The ontology of virtual personality

1. Personality is the object to which qualities of the subject are ascribed.

2. Virtual personality is the object to which qualities of the subject are ascribed but the status of which is undetermined. “Virtual” here signifies neutralization of the opposition between “real” and “unreal”.

3. Virtual personality differs from the real in that it has no physical body and consists exclusively of signs and actions (as well as of images, thoughts and feelings that it evokes in the psyche of the recipients). “Virtual” here is opposed to “material”.

4. Virtual personality in the narrow sense is a sign complex that exists in the electronic environment that serves as a medium for these signs. However, as it has been stated above, the realization of meanings of these signs takes place in the human mind or minds. Therefore, the nature of medium and the essence should be distinguished.

5. It follows from this distinction that the electronic basis of existence of virtual personality has a secondary significance. As a medium of the signs that signify it other carriers can be used, such as stone, paper, canvas, film and so on. The human person as a material object also can be used as a medium for virtual personality. What is important is not the nature of the medium but the effect that is evoked in psyche by the corresponding sign complex. Therefore, virtual personality in the broad sense is not limited by the properties of the medium.

6. Virtual personality has two fundamental qualities:

• proper name
• the ability for autonomous action

All other qualities of virtual personality are derivative.

Explanation:

(1) The lack of a proper name makes it impossible to differentiate the object from other objects of the same class. For example, anonymous postings to a discussion are perceived as impersonal even if they contain some original ideas and sings of individual style. On the other hand, writings of a number of people signed by the same name create the impression that they relate to the same personality. Similarly, giving a name to an inanimate object such as tree, mug or body part imparts to them personal properties. The connection of this fact with the logic of myth does not demand any comments.

(2) If the object is inactive, it is impossible to determine whether it is object or subject, that is, its personal status is undetermined. However, since the virtual identity has its existence not only as a complex of signs in electronic or other media but also as a complex of ideas in the minds of others, it can be supported by investments of psychic energy of others, including its originator, its recipients (readers, viewers, users, etc.), and “gate-keepers” (publishers, critics, experts, etc.), and remain alive if even it does not change objectively.

(3) If the actions of the object are determined by the influence of forces that are external in relation to it, then it acts as an object rather then a subject of the action and its personal properties are revealed negatively. The autonomous action presupposes free will. Wherein there is no free will, there is no personality. For example, postings to a forum or notes in an online diary made by a person in whose existence we have confidence are not perceived as the manifestation of a virtual personality but rather as an expression of a real person.

7. The neutralization of opposition between the real and unreal in the notion of the virtual makes virtual personality similar to the work of art. Potentially, every virtual personality is a work of art, but actually, only those of them become a work of art, which have the radiance of form, which is perceived directly.

8. The intrinsic properties of virtual environment such as immateriality, incorporeality and plasticity allowing the creation of images, forms and meanings make it analogous to the human mind and especially to such a manifestation of it as imagination. As it was aphoristically formulated by the author of a novel about “love, life and travels on the electronic frontier”, ‘Cyberspace is the name we give to the human imagination when we access it via a modem’ (Sinha 1999: 130). However, there exists a principal difference between the creative act in electronically mediated communications and in other creative environments such as art and literature. It is a possibility of interactions between creatures of individual imaginations in common virtual space. As the same author rightly notes,

Until recently we have been alone in our imagination. However vividly a play, film or book brings characters to life in our minds, we always form an audience of one. ... In cyberspace, for the first time, we create imaginary worlds which can truly be shared, in which each of us is fully present, with the power of free and spontaneous action. We no longer have to follow the script. We can play inside each other imagination. (ibid: 131)

9. The nearest literary analogue of virtual personality in the narrow sense is character – a fictitious identity endowed by a name and the ability to take autonomous action in a fictitious environment.

Lilith, one of the characters of Indra Sinha’s novel The Cybergypsies quoted above, explains to Bear, the protagonist of the novel,

When you roleplay, you are the character... There’s no script. You open your mouth and are surprised by what comes out. Your character has a life and friends of her own. You may not approve of what she gets up to, but it is not your business. We, the puppeteers, the mask-wearers, have duty not to interfere, yet we must know out characters well, as well as we know ourselves. This is hard. Most of us have only sketchiest idea of ourselves... (ibid: 120)

Or as it is stated in the Cyber Sutra included in the novel, ‘[c]yber characters are true livings beings, with their own lives’ (ibid: 256).

This description bears a striking resemblance to the accounts of many writers who have stated that their characters had a kind of separate existence and independence from their creator’s will. Another noteworthy similarity is the identification of the creator with its created character that is also has often noted by writers and artists. Remember, for example, Flaubert’s famous phrase ‘Madam Bovary c’ést moi’. These two aspects of relationship between the author and its characters at first sight seem contradictory. However, this contradiction can be reconciled if we take into account that ‘most of us have only sketchiest idea of ourselves’. In the process of creating a fictitious world or participating in a virtual world, the person paradoxically acquires self-knowledge through the objectification of his or her self (or some of its aspects) in the characters he creates or plays. The creation of virtual personality, therefore, turns out to be one of the forms of the creative act as well as a way of self-knowledge.

One of the corollaries that follow from the interactive nature of virtual space is that virtual character, unlike literary character, is a product of collaboration between the participants of a virtual world. ‘Your character is not just your own creation. It is created and constantly re-invented by you and your partner together’ (ibid: 120).

