Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 4

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Remapping the Present: Dave Eggers's Spatial Virtuality and the Condition of Literature / Nathan D. Frank

Keywords Virtuality, Intertextuality, Spatiality, Literature

Abstract Piggy-backing on the spatial turn in literary studies, this paper "remaps the present" by making a parallel spatial turn in virtual theory. Surveying and synthesizing the many invaluable contributions to conceptualizing virtuality - from those of Bergson and Deleuze through to those of Daniel Downes and Brian Massumi - a "spatial virtuality" accounts for an increasing focus on digitization without dismissing the previous (and, at times, prescient) preoccupations with temporal virtualities. But I also frame spatial virtuality in terms of N. Katherine Hayles' compelling work in which virtuality is a condition. Within such a framework, many things happen, not the least of which is a sustained meditation on an information-materiality dialectic, wherein two sub-dialectics are housed: that of pattern-randomness (information), and that of presence-absence (materiality). But something else happens, too. Virtuality as a spatial condition comports with the classic tropes of power and literature - namely, circles and stories about circles - and so I use it, along with two novels by Dave Eggers (A Hologram for the King and The Circle), to interrogate how (a reappropriation of) Judith Anderson's intertext, as a condition of potentiality and relationship, might provide the substance of that which is present without being local. In this way, "spatial virtuality" and "a condition of literature" suggest that language and texts are the presence around which information and material bodies congregate, as demonstrated by the self-referential and world-making fictions of Dave Eggers, and as a way forward in the information-materiality-riven discourse surrounding virtuality.

…they will occasionally deploy the term real…to describe the one they love.

~ Adam Levin, The Instructions

Ah, present. That is a wonderful word. I'm glad you used it.

~ Dave Eggers, The Circle

Some connections are not worth making.

~ U2, "North and South of the River"

<1> Circles are classic tropes for imagining sovereignty: they literally circumscribe ins and outs, inclusions and exclusions, heres and theres. They diagram political worlds in spatial terms. They map power through their indications of that which is present or absent, contained or excluded. But maps of "that which is present" have a tendency to temporalize into maps of "the present," even for certain "political cartographers" who are considered central to the spatial turn in literary and cultural studies [1]. Consider Michel Foucault's introduction to Discipline & Punish, in which he is "only" interested in diagramming power relations of "the past" if it "means writing a history of the present" (31), or Lauren Berlant's motivation in Cruel Optimism to explore political inclusions and exclusions via a "stretched-out present moment" if it helps to apprehend "affect in the present," or if it means better understanding "the activity of world-making, which may be hooked on futures, or not." (12-14). Foucault and Berlant are two very influential mappers of power who make plenty of spatial turns elsewhere but who just as often situate political reality as presents lodged between pasts and futures, shifting from that which is spatially here to that which is temporally now. Similarly, Foucault and his interlocutors - Berlant but others, too - tend to read such presents as actualities, and therefore to read the problems of and solutions to such presents as temporal virtualities, by which I mean (and I think they usually do, too) that the alternatives to their historical presents are suspended in time, embedded in the memory of the past or sequestered in the hope of the future.

<2> Given the staying power of the circle in diagramming power relations (more on this below, paragraphs 27-35) and the mutual investment of circles and historical presents in mapping and interrogating political realities, highlighting problems, and posing solutions, I propose a spatial virtuality predicated on a turn back from the temporal present to that which is spatially present, or from present to presence, as a way of conceiving of alternatives and world-making that matches the spatiality of circles, and as a way of putting the mutually invested aspects of virtuality together on a single axis. For this to occur, what is needed is a definition of spatial virtuality that also holds up and works as a theory. As I am interested in interactions between textual and material worlds, I seek ways that contemporary theory might dovetail with literature to map that dynamic. My argument, then, is two-fold. First, I define a spatial virtuality that realigns with the spatial turn in literary and cultural studies as that which is present without being local. The utility of this definition is that it enhances our circular maps of power by allowing us to think through what it means to be in or out, contained or excluded, even if/when physical location seems at odds with one of these designations.

<3> The second part of my argument is that spatial virtuality as a conceptual enhancement can double as a resistance to these difficult-to-map conditions of sovereignty when it lends itself to what I am calling a "condition of literature," which is a condition in which literary texts refer to the conditions they create instead of referring to the conditions that create them. These conditions that are textually referred to or privileged by a work of literature determine the direction of a virtual projection. When the "direction of the projection" goes the other way - that is, when a textual build-up of information refers to and therefore perpetuates the difficult-to-map conditions of sovereignty at the expense of any material conditions that a text could otherwise invoke - then a spatial virtuality thwarts a condition of literature and fuels the very sovereignty that literature attempts to map. Remapping the present by aligning virtuality with the spatial turn, then, means extending the spatial turn to a material(ist) turn, and implicating literature in this endeavor [2].

<4> To appreciate the movement from temporal to spatial virtuality, it is worth tracing the various virtualities already volunteered, as well as how and why they developed, after which I can elaborate my spatial adjustment. As to what it is that is present without being local, I offer Judith Anderson's notion of "intertext" as the virtuality that is either the presence of outside worlds inside a circle or else the presence of inside worlds outside a circle (but this is still overly abstract). Anderson's intertext is a connector of inside and outside worlds in much the same way that, as will be shown, temporal virtuality connects pasts and futures to the present. Once the intertext shifts from time to space, it proves instrumental in mediating interactions between the circles of material worlds and textual worlds, giving (more concrete) shape to that which lies between the circumscriptions of actual political landscapes and alternative topographies, and measuring the distance between the spheres of reality and possibility. In the best case scenario, a condition of literature develops, and a virtual intertext inserts itself into, or extricates itself from, these other worlds, and it therefore asserts itself as an alternative to, or within, those worlds.

<5> Finally, I use a literary perspective to highlight the potential of a spatial virtuality as a world connector. If using a literary method to explore the possibilities for "a condition of literature" sounds redundant, I should clarify that, while literature certainly makes up textual worlds, not all textual worlds are necessarily literary, or made up of literature. Under the (inter)textual umbrella, literature finds shelter, but so do other worlds of discourse. The point of intertext is to see how everything under the umbrella transforms everything else under the same umbrella, and even, in some cases, things beyond the umbrella. To this end, my selected texts are literary, or so I argue. They are Dave Eggers's antepenultimate and penultimate novels, A Hologram for the King (2012) and The Circle (2013). In them, I find both creative and destructive obsessions with intertextual connectivity; that is to say, Eggers intuits spatial virtuality as a new way that subjects deal with material situations, and his fictions explore whether such virtuality is a symptom of, or a solution to, contemporary circumscriptions of sovereignty. Through my readings of Eggers, I find a subjectivized remapping of that which is present - to such a degree that the efficacy of spatial virtuality in making present the non-local, though it lends credence to my redefinition, can also be troubling. If the best case scenario is the development of a condition of literature, the worst case scenario is an ever-compounding virtuality under layers of information that put material worlds further out of reach, and so I cite my lyrical epigraph in concluding that some connections are not worth making.

1. The Appeal of Presence

<6> I carefully worded my introduction so that "actual" and "actuality" are pitted against what I have called temporal virtuality. The temptation to substitute "real" for "actual" and "reality" for "actuality" provides a good point of departure for thinking through what is meant by the virtual. The virtual is a scandal of meaning, often conjuring a vortex of things that it is not, or of things that it is albeit without being something else: the virtual is neither real nor actual, or it is possible without being real, or it is real without being material, or it is actual even though it is not present, or (as I argue) it is present without being local. Virtuality has been theorized as unrealized potential or a not-yet-arrived future, as a solution or an alternative, as a danger or a threat, as a latent vital force, a consciousness, or even as a spirit or a soul. The virtual can indicate differences in both degree and kind - something that is virtual is almost complete or practically enough, whereas something that is virtually x is of a different kind than what is actually or really y. Though John Wood makes an etymological connection between the virtual and the virtuous (4), there is a strong tendency to privilege reality over virtuality on a hierarchy of meaning and experience, as my epigraph by Adam Levin exhibits. It is a trend that I admit to participating in, as becomes clear in my conclusion. Sometimes "virtual reality" assumes its own subfield under a more scientific rubric and there it becomes abbreviated as VR, and in this case the virtual is associated with the artificial, in the same vein as artificial intelligence (AI), or else with simulations - which can be the simulations of consciousness or of the conditions in which virtual and/or actual and/or real consciousness operate(s). Though some theorists are careful to distinguish VR from virtuality, many use them synonymously. As a rhetorical sobriquet for colloquial use more recently, the virtual has come to stand simply for that which is digitized - it is the stuff of cyberspace. If Gilles Deleuze's observation that "we have ceaselessly invoked the virtual" carried weight in 1968, it has only intensified in the decades since (1994, 208). Given the proliferation of interest and meanings that virtuality has garnered since the arrival of the Internet, pinning down the development of the concept helps to clarify not only what is (or what can be) meant by virtuality, but also what is at stake and therefore why its (re)definition matters.

<7> The pitting of "virtual" against "actual" (as opposed to "real") stems from Deleuze's reading of Henri Bergson, and the formulation of virtuality as "being something without being something else" stems from Deleuze's citation of Marcel Proust, for whom "the virtual is real without being actual, ideal without being abstract" (to which Deleuze adds: "symbolic without being fictional"), both of which lead to Deleuze's somewhat slippery and circular postulate that "the virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual" (208, emphasis in original). Taylor Hammer's unpacking of these readings (of Bergson and Proust) by Deleuze helps to clarify that the difference between "real" and "actual" has to do with their relationships with "possibility" and "virtuality," respectively: "if our terminology is consistent," he explains, "we must say that virtualities are actualized and possibilities are realized," and that "actualization and realization are two very different processes" (2007, 60).

<8> So what is the difference between the processes of actualization and realization? It is the same as the difference between the virtual and the possible, which is that the possible realizes (in part) through its resemblance to the real, whereas actuality bears no resemblance to the virtual (Hammer, 60-61). One way to appreciate this difference is through temporality - to think of "the actualization of a virtual past," wherein the actual is in the present, versus "the realization of a possible future," wherein the real is also in the present [3]. However, as these formulations show, virtuality and possibility find themselves on opposite ends of the temporal divide, separated by a gulf of real and actual presents. For Deleuze, virtuality is lodged in memory, in the past, and "the appeal of the present" lies in its ability to access these past memories or recollections so that "they no longer have the ineffectiveness, the impassivity that characterizes them as pure recollections; they become recollection images, capable of being 'recalled,'" as Proust suggests by his title, In Remembrance of Things Past [4].

<9> Another "actualization" that Deleuze reads into Bergson's philosophy is that of the élan vital, which in turn leads to a consideration of "the actualization of 'a life,'" - both of which follow the same Deleuzian principle of differentiation that allows actualization of a virtual past (Hammer, 63-64). Namely, the actuality in each of these cases - that is, the virtual thing-of-the-past that actualizes into something else in the present - bears no resemblance to the virtuality from which it springs. Most commentators explain that this aspect of differentiation is important to Deleuze because of the creative potential, causality, and agency that it implies. Indeed, Hammer, along with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, points to this as one of Deleuze's reasons for preferring to think in terms of actualization over realization. Hardt and Negri go in a different direction, however, annotating their own definition of virtuality in Empire with the following:

Our conception of virtuality and its relationship to reality is somewhat different from the one Deleuze derives from Bergson, which distinguishes between the passage from the virtual to the actual and that from the possible to the real. Bergson's primary concern in this distinction and in his affirmation of the virtual-actual couple over the possible-real is to emphasize the creative force of being and highlight that being is not merely the reduction of numerous possible worlds to a single real world based on resemblance, but rather that being is always an act of creation and unforeseen novelty…. We certainly recognize the need to insist on the creative powers of virtuality, but this Bergsonian discourse is insufficient for us insofar as we also need to insist on the reality of the being created, its ontological weight, and the institutions that structure the world, creating necessity out of contingency (468).

But if Hardt and Negri express their preference for thinking in terms of the realization (instead of actualization) of possibilities, then, following Bergson and Deleuze (and Hammer's helpful rehearsal), it should come as no surprise that their virtualities are future-oriented. Possibility dwells in the future. But before diving headlong into the futuristic, kairotic, and utopian inflections that are so characteristic of Hardt and Negri's work and that give them their appeal, there is another aspect of Empire that speaks once again to the appeal of presence that I want to sketch, and that is its role, in some ways, as an interlocutor of Michel Foucault's late work.

<10> Foucault's notions of biopower and governmentality, which he began to explore in the later part of his career, have been picked up in a variety of divergent and interesting ways by contemporary theorists. Some have attempted to rearticulate models of sovereignty (e.g., Giorgio Agamben) while others have attempted to rethink the implications of such power relations and ethical modes of negotiating these interpreted power arrangements (e.g., Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips). Some theorists, such as Hardt and Negri, have ambitiously attempted both: Empire is the name they give to their interpretation of a contemporary biopolitical sovereignty, and their chapter called "Virtualities" combines the "ontological weight" that they are sensitive to, and which they cite above as their reason for following a virtual path linking reality to the future instead of a virtual path linking actuality to the past, with an "ethico-political" discourse designed to "calculate passions and interests" (353). It is here that many strands of scholarship converge on a foundation of Foucault. We have seen Foucault's interest in the present, which is how he opens Discipline & Punish and which inspires the likes of Lauren Berlant to take up a similar methodological vocabulary. Foucault's History of Sexuality trilogy introduces his landmark biopower but it also sets him on a new foray into ethics. But there is also something scattered throughout these later works that seems to verge either on futurity or spatiality, depending on how such things as "utopia" and "distance" are read, synthesized, and resolved. For example, Discipline & Punish ends on (what might be called) a futuristic note in its allusion to "the distant roar of battle" (308). If we read this "distance" against "the present" that begins this volume as a spatial metaphor for time, then Foucault's battle is one that happens not in some far-away place, as "distance" spatially and literally indicates, but in the future: the battle that will take place later. Similarly, the utopia that he defines to pave the way for his neologistic heterotopia is an entirely spatial concept, and he means it as such: utopia is a place with no location (1986, 23-24). But the overt spatiality of utopia has not kept so-called utopian tracts, such as Hardt and Negri's Empire, from being read as future-oriented manifestos more so than spatial manifestos, laden with emphasis on the future possibilities for present realities, as Hardt and Negri are quick to embrace.

<11> This convergence of space with the future is not necessarily surprising. After all, it takes time to get somewhere. What I think is surprising, or at least unexpected, is that Foucault's interlocutors are responding to difficult-to-define conditions of power relations with just-as-difficult-to-define ontologies, ethics, and politics. Hardt and Negri collapse the ontological and ethico-political "weights" of this response and call it virtuality, while others, such as N. Katherine Hayles, are calling virtuality itself a condition (more on this below), so that, following Hayles, one result of taking Foucault's biopolitical cue is to respond to the subjectivizing conditions of sovereignty with the ontological, ethical and political conditions of virtuality - that is, responding to conditions with conditions, a very contingent exercise…and we will recall that "creating necessity out of contingency" is something that Hardt and Negri "need to insist on." Moreover, we have seen how these conditions of virtual response seem to have shifted from actuality to reality in the wake of Foucault. In terms of Bergson and Deleuze's virtuality, this shift gives the appearance of a shift from the past to the future though it might actually be a shift from time to space altogether - from virtual or possible things converging on the present to arrive at actuality or reality from the opposite ends of the past and the future, respectively, to a preoccupation with spatial presence, in which virtual or possible things converge on presence to arrive at information or materiality, also from the opposite ends of dislocation. But instead of a virtual past and a possible future, with actualities and realities hanging out in the present, a spatial model of virtuality means that we have virtually dislocated heres and possible theres, with information and material bodies filling some textual or linguistic gap known as presence. Deleuze's "appeal of the present" thus becomes a post-Foucaultian "appeal of presence," as virtuality becomes the spatial response to biopolitical conditions of sovereignty.

<12> Returning to Hardt and Negri's "Virtualities" in Empire, we should not be surprised to find an overwhelmingly spatial description of the virtual condition that links up with futurity: "We are situated precisely at that hinge of infinite finitude that links together the virtual and the possible, engaged in the passage from desire to a coming future. This ontological relation operates first of all on space" (361, emphasis added). Here we are given, quite explicitly, the "hinge" to swing straight from the future into space. It is a movement that resonates. Brian Massumi defines the virtual "as that which is maximally abstract yet real, whose reality is that of potential," and potential, he says, "is the space of play - or would be, were it a space. It is the modification of a space" (58, 75). Daniel Downes is one of those careful theorists who distinguishes virtual reality from virtuality and describes the latter as "a person's incorporation of, or adaptation to, a new technologically mediated situation" (72), which is not necessarily temporal or spatial by itself but it does allow for either, and further, it shares an affinity with Marshall McLuhan's "electronic tribalism," which invests subjects with "a new ability feel present across vast distances. Presence in this context concerns the assumption of an optimum range for the self beyond which it fragments, dissolves, and disappears" (71, emphasis in original). McLuhan's own flirtations with virtuality are remarkable not only for preceding the work done by those post-Deleuze who take the futuristic turn in virtuality, but for preceding much of the technology and vocabulary that triggered that turn in the first place. It is one thing for Downes to follow Bachelard's seminal "poetics of space" with his own "poetics of cyberspace" in 2005 but quite another for McLuhan to discuss, in the late 1960s (just after Bachelard's The Poetics of Space and amid the spatial turn happening more broadly in critical circles but apart from virtual theory), the implications of technological media in which his "typographical man takes readily to film just because, like books, it offers an inward world of fantasy and dream" (391). McLuhan, punning on the difference between the "Reel World" of movies and the real world, sets up the virtuality of art as an avatar nearly half a century before the release of James Cameron's Avatar (2009), and he does so with a heightened proprioceptive attention to how the body moves in both space and time as well as with a working concept of art, broadly, as an "inward world" [5].

<13> Before exploring the inward world of art, however, a final definition of virtuality is in order which grounds my spatial adjustment toward presence in my own ethico-political preference for materiality over information, since materiality, as we are about to see, aligns with a presence-absence coupling, in contradistinction to the pattern-randomness coupling that aligns with information. The definition comes from N. Katherine Hayles, for whom "virtuality is the condition millions of people now inhabit" (182). I alluded to this condition earlier to make the point that the condition of virtuality is a response to the condition of Empire as a power structure, but the precise nature of the condition is what matters here: "Virtuality is the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns" (182, emphasis in original). Hayles clarifies that the condition is a cultural perception, and this cultural perception, she continues, is the result of "a historically specific construction that emerged in the wake of World War II" that posits "information as the site of mastery and control over the material world" (184-185, emphasis in original). To illustrate this point, Hayles close-reads the Human Genome Project as a narrative that somehow manages to conceive of DNA "as the originary informational pattern that produces the body, even though logically the gene is contained within the body, not the other way around" [6]. The appeal of the narrative is that "if human beings are essentially informational patterns" (186), then they are free of material and therefore of physical, political, real-world limitations, and a virtual existence creates immortality: "the great dream and promise of information is that it can free from the material constraints that govern the mortal world. If we become the information we have constructed, we too can soar free, immortal like the gods" (188).

<14> In addition, Hayles explains that information relies on a pattern/randomness dialectic as opposed to the presence/absence dialectic that aligns with materiality (if I was careful to pit "virtual" against "actual" in my introduction, I was also careful to mention a circle's concern with presence and absence), and she finds that she self-consciously wants to transgress the narrative in which information wins on the grounds that "the efficacy of information depends on a highly articulated material base" (185), that "the perceived primacy of information over materiality obscures the importance of the very infrastructures that make information valuable" (186), and that "information must always be instantiated in a medium" (189, emphasis in original). In a lively piece, then, Hayles-the-posthumanist goes to bat for materiality, which leads her to fight for spatiality, which leads her to fight for what she claims to be at stake for literary theory:

When information is privileged over materiality, the pattern/randomness dialectic associated with information is perceived as dominant over the presence/absence dialectic associated with materiality. The condition of virtuality implies, then, a widespread perception that presence/absence is being displaced and preempted by pattern/randomness.

As this displacement suggests, the impact of virtuality on literary theory and practice will be far-reaching and profound. At present, virtuality is largely terra incognito for the literary establishment. In City of Bits, William Mitchell has written insightfully about how technologies of information are forcing a reconceptualization of literary theory and practice… Part of what is at stake for me in this analysis is to show that materiality, far from being left behind, interacts at every point with the new forms that literature is becoming as it moves into virtuality (190).

Hayles' concomitant defense of spatiality is elided in this passage, but it is logically nestled between her defense of materiality and her understanding of how the new, virtual condition of literature relies on materiality - an insight corroborated (in an unrelated project) by her Duke colleague, Elizabeth Grosz, who complicates and nuances the relations between spatiality and materiality as I had promised in fn. 2. For Grosz, it is precisely that mind and body cannot be separated - the opposite of Cartesian dualism - that leads her to connect spatiality to materiality in much the same way that she connects virtuality to reality (81). For Grosz as for Hayles, the inseparability of mind and body extends to the inseparability of all the other related false dichotomies (this "relation between the virtual and the real prefigures and is entwined with a whole series of other oppositional terms - among them, mind and body, culture and nature, origin and copy," 81), including and especially the inseparability of some sort of informationalized and therefore abstracted presence from a material presence. Since it is precisely the virtual object's ability to enact "real" effects and to engage our "real" senses that affords it virtual status, and since the putative abstractness or disembodiedness of an object still relies on some material medium if we are ever to experience those real senses, then virtuality as a concept of informationalized materiality is shaky at best. Grosz's suggestion is to reconceive of the virtual as, essentially, "the strangeness of writing, of inscription" (77), which is "just as rife with potential" - just as open to the future - "as cyberspace itself"; as a "(temporal) displacement, not simply deferral but endless openness" that "poses no threat to the real because it is a mode of production and enhancement of the real: an augmentation, a supplementation, and a transformation of the real by and through its negotiation with virtuality" (89-90).

