Giovanna Borradori: Virtuality, Philosophy, ArchitectureEven with the rise of digital technology, the concept of virtuality has not attracted much philosophical attention. Philosophers have instead been captivated by the challenge of interpreting cognitive processes in terms of information-processing, a challenge that has convinced many of them to understand the cognitive function of the mind in terms of a computer. A more radical approach to the analogy between the human mind and information technology is the study of the programming and performance of computers as a model for human capabilities that go beyond the cognitive. For some philosophers, mental states can be likened to a suitably programmed computer, one that would not just replicate but produce thought. 1The indifference philosophers have shown to the concept of virtuality is not matched by the ample use made of it by sociologists and architectural theorists, for whom virtuality describes the totality of effects and mutations brought about by the information and communications network.2 In this definition, virtuality designates not only whatever happens on, or is generated by, the Internet but also includes the impact of the media on the way in which we apprehend, represent and consequently build the world around us. For most theorists, the role virtuality plays is so extended that it disables us from distinguishing between perception and representation, original and copy. In virtual space, so the claim goes, objects do not appear as self-contained entities, accessible via sensory perception, but rather emerge as irreducibly represented and reproduced. It is the peculiar effect of mediatized technology to fabricate events as "simulacra." 3The first objective of this essay is to call into question this definition of virtuality on the grounds of its fundamental reductionism. If virtuality amounts to a technologically generated set of events, it is in fact "reduced" to physical states of affairs. For reasons that will be elaborated on later, I will term this reductionist standpoint "representationalist" (fig. 1). In contrast, I see the possibility of developing a non-reductionist concept of virtuality, in which virtuality is not the reflection of technologically generated events but phenomenologically understood as part of intentionality. In this second definition, virtuality emerges as a constitutive component of experience, and as such, is neither mind-independent nor reducible to external sets of physical states. Along with Nietzsche's definition of perspectivism, as the doctrine for which there are no uninterpreted facts or truth, I shall call this non-reductionist alternative "perspectivist" (fig. 2).

My second purpose will be to show that these two determinations of virtuality-the representationalist and the perspectivist-are based on fundamentally different conceptions of space, elaborated, in a somewhat parallel way, by philosophers and architects in the classical age.4 I shall limit myself to articulating the philosophical aspect of the correspondence, and, except for a few sketchy remarks, will leave the architectural aspect to be evoked, rather than explicated, by the images that accompany the text. My intent is to indicate that, on the one hand, the representationalist understanding of virtuality depends heavily on what I call the "rationalist" notion of space,5 whose origins are to be found in Descartes. On the other hand, I see the perspectivist alternative as a critique of the rationalist notion of space aimed at the phenomenological description of space in terms of "virtual spatiality."6 This kind of spatiality has heterogeneity and movement as its chief features.7 Drawing from the philosophical insights of Nietzsche and Bergson, I will attempt to unfold a heterogeneous and dynamic concept of virtual spatiality, in which tensions and qualia8 override oppositional pairs: in virtual spatiality, direction and movement cut transversally across the distinction between subjective and objective (fig. 3); density and rarity replace the opposition between material and immaterial (fig. 4); latency and expression take predominance over presence and absence (fig. 5).

Virtuality De-Technologized

My phenomenological explication of the meaning of virtuality brings into focus a new vantage point from which to understand the philosophical implications of architecture. The interest and the challenge of this new point of view is that it calls into question the indifference toward architecture shared by the vast majority of Western philosophers. Traditionally, the philosophical meaning of architecture has been considered merely aesthetic. As an art form, architecture has been mostly denigrated as the least "pure" of all the arts due to its heavy material involvement, social function and use. This classical view becomes institutionalized by Kant who subordinates architecture as an "inferior" art: namely, as the art most bound to the utilitarian element, which is precisely what beauty is supposed to transcend.
If virtuality is interpreted in the technological sense, I argue, this traditional conception is not being challenged. In most theorists' reading, at a determinate point in time, architecture begins to be reshaped digitally, in terms of both its technology and its object. In the course of such reshaping of architectural theory and practice, while design is being increasingly produced through digital means, the spaces architecture is called on to design are themselves virtual. Finally, architecture is being put face to face with a different spatial sensibility, derived and constantly enriched by the experience of navigating and cruising the digital highways; a spatial sensibility that accords with a new range of spatial needs, the identification of which is still largely a work in progress, as ever greater portions of our existence are being conducted on-line. It seems to me that until the role of philosophy is restricted to helping architecture demarcate this sensibility, the meaning of architecture will remain merely aesthetic, without further constitutive involvement.

In contrast, the phenomenological explication of virtuality seems to call into question precisely this traditional encapsulation of architecture within aesthetic confines, and consequently opens the way for a discussion of its ontological implications. I wish to underline that my critique of technological virtuality does not aim at denying either its existence or its compelling influence. I am simply pointing out that, by giving us the means to technologically "produce" virtual effects, digital technology replicates a feature of our experience that, in and of itself, is not technological at all, but is rather constituted largely by architecture. In order to de-technologize virtuality, I shall follow the strategy that Martin Heidegger used to de-technologize technology.

