘fallen’ mortal. The mind and soul could escape, but in both cases the body is a dead weight which pulls one back to Earth. Angels indeed – these spaces solicited a separation of the mind and body into a virtual and concrete pair: the soul and the flesh. For the former, salvation came through the powers of the state and its church; for the latter, abjection and domination as a ‘bare life’ (cf. Agamben, 1998) worthy not of lofty institutions such as the state but of the soil.

Some of the first commercial immersive environments, such as nineteenth-century panoramas, drew huge paying crowds to see the world as controlled spectacle. Like a diorama in a museum which has been constructed and arranged to show the ecology in which an animal lives, panoramas attempted to create a virtual environment via a 360-degree painting viewed from a central viewing platform. Into these circular paintings ‘it was possible to project yourself imaginatively, exploring the mise-en-scène’ visually, as earlier Europeans had marvelled in the baroque ceilings of their basilicas. In

a curious inversion of the panopticon, placing the subject in the centre of the field of vision, radiating out into a world prepared for ocular discovery, placing … the power of universal vision firmly in the eye of the mass spectator, a bizarre democra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The return of the virtual
• 2 The virtual and the real
• 3 Digital virtualities
• 4 Virtual Africa
• 5 Joystick generation: cyberpunks, camkids and family life
• 6 Work: virtual working
• 7 Business sense for a virtual world
• 8 Risk culture, trust and the virtual
• 9 The future of the virtual
• Notes
• References
• Index