INTRODUCTION : FROM POSSIBLE WORLDS TO VIRTUAL REALITY

In: virtual reality. Out: reality. So claimed on December 31, 1994 of those countless lists of predictions that invariably herald coming of a new year.(1) What is out is concept of a where mind and body encounter resistance of matter, where laws of gravity hold, where some events happen that you cannot take back, where you live only life. What is is a realm where all your wishes can be fulfilled, where you live multiple lives, where you can inhabit multiple personalities, and where nothing counts because it is only a game, an endlessly repeatable and endlessly variable simulation. With this pronouncement, a major theme of has gone mainstream. As Benjamin Woolley describes contemporary mind set: Reality has left physical world and moved into virtual one (235). For past twenty years, what has been in for cultural theory was any kind of concept that opposes and challenges nature, essence, and reality: copies, fake, fiction, conventions, artificial, make-believe and role playing. The news of the death of reality and of its replacement by hyperrealities did not await electronic mail td spread throughout cultural, critical, and literary scene. In an intellectual climate that regards concepts as toys to play with and that favors consensus over correspondence theories of truth (if truth remains an issue at all), professions of radical antirealism are often more an intellectual game than a metaphysical commitment, for such a commitment would reinstate the absence of reality as surrogate reality: this is to say, as transcendental object of knowledge. (Hard-core postmodernists would of course reply that playing games is only metaphysical commitment left after death of reality.) Games may be played a spirit of nonseriousness, but they are part of a culture, and as such they must be taken seriously. Thus, regardless of our personal position concerning nature, existence, or epistemic accessibility of reality, we must address theme of its crisis and emergence of alternative concepts if we want to understand contemporary zeitgeist. The focus of this issue of Style is a conceptual space encompassing two manifestations of what may be called the parareal: one--possible worlds, or PW--a philosophical notion currently developing into a tool of literary criticism; other--virtual reality, or VR--a technological phenomenon that has recently captured public's imagination, attracting along way theoretical attention from academic community. The relation between and PW theory can be described as a love-hate affair. The love part stems from endorsement by PW theory of an ontological model consisting of a plurality of worlds. In this model, contemporary thought finds a philosophical basis for its endorsement of diversity all its forms, from multiculturalism within society to a pluralism of coexisting individuals within subject. According to Brian McHale, transition from modernism to is defined by a shift from an epistemological to an ontological dominant: Intractable epistemological uncertainty becomes at a certain point ontological plurality or instability (11). McHale's assimilation of plurality with instability--a fairly typical move postmodern thought--points, however, to hate part of relationship. The rallying cry of postmodern theory is negative prefix: as Linda Hutcheon observes, term postmodernism is usually accompanied by a grand flourish of negativized rhetoric: we hear of discontinuity, disruption, dislocation, decentering, indeterminacy, and antitotalization (3). Encompassing all of these notions, of course, is almighty concept of deconstruction. This approach to diversity runs contrary to structure assigned by PW theory to its ontological model; hence hate component. By designating world of system as actual and by opposing it to surrounding nonactual possible worlds (as Saul Kripke defines so-called M-model), PW theory postulates an ontological center that dispels any chance of equality among members of system. …