In one of his most celebrated essays, "The Question Concerning Technology," Heidegger attempts to de-technologize the modern concept of technology by interpreting it as a mode of revealing the world in relation to truth, on the one hand, and poetry, on the other. According to Heidegger, the essence of technology is not technological but rather bound, both etymologically and ontologically, to the Greek term techné, which encompasses at least two non-technological approaches to the world: art and knowledge.9 As long as technology is analyzed instrumentally, namely, as a contingent technique of manipulation and exploitation of resources, its essence will remain veiled. Technology can neither be pushed forward nor evaded, but only critically reappropriated as the expression of human intentionality.
I wish to suggest a parallel de-technologization of virtuality. Since the de-technologization of technology provides Heidegger with the opportunity of opening up technology as a phenomenological concept and, through it, of pursuing a critique of its instrumental interpretation, I hope to release the phenomenological potential of virtuality, and through it, to unfold the virtual dimension of experience. My non-technological interpretation of virtuality is grounded, both etymologically and ontologically, in the Latin notion of vis, or force, which is a leitmotif in Nietzsche's philosophy. Underlying Nietzsche's philosophy is a definition of spatiality as an immanent field of forces, where forms are not simply "contained" (fig. 6) but

constantly produced and moved around by the very differential between the forces themselves10 (fig. 7).If we understand the nature of these forces to be discursive, virtual spatiality will emerge as the experience of a discursivity that is virtual only insofar as it is latent, yet unexpressed, or non-actualized.11 Believing in the existence of such silent, unexpressed forces brings about the need to enlarge the concept of experience embraced by most thinkers in the empiricist tradition: namely, the concept of a sensory-based observation of the world before all inference. On the contrary, the notion of virtual spatiality would entail adding to experience an inferential dimension of its own, given that the forces constituting it-mainly implicit in the spatial organization of the world and articulated by it-are themselves discursive.Since architecture is responsible for the spatial organization of the world, it plays a constitutive role in the formation of the human subject, at the level of both its representations and its perceptions. I term this constitutive role the virtuality of architecture.From the standpoint of the virtuality of architecture, the individual is not just "always already thrown" into existence, as Heidegger would have put it, but "always already built"12 (fig. 8). Architecture does not elaborate theoretical, aesthetic, functional propositions "in" space, but becomes the condition of possibility for the hermeneutical exchange between the individual self, others, and the environment. It is this exchange that makes the human subject a being-in-the-world. The virtuality of architecture picks out the way in which, in Heidegger's language, we come across ourselves: namely, in a world that is not just simply "there" for us, but is always already built and constructed spatially, socially, historically and culturally. As the social, historical and cultural structure of our world is passed on to us through the organization of the space in which we live, the traditional regimentation of architecture within stricly defined aesthetic boundaries needs to be revised, for architecture builds us as much as we build it (fig. 9).Why Is "Virtual Space" a Representationalist Concept?If an entity can be reduced to its physical and quantifiable components, it can also be faithfully "represented" in terms of these components. Since the Renaissance, perspective has been the science of representation in this sense, the technique used to rationalize, quantify, order and control spatial relationships 13 (fig. 10).The central role of representation in the rationalist lineage is one of the main themes of Heidegger's later philosophy, in which representation appears interwoven with the concept of "presence."14 According to Heidegger, the more representation is granted epistemological transparency, the more the presence of which it is a representation is presumed to be stable, permanent, self-identical (fig. 11). However, stability, permanence and identity cannot exist without that which allows the object to be present: namely, space. Neither reduction nor representation can happen without the homogeneity of Newtonian and Cartesian space.
My view is that whenever virtuality is understood either as the host dimension for simulacra or as the effects of simulation, a reductionist and representationalist interpretation of it is being offered. Anytime the blurring of the distinction between perception and representation is justified in technological terms, not only a reductionist but a representationalist position is being presented. I wish to show how representationalism applies to the semiologically construed theories currently endorsed by sociologists and architectural and cyber theorists.

Simulacra are conceived as infinitely layered compounds of mediated information whose object or reference, assumed as self-contained presence, is ultimately irretrievable. In the vocabulary of poststructuralism, largely influenced by Saussure's linguistics, such an infinite layering of mediated information without a definite object or reference is translated as the endless deferral from signifier to signifier (fig. 12). Whether only simulacra are available, which are neither copies nor originals, or only signifiers, which point to yet another signifier-rather to a transcendental signified-the categorical framework remains essentially

representational in that it maintains the belief in something like an original presence. In other words: if virtuality is explained, as the result of such a determinate and external agent, as either digital technology or the information media, it follows that it is assumed to be the manipulation of a primitive reality, or self-contained presence. In anchoring their interpretation of virtuality exclusively in the information and communications paradigm, these semiologically construed theories express what Heidegger would have called an instrumental view of virtuality, based on a representationalist concept of the world.15

Heidegger elevates his "strong" concept of presence to being the mark of a specifically Western way of philosophical speculation, committed to keeping in place a fundamentally oppositional structure. This structure is the matrix of the rationalist concept of space as homogeneous and inert dimension.

The Cartesian Theorem

The representationalist concept of space, which virtual space relies on, is infiltrated by the theme of alienation. To understand the ways in which this happens, I shall briefly recast what I call the "Cartesian theorem," which, in my reading, provides the conceptual framework for such different architectural experiences as nineteenth-century historicism (fig. 13) and twentieth-century modernism (fig. 14).

Descartes's conception of space revolves around the central opposition between the empirical dimension, defined as having spatial features, and the transcendent or spiritual dimension, which is characterized by mental features. The absolute transcendence of the mental is gained via a method of progressive "doubt," which allows Descartes to reach thought as the only activity not subjected to doubt. We can doubt everything, he writes in the Meditations, except that we are thinking beings: even if we think that we are not thinking, we are still thinking. Assumed as self-reflection, thought is freestanding, internally justified, autonomous of all sorts of empirical support. In fact, the inescapability of thinking does not prove at all that we are awake or completely sober. All it proves is that thought is absolutely primary and independent of anything that is extended in space.

This transcendence of thought is what leads Descartes to define space as mutually exclusive of anything active and spiritual. What I have called the Cartesian theorem entails precisely the mutual exclusion of space and thought. Any thinking being expresses an autonomy from the empirical as well as from space. Whatever thinks is not extended, or spatial, and whatever is extended does not think. The receptivity or passivity of space, as contrasted with the absolute activity of thought, is the chief characteristic, in philosophy and architecture, of what I have termed rationalist space. For Descartes, it is the exclusively mental faculty of "understanding" that is able to conceptualize the notion of extension, which in and of itself is imperceptible. In this sense, the very existence of space depends on the mind. The mind injects space with ideas and forms and, in turn, the absolute emptiness of space does nothing but receive them.