<15> However they may differ tonally about what virtuality has to offer, Hayles and Grosz are united to the extent that they distrust the dominant cultural narrative espousing a purely informational interface bereft of materiality. Just as Hayles reads the narrative of DNA as culture's constructed triumph of information over materiality, for example, she also analyzes the popular computer game Myst and its treatment of books. In her analysis, Hayles says that Myst gives books a "fetishistic quality" that "is consistent with their representation as [material] anachronisms" (192). According to the computer game, books are subject to the condition of virtuality, and so, as material objects, they become products interpenetrated by informational patterns as their material presences (appear to) wane.

<16> No wonder that Hayles heads toward a vision of "spatiality and virtual writing" - it is her attempt to cope with a condition, as she defines it, just as the condition of virtuality copes with the condition of subjectivizing power. But to continue responding to conditions with conditionality only compounds the condition of virtuality with ever increasing layers of information, and virtualities end up housing virtualities. I once had a "virtual desktop" installed on my office computer, which meant that I could click an icon from my "actual desktop" and be taken "behind the screen" to another so-called "desktop." Presumably that desktop could have had a hyperlink to another virtual desktop, too. By Hayles' definition of virtuality, a book is shot through with information to the point that it becomes secondary to the pattern-over-randomness dialectic, which means that computer-game books are subject to the condition of virtuality in the same way that my virtual desktops are perceived as virtually housed in non-physical locations - or in the way that they are present without being local. By reprioritizing materiality over information, however - that is, by privileging a presence-over-absence dialectic - the information patterns of computer-game books would be re-infused with materiality, and the "virtuality of books" would acquire a new, inverted sense. Books (of any kind) could now be subject to what I suggest we call a condition of literature: a book's virtuality now refers to its own "inward world" that it creates, instead of only and always referring to the fact that it resides in the "inward world" of something else that created it [7], which preserves the agency that Bergson and Deleuze would have wanted for it and which builds on Grosz's wonderful "strangeness of writing" in a way that spatializes her openness to the future. Hence the appeal of presence.

<17> I have argued for presence as the basis for a spatial virtuality, and not for an obliteration of virtuality, because even a materially-driven presence might, following Grosz, be just as virtual as it is real or actual (especially if the presence in question is called into being through writing or inscription), or, because there is still the question of interaction and mediation between that which is present and that which is not. A spatial virtuality is something that is present without being local. This will appeal to anyone, like Bruno Latour, attempting to "reassemble the social," since it implies a way of "localizing the global, "redistributing the local," and "connecting sites" (2005).

<18> What if a condition of literature means that language and texts are the presence around which information and material bodies congregate? Then languages and texts would act as intermediaries, which is exactly what languages and texts do. In addition, the virtuality of that which is present without being local would be animated by a positive content, meaning that, as a condition, virtuality need not retreat into further conditions but that it could engage in relationships. If a spatially virtual site is to be a nexus for conditions and relationships, languages and texts, then Judith Anderson has already constructed the "allegorical intertext" as precisely this thing that can "operate virtually" as a non-local presence. She even compares it to the Internet, so that it resonates both virtually and spatially:

The title of this volume, Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, plays on "surfing the Internet." I conceive the intertext, like the Internet, as a state, or place, of potential, one that can variously be narrowed or expanded, minimized or enlarged. More exactly, the intertext is a convenient term for a relationship or a series of relationships with a single text or multiple texts that enrich and reorient the signification and reception of the text in question. The intertext can be imagined on a continuum between deliberate imitation and intentional allusion, on the one hand, and on the other, an intertextuality in which the unlimited agency of the signifier operates virtually without regard for context, whether sentential and textually specific or broadly cultural, societal, and historical. While authorial agency and linguistic free play are opposing binaries in the abstract, in practice they coexist interestingly, elusively, and indefinitely. The same applies to the coexistence of individual agency with cultural and societal determinism.

Necessarily, as a condition of potentiality and relationship, the intertext, like any good fiction, is conceptually and functionally unstable… (1-2, emphasis added).

What I am doing here is metatheoretical, metacritical. I am accepting Anderson's invitation to surf the intertext. However, instead of entering at one of the recommended portals called Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, or Milton, I am wading into Anderson's own textual waters and I am making it my intertextual wave. Moreover, I am holding Anderson to her own claim that her "authorial agency" and my "linguistic free play" indeed "coexist interestingly, elusively, and indefinitely." By way of example, I will co-opt her use of the word "virtually" to suit my purposes. Although I am nearly certain, based on her use of the word elsewhere in the book and within its context here (which she says we can disregard), that she intends for this word to be taken more loosely than my co-option of it, I have taken literally and technically the notion that intertextuality operates virtually. The virtuality - that is, "the condition of potentiality and relationship" - that Anderson builds into her theory works instantly: I have just used it to connect her textual world to my material world.

<19> And Michael Taussig wonders whether, "with disembodiment," does "presence expand?" And then he answers, yes, that "language is like that too" (3). Taussig's insight (though it erroneously tethers language to disembodiment) together with Anderson's intertext (which corrects Taussig's error while affirming his insight regarding expanded presence) provides a new perspective on the "inward worlds" of art that McLuhan gestures toward, and transitioning now into literary worlds we can see how inward worlds made up of language carry the potential to expand their presences into materiality, but also that they can shrink into themselves and pad themselves with information, depending on whether they are virtual in reference to what they create, or to what creates them. Hayles offers a reading of George Gamow's Mr. Tomkins Inside Himself (1968), a story in which, "on a visit to his doctor, Mr. Tomkins is sitting in the waiting room when he hears a sucking sound and feels a strange sensation of constriction. Somehow he is drawn into a hypodermic needle and then injected inside his own body" (184). Hayles sees this as a reenactment of information's victory over materiality, an illogical narrative parallel to the story of DNA that turns the world inside out. She then turns to Hans Moravec's Mind Children (1990), which entertains the possibilities of downloading consciousness onto a computer: "As 'you' are transferred into a computer, the trashed body is left behind, an empty husk. Once 'you' are comfortably inside your shiny new body, 'you' effectively become immortal. For when that body wears out or becomes obsolete, 'you' can simply transfer your consciousness to a new model" (186).

<20> Hayles' readings are consistent with her definition of virtuality as a condition of being created by information, which strips text of its agency. This is why she goes to bat for literature via spatiality via materiality. Others are more optimistic, perhaps intuiting a condition of literature that reverses this tendency of virtuality to shrink inside itself, and to use textual language to expand its presence instead. Leo Bersani, for example, offers a reading of Henry James' A Beast in the Jungle (1903) in which "the rare dignity" of "a life lived as pure virtuality" might provide a model for anonymous interactions within our current circle of Empire so long as one doesn't "speak of it as if it were an affective and moral failure" (24). Bradley Smith finds that Richard Powers "destroys the boundary between the material world and the virtual world" in his 2001 novel, Plowing the Dark, since "in a virtual reality there can be the perception of reality without the presence of things-in-themselves" (100). Smith is still operating on a temporal virtuality (of the futuristic, real-possible variety) to think that virtual reality displaces presence, but that is only because he equates presence and locality; his insight that virtuality can destroy the boundaries between worlds gets even more mileage when we separate presence and locality in a spatial virtuality, as Dave Eggers does. Reading Eggers, the question becomes not whether the presence of language expands, but indeed, what are the limits, if any, of the intertext's presence?

2. A Hologram and a Circle: Eggers's Spatial Virtualities

<21> In Eggers's A Hologram for the King, an American salesman, Alan Clay, travels to Saudi Arabia to pitch his company's hologram projection technology to King Abdullah. Alan's company, Reliant, is an American-based conglomerate, "the largest IT supplier in the world," and Alan needs this deal to go through to pay down his debts, fund his daughter's college tuition, and to reestablish himself as a functional and respectable member of society (20). Alan is therefore extremely reliant on Reliant, but upon his arrival in Saudi Arabia, things do not go according to plan. He and his Reliant staffers stay in a hotel a good distance from the King Abdullah Economic City, KAEC (the Saudi answer to Dubai); when they arrive on-site at KAEC, they are housed in a tent without air conditioning and spotty wi-fi, which they will need to have working optimally in order to project their hologram. The crew spends days driving to and from KAEC, sweltering in the tent, waiting for the king. Virtuality beckons as one kind of connectivity is leveraged for another kind of connectivity and layers of privileged information begin to mount.

<22> But the idea for spatial virtuality is based on the hologram itself, and the process that brings it to fruition. If temporal virtuality hinges on the processes of actualization and realization, then spatial virtuality depends on a process of present-ation, or "presencing" [8], the process of making something present, which in turn depends on the material substrate that Hayles insists upon. Back at KAEC, Alan Clay and his team struggle with material conditions. "For a holographic presentation, they needed a hard line, and if not that, a massive signal, nothing faint or poached" (57). The word "signal" here is "crucial," as Hayles explains:

In information theoretic terms, no message is ever sent. What is sent is a signal. The distinction information theory posits between signal and message is crucial. A message has an information content specified by a probability function that has no dimensions, no materiality, and no necessary connection with meaning. It is a pattern, not a presence. Only when the message is encoded in a signal for transmission through a medium - for example, when ink is printed on paper or electrical pulses are sent racing along telegraph wires - does it assume material form (187).

<23> A "massive signal," then, for massive "presence," which is precisely what Reliant's holographic presentation is intended to be. By the time the material infrastructure is in place to rehearse the presentation, the result is "astonishment":

One of their colleagues in London appeared to be walking around the stage in their Red Sea tent, could react to live questions, could interact with Rachel or Cayley on the stage. It was the kind of technology that only Reliant had, only Reliant could deliver for a price. Making the prototype in the U.S. had been catastrophically expensive, but they'd found a supplier in Korea who could build the lenses into their specs, at about a fifth of the cost in America, even cheaper if they shopped it out to a Chinese factory. Reliant would make a robust profit on any unit, but more than that, the telepresence technology was part of an overall juggernaut of baseline telecom abilities, the ability to wire an entire city, and on the higher end, this kind of astonishment. Alan was utterly confident that the presentation, when Abdullah arrived, would seal the deal quickly (199).

Astonishing, indeed. The colleague who appeared to be walking on the stage achieves a spatial virtuality through his or her non-local presence. This colleague, projecting holographically in a tent by the Red Sea, is able to interact in and with the material reality of KAEC from London. Eggers's effect, like Richard Powers' virtuality, "destroys the boundary between the material world and the virtual world." The hologram, having "localized the global" and having "redistributed the local" appears to succeed in "connecting" Latour's "sites." And with the insertion of a cosmopolitan English presence into a traditional Arabian kingdom, and with the dispersal of audio and video feeds back to London, it is perhaps not too strong to state that a "reassemblage of the social" occurs via spatial virtuality, if by "the social" we mean (still following Latour) "that which is associated" (Latour, 5). Reliant's tele presence technology connects and associates two spatially distinct worlds, but it does so without locality. The hologram does not effect a change in proximity but in presence.

<24> Of course there is a material situation in London allowing this to occur. There is also a material situation in Saudi Arabia allowing this to occur. And there is a material situation mediating these two sites and contributing to and cooperating with the material infrastructure set up by Alan's team inside the tent, just as the global outsourcing of the hologram's contracts and manufacturing also participate in a material situation - Eggers describes a condition of neoliberal capitalist flows as the condition to which the hologram, in turn as a condition in its own right, responds. This is how the existence of London's materialist situation does nothing to vitiate its virtual presence in Saudi Arabia. The location of London is involved, yes, but the cultural perception is that its informational presence preempts or displaces its material reality - according to Hayles' definition, it is precisely the informatic trappings that give the hologram its virtuality. And despite her complaint that this is tantamount to locating London inside itself in the same way that a gene located inside a body is credited with the materialization of that body, the response nevertheless supports the narrative. The material body that is a colleague in London is outstripped by information in another location; in this particular location, KAEC, information wins and materiality loses because the conditions of virtuality adhere to the conditions that create it. The hologram is a commodified piece of technology that supports the conditions that brought it into existence. It will probably, if things go Reliant's way, even become responsible for increased sales of itself, if it ends up in the right board rooms, conference halls, and convention centers where executives can use the technology to close deals selling the technology.

<25> But this spatial virtuality is virtual in another sense, too. Just as the virtuality of books is for Hayles the result of their being trapped under layers of information inside a computer game, an actual and real book is still virtual in that sense that McLuhan, Norton, Grosz, and Moslund identify. Art and inscription create presence. A hologram cannot help responding to a neoliberal condition if that's the situation it finds itself in, just as a book cannot decide who writes it. But the hologram, like the book, is a virtuality, after all, and it does simulate presence. No, "simulate" is the wrong word, since it evokes the origin-copy dichotomy that Grosz challenges. Rather, holograms and books as virtualities create presence in the way that Moslund and the geocritical school insist: they presence, as a verb. The worlds that get created and connected need not be mutually reinforcing of the conditions that bring them together, just as a book need not be an autobiography. At one extreme, the hologram perpetuates the conditions that make it. At another extreme, the hologram can be used as a tool in its own destruction [9]. We don't want the hologram sucked through a needle and shot inside itself, like Mr. Tompkins, but neither do we want it subsumed by that which it might oppose, either. But between these two extremes, where virtuality is most at home [10], is an intertext, a condition of potentiality and relationship. Who is to say which worlds the hologram connects? Why not textual worlds? In the right hands, the hologram could project exhibits, performances, protests, dialogues, films, and even materially real books, as much as it could project heads of state, dignitaries, corporate executives, celebrities, and sales pitches. If the hologram is truly used for communication more than it stands in as a symbol of Haraway's Informatics of Domination, then various worlds of discourse and text and language all have access to each other. The inward worlds of art can interact, and the intertext hums with engaged surfers. The hologram thus carries in it the appeal of virtual presence.

