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Performing Virtualities: Liminality on and off the 'Net'
Rob Shields
and presuppositions. It is thus with all things virtual. To say one is virtually
or almost finished a task, indicates that it is complete for all intents and
purposes but not formally so. To put the definitions all together, a task could
be said to be really not actually complete, even if it is virtually complete.
The virtual is 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(OED)). It most
common form is the adverb virtuallyin respect of essence or effect, apart
from actual form or specific manner or in effect... practically, or to all
intents (OED)as in almost or virtually complete. Perhaps we should not be
surprised that this usage arose in Reformation debates concerning the
quality of the Christian communiondid eating the host at mass amount to
receiving or communing with Christ by mouth, as well as spiritually?
Virtualism is the Calvinistic doctrine of Christs virtual presence in the
Eucharist. As a 1654 source cited in the OED puts it, 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.
So what do we contemporaries believe about presence, embodiment and
faith...? Virtual is an adjective quickly becoming a proper nounThe
Virtual a place, a space, a whole world of ersatz graphical objects and
animated personae which populate fictional, ritual and digital domains as
representatives of actual persons and things. Commentators have not failed
to remark that these virtual avatars, agents and objects not only stand-in for
flesh-and-blood persons and physical materials but they can have
significant and shocking impacts on the real-life status and well-being of
people (Hillis 1999). Although artists and writers have imagined virtual
personae, for example, as more adequately represented by avatars (for
example, representing oneself in a computer-generated environment as an
animated cartoon character), as Christine McCarthy (2000) has shown,
rarely are they more than a outline of a pointing hand. The mundane reality
is more like a line of code in a database which records and polices a
persons relationships within a digital domain and by extension in everyday
life. This is not only the pre-determined and prescribed movements
available to a iconic hand, in other cases, such as financial transactions and
entitlementsa credit profile is ones virtual identity for banking purposes,
as far as institutions are concerned.
In the case of digital domains spawned by computer-mediated
communication, The Virtual more strongly troubles the nominalist and
positivist sense of a bounded reality as lived, face-to-face experience by
ushering a whole series of (realist) objects which are conventionally held to
exist or are detected via probabilistic inference, mathematical modeling and
computer-generated visualizations of things which may be impossible to
experience directly in everyday life or which are unrepresentable in the
itself that is not reducible to the properties of a subject. In short, You are
longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between formed
particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects. You have the individuality of a day,
a season, a year, a life... (1987:253, 262). The iconography of any object
which is composed of parts, or which must be imaged as an abstract totality
on the basis of an encounter with only a small part of it (such as, for
example, a continent, a city, even a people), goes into crisis because
being dramatically altered by the digital processes of representation in any
number of virtual spaces.
This spatialisation extends beyond understanding that digital domains will
be treated as virtual spaces, it includes cooperation in the treatment of
these spaces as serious domains of action with an equivalence status to
face-to-face, embodied interaction. Part of the necessary performative
competence is an acceptance of the conventions mapping the virtual and
the real onto each other. This amounts to saying that the virtual is a type of
ideality that must be performed, that it cannot subsist without being
actualized as material, as embodied.
Digitally virtual spaces have an elusive quality which comes from their
status as being both nowhere and yet present via the technologies which
enable them. However, just as these environments are not spatial per se,
but only virtually so, they also have duration but strictly speaking, neither
history, nor a future. Of course there is a history of virtual spaces and of the
technologies that make possible the transposition of interaction away from
the limits of the human voice into various media. But inside a virtual space
itself, there is only the immediacy of the scenario displayed. This
presentism (Maffesoli 1996) temporalizes virtual space making it, and
processes or events in it, something that always happens now, in the
present. Although they can be archived, creating a form of virtual history,
both virtual space and virtual objects are merely retrieved and recreated in
whatever present moment one might chose to witness them in. One may go
back to a previous webpage or virtual room but one may also jump as far
back or forward as one wishes. A sense of elapsed time must be
accomplished by developing a spatial narrative of the path that one has
taken and which might be retraced. Researchers in the United Kingdoms
Virtual Society? Research Programme have argued that, The ICT industry
works with axiomatic ideas about memory as storage (of data and of the
means to access data). But, what counts as adequate remembering?