The extreme polarization of activity and passivity, in terms of mind and body, form and space, is essential in the history of representationalist architecture16 (fig. 15), whose epitome I place at architectural modernism's emphasis on geometry as a way to protect from change, compromise, obsolescence and fallibility. Spanning the essentialism of De Stijl, the different versions of functionalism and the international Style, architectural form gains timelessness and universality as a result of its absolute transcendence. If this premise is true, a basic correspondence could be set up between the main thrust of architectural and philosophical rationalism. Such a thrust can be genealogically identified in Cartesian philosophy, namely, in the opposition between the empirical sphere, architecturally understood in terms of space and function, and the transcendent sphere, a role occupied in architecture by the notion of form.

Two Conceptions of the New

Geometry grants the perfect harmony between form, function and the idealization of modern life. This idealization, which is at the center of the philosophical and architectural question of modernity, revolves around a normative understanding of novelty. To be modern is to be new. Arthur Rimbaud's imperative to be modern, "il faut étre absolument modernes," is in fact an incitation to interpret and practice the new as a way of life. But what does it mean to pursue the new? Where is the new to be found? Nowhere, otherwise it would no longer be new. Does this mean that the new is necessarily utopian? And does utopia entail impossibility? My short answer is that the modernist conception of the new is explained by the notion of utopia, otherwise the new would cease to be such. However, the modernist utopia is a political project of social emancipation, and therefore, it needs to be conceived as possible. Utopian modernist novelty is what it is not yet real but may become so on the basis of the conditions found in the real. In fact, the modernist conception of normative novelty coincides with the notion of possibility, a foreseeable possibility. (fig. 16).

In contrast, from a perspectivist viewpoint, novelty corresponds to the actualization of virtual presences: presences virtually contained in the real but not yet actualized. While a representationalist, Cartesian and modernist notion of novelty is based on the category of possibility-on what is not yet real but which may become so on the basis of conditions found in the real-perspectivist novelty is the affirmation of submerged and unexpressed forces, virtually contained in the real but not yet actualized. In other words, while representationalism moves within a system of oppositions based on two classical modalities, reality and possibility; the perspectivist scheme is based on the non-oppositional pair constituted by actuality and virtuality. Moreover, while possibility is larger than reality because it contains whatever could become real on the basis of the conditions found in the real as well as the real, virtuality is coextensive with the real, for virtuality is already real, inclusive of the yet unexpressed or non-actualized portion of the real.

Conceived non-representationally, virtuality is neither a technologically supported event nor the representation of a more primitive reality located "before" virtual reality. Virtuality is not the representation of an original presence but phenomenologically descriptive of the extreme complexity of experience, which includes individual and collective memory, oniric activity and imagination. Perspectivist virtuality is phenomenologically understood as a mode of our experience. As such, virtuality helps articulate a new dimension of experience, based on virtual spatiality rather than on space.

Virtual spatiality does not perform the function of space, insofar as it does not provide forms with material and objective stability. While space is the receptor of forms, virtual spatiality is the generator of forms. Virtual spatiality is an active and differentiating dimension rather than a homogenizing. Forms are not injected into space as if from the outside, but generated within it (fig. 17). While the Cartesian notion of space implies the installation of the radically new (possibility) into reality, virtual spatiality implies the affirmation of the yet unexpressed, silent forces by which reality is constituted (fig 18). What are these discursive forces? An answer can be found in Nietzsche.

Perspective, Force, Interpretation

For Nietzsche, the concept of force is linked with that of affirmation. Affirmation indicates a process of regeneration of existing and yet unforeseen forces-forgotten, repressed, coerced, marginalized-that silently constitute our present. Affirmation entails the actualization of virtual presences.

The difficulty in giving examples of these forces, or attributing a content to them, is due to the fact that forces are by definition determined quantitatively rather than qualitatively. In The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche solves this problem by assigning a genealogical function to two forces that he names the "will to truth," or the will to transcendence, characteristic of the rationalist lineage, and the "will to create," the result of vital impulses. In the Western tradition, so Nietzsche's argument goes, the constant predominance of the will to truth has minimized the will to create so drastically that the play between them has been largely obliterated. This is the cause of the "temptation" to think exclusively in objective terms, as if the primitives were self-contained, measurable entities and principles. On the contrary, Nietzsche wants to recover both the antagonism between the forces-since the forces are irreducibly multiple-and their primitiveness.

In Nietzsche's analysis, Western culture's generalized commitment to representation has historically implied the suppression of the notion of force as well as the acknowledgment of the dynamics occurring between the different forces. This suppression is the cause of several hegemonic outcomes. On the contrary, representation should be looked at as just one of many "perspectival" alternatives.

"Perspectivism" is the term Nietzsche gives as an alternative to representationalism, that is, to the dogmatic and totalizing aspiration of traditional philosophical systems. Nietzsche provides the following definition of perspectivism: "Insofar as the word 'knowledge' has any meaning, the world is knowable, but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings. 'Perspectivism.'"17 Granted the obscurity of the statement, it seems clear that Nietzsche, on the one hand, defines perspectivism as the doctrine according to which there are no uninterpreted facts or truths, and, on the other, establishes a correspondence between perspective and individual meaning. What I see him defending here are two points: knowledge is pluralistic insofar as it entails some form of interpretation; and the play of interpretation is a play of different perspectives and can thus be defined as perspectivist. However, perspective is unique. Despite the fact that Nietzsche himself uses perspective and interpretation interchangeably more than once, there is a subtle difference between the two terms that should not be overlooked by those interested in the contrast between space and virtual spatiality, both from a philosophical and an architectural standpoint. 18 While perspective indicates the absolute uniqueness of our spatial and sensory location within the world, interpretation is an intellectual organization of perspectives. This is because the juxtaposition of perspectives can be apprehended only at an abstract, intellectual level. Nietzsche's use of the term "perspectivism," rather than "interpretation," is revealing of the fact that he is committed to both the determinacy and uniqueness of the individual's actualized sensory presence within space and to the virtual presence of others. To translate perspectivism into interpretation is to provide an intellectualistic reading of Nietzsche, a reading that I suspect he would have resisted precisely in the name of the uniqueness of the individual sensory presence in space.
In order not to naturalize perspective in the representationalist way-as the transparent means of rationalizing spatial relationships-Nietzsche attributes to perspective an existential and thoroughly materialistic meaning (fig. 19). In Nietzsche's perspectivist approach, there are as many foci as there are eyes in the world (fig. 20). Perspective is not a technique of representation but the affirmation of one's own actualization as well as the intuition of the virtual spatiality of others. Perspectivism is both a critical project of displacement of the focus, and an affirmative project, consisting in the actualization of other foci, an actualization whose scope is to give the undecidable, enigmatic, unpredictable features of existence a new legitimacy (fig. 21).

