I have these memories from my life. None of them happened…
The relationship between the virtual and the real
Baudrillard proclaimed that “[t]he real [Vietnam] war is waged by Coppola as it is by Westmoreland” — entangling the ‘real’ war and the cinematic simulation of the war as virtually the same event. He goes further, saying that this profound entanglement inspires us to believe that “the war in Vietnam ‘in itself’ perhaps in fact never happened…”
The deeply faithful, yet fictional, war simulation of Apocalypse Now provides emphasis to Baudrillard’s conception of simulation and how it colours our perception of what is being simulated. Like a cartoon caricature, the simulation brings forth elements from the real and draws particular focus on them. The same seminal work in which he discusses simulation also discusses simulacra — if a simulation is in some sense a caricatured copy of the real, a simulacrum is a caricatured copy without an original, a conception owing much to Benjamin’s ominous The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936). The core distinction made by Baudrillard between simulacra and simulation is one of originality and indexicality, of whether a ‘real’ correlative exists to anchor these virtual representations.
As similar sentiment to this philosophical approach can be found in the successful film The Matrix (1999). Midway through the film, the protagonist Thomas Anderson returns to the virtual world of the Matrix after learning of its profound artificiality. He has seen the ‘desert of the real’ and this virtual world where he had spent his entire life is exposed as fraudulent, a ‘lie’. In a car, he passes a restaurant where he used to eat and laments;
I have these memories from my life. None of them happened…
Even within the fantastic narrative of The Matrix, we might not want to pardon Anderson for his assessment of the non-reality of virtuality. How Anderson treats his past life, once he learns that it is a virtual simulation, signifies a distinct line being drawn between the virtual and the real that echoes Baudrillard and Benjamin. It is a shift in perception catalysed by a disavowal, a negation that places the virtual in an affecting relationship with what we see as real, and vice versa.
This has very real implications for us, in our normal discourse and in our perceptions of the virtual media that increasingly surround us. If we were to agree with Anderson, we ought to extend this sentiment to many of our contemporary interactions — if we engage in some activity in a simulated space, does it really happen? Do we feel comfortable saying that an interaction with another player in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game didn’t happen? What about a conversation with a friend on social media? And what about an exchange of letters with a distant pen-pal?
In this short essay, we will examine the dualism that is proposed in some of these philosophical frameworks. We will critically look at the inherent negation in the logic of virtual reality that affirms the distinction between the real and the virtual. We will also delve into the philosophy of virtuality, which deals with the intrinsic connections between the real and virtual. And ultimately, we hope to respond to Anderson’s lament.
In Times of the Technoculture (1999) Robins and Webster address the philosophy of Lévy as an example of an unquestioning distinction being made between the virtual and the real. The terminology shifts here towards a language of placed-ness, of being embodied or situated.
It is Lévy that introduces the discourse of placed-ness, but Robins and Webster want to temper Lévy’s somewhat utopian optimism. They cite Lévy for distinguishing the two worlds as follows, that orality in digital, virtual space differs from ‘archaic orality’ because:
[T]he direct bearer of knowledge is not the physical community and its bodily memory, but cyberspace, the region of virtual worlds, through which communities discover and construct their own objectives, and come to know themselves as intelligent collectives.
Lévy is saying that the physical ‘real’ is not where knowledge is located in this new paradigm of orality, but rather in a much more malleable, virtual, imaginative world that permits knowledge to be more flexibly and progressively applied.
Robins and Webster want to apply a more skeptical approach than Lévy’s, they want to “question the unreflective assertion that the new, deterritorialised technological knowledge space is a ‘better’ space than the other (i.e. embodied and situated) spaces.” They point to the fact that these digital technologies that have enabled and distributed virtual worlds have been created by globalised corporate interests. They go further to remark that as the technologies themselves are not capable of contradicting the corporate interests that created them, neither can the cyberculture that has grown from them.
The corporate ideology of globalisation and the network society is the ideology of the ‘absentee’ class. It is an ideology, moreover, that disavows the realities of actual globalisation.
