Performing Virtualities

Papers
Performing 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 virtuallyin 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 communiondid eating
the host at mass amount to receiving or communing with Christ by mouth, as well as
spiritually? Virtualism is the Calvinistic doctrine of Christs 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 nounThe 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
persons 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 entitlementsa credit profile is ones
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 Pierces 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 Guattaris question, What is the
individuality of a day, a season, an event? ... a degree, an intensity, is an individual, a
Heccit 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 Kingdoms 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 Visitors 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 virtusfrom 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 Bergsons 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 Bergsons admiration for Prousts
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).

Bergsons 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 Deleuzes 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 dont 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 Lefebvres 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 is 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 Turners 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 Virtualand
perhaps its most widely discussed featurehas 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
experimentationlike 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 statusa 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 softas much as hardtechnology, 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 Canadas
Challenges and Opportunities of the Knowledge-Based Economy Strategic Theme (see
http://www.carleton.ca/~rshields/kbe/kbesummary.html).

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