Nietzschean affirmation injects ambiguity into the apparent unity and stability of the actual, opening up fissures of virtuality and becoming.19 To affirm means to experience the

multiplicity of "perspectives" that a present state of affairs, or a form, contains virtually. To a degree, the heterogeneous group of architects defined by critics as "deconstructivists" began exploring such an internal instability of form.20 What is unforgettable about affirmation, and yet extremely elusive, is possibly the Nietzschean idea of form deforming itself, of perspective dislocating its own focus into perspectivism. In contrast to the formalist aspiration to purity,21 to forms free from all movement and perfectly solid in their historical or geometrical structure, perspectivist spatiality is self-reflective and insecure, warped and contorted. The internal deformation of form and the dislocation of the perspectival focus are the virtual lines along which becoming unfolds.
For Nietzsche, becoming affects all facts in the world, whether material, mental or formal. This becoming is the virtual aspect of experience. While form is necessarily actualized, becoming is yet-unformed. The challenge of the architecture of virtuality is thus to explore new avenues over and beyond the articulation of form. For architecture to be able to connect with perspectivist virtuality, it needs to abandon all formalist stances and take up perception as a response to the yet-unformed. The yet-unformed is pure movement, the movement produced by the pushing of forces against one another-a movement that, in Nietzsche's philosophy of force, comes before space in the sense that it constitutes spatiality. Architecture should open itself to a thoroughly material, sensory type of spatial inquiry.

The Unformed and the Untimely

Nietzsche's concept of perspective can be best explained by a comparison with DNA. Nietzschean perspectival foci are real and cognitively co-present in the same way that DNA is real and present in an organic body. But unlike DNA, particularly if it is interpreted as chemically determinate and subject to the indeterminacy of life processes, the foci of Nietzschean perspectivism are themselves indeterminate, insofar as they unfold only alongside the forward-moving and ever-changing dimension of those processes.
However, although vitalism and the theme of "life" play an autonomous role in Nietzsche's thought, I am deliberately limiting the significance of the biological to explanatory purposes. Instead, I wish to develop the connection between perspective and life in terms of history, in which is embedded the monumental, archival, memorializing function traditionally attributed to architecture. Nietzsche himself elaborated perspectivism in historical terms, hoping to rescue history from the pitfalls of historicism. Nietzsche's perspectivism is aimed at activating the virtual dimension of history that all forms of historicism repress, including the more recent versions of postmodern neo-historicism (fig. 22).

Nietzsche's early essay "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" illustrates the connection between life and history. According to Nietzsche, there are two possible connections to history: one is authentic and life-enhancing, the other is inauthentic and destructive. Inauthentic historiography imposes itself whenever history is taken as a given, as the historicists do by monumentalizing it and revering it indiscriminately. History does not have either determinate meanings or a unifying scope and, therefore, deserves to be hermeneutically activated and challenged rather than religiously respected. In contrast, authentic historiography depends on the ability to "make history," an ability that Nietzsche distinguishes from simply "being in it." This ability depends on what Nietzsche calls "plastic power." With the notion of plastic power we return to affirmation, since the plasticity of an individual or a community is a function of their impulse to affirm themselves. To affirm means to remain oneself in the face of pain, change and injustice, and therefore to "become what we are." Life is "plastic power," the power to shape other perspectives without being afraid of losing oneself. Only if this power is affirmed and cultivated, rather than suppressed, will history serve life.

The authentic understanding of history, and of human existence within history, is contingent upon what Nietzsche describes as stepping into the Unhistorical. Such a leap consists in a type of "creative forgetting," disengaged from the normative power of history, and it is necessary in order to strengthen one's plastic power (fig. 23). "It is possible to live almost without memory, and to live happily moreover, as the animal demonstrates; but it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting."22 Forgetting means disconnecting from a linear sense of time, described as a series of punctual "nows," some of which are no-more and some of which are not-yet. This linear description of time represents selves and cultures as located in time, rather than constituted by it and becoming with it. Switching between the Historical and the Unhistorical, making the present part of becoming, is what secures a healthy and constructive relationship with history, for both philosophy and architecture.
What is no-more cannot be objectified as something without an active influence on the present but needs to be reactivated precisely in terms of these influences (fig. 24). This is the transformative function of time that the Unhistorical is supposed to introduce into the present. Implementing the role that time, in its transformative function, plays in existence means implementing the contact with a specific ontological modality that is located in reality but is not actualized: virtuality.

The relationship with history opened up by contact with the virtual dimension of experience is neither the radical rejection of the past promulgated by the most rigid formulations of architectural modernism and the International Style nor the reverence for the past undertaken by the postmodernist appropriation of historical styles. Nietzsche's perspectivist history is not, as it is often and all too simplistically interpreted, the generating matrix of an unqualified relativism, which both in architecture and philosophy translates into a neo-historicist kind of sensibility. Perspectivist history presents both the philosopher and the architect with the question of how to interpret the yet-unformed, whether conceptually or spatially. Sensing becoming, responding to movement: these are the new challenges that need to be faced by attempting to capture form as it emerges from the process of its own formation and deformation.

The Tensions of Memory and Perception

Is there a technique for capturing movement-or, more precisely, the movement of forms and forces before their expression (fig. 25)? For some, the answer is topology, the digital animation of form, to such a degree that we would be witnessing a "topological turn."23 In contrast to the formalistic orientation promoted by the evolution of modernism into the International Style, topology has pushed architecture to stop viewing form as its ultimate parameter but rather as a by-product of the design process. Topological design no longer consists of a highly polarized activity in which the architect injects form and meaning onto a passive, inert white surface representing space. It has transmuted into the interactive experience between a mind and a form, which is interactive because the form emerges from its own generative process. Movement, in other words, exceeds form.

However, the changes brought about by the development of digital technology need to be looked at as opportunities rather than causes. As discussed, my intention is to rescue the concept of virtuality from an exclusively technological definition. Virtuality is a constitutive feature of experience that the digital means allow to explore further. The elaboration of virtuality in this phenomenological rather than technological key is anticipated in the work of the turn-of-the-century French philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson is the only philosopher in the Western tradition to offer an explicit treatment of virtuality.
For Bergson, virtuality is the ontological modality of consciousness, or duration. Duration roughly corresponds to what William James, using a famous aquatic metaphor, called the "stream." Just as James's stream of consciousness is continuous, forward-moving and in constant change, Bergson's duration is

the succession of qualitative states of mind, indiscernible as atomic units but only feasible in their interconnectedness and passing (fig. 26). The characteristic of passing is the result of deeper currents that, while remaining submerged, push water toward the surface. Both the deep currents and the superficial motion of the water they create are real components of our experience. But while the motion on the surface is actual, the submerged currents are virtual. What does this virtual modality entail?
In Matter and Memory, James's metaphor of the stream is primarily assimilated into the mental function of recollection, or memory, which Bergson discusses in opposition to perception. Both perception and memory are "tendencies" at work in our experience. Perception and memory are tendencies along which experience "tends" to organize itself, but do not constitute independent kinds of experience, available separately from one another. Experience is a "composite" of tendencies, the product of their internal dynamics.

Bergson defines perception as the "abstract" tendency of our experience, where abstract refers to what our experience would be like if extrapolated from the effects of time on it. Continuing the Jamesian metaphor, abstract experience would mean considering the emerged layer of the moving water at the surface separate from the deeper currents underneath. This is the kind of experience that we tend to produce artificially, when we look at the world objectively, with causal, quantitative or geometrical models of explanation in mind. In contrast, memory embodies the "concrete" tendency to experience the world as a constant becoming-other than itself (fig. 27). It is experience in terms of the effects of time on it. Unlike James, Bergson indicates these two tendencies as radically heterogeneous. It is as if deep and superficial could not measured against each other.24 The heterogeneity of perception and memory is indispensable insofar as it is, for Bergson, the primitive distinction. If it is primitive, it cannot entail anything objective, otherwise the distinction between subject and object would become primitive.

Whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up some period of our history, we become conscious of an act sui generis by which we detach ourselves from the present in order to replace ourselves, first, in the past in general, then, in a certain region of the past-a work of adjustment, something like the focusing of a camera. But our recollection still remains virtual; we simply prepare ourselves to receive it by adopting the appropriate attitude. Little by little it comes into view like a condensing cloud; from the virtual state it passes into the actual; and as its outlines become more distinct and its surface takes on color, it tends to imitate perception. But it remains attached to the past by its deepest roots, and if, being a present state, it were not also something which stands out distinct from the present, we should never know it for a memory25

Either we are "in" memory or "in" perception. We do not reach the past from the present via the extension of the representational model. Quite the opposite. As we intentionally try to recollect something, we step into the past and its virtuality, and we navigate it, not rationally but intuitively, until we meet the virtual current that is pushing along the memory we are looking for. In order for us to individuate it and recollect it, that specific memory needs to be actualized and transformed into a perception. But, as Bergson warns in the last sentence of the above quotation, part of the memory still remains attached to the past, otherwise we would not be able to discern it is a memory. This explains the sense of uncanniness, otherness, vagueness and suspension that memory entails (fig. 28).

The coexistence rather than integration of perception and memory is key to Bergson's relevance to my discussion of space, virtual spatiality and architecture. In Matter and Memory, Bergson articulates such a coexistence within a peculiar conception of matter defined as the fullest aggregate of images, the sum total of all the past, present and future images available. An image, for Bergson, is "a certain existence which is more than that

which an idealist calls a representation, but less than what a realist calls a thing-an existence placed halfway between the "thing" and the "representation."26 The image is therefore neither purely mental nor purely external to the mind, but somewhere in between. Matter is not out there, in the world, but a mix of temporal self and world, memory and perception. An example will clarify this point.

Perception and memory are indistinguishable because any perception unfolds in time. Even the most instantaneous perception, like feeling cold or hot, takes time. Whenever a perception is quantified according to objective scales of measurement, we act as if this particular time, indispensable to experience, did not exist. In the same way, when we try to recapture a memory long past, we are unable to revive it without transforming it into a perception. The interesting feature of the differential relation of these tendencies, memory and perception, virtual and actual, is that perception of actuality is arrived at, according to Bergson, from memory or virtuality. The present is accessed from the past, and not the reverse, so that experience is the constant reassessment of the present in terms of the past.

Bergson's discussion of memory and perception as irreducible to each other helps him dissolve the dichotomy between what is internal to the mind and what is external to it, interiority and exteriority. In concrete experience, as Bergson calls it, form is not injected into space as if from some otherworldly, timeless, geometrical outside but emerges from the generative process of its own formation and deformation. What contemporary theorists identify as the animation of form, via topological techniques (fig. 29), Bergson illustrated as the infiltration of perception by memory (fig. 30). Such an infiltration provides experience with what Bergson calls its "pictorial" character, which indicates the process-like nature of the world. Quite paradoxically, it is time itself that constitutes experience pictorially, like a cinematic sequence.

