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Albert Borgmann. HoldINg ON To ReAlitY: THe NaTurE Of InfOrMatIoN aT tHe TuRn oF thE MiLLennIuM. Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1999.

Borgmann's overriding thesis is that there really is nothing ‘like' reality. The explicit problem of virtual reality, for Borgmann, is not its definition. He understands VR, in general terms, to be any experience of technologized information that delivers vividness and interactivity (from CDs to cyberspace to flight simulators). Such issues as the relation of imagination and narrative fiction to virtual reality, as well as the fact that Borgmann claims at one point that virtual reality, properly speaking, does not actually exist, are very ambiguously attached to this definition which Borgmann treats as stable and straightforward, and make the question of definition for Borgmann's reader again problematic. The essential problem VR does pose for Borgmann is its capacity to diminish our sense of the superlative exquisiteness of the actual world, since it is capable of manifesting both as what Borgmann calls 'artificial' reality and as 'hyper'reality. While the former clearly marks not only the borders but also the limitations of virtual reality in Borgmann's logic, the latter poses a serious threat, because it is capable of tricking us into thinking it is as brilliant and various as the real world, and even more than that, capable of giving us a more-than-real availability as well as the guarantee that we are invulnerable to pain or death. With the threat of this powerful virtual-reality world in mind, Borgmann works hard to prove that his original thesis--there is nothing like reality--is ultimately true, that even hyperreal VR worlds, when unveiled by truth, are powerless to deliver what the actual world delivers to us. This argument is supported largely by Borgmann's notion of ambiguity, in which he theorizes the difference between real-world ambiguity,which we do not value and work to resolve, and virtual ambiguity, which is necessary for the VR world to function but ultimately diminishes its essential value in our lives.

Scott Bukatman. TermInAL IDenTItY: ThE VirTUaL SuBJecT in PosT-mOdERn ScIENce FictIOn. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

To some degree Bukatman considers the notion of virtuality throughout Terminal Identity, but the most concentrated examples of his thought occur in Section 3, which is entitled "Terminal Penetration." He begins this section by offering a succinct narrative description of the experience of VR technology. He then documents and comments on the (quoting Michael Benedikt) "almost irrational enthusiasm" that surrounds the topic of VR, considering the claims about the power of VR made by thinkers such as Howard Rheingold and Timothy Leary, from whom Bukatman clearly wishes to distance himself. An extremely valuable aspect of Bukatman's work is his critique of the 'newness' of VR technology through an argument he builds around the idea of representational precursors, using thinkers such as Jonathan Crary, Vivian Sobcheck, and Andre Bazin to support his claims. Particularly interesting is the analogy he creates between Bazin's notion of "total cinema" and the phantomware association of VR with 'total immersion' that haunts its actualization. Finally, Bukatman considers virtual reality in relation to narrative. He is ultimately unclear about the nature of this relationship, however. On the one hand he puts forward the idea that narrative itself is fundamentally a virtual reality. On the other, he postulates the VR experience as one that transcendes narrative, and rather must be defined by spatial metaphors and heightened multi-sensory experience. A crucial part of this debate about the relation of narrative to VR is Bukatman's emphasis on the desire, in VR, for the interface to completely disappear, such that the immediacy of experience it promises becomes an end in itself as well as a disavowal of the technologies that enable the experience in the first place.

Hayles shifts the terms of debate away from virtual reality entirely, where virtual reality is defined as a representational system, environment, or object facilitated by some material object (the computer, a CD . . .), and instead focuses on the term 'virtuality.' This term signifies a state of mind, a mode of apprehending the world, in which we believe that all material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns, making the world 'decodable' and therefore never defined by such things as excess, chaos, or the unknown/unknowable. Hayles is adamant, however, that virtuality so defined is not merely psychological, since it is ultimately the result of a feedback loop between human perception and various extremely powerful technologies in contemporary culture. As Hayles puts it, the clear implication of virtuality is our desire to belong to a world in which we can effectively achieve immortality by imposing and becoming the equivalent of code. Hayles argues that it is finally bodies--primarily human, but in a degraded form, textual as well--which effectively resist virtualization through their messiness and their defiantly changeful and unpredictable presence as material in the world. Bodies can and do resist the fantasies that human minds, coupled with digital technology, entertain about safety and even immortality, thereby reawakening humans to the dangers and even depravity of these fantasies. Hayles ultimately calls, through her analytical work, for a reworking and rearticulation of what it means to be 'posthuman,' such that posthumanity is defined by the humane rather than against it.

