What is Virtual?
Virtual, in Brain Massumi’s term has little to do with reality. Often people like to suggest virtual as an unreal and simulated type of reality. Massumi’s “Parables for the Virtual” book rejects this popular cultural theory and argues for another perception: Virtual is a continuous process of becoming and changing. The position is merely a stopping of a movement. It is in relation to possibility when referring to a past passage. Process is a constant qualitative change that does not derive from position. It is in relation to potential as it unfolds in an unprescribed future. With the distinction of possibility and potential and the emphasis of ontogenesis of movement over position, Massumi suggests processual indeterminacy and social determination, nature and culture, are in a dynamic unity that mutually feeds back and feeds forward each other. He defines virtual within this dynamic unity, the transition of the two modes.
To exemplify this idea here, I will use a current television series show Heroes as an example. Let’s not focus on how a TV show itself is a debatable medium of real or unreal, and not focus on the genre of this TV show as science fiction, but focus on the narrative as an independent entity. Heroes premiered on NBC in September 2006 and is currently up to its 14th episode. The story is about several everyday individuals discovering they possess special abilities while a catastrophe is foretold and impending. Their special ability and their role of saving mankind has connected them together.
The sequence of narrative in Heroes is a rather challenging one compared to conventional Television drama. Every episode narrates parts of the sequence at a certain time period and the following episode starts with the same time frame but narrates and connects the other part of the sequence to precede the whole story line. To uses Zeno’s arrows as a simple abstract way to understand the passing and stopping as Massumi did in page 6. In Heroes, the narrative is as if twelve separate and simultaneously traveling arrows. Each series routinely focused on several of the twelve while suggesting the others are continuously in movement. As the series unfolds, the story further develops by starting from different characters within the same time period as the last episode.
However, the ordinary sense of time and place is even subverted further by the super power processed by the characters. And, some characters’ powers, such as time bending, and capability of painting future scenes are an outlet for the emergence of events in non-linear space and time. One of the twelve main characters, Hiro Nakamura, started off as a programmer in an office cubicle in Japan, and yet he found out that he has the power to manipulate time. He can stop time, slow it and can even travel back and forth in time. With his ability, Hiro felt his destiny must be beyond an ordinary office man and he decided to tele-transport himself to New York. As he arrives in New York, he is surprised to find a comic book in the news stand where Hiro is the main character and everything he has done, and will do is depicted in the book. Hiro went to find the comic book author to look for the answer. Instead he found the author, who is also a painter (real and of the future) dead in his studio with his brain violently cut opened. Hiro was shocked; police ran into the apartment; but all the sudden, a nuclear bomb exploded in the city. Hiro suddenly realizes that his special power was to be used to stop this explosion. And he went back to his normal time in Japan and started a different trip to America.
This catastrophe sets up one emergent event in one way when time moves forward. Along with super-powered individuals, if we draw a diagram of the nuclear explosion as a dot and moments of people discover their special power as different dots, to indicates these emergents’ signification and their time occurrence, the explosion will be a dot on a outer circle of time and the discovering of special powers are many dots on inner circles. Yet, with a height to indicate the signification level of the explosion dot and super powers dots, they will be equally high. The TV show sets up this “final” dramatic scene parallel to the development of twelve individual organisms. Within the complication of humanity, “Heroes” are carrying their discovery to a unknown consequence.