The possible meanings of the virtual

In the previous text, we presented Marilena Chauí's analysis of the media. We observed that, for the philosopher, the internet presents a contradiction inherent in ideology, understood as a masking of social reality, a concealment of power relations, and exploitation through symbolic artifices.

Thus, it becomes very clear when Marilena says: while the internet ensures the free production and circulation of information, even promoting political events that affirm the right to participation, users do not hold any power over the tool employed; the monopoly of information remains in the hands of mass media companies and, notwithstanding the creative and anarchic aspect of social networks, there is control and surveillance over its users on a planetary scale, that is, over the entire mass of information on the planet (the management of the internet is done by an American company in conjunction with the US Department of Commerce).

This contradiction would be inherent to ideology. The horror of contradiction, which is the title of my previous text, is the horror of ideology, which masks power relations and exploits them through symbolic artifices. In this sense, in a very rationalist and systematic way, consistent with metanarratives, Marilena Chauí's text, "Communication and Democracy," clearly demonstrates that there is a substitution of parameters based on lived experience in favor of a normative system of beliefs, capable of justifying errors, singular events, exceptions, in the name of more abstract beliefs. The horror of contradiction is the impossibility of sacrificing coherence.

It's not difficult to see how Marilena understands the virtual. And here we enter today's topic. Even before the multimedia system, which, according to Marilena, only enhances this process, that is, without introducing any significant difference, the means of communication express: a) the absence of spatial reference (the TV screen, the radio, the newspaper page become the only real space - distances, proximities, geographical and territorial differences are ignored); b) the absence of temporal reference (events have no continuity in time, they are events without causes and without future effects - they exist as spectacle, remaining in the spectators as long as the spectacle of their transmission remains).

Now, from this perspective, there is an absolute separation between the real world and the virtual world. Marilena's observation is quite telling: "reality is captured totally immersed in a composition of virtual images in the world of make-believe, in which appearances are not only found on the screen communicating experience, but are transformed into experience." It is not difficult to see that, for Marilena Chauí, the virtual is the world of make-believe, the world of appearances, which no longer has any relation to the real.

But there are controversies, as common sense would say. And how there are.

Pierre Levy, in his 1995 book "What is Virtual?", presents a different meaning for the concept of virtual, one that has no relation to the form presented by Marilena Chauí. For Pierre Levy, the virtual is complementary to the real, and what Marilena calls the real world would be, for Levy, the actual world. Thus, if, for common sense, the virtual is an unreality, a fiction (as we infer from Marilena's text), for Levy the virtual is a potential that emerges in an actualization. This is the philosophical meaning of the virtual, and it is what makes it belong to the dimension of reality.

Understood as a concept of potential, the virtual, for Levy, at least initially, is a field of forces and problems that tends to resolve itself in an actualization. In other words, what constitutes the field of the real is the virtual and the actual, considered in their differences. One could think of a difference between the real and the possible, according to Deleuze. But virtualization is not a derealization, it is not the transformation of an entity into a set of possibilities, but a mutation of identity, a displacement of the ontological center of gravity of the object considered – instead of being defined by its actuality (a solution), the entity comes to find its essential consistency in a problematic field.

Another way of thinking about the virtual, according to Pierre Levy in his 1995 book "What is the Virtual?", is as a partial deterritorialization in relation to the actual (total deterritorialization would be within the realm of the event or process). Ubiquity, simultaneity, radiating or massively parallel distribution, the present moment, the global dimension, interconnection, and synchronization would be elements of the virtual, conceived as information, that is, with form, structure, and properties.

In this case, information is never separated from its material support, and interpreting it and linking it to other information is part of this second aspect of the virtual. Finally, the third aspect, for Pierre Levy, at this initial stage, represented by the book "What is Virtual?", would be the fact that the virtual is replicable through copying or printing.

What marks this first moment of analysis of the virtual, for Pierre Levy, will therefore be a broad concept, which is its philosophical meaning and the fact that cultural changes can be made from processes of virtualization, understood in an anthropological sense. Originating from a medieval model – grammar, dialectic and rhetoric – (grammar, separating non-significant elements to recombine them in an unlimited way, as in digitization; dialectic as the substitution of elements, but always referring to the real, as in "walking"/"rotating"; rhetoric as signification and substitutions separated from references, which will end up founding the virtual – "the rhetorical act, which concerns the essence of the virtual, raises questions, arranges tensions and proposes purposes: it puts them on stage, puts them into play in the vital process. The supreme invention is that of a problem, the opening of a void in the middle of the real", cf. "What is the virtual?"), the virtual, in Levy, will be under the aegis of signification.

Already in "Cybernetics," published in 1997, in addition to the common and philosophical meanings, Pierre Levy introduces a new meaning for the virtual: the technological one. Here, he subdivides the technological meaning of the virtual into three groups: 1) the strictly technological meaning, which is the strongest meaning on the general ladder of virtuality, and which is the simulation of reality, an interactive simulation in which the explorer has the physical sensation of being immersed in the situation defined by the database (e.g., combat simulators); 2) the virtual is a kind of map of reality without needing to be three-dimensional, when the explorer directly controls a representative of themselves through proximity navigation: the explorer controls their access to a vast database, according to principles and mental reflections analogous to those that allow them to control access to their immediate physical environment (e.g., video games); 3) when virtuality results from the digitization of information, this modality being the weakest sense of virtual from a technological perspective – in this modality, an image is virtual if its origin is a digital description in a computer memory (remembering that, here, the image is only virtual in the computer's memory, while on the screen it becomes actual).

In his article "The Meanings of the Term 'Virtual' in Pierre Levy," published in LOGEION – Philosophy of Information, 2016, v.3 n.1, Cleyton Leandro Galvão attempts to demonstrate how Levy, in his philosophical understanding of the virtual, remains trapped in a medieval conception where everything is restricted to meanings – these meanings are separated from references, making rhetoric the foundation of the virtual, by raising questions and creating a void within the real. In this sense, for Levy, the virtual occurs via semantics.

Both a text by Plato and the digital elements embedded in a war simulator would be virtual, deterritorialized. Therefore, we read the text or interact with the simulator, and when we do so, we actualize them: the virtual ceases to be virtual as soon as human presence arises, becoming an act. This fleeting nature of the virtual, according to Cleyton Leandro Galvão, stems from a medieval conception (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric) that treats the virtual as a kind of non-being.

The fact is that mere words on paper would not be interactive, malleable, fluid, or manageable in real time – such characteristics attributable to the virtual would only make sense with the digitization of information. In other words, the virtual character of information is given by digital encoding. Both Marilena Chauí and Pierre Levi, although the virtual is not the same thing for them, tend to think that digitization only intensified a process, when in fact digitization established a new order.

In addition to conditioning the plastic, fluid, calculable, hypertextual, and interactive nature of information, digitization has allowed simulated elements to remain virtual during interaction, contrary to what Levy thinks. And this brings us back to Deleuze when he understands the virtual as coexisting with and accompanying the actual in its unfolding, not being eliminated with the advent of the present.

Nevertheless, in comparison with Marilena Chauí's text, Pierre Levy's conception of the virtual represents an advance: it is not the world of make-believe; it is the Real, producing effects in the world and being a conditioning factor of social change.

The criticism leveled at Levy, which Cleyton Leandro Galvão's text clearly expresses, is his tendency towards the virtual via semantics, when we know that interactivity, the main aspect of the virtual and what gives it its strongest meaning, can only be achieved digitally. What is actually being proposed is to explain the virtual through the digital and not through semantics.