(Harvey et al 2000) is a question answered in advance by a rationale
geared to the predefined needs of software functionality, not remembrance
or reverie.
Perhaps there is a gut recognition of this distinction. While software has
been created to provide time lines and virtual tours of historical sites, there
The possible is never real, even though it may be actual; however, while the
virtual may not be actual, it is nonetheless real. In other words, there are
several contemporary (actual) possibilities of which some may be realized
in the future; in contrast, virtualities are always real (in the past, in memory)
and may become actualized in the present. Deleuze invokes Proust for a
definition of the states of virtuality: "real without being actual, ideal without
being abstract" (Deleuze1988:96 after Bergson, cited in Hardt 1993:16).
ideal
Actual :
[material]
probability
the "virtual" can be distinguished from the "possible" from at least two
points of view. From a certain point of view, in fact, the possible is the
opposite of the real ... but, in quite a different opposition the virtual is
opposed to the actual. ...The possible has no reality (although it may have
an actuality); conversely, the virtual is not actual but as such possesses a
reality. (Deleuze 1988:96)
It follows that the direct opposite of the actual is the ideal, not the
virtual. The virtual is outside not only the abstract, but also the material (that
which exists actually), in a continuum of forms of the real and possible. This
is a continuum of soft oppositions in which relations between the terms are
as significant as the distinctions between them. For example, the virtual
might feed and nurture the possible and is in a dependent relation to the
actual in most social theory - although Deleuze deliberately sets out to
show that the reverse is the case (on this point, Deleuze brings together
both Spinoza and Bergson). The abstract is a possible ideal (expressed as
concepts); and an actual possibility is expressed as a mathematical
probability (see Table 3). Material and virtual spaces are dominated by their
relations with each other, as points of identification, temporary addresses
(Grossberg 2000) as well as their commitment to the temporalized realms
of becoming which make up the possible. While many will see this as an
argument over semantics, it is essential to get the relations between the
virtual, the real and the possible right, if one is to preserve the option of
utopian reform, which is couched not only in the virtual but in the abstract
and probable. (This, I would suggest, is the root of a Marxist theorist such
as Lefebvres deepest objections against Bergsonism in all its forms).
Real (existing)
Ideal :
virtual
abstract
Actual :
material
probability
The second table may yield the same aphorism. However, it specifies the
position of the virtual as an interstitial state and space between the material
and abstract. It also forces us to attend to the socially constructed quality of
any distinction we might want to make between the virtual and other forms
of lived experience as a distinction with the concretely material, in parallel to
the completely theoretical, and dubious, distinction set up between ideal
exemplars and contingent, actual cases (see De Landa 1998).
In this philosophical schema of the virtual and its others, qualitative
relations between the terms can be sketched in on the diagonals as well as
between the major classes such as the real and the possible. For the
relation from the virtual to the abstract are a two-way street characterized
by the movement of the imagination in one direction and resemblance in the
returning direction from the abstract to the virtual. To wit the possible is
that which is "realized" (or is not...)... subject to two essential rules, one of
resemblance and another of limitation. For the real is supposed to be in the
image of the possible that it realizes. (It simply has existence or reality
added to it) (Deleuze 1988:96-7). Similarly the relation from the material to
the probable might be glossed as forecasting and realization on the return.
This is not the place to sketch in all of the relations between the terms, but
the table is suggestive (where does one place fetishism, revolution, risk and
the operations of science?): The virtual, on the other hand, does not have
to be realized, but rather actualized; and the rules of actualization are
....those of difference or divergence and of creation. (Deleuze 1988:97)
This actualization takes the form of performance in the one direction and
intuition in the opposite direction (Badiou 2000:48). The actual is always
objective and the virtual is subjective... "the affection of self by self"(which
Deleuze sees as time 1989:83). The really actual is characterized by its
quality of differentiation precisely because of its performative character.