Robins and Webster exact a ‘real’ political analysis of the virtual as it exists, accounting for its historical foundations. In doing so, they acknowledge on the one hand the discrepancy between these realities (one “disavowing” the other) while on the other hand exercising a bio-political handling of cyberspace as simulacrum — a simulacrum created by a particular class for a particular agenda (not unlike the Matrix).
Rheingold writes extensively on the industry of virtual reality, framing his debate in the context of the real technicians who strive to create worlds that are convincingly separate from ‘reality’. Writing Virtual Reality, he focuses more on how these worlds can exist, or at least be perceived, in separation. When discussing the visual requirements for virtual reality technology, he notes that “as long as you can detect an edge or boundary to what you can see, the size of the field is inadequate.” He acknowledges that virtual realities naturally strive to be immersive and immediate experiences and the extent to which a virtual reality can be seen as framed, cut or mediated is the extent to which it has fallen short of its aims. For Rheingold, virtual reality proper is nothing short of The Matrix, less of a medium and more an enveloping world where the suspension of disbelief is difficult to shake off.
A virtual reality for Rheingold is more than a Baudrillardian simulacrum or simulation and more than the culture or space that directly ‘disavows’ reality. He sees them as striving towards negating themselves as media in order to reassert themselves as realities. In this sense, the virtual disavows itself as a medium (and thence the ‘reality’ in which the medium exists) and the extent to which we buy into that disavowal, the extent to which we suspend our disbelief, is what can create a separation between the virtual and the real:
One way to see VR is as a magical window into other worlds, from molecules to minds. Another way to see VR is to recognize that in the closing decades of the twentieth century, reality is disappearing behind a screen.
As virtual media are marketed and recognised as other realities, reality that is not mediated (insofar as it is only mediated by the body) becomes threatened. While Rheingold appears to acknowledge the foundation of virtual reality in the reality of industry, he recognises that the perception of the virtual can have a destructive influence on the perception of reality in a similar manner to Robins. The virtual is “behind a screen”, a screen that is growing so broad and crystal clear as to become a reality.
In both of the above philosophies of the virtual, framed particularly around virtual reality, we find a crucial logic of negation through disavowal. This, despite grounding their discourses on the virtual in very real political and industrial contexts, accentuates the dichotomy of the virtual versus the real. Where Thomas Anderson disavows the virtual having seen the real, Robins, Webster and Rheingold describe the virtual as disavowing the real. Though they might differ in approach, they concur in their separation of the virtual and nonvirtual.
It may be the case that positing the virtual as a virtual reality is what creates this tension and resulting negation. Insofar as we conceive of digital media as striving to do away with their own borders, we may indeed feel threatened by a looming spectre putting our own world into retreat. Positing the virtual in a different way, however, may help us to see things differently — less antagonistically and with less apprehension.
Hayles interprets virtuality as “the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns.” She frames the virtual not as another reality but as an integral part of our reality — it is the level on which we render our reality intelligible.
This conception of the virtual allows us to abstract it from a conception of virtual reality as a disavowal of itself as a medium. By re-placing virtuality as information and pattern, we also benefit from a genealogical view of virtual reality not as a haunting otherness that threatens us but as a permutation of the media on which we already depend. We might then begin to see virtual media in the same way that we regard a good book, a novel that we can get ‘lost’ in or an educational text that can instruct and prepare us for situations that we imagine we might face in the future.
For Hayles, the virtual is a kind of supervenient level of pattern or information over the material level of randomness. This distinction between pattern and randomness is a deeply perceptual one, introducing a more truly phenomenological interpretation of how we interact with reality. For her, the virtual and the real are not separate, any more so than the world of living cells is separate from the worlds of molecules or atoms. Accordingly, just as any changes or events in the world of living cells has its analogue in molecules and atoms, so too does the world of the Matrix have its analogue in the desert of the real — even if that analogue is only the interaction of data sets in the Matrix’s computing apparatus.
The virtual is generated by and exists within forces in the ‘real’ world, namely technology and media:
Only when technological infrastructures have developed sufficiently to make rapid message transmission possible does information come into its own as a commodity[…] From this we can draw an obvious but nonetheless important conclusion: The efficacy of information depends on a highly articulated material base.