Experience, for Bergson, cannot be reduced to objective descriptions, a possibility implicit in Descartes's pursuit of the dichotomy between internal and external, form and space. Reducing experience to objective terms is like taking a "snapshot" of the world, portraying experience only in terms of "predetermined possibilities," stemming from the stability, stillness and immutability of a photograph. Thinking in objective terms implies a conception of matter and space as empty, void, homogeneous and passive, rather than full, heterogeneous and in constant motion: namely, as an aggregate of images in endless tension and becoming. When we take the objective standpoint, according to this Bergsonian sense of objectivity, we analyze only actualized events and states of affairs. This means that we take them in isolation from their becoming, as if they were not in the process of evolving through time. In so doing, we reverse them, dissect them into discrete units and put them back together as if they needed no time to happen. But in fact, they do need time to happen and ineluctably change in time as they happen.

Let us return once more to the metaphor of virtuality as a range of deep currents that, while remaining submerged, push water to the surface. These submerged currents are virtually present in the stream. It is these virtual movements of duration that determine the emergence, or actualization, of whatever stretch of the stream of consciousness reaches the surface. Bergson's suggestion is that the virtual currents correspond to what the pure past would be like if it were accessible. The emerged stream taken in isolation from the deep currents corresponds, instead, to what the pure present would be like as a self-contained discrete dimension. However, what is true for the dynamics of aquatic currents is also true for perception and memory, present and past, actual and virtual. Experience is the theater of these dynamics, where the invisible, or deeper layer, is always responsible for the emergence of whatever comes into view.

In conclusion, in contrast to the representationalist interpretation of virtuality, according to which virtuality can be "represented" as the sum total of the effects of communications and information technology on how we both know and build the world around us, I have attempted to elucidate an alternative concept of the virtual by phenomenologically understanding it as an expression of intentionality. My definition of virtuality describes it as a constitutive component of experience, irreducible to physical processes as well as to quantification and formalization.

If this phenomenological interpretation is viable, experience contains a virtual dimension that calls into question a whole range of philosophical categorizations and architectural presuppositions. The first of these is the rationalist notion of space in all its modernist and postmodernist, historicist and neo-historicist, semiological and post-semiological reductions: a space conceived as the passive receptor of forms, installed in it by an active and independent mind. If the hypothesis of a stable and controlled space fails, one of the most enduring bridges between philosophy and architecture is swept away. On its remains, a new concept of virtual spatiality emerges, which I have attempted to articulate using Nietzsche and Bergson.

The relevance of these two philosophers for my project lies in their insistence on the irreducibly passing quality of our experience. This is what makes them champions of philosophical anti-Cartesianism and architectural anti-formalism, both incompatible with precisely this passing and becoming feature, which is the greatest challenge of the architecture of virtuality.NotesThis essay has benefited from my discussions with several colleagues and friends. I wish to thank Michael Murray for his comments on the text and David Michael Rifkind for his help with the iconographical material accompanying the essay.

1. Jerry Fodor is a major proponent of this line of philosophical inquiry. His "language of thought" hypothesis represents the "orthodox" interpretation of cognitive science insofar as it offers an account of mental operations strictly in terms of manipulation of symbols, realized in the neural structure of the brain, with a syntactic and semantic structure, according to computational rules. Thinking, according to this hypothesis, has a causal structure mirroring the logical structure of trains of thought. See Jerry Fodor, Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1987). More recently, however, a different way of thinking about computational models has contested Fodor's position. This second orientation is referred to as "connectionism." Connectionism is the view according to which the brain is a weave of multilayered networks, as opposed to a manipulator of symbols. The individual units of a given network are simple processors and the focus is on the type of connection occurring between them. See William Ramsey, Stephen P. Stich, and David E. Rumelhart, eds., Philosophy and Connectionist Theory (Hillsdale, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991).

2. As it is very difficult to provide a comprehensive synthesis of recent cybertheory, I shall limit myself to a few references as indications of different tendencies. A utopianist, science fiction-type of analysis is presented in Howard Rheingold's Virtual Reality (New York: Summit Books, 1991). A more scholarly approach, attempting to bind cybertheory to classical philosophical sources, is Michael Heim's The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), as well as Heim's most recent book, Virtual Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). A comprehensive theoretical account can be found in Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age by French sociologist Pierre Lévy, translated by Robert Bononno (New York: Plenum, 1998). John Beckmann's The Virtual Dimension: Architecture, Representation, and Crash Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998) is an anthology of essays with different theoretical approaches from a variety of disciplines, including architecture.

3. The term was first introduced by French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. See his In The Shadow Of The Silent Majorities (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), Fatal Strategies (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990) and, finally, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1995). In the context of this essay, I use the term to epitomize the "technological" conception of the virtual, which I critique as "reductionist" and "representationalist." The coincidence of virtuality, simulation and simulacra in contemporary "cybertheory" is identified and opposed by architectural theorist Greg Lynn, who writes: "The term 'virtual' has recently been so debased that it often simply refers to the digital space of computer-aided design. It is often used interchangeably with the term 'simulation.' Simulation, unlike virtuality, is not intended as a diagram for a future possible concrete assemblage but is instead a visual substitute." Greg Lynn, Animate Form (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 10.

4 The definition and periodization of the "classical age" is an open question, both in a historical and a theoretical sense. I have adopted Michel Foucault's periodization and conceptualization of the term since Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Pantheon, 1965). For Foucault, the historical and epistemological break of modernity is located during the eighteenth century.

5, I realize the challenge of applying a general definition to rationalism. However, it is one of the crucial conceptual hinges discussed by both philosophers and architects throughout the twentieth century. In particular, it has been central to the debates on modernism and postmodernism, structuralism and poststructuralism, historicism and neo-historicism, which underlie the discussion of virtuality.

