One common criticism of Deleuze and DeLanda is that their ontolog(ies) suffer from what might be called “virtualism”. It’s important that some might not consider this a failing and that there is, I believe, a way of interpreting these thinkers so that this problem largely disappears. Roughly, virtualism would consist in treating the virtual as the domain of the “really real” and reducing the actual to mere “epiphenomena” that have but an epiphenomenal “being”. In the language of Roy Bhaskar’s ontology, the virtual can roughly be equated with the domain of “generative mechanisms”, while the actual would consist of events take place as a result of these generative mechanisms. Virtualism would thus treat these generative mechanisms as what are properly real, while the actual events engendered by these generative mechanisms would have a subordinate and lesser status.
The problem with this sort of virtualism is that it fails to observe a particular property of groups known as “closure” as described by mathematical group theory. Roughly, closure is the property of a group such that for a group G, all operations carried out on elements of G— say a, b –are also in G. Thus, for example, if group B consists of the numbers 1 and 2, the conjunction of 1 and 2– 3 –is also a member of the group. This point can be illustrated for material systems with respect to fire. A flame requires all sorts of generative mechanisms involving chemical and atomic reactions that are conditions of fire at the level of the “virtual” with respect to the flame as an actuality or event. However, it does not follow from this that the flame is itself an epiphenomenon or lacking in reality. The flame has all sorts of powers, capacities, are “able-to’s” that cannot be found at the level of the generative mechanisms themselves. Put otherwise, a flame is itself a generative mechanism with respect to other relations.
read on!
It seems to be that the demotion of the actual produced out of the virtual or generative mechanisms is a variant of Bhaskar’s epistemic fallacy. Here issues of epistemology are being conflated with issues of ontology in a slippage that goes unnoticed. In A Realist Theory of Knowledge Bhaskar argues that reality is itself stratified. By this he means that phenomena at one level are themselves based on a lower level of generative mechanisms. However, the phenomena at each level are themselves autonomous domains with their own unique structural properties that, while dependent on the lower level and impossible without the lower level, cannot be deduced from the lower level. Organic life is dependent on chemistry and impossible without chemistry, but it has its own internal generative mechanisms or structures that diverge from those of chemistry and are irreducible to chemistry.
Part of inquiry consists in 1) the discovery of these structures, but also 2) discovering these deeper structures on which these higher order structures are based. Virtualism, however, conflates the aims of inquiry with the nature of being. Put otherwise, it confuses its search for deeper level structures and generative mechanisms with the “epiphenomenalization” of the structure to be accounted for at a higher level. However, the fact that something is dependent on a deeper level structure or set of generative mechanisms does not undermine the emergent reality and generative mechanisms based on these deeper level generative mechanisms. In this connection, the “virtual” should not be understood as a distinct ontological domain apart from the actual, but as a relative term with respect to a domain of the actual. What functions as a “virtuality” for one domain of actuality can, is, in turn, an actuality for another domain of virtuality or generative mechanisms.
Larval Subjects . 
November 24, 2009 at 3:02 pm
[…] 24, 2009 LEVI WITH ANOTHER GREAT POST, this time on Deleuze and DeLanda’s fondness for the virtual. If anything, I’m even […]
November 24, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Nicely explained.
Following Spinoza, Deluze posits the virtual through itself with the intensities/extensities as effects of the former remaining within its cause (contra emanation). This is what you are getting at with “closure” if I am following the maths correctly, and why positing the epistemological as absolutely distinct in order to be in turn subordinated is poppy crap.
Yay flat ontology’s.
Will.
November 24, 2009 at 5:30 pm
I enjoyed this posting, as well I am a fan of your blog, ideas, and writing. I have a point just limited to Deleuze’s virtual. Neither the virtual nor the actual is more real than the other. As you observe, it does seem however that Deleuze ascribes greater importance to the virtual, given its generative role. I do not think that makes the actual an epiphenomenon. And if it does, I still think that for Deleuze the virtual and the actual mutually depend on each other for their reality.
For the example of fire, the virtualities might be better illustrated this way. We strike a match. At one point the match-end is wood; at the next moment it is fire. There is an instant at the limit right before it becomes fire. So there is no extent of time then between its being wood and its being fire. They are contracted together. They fully maintain their differences. But nothing separates the two.
Deleuze also seems to associate the virtual with intensity, and the actual with extensity. Implicit intensities explicate as extensities. The wood was virtually fire at its limit, but that fire did not yet extend in space or time, even though the fire was fully and really there, because nothing stood between the virtuality and its actuality. Its being fire is an inner tendency, that is, an intensity. But for Deleuze, reality is expression. And expression is both implicit and explicit. If the virtual were not also expressed explicitly, it would not be expressed at all. That is to say, if there was no fire at the limit of the match, it would not virtually be fire. Reciprocally, the fire would not become actualized if there was not the wood’s profound tendency to become fire. So, the virtual depends on the actual for its reality, just as much as the actual depends on the virtual for its reality. If this is so, does the virtualist critique still hold?
Again, thanks, Corry Shores
November 24, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Corry,
Yes, of course this is the standard rejoinder, and one I myself developed in my book Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence (Northwestern 2008). I do not, believe however, that this rejoinder works. First, the Deleuzian distinction between the intensive and the extensive and the fixed and becoming conflates a strictly ontological issue (what beings are) with how we cognitively tend to think of entities (as fixed, static, and unchanging points that do not become as in the case of your example of the match. This alone is sufficient to undermine the value of Deleuze’s distinction between the virtual and the actual as having any ontological or metaphysical significance as it is crossing cognitive considerations (how we experience the world) with properly metaphysical considerations (how the world is). Second, the whole point is that Deleuze is placing all the causal efficacy at the level of the virtual or the intensive, treating the actual as a mere excrement contributing nothing at all. Claiming, as Deleuze does, that the virtual is simply a part of an actualization really doesn’t get at the issue.
