The Two (and Thousand) Faces of the Virtual

A summary of:
Ryan, M.-L. (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.
Chapter 1 – The Two (and Thousand) Faces of the Virtual

In this chapter, Ryan explicates the difference between virtual as illusion (drawing on Baudrillard) and virtual as potential (drawing on Lévy).

Baudrillard’s term was “simulacrum”, which as explained by Ryan, “is not the dynamic image of an active process, as are computer simulations, but a mechanically produced, and therefore passively obtained, duplication whose only function is to pass as that which it is not: ‘To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have’…. Baudrillard envisions contemporary culture as a fatal attraction toward simulacra” (29). This seems to jive with Lanier’s criticism of the goal of VR (which I think he later abandoned for his own attraction to the simulacra of even cooler VR technology). We do seem drawn to things-that-are-like-other-things. But this has always been the case, Ryan points out. It is not unique to the technological age, though it may be enabled to a greater degree by it.

For Baudrillard, this fatal attraction represented a threat: “With the Virtual, we enter not only upon the era of the liquidation of the Real and Referential, but that of the extermination of the Other. / It is the equivalent of an ethnic cleansing which would not just affect particular populations but unrelentingly pursue all forms of otherness. / The otherness… / Of the world – dispelled by Virtual Reality. (Perfect Crime, 109)” (30). But one could critique this by arguing that all thinking activity requires an act of simulacrum: “…meaning is a rational simulacrum of things. Disarming the other of its otherness by representing it and building ‘realities’ as worlds to inhabit are one and the same thing. It is simply thinking” (35). Furthermore, simulacrum is an integral component of mystical or spiritual experience: “We know that this ‘other’ real exists, and often we butt into it, but we do not live in it, except perhaps in some moments of thoroughly private and nearly mystical experience, because the human mind is an indefatigable fabricator of meaning, and meaning is a rational simulacrum of things” (35).

But Baudrillard hits upon the same Foucauldian criticism of the illusory nature of our freedom, this time made possible by the mesmerizing nature of simulacrum: “…it is a simulacrum of activity that conceals the fundamental passivity of the user, just as the world outside prisons is for Baudrillard a simulacrum of freedom that conceals the fundamentally carceral nature of society (‘Precession,’ 12)” (31). And furthermore, the more insidious effect of simulacra is the way they disempower us by causing us to become disillusioned by the whole world: “[Baurdillard:] ’The illusion of the world… is volatilized in psychosensorial telereality, in all these sophisticated technologies which transfer us to the virtual, to the contrary of illusion: to radical disillusion. (27)’”

Over time, Baudrillard began to use the terms simulacra and virtual reality interchangeably. Meanwhile, on the other hand, there is a more cheery understanding of the virtual posited by Lévy. He argues instead that virtual reality does not in any way weaken the real: [Lévy, Qu’est-ce que le virtuel] “The virtual is by no means the opposite of the real. On the contrary, it is a fecund and powerful mode of being that expands the process of creation, opens up the future, injects a core of meaning beneath the platitude of immediate physical presence. (16)” (35)

Ryan’s point is not a judgment about the relative merits of either view of virtual reality so much as it is that we have always done it: “In our dealing with the virtual, we are doing what mankind has always done, only more powerfully, consciously, and systematically…. If we live a ‘virtual condition,’ as N. Katherine Hayles has suggested (How We Became Posthuman, 18), it is not because we are condemned to the fake but because we have learned to live, work, and play with the fluid, the open, the potential” (37). This, she suggests, derives from a linguistic imperative: “Language originates in a similar need to transcend the particular. The creation of a system of reusable linguistic types (or langue) our of an individual or communal experience of the world is a virtualizing process of generalization and conceptualization” (38). In other words, language itself is virtualization of a kind. So is music: “The effect of music, according to Langer, is to create a ‘virtual time’ that differs from what may be called ‘clock-time’ or ‘objective time’ in that it gives form to the succession of moments and turns its own passing – transfigured as durée – into sensory perception” (42-3). So are novels. So is television. Etc..

I hasten to add that while I think it is important for us to realize that virtualization is not unique to our time, we cannot lose sight of what is unique about our time, namely the increasing value of knowledge in our society (38) and the specific way in which we have designed our virtualizations to match our evolving worldview, i.e. the Internet as it is now. To say that we have always – and will always – virtualize our world is not to say that the Internet as it exists now is inevitable, or in other words, that our Internet takes an inevitable form.

The spirit of this book is very similar to Wertheim’s, and Ryan has drawn significantly from Wertheim’s work. But she fills in a gap ignored by Wertheim, i.e. the birth of the novel as a new kind of space: “As a real object inscribed in space and time, the work of art is in the world, but as a virtual object that creates its own space and time, it is not of the world” (42). The transformation of the novel provides insight into the changing worldview of which it is a part, and therefore its expressions (I might say ‘symptoms’) are the same with those of technology. For example, our worldview precludes why questions; we design technologies because we can, and we create texts because we can: “The attitude promoted by the electronic reading machine is no longer ‘What should I do with texts?’ but ‘What can I do with them’” (47)? And just as Carr argues that the Internet is turning us into ‘pancake people’, Ryan argues that, “The reader produced by the electronic reading machine will therefore be more inclined to graze at the surface of texts than to immerse himself in a textual world or to probe the mind of an author…. The non-holistic mode encouraged by the electronic reading machine tends to polarize the attitude of the reader in two directions: reading becomes much more utilitarian, or much more serendipitous, depending on whether the user treats the textual database as what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus) call a striated space, to be traversed to get somewhere, or as a smooth space, to be explored for the pleasure of the journey and for the discoveries to be made along the way” (47). Our weakness is being our inability to construct holistic meaning; and our cherished value is more and more becoming getting somewhere as fast as possible.

Sometimes it’s easier to come at the problem from another angle. It’s difficult to see the technological mindset because it appears invisible as “second nature.” One way to defamiliarize this thinking is to look to other areas that may shed light on this mindset. The reason I find this book helpful is because I can use trends in art and literature as windows into our technological thinking. Ultimately, this is the approach I plan to take in the PhD, drawing on all sorts of art theory.