Forces at play - an exploration into the reality of the virtual within digital environments

This thesis investigates military simulation environments, in order to shed light on the productive ways in which digital and non-digital realities inform and transform each other. Cultural geographers and cultural theorists have done much in recent decades to challenge the naive naturalism that relegates digital technologies to a secondary representation of reality. Non-representational geographers have challenged the very distinction between an essential, pre-given reality and its representations, while post-structuralist theories have theorised the role of technologies in the production of reality. This thesis contributes to these debates by analysing the development of habit in the context of military simulation and military-themed videogames. The military context has provided significant impetus for the development of these novel technologies and is highly instructive when seeking to understand human-technological relations and the development of embodied habits. Through interviews with tank operators and military-themed videogamers, the thesis seeks to understand the relationship between digital and non-digital realities, without predetermining and judging them on the basis of their conformity with a narrowed understanding of the real. At a time when technology evokes both promise and angst, the thesis returns to Martin Heidegger's work, not in order to pursue his critique of technology, but to understand the distinct modalities through which humans grant intelligibility to non-human reality. Ultimately, however, Heidegger's thought can only take us so far in terms of understanding the complex reality that provides the context of our relation with the technological. It is through Gilles Deleuze's more virtual and radically differential ontology that I am able to open up the problem of our encounter with the digital more fully. A Deleuzian reading of the recently translated work of Felix Ravaisson on habit directs the more abstract problem of the human/technological encounter toward the precise problem of simulated learning environments. Inflecting the empirical content of the thesis through these thinkers, I argue that learning through military simulation is always more complex and productive than a representational account would allow. I suggest that the richness of such environments for the social sciences lies in the microcosm they provide for understanding diverse encounters germane to contemporary reality