Performing VirtualitiesPapersPerforming Virtualities: Liminality on and off the 'Net'Rob Shields

 

1. The Realism of the Virtual

What is contrasted in the real versus virtual dichotomy which dominates not only popular but academic discussion of computer-mediated communication and digital environments? When sociologists and political economist think the virtual, it is often simply in relation to the real and a series of dualisms which pit the human against the technological, the developed against the underdeveloped, the natural against the artificial. If not, then it is an evolutionary matrix of technologies or scales of interaction which pre-determines the logic of analysis. These attempts to section the mass of data have the advantage of simplifying phenomena but the fetishization of processes and their fixation on reifying complexity into a simple plane of reference hampers thought from moving beyond merely a strategic summation.

Nor can the term, ‘virtual’ simply be dismissed as an overused and under-defined label. Rhetorically, it is one of the most important marketing terms for the development of a putative high tech, knowledge-oriented ‘virtual society’ _ not much of a question-mark about that.

In many discussions, ‘virtual’ is vaguely, and unhelpfully, contrasted with ‘real’. But to describe something as ‘virtual’ indicates that it is not strictly according to definition, as in ‘virtual office’, which to say, not literally an ‘office’ as one might understand a built ‘office’ to be, but an office ‘in effect’.

This example illustrates how being ‘not quite’, say, an ‘office’ can shade into being a new form of the office which necessitates a change in the definition 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 ‘virtually’–‘in 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 communion–did eating the host at mass amount to receiving or communing with Christ by mouth, as well as spiritually? ‘Virtualism’ is the Calvinistic doctrine of Christ’s 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 noun–‘The 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 person’s 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 entitlements–a ‘credit profile’ is one’s 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 traditional conventions of paper media (such as 2D and 3D graphs or axonometrics and linear perspectives). These ‘virtuals’ might be distant; might be something invisible but nonetheless significant in its effects, or might be references to informal arrangements or latent factors. For example, even on a strictly local scale, the term ‘virtual teams’ has come to describe more than far-flung work groups managed through email and phone or videoconferencing. They have become all groups that are assembled to address particular types of problem, to respond to crises or to pursue very specific projects–springing into action with the lightness of electrons, and winding up their operations at the conclusion of a project. If these teams are fleeting, they can be recalled back into existence, like a computer file redisplayed on a video screen (see Lipnack 1997; Hughes 1998). They are virtual if only because they are neither face-to-face nor propinquitous (local); rather they are far-flung, intangible, and latent. Their supporting infrastructure is a rented communications link and thus they leave few tangible traces other than email records and archived videoconference recordings. All such virtual objects, sets and environments have an existence which is less typical of the phenomenologically present-at-hand and more typical of the non-existent and non-present, such as is the status of mathematical sets which exist only by virtue of their members (Table 1).

Qualities of Virtual Objects and Environments:-distant-dispersed-invisible but significant-informal latent-intangible-fleeting

[Table 1. Virtual Objects and Environments]

 

The Digitally Virtual

What are virtual spaces? ‘Virtual’ implies a space or a spatial relation; it is places, relationships, values. It uproots and carries off everyday spatial relations, places, relationships and values. In the case of digital domains or environments, ‘virtual space’ is a product of the recasting of communication as a space or environment. However, the telephone has long intervened in our sense of the world as a space of distance by providing virtual auditory spaces in which, usually, a person in one place is brought into earshot, so

to speak, of a person in a distant place (see Ronell 1989). Calling a telephone conversation a type of virtual space forces us to re-examine the oddness of the idea of a virtual space which is imagined to be enduring and independent of geographical spaces. The spatialisation of communication as an multi-variable environment rather than a bi-polar line of exchange back and forth between two callers comes with addition of the visual. While futurists long anticipated ‘videophones’ this was rarely conceived of as a full-fledged environment, merely an animated image to go with the speaking voice. ‘The Virtual’ is imagined as a ‘space’ between participants, a computer-generated common-ground which is neither actual in its location or coordinates, and nor is it merely a conceptual abstractions, for it may be experienced ‘as if’ lived for given purposes. As Bogard points out, virtual spaces cannot properly be said to be in the same locale as one or the other of the participants (2000). Virtual spaces are indexical, in Pierce’s sense, in that they are interstitial moments (Shields 2000a; see also Elmer 1998). But, as Christine McCarthy warns in her study of an virtual building (2000), because of its intimate relation to the material, any notion of escape into cyberspace will be a faked departure, a ‘foreign domesticity’.

