Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress 11

Joaquim Braga Editor

Conceiving
Virtuality:
From Art To
Technology
Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress

Volume 11

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Joaquim Braga
Editor

Conceiving Virtuality: From

Art To Technology

123
Editor
Joaquim Braga
Departamento de Filosofia, Comunicação
e Informação
Instituto de Estudos Filosóficos
Universidade de Coimbra
Coimbra, Portugal

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Preface

It can be asserted, with some accuracy, that the technological nature of the new
media has been one of the most decisive factors for the discursive increment on
virtuality and simultaneously for its philosophical rebirth. As regards philosophy,
the main questions about mediation and media tend to converge to the broad
question of “reality”; by extension, reality is also philosophically reborn as a the-
matic object, being directly articulated with the virtualization processes initiated by
the new media. From this articulation between real and virtual—through which it is
possible to glimpse an increase of communicative operations and contexts—several
theses frequently emerge about a supposed dematerialization of the real, thus
linking virtuality to a negative ontological foundation. The term “virtualization”
appears, in this discursive realm, as synonymous with “derealization”, additionally
emphasizing the view that the virtual is the mere suspension of the real.
In Western philosophical thought, there has been, for centuries, a clear primacy
of the “actual” over the “virtual”, which greatly contributes to the latter being still
beset by a conceptual fog. To put it simply, it is possible to find in the
historical-philosophical legacy of the virtual two contrasting dimensions that have
prevailed until now: on the one hand, Western metaphysics assigns to it a role of
substance, largely embodied by the platonic (and neo-platonic) ontological dualism
between images and ideas; on the other hand, at the beginning of the twentieth
century, it is thanks to the meaning-making theories that a role of function (of the
virtual) is truly revealed—notably in the works of Charles Sanders Peirce and Henri
Bergson. In the sense of the latter, the virtual appears more as a relation concept
than a mere ontological operator. A dynamic framing of what we mean by reality is
largely due to such inclusion of the virtual in the meaning-making processes. In a
word, the real opens itself, through the virtual, to the possibilities of its realization.
William James’s pluralistic theses on human mind precisely display this dynamic
conception of the real imposed by the virtual, since such theses are based upon the
seminal idea that the possibilities of meaning, contrary to what determinism and
psychological monism claim, are necessary conditions for the existence of selection
and actualization psychic processes.

v
vi Preface

With the appearance of modern media, reality and meaning-making processes

can no longer be thought from a strictly logo-centric perspective. Language is not
the predominant symbolic form in the life of human beings, but converges with
pictures and other modalities of mediation. In fact, the increase of possibilities in
the constitution and perception of reality is also connected with the growing
articulation between different media. The articulation of the word with the picture
not only transforms the space and time of communication, but also the symbolic
nature of both. New technological devices precisely expose this convergence of
media, this convergence of the word with the picture, of the picture with music,
through which they can rebuild communicative and perceptive atmospheres that are
no longer identifiable with the traditional characteristics of each medium involved.
Although they come from two opposing semantic spheres, the two roles
attributed to the virtual (those of substance and function) still tend to fuse in certain
phenomena analyzed under the prism of virtuality and generate the idea that, unlike
the concept of the actual, the one of the virtual will always be plunged into a
paradoxical logical domain of difficult philosophical inquiry, even more prone, as
attested by a significant part of the bibliography on the subject, to mythological
subcategories or to utopian and dystopian literary descriptions. The symbolic uni-
verse of digital technologies has, up to a certain extent, inspired such fusion and
such paradoxicality, to the point that the complex theoretical spectrum of virtuality
fades away when faced with the so-called virtual reality. In this specific case, can
the simulation of the real undermine the epistemic richness of virtuality? Here, in
fact, arises a negative approach to the concept of the virtual, since what animates
technological simulation processes are, above all, their ontological effects, that is,
the sensible recreation and perception of something that appears to be what it is
really not. Such a negative approach is not, as a matter of fact, an exclusive
theoretical corollary of simulation devices. In the philosophy of art, the theories of
mimesis frequently start by presupposing the duplication of the real to ground and
justify the analogical dimensions of fiction and its consequent illusory effects on the
aesthetic experience itself. In this sense, the fictum is not totally free from its analog
reference—the fictum is, conversely, a deceptive factum.
It is true that the philosophical inclusion of the virtual in the understanding of
reality and the processes that explain it tends to bring to expression several theo-
retical gaps, multiple unclear conceptual fields, often only perceptible through both
metaphorical and discursive intuitions. However, philosophical accuracy should not
be entirely anchored in logical prejudice, nor should it be circumscribed by an
absolute ontological order of reality.
Consequently, virtuality as a philosophical concept displays a broad semantic
spectrum that still lacks deep inquiry. Such an inquiry, however, cannot be done
without the enlargement of those phenomena that can best express the theoretical
dynamics of the virtual. It has been common in our days to circumscribe the
analysis of virtuality to technological phenomena, particularly those that operate
through digital devices. Nevertheless, such reduction has led to several conceptual
misunderstandings and, in some cases, concurs to the philosophical impoverish-
ment of the concept of virtual itself. The main reason for this is that the common
Preface vii