6. I have coined the expression "virtual spatiality" in order to mark the difference between the rationalist concept of "space" and my perspectivist and non-reductionist critique. In my analysis, the rationalist definition of "space" coincides with the idea of a mutual exclusivity between res cogitans and res extensa, introduced by Descartes. The term "virtual spatiality" echoes the Heideggerian "spatiality," which together with "temporality" and "historicity" is at the center of Heidegger's existentialist project, as laid out in Being and Time. These terms imply a critique of the way in which the tradition of Western metaphysics has "objectified" space, time and history. According to Heidegger, objectification amounts to the inability to posit the meaning of these concepts beyond the oppositional framework set up by the subject-object distinction. Spatiality, temporality and historicity testify to Heidegger's commitment to restore and/or reappropriate space, time, and history in a phenomenological and existentialist key.

7. The critique of the rationalist concept of space as an alienated and inert "outside" is one of the steadier themes in Heidegger's philosophy, spanning Being and Time to "Building Dwelling Thinking," one of his most celebrated essays from 1952. Section III of Part I of Being and Time, which is

entirely dedicated to the distinction between space and spatiality, contains the kernel of Heidegger's treatment of space. The discussion of spatiality is conducted as a critique of what Heidegger calls "the Cartesian ontology of the world." My focusing on Descartes as the godfather of the rationalist conception of space is in line with this Heideggerian intuition. "Space is neither in the subject nor is the world in space. Rather, space is 'in' the world since the being-in-the-world constitutive for Da-sein has disclosed space. Space is not in the subject, nor does the subject observe the world 'as if' it were in space. Rather, the 'subject' correctly understood ontologically, Da-sein, is spatial in a primordial sense. And because Da-sein is spatial in the way described, space shows itself as a priori. This term does not mean something like belonging beforehand to an initially worldless subject which spins a space out of itself. Here, apriority means the previousness of encountering space (as region) in the actual encountering of things at hand in the surrounding world." Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1996), I.III, 112. Of the notions of space and world, the latter is more primitive than the former. This is the essence of Heidegger's internal dismantling of Descartes's dualism, which posits space and human agency as mutually exclusive. Put in non-Heideggerian terms, the world is the place in which human agency can express itself, and spatiality is one dimension, or region of it. Since the world is prior to space, and Da-sein is by definition a being-in-the-world, Da-sein cannot be spaceless. If my perspectivist conception of virtual spatiality draws from Heidegger the opposition to spatial inertia, it draws from Bergson and Nietzsche its further characterizations in terms of movement and heterogeneity, in ways that will become clear in the last two sections of this essay.

8. Qualia can be defined as the subjective qualities of conscious experience. Examples may include the way sugar tastes, or the way a dog's bark sounds. Explicating qualia has been one of the most heated areas of debate in the philosophy of mind, and possibly one of the greatest impediments to the materialistic solution of the mind-body problem, as it is arduous to provide an objective physical account for the subjective character of these states.

9. Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," in Basic Writings, translated by David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Collins, 1977), 287.

10. It is difficult to locate a single definition of force in Nietzsche' s work, as force is one of the most deeply embedded concepts in his philosophy. The idea can be traced back to the Dionysian theme in The Birth of Tragedy, in which the notion of subterranean forces-such erotic arousal, oniric association and collective pain-is contrasted with the impossibility of their Apollonian rationalization or quantification. In this essay, I relate the notion of force to history, which is particularly relevant to the way in which forces shape space through architecture. Nietzsche discusses the meaning of historical "forces in the second of the Untimely Meditations, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" (Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, edited by Daniel Breazeale [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997] 59-123). Gilles Deleuze is the interpreter of Nietzsche who has underlined most conspicuously the centrality of the notion of force. In his early book Nietzsche and Philosophy, he offers a reading of the role of force based on the distinction between "active" and "reactive" forces. This distinction is connected to my interest in the second Meditation, because it is intertwined with the concept of life. Deleuze explains the activity of forces in terms of their life-enhancing power, or their power of differentiation. Reactive forces, in contrast, correspond to a life-impoverishing or homogenizing power.

11. The discursive nature of forces is a question that would need further elaboration and finessing than I am able to provide within the context of this essay. Here, I shall limit myself to defining discursivity in close relation to the all-encompassing notion of textuality assumed, by both deconstruction and hermeneutics, as a background for their inquires. What is the advantage of discourse over text? Since I derive the notion of force directly from Nietzsche, and the question of the nature of those forces remains problematic in Nietzsche's own writings, I prefer discourse to text because discourse seems to describe more pertinently what would be the nature of those forces according to a distinctly Nietzschean line of argument. It is no coincidence that Michel Foucault, who coined the term "discourse" in the mid 1960s and launched it in a postmodernist and poststructuralist context, did so right around the time that Nietzsche appeared on the French scene. The first postwar international conference on Nietzsche, which Foucault participated in, was held at Royaumont in 1964. See Nietzsche: Cahiérs du Royaumont, Philosophie no. 6 (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967). Deconstruction, at the time, was not yet born and Heidegger, as well as hermeneutics, was still to make an impact on French philosophical circles. I wish to anchor the term "discourse" to that context, in which it meant the implicit knowledge that underlies and makes possible specific social practices, institutions or theories. Foucault's work in those years is dedicated to the institutional and epistemological birth of asylums and prisons, which is connected with the specific definition of universal rationality developed by seventeenth-century European culture. In Foucault's inaugural address at the Collège de France, discourse is defined as the archaeology or the archive of determinate sets of values, beliefs and behaviors, namely, that on which all of these silently rely. See The Discourse on Language, translated by Rupert Swyer and published as an appendix to The Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). The examination of such archives is for Foucault a critical undertaking. It is the "archives" that reveal the way in which the relationship between knowledge and power has deployed itself through a network of exclusions and constructions, first and foremost of which is the modern notion of the "subject."
12. One of the most fundamental notions in Being and Time is the notion of "thrownness" (Geworfenheit), which refers to the way in which we find ourselves always already "placed" in our existence; we are not objectively present in a place, but must make it our own place, we have to appropriate it and give it a meaning. The way in which we relate to facts in the world, our "facticity, is essentially distinguished from the factuality of something objectively present. Existing Da-sein does not encounter itself as something objectively present within the world. But neither is thrownness attached to Da-sein as an inaccessible quality that is not of importance to its existence." (Being and Time, II.II 276). Thrownness belongs to Da-sein as its irreducible existential trait and challenge. It seems to me that within this challenge, architecture plays a major, and yet largely underscored, role. The world in which we find ourselves thrown is, in fact, a "built" world, which has constituted us as what we are in many substantial ways. The hermeneutics of this constitution is largely what I mean by the virtuality of architecture. Some studies have tried to unravel the constitutive role of architecture along Heideggerian lines. A comprehensive and lucid analysis of this theoretical knot is provided by Karsten Harries in The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). See also David Farrell Krell, Archeticture: Ecstacies of Space, Time, and the Human Body (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1997), and Edward C. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1993).

13. See Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1991); Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994); and Alberto Perez-Gomez, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).

14. The notion of presence (Anwesenheit) is operative in Heidegger's thinking since the philopsopher's existentialist phase. In the introduction to Being and Time, the question of presence is first raised in conjunction with the Greek interpretation of the question of the meaning of being in relation to time. Assumed as parousia or ousia, the "being" of beings is both ontologically and temporally understood as presence, where presence indicates a definite mode of time, which is the present (Int. II, 25). The identification of a specific temporal modality, the present, with the way in which beings are, is for Heidegger a highly meaningful move on the part of Greek thought, since it indicates a fundamental "repression" of time in its becoming quality. By absolutizing the present, Greek and Western thought in general declare the wish to exorcise the ever-changing and forward-moving structure of human existence. Western thought seeks to confirm being in terms of some eternal stability (the notion of presence), which is simply the abstraction of a specific modality of time: the present.

15. After Being and Time, Heidegger makes the notion of world crucial to his existentialist line of argument, insofar as world is as totally inherent to Da-sein as Da-sein is inherent to the world. Neither Da-sein nor world would mean anything without this inherence. This is a unique aspect of the concept of world. Traditional ontology has ignored it by wrongly objectifying the world, that is, by making it external to the mind. Only if the world is placed out there, externally to the mind, can it be represented. For an excellent treatment of Heidegger's input into a hermeneutical interpretation of the concept of world, see Michael Murray, "Hermeneutics of the World," in Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, edited by Hugh J. Silverman and Don Ihde (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1985), 91-105.

16. In the history of architectural theory, the concept of "space" only becomes a central category at the end of the eighteenth century, as the issue of canonical authority, previously identified solely with Vitruvius, is raised in connection with a universal definition of authority, established on the basis of human rationality rather than canonical sources. This is a question deeply connected with the interdependence of the three Enlightenment categories of fraternity, humanity and freedom, which are at the center of the debate on rationalism, both in architecture and in philosophy. The paradigmatic, though late, example of the role of space at the intersection of the Enlightenment debate on the foundations of rationality, can be found in the classical text of modernist architectural historiography, Sigfried Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974).
17. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Nachlass," in The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1986), 481.

18. A thorough discussion of this point can be found in the excellent chapter "Perspectivism, Philology, Truth," in Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 144-168. Correctly, Schrift points out that this distinction between perspective and interpretation may "reveal itself to be merely heuristic, inasmuch as perspectives never 'exist' outside of some form-giving interpretive matrix and this interpretive matrix is always already perspectivally conditioned," 145-146. I agree with him that it is a very useful distinction, particularly in relation to the scope of this essay. However, unlike Schrift, I emphasize the intellectual rather than the sensory contrast, which explains the greater relevance of perspective to the issue of space and virtual spatiality, and the lesser relevance of interpretation within this context.

19.On this issue of ambiguity I dissent from Brian Massumi, who wants to render virtuality and ambiguity incompatible. In fact, Massumi aims at identifying the spatial implications of both the virtual and ambiguity rather than their conceptual relations. He claims that the virtual, in its distinctive architectural incarnation, has to do "neither with trompe l'oeil, optical illusion, nor ambiguity. Trompe l'oeil is fully subordinated to formal resemblance...Optical illusion also never leaves the formal level, being an oscillation between two forms, rather than a rhythm of recursion between form and the unformed. Ambiguity, for its part, belongs to signifying structure. It is nothing new for architects to build-in ambiguity in order to make an event of standing form. But ambiguity still addresses the conventional function of the sign-form." Brian Massumi, "Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible," in Stephen Perrella, ed., Hypersurface Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1999). Ambiguity does not necessarily need to be interpreted in terms of the "signifying structure." Ambiguity can be felt, or sensed. In fact, Bergson's definition of memory in relation to perception touches exactly on this point. In order for a memory to emerge at the surface of consciousness it needs to become a perception. However, there is a fraction of memory that remains attached to the past. This is the justification Henri Bergson gives for the fact that we still know a memory as a memory, and not as a perception. Such attachment to the past gives to memory an aura of uncanniness, otherness and, I would assert, ambiguity.

20. See Deconstructivist Architecture, edited by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1988).

21. In my use of the term "formalism" I am collapsing the essentialist aspirations of both modernist and postmodernist architecture.

22. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 62.

23 See Stephen Perrella, ed., Hypersurface Architecture, and Greg Lynn, Animate Form.

24. "Deep" and "superficial" are typical examples of vague predicates and, as such, are unmeasurable. I cannot say, for example, whether six feet of water are deep or not, nor whether a three-millimeter cut in my skin is superficial or not. Neither is clearly deep nor clearly superficial. No amount of conceptual analysis or empirical investigation can settle these questions. See Timothy Williamson, Vagueness (London: Routledge, 1994).

25. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 133-134.

26. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 9.