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Introduction
 
CYBORG
 
HYPERTEXT
 
VIRTUALITY
 
References
Acknowledgments
 
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VIRTUALITY

The virtual has become especially associated with digital media, for example as virtual identities in chat-rooms or virtual reality in 3D computer graphic simulations. But the virtual also functions beyond the narrow association with computers, by providing another name for age-old debates about appearance and reality, fact and fiction, mind and body, idealism and materialism. Specific instances of these debates occur in aspects of computer culture. For example:

William Gibson, science fiction author of Neuromancer (1984), is generally credited with the invention of the idea of cyberspace: a global information cityscape that computer users enter, leaving the "meat" of their body behind.

Artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky, in essays such as "Will Robots Inherit the Earth?" (1994), claims that we'll eventually be able to replicate our brains using nanotechnology and thus transcend the mortality of the body. Others fantasise about downloading their consciousness into a transferable computer program.

Howard Rheingold and other advocates of "virtual communities" seek respect for the social relationships that can develop through online communication systems.

Thus the offline material world normally designated as "real" is only one of many realities among which there is no longer any authoritative hierarchy. A key figure in this line of argument is Jean Baudrillard. Essays such as "The Precession of Simulacra" (1983) propose the death of the real: a global culture is already upon us in the form of a sign economy, which systematically deauthenticates the self and the world and renders every aspect of them the subject of representation.

The relationship between realism and romance is one of the staples of debate about James's fiction. His key essay "The Art of Fiction" (1884) makes a commitment to realism while rejecting narrow definitions of reality:

the measure of reality is very difficult to fix. The reality of Don Quixote or of Mr Micawber is a very delicate shade… Humanity is immense, and reality has a myriad forms... (51)

Some of the explorations of consciousness in his later works are indeed very delicate shades - haunted visions markedly removed from the more fully consensual and embodied world that his earlier work represents and addresses. Hence the strand of judgment, typified by the chapter on James in F. R. Leavis's The Great Tradition (1948), that prefers the works of his early and middle periods on the basis that they are more solidly real. By contrast, defenders of James's twentieth century work point out that it does not simply retreat from reality. It seeks new ways to (a) represent mind and body and (b) respond to the challenges made by New Journalism, investigative biography and photography to the traditional authority of literary culture to represent the real.

  • "The Papers" (1903) anticipates the triumph of mass media representations over any private or literary "real".
  • The phrase "virtual Henry James" suggests a computer simulation. This would be a contemporary contribution to the iconography of James the Author - a discourse which he actively initiated with the New York Edition of 1907-9.