By LEONARDO CABRAL*
The current configuration of virtual reality highlights the philosophical problem of how the subjective and the objective interact in non-virtual reality, to simply constitute what “reality” is.
Based on critical self-reflection, the article “The logic of virtual reality” – recently posted on the website the earth is round – raised issues that deserve to be discussed. It is appropriate that this commentary, after exposing the logic of virtual reality, breaks this logic in the name of opening up possibilities.
It is argued that the process of defining the subject in new terms – by converging on immediate reality – makes societies return to the historically modern point from which contemporary social conflicts began. This “modern”, when defined from the processes of secularization that began in the 19th century, is what causes social anomie: the loss of belonging to the reality that forms what is collective in existence – a condition that aggravates social conflicts.
This, however, is not what motivates the reflection presented here. We will continue the reflection on what we call virtual reality, to arrive at the definition of the concept of freedom, when the “I”, by understanding that it is “I”, will feel in the strong postulation of the term freedom what it is. And the reflection thus presented involves a question that is essentially a beginning: what makes virtual reality what we can call this?
Subjectivity enters virtual reality, which is understood as objectivity when there is the presence of the other – this is the elementary proposition for what constitutes “virtual reality”. However, while the other is also subjectivity that enters virtual reality, the relationship between subjects is what creates the illusion of objectivity that constitutes “virtual reality”. The virtual “I” is an illusion because it is nonexistent.
Thus, the core of this text will be based on the following premise: the current configuration of virtual reality highlights the philosophical problem of how the subjective and the objective interact in a reality that is not virtual, to simply constitute what “reality” is. If the self exists in relation to the other, and these are the poles that create objectivity – shaping reality –, the self and the other have subjective perspectives, and thus the illusion of objectivity is what configures any reality as illusory. If the “self” is the only reality – when the content internal to the subject is what comes from reality to be expressed in reality, that is, if the “self” is the power to constitute reality –, what happens from the refusal to express reality?
Let us return to virtual reality in its artistic status. When virtual reality is intrinsically artistic – photos and videos (in short, texts) are produced to be reproduced –, the identity of virtual reality is not necessarily artistic. It is stated in the previous text that the subject whose identity is virtual reality has in it what conditions his immediate reality, which is in fact understandable, however, immediate reality is traversed by the concept that François Hartog calls “regimes of historicity”, which forms the temporal line to be superimposed.
This superimposes virtual reality when the regime of historicity is presentist: if the current regime of historicity is presentist – which means that the present is conditioned by what happens in the present time –, the subject whose identity is virtual reality, if not conditioned by immediate reality, is conditioned to express the present in relation to the present. (Although its contents encompass regimes of historicity other than these, the material basis of the subject – the body – is what is in the present.) Therefore, let us reframe the question: if the “I” is the power to constitute reality, what happens when there is a refusal to express it?reality, if expressing this is to be limited by the present time?
The answer may be the following: if the formation of the subject in new terms converges in immediate reality, there is the re-engendering of modern and contemporary conflicts whose effect is to break with the alienating chain of time in ultra-liberal capitalism. There is an answer other than this. (However, one can stop reading here and wait for these conflicts to happen; otherwise, one is invited to enjoy and enjoy the text).
When virtual reality is intrinsically artistic – photos and videos (in short, texts) are produced to be reproduced – and when virtual reality conditions immediate reality, what is excluded from the logic of production for reproduction is what has the status of reality that can be expressed by this name. Life, apart from virtual and immediate realities. If the “I” is the power to constitute realities by expressing reality, when this is refused, the “I” is faced with what is empty – the lack that is constitutive of being, the lack that when constitutive of being is what frees the creation of what Friedrich Schiller defines as unlimited being.
But what makes the void what is void as a power that creates the unlimited? The refusal to express reality is the refusal to express historically shaped reality: if this has the direction of the end, saying this is what immobilizes the direction of the end, immobilizing the direction of the end to reverse it in a direction that is another: the direction of creation, which we know is what occurs after the end that is inevitable.
This is how existing in virtual reality becomes a condition of appearance, as this existence escapes the determination to exist in the regime of presentist historicity, so that existence happens in the absence of regimes of historicity, which means existing in the irreducible place of the “I”, which means preparing thought for socialism.
The absence of a regime of historicity to condition is what moves time to open what is the “place of the self”, and this is what the being intrinsically conceives for itself, however, the question is: does the self conceive infinitely for itself? For the collective creation of the unlimited, the logic that constitutes virtual reality is rewritten: “If the self exists in relation to the other, and these are the poles that create objectivity – shaping reality –, the self and the other have subjective perspectives, and thus the illusion of objectivity is what configures any reality as illusory.”
It is rewritten to then advance on the negative aspect of virtual reality: just as virtual reality is an illusion, any reality is an illusion, however, by equating two realities that are illusory, the space of reality that is unconditioned is retained, and this is the space of socialist reality where the interaction between subjects makes sensitivity the central element. The creation of the unlimited – where what we do is what we do when the only pragmatic is to destroy capitalism – passes through thought when unconditioned: if the production of what we do to be reproduced is what does not say about what we are, this is the production that says about what we will be, and what we will be is irreducible when it is what exists in our inner life, born from it.
Existing in our inner life – having in it what are elementary contents: the sensitivity that produces intelligence – the “I” in relation to the “other” does not form the system previously belonging to the historically shaped reality; what there is is the power of a new reality, which is born from the freedom inherent in the act of feeling, creating and sensing, continuously, in this which is the essential definition of freedom. The same process of creating reality – after the critical inference that speaks of the place of social conflict and the place of thought – is a process that returns, opening existence to the dimension where utopias happen.
What is against utopia is anomie, this absence of collective meaning that paralyzes thought and action, when what moves thought and action depends on the sensitivity that produces intelligence, in the face of times when conflicts are what establish anomie from fear. Thus, the dialectic between virtual reality and life, by revealing that the former can be dissociated from the latter – breaking what the previous text defines as the logic of virtual reality –, does this, and does it with intensity, so that life is not reduced by the pragmatic algorithm, which seeks to determine the indeterminable, which in the face of the creation of the unlimited is only the number that says of the era what the era is not, when humanity is what does not accept being reduced to calculation.
*Leonardo Cabral is a historian in training and a writer. He is the author of the novel The peasant sketches (Roof tile).
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