An Analog, Embodied Virtual

As for the virtual, the true stock from which novelty can arise in Deleuze’s thought, Brian Massumi tells us that it is inaccessible to the sensible, but that it nonetheless remains possible to figure it by way of a multitude of images¹. And it is true that one of the most stable characteristics of the virtual in Deleuze – a virtual that envelops an entity, for example – is to be associated with a multiplicity². One understands this (in a situated way) when thinking of the work by Jacques Perconte we have considered – Impressions (2012) – if one accepts bringing the virtual close to the Deleuzian time-image (of which this film seems to us to offer an example), and these two notions close to Bergsonian duration. But while nothing prevents us from evoking these notions when it comes to describing the breathing of a work that seems to live (just like a time-image), and that expresses itself through a multiplicity of static cuts (movement-images), it is on the contrary problematic to think that such a virtual could reside in the analog periphery of creative processes, ready to manifest itself (to actualize itself), all the more so since this virtual would in fact be “completely determined”, as Deleuze himself tells us³. It is a multiple determination, one might say, and therefore an indetermination in the end, but this seems an unjustified complication – and one of a somewhat restrictive bearing – in a framework such as ours.

Moreover, the actual and the virtual, understood as ontological categories, emerge in Deleuze’s thought by substituting themselves for the intelligible/sensible pair⁴. Yet the sensible/intelligible dialectic seems entirely suited to thinking about creation in the digital⁵, a domain where the intelligible is structured in a particularly clear-cut way within the computing machine – the intelligible being considered, by certain discourses, as the only force expressed within the medium –, in a research such as this one, which aims to restore the place of the sensible in reflection on digital creative processes.

There have also been clumsy uses of the notion of the virtual – as defined by Deleuze – in reflection on the digital, especially across the Atlantic. This is due to the fact that certain writings in which the philosopher extensively mobilizes the notion of the virtual were translated into English late. These are Le Bergsonisme, written in 1966 and not translated into English until 1988, and Différence et Répétition, written in 1968 and translated only in 1994⁶. It took works such as those of Brian Massumi⁷ and Mark B. N. Hansen⁸ for certain more or less significant inaccuracies to begin to dissipate.

Our intuitions regarding the virtual, which emerge from an artistic practice and reflection, do indeed come close to the proposals of Mark Hansen, who claims a decidedly more embodied approach to the virtual than the one proposed by Deleuze, situating it closer to its Bergsonian root, while proposing a reflection that extends that of Merleau-Ponty. For Hansen, the virtual becomes actual only by passing through the body, in an embodied, unpredictable process in which perception plays a central role, and in which the body is also actualized according to a form of virtual proper to it:

The virtual dimension opened up by art, like the virtualization of the body that follows from it, cannot be approached as if they existed outside or independently of the interaction that constitutes them both: the virtual dimension at stake in new media art is precisely the one that is actualized (in “a thousand ways”, as Lévy puts it) through the experience of the work as process, and which, in so doing, mobilizes the potential of embodied affectivity⁹.

This is an apprehension of the embodied virtual that better suits this research, bearing in mind that, while Hansen reflects above all on the link between the spectator and an interactive work at the moment of reception, for us the point is to see in it a process that also takes place during the conception phase, when the artist interacts with the computer directly, but also with the non-digital components that are part of the creative process.

The fact remains that this virtual, if it is to be coherent with the felt sense that drives this research, must remain immanent. In this respect, Hansen’s conception again proves suitable:

affectivity corresponds to a specific form of virtuality — a virtuality of the body — that differs fundamentally from the Deleuzian development of the virtual as a transcendental force¹⁰

Here, at last, is a conception of the virtual that suits this research when it comes to thinking about the uncertainties that can manifest themselves within the digital creative process. Without further specification, we can for the moment attribute this type of virtual, to be grasped as the “analog virtual”, to the analog periphery and the protocol zone. A different type of virtual, though still embodied, resides at the level of the algorithmic core.

1. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, op. cit., p. 133.↩︎

2. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues. Nouv. éd. Paris : Flammarion, 1996, p. 177.↩︎

3. Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition, op. cit., p. 270.↩︎

4. As Anne Sauvagnargues indicates in the definition of the Actual/Virtual pair she proposes. See on this subject Robert Sasso and Arnaud Villani (dir.), Le vocabulaire de Gilles Deleuze. Nice - Paris : Centre de recherches d’histoire des idées / Vrin, 2003, under the entry Actuel/Virtuel.↩︎

5. This since Couchot’s remark, which aptly poses the problem of the digital artist who takes hold of a computer as a tool: he finds himself in the delicate position of wanting to generate the sensible from the intelligible. A proposition that we have qualified in various ways.↩︎

6. Yves Abrioux, «Le virtuel : Les avatars d’une notion entre philosophie et nouveaux médias ». Revue française d’études américaines [en ligne]. CAIRN, February 2012, vol. n° 128, n° 2, p. 79–98.↩︎

7. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, op. cit.↩︎

8. Mark B. N. Hansen, New philosophy for new media, op. cit.↩︎

9. Mark B. N. Hansen, New philosophy for new media, op. cit., p. 145.↩︎

10. Ibid., p. 142.↩︎