<26> Determining which version of virtuality Eggers's hologram represents - the hopeful, supplementary, intertextual model, or one of the extremes as articulated by Grosz - seems to depend on what relationships, in Eggers's textual world, can accomplish, or else on the degree to which technology is seen as helpful in facilitating these relationships. In the first instance, we are told very early on that "relationships no longer mattered, Alan knew this. They did not matter in America, they did not matter much of anywhere, but here, among the royals, he hoped that friendship had meaning" (20). This is a deflating condition of the world to which a virtuality predicated on a condition of relationships might not respond well. But in the second instance, it is hinted that the connecting of worlds might simply be an undertaking that does not ask much of technology - certainly not "catastrophically expensive" technology. Toward the end of the novel, Alan has a conversation with a medical doctor, Zahra, who removes a lipoma from the back of his neck. He also happens to be falling in love with her. As he is a middle-aged American salesman, and she is a slightly younger woman of Lebanese-Arab-Swiss-Greek-Dutch heritage practicing medicine in Saudi Arabia, Alan is curious about the conditions of potentiality and relationship that bring them together. He is, in short, curious about their intertext:

-What do you think our kids would make of this? he asked.

-How do you mean? You and me? Because we represent some kind of culture clash?

-I guess so.

-Please. We're separated by the thinnest filament.

-Well, that's the way I think.

-That's the way it is. She looked at him sternly. I won't let us play those games. It's so tiresome. Leave that to the undergraduates (292).

This "thinnest filament" is still an acknowledgment of a world divider, but perhaps Zahra's larger point is that a common language and some proximity is technology enough to remove this filament and to bridge the gap with the meaningful presence of something that is not local. The possible conclusions seem to include that (1) a spatial virtuality that simulates presence (instead of creating presence) is not necessary when you've got proximity, (2) that a spatial virtuality that simulates presence (instead of creating presence) is ineffective when relationships don't matter, or (3) that a spatial virtuality that does create presence is not given the chance to show what it is capable of in a setting where relationships do matter. In A Hologram for the King, Eggers sets up this last option as an as-yet unconducted experiment, though the first two options may form hypotheses. Eggers saves the conduction of his experiment for The Circle.

<27> Richard Norton tells us that, without virtuality, the world would collapse (500). The line is delivered tongue-in-cheek - Norton's writing is delightfully witty - but the point, having to do with completion, is serious in light of how Eggers's experiment in The Circle plays out, how the intertextual conditions of potentiality and relationships unfold, how presence (or absence) obtains. What is at stake in the relationship between a spatial virtuality and completion has everything to do with remapping the present, since the purpose of shifting to presence is to determine a virtual space in relation to the circles of sovereignty - the open or closed, broken or whole, single or plural, separate or overlapping circles that do or do not contain or exclude a presence.

<28> If there is any doubt as to the ubiquity of circles in mapping conceptions of sovereignty, look no further than Jacques Rancière'sDissensus, which, as I understand it, is another Foucault interlocution as well as a redrawing of Agamben's iron-clad circle in Homo Sacer and Hardt and Negri's circle with no edge from Empire to Commonwealth. Rancière's work conceives of a politics for "those who simply fall outside of the happy circle of state and right" (11) (or of "fact and law," 102), a way to escape the "vicious circle of a theory" that identifies "the subject of the Rights of Man with the subject deprived of rights" (71), a way to assist Derrida in breaking "the circle of the self" (52), and a way to erase the consensual "circle of 'infinite injustice'" (103). It is nothing short of a way to redraw "the very circle of 'political philosophy' itself" (40).

<29> How does Eggers's circle fit? What sort presence map does The Circle provide? How does the desire to collapse the weight of ontological along with ethico-political concerns into the dimensions of the circles that we imagine to map presences of power operate within the experiment that Eggers conducts? I think it confirms that another experiment is needed. If what was missing in A Hologram for the King was an acknowledgement that relationships matter, we will see that what is missing in The Circle is an intertext. In this "inward world," there are emphasized and prioritized relationships, but they are all internal - they comprise an insular text that either refuses to or simply cannot move between textual presences. The singular world of The Circle responds only to the mapping of the present as a circle and nothing else. Conditions stack up and virtualities locate themselves within their own casings. In some ways, fiction writers are every bit the theorists as are Foucault's interlocutors who envision new modes of relationship in order to cope with or respond to certain power structures. If Bersani detects a virtual "intimacy" in James' The Beast in the Jungle, for example, perhaps Eggers also imagines new ways for people to "connect," equally virtual. But, if so, then Eggers also imagines the nightmare of using virtuality to compound its conditions and create more of itself, so that The Circle is drawn into its own inward world much like Mr. Tomkins ends up inside his own body.

<30> Mae Holland is an employee of The Circle, which is somewhat reminiscent of Hologram's Reliant but much more heavily invested in social media formats. The Circle presents itself with "its name and logo - a circle surrounding a knitted grid, with a small 'c' in the center" (2). This visual metaphor cannot be more literal: by the end of the novel, this totalizing and totalitarian company envisions "completing the circle," modifying the logo so that it goes from the small 'c' to a circular 'o': "Completion is the end. We're closing the circle around everyone - it's a totalitarian nightmare" (481). It is a map of power with very clearly defined boundaries.

<31> From gaining employment at this prestigious company to finding herself warned in this dialogue about the consequences of completing The Circle, Mae is encouraged to get connected. She learns to participate through nine screens of social media on her desk at once. (Presumably each of those screens can house virtual desktops within virtual desktops within virtual desktops.) Mae watches people communicate with advanced telecommunications technologies even when they have direct proximity to those with whom they share information. She sees people watching the projection of a figure who stands several feet away from them. Her response time to emails and text messages approaches instantaneous. In short, Mae undergoes a steady transformation in which she negotiates a dialectic of "knowing" and "not knowing" - eventually, "knowing" (like information) triumphs, and Mae attributes the broken feeling inside her, described throughout as a black tearing of her inner fabric, to a condition of "not knowing." But this is a gradual process. There are times before the nightmare is complete in which Mae is convinced that there might be such a thing as too much information, that not every facet of a personal life needs to be shared publically, and that the material presence of those with whom she might relate matter as much or more than the information-sharing itself that makes such a hyper relational environment possible. The tearing inside her morphs from a condition of knowing too much (information overload) to never being able to know enough (information addiction).

<32> To be sure, material presence within The Circle is given consideration before it is dismissed in favor of pure information. Just as there is no denying the material conditions that contribute to the projection of a hologram, there is no escaping that The Circle must store its information cloud in physical, water-cooled, underground tanks. The Circle must keep its employees fit and sane. It must expand its circumference by buying up the surrounding properties and converting them to its campus. But each of these material considerations is deprioritized according to an information narrative that renders The Circle's material infrastructure invisible and irrelevant.

<33> In a telling passage before Mae has been completely won over by the "need to know," two of her supervisors, Denise and Josiah, confront her about her lack of participation in the company's social media. Denise and Josiah learn that Mae has been dealing with her father's MS without "reaching out to any Circlers during this crisis." They want to know why, and Mae explains:

"I wasn't very present."

Denise raised a finger. "Ah, present. That is a wonderful word. I'm glad you used it. Do you consider yourself usually present?"

"I try to be."

Josiah smiled and tapped a flurry into his tablet.

"But the opposite of present would be what?" Denise asked.

"Absent."

"Yes. Absent. Let's put a pin in that thought, too" (182, emphasis in original).

If Mae puts a pin in that thought, it falls out. She progresses through the ranks of The Circle (indeed, through her "PartiRank") with increasing commitment to the company's vision of complete transparency based on the unfettered flows of information, and her physical presence steadily diminishes while her informational presence increases. Mae succeeds in being present without being local. And it is her very reliance on The Circle's hyperconnectivity that destroys "the condition of potentiality and relationship" that should otherwise obtain between her and her parents, and between her and her ex-boyfriend, Mercer. In other words, information overload vitiates Mae's intertextual relations and confines her to the terms and conditions - that is, the insular textual world - of The Circle. Finally, Mae eventually gains so much informational, social-media presence through The Circle that her material presence suffers to the extent that it becomes foreign and unintelligible, and she no longer understands the needs of others' for privacy outside of The Circle. Mae no longer comprehends the shape of a circle as a map of power, and therefore has lost the ability to understand that she has been fully integrated into the self-perpetuating designs and conditions of an all-subsuming structure of sovereignty, and that her virtuality can therefore refer to nothing apart from the conditions of this very structure.

<34> In The Circle, the drive to completion is a drive to perfection, and perfection is "based on complete information." Sitting in Bailey's office (Bailey is one of the Three Wise Men who controls The Circle), Mae is given the full explanation. Secrets (and therefore privacy) have never helped anyone, Bailey explains, and incomplete information is like a broken mirror that distorts our "view of ourselves" and therefore distorts our relationships. By the end, Mae is convinced that the tear inside her can be cured by complete information:

She knew what the tear was and how to sew it closed. The tear was not knowing. Not knowing who would love her and for how long. The tear was the madness of not knowing. […] It was not knowing that was the seed of madness, loneliness, suspicion, fear. But there were ways to solve all this. Clarity had made her knowable to the world, and had made her better, had brought her close, she hoped, to perfection. Now the world would follow. Full transparency would bring full access, and there would be no more not-knowing. Mae smiled, thinking how simple it all was, how pure. Bailey shared her smile. (287, 465)

<35> Without virtuality, the world would collapse. Norton knows what Mae Holland does not: that virtuality should be a creative force to support and connect worlds. Such a force can be found in art. Art can be compared to a mirror. Norton knows that the reflection in a mirror is not a fully accurate representation of reality - he says that it is dangerous because it lies, but that it also gives us what we want, and so we use it for its ability to respond to reality without confusing it with reality (505). A mirror responds to and reflects real conditions, but it also creates and conditions its own reality. Mirrors, then, use reality to create their own worlds, their own realities, and to move between worlds. Grosz uses a mirror analogy, too, in describing a Lacanian basis for understanding virtualities that both invert and supplement external worlds - a view that "both affirms and undermines the reliance of the real on the space of virtuality, showing the necessity and impossibility of their separation":

The mirror surface creates a virtual field that reflects the real, duplicating its spatiality and the object's visual characteristics. Gilles Deleuze later identifies a reciprocal interaction between the virtual and the real, an undecided reversibility, as if the image could take the place of the object and force the object behind the constraints of the mirror's plane. Each makes a certain imperceptible contribution to the other, not adding any particular feature or quality but a depth of potential, a richer resonance (80).

Mae, on the other hand, believes that complete information is the piecing together of a broken mirror, as Bailey tells her, and that the mirror will allow us to know the truth:

"If we look into a broken mirror, a mirror that's cracked or missing parts, what do we get?"

Now it made sense to Mae. Any assessment, judgment, or picture utilizing incomplete information would always be wrong. "We get a distorted and broken reflection," she said.

"Right," Bailey said. "And if the mirror is whole?"

"We see everything."

"A mirror is truthful, correct?"

"Of course, it's a mirror. It's reality" (181-182).

In other words, Mae cannot appreciate Grosz's "richer resonance" precisely because virtuality's "contributions" are "imperceptible." She mistakes a mirror's virtual field for reality, which is to say that, for her, virtuality refers only to the conditions that create it and cannot meaningfully engage with broader conditions of potentiality and relationship. For Mae, the virtuality of the Circle is a virtuality devoid of intertext. Completion of the Circle - the Oircle, I suppose - is therefore the condition of virtuality that Hayles describes, and not an intertextual condition of literature. It is the result of a narrative that prioritizes information at the expense of material presence. A spatial virtuality can counter this tendency, but only if there is an intertext to plug into. A mirror may project a non-local presence similar to a hologram, but only if and when there is something outside of itself to form the conditions of potentiality and relationship. Facing mirrors, on the other hand, invert these conditions entirely. They nest virtualities inside each other so that there is no escape from the unending reflections of their own internal information, which, after a while, may cease to be information at all, and degenerate from pattern to randomness. Without an intertext, we run the risk of being caught up in our own unintelligible oircle, subject to unmappable conditions of sovereignty.

3. Conclusion: The Direction of the Virtual Projection

<36> To clarify, I do not argue that Eggers's novels are subject to Hayles' condition of virtuality; rather, they are metavirtual insofar as they are virtualities depicting virtualities that project in a particular direction. Taking a cue from Robert T. Tally Jr., who takes his cue in discussing "The Spaces of Literature" from Thomas Pynchon's 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49, I want to close by considering the nature of literature's virtual capacity to project worlds. After all, it is Pynchon's Oedipa Maas who asks, "Shall I project a world?," and Tally Jr. who comments that "'projecting a world' seems an entirely appropriate phrase for describing the role of literature, and a great many literary works have undoubtedly functioned as imaginary maps, diagrams, constellations, and the like" (42). Even so, a number of tensions continue to inflect and even strain my intonations of a spatial virtuality culminating, hopefully, in a condition of literature. Time and space are twin pranksters of theory, forever sliding past and into each other, disguising each other and masquerading as the other. Information and materiality mimic the pranks of time and space. There is an ever-shifting hierarchy in which privilege is assigned and reassigned to a steady rotation of actualities, realities, and virtualities. Virtuality itself eludes definition, and when definition can be agreed upon, it still remains unclear as to whether virtuality is "good" or "bad," both, or neither. In short, the tension between Grosz's "unabashed apologists of cybertechnologies" and her "nostalgic Luddites yearning for days gone by," who, by turns, detect in virtuality "a powerful force of liberation" or a "a form of ever-encroaching fascistic control," remains an unresolved and perplexing dilemma.

<37> I don't pretend that my spatial redefinition of virtuality does much to alleviate these tensions, but I do claim it might enhance the way we think about how literature maps and negotiates power, or at the very least, how it can provoke new thinking. I can use Grosz's seminal insights, for example, to push back against her assertion that virtuality never threatens reality - a move which at once reveals my sympathies for material realities as well as my more extreme readings of virtual conditions. But if I have a tendency to gravitate toward the poles, it is based on an "inter(con)textual" belief that literature qua virtuality creates its own internal realities rather than merely representing some external reality - that, to appreciate Benny Liew's "postmodern sensibilities," as he calls them, literature can enact a "blurring" of "texts and contexts" (25-30). And to blur texts and contexts returns us not only to intertext, but also to Moslund's notion of "presencing," which explicates that literature projects and connects worlds and that those projections and connections - at least according to the geocritical lens that he advocates - flow in a particular direction:

it is not so much the work that is uprooted from its locality and distributed to the nearness of a distant reader as much as it is the distant reader who stretches toward the place or the nearness of the work. It is not a matter of experiencing a location inside our "present here," to paraphrase Heidegger, but to let our thinking, our embodied thinking, "get through, persist through, the distance to that location," to the nearness of the place from where the work "begins its presencing." [11]

<38> Moslund has just described for us the direction of the virtual projection, and he has clarified that a spatial virtuality that remaps and renegotiates the present is a force of liberation not when an outside world is brought into a given circle of sovereignty, but when subjects within that circle are transported via a self-referential intertext to an outside, to a beyond…to a non-local presence. The object of resistance is always to move outside those circles that Rancière so carefully tracks from antiquity to postmodernity, not to break into Empire from beyond its grasp. Perhaps this is why Grosz feels no threat: hers is an "architecture from the outside," never from within. Grosz teaches us, then, that containment is more threatening than exclusion; exclusion at least allows for Rancière's dissensus in a way that containment does not.

