CHAPTER TWO
The Virtue of the Virtual and the Virtual sense of Virtue’s Virtue
In which I define the virtual in two senses—strong and weak— and show the influence of digital technology’s emphasis on information
When we speak of the virtual from the perspective of the 21st century, we generally think of it as what Brooks Landon concisely defined as “A technologically created simulacrum of reality.”[1] It has become synonymous with the digital and artificial terrain, speaking to and from a vast landscape of the unreal. When pushed, we realize that the term carries other, broader implications than what surfaces. “Virtual” points to and creates spaces characterized by an odd tension with reality. Merriam-Webster defines it as “being such in essence or effect though not formally recognized or admitted,” and the American Heritage dictionary includes “Existing in the mind, especially as the product of the imagination. Used in literary criticism of a text.” These discussions open up the weak sense of the virtual as being less than what appears.
The stronger sense of the term is largely obsolete. The American Heritage dictionary acknowledges that virtual still carries a lingering sense of “moral excellence” or “goodness,” as well as “a particularly efficacious, good, or beneficial quality.” It allows that virtue also deals with something foundational, something essential: “On the grounds or basis of; by reason of,” giving the example of “well-off by virtue of a large inheritance.”[2] This sense of the virtual is a strong sense of the term, defining the virtual as a qualitatively important (although unseen) factor that has causal, generative force. This force, its strength, is (importantly) equated with a sense of moral goodness.
The term “virtual” thus develops two trajectories based on divergent understandings of an “observable non-reality.”[3] The virtual’s chronologically prior strong sense is a present, active, slumbering power or potentiality that inheres as the foundation of a thing—its particularly good, efficacious quality. The virtual, here, is a secret inheritance ingredient within a material thing, left latent by circumstance. This virtue was its beneficent, innate goodness, associated with moral rightness, unexpressed but present. This sense of the virtual allows reality to be more than what appears, nourished by its unseen virtual potential.
The common use of the virtual (echoing Landon’s sense of the virtual as a “technologically created simulacrum”) in the present day is the opposite—the virtual is fabrication, mere appearance, an unreality whose presentation to us suggests a form of reduction. This weak version refers to something that exists as an essence deployed, technologically, at odds with what the surrounding reality would support. Things that are virtual are less than what they appear to be. Alternately, when we remain engrossed by the enhanced properties embedded within a virtual reality dislocated or abstracted from a geographically present location, we look at the drab, mundane material reality as somewhat lacking. The virtual thus also makes reality appear to be less than it is.
The contrast between the virtual as more than, or less than, what appears becomes important to understand in a culture increasingly informed by digital technologies. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies In Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, 1999) provides a discussion of the “virtual” in its activated, contextual form. She defines virtuality as a “cultural perception,” and describes how technologies developed after WWII installed a notion of the virtual based on the idea that “material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns” (14-15), patterns that can be abstracted. Put into the terms above, the material is reality, and information patterns are the virtual,[4] the “observable non-reality” that is interpreted as the essential, extractable element of the material. This extracted element is the core ingredient that allows the replication of subsequent “virtual realities.” Because our lives are anchored in technologies that recreate this situation, Hayles argues that a shift occurs:
…the impression is created that pattern is predominant over presence. From here it is a small step to perceiving information as more mobile, more important, more essential than material forms. When this impression becomes part of your cultural mindset, you have entered the condition of virtuality (19).
Due to this value shift, and because the virtual is set against the “actual” or the “real,” reality itself becomes far more about perceptions, appearances, and patterns than what is actually (materially) present. Our acculturated acclimates us to look at things such that we identify the real as the virtual, causing the material to become latent and disposable.
Hayles then makes an interesting point about the relationship of narratives to information patterns: although on the one hand a “narrative” seems like a bit of code or an abstractable element, she finds that “literary texts give these ideas and artifacts a local habitation and a name through discursive formulations whose effects are specific to that textual body.” She thus argues that an “abstract pattern can never fully capture the embodied actuality, unless it is as prolix and noisy as the body itself” (24). This leads to a change, although not one that society takes seriously. Once information becomes essentialized and “pattern” is seen as real, it is contrasted against “randomness” in a way that makes them “not so much opposites as complements or supplements to one another. Each helps to define the other; each contributes to the flow of information through the system” (25). We believe that information is what confirms our pattern, and ignore as noise random facts that seems extraneous or contradictory to the pattern we favor. The virtual pattern, once part of reality, becomes the only reality we inhabit.
Problematically, this perspective partakes of an overly simplified sense of information. Information, as Hayles clarifies, actually has a paradoxical relationship with uncertainty: “information increases as the probability that the event will occur diminishes; the more unlikely the event, the more information it conveys” (32). That the sun will rise scarcely counts as information—that the moon would not, would be. Our social emphasis on dematerialization corresponds with information’s increasing importance. Hayles interprets this as “as an epistemic shift toward pattern/randomness and away from presence/absence,” and argues that. It “ affects human and textual bodies on two levels at once, as a change in the body (the material substrate) and as a change in the message (the codes of representation)” (29). Cohesion becomes increasingly important as we invest more time in non-physical spaces and realities: information that confirms our sense of reality satisfies our sense that we’re at home. Information that would disconfirm our understanding of reality becomes more important to ignore.[5]
This epistemic shift has implications for what we understand the term “virtual” to mean. In an epistemology of presence, the term “virtual” valued the existence of moral goodness as an effective power that lingered under the surface. An informatic epistemology, which values the power gained by grasping patterns, understands mastering patterns as inherently good. Power transformed from something that rested within reality, such that everything potentially exceeded how it appeared, to an ability to replicate this pattern beyond a particular manifestation of it.
Hayles argues that this situation is modeled in terms of programming and coding, when a signifier at one level can shift to becoming the signified at another level, and that these levels change through a single, global command. In a sense, the shift to informatics indicates that we are outside the metrics of good and evil, if not beyond it. The virtue of the virtual at the level of informatics includes the power to offer a global command that allows different kinds of patterns to govern a shared experience of “reality,” changing its constitution by altering its base rules.
In the original Blade Runner, this power is exercised by giving police (Blade Runners) the authority to understand the psychological pattern that indicates who is human, and the Replicant who is “virtually identical” to humans. Mastering this pattern also provided the power to “retire” a replicant without committing a crime In Blade Runner 2049, Wallace’s “mastery” over the pattern/randomness binary allows him not only to save humanity from famine by creating a synthetic farming system and to redevelop/reprogram Replicants, but also to create adaptable holographic companions named “Joi” designed to fulfill male desires (“Everything you want to hear/Everything you want to see”).[6]
The relationship that develops between K. and his Joi reveals that this dematerialized program is a virtual human. Initially glimpsed, Joi’s virtual reality seems to speak to her diminished capacity: a disembodied artificial intelligence (gendered female) designed as entertainment. Its inorganic existence gives it an autonomy and independence that the organic Replicants lack, but this existence is balanced by programming that makes Joi(s) orient around male desire to find existential meaning. Villenueve describes Joi as follows:
But what it says about today is our relationship with technology, the way it’s seen in the movie that our character cannot have an intimate relationship but with what would be an app, with a machine. That machine is designed to fulfill his desires. It’s like an app that is a mirror of his conscious. It’s really an app that, she’s there to project his desires. If he wants to do sports, she will try to encourage him to go aside and to run, that’s kind of thing. That relationship with technology, the boundaries between machines and humans, from an intimate point of view are smaller and smaller. We are closer and closer. That’s something I thought was quite interesting and how technology doesn’t bring us closer one to the other, but we are closer to the technology itself.[7]
As an app, Joi(s) are a virtual mirror of their users, a way to create an external projection of one’s interior self capable of validating that self. In becoming intertwined with technology, we become habituated toward the sort of virtual imagining of ourselves as validated (or, in practice, condemned) by others. When we interact with others in a shared reality, we continue to act as we’ve programmed ourselves, populating our reality with projections instead of receiving others as different.
While Villeneuve may have intended Joi’s character to represent that sort of virtuality, it is useful to note that the realization of Joi has a different kind of effect. The screenwriter, Michael Green, indicates this shift in terms of Joi’s alchemical function within the story line. He notes that K’s digital companion was originally co-writer Fancher’s idea, which let him imagine it as fitting to have a Replicant as a “lesser human… have a strong bond that's a third species, lesser than even Replicants.” This clearly echoes the sense of virtual as “lesser” discussed above. What’s interesting is how Green develops the character:
I knew we'd be telling the story of his character's aspiration toward ascension, so since we are defined by what we love, what he loved needed a story as well. Now, if that story is merely a projection of his fantasies combined with excellent programming, or if she is a “special” version of herself who became something more because she was involved with someone unique – that's something I hope people struggle with.
Green allows two virtual possibilities within his virtual-digital character. There’s the sense of Joi as “merely a projection,” and a sense that she has a vital essence that coalesces alchemically with the uniqueness of the other. What’s important for Green is allowing each of these virtual possibilities to remain latent within the story, perpetuating the thematic tension between more than/less than that defines the virtual heart of 2049.
Green also comments about K’s character and how 2049 posits a Replicant aware of his status—but also questions his capacity for humanity as a virtual possibility. This parallels Deckard’s confusion in Blade Runner but from the other direction; as Green puts it, the audience has “the experience of watching [K] wonder if” he actually is a Replicant, “and wonder in a completely different way. In an aspirational way.” This is interesting, but Green’s intention was to challenge the audience beyond this, and his language summons the virtue of the virtual in a manner contextualized by hope: “It becomes a question of ‘can you change what you are by virtue of what you do?’” (emphasis mine).[8] Put otherwise, the character of K. questions whether motivations of moral goodness (aspiration) can direct behaviors that have the power (virtue) to recreate actuality (the givenness of ‘what you are’) by emphasizing different latent virtual elements.
