The concept of virtualization involves any mental operation that leads from the here and now, the singular, the usable once-and-for-all, and the solidly embodied to the timeless, abstract, general, multiple, versatile, repeatable, ubiquitous, immaterial, and morphologically fluid. Skeptics may object that Lévy’s concept of virtualization simply renames well-known mental operations such as abstraction and generalization; but partisans will counter that the notion is much richer because it explains the mechanisms of these operations. If thought is the production of models of the world—that is, of the virtual as double—it is through the consideration of the virtual as potential that the mind puts together representations that can act upon the world. While a thought confined to the actual would be reduced to a powerless recording of facts, a thought that places the actual in the infinitely richer context of the virtual as potential gains control over the process of becoming through which the world plays out its destiny. (p: 37)
The power of Lévy’s concept of virtualization resides precisely in its dual nature of timeless operation responsible for all of human culture, and of trademark of the contemporary Zeitgeist. In our dealing with the virtual, we are doing what mankind has always done, only more powerfully, consciously, and systematically. (p: 37)
If we live a “virtual condition,’’ as N. Katherine Hayles has suggested (How We Became Posthuman, 18), it is not because we are condemned to the fake but because we have learned to live, work, and play with the fluid, the open, the potential. In contrast to Baudrillard, Lévy does not seem alarmed by this exponentiation of the virtual because he sees it as a productive acceleration of the feedback loop between the virtual and the actual rather than as a loss of territory for the real. (p: 37)
The power of Lévy’s concept of virtualization resides precisely in its dual nature of timeless operation responsible for all of human culture, and of trademark of the contemporary Zeitgeist. In our dealing with the virtual, we are doing what mankind has always done, only more powerfully, consciously, and systematically. (p: 37)
If we live a “virtual condition,’’ as N. Katherine Hayles has suggested (How We Became Posthuman, 18), it is not because we are condemned to the fake but because we have learned to live, work, and play with the fluid, the open, the potential. In contrast to Baudrillard, Lévy does not seem alarmed by this exponentiation of the virtual because he sees it as a productive acceleration of the feedback loop between the virtual and the actual rather than as a loss of territory for the real. (p: 37)