She implicitly rejects the notion of the virtual as otherness via her synthesis of virtual and non-virtual cultures in the posthuman, the point of view characterised by, amongst other things, thinking of “the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate”. Where other philosophers discussing virtuality have regarded the body as the quintessential example of the real, Hayles puts that too into question. By remarking on the prosthesis of the body we can begin to see it as another interface, where the prosthetic, mediatory role that a virtual reality plays between us and a computer database can be seen to reflect the prosthetic, mediatory role that our body plays between us and an otherwise inaccessible reality. Though this notion of the body as prosthetic leads to some problematic conclusions (is there a ghost in the bodily machine, to which prosthetics are attached?) this view would also lead us to conclude that interactions within either a real or virtual world can be phenomenologically the same.
In this supervenient relationship we can see the profound literalness of McLuhan’s refrain: the medium quite literally is the message — it constitutes it. In digital virtual realities, simulated media are the messages of the physical, ‘real’ silicon medium, in no more specially metaphysical a manner than if we encountered a photograph within a book. The difference can only be phenomenal — whether we see the book or only the photograph, if we see the computer or only the simulation — but we can only mistakenly perceive the message as separated from the medium in this manner. And this is the core fallacy of an immersed conception of virtual reality: it attempts to treat the message removed from the medium.
We can see that Hayles’ retort to Anderson’s lament would be a clear ‘no’ — his memories from his life happened, whether they happened in a ‘real’ world or in the machinations of a real database medium — these are ultimately the same world, ultimately governed by the same definitions and taxonomies.
The reason why a single remark from The Matrix is particularly relevant to this essay is primarily to illustrate the impact that philosophical debates can have upon popular culture and, with that, the prevalent discourse on such matters. The relationship between Simulacra and Simulation and The Matrix is mixed — on one hand the book gets a cameo in the film itself, on the other Baudrillard has publicly said that the film was based on ‘misinterpretations’ of his book — but still the film has to an extent served as a medium for such philosophies, however accurately, to be brought into popular culture. Philosophy not only has something to say about issues of virtuality but also sometimes the opportunity to affect prevalent conceptions.
Embedded deep within the narrative of The Matrix there is a convenient (desert of the) real to provide contrast against the virtual Matrix. But this work of fiction has the luxury of being able to choose which way they create their definition — they are able, by virtue of creating (and defining, and hence knowing) the film’s reality, to use it to illustrate the virtual in opposition to the really real. In our case we are condemned, by not knowing what our reality consists of but having created the virtual, to need to define reality by opposition. Reality is what we have found ourselves thrust into, abandoned, and we must come to terms with it through various virtual apparatus — be they cultural, physical or metaphysical.
All of our thinkers point out a dynamic change in our interactions and culture, ‘a new relation to knowledge’. Even Hayles states that “[t]he condition of virtuality implies[…] a widespread perception that presence/absence is being displaced and preempted by pattern/randomness.” In terms of the prevalence of virtual worlds, these thinkers all agree that something ‘new’ is happening, that the increasingly widespread ability to render artificial environments coincides with some new cultural permutations. However the important distinction to make in such an observation is that placing the virtual and nonvirtual in opposition to each other, through negation, disavowal or some other logic, implies some kind of neo-Benjaminian causation across the two worlds that would seem to be an untenable over-simplification.
The notion of virtual reality depicts a medium that seeks to negate itself — media that seek to become real. In this sense, the VR industry itself challenges our conceptions of media and reality that can only be addressed philosophically. As we continue to extend ourselves through media, we have to deal with the consequences of rendering the initial randomness of the reality we have been born into into something that serves our needs.
While we may be inclined to do away with Baudrillard’s emphasis on a separate, referential reality assigning credibility and authenticity to virtual simulation (and inauthenticity to simulacra), the way in which he illustrates Apocalypse Now as deeply influencing our perception of the Vietnam war is still of great value to us in ascribing a strong, entangled relationship between the virtual and the real. Every interaction we have in virtual space — be it simulation or a simulacrum — has an impact on our ‘real’ and situated world.
