Like my essay on “visual communication”, this essay is exactly what it says on the label: the entry for virtuality in a design dictionary — specifically, Michael Erlhoff and Tim Marshall, eds., Design Dictionary: Perspectives on Design Terminology (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008; available via the Internet Archive). The Dictionary was simultaneously published in English and German; the German translation of this essay is here. The arrows (→) are cross-references to other dictionary entries.
Virtuality
Virtuality describes a general condition (for example, of a historical period), a localized state (of a social environment), or a peculiar status (of a network, system, or object) of being virtual, that is, characterized mainly by immateriality.
The term “virtuality” is rare, and typically occurs in theoretical efforts to adapt technical uses of the more common adjective “virtual” (which in computer science is used interchangeably with “logical” as opposed to “physical”) into a philosophical status. In these discussions, the process by which objects, functions, systems, and situations take digital form (through very ill-defined mechanisms) has been called “virtualization” by thinkers heavily invested in new technologies (such as Howard Rheingold). These discussions of virtuality typically rely on historical determinism, the belief that technological development is the determining factor in social, cultural, and political change. Those who do not share these views rarely devote many words to rebutting a concept as baroque as virtuality (Arthur Kroker, Michael A. Weinstein, and Michael Heim are notable exceptions); as a result, “virtuality” and “virtualization” often carry strong connotations of advocacy.
In the English language, the term “virtuality” is venerable but marginal. It first appears in a 1483 translation of the hagiographic Golden Legend, published by William Caxton, the first Englishman to introduce a printing press into, and to retail books in, his native land. For centuries after its introduction, the term mainly appeared in religious contexts as a way to describe the potential of material (→) objects to express, perpetuate, or elaborate the cosmos. Thus, for example, in Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646) Sir Thomas Browne observed that in “one graine of corne…there lyeth dormant the virtuality of many other, and from thence sometimes proceed an hundred eares.” Scientific thought has since illuminated in mechanistic terms the numerous processes that contribute to how this “virtuality” is realized; yet mechanistic explanations are hard-pressed to address the sense of wonder that such processes can sometimes inspire. This tension, between mechanism and eruptive potential, is a central to the dynamics that have made ideas about things virtual so popular.
In its modern form, virtuality is generally associated with the rise of computer networks, in particular the Internet (→ Networking). Like several terms that became popular on a global scale in this context (for example, “digital,” “information,” and so on), it is difficult to arrive at any precise definition: the proliferation of terms via these networks across wildly different cultural and disciplinary contexts ensures that there is no clear, unified framework within which to define the term. Yet this phenomenon is recent, so it remains to be seen whether such a transcultural condition might itself come to be seen as a unified context for understanding the meanings of these terms in new ways. If it does, the resulting polyvalence may be a (or even the) defining characteristic of ideas such as virtuality; for now, their defining characteristic is ambiguity.
For recent or contemporary thinkers heavily invested in ideas of or about virtuality, the potential of something “virtual” is often thought to be inversely proportional to its materiality: the less something takes material (→) form (runs the argument), the less limited it is by that form, ergo the greater its potential. In primarily technical contexts, this approach makes sense. The use of “virtual” techniques in computation allow many different types of procedures to be performed by software running on general-purpose devices such as PCs, as opposed a few processes running on single-purpose devices; the benefits — in terms of economies of scale in hardware and flexibility in software development and maintenance — are profound.
However, when applied in nontechnical contexts (for example, in theories of subjectivity, class, or governance), notions of virtuality quickly become problematic. Arguments of this kind — proposals, in essence, that substantial parts of human experience can somehow be translated into “virtual” form — have been, if not common, remarkably influential. For example, John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of Cyberspace Independence” (1996) posited two utterly separate worlds and pitted a collective “mind,” rooted in “cyberspace” and equated with the future and potential, against the political structures of the material world, which were equated with the past, industrialism, and physical being. This manifesto struck many as extremely bombastic at the time (as indeed it was intended to); but his argument was substantially similar to widely popular beliefs — about the limitless possibilities of virtual compared to “bricks and mortar” businesses, the inability of governments to enforce laws or impose taxes on virtual commerce and communities, and so on. The roots of these polemical claims about the potential of “virtuality” are extremely complex. On the one hand, the fundamental discourses about Turing machines — in essence, machines capable of simulating any other machine — derive directly from the work of first-generation cyberneticians such as Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, whose milieu was professedly secular, materialistic, technocratic, and apolitical (or at least hostile to “leftist” concerns associated with communism in the post–Second World War period). On the other hand, mature converts to Christianity, such as legendary media theorist Marshall McLuhan and the Wired magazine founding editor, Kevin Kelly, made critical contributions by promoting organicist, communitarian, and above all utopian visions of collective human thought and action. At the same time, theories about virtuality also bear strong traces of the optimistic futurism (for example, in “extropians”) with a profound mistrust of materiality (seen by some as a resurgent form of Neoplatonism). This eclecticism itself has many sources and contributing factors, ranging from the dominance of American thinkers (for whom systematic or pure philosophical inquiry is rare) in articulating these theories, to the applied context that drove these theories (that is, the rise of digital computers and networks).
