SubStance

Gilles Deleuze, arguably the best-known theorist of virtuality, describes the virtual as part of an ontology of becoming and multiplicity: he sees the virtual as a characteristic of being which is directly opposed to, but simultaneously constitutive of the actual aspect of reality, as a force that works mostly invisibly, but powerfully within the interstices of the material world, introducing constant flux into reality through its negotiations with the actual.¹ This conception of the virtual represents something of a leitmotif for the forty-four essays collected in The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality. The collection offers a wide range of approaches to virtuality as a philosophical and aesthetic concept as well as a technological reality, emphasizing the continuities between the two. In doing so, it usefully combines, continues, and complements themes explored by the proliferating work on digital culture and the “posthuman,” such as that carried out by N. Katherine Hayles, Michael Heim, Anne Balsamo, Marie-Laure Ryan, or Howard Rheingold, to name but a few.² While scholars with a background in theory and literature may be surprised that the volume does not explore gender, governance, or electronic writing in greater depth, the Handbook more than compensates for these economies by providing accessible insights into the vast social, cultural, psychological, economic, and scientific transformations brought about by a reality first described as “virtual” by Jaron Lanier in the 1980s. Grimshaw’s volume thus achieves a rare interdisciplinary range of innovative studies in the ways in which reality interacts with, and is indeed constituted by, virtuality.

The forty-four essays of the volume are distributed over nine parts that cover a broad range of the manifestations of the virtual, discussing “The [historical and philosophical] Foundations of Virtuality” (Part I); the effects of the virtual on “Psychology and Perception” (Part II); manifestations of the virtual in “Culture and Society” (Part III); sonic content in virtual words in “Sound” (Part IV); the changes in artistic practice thanks to digital technology, and how these were anticipated by traditional art, in “Image” (Part V); the role and transformations of “Economy and Law” as virtual currencies and transactions surge (Part VI); practical and philosophical questions surrounding “A-Life and Artificial Intelligence” (Part [End Page 165] VII); “Technology and Applications” (Part VIII); and, finally, the familiar ambivalence of our representations and expectations regarding the rise of the virtual in “Utopia and Dystopia” (Part IX).

A large number of these essays, especially those in Part I, begin by tracing an historical obfuscation of the power of the virtual, one that is starkly revealed by the terminological transformations of a concept whose meaning has shifted from its initial signification of manly strength – originating in the Latin vir (man) and its derivative virtus (strength) – to an inherent (virtualiter), as opposed to essential (essentialiter) power in Thomas Aquinas’s reworking of Aristotle’s potential, and from there to the medieval English “virtual,” where it designates characteristics and facets of things when they are implicit rather than explicit. The contemporary use of “virtually” to mean “almost” signals a further distancing from notions of “real” power that nevertheless contrasts sharply with the obvious importance of technologies of the virtual since the 1980s on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the impact of the virtual as a layer of latency within reality. This last emphasis on the philosophical importance and singularity of the virtual shapes most essays of the collection in one way or another, and is brought into sharp relief in the opening essays. A particularly complex essay by Brian Massumi departs from readings of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze in positioning the virtual as a key ontological category, while in an essay that subtly distinguishes virtuality from simulation, Philip Brey underscores how “certain types of virtual objects, actions, and events qualify as real, in the sense that they do not just simulate but ontologically reproduce the entity that they are an imitation of” (53).

Several essays argue that the virtual constitutes a pivotal step in human evolution, broadly defining it as...