What did the virtual ever do for us?

A double-exposed photograph showing Tesla in his Colorado Springs laboratory. Dickinson Alley, 1899. Source.

This is the fourth in my series on the process philosophy concept of the virtual (you can find parts 1, 2 and 3 here). In this final piece I want to tackle why the concept of the virtual is so important and what it gives us.

In many ways the virtual is the backbone of process philosophy. It’s the bass player in the band, the negative space around the image, the interstitial space that cushions the cells.

It’s important firstly because it frees us up from conventional modes of thought. Where Western science believes in the conquest of universal truths, process philosophy says that every event or occasion has a virtual aspect that can never be fully grasped; that science is hubris and the real never resides in the universal. It is the zero to science’s number one.

The virtual also allows us to shed the Kantian idealism that has dominated the qualitative world for 200 years. Where idealism says that all we can know is filtered through our human subjective experience, process philosophy asserts that contemplation is an act of feeling (Whitehead) common to all events and occasions throughout the cosmos, no matter how grand or nondescript those are.

The virtual also rids us of our need to explain the world by referencing a second, remote, inaccessible realm beyond what is immanent to us. There is no need for a transcendental ‘beyond’; everything events and occasions need is already present, already here.

What then does the virtual give us, then?

There are a number of different forms of the virtual in process philosophy, including Bergson’s élan vital, Deleuze’s virtual real, Harman’s sensual objects and qualities, Whitehead’s eternal and perished objects, and Spinoza’s conatus, and each must be understood within each author’s broader philosophy. But some commonalities are clear, and these show just how profound the idea of the virtual really is.

Firstly, the virtual is the main way process philosophy explains time without needing to spatialise, objectify or instrumentalise it. Much of our world may still run on somewhat arcane notions of Newtonian linear time, but process philosophy rejects such abstract ideas.

In the second post in this short series I talked about how the past, present and future are radically different in process philosophy. Process philosophy, in this respect, is a lot closer to quantum gravity and many Indigenous beliefs about time.

So, to begin with, process philosophy gives us an radically different and arguably far more real idea of what time is and isn’t.

Secondly, the virtual rids us of the need to spatialise everything, from fixed, stable and static objects (that sit patiently waiting for some external force to move them), to physical space itself.

In process philosophy, acts of grounding, sedimentation, concrescence, thickening or condensation are only possible because of a parallel ungrounding and deterritorialisation. In Deleuze, for instance, every striated space is accompanied by smooth space. Every local compression or centripetal force (Nail) is accompanied by a relaxation or centrifugal movement somewhere else. Some groundings are trivial, others profound, but even the most trivial movement pulls on threads of duration that affect even the most distant occasion. Nothing is inconsequential.

There is no fixed space, then. Every ‘here’ also comes with a ‘there’. Every actual ‘now’ has a virtual past folded into it. This is never just this.

It follows in process philosophy then that nothing is ever singular. There is no singular apple, tree, woman, thought, or solitary walk in the woods. Everything is always multitudes. So there are no singular, real, identifiable objects or things in the world.

Not because there is nothing fundamentally real, or because the ‘real’ is a projection of our perceptions, but because everything happening in the universe is a messy mesh of overlapping flows and virtual forces occasionally produce, like fruiting bodies on fungi, forms that others entities can prehend.

Finally, the virtual is always ‘anterior’ to the event; it is a drive, a push, a ‘will’ (Nietzsche) that gives impetus for creative exploration (creative evolution in Bergson), rather than ‘pulling’ events from the future.

Transcendentalism and teleology are both rejected by process philosophy because they presume some kind of already established mystical future that looks back over its shoulder and pulls the present into it like a dog on a leash.

The virtual is, instead, a kind of desire. But Deleuze repeatedly argued against an understanding of desire as ‘lack’. Instead, desire, or what Bergson called élan vital, resides in the virtual and impels events forward into a radically empty future.

Without the virtual then, there really would be no process philosophy.

The virtual, then, gives us a different understanding of time, space, movement and desire, but it’s also an elusive concept that is often hard to pin down.

Below are some readings I think might help if you’d like to know more about the virtual and how it’s thought about in process philosophy.

What’s next? I’m going to start a new short series in the next few weeks tackling another strange idea: furniture therapy.

References and suggested readings

Bergson, H. (1911). Matter and Memory (N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer, Trans.) Allen & Unwin.

Bergson, H. (1911). Creative Evolution (A. Mitchell, Trans.). Macmillan.

DeLanda, M., & Harman, G. (2017). The Rise of Realism. John Wiley & Sons.

Deleuze, G. (1969). The Logic of Sense. Columbia University Press.

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

Harman, G. (2011). The quadruple object. Zero Books.

Kleinherenbrink, A. (2018). Against Continuity: Gilles Deleuze’s Speculative Realism. Edinburgh University Press.

Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and reality. Free Press.