engleski

Renaissance and the Virtual: The Back Parts of Satan

The virtual has remained ―invisible‖ in Renaissance studies in spite, and probably because, of the developing virtual reality technologies and their most expedient potential in military training, games, and teledildonics. When it does attract scholarly attention, it is still in conjunction with negative connotations it has received in contemporary philosophy and culture, linking it to the unreal, simulacra, visual fake, copy or ―false approximation‖. It is not surprising then that both in contemporary and Renaissance studies Satan appears to be the creator of the virtual. However, the virtual must not be confused with the visual or actualized forms that it effects. It is a powerful impulse that becomes perceptible in transductions of sensible things from one medium into another, like sound into architectural structures or visible forms. The Renaissance culture teems with such transduction. A very significant one occurs in the area of linguistics as language – already transduced from sound into writing – becomes virtualized for the second time by the printing press. What Bill Gates and others have done to virtualize the individual and community in our time, another Bill, William Caxton, did for England at the end of the fifteenth century. Mass production of books led to transductional activities of translation, reading, and interpretation, creating new virtual spaces and communities outside of the existing monopolies of knowledge. Within those virtual environments a new form of collective intelligence emerged which was not in the service of preserving knowledge as a fixed entity but subjected everything to an act of exploration. The prophet as initiator of virtual worlds was replaced by explorer. Accordingly, John Milton‘s Satan in Paradise Lost, as initiator and explorer of virtual worlds, ceases to be a fixed entity himself.

Renaissance, virtual environments, printing press, Milton, Paradise Lost.

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