binary logic of technological mechanisms and operations is applied in a generalized

way to a purely ontological view of the virtual and to all the phenomena covered by
it. Thus understood, technology would be the ultimate expression of virtuality, and
the other related theoretical fields would always have to be shaped by its epistemic
record.
One of the main purposes of this volume is to broaden and rethink the thematic
horizon of virtuality, regarding—as essential—the idea that the explanation of the
concept of the virtual always depends on its programmatic extensions. As will be
seen over all these chapters, the authors far exceed the theoretical and conceptual
limits imposed by a negative approach to the question of virtuality. The contem-
porary paradigm of “virtual reality” is not, therefore, predominant at the heart of the
reflections proposed here, nor is technology assumed as the dominant thematic
issue. On the contrary, the themes presented in this volume range from art, per-
ception, memory, communication and therapy to technology and utopia. Thus,
various conceptions of virtuality are projected and articulated through them, sup-
ported either by authors—such as Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, Susanne Langer
—which formulate it explicitly, or by authors who, although they do not refer to it
in a systematic way, somehow presuppose it in the construction of their main
theoretical proposals, as it is the case, for example, of the French psychotherapist
Pierre Janet.

Coimbra, Portugal Joaquim Braga

November 2017
Contents

1 Utopia, Ideology, and Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Henrique Jales Ribeiro
2 Phenomenology and the Challenge of Virtuality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Daniel O’Shiel
3 Personality, Dissociation and Organic-Psychic Latency in Pierre
Janet’s Account of Hysterical Symptoms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Edmundo Balsemão Pires
4 Sonic Virtuality, Environment, and Presence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
5 Imagination and Virtuality. On Susanne Langer’s Theory
of Artistic Forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Joaquim Braga
6 The Virtual as Precondition for Artistic Creation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Michaela Ott
7 The Virtuality of Cinema: Beyond the Documentary-Fiction
Divide with Peter Watkins and Mark Rappaport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
João Pedro Cachopo
8 Digital Fabrication and Its Meanings for Photography
and Film . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Matthew Crippen
9 The Reality of the Virtual in Deleuze’s Transcendental
Empiricism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Paulo M. Barroso
10 The Scope of the Virtual in the Treatment of Melancholia . . . . . . . 145
Cláudio Alexandre S. Carvalho

ix
x Contents

11 The End of the Virtual? A Hermeneutical Approach

to Digitality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Alberto Romele
12 Virtuality Beyond Reproduction. Remarks on the History
of Metaphysics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
Simone Guidi
Chapter 1
Utopia, Ideology, and Philosophy

Henrique Jales Ribeiro

Abstract In contrast to the vast literature on the relationships between philosophy

and utopia, for which the latter is simply an object of the former, the author shows
to what extent philosophy itself can be a matter of utopia, i.e., an essentially utopian
discourse, while, on the other hand, being a discourse that can transform reality
ideologically. The philosophy of science, from Descartes and Kant to the present, is
the framework used to exemplify this new approach, starting with Karl Mannheim’s
and Paul Ricoeur’s studies on utopia and its relationship with ideology. The central
thesis is that the discourse on sciences has its seat in a “no-place” or a “nowhere”,
which is the ideal laboratory for philosophic work, where sciences are reconstructed
both epistemologically and ideologically.

1.1 Introduction: After Mannheim’ and Ricoeur’s Studies

on Utopia and Ideology

I may sound provocative to the majority of philosophers (especially professional

philosophers) when I speak about a “theory of philosophical utopias” for, in point
of fact, utopia has always been considered to be an object of philosophy rather than
something which philosophy would be an object of, or that might somehow be an
intrinsic and constitutive part of philosophy itself. In that first sense, utopia as an
object of philosophy, we could mention, for example, utopia in the thought of Ernst
Bloch, or the way how the philosophies of Foucault, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida,
Deleuze, and others, enable us to think the problematic of utopia on the basis of this
or that specific trait of human existence. It is also in that sense that I include what
Mannheim (1976) and Ricoeur (1986) have written about the relationship between
utopia and ideology insofar as this relationship includes philosophy, because neither
of the two thinkers really addressed philosophy as utopia. That is, therefore, not the
sense I’m interested in here, although it is not at all indifferent to what I am going