Rather than allow the material the positivist virtues of self-identity and
stability, it is real (it is realized and actualized) only in as much as it is
enacted, an observation made also made by de Certeau who comments
that a sidewalk is only such if it is reserved for pedestrians; if it is driven
upon it is merely part of the roadway (1984). Thus, While the real is in the
image and likeness of the possible that it realizes, the actual, on the other
hand does not resemble the virtuality that it embodies(Deleuze 1988:97).
The material is thus characterized by not only differentiation and nonidentity but by innovation, simulation, and transitoriness (1994: 212).
What are the stakes in drawing out the mutual inter-relation of material and
virtual? It is the relations between terms or cells that are most significant
because each cell in the matrix bears the charge of the other cells. They
are indiscernible (1989:81-2; Deleuze at some times even casts actual and
virtual as joined in the material 1994:209). This interdependence
destabilizes the tendency to treat the material and the virtual as reified
states. The real is always both ideal and actual and the contrast between
virtual and material merely serves to differentiate and mobilize our
conception of the real.
3. Liminal and Virtual
A longstanding history of re-performing virtuality may be identified in range
of activities from carnival to risk accounting. These are performative
matrices which mobilize the socially real by re-actualizing the ideal in
alternative and often utopian performances which contrast with prevailing
settlements and habituses. Whether by carnivalesque inversion of the
social order, the liminal suspension of norms, or the queering of social
regulation, the virtual is re-invoked and re-performed. Something of this
relation can be found in both the history of the carnivalesque and liminality,
as well as in the case of the virtual spaces of digital domains.
But in this sense, one can properly speak of the Virtual Society which is a
mere representation which plays on the cachet of virtue, and the liminal
open-field of the virtual in contrast to the regulated and legislated domains
in areas such as labour relations, equity and health and safety legislations,
worker-entitlements and unionized work-organization, and any tacit
practices of politesse in the workplace. There is a noticeable investment in
the rhetoric of the virtual society including corporations such as Mitsubishi
and Sony (see for example, http://www.vs.sony.co.jp). This appears to also
be the case in North America, despite the European observation that, there
is an uneasy fit between the rhetoric of virtuality and the day_to_day
problems of running an organisation (Hughes et al 1998).
Like other liminal zones under capitalism, such experiences and sites
generally become commodified as package tourist attractions, not sacred
places which are the sites of Cures or pilgrimage destinations. Much of the
popular discussion of computer-mediated communications amounts to
domesticating virtual spaces and bringing it out of its liminoid statusa
realm of illicit information (how to build a nuclear bomb etc. etc.), the resort
of the repressed that contemporary culture generally excludes or refuses to
grant a place to (the obese, those physically challenged in one way or
another), an arena in which forbidden desires are unleashed, and a
subculture populated by mythified figures such as the hacker. Artists
functioned as prophets of the potential of the virtual as a liminal space (see
Virtual Museum, Linz; the annual Ars Electronica Awards; Stelarc 1998).
From the virtual as a threshold onto the effervescence of cultural margins,
the internet becomes more and more a pay-per-view, pre-screened
information service. In place of the old, a fun, child-safe Web, family
computers and smart-appliances as domestic servants. Illegal child
pornography, the illicit, and the uncontrolled continues to issue from and
anonymous access providers. rogue states, and non-EuroAmerican
societies with deeply-ambiguous attitudes towards the globalization of
Western values. However, the internet is now more than ever integrated
within the commercial structure of a metered-economy operated by
machines for the benefit of a global class of virtual agents such as holding
companies and large shareholders such as North American pension-funds.
If not strictly speaking intelligent machines, these assemblages (see van
Loon 2000, this volume) of humans, virtual agents, algorithms and other
softas much as hardtechnology, are intelligence machines, both
dispensing information and gathering knowledge about users. As a
continuation of on-going processes rather than a development from tabula
rasa, one can still ask sociological, economic and political questions of.
What is the relation between The Virtual and social inequality, liberation and
self-determination (see also previous articles: Elmer 1998; Hutnyk 1997)?
The 1990s appear to have seen societies in retreat from the liminoid
qualities at first celebrated in visions of cyberspace and the virtual society
(see also ESRC Virtual Society? Research Programme 1999). Some of
these societies, such as Singapore and China resorted to physical
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