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January 28, 2007
As I noted back in this post Liz Grosz in her Time Travels: Feminism, Nature and Power has a chapter on Deleuze, Bergson, and the Virtual. I find it hard to follow mainly because movement (life) is placed in consciousness and not in the material processes of objects. I recoil from the idealism, but I guess that is Bergson. Does Deleuze materialize Bergson on Grosz's reading? I'm not sure as Bergson and Deleuze tend to be run together.
She begins by placing matter on the side of the actual and the real and mind, life, or duration on the side of the virtual. I presume that the "real" includes, in addition to the physically perceived, sensuous world of the actual, the virtual properties inherent in matter and the intensive processes that select and animate them. Grosz turns to Bergson to say that he claims:
that a distinction betwen subjective and objective (or, what amounts to the same thing, duration and spatiality) can be formulated in terms of the distinction between virtual and actual. Objects, space, the world of the inert are entirely actual;t hey contain no elements of the virtual. While matter may well exceed the images we have of it, while there is more in matter than in our images of it insofar as it is the ongoing occassion for the generation of images, the images that our perception gives of it are nonetheless of the same kind as our images. That is, because matter has not virtuality, no hidden latency, it is assimilable to the images we have of it, even if it is not reducible to our image along. (p.105)
Grosz adds that by contrast, what duration, memory, consciousness bring to the world is the possibility of an unfolding a narrative.This is what life (duration, memory, consciousness) bring to the world: the new, the movement of the actualization of the virtual.
What we have are two sets of oppositions: virtual/actual and possible/real. Bergson, Grosz says, rejects the possible/real couple (duality?) in favour of the virtual/actual, as does Deleuze, with the movement of becoming understood as a process of actualization rather than realization. She then says:
The process of realization is governed by two principles--resemblance and limitation: the real exists in a relation of resemblence to the possible.Indeed the real is an exact image of the possible, with the addition of the category of existence or reality...Moreover, the process of realization involves the limitation, the narowing down of possibilities so that some are rejected and others are selected for exisence. The fields of the possible is wider than that of the real. (p.108)
I'm confused. I thought that becoming as realization had been replaced by becoming as actualization (whatever that is) and that the possible/real duality had been replaced by the virtual/actual one. Why then are we talking in categories or couple that has been rejected? Deleuze is quite explicit in saying that the virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual.
Grosz then gives us paragraph upon paragraph about the possible/real duality. It is unclear whether this kind of intellectual labouring (it reads like a dialectics that does speak its name) is a laying out of how Bergson (or is it Deleuze?) understand the possible/real duality, only to highlight its limitiations, then make the shift to the virtual/actual couple (or duality?). Deleuze does say that the danger is that the virtual could be confused with the possible, which would in turn suggest that the virtual and actual resemble each other. Grosz recognizes, and then describes how Deleuze distinguishes the virtual and the possible--he does so in three ways.The upshot is that, as opposed to the realisation of the possible, the crucial point about the actualisation of the virtual is that it always occurs by 'difference, divergence or differenciation' (Difference and Repetition, p. 212). Actualisation, (or differentiation) is 'always a genuine creation' that is not limited by, nor does it result from, 'any limitation of a pre-existing possibility'.
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Yeah, something "smells" off here, though it's hard to say what it is or what motivates it. The identification of matter with space and with inertness is itself very traditional. (Already Leibniz objected to Descartes identification of matter with "extention", pointing out that the quantity conserved is not mass times speed, as Cartesian physics had it, but mass times velocity squared, which notion of "force" not directly manifested in space he used to underwrite a distinction between "mechanics" and "dynamics"). And with Einstein's General Relativity, if I have any glimmering of understanding, space and time become physical functions of each other, with space-time frameworks themselves being effectively a function of the unfolding of energetic events, to which matter is itself ultimately fully convertable. You'd have to reach awfully deep and far-back into the basic structure of matter-and-energy to get to something where the structure of matter-and-energy in its spatial-temporal dispersion does not effectuate anything, and that would be to the first nanoseconds of the "Big Bang", which is the putative cause of everything. So it belongs to the very conception of physical nature that it effectuates "things", including consciousness itself, independent of our existence. And that is something that our own existence, including our explanatory narratives, is contingent upon. So it would seem that our own contingent possibilities for generating "virtuality" would be effected by a "virtuality" in physical nature itself. (Virtus = potency, potentia?)
Also, the author would seems to want to be saying that there is no ultimate divide between "subject" and "object", that the "subject" too is part of the "object" world, which is the only basis of our knowledge of it, which seems roughly correct. But then why is matter no different than our image of it? Isn't that backwards? Isn't our "image",- I would already prefer to speak more generally of our "interpretation",- what Whitehead would call a "symbolic representation", that is, a transformation of physical inputs into a neural mapping, including possible responses? Isn't what emerges from "duration" into discrete articulation precisely not directed by consciousness, but rather by what "gives" consciousness, and discrete consciousness the end of "duration" and its transformation into another "duration"? "Consciousness" would be less the "producer" of novelty in the world than of novel responses to novelty. It's the very contingency of consciousness that "gives" to consciousness its possiblity of novel response, retained through the memory of its articulations. That possibility would seem to be the end-and-by-product of consciousness rather than the basic directing "force" of the whole process. The ghost of teleology seems to be still whispering in Grosz' account.