ÜHEST KIRJANDUSTEOREETILISEST KOKKUVARISEMISEST
About a Literary-Theoretic Collapse

Summary/Abstract: The article focuses on the concept of the virtual (here to be taken in the strict Bergsonian or Deleuzean sense as the abstract field of infinite potentialities) and explore its problematic relation to virtual reality (which is here to be taken as the simulation of reality or the simulation of our experience of reality through artificial mediums) and the cognitive impact that virtual environments have on the notion of textuality. The article critically questions George Landow’s polemic assertion that the perspective or the idea of electronic hypertext can be used as a means to somehow practically ’check’ the validity of poststructuralist theories and concepts. Landow’s error here lies in the conviction that an ideal concept only has a meaning insofar as it can be materialized or poured into some ’practical’ form. Instead, the article postulates the opposite assertion that the very process of the practical checking of the validation of poststructuralist ideas or concepts ruins their validity of those concepts on an ideal level. In other words, Landow has short-circuited the obvious qualitative difference between an infinitely plural ideal concept (e.g. the reality of the virtual) and its narrowly singular practical realization (e.g. virtual reality).Just as the Borgesian garden of forking paths is a valid and infinitely plural concept on an ideal level and the process of reading a hypertextual novel is its narrow materialized correlate on a practical level, reality itself can be considered a narrowing collapse of the infinite ideal reality of the virtual.

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