This text is committed to answering one of the most haunting issues in virtuality studies: the degree to which virtual reality must be defined by the new technologies. Heim differentiates between two modes of definition, what he calls "the strong sense" and the "loose, popular sense" of virtual reality. The strong sense, which Heim considers the 'true' meaning of the term VR, is defined by a very specific realm of the new technologies--those that are productive of what Heim terms full-sensory systems. The loose sense, on the other hand, is descriptive of the ubiquity of association between the term "virtual" and all forms of technology or experience generated by computers, such as joysticks, screens, or email. Heim then works through the question of what our relationship, as human beings, should be to this new, and in his eyes, newly powerful mode of imaginative experience that virtual reality offers. He designates the term ‘virtual realism’ as his solution, which is Heim's attempt to theorize a healthy intellectual balance between the human impulse toward enthusiastic idealism for this new technology and the human need to be grounded in what he calls the "primary reality" outside the computer. In effect, virtual realism wants to admit the ways in which virtual reality technology acts on human agents, yet wants to counter this action with an equally powerful human agency. With this balance, according to Heim, technology can be increasingly powerful, but the category of the human will not be jeapordized.

This text is not overtly concerned with the concept of virtual reality. However, for two crucial reasons it is an extremely valuable text in the context of VR studies. First of all, Johnson offers a sustained treatment of the human-computer interface, including chapters on the desktop, windows, links, text, and agents, all of which are understood to be definitive of the computer as a virtual apparatus in Johnson's terms. This emphasis on close-reading the computer interface actually serves the debate in VR studies focused on definition. With Johnson's work in mind, it becomes much harder to write off the importance of the term 'virtual' as an appropriate term for the basic computer interface in favour of something like the head-mount display, and equally hard to wave off the impact that these associations have on our understanding of virtual reality in general. Second, Johnson makes a sustained argument that it is the computer interface that can and should challenge the paradigm of dichotomization between the Arts and technological science. One of the major claims of Interface Culture is that interface engineers are the twenty-first century's new artists. And at the same time, this text indicates (and performs) the simultaneous claim that these new engineer-artists must take their inspiration from the traditions of literature and art which precede them and which must in fact influence the new digital 'art' that they create. The energy of optimisim is deeply present in Johnson's arguments, but not so much in what he sees as the domain of the interface or of cyberspace/WWW/the Internet now. His optimism stems from his belief that this revolution of the fall of dichotomy of art and science will be the spark of change that will enable the new (virtual) technologies, by way of inspired engineer-artists, to enact a similar revolution in the way we think, communicate, and create. The real revolution, for Johnson, I think, is that he sees in the new technologies the possibility for people to revalue the act and the effects of creation--the possibility for the energy of artistic activity to infuse the technological world as well as the world in general.

Levy continues the tradition, begun by Baudrillard, of considering virtual reality both as a product of the digital revolution and as a philosophical term whose emergence serves as the definitive marker of drastic cultural change. While Baudrillard has professed the dire and even apocalyptic nature of these changes and their effects, and understands virtuality to be an allegory for the loss of the real in contemporary society, Levy reads virtuality as a non-catastrophic allegory for society, in which the term comes to signify creativity in the most abstract sense. Levy launches this argument by making a strong case for the fact that we must ultimately not think of virtuality as exclusively attached to contemporary culture or the technolgies that have defined it for us, but as extending far beyond the realm of information technology. He then counters the claim, again following from Baudrillard, that virtuality is defined by the false, the not-real, or derealization. Levy creates the possibility for us to understand virtuality as essentially unattached to a prescribed ethics, to an absolute truth or falsity. From the grounds of this detachment Levy comes to define virtuality as the energy and the essence of dynamism and change, both on the individual and the cultural level. for Percy B. Shelley.

Collectively, the contributers of this anthology engage in a forceful critique of historical, philosophical, and theoretical conceptions of virtual reality/cyberspace that herald it as revolutionary, new, or the celebrated end product sprung from parents History and Technology. In the first place, Virtual Realities argues that it is a terrific fallacy to imagine, as proponents of VR do, that virtual technologies either displace or transcend print culture. (And the fact that two essays of this anthology focus explicitly on cyberpunk fiction—William Gibson's Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash—pays tribute to this argument.) At the same time, however, there is a strong claim made across this anthology for the importance of separating virtual technologies (literally hardware and software) from what is termed ‘the abstraction of cyberspace’ and for appropriately historicizing these technologies. Furthering this historicizing gesture as well as the desire to avoid falling into philosophical abstraction, contributors give concentrated attention to the problem of defining virtual reality/virtuality. In addition, the anthology is deeply invested in forging a political critique of virtual reality, one that exceeds simply worrying about problems of access. Finally, throughout this anthology, the sense that VR/virtuality is the medium through which we can finally achieve transcendence is severely critiqued. In the last, this anthology argues that the new technologies and the virtual realities that they support, being closed systems, are impotent to deliver transcendence, but more than that, aggressively imperialistic closed systems that would redefine the earth itself as such, given the opportunity.