[1] Private communication, 10 Nov. 2019
[2] It perhaps is worthy of note that the example involves property: the property “well-off” that characterizes the person comprises an inner sense of character. The term is a “property” understood as a quality of the person that extends from a sense of “property” that extends from its corollary definition, “possessions.” To be “well-off” is virtually present within the possession of the inheritance as a personal quality. Part of our larger social struggle with the consequences of the virtual are tied to questions of identity—whether we are our identity (property) or whether our identities can be stolen or stored (possession). The virtual is a sphere where this struggle has always been undertaken, and the current use of the virtual as a feature of digital technology has given new life to an old problem.
[3] The virtual’s relation to the efficacious and beneficial is a latent strain of the word rooted in a series of currently obsolete senses of the term. The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following definitions of virtual: “Inherently powerful or effective owing to particular natural qualities,” “Of a plant, liquid, or other substance: having potent healing properties; powerful, strengthening” (which extends into spiritual healing), “Producing, or capable of producing, a particular result; effective.” Part of the disappearance of our understanding of the virtual as possessing an innate, material effective power comes through a sense of the term—active in the present, that stretches back to 1760:
Designating a notional property, dimension, etc., of a thing which would produce an observed effect if counteracting factors such as friction are not allowed for; spec. designating a head of water which would give rise to an observed pressure in the absence of friction, etc.
The virtual begins to refer to a latent form of material reality that does not emerge given contingent circumstances. The virtue remains present as an observable non-reality.
The “observable non-reality” informs an additional sense of “virtual” that the OED categorizes as “Senses relating to essential, as opposed to physical or actual, existence.” The first definition within this category, “That is such in essence, potentiality, or effect, although not in form or actuality...supposed, imagined” includes an early use of the term dating back to 1443, still in use in 1990. The “imagined” virtual is a very specific mode of imagining: the virtual relates to imagined things that “may be so called for practical purposes, although not according to strict definition; very near, almost absolute.” The virtual is a very proximate form of imagining—hearkening back, one supposes, to the latent possibility that would emerge had circumstances been otherwise.
In physics, “virtual” becomes appearance: “Of an image: such that the light forming it appears to diverge from a point beyond the refracting or reflecting surface; designating the focus from which such light appears to diverge,” the simple example is that of the image of an object under water. What appears to us has a virtual reality—we become familiar with an essence that is connected to but distanced from its physical existence due to contingent circumstances. This essential, now meaning also disembodied, property of the virtual then becomes carried into the digital landscape: “Of hardware, a resource, etc.: not physically present as such but made by software to appear to be so from the point of view of a program or user,” and “a computerized or digitized simulation of something; spec. … simulated in virtual reality.”
The final definition provides a stronger contrast with material presence: “That which is virtual rather than actual or real,” emphasizing “that which is simulated by computer technology, virtual reality.” A shift occurs within this definition that speaks to our larger shared understanding of the term, found in Landon’s “technological simulacrum.” The first definition of “the virtual” listed here, from an 1882 book of synonyms, still suggests the real: “The virtual is strong but indefinite. The potential is powerful but inactive.” This definition recalls the state of latency silenced into slumbering by contingent forces. The next definition, from 1915, shifts “virtual” markedly from an innate quality within material reality to a product divorced from reality by an act of the mind: “We must know what phase of the act is being used by thought to change the actual into the virtual.” The final example listed for the term is from the Atlantic Monthly of 2009, referring to Guitar Hero that invited “beat-matching” through pushing buttons “while conjuring around it, via the black arts of the virtual, a floating sensorium of rock-and-roll performance.”
[4] Interestingly, the production designer for 2049, Dennis Gassner, discusses his use of visual patterns as a way to construct the movie: However, Gassner’s first priority was tackling an updated Spinner, the iconic flying police vehicle. ‘The Spinner would create the pattern language, which we could then spin-off into the rest of the world,’ Gassner said. While the original Spinner driven by Harrison Ford’s Deckard had a soft quality, the one powered by Ryan Gosling’s K was more angular, robust, and brutal.” https://www.indiewire.com/2017/10/blade-runner-2049-dystopia-production-design-denis-villeneuve-1201891427/
[5] The Oatmeal called this the “Backfire effect” in one of its comics: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe
[6] Ridley Scott, discussing his vision for 2049, claims “And the digital girlfriend is me. I wanted an evolution from Pris, who is inordinately sexy in the original, right?” I believe that his notion of “evolution” speaks to the installation of the virtual in a new register—one that is simultaneously more and less tangible than what Pris features in Blade Runner. https://ew.com/movies/2017/12/27/blade-runner-2049-ridley-scott-reaction/
[7] https://www.goldderby.com/article/2018/denis-villeneuve-blade-runner-2049-ridley-scott-ryan-gosling-harrison-ford-complete-interview-transcript-video-news/
[8] https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/blade-runner-2049-explained-burning-questions