November 24, 2009 at 8:15 pm
What you miss is that the generic mechanism is only specified up to isomorphism and all its representations may produce the same differences. That’s why you can’t decide whether you are a figure in a video game living in a box of a hyper-user, or live in an actual 4-D space-time. All we can do is decide for the latter hypothesis for extra logical reasons: it is shorter, less surprising, more elegant and less ambiguous from the position of a being inside of its own world. So the virtual is more “real” in the sense that it is an invariant which holds in different concrete worlds.
Recently something similar has been discussed in the context of the so called holographic principle.
November 24, 2009 at 10:30 pm
Dear Levi,
Your answer taught me some new things, so I thank you. And your attention to my question is doing me more good than it is doing you, so let me thank you for generously giving it your time. If my next question can be answered by reading your book or some other source, please just direct me rather than sacrifice more of your time to reply.
I wonder two things:
Does Deleuze say that the real things in the world that we conceive and articulate are solely “fixed, static, and unchanging points that do not become”? And,
for Deleuze, are actualities necessarily effects that are caused by virtualities, even though he does say that virtualities pass into actualities?
I am under the impression that for Deleuze, our cognitive understanding of the world around us is not just of static things. “Morning star” and “Evening Star” refer to the same extending body in space. The object we see (the actual planet Venus) I suppose would be a common extensional meaning for these terms. But Venus is moving. In the same instant that she appears at dawn, she is also carrying-out a motion that is making her the Evening Star. Consider if we point to Venus at dawn and say “there is the Morning Star and nothing but the Morning Star.” We would not be conceiving and expressing Venus’ inherent tendency of becoming the Evening star at that same time. I could also say “There is the Morning Star” with an ironic wink, implying that I am not so silly as to think the Morning and Evening stars are different. In that case, my statement would have an implicit intensional meaning that expresses Venus’ divergent tendencies, not just the divergent tendencies of the term’s meaning, but also the real divergent tendencies of her becoming. I am trying to make this point: we do not mix-up the way we conceive things with the way they are, when our statements are true, and this happens when their intensional and extensional meanings refer to the concurrence of the virtual tendencies and actual extensities that coexist simultaneously in the real thing.
Next I wonder, can an effect be said to follow or result secondarily from a cause if there is no succession of time separating them? What is the temporal nature of Deleuze’s conception of the passage from the virtual to the actual? Alice grows larger. In any instant, she is actually one size, but virtually another (in the same way that the match was actually wood while virtually fire in that instant lying at the limit of it being a match). So on account of Alice’s actuality, she is smaller than she is now becoming. This smaller size is fully real and fully expressed. Yet on account of her virtuality, she is now really larger than she actually is. Her virtuality is no less real than her actuality, because nothing stands between them in that instant. Yet there is still only one Alice in that instant; she is merely expressed differently implicitly and explicitly in the same moment. So in reality she is both larger and smaller than herself at the same time.
As being really both one size and another in the same instant, she is really changing in that instant. The coincidence of her virtuality and actuality together produce the event of her becoming. Virtuality might in fact pass into actuality. But it does so instantaneously. And in a sense, her actuality is reciprocally contracting into her virtuality. The nature of the passage, I gather, is contraction without temporal succession or logical priority. In that instant, we would not say that her actual size is the effect of her virtual size. We would also not say that her event of changing size is the effect of just her virtual size. Rather, her becoming is the result of the coincidence of virtuality and actuality, whose differences produce her real change in that instant. So if we take-up this perspective on Deleuze’s notion of becoming, how can we say that the passage of the virtual into the actual involves the virtual being a cause of the actual? If there is a causal relation, would it not be that the event is the instantaneous effect of its cause, which is the simultaneous coincidence of the virtual and the actual?
Thanks by the way for providing this forum for ideas to grow. [And I look forward to celebrating your millionth ‘hit’]. Corry Shores
November 25, 2009 at 12:07 am
Hi Corry,
Thanks. I fear that we are sliding dangerously close to having a discussion about Deleuze rather than the being of beings or objects. Deleuze, or any other philosopher I think, is only of interest insofar as he sheds light on these questions about the world, not the philosopher himself. As I said in the post, I think there’s a way of reading Deleuze that doesn’t fall into these problems. If your claim is simply that the virtual is time and the actual is instaneousness, then I have no objection to this. In my view objects are dynamic temporal systems unfolding in time. All of that aside, Deleuze does have a number of unusual things to say about the nature of time and cause and effect. For example, he does not treat effects as following events in time. This is what he’s getting at with all of his talk of static genesis. And, of course, I am suggesting that Deleuze treats the spatialization of time as a cognitive issue based on Bergsonism and his other essays on Bergson where he treats this way of thinking being and entities based on the cognitive function of understanding (as opposed to intuition). I am not sure, however, that we need explicit textual evidence for such a thesis. Claims or assumptions can be implicit in a philosophical position without directly being stated.
January 12, 2010 at 5:47 am
[…] which I think often manifests itself in his use of the virtual. Despite Levi’s comments here, I would argue that Deleuze’s virtuality embeds a certain thinkability or discernability, […]