Although more speculative than the work of Michael Heim, and concerned primarily with the relationship between the history of imagination and VR than VR and technology, Murray's principle concern (like Heim's) is to stabilize the term virtual reality through definition. In some ways, virtual reality is for Murray not so much a reality as a good idea waiting to be fully realized. She treats the term as an idea that is glimpsed via the current technologies in contemporary culture, but also, and equally if not more importantly, yet longed for by those, like herself, who have faith that those technologies will someday be able to deliver a VR experience as powerful and vivid as the ones we have imagined for ourselves or that popular culture--for instance those experienced by members of Star Treck via the Holodeck--has imagined for us. Murray ultimately defines virtual reality, however, by turning to the tradition of storytelling in the most generalized sense, from the Ancient bards to the Victorian novel. Murray uses the experience she understands literature to offer as a means of defining what she takes to be the definitive elements of 'virtual' experience: immersion, agency, and transformation. In this way, Murray shapes the experience of virtual reality in the image of literature, such that narrative and our relation to it override generic distinctions such as linguistic- vs. image-oriented experience, and VR becomes the newest medium for satisfying the human desire for powerful modes of storytelling.

Howard Rheingold. VIRtuaL ReALitY. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Rheingold has been quoted as an idealist, a ‘cyberdrool’er, and a utopian dreamer as a result of this journalist account—complete with personal interviews with many of his subjects and an easy-read format—of the history of Virtual Reality. His outlook on both the history and the future of VR technology is certainly very optimistic. He understands VR to be the culimation, or the fusion, of all the most powerful media, capable of augmenting human power (philosophically, entertainment-wise, and scientifically) immeasureably. Virtual Reality tells the history of VR in fairly inclusive terms, such that a significant number of the technologies that evolved prior to the digital revolution (Morton Heilig's Sensorama, for instance) and most of those that evolved with and post digitization (video games, experimental programs, graphics) seem to have all been really invented in order to spawn the meta medium of VR. Relevant to humanists in particular, perhaps, is the chapter entitled "The Origins of Drama and the Future of Fun," in which Rheingold begins by evoking the work of Brenda Laurel and goes on to muse about the relationship of VR to Greek theater himself. Critical thinkers of VR such as Robert Markley and Scott Bukatman are fairly tough on Rheingold, discouraging his progressivist mode of telling history as well as his bubbling optimism for the new technologies. However, for as much criticism as Rheingold has received in critical circles, one can find his name in the Index of nearly every text in this bibliography. His work seems to either function as a counterpart/strawman for setting up a critical (rather than progressivist) paradigm, or else, significantly, as a means of conveniently accessing bits of 'history' here and there, including the wave of utopian excitement for the new technologies that Rheingold represents.

This anthology is principally concerned with the question of how our relation to the written word has been altered by electronic textuality. As a means of confronting this question, contributers pay careful attention to some of the fundamental terms surrounding this debate. Virtual Reality, virtuality, virtualization, cyberspace, as well as immersion and interactivity are carefully analyzed to derive theoretically complex and yet specific definitions via attention to etymology, historical specificity, theoretical/imaginative terms that have helped to usher in these terms' usages, and contemporary usages of these terms that affect their meanings or lack of meanings. In spite of, and ultimately perhaps because of the nuance that surrounds this text, it is fascinating for those interested in the study of virtuality to tap into the fairly polemical debate that still erupts in Cyberspace Textuality, much as it seems to want to be soothed over at key moments, particularly between the work of Ryan and Poster, regarding the question of whether virtual reality should finally be understood as a transcendental term that is inclusive of such things as literature and imagination, or whether it should be understood as historically specific and essentially attached to the information age and its technologies.

