Virtually thinking

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As some of you know, I’m in the midst of writing a new book that I hope one day will offer a new way to think of the physical therapies.

I’ve been deep in the weeds researching this for more than eight years now, and it’s slow going. I do love this long form process though; it can be like a slow walk in the forest at times, at other times as thrilling as turning the last page of a thriller to find out who really hid the body in the basement.

Naturally, the book will draw heavily on process philosophy, so what concepts like the ‘physical’ and ‘therapy’ even mean will need to be established early on.

But perhaps one of the central concepts in the book will be the idea of ‘the virtual’. This is really important because in all process philosophies there’s enormous space given to this concept.

The problem is I’ve never really found a good way to talk about it. (As will become clear shortly!)

The virtual means different things for different process philosophers. Deleuze and Guattari, Kleinherenbrink, Lapoujade, Bergson, Whitehead, Harman, and a host of other process philosophers all differ in the power and meaning they ascribe to it, But most agree that it is a non-actualised, un-realised ‘zone’ that has no spatial coordinates and has no ‘extension’ (the Cartesian word for something that has shape and form).

Crucially, it’s also not transcendent, meaning that it’s not a term used to describe a heavenly realm or spirit world ruled over by gods inaccessible to man (sic). Nor is it an idealised version of reality, as in Plato’s forms. It’s not a cluster of universal laws, like the 'laws of nature’. Nor is it the Freudian unconscious.

On the other hand, it is common to all things, forms, matter, objects, thoughts, events, and processes, and no actual occurrence of anything can exist without it.

In Deleuze’s early writings especially Difference and Repetition, the virtual is described as composing reality whilst also containing all possible realities.

And its this mind-bending idea that something that doesn’t ‘exist’ can contain everything whilst also making everything that causes so much consternation.

And yet, in some ways, it’s so commonplace it’s ridiculous. When you bake a cake, for instance, you’re drawing on the idea of a cake when you make it. By making the cake you don’t withdraw all forms of cake from the world leaving nothing for anyone else; the idea of cake is still there. So there’s some form of virtual cake to which we all refer that can never be exhausted no matter how many you make. (In fact the more cakes you make, the bigger the virtual world of cakiness becomes.)

But perhaps this example is too simplistic?

Deleuze and Whitehead both use the analogy of oogenesis in which an egg becomes a living organism as an example of the virtual. Everything is held in the egg, and yet nothing is yet realised.

The problem with this image, though, is that it can encourage people to think that the structure of the future organism is already laid down in the egg and that the future is, in some ways, foretold. This is absolutely not what Deleuze and Whitehead would want us to think.

Some people have used mathematics as an aid to understanding the virtual. For example, it’s very hard for us to find words to express either the concept of infinity or the number zero, and yet we know both are real. But how can zero be real? Surely zero means nothing? But how can nothing be something? (Sartre, of course, made a very unhealthy career out of this question.)

This gets closer to the kind of abstraction you need to understand the virtual. But for me, it can still be too abstract.

One might think of the virtual as a form of ‘potential’ energy, waiting to be converted into kinetic energy and movement. But Deleuze is adamant that ideas of potential already pre-supposes a set of future possibles, and so again limits what might become.

The biggest problem, I think, is that the virtual has no spatial coordinates, so it can’t be thought of as some kind of empty warehouse waiting to be filled with actual things and events. On the contrary, the virtual is radically full; ‘it possesses a full reality by itself’ (Deleuze 1993, p.211).

So why bother with the virtual?

It would be perfectly reasonable at this point to ask why we need to even bother with a concept like the virtual. Isn’t it just making things overly complicated?

My answer would be that if you’re trying to think philosophically about how the universe works, and you’ve turned to process philosophy, at some point you’ll need to ask what a thing ‘is’. Remember that things, matter and objects in process philosophy are very different to things in the classical substance philosophies.

But even classical Western philosophies accept that there’s more to things than meets the eye; there’s always something that exceeds our ability to know a thing entirely. An object is never ‘exhausted’ by our perception of it.

It’s why Kant differentiated the thing ‘in itself’ (noumena) from the thing as we encounter it (phenomena).

And the fundamentally excessive, elementally inaccessible nature of things is exactly why we go to such lengths in quantitative and qualitative research to prove our observations, because we know they will always miss something.

In normal life, what this means is that if I buy a car or think about my breakfast, I experience it, but something of the car and breakfast remain — a virtual car/breakfast if you will. I do not remove the car or breakfast from the world, ending everyone’s possible access.

Something of ‘car’ and ‘thought of breakfast’ remains and my specific encounter gets added somewhere, somehow to the universe.

This is why the universe grows ever larger, not smaller. So, no virtual, no life.

Some virtual car/thought must lie both in the past (having been encountered) but also retains some presence in the present, so that there are more cars/thoughts about breakfast for you to encounter next time.

Philosophers have tried for thousands of years to explain how the actual car/breakfast thought differs from the virtual. There are realist, idealist, constructivist, postmodern, existential, pragmatic and all sorts of other explanations offered, and they all differ.

But they do all agree that there can be no comprehensive metaphysics of life without a solution to the problem of how to explain the virtual.

For its part, much of the frustration many people feel with process philosophy is with the way a lot of these concepts are framed. The language is almost always opaque and perplexing.

But these philosophers are writing about ideas that, they argue, defy traditional logics and easy analogy. So inevitably there’s more James Joyce than Roger Hargreaves about them.

Still, it would be nice if it were just a little bit easier!

I’d be really interested to hear how some of you build mental pictures of the virtual in your work. If you’ve got any suggestions for ways you understand the virtual, I’d love to hear them.

Reference

Deleuze, G. (1993). Difference and repetition. Columbia University Press.