virtuality 2

Wim van Binsbergen, Virtuality as a key concept in the study of globalisation: Aspects of the symbolic transformation of contemporary Africa

2. Introducing virtuality

2.1. Virtuality provisionally defined

In my view virtuality is one of the major underlying themes in the context of globalisation.
The terms virtual and virtuality have a well-defined and illuminating history, which in its broad sweep of space and time, its multi-lingual aspect and its repeated changes of meaning and context, reminds us of the very globalisation process we seek to illuminate by the use of these terms. Non-existent in classical Latin (although obviously inspired by the word virtus there), they are late-medieval neologisms, whose invention became necessary when, partly via Arabic versions of Aristotle's' works, his Greek concept of du\na±mii ('potentiality, power, quadrate') had to be translated into Latin.12 While the Scholastic/ Aristotelian philosophy, with its emphasis on general potential to be realised in the concrete, gradually retreated from most domains of North Atlantic intellectual life, the terms found refuge in the expanding field of physics, where virtual velocity, virtual moment, virtual work became established concepts around 1800. This was a century after optics had formulated the theory of the 'virtual image': the objects shown in a mirror image there do not really exist, but they are merely illusory representations, which we apparently observe at the end of the light beams connecting the object, the surface of the mirror, and our eye. In our age of information technology the term 'virtual' has gained a new lease of life,13 which takes its cue from the meaning given to the term in optics.
In the globalisation perspective we frequently refer to products of the electronic industry, and the furtive, intangible projections of texts and images on electronic screens is an obvious example of virtuality. Virtual reality has now become a cliché of the post-modern experience: computer games and simulations which - with extreme suggestions of reality - conjure up, for the consumer, vicarious experiences in the form of illusions. As electronic media, like television and video, march on in contemporary Africa, it is also in that continent that we can make out this form of virtuality in the context of the globalisation process.
But the applicability of the concept of 'virtuality' extends further. Drawing on a notion of 'virtual discourse' which while inspired by Foucault (1966) is in fact equivalent to that of performative discourse in analytical philosophy,14 Jules Rosette (1996) in a splendid recent paper reserves the notion of virtuality for a specific discursive situation: the

'symbolic revindications of modernity's broken promise' (1996: 5),

which play a central role in the construction of postcolonial identity:

'When a virtual discourse becomes a master cultural narrative [ e.g. authenticité, négritude ] , individuals must accept it in order to validate themselves as members of a collectivity' (1996: 6).

This allows her to link the specific form of postcolonial political discourse in Zaire (for a strikingly similar example from Nigeria under Babangida, cf. Apter 1996) to the macro-economic predicament of Africa today, of which the elusive magic of money then emerges as the central symbol.
Inspiring as this is, it is not necessary to limit the concept of virtuality to that of explicit, verbal discourse, and there is much to be said for a much wider application, encompassing implicit beliefs, the images on which the electronically-inspired use of the concept of virtuality would concentrate, and object. Here we may allow ourselves to be inspired by a recent paper by Rüdiger Korff (1996) even if our emphasis is to be on the cultural and symbolic rather than - as in Korff's case - on the technological and economic side:

'Globalization is accompanied by virtuality. The financial markets gained autonomy by producing the goods they trade among themselves and thereby developed into speculators' 'Monopoly'. Virtuality is well shown by the information networks in which the hardware determined the possibilities for person to person interaction. This allows an anonymity in direct interaction. All personality features are hidden, and virtual personalities take over the conversation. Even the world of commodities is virtualized. While for Marx a commodity had two aspects, use- and exchange value, today a 'symbolic' value has to be added. Traditions and cultures are created as virtual realities and states offer imaginations in their search for political subjects. This indicates a new stage in the dialectic of disenchantment and mystification. While capitalism disenchanted morality and substituted it with the magic of commodities and technology (Verdinglichung), today commodity fetishism is substituted by post-modern virtual realities. (...) Appadurai (1990) mentions in a similar vein ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes. (...) As with commodities, these 'imagined worlds' and virtual realities develop their own dynamics and start to govern their creators for whom it is impossible to distinguish reality from virtuality. Just like Goethe says in the Magician's apprentice: 'Die Geister, die ich rief, die werd ich nicht mehr los.'15

Ultimately, virtuality stands for a specific relation of reference as existing between elements of human culture (A1, A2, ..., An). This relation may be defined a follows.:

Once, in some original context C1, Avirtual referred to (i.e. derived its meaning from) Areal; this relationship of reference is still implied to hold, but in actual fact Avirtual has come to function in a context C2 which is so totally dissimilar to C1, that Avirtual stands on itself; and although still detectable on formal grounds to derive from Areal, has become effectively meaningless in the new context C2, unless for some new meaning which Avirtual may acquire in C2 in ways totally unrelated to C1.

Virtuality then is about disconnectivity, broken reference, de-contextualisation, through which yet formal continuity shimmers through.