10. Considered from the perspective of its relationships with its creator, virtual personality reveals similarity to another literary phenomenon, namely, pseudonym. Pseudonym is a fictitious or assumed name used instead of a person’s real name. It can be use for both identification and concealing the identity.

On the internet, digital identity is used, for example, in the form of a user name for logging on to services or sites with limited access, in the form of the nickname in online chat and instant message messengers, and so forth. Such uses are functional; they provide an opportunity to identify a digital person while retaining his or her (relative) anonymity. Having a pseudonym is necessary but not enough for creating a virtual personality. Only when the pseudonym is endowed with a degree of autonomy (which may include a biography, specific personal traits, and creative works) it can develop into a full-fledged virtual personality.

Beyond the internet, virtual personalities have usually emerged in the framework of literary mystifications.

Examples:

(1) One of the most striking examples of a literary virtual personality is Ossian, legendary Gaelic warrior-bard of the 3rd century AD (reputedly the son of the Irish hero Fionn mac Cumhaill), the author of Ossianic ballads, published in English as translation ‘from Gallic or Erse language’ in 1760s by James Macpherson (1736-1796). Ossian’s majestic and melancholic ballads had a tremendous influence on the romantic poetry of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries and inspired Scottish authors of that time to writing poetry in Gaelic in the Ossianic vein. Ossianism had become the subject of fervent controversy; many critics, including the influential Samuel Johnson, denied authenticity of his poetry and argued that it was written by Macpherson himself (even if on the basis of genuine Gaelic sources). Yet the figure of Ossian separated from its supposed creator and acquired a kind of independent life. This ambiguous status in relation to the author is a characteristic trait of a true virtual personality – it is and is not its author at the same time.

(2) In the 19^th century, a similar mystification was performed by Prosper Mérimée (1803-1870) who published in 1827 his La guzla, a forged collection of supposedly Illyrian folk songs, which became one of the sources for Pushkin’s Songs of the Western Slavs published in Russian five years later. However, this double literary mystification did not lead to creation of a virtual personality because the poetry had not been ascribed to a personified author. It demonstrates the importance of a proper name for virtual personality.

(3) Émile Ajar is, perhaps, the most famous literary mystification of the 20^th century. It was a pseudonym of Romain Gary which was, in its turn, a pseudonym of Romain Kacew (1914-1980), French writer and diplomat, born in Vilna (now Vilnius), Lithuania and brought to France by his Russian mother soon after the October Revolution of 1917. Romain Gary achieved literary success in 1945 with L'education européenne, an account of the lives of Polish Resistance fighters during World War II, and received the Prix Goncourt in 1956 for Les racines du ciel that demonstrated his concern for African wildlife and balanced ‘a visionary conception of freedom and justice against a pessimistic comprehension of man's cruelty and greed’ (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2003). In the following years, he wrote a number of novels that mixed humour with tragedy and touched serious moral problems in a comic way. Regardless of public recognition, he felt a growing discontent with the indifference of the audience. In 1974, in the age of 60, he published Le Gros calin, a grotesque and lyrical narrative on behalf of a clerk keeping a boa constrictor as a pet in his small apartment. The novel was published under the pseudonym of Émile Ajar and become a great success. Ajar’s second novel, La vie devant soi written on behalf of a small Arab boy Momo living in a clandestine kindergarten maintained by a former prostitute, old Madam Rosa, was published next year. It received the Prix Goncourt and provoked a vivid interest in the author’s personality. Gary’s nephew, Paul Pavlovich, was introduced to the audience as the real Émile Ajar and allusions to support this identity were made in the next Ajar novel Pseudo. Gradually Pavlovich got a taste for being a celebrity and began to blackmail Gary demanding the manuscripts of Ajar’s writings. A materialized pseudonym became a threat to its originator. In 1980, the last Ajar’s novel, L'Angoisse du roi Salomon, was published. In the same year Gary shot himself. In his essay La vie et la mort d’Émile Ajar, published posthumously, he wrote: ‘I was banished from my possessions. Another has been settled in the mirage I created. Having been materialized, Ajar set an end to my ghostly existence in him. A vicissitude of fate: my own dream turned against myself.’ Gary, for whom creativity was a synonym for transformation and who continuously fought with limitations of his “real” self, became a victim of his own creation. The virtual personality killed the real person.

11. The relationship of virtual personality with its originator is ambivalent. On the one hand, it is based on identification, at least partial, of the creator with its creation. On the other hand, however, the created identity tends to separate itself from its originator and to gain a kind of independent existence. It appears that this ambivalence is a prerequisite for a perfect virtual identity.

Explanation:

If a virtual personality is entirely dependent on its originator, then its actions are determined by an external force and, therefore, under clause 6 it cannot be considered as a personality if even it possesses an individual name.

If, on the other hand, a virtual personality becomes entirely separated from its creator, then, with the passage of time, it usually looses the ability to develop, regardless of whether it is a literary construction or a computer programme. The lack of the ability to develop prevents it from adaptation to the changing environment, which, in the final analysis, leads it to death.

12. Death of a virtual personality appears either as the physical destruction of data containing the sign complex that represents this personality (deleting data from computer memory, demolition of a grave, etc.), or as the loss of access to them (Error 404, absence of a book in the library, etc.), or as their de-actualization that causes their content to be buried in oblivion (texts which nobody reads, software which nobody uses, etc.).

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