H. J. Ribeiro (B)
Department of Philosophy, Communication and Information,
University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 1

J. Braga (ed.), Conceiving Virtuality: From Art To Technology, Numanities - Arts
and Humanities in Progress 11, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24751-5_1
2 H. J. Ribeiro

to discuss today concerning a theory of philosophical utopias about science. Thus, it

is the second, more radical, sense of utopia, that sense in which, again, philosophy
itself, as a discourse, is considered utopian, in contrast with the known literature,
that I shall be discussing in this paper. Not a lot, or virtually nothing, has been
written on this approach (at least not directly or explicitly), but it is certain that, on
the other hand, as I’ll mention latter, certain thinkers, coming from different areas,
have repeatedly touched upon it in their criticism of the philosophy of science. Two
examples are the above-mentioned case of Karl Mannheim’s sociology, as early as
in the 1930s, or, more decisively, the case of Thomas Kuhn’s history and sociology
of science (Kuhn 1996, 1977). Since Thomas More’s famous book (More 2003),
“utopia” has always meant, both in its common usage and for philosophy as such
in general, a concept opposed to that of rationality, which philosophy is supposed
to incarnate; thus, if philosophy itself, as an object, is considered utopian, when we
talk about “philosophical utopias” we mean a rationality that would be utopian; and
this sounds like a contradictio in adjecto. However, it really is not a contradiction,
exactly for the reasons expounded by Mannheim, as early as in 1929, in respect to
sociology.
Let us recall the major aspects of Mannheim’s understanding of the relation-
ship between utopia and rationality. According to the traditional views prior to the
now-famous sociologist’s, the utopian reference was a “no-place” or a “nowhere”
produced by imagination and fantasy, incongruent with reality and supposed not to
happen or come to be; and, at first sight, these signs are the opposite of the signs of
rationality. However, as the author of Ideology and Utopia has shown, this incongru-
ence is only (sociologically and philosophically) interesting when utopia eventually
emerges as actively transformative of the social, cultural, and political reality in
which it operates; this is the major characteristic which, in Mannheim’s view, dis-
tinguishes it from ideology as such (Mannheim 1976, p. 173ff). As we know, the
Marxist utopia played this exact role of active transformation of reality at the dawn
of 20th century. From this fundamental perspective, only at a first moment (a moment
characterized by its manifest incongruity vis-à-vis the establishment and its values)
does utopia emerge as opposed or contrary to rationality, because, at a later stage,
it is eventually assimilated by the same rationality or identified (if you prefer) as
a new form of rationality (Mannheim 1976, pp. 177–179). I believe that, basically,
Mannheim’s theory is still generally valid today and especially so as concerns phi-
losophy; however, I will be suggesting some fundamental corrections to this theory,
corrections without which it will be impossible to even conceive of the possibility
of a theory of philosophical utopias about science (which were quite remote from
Mannheim’s thought).
More specifically, the topic I am going to discuss is the possible relationship
between philosophy and utopia, inasmuch as philosophy purports to be a more or less
systematic undertaking that aims to justify and/or found science. That undertaking
is currently understood as “philosophy of science”. I shall approach it from the
perspective of the history of western thought from the beginnings of modern thought,
with Galileo and Descartes, to the present, particularly Thomas Kuhn’s history and
sociology of science and certain “naturalised epistemologies”, such as Willard Van
1 Utopia, Ideology, and Philosophy 3

Quine’s. This historical delimitation is important for my purposes, because I will be

