Thoughts on the Nature of the Virtual

9/11/12 12:48 AM

Articles
THOUGHTS ON THE NATURE OF THE VIRTUAL
July 2008 | BY CHARALAMBOS TSEKERIS

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This article seeks to formulate some brief sociological and philosophical

thoughts on the radically problematic nature and character of the virtual.
These ultimately aim to critically challenge and reinvent the complex
interrelations of contemporary virtuality to the real and the political. In such a
context, new media studies acquire a normative impetus.
In the age of the "hypersphere" (Regis Debray), the unbridled digitalization of
knowledge (including scientific knowledge) has rapidly signified a higher
universal cyber-order. In specific, cyberspace, or the ever-expanding, chaotic
"space of communication opened up by a world-wide interconnection of
computers and informational memories" (Levy 1997: 107), increasingly
constitutes a global social event.
Actually, nothing is more social than the hyper- or the cyber-world itself (an
evolving ateleological, deterritorialized and complex Deleuzian world, without
ends, centres, and Gods). It creatively welcomes alterity (or non-identity) and
generously gives a voice to almost everything. Everyone is potentially able to
efficiently communicate and socialize with everyone (who's not physically
present)! And this epochal non-linear process comprehensively allows
humanity (as a whole) to reflexively communicate with itself!
The on-going integration of many computers into a word-wide electronic
network enables human minds and communities to fruitfully interconnect to
each other in and through a self-expressive anonymous "thinking collective" or
a "collective intelligence" (Pierre Levy), which is unified in its vast diversity and
made possible through the fluid hypersphere. This ultimately coincides with
humanity's radical potential to consciously re-discover and realize itself
(without essences or transcendences): "History is the adventure of
consciousness" (Levy 2000: 46).
In this respect, cyberspace can be imaginatively compared with some kind of
a collective brain, an emergent "social megapsyche" or the "hypercortex of
Anthropia, the daughter of Gaia" (Levy 1998: 65, 114). Moreover, the
aforementioned fruitful interconnection of minds and communities has
eventually resulted in a dynamic circular-dialectical relationship between the
external and the internal, the visible and the hidden, the outside and the
inside, the objective and the subjective, the collective and the individual, the
textual and the corporeal, the global and the local1. These Cartesian
opposites have now become so thoroughly integrated that one can only
analytically distinguish between them (though clear-cut analytical definitions
are still very difficult).
In fact, they form a "seamless web" (Bruno Latour) where, according to the
well-established sociological principle of performative reality-construction
(see, for example, Law & Urry 2004), the making of what we know in-here (online) goes hand in hand with the making of what there is out-there (off-line).

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Accordingly, the (hyper-)technological, the socio-cultural and the individual