In this essay, Zizek claims that computerization is threatening the boundaries between three major lines of separation: between ‘true life' and its mechanical simulation; between objective reality and the false (illusory) perception of it; and between fleeting affects, feelings, attitudes etc. and the remaining hard core of the Self. Three aspects of the new technologies are responsible for this threat, according to Zizek. The first is that technobiology is undermining the difference between ‘natural' life/reality and ‘artificial' life/reality. In this way, natural reality ends up being ‘revealed' by technology, thereby being something the technology can simulate, the only Real being the underlying structure of DNA. Second, insofar as the VR apparatus can generate experience of ‘true' reality, it undermines the difference between what is true and what is semblance. (Zizek discusses this ‘loss of reality' both in terms of computer-generated Virtual Reality and the increasingly hyperreal images of the media.) He discusses this as a crisis that turns on the loss of a ‘blindspot,' through ‘perfect vision,' because as Lacan argues, the blindspot is actually what enables us to ‘see' (mentally)–"Without visual limit there can be no, or almost no, mental imagery." The third aspect is MUD technology in cyberspace, which undermines the notion of the self into a ‘collective mind,' a plurality of self-images without a global co-ordinating centre. Throughout this essay, Zizek plays with the relationship between virtual reality (a product of digital culture) and the concept of virtuality (by which he means not-actual), and he traces the ways in which both of these terms find precursors in the language of psychoanalysis.

Slavoj Zizek. "From Virtual Reality to the Virtualization of Reality." ELecTroNiC CuLTurE. Eds. Timothy Druckrey. Preface by Allucquere Rosanne Stone. Aperture Foundation, 1996. 290-295

Zizek's interest in the relation between 'reality' and virtual reality in this essay stems from a set of warring metaphors, one he creates based on their prfound similarity and the other from their profound distinction. On the one hand, Zizek argues that what we understand to be 'real' reality is structurally indistinct from virtual reality (which is synonomous, for Zizek, with the computer screen). On the other, he describes the dangers of this similitude, based on the very real differences between the two. According to Zizek, both 'real' reality and virtual reality are modes of experiencing the world through fantasy—what he calls the "detour through the maze of fantasy"—which functions to repress the traumatic Real (variously represented as Woman or the sexual relationship). As he explains it, what we must sacrifice in order to access 'reality' is our access to the 'reality of the trauma'—the Real. Termed 'symbolic bliss,' this veering away from the Real through imagination constitutes human survival and is productive of reality as we know it (and of virtual reality as we know it). As a result, virtual reality can be extremely valuable, according to Zizek, because it serves as a metaphor through which we can understand and remember the general fantasy structure of any reality we experience. At the same time, however, he is greatly alarmed by one striking difference of the 'reality' that virtual reality offers as opposed to our 'real' reality. Virtual reality is more efficient at excluding the Real, because nothing 'inconsistent' can interfere with its (closed) system. In the reality outside the computer, human beings are less capable of screening out inconsistency: chance, unpredictability, the Other, irrupts in spite of us outside the computer, and, for Zizek, this disorder permits a deeply valuable metaphor for understanding—and subsequently experiencing—reality. Further, the fact of the closure of computer (VR) reality is most terrifying, for Zizek, precisely because it is not hidden from us. We recognize the closure and we choose it anyway: Zizek's almost apacalytpic formulation peaks in his description of his imagined child of technology turning away from 'real' reality and toward VR not in spite of—but rather because of—the safety of this Closure.

F I C T I O N

Alexander Besher. RiM: a nOVeL of VIrtUaL rEaLIty.

Alfred Bester. ThE DEmoLisHed MAn. 1951. Introduction by Harry Harrison. New York: Vintage, 1996.

Much of contemporary culture--as the energy driving the concept and the material fact of virtual reality exemplifies--is obsessed with visuality. As Jaron Lanier has written, VR is supposed to be a means of communicating by way of shared images rather than shared words (as the medium for representing the mind's thoughts). He intimates that this new mode of communication is newly soulful, transcending the power of words to allow us to share ourselves with others. In The Demolished Man, Bester creates a storyworld in which some people actually do have an unusual capacity to communicate and 'read' other people, as Lanier's VR model wishes for. (And like cyberpunk today, Bester traces the effects of such a 'technology' on culture and individuals alike.) Yet this ur-communication does not divorce itself from language; rather, language becomes both the conduit of communication for the characters to communicate with one another AND the bridge over the gap between these characters and ourselves, the readers of the novel. These characters are a special portion of the population known as 'Espers' in the context of Bester's novel, because they are clairvoyant. Whether they are actually 'special' or whether they are simply better at exploiting a capacity that all human beings actaully possess is unknown. At any rate, they can literally 'read' minds. They communicate without speaking out loud; yet they communicate with fellow Espers--in complex rhythms and patterns--through words. As some of the finest cyberpunk fiction has done (I am thinking of Neal Stephenson specifically), this novel beckons us to think about language as a technology in the same way that we think about VR--as powerful, possessive, alluring, hopeful. As Harry Harrison has written, in the Introduction to the 1996 re-issue of this novel, "Most of all, Bester is in love with language." I couldn't agree more. Harrison ends his Introduction with the words, "Thank you Alfie, thank you very very much." I just couldn't agree more.