suggesting that the philosophies of science, from the 17th century on, were essentially
utopian, and that part of the work of the theories about science (either philosophical
or otherwise) introduced in the second half of the 20th century, as is most notably the
case of Kuhn’s, consisted in de-constructing the utopian nature of those philosophies
while not completely rejecting or eliminating it. My suggestion, insofar as it is
possible to introduce it briefly for now, falls into two parts: first, the philosophies of
science, through their claim to found what, in each different period, is understood as
“science”, are par excellence spaces of creation and establishment of utopias, which
in fact consist in the more or less rational reconstructions of the science that they
configure, or, if you prefer, configured by the “topoi” from which all the “u-topoi”
that are supposed to philosophically constitute science or scientific knowledge in
general are born and emerge; the second part of my proposal is that these “topoi”
from which the philosophies of science emerge are themselves, to a certain extent,
u-topian, although in a different sense from the one behind my assertion that their
respective reconstructions of science are utopian. This difference has to do with the
“order of reasons” rather than with “the order of things”: a theory of philosophical
utopias is possible only if one accepts that the above-mentioned “topoi”, as more
or less ideal theoretical spaces for the re-constructions I have mentioned, can in
themselves be analysed and researched into. That was the analysis that Ricoeur
(whose thought was nonetheless very distant from my assumptions in this paper)
had in mind when he posited a “phenomenology” of utopian thinking (cf. Ricoeur
1986, p. 15). At first sight, it is far from obvious that such spaces do exist and can be
studied, phenomenologically or otherwise. However, this is one of the major purposes
of the following reflections. From this wider perspective, I will try and analyse the
problematic of the relationship between utopia and ideology, first identified and
discussed by Karl Mannheim and Paul Ricoeur, among others, and without which
one cannot envisage the possibility of a properly philosophical theory of utopia.

1.2 The Topological Space of Representation in Philosophy

“U-topia” shall here be understood, according to its common sense (including the
philosophical sense), as the speculative production of a “no-place”, a “nowhere” or
a “not anywhere” which is created and configurated by thought and imagination;
however, in contrast with that sense I have mentioned, the “no-place” I mean is
supposed to have in itself already taken “place”, happen or exist in the present,
being, therefore, not a mere projection, idealization or imagination of a reality that
is more or less deliberately fantasized, as happens with literary utopias proper. I will
try to show how the philosophical reconstructions of science are generally utopian in
that they mostly address the issue of what science can and should be; and that what
science can or should be is envisaged as already occurring in an essential way, more
or less distorted either by science or by the theories that deal with it in each spe-
cific period. A similar phenomenon (though not necessarily identical in conceptual
4 H. J. Ribeiro

terms) was highlighted by Thomas Kuhn concerning the movement of the emergence
and establishment of new paradigms that incorporate what he calls non-normal or
“revolutionary science” (Kuhn 1996, p. 92ff). As the author suggests, in a different
language, the new theories of revolutionary science are disqualified by “normal sci-
ence” on the grounds that they are ultimately utopian (Kuhn 1996, pp. 66ff, 92ff).
This characteristic of philosophical utopias about science, i.e., the fact that they refer
to something that is supposed to be or to happen essentially and which is nonetheless
reflected in or translated by neither science itself nor the theories that deal with it,
is not included in Mannheim’s theory, or, later, in Ricoeur’s. This happens for two
reasons: first, because, in both cases, and as mentioned above, utopia is considered to
be an object of sociological and/or philosophical explanation, rather than something
(as in Ricoeur, particularly, but also in other philosophers) which that explanation
would itself be an object of; the second is that both have failed to explain, from this
essential point of view I have just mentioned, the relationship between utopia and
ideology, which emerges in both authors as more or less conceptually accidental. By
“accidental” I mean that neither Mannheim nor Ricoeur raised the question of the
connections between utopia and ideology in their full extent or meaning, and that the
two concepts remain separated or divorced in both thinkers after all. This becomes
apparent in the fact that both start from ideology towards utopia when, in reality, and
as I will try to demonstrate, the true connection suggests the opposite direction, that
is, that one should start from utopia towards ideology, since all ideology necessarily
derives from a utopia, although, synchronically speaking, not all ideology is utopian.
On the other hand, without questioning it thoroughly, they did accept the traditional
literary, political and philosophical paradigm for defining utopia, which posits utopia
as something that has to do mostly with the future, with what might possibly come
to occur, or not occur, and to that extent (or only to that extent) is anticipated by the
present in this or that specific manner. A definition like this is applied by Ricoeur
(1986), and others after him, to those concepts that philosophically translate utopia,
like hope, “project”, etc. I definitely do not mean to say that such definitions should
be rejected; I rather mean that they hinder our understanding of utopia in science, or
of the philosophical utopias about science. If the concept of utopia were limited to
the future and/or to the more or less “eventual”, modally, if I may put it so, (what
is or is not possible), its interest for the study of scientific utopias would be scarce.
One of the particular characteristics of these utopias is the fact that, even when they
are introduced by this or that scientist in this or that domain, the same scientist is not
aware of the fact that he/she is proposing a utopia; on the contrary, he/she presumes
to be “doing science” in the ordinary sense of the concept. And this fact suffices to
show that this traditional literary, philosophical and political paradigm of utopia is
not suitable for either science or the philosophy of science.
As I have said above, the “no-place” that is implied in philosophical utopias
about science is supposed to actually have already “taken place”, to happen or exist
in the present, rather than being, like I said before, a mere projection, idealization or
imagination of a reality that is more or less deliberately fantasized. The “no-place”
I mean does actually happen, in a more or less constitutional and inevitable way,
through the claim of philosophical thought and imagination to rationally reconstruct
1 Utopia, Ideology, and Philosophy 5

science (and, notably, physics) and thereby configure a “place” or “places”—in this
case, those that will be inherent in the science or the sciences that they seek to
philosophically found.
I shall later explain in detail what I understand by philosophical reconstruction of
science. But I can advance the following explanations: briefly, reconstructions take
the form of
(1) theories in which a set of philosophical categories that is supposed to repre-
sent the categories of science themselves, whichever they be, is put forward in
conjunction with
(2) a speculative, more or less analogical, configuration of the actual physical pro-
cesses in the ambit of the theory that stems from what is supposed to be the
application or interpretation of the said categories.
These two fundamental characteristics shape what may be called the “topological
space of reconstruction” inherent in each philosophy of science. They may be found,
in a different language and within a different scope and significance, in E. Nagel’s
important work The Structure of Science (Nagel 1961, p. 108ff). The specificities of
this topological space, for instance, the accepted philosophical categories, or the way
in which they will represent those of science, may vary with each different philosophy
of science (and, as we know, they indeed do); I shall be arguing, however, that all
of these philosophies presuppose the same fundamental type of topological space of
reconstruction, even if these vary greatly among themselves. They vary and differ
because the connection established between their respective categories themselves
does vary and differ from one space to another. To simply say that philosophical
categories “mirror” scientific categories and thus those of the world, and that this is
a debatable epistemological presupposition, as in R. Rorty’s argument (Rorty 1979,
p. 3ff), is not enough, not to say that it is practically nothing, because what is at stake
here is exactly knowing what the nature of that “mirroring” is. Be it as it may, the
famous American philosopher was one of the first to point out, in his own specific
way, not only the singular nature of the topological space of reconstruction, but
also—and this is what I am now interested in—the fact that Descartes and Kant were
the great founders of the idea of a “philosophy of science” to date.
The major difference between the philosophy of science, understood in those
terms, and the old Aristotelian “metaphysics of nature” consists basically in the
idea, inherent in Cartesian and post-Cartesian modernity itself, according to which
the philosophical reconstruction of science is based on a topological space of rep-
resentation introduced by the subject of knowledge, irrespective of the way how
both this space and the subject himself/herself are understood. Descartes’ novelty
in the history of the philosophy of science is exactly rooted in the introduction of
the notion that science (the science at the time) finds its foundations in a topological
space of reconstruction that is inherent in the positioning of the “cogito” and, with
it, of a “pure subjectivity”, within which the fundamental concepts or categories that
form the basis, metaphysically speaking, of the reconstruction of science (a task to
which the philosopher dedicates himself especially after the third meditation of his
Meditations on First Philosophy) are established and justified (see Descartes 1901,
6 H. J. Ribeiro

p. 234ff). The distinction between “primary qualities” and “secondary qualities” of

bodies is one such concept or category. Taking up the Cartesian concept, Kant (1998)
decontaminates that space, casting off some of its psychological, epistemological,
and metaphysical ingredients (the case, for instance, of “innate ideas”) by means of
the notion of “pure reason”; the new Kantian framework for the topological space
of reconfiguration becomes an essential paradigm for the subsequent philosophy of
science. Taking into consideration the criticisms that certain philosophers of science
(such as the logical positivists) were to level against Kant, that context need not be
psychologically conceived, or it is not necessary for it to be considered as a work or
an activity of the subject of knowledge himself/herself; as Rorty suggests, it suffices,
and in the history of the philosophy of science it indeed sufficed, that it be taken as a
more or less ideal laboratory of the rational work that aims to justify science (Rorty,
p. 131ff). Indeed, in his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant himself advances a set of argu-
ments against the psychological (or empirical) interpretation of his concept of “pure
reason” (Kant 1998, p. 411ff); and Ernst Cassirer’s and others’ Neo-Kantians have
reinforced those arguments (see Cassirer 1907). However, admitting that the philoso-
pher himself has fallen into the pitfall of the very psychologism he criticises, the truth
is that one may be clearly anti-Kantian, for that same reason, vis-à-vis several funda-
mental topics (such as a priori synthetic judgements), while subscribing Kantianism
as regards the concept of a topological space of reconstruction considered in itself
and completely exempt from psychological and (to a certain point) epistemological
implications. Logical positivism, