The virtual and the social

Abstract

The hypothesis of this paper is that the virtual, at least in the way we define it, is not something new, something that we observe as a result of the proliferation of new ICT's. Rather, the concept of the virtual has a long history. The word virtual comes from latin "virtualis", derived from "virtus": force, potency. In scholastic philosophy the virtual is what exists in the making, potentially but not in act. This is why Levy (1998) argues that the virtual isn't opposed to the real, but to the actual. This paper develops the term 'virtual' by drawing on Levy's work alongside that of Michel Serres (1994). In Atlas, Serres characterises the virtual through the notion of being-out-of-there. Imagination, language, knowledge, religion or fiction are modes of being-out-of-there. Nevertheless, new technology allows us to rediscover, to refocus or to reinvent the virtual. And we argue that addressing some of the stories we present here through the figure of the virtual brings intelligibility to some of the processes and relationships that define our present. We will then go on to argue that the idea of the virtual may be useful to understand local-global tension, the creation of collectivities without designated place or space, and forms of ordering multiplicity and of governing quite different from those described by institutions.