<39> Moslund's clarification works in reverse, too. Just as an intertext can extricate a reader from a circle, from a sovereign space, to a location beyond, so can a literature that "presences" outer locales within a circle project the subjectivities from an outer world of freedom onto an inner screen of domination - it can re-subject itself to a local power arrangement. And when this happens, it is still virtuality: there is still the presence of the something that is not local, which is how we know that virtuality can be a threat. Nobody has a monopoly on virtuality (although that is a scary prospect, too, as Eggers makes clear) in the sense that if virtuality is an "augmentation" of reality, following Grosz, it may be a grim and threatening reality indeed that augments. After all, reality itself can be and often is threatening. A bad reality, like a bad virtuality, threatens itself.

<40> But it is not that information is bad and that materiality is good; it is that information, like language and texts, is generally misread as immaterial. It is that information, like virtuality, has come to stand for the disembodied abstraction of knowable stuff when it is in fact a process of informing or shaping the very materiality that it appears to supersede or transgress. Digitally, information is confused for the binary codes of 1s and 0s that the opening and closing of actual-and-material gates produce, the impressions of writing, and cutting of not-random patterns onto microchips. Messages are taken for signals, and vice versa. Unfortunately, language and texts are similarly confused. Because they are so mobile, and transportable via minds, they are taken as knowable-but-immaterial codes in the same fashion as binary 1s and 0s when in fact they are incursions into material worlds. I asked earlier: What if a condition of literature means that language and texts are the presence around which information and material bodies congregate? Such a question presupposes a linguistic physicality that is technologically sufficient to project and connect worlds, to (re)map and (re)negotiate present realities. I am ready to commit to a condition of literature that is at once virtual, but also: possible, real, actual, physical, material, symbolic, fictional, ideal, and present…but not abstract and certainly not local. Shall I project a world? It depends. It depends on the condition of the literature - which world and into which location? It depends on the direction of the projection. And it pays to remember that some connections are not worth making.

Notes

[1]. See Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality (2013), 11-20. Tally opens his section on "The Spatial Turn" with a quotation from Michel Foucault's "Of Other Spaces" (1986), and he puts Foucault in the company of Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze as well as David Harvey, Ed Soja, J.B. Harley, and Frederic Jameson as a cohort of theorists for whom spatiality makes gains over temporality in its usefulness in analyzing and explaining postmodernity.

[2]. By "extending the spatial turn to a material(ist) turn," I may appear to run the risk of ascribing to a decidedly Cartesian view of space. As Tally explains, "Descartes maintains a notion of Euclidean space in which space cannot be separated from the bodies in space. Following the Aristotelian definition, the term body here refers to anything with mass and dimensionality, and for Descartes all bodies have a fundamental characteristic, spatial extension, so that what we think of as space is really just this extension of bodies" (Spatiality, 27). Similarly, my desire to "implicate literature in this endeavor" might be seen as a willingness to engage in Edward Soja's theory of thirdspace, which, building on Henri LeFebvre's trialectics and Foucault's heterotopia, is a way to synthesize "subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history" (57). Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace (1996). As to this first appearance of conflating spatiality and materiality, I turn to Elizabeth Grosz later in this piece (paragraph 14) for complication and nuance; as to the second appearance of engaging with Soja et al, it is true, and I confess that while this paper only tangentially flirts with thirdspace and trialectics, I imagine them as compatible with this paper and, further, I suggest that separate, explicitly intertextual treatments of thirdspace are worthwhile, as Russell West-Pavlov also seems to intuit in Space in Theory: Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze (2009), though West-Pavlov is only flirting, too, with the intersection between Foucault's "positivity" and Kristeva's "intertextuality" (130).

[3]. Hammer, 61. Hammer uses the phrase "The Actualization of the Virtual Past," and he discusses the futurity of possibility without using the phrase "the realization of a possible future" - but I mimic the formulation and invoke the phrase in order to illustrate the temporal distance between virtuality and possibility.

[4]. Deleuze, Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 63. Qtd. In Hammer, 62. The more common translation for Proust's work is In Search of Lost Time, but since I am reading Deleuze reading Proust, I defer to his French reading of the French novelist; either way, both versions of Proust's title testifies to the point Deleuze makes, to "the appeal of the present."

[5]. C.f. Frank Zingrone, "Virtuality and McLuhan's 'World as Art Form'," in The Legacy of McLuhan (2005, 43-48), and Richard Norton, "What is Virtuality?" in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30.4 (Summer 1972, 499-505). Both Zingrone and Norton conclude, in their ways, that art is always virtual.

[6]. Hayles, 183. Hayles cites Richard Doyle, On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations in the Life Sciences (1997) to substantiate this point.

[7]. There are many angles from which to come at this - many theoretical enterprises (postmodernists and feminists leading the charge) that suggest that texts create reality rather than reflect or represent it, but there is one interesting for its intersection with spatiality studies by way of "world literature." Maurizio Ascari, discussing "The dialectics between words and reality" in Literature of the Global Age: A Critical Study of Transcultural Narratives (2011), identifies a "self-referential" "condition" of literature with an "emphasis on the distance between author and reader" (30-31). Ascari's discussion includes Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, which I pick up on in my conclusion because of Robert T. Tally Jr.'s interest in the same novel for his discussion of the spatiality of literature.

[8]. See Sten Pultz Moslund, "The Presencing of Place in Literature: Toward an Embodied Topopoetic Mode of Reading" (2011, 29-43). Moslund, working from Heideggerian foundations, describes "a mode of reading that moves away from the representation of place in literature to a direct presencing or sensation of place" (31, emphasis in original), and he defines presencing as the way in which "a work makes a world present or how it produces a presence in the literal sense of 'production' as a physical 'bringing forth' of something. Presence effects 'exclusively appeal to the senses' the way art, in 'moments of intensity' touches our bodies and brings 'the things of the world close to our skin'" (31-31, emphasis in original). The quoted phrases refer to Hans Ultrecht Gumbrecht's The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (2004, 18-19).

[9]. Grosz discusses the two extremes in order to come to her own middle ground: "Unashamed apologists of cybertechnologies and nostalgic Luddites yearning for days gone by see VR as a powerful force of liberation and a form of ever-encroaching fascistic control, respectively" (77). We recall that, for Grosz, virtuality never threatens but only supplements reality. I return to the two extremes and Grosz's non-threatened stance in my own conclusion, in which I argue that the dangers of virtuality or virtuality's liberating qualities depend on which conditions the virtuality projects: those of a mapping literature, or those of the unmappable circles of sovereignty.

[10]. See Richard Norton, "What Is Virtuality?" (500-501). For Norton, virtuality occupies a place somewhere "between" the standards set by "actual" and "not good enough." Too far to one end or the other, and it ceases to be virtual - too far toward "actual" standards, and it simply becomes actuality; too far toward "not good enough" and it fails as virtuality.

[11]. Moslund, 41. Moslund's quotations are from Heidegger's Poetry, Language, Thought (2013, 152-156).

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