Alfred Bester. THe StARs My DesTiNatIoN. 1956. Introduction by Neil Gaiman. New York: Vintage, 1996.

Anyone who loves the work of contemporary SF writers such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, or Neal Stephenson has to consider Bester, well, the best of the best. The Stars My Destination is a stunning work of SF, but even more exciting, it defines--three decades before the movement would be named or defined--what we have come to know as cyberpunk. As Neil Gaiman writes in the latest introduction to the novel, Stars is "the perfect cyberpunk novel: it contains such cheerfully protocyber elements as multinational corporate intrigue; a dangerous, mysterious, hyperscientific McGuffin (PyrE); an amoral hero; a supercool thief woman . . ." Perhaps most intriguing for me from this point of view is the phenomenon that structures the plot of this novel--jaunting. To jaunt is to travel, literally, to where one's mind imagines. It is immediate, happens in 'real time' as one thinks of the place one wishes oneself to be. The ways in which jaunting parallels the metaphors through which we understand cyberspace and its correlative of travel--linking--is extraordinarily exciting to think about. This novel works through both the material and philosophical changes that jaunting has on the world, just as thinkers today ponder those types of changes wrought by the Internet and WWW, as well as by virtual reality (both as Idea and as material fact). And yet. And yet one wants to claim for this novel more than a retroactive affiliation with the cyberpunk Movement. It's not enough. It seems more right, somehow, to say that this novel just must have been an inspiration to contemporary cyberpunks--a way in, a portal through which to see how to create such magic and wonder when exploring technologies, of the present and of the imagination, in which the two merge so that the world not only seems new and different somehow, but so that we also see, mirrored back to us, the ways in which metaphor and imaginative thought structure our lives in, as, and through technology. The novel is a damn masterpiece.

Alfred Bester. The DEceIveRS. 1981. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.

Stephen Bury ("&" Neal Stephenson). IntERfaCE.

Pat Cadigan. TeA froM an EMptY CuP.

Orson Scott Card. ENdeR's GAmE.

Ender's Game is Orson Scott Card's novel-length retelling of a short story by the same name that effectively launched his career as a Science Fiction writer in 1977. From the seed of this novel, Card has created an entire series of "Ender" novels including Speaker For the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, Ender's Shadow, and the forthcoming The Shadow of Hegemon. Ender's Game is commonly understood as a classic work of Science Fiction in the sense that it follows well-trodden generic territory such as taking place in the future and indulging themes such as intergalactic travel and alien invasions of earth. It is, however, extremely interesting to note that this novel was published in 1985, just one year after the ground-breaking publication of William Gibson's Neuromancer, which marks a profound shift in the science-fiction world and has come to define the beginning of a new SF literary movement known as cyberpunk. One way to understand the divergence of cyberpunk from SF, according to one of its premier spokespeople, Bruce Sterling, is through its focus on present-day technologies and their possibilities--on "the lateral futures of today's information technology" rather than on the conventional "linear futures of space adventure." Although I would not suggest that Ender's Game is directly aligned with the cyberpunk movement (nor would either its author or its critics), I would suggest that it is a worthwhile thought experiment to consider this novel as a type of accidental hybrid between conventional SF and Cyberpunk fiction. With this experiment in mind, aspects of the text jump out that might not otherwise become the subject of analytic focus. . . . [for more on Ender's Game, please drop in to the Transcriptions Bookshelf]

William Gibson. NeuROmAnceR.

William Gibson. MoNA LIsa OveRdrIVe.

William Gibson. CoUNt ZeRO.

William Gibson. IdOrU.

William Gibson. ViRTuAl LIghT.

James Tiptree, Jr. "ThE gIRl WhO wAs PlUGged IN."

Neal Stephenson. SnoW CrAsH.

Neal Stephenson. ThE DiAMonD AgE.