Virtual to begin with?

Appeared in:  Subjektivität und Öffentlichkeit - Kulturwissenschaftliche Grundlagenprobleme virtueller Welten, eds. Mike Sandbothe and Winfried Marotzki (Cologne: Herbert von Halem 2000), 25-60

Much fuss is being made these days (and has been made for years) about the electronic virtual. Prophets say that we have entered the new millenium ahead of time and that it will be electronic paradise. - What is to be made of such assumptions?

In the first section a historical and critical survey of the usage and meaning of the term `virtual' is provided. Does it belong to the order of the real or oppose it? Contrary to the common claim that the virtual might replace the real, it seems rather to point to a plurality of different versions of reality.

In the second section counter-tendencies to current virtualization are addressed, in particular the revalidation of non-media forms of experience, such as can be observed today, complementing the advance of electronic media and putting particular emphasis on aspects which are inimitable and unsubstitutable by media-experience. The revalidations are concentrated around keywords such as `matter', `uniqueness´, or `body'. In contrast to the hyperspeed, transformability and artificiality of electronic worlds, what claims its own space and time, what's notexchangeable, but rather unrepeatable, is becoming important to us once again.

In the third section epistemological aspects connected with the current focus on the virtual are analyzed. To what extent has `reality' (no matter how different its shape and conception may have been) always implied virtual constituents? Faced by the electronic virtual the constructivist character of every kind of reality and the interpretivity of all apprehension of reality comes to our attention more clearly than ever before. If we consider the amount of imagination and fiction built in to every kind of reality (which we only straightforwardly take to be real when we forget these components), then we might very well say that reality has always been virtual to begin with.