What is contrasted in the real versus virtual dichotomy?

• a series of dualisms pit the human against the technological,
• the developed against the underdeveloped,
• the natural against the artificial.
• digital versus lived.
 

'Virtual': not strictly according to definition,not literally, but 'in effect' (OED). 
• most common form: the adverb 'virtually'.
• 'Virtualism' is the Calvinistic doctrine of Christ's virtual presence in the Eucharist.

'Virtual' is an adjective quickly becoming a proper noun-'The Virtual'- a place, a space, ersatz graphical objects and animated personae...

Examples of virtual institutions and spaces (virtual Jerusalem).

Power of these virtual alternatives may well lie in the concealed manner in which they evoke some notion of a desirable ideal:

The virtual assimilates a sense of the virtuous (OED)

'Virtual' implies a space or a spatial relation; it is places, relationships, values. It uproots and carries off everyday spatial relations, places, relationships and values. 

'Virtual space' is a product of the spatialization of communication as an environment
• imagined as a common ground between participants 'brought into earshot'
-neither actual in its location or coordinates
• performative competence: experienced 'as if' lived: a serious domain of action 
-metaxis: imagination transposes digital action and virtual encounters to living animals and objects.

Virtual spaces are indexical, in Pierce's sense, in that they are interstitial moments. Moments relate dissimilars (cf. Lefebvre)
• Webpages are sets, not objects. 
-composed out of linked elements, punctuated by hypertext links to other data and files. 
-partial objects come to be re-imagined as complete wholes

The Virtual as an ontological category can be examined non-dualistically

Proust, Bergson, Deleuze etc. virtual quality of memories and dreams, real in their own terms.
• "real without being actual, ideal without being abstract"

But the primary distinctions are between the actual and the ideal as well as the real and the possible.
• The virtual is outside not only the abstract, but also the material (that which exists actually)
• The abstract is a possible ideal (expressed as concepts); 
• An actual possibility is expressed as a mathematical probability

 
               Real (existing)  Possible (not existing)
 Ideal     :     virtual                    abstract
 Actual  :     material                  probability

 Matrix of the forms of the real and possible.

Material and virtual spaces are dominated by their relations with each other, as points of identification, 'temporary addresses' and 'commitment' to the 'possible'.
• They are interdependent and indiscernible on their own.

Hypertext links are indexes 'caught on the threshold of departure', signalling to another file
• not a portal to an outside but a hidden passage in a building- a door to the inside
• sense of self-sufficient totality
• Ambiguity thus becomes 'mystery' in the absence of a span across a clear categorical divisions

Elapsed time must be accomplished by developing a spatial narrative of a path that one has taken.
• Virtual Spaces have duration but strictly speaking, neither history, nor a future
-digital archiving creates a form of history but merely as repetition (Kierkegaard)
-governed by software functionality, not remembrance or reverie.

Adequate remembrance, memorialization requires forms of performance.
• testimony over monumentality (eg. the Virtual Vietnam Memorial http://www.VirtualWall.org
• Remembrance: Stitching the collective past not only the present, personal biography of a witness but into the social future requires forms of performance, ie. ritual.

Rituals are social forms of the virtual.
• As indexes of specific (and we must add, reified) elements the past, they are also thresholds; 'liminal' zones, a 'time out of time' on the cusp of the present and past.
-performative settings for rites of passage
-allow what is often a symbolic death or removal from one social status and birth into another.
-the 'limen' (threshold) of membership is itself 'betwixt and between': indexical
• rituals are the infrastructure of a social, lived memo-technology

There is a history of 'performing virtuality':
• performative matrices mobilize the socially real
• re-actualize the ideal in alternative and often utopian performances: