Negotiating Language Conflict in the Digital Era: Rethinking the Virtual

Abstract

This study analyzes the transformations of the concept of the ‘virtual’ from metaphysical thought to the environment of digital technology, and on this basis, proposes a renewed articulation of its contemporary ontological implications. The virtual has often been understood as a lack or absence of the real; however, through the thought of Plato, Aristotle, and Deleuze, its meaning has expanded from a mere illusion to the potentiality for the generation of the real. For Plato, the virtual remained within a non-real domain as a mimesis distanced from the truth of the Ideas, whereas Aristotle provided the ontological foundation of the virtual by understanding δύναμις (dynamis “potentiality”) as the latent condition of ἐνέργεια (energeia “actuality”). Deleuze goes beyond this tradition by defining the virtual as a field of creative genesis independent of whether it is actualized, rejecting its conflation with the possible, and affirming its autonomous reality. Historically, the virtual became popularized in the field of computer science through the concept of ‘virtual memory,’ and in the media environment of VR and AR, accompanying shifts in human subjectivity and corporeality. In the contemporary technological milieu, the virtual functions not as a mere representation or substitute, but as an inventive stratum that produces new forms of reality. However, perceptions that disparage the virtual as non-real exacerbate social, generational, and cultural conflicts and generate blind spots in legal and institutional frameworks. Accordingly, this study proposes to understand the virtual not as the antithesis of the real, but as the generative force of difference and repetition, and to reestablish it as an ontological condition that expands and reconfigures the real.