Curiously, the two most influential twentieth-century thinkers who devoted sustained effort to analyzing “virtuality” seem to have almost no influence in technology-oriented uses of the concept: Henri Bergson, who applied the concept in describing the process by which a material object becomes or spawns a representation through (→) perception; and, later in the postmodern period, Jean Baudrillard whose analyses of the arbitrary operations of metaphysical thought drew heavily on the pre-absurdist French writer Alfred Jarry and his creation “pataphysics.” Instead, the importance of ideas about “virtuality” in technological contexts can be attributed to two maverick American thinkers, Ted Nelson and Jaron Lanier.
Nelson, an iconoclastic technologist (credited with, among other things, having coined the term (→) “hypertext” in the mid-1960s), gave the term a decisively modern meaning and application when he used the term “virtual” to describe “conceptual structure and feel” and as “the opposite of reality.” More specifically, he understood virtuality as the range of possible functions that (→) software, whether in a specific or in general, is capable of prior to the reductive expression of those capabilities in the tangible form of an interface (including logical and physical interfaces, not just human or graphical interfaces) (→ Interface Design). Nelson’s ideals centered mainly on texts and intertextuality, which conceived in terms of what he called a “docuverse.” The quixotic nature of his vision of the first hypertext project, Xanadu (beginning in 1960 and running, in fits and starts, for almost four decades), can be surmised from his criticism of the web and its “ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can’t follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management.” At the same time, though, Nelson was uncompromising in his critique of “the computer as a paper simulator” and denounced the two-dimensional understandings of digital (→) artifacts as a “four-walled [i.e., four-sided] prison.” In essence, Nelson envisioned a technical system capable of preserving all the perceived limitations of material documents as options rather than inevitabilities: for example, users would have access to every stage of a digital artifact’s development as well as to every possible connection or association (formal, temporal, semantic, and so on) that artifact might share with any other artifact. In this sense, then, Nelson’s vision of the “virtual” can be seen as a technical realization of the marvelous potential implied in centuries-old uses of the term “virtuality.”
It was largely on the basis of Nelson’s theories and activities, on the one hand, and the phrase “artificial reality,” which had achieved some popularity in experimental computing circles in the early 1970s, on the other, that Jaron Lanier is credited with having coined the term (→) “virtual reality” in the early 1980s to describe three-dimensional, purportedly “immersive” environments. Lanier’s efforts took much more practical, functional form than Nelson’s — for example, quasi-3-D environments that users could explore and manipulate through experimental input (for example, haptic) and output (for example, “heads-up”) devices. Like Nelson’s work, though, the technical (→) complexity and computational intensity of Lanier’s efforts far outstripped commonly available computing resources, with the result that his work, too, remained beyond the means of all but the wealthiest institutions and therefore marginal.
Ultimately, it was the confluence of Nelson’s and Lanier’s respective efforts — and, of course, that of many others across myriad aspects of research, development, and use — that “virtuality” came to become an all-purpose (and consequently vague) term used to describe the immateriality of things digital. This popularization, which largely coincided with the rise of the internet, led to the popular use of the term “virtual” to refer to phenomena ranging from descriptive and/or depictive environments (for example, MUDs [multiuser dungeons], MOOs [MUD Object-Oriented], and RPGs [role-playing games]), “communities” such as mailing lists web sites that rely heavily on users’ contributions, and so on. However, as these forms of media and exchange become more normal, the terms “virtual” and “virtuality” will almost certainly lose their last shreds of historical specificity and become obsolete, and perhaps even camp.
→ Form, Information, Materials
Sources
Heim, M. 1993. The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Heims, S. J. 1991. The Cybernetics Group. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kroker, A., and M. A. Weinstein. 1994. Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class. New York: St. Martin’s.