 In digital domains, the network, in all its computing and telecommunications infrastructure, the conventions of digital addressing and of data processing, precedes space in an even more literal manner than Baudrillard could have dreamt of when he remarked, ‘the map proceeds the territory’ (1990:1). Even the current notion of the website is a gloss on what is a strictly codified manner of retrieving and displaying data. Webpages themselves are composed out of linked elements such as graphic image files, punctuated by hypertext links to other data and files. Hypertext links as indexes ‘caught on the threshold of departure, signalling to another page or text. It is paradoxical because it appears to be an interior gateway. To indulge in an architectural metaphor, it is less a portal to the outside and more like a hidden passage in a building– a door to the inside, that leads out somewhere else, reinforcing the sense of self-sufficient totality achieved in the ‘Net. Ambiguity thus becomes ‘mystery’ in the absence of a span across a clear categorical divisions (in this case, distinctions such as inside and outside, here and there, break down)’ (Shields 2000a).

Webpages do not distinguish between internal and external, the native and the foreign. They are so riddled with links to data stored elsewhere that it is a leap of imagination indeed to conjure up what we call, without examining its lack of wholeness, a ‘page’. It has the being of a set not an object per se. In virtual space, it is not unusual to discover that such partial objects come to be re-imagined as complete wholes. The illusory quality of virtual identity reminds one of Deleuze and Guattari’s question, ‘What is the individuality of a day, a season, an event? ... a degree, an intensity, is an individual,

a Heccéité that enters into composition with other degrees, other intensities, to form another individual. ...these ... imply a flutter, a vibration in the form 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 Kingdom’s ‘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 is no virtual Auschwitz. Virtual memorials focus on testimonial and eulogy text over monumentality (see for example, the Virtual Vietnam Memorial at http://www.VirtualWall.org). These often include testimonials to a person or a form of ‘Visitor’s Guest Book’ commentary on the power of physical monuments, or of remains, which the virtual supplements but does not supplant.

 It is not just that monumentality might be difficult to ‘render’ because of its multiple-levels of meaning (see Lefebvre 1991). The social and moral force of sacred and historic sites rests on their ability to create a sense of timeless historicity of positive ‘moral value’ whereby the collective past is stitched into not only the present, personal life of a witness but into the social future. This form of remembrance (of values) is not only recollection, but repetition (continuing to hold those values). This is also true in a negative manner, as attested to in the many debates over the risk of memorials being treated as celebrations of past wrongs atrocities: thus, war memorials are criticized as celebrating war, as well as remembering the dead. Such geographical places are topoi, mnemonic figures for remembering by. As indexes of specific (and we must add, reified) elements the past, they are also thresholds; ‘liminal’ zones, on the cusp of the present and past. As such they are the infrastructure of a memo-technology by which people come, among other things, to understand their personal biographies in relation to the historical narrative of a group (Kirmayer 1996).

 A search of the internet reveals not only ‘virtual worlds’ but also: virtual hospitals; florists; virtual tours and virtual tourists; many games (virtual Pool); towns (eg. Springfield Mass., or Santa Cruz Cal.); music, malls, virtual girlfriends (Bernadette.net in Australia has long been one of the most famous websites); an ancient Egyptian ‘virtual temple’ (which is probably throughly contemporary and accessed via an American server), and a virtual Jerusalem (which leaves one wondering about whether or not heaven could be described as ‘virtual’?). In as much as these pose a challenge to actual institutions, sites or embodied practices (of retail consumption, for example) the evocative power of these virtual alternatives may well lie in the concealed manner in which they evoke some notion of a desirable ideal. This might include ‘frictionless’ transactions (online banking), the overcoming of distance (virtual support groups), a pure state of perfect service (ecommerce), unquestioning love (virtual friends), sexual dominance (virtual porn) an omniscient view (webcams) or complete information (web desktops) or pure sociality (virtual community) and so on. The multiple uses of ‘virtual’ hint at more than the strictly digital; the term has connotations of effectiveness and success. The virtual assimilates a

sense of the ideal, of the possibility of alternative actualizations of those ideas, and of the pure form of objects, characters and relationships.

 ‘The virtual’ is indeed a desirable epithet, redolent of its barely-masked links to the concept of virtue (with which is shares a root in the medieval Latin virtus–from vir, ‘man’). In this older usage, a ‘virtual person’ is what we might understand in more contemporary usage a person of some outstanding virtues, ‘Possessed of certain physical virtues or capacities’; or, an embodiment of divine power (OED). Virtual personae, objects and environments increasingly take-on the powers and influence once held as inalienably human and embodied attributes. As ‘People disappear into the medium itself’ (Bogard 2000) The criterial for sorting out the human and the animatronic, here versus there; ingroup versus outgroup disappears. Intimacy can be built only on abstract commonalities (ie. stereotypes), entangling not only social relations but geographical positions and relationships in a form of trust which is rarely found in urban social interaction.

 2. Philosophy and Virtualism

Drawing on Bergson’s Matter and Memory, Deleuze (1988) and Lefebvre (1989:381-85), the virtual as an ontological category can be examined against the ideal and actual; the possible and abstract; the fatalistic and utopian. Only on this basis is it possible to understand the relationship of the virtual with other performative spaces, and the achievement of sociable relations, including trust and intimacy, within virtual environments and via computer-mediated interaction.

 Like set theory and other virtual objects, philosophers such as Bergson and Deleuze have pointed to the virtual quality of memories or fictions, and argued that they are real in their own terms. Dreams, for example, often seem so real, so ‘lived’, that we might confuse them with an actual experience. Evoking Bergson’s admiration for Proust’s recovery of the unwinding passage of time in A La Recherche du temps perdu, Deleuze contrasts the virtual with the ‘actual’, arguing that the opposite of the real is the possible. This is a formula repeated by Deleuze commentators such as Stivale (1998) and Hardt:

 

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).

 

Bergson’s approach is better, but nonetheless misleading in contrasting the actual, the virtual, the real and the possible in such a manner that the terms become entangled. It helps to put Deleuze’s terms as a table. If one struggles to put meaningful terms into the matrix that is created, the expected correspondences between terms in the same row and column don’t appear. There distinctions between the terms are not clear, however. In many of his commentaries, Deleuze leaves one floundering to conceive of a ‘possible’, that is, a non-existing virtuality. He himself argues this is an impossibility, a null-set (See Table 2). Sketching in the ‘real and actual’ as the material (in square brackets) produces a Platonism in which the real includes both ideal forms and material objects (cf. Badiou 2000). The abstract, understood as a transcendental that exists only in concept but not in reality, fits poorly.

 

                     Real (existing) Possible (non-existing)

Virtual :     ideal

Actual :     [material]             probability

 [Table 2. Bergsonian matrix contrasting the virtual and actual]

 Deleuze goes on to clarify these terms in a manner which suggests another reading and arrangement of the terms in which the primary distinctions are between the actual and the ideal as well as the real and the possible:

 

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 Lefebvre’s deepest objections against Bergsonism in all its forms).

 

                 Real (existing)     Possible (not existing)

Ideal :       virtual                   abstract

Actual :     material                probability

 

[Table 3. Matrix of the forms of the real and possible]

 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 non-identity 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.

 Retrospectively, it is clear that there has been a history and succession of socially virtual ‘worlds’. These anticipate the ability of information and communications technologies to make present what is both absent and imaginary. That is, they actualize the ideal by embodying and performing the philosophically virtual (as it has been sketched above). At the same time, it would be remiss not to observe that liminoid genres and spaces ‘realize’ the possible. They traffic in the impossible perhaps to an even greater extent than the probable through mechanisms such as the inversion of social order or the suspension of production. Traditional carnival days coincided with the events of the spiritual calendar. The carnivalesque is an actualization and realization that joins the abstract and virtual in a miraculous performance which has the strange quality of thus polluting the real with the possible, mixing up the actually real (ie. the material) with the actually possible (ie. the probable). Hence its revolutionary potential (and a hint about the relations involved in the truly revolutionary).

 The cinema is one example, but any number of rituals create, through a willing suspension of disbelief (for EuroAmericans), milieux in which rules other than those which conventionally govern the face-to-face interactions of actual bodies are the norm (for example, flash-backs and other temporal re-orderings, leaps from scene to scene and ‘superhuman’ powers). For most cultures, however, the collective ‘conjuring’ of altered modes of perception and understanding are more common practices (Cove 1989). The virtual spaces that populate the anthropological literature are lived more strongly than the mere ‘consensual hallucination’ envisioned for cyberspace (cf. Gibson 1984). Rituals inaugurate liminal zones which are the performative settings for rites of passage such as puberty or marriage (Turner 1974). These zones allow what is often a symbolic death or removal from one social status and birth into another. In between is a ‘time out of time’ on the ‘limen’ (threshold) of membership in a new group or a new social status. In these ritualized periods, the classic anthropological studies focus on how initiates are instructed in their new identity and responsibilities (cf. Van Gennep).

 Liminal zones share the characteristics of virtual spaces. The rules of quotidian face-to-face life are suspended or even inverted in a carnivalesque of norms. In their place, special rules of engagement rule the moment and the space. Like liminal zones and events, virtual spaces are ‘liminoid’ in that they are participated in on a temporary basis, and distinguished from some notion of commonplace ‘everyday life’. Although in recent media-stunts, people attempt to purchase all of the necessities of life via online shopping sources for a full year. However, they do not remain

logged-in participants in an online, virtual environment for the whole period, merely direct their consumer spending to retail sites on the World Wide Web.

 In other ways, virtual spaces supercharge and finally overpower qualities of liminality, such as Victor Turner’s famous dictum that liminality is ‘betwixt and between’ stages in the life process, located in special zones often between the urban/civilized/members and the wilderness/nature/outsiders (Turner 1974). Virtual space is not only betwixt and between geographical places in a non-place space of telemediated data networks, but participants take on specific ‘usernames’ or identities, many surreptitiously engage in activities they might not otherwise engage in. The greatest power of The Virtual–and perhaps its most widely discussed feature–has been in providing a matrix in which new modes of being and practices of becoming could be experimented with. In its early stages through the 1970s and 1980s, both few and tenuous guidelines were provided for the metaxis of the actual and the virtual, such that identities in one realm could be shed in the other. This charged, affectual space gains its character only as an extension of the rhythms and encounters of virtual bodies, sociable exchanges and animated tracings of vectors of hypertext links, none of which the space pre-exists even virtually. A liminal zone provides the potential for assuming new identities, and thus The Virtual became a liminoid space but not one directed at rites of passage, but rather at experimentation–like those other, sacred liminal spaces of advanced economies, the scientific laboratory (compare Woolgar 1988; Latour 1999).

 The digitally virtual is betwixt and between, a threshold between at least one immediate lived milieu and the distant ground of the other(s). In it, everything is representational, a convenient fiction by which participants ‘meet’ but only figuratively; elements interact ‘in essence’ but not physically. Even where there is no obvious performance, beyond the transmission, bricolage and the animation which is the labour of the technologies involved, there is always an innately human work of metaxis,  translation and imagination which transposes digital action and virtual encounters to the world of living animals and objects.

 Digitally actualizing the philosophically virtual

The significance of digitally virtual spaces is to realize a new mode for actualizing the philosophically virtual. Online interaction involves performing the virtual and negotiating our relation to the virtual on an ongoing basis. Not only is the quality of ideal-ness mobilized. Virtual space appears to have been accompanied by an adjustment of spatio-temporal categories to create a new ground of action, impacting the territorialization of the social (as a taken-for-granted plane of immanence) and of society (as an order of

power relations). While one might be skeptical of the journalistic visions of a ‘virtual’ society of telecommuters and net-addicted shut-ins, a more analytic focus reveals the virtualization of social spaces, action and qualitative shifts in categories which underpin value judgements in the spheres of justice, politics and economics.

 The Virtual rebounds on the material and the abstract. Instead of supplanting material, physical interaction, feminist critics have shown how people remain embodied and subject to risk and harm. This changes the Enlightenment tradition of simple dualisms of not only here and there, inside and outside, but of concrete and abstract, ideal and actual, real and fake, and transcendent and immanent. The either-or model is shifted in a tangible and everyday manner into a system of hybrids of the old dualisms which are best understood as intensities and flows.

 How then might ‘performance’ be understood not only in the case of the virtual but as a more general mediating action between the possible and the real? Who and what ‘performs’? The tenses of this verb and the careful regulation of what is admitted into the category of acting ‘subject’ of this performance signals a deep-seated settlement of the terms of agency and causal flows. What does ‘performance’ accomplish? As the spatiotemporal contours of ‘actionable’ domains which support agency change, so changes in agency and interaction follow. The Virtual infects the actual as a metaphor which moves from the realm of digital domains and computer technologies to become an organizing idea for government policies, everyday practices, and managerial strategies. The Virtual shifts the commonsense notions of the real away from the material. The virtual, as in a ‘virtual organization’, is more heavily invested with notions of collective performance and inhabitation than an a priori architectural object such as ‘the factory’ or ‘the office’.

 

An occupant still must occupy the disciplinary space...to occupy or inhabit...is to do more than take up space: "we live through a space which brings with it its own structuring of use into which we inject our own kinetic sense" (Davies 1990: 59).

Inhabiting is, therefore, inherently corporeal and suggests an adjustment between body and the...environment: ...making it ours, articulating those pleasures that can be accommodated and seeking ways of weaving in those pleasures for which the space was not planned (Roderick 1998:4).

 

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 status–a 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 soft–as much as hard–technology, 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 disconnections and policing of the virtual. Others, resorted to the sophisticated monitoring apparatuses of their militaries and private communications surveillance systems. This is a continuation of the ongoing struggle to domesticate the liminoid, to territorialize new representations of the world as a space of distance, difference and present-absences. Veering away, from a ‘virtual society’ to a canalized, controlled ‘abstract’ society of intelligence machines, is an illustration of the territorialization of the virtual, to use the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari (1987). This is, however, an ongoing process. If social settlements of power/knowledge and action are re-inscribed in a new time-space regime - one in which the virtual figures more prominently that it did in the past - then surely new social outcomes become possible; or, relatively speaking: a virtual society. Whether the artists of the undisciplined, early stages of the internet have found a ‘people’, cannot yet be answered, for ‘The Virtual’ is a work-in-progress. This is the meaning of the question-mark after any epithet such as virtual society or virtual space.

 Acknowledgments

My thought was much shaped by a seed grant and conferences hosted by the National Centre for Geographical Information and Analysis, at Santa Barbara, and the Metaphor Magic and Power Conference at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa, (see Shields 2000a) as well as to colleagues in the ‘Virtual Organization’ of Expertise and Knowledge Project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Challenges and Opportunities of the Knowledge-Based Economy Strategic Theme (seehttp://www.carleton.ca/~rshields/kbe/kbesummary.html).

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