demiurgically co-produce each other and synergistically co-evolve, in a highly
unpredictable way. In this common sociotechnical universe, where order and
unity mutually come from "chaotic noise" (Heinz von Foerster), the future
cannot be fully predicted anymore; it just becomes a mere possibility. Nothing
is written in advance2.
In particular, no prediction can be decisively made if we do not seriously take
into account an indispensable "predictability horizon" - that is, the "short time
period during which above-chance prediction can occur in a chaotic system
Hence, the question of prediction shifts from 'controlling accurate values' to
'controlling the error propagation of inaccurate values'" (Katerelos & Koulouris
2004: 34).
Social agents often perform collective behaviours with unintended, unforeseen
and unanticipated macro-social structural outcomes and side-effects (taking
systems dramatically away from equilibrium): "Systems can reach 'tipping
points', when what seem like long-term stabilities unpredictably flip over into
their apparent opposite This provides a rich and critical agenda for a
complexity take on global dis/order" (Urry 2005: 251). Such "outcomes and
side-effects" have been right at the forefront of various debates by both
sociologists (e.g., Weber, Giddens, Beck, Lash) and economists (e.g., Hayek,
Menger, Smith). A panoptical mimetic re-presentation of the a-centric and
disorderly (but not anarchic) social totality is forever impossible and so is
steering (see Luhmann 1990).
We thus move beyond the Enlightenment need for grand intellectual heroes,
or compassionate social engineers (designing unflawed systems), and the
utopian/narcissistic modernist dreams (delusions) of unlimited theoretical
wisdom and epistemological perfection - without however devaluing science
or eschewing issues of value, justice, politics and accountability.
Complexity, performativity, self-reference, the "observer" (seen as changing
that which is observed), randomness, non-linearity and unpredictability
(leading to entropic chaos and generating surprises) in "post-modern" web
science have radically transformed our "received" homogeneous, purist and
orderly view of (techno)scientific knowledge, as being the magic selfimmunizing tool for deterministic control over nature and society, into a
second-order reflection on factuality and the ephemeral (contingent) limits of
predictability/controllability and objectification.
Of course, it follows that the virtual is not autonomous anymore. As Professor
Jeff Malpas has recently argued, "the non-autonomy of the virtual means that
the virtual is causally and contentually interconnected with the everyday
The non-autonomy of the virtual allows us to grasp both the constructed or
'fictional' character of the virtual as well as the reality of the virtual" (Malpas
2008).
In the same line, Manuel Castells imaginatively refers to the virtual as the
fundamental "material basis on which we live our existence, construct our
system of representation, practice our work, link up with other people, retrieve
information, form our opinions, act in politics, and nurture our dreams" (2001:
203).
Against the technophobic rejection of the internet (e.g. Virilio) and the
Baudrillardian simulation theory3 which is "strongly pessimistic and anti-realist
(though practical simulation is both future-oriented and empiricist) virtuality
theory is equally strongly optimistic (although practical virtual reality is open to
criticisms of nostalgic reconstruction of Enlightenment ideals)" (Cubitt 2007).
Thus, the "contingent", "relational" and "rhizomatic" virtual world is no less real
(or less promising) than "real life" (off-line world). Virtual reality is exactly as
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real as life off line, even if it is not always actualized.

Contrary to the widespread post-structuralist myth of a virtual life completely
free from the physical constraints of biological bodies and materiality, as well
as any form of cyberutopian voluntarism "which argues that dematerialization
allows participants to liberate themselves from normative fixity ... we should
look to the normative orders that operate in cyberspace in order to explain the
kinds of materiality that are in fact produced there" (Slater 2002: 228).
The virtual cannot merely be seen as either "mirroring" (realistic determinism)
or "eliminating" (visualistic determinism) the physical and the corpo-real. This
calls for a middle situation whereby "a text-based virtual world might be an
extension of the corporeal, as well as the physical a refiguration or perhaps
rather an incarnation of the textual" (Sunden 2003: 109).
But where is the so-called "normative dimension" (Andrew Sayer) around
here? Perhaps, it is located within systematic democratic attempts to actively
reject the internet as celebrating the universal advance of neo-liberalism, the
dissolution of the social bond (through forms of digital inequality and injustice)
and the commodification of knowledge and the contents of consciousness.
Instead of merely reproducing the silent oppressive logic of capitalism, new
media technologies (especially, web 2.0) should strategically foster emerging
on-line social network models and radical electronic citizenship practices, as
alternative forms of political engagement and action (potentially available to
oppositional, oppressed, or excluded social groups and communities).
Social web is thus an important means of consciousness-raising and
empowerment (globalization from below), which optimistically signifies the
critical use of technology (digital media of communication and other cultural
forms) to enact small (everyday) revolutions in the here-and-now, to increase
the sense of community, and to serve the vital need for global peace, equality,
and justice (Tsekeris 2007).
It also signifies resistance to the capitalist waves of transforming the surfer
into a commodity, into a passive informational being or, more generally, into
something other than human. In the last instance, as Arun Kumar Tripathi
perceptively suggests, we ought to "develop a new mode of action to deal with
technological development", as well as to "make a plea for a NEW ETHICS,
which can be defined as "Technological Ethics" and to develop a suitable
"technikethik" with "Umgangswissen"" (Tripathi 2005).
What we additionally need here is a critical discursive form of "online
pedagogy" (Andrew Feenberg), which would be able to empirically
demonstrate internet's humanist dimension (over against contemporary
nihilistic expressions of "post-humanism") and emancipatory orientation. The
global cyberworld demands a comprehensive humanist political project in
order to substantially "help people tolerate each other" (Dominique Wolton).
Technological progress cannot enhance human and social communication
unless we courageously set into motion the subversive dynamic of an
everyday practice-oriented Virtualpolitik (Losh 2005).
Notes
1 According to the "five rules of virtuality" formulated by Steve Woolgar (2002:
14-20):
The uptake and use of the technologies depend crucially on local social
context.
The fears and risks associated with new technologies are unevenly socially
distributed.
Virtual technologies supplement rather than substitute for real activities.
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The more virtual the more real.

The more global the more local.
2 In the 20th century, the static view of truth had been actively replaced by a
dynamic, multi-dimensional and changing truth bounded by perspective, time
and space. To a large extent, this was due to the reflexive sensitization of
modern science, from Biology to the Human Sciences, which gradually begun
to self-consciously and self-critically look at itself and discover its own limits
and weaknesses, especially since the first formulations of early 20th century
Physics (e.g. Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, Heisenberg's Theory of
Uncertainty and Prigogine's Theory of the Dissipative Structures).
3 For the French philosopher and media theorist Jean Baudrillard, society has
gradually become "a self-replicating Code, a homeostatic system". According
to the simulacrum's four historical phases (Cubitt 2007):
(a) "it is the reflection of a profound reality"
(b) "it masks and denatures a profound reality"
(c) "it masks the absence of a profound reality"
(d) "it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum"
References
Castells, M. (2001) The Internet Galaxy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cubitt, Sean. "Simulation and Virtuality." Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology.
Ritzer, George (ed). Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Blackwell Reference Online.
13 June 2008
http://www.sociologyencyclopedia.com/subscriber/tocnode?id=...
Katerelos, I. & A. Koulouris (2004) "Is prediction possible? Chaotic behaviour
of Multiple Equilibria Regulation Model in cellular automata topology"
Complexity 10(1): 23-36.
Law, J. & Urry, J. (2004) "Enacting the social" Economy and Society 33(3):
390-410.
Levy, P. (1997) Cyberculture. Rapport au conseil de l'Europe. Paris: Odile
Jacob.
Levy, P. (1998) Qu'est-ce que le virtuel?. Paris: La Dcouverte.
Levy, P. (2000) World Philosophie. Le marche, le cyberespace, la conscience.
Paris: Odile Jacob.
Losh, E. (2005) "Virtualpolitik: Obstacles to Building Virtual Communities in
Traditional Institutions of Knowledge" Center for Studies in Higher Education.
Paper CSHE-9-05. http://repositories.cdlib.org/cshe/CSHE-9-05
Luhmann, N. (1990) Essays on Self-Reference. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Malpas, J. (2008) "The Non-Autonomy of the Virtual" Ubiquity 9(19).
Slater, D. (2002) "Making Things Real" Theory, Culture & Society 19(5/6):
227-245.
Sunden, J. (2003) Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual
Embodiment. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
Tripathi, A. K. (2005) "Reflections on Challenges to the Goal of Invisible
Computing" Ubiquity 6(17).
Tsekeris, Charalambos. "Technopolitics." Blackwell Encyclopedia of
Sociology. Ritzer, George (ed). Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Blackwell
Reference Online. 13 June 2008
http://www.sociologyencyclopedia.com/subscriber/tocnode?...
Urry, J. (2005) "The Complexities of the Global" Theory, Culture & Society
22(5): 235-254.
Woolgar, S. (ed.) (2002) Virtual society? Technology, cyberbole, reality.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Author's Bio
Dr. Charalambos Tsekeris is currently lecturing at Panteion University of
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Social and Political Sciences, Department of Psychology, Athens, Greece. He

graduated from Brunel University (Department of Human Sciences, 2000) and
earned his doctoral degree in Sociology and Epistemology from Athens
Panteion University (Department of Sociology, 2006). He is a member of the
Greek Sociological Association, co-editor of the peer-reviewed Intellectum
Interdisciplinary Journal, and an active researcher on the complex
relationships between technoscience, cyberculture and democratic politics.
Source: Ubiquity Volume 9, Issue 28 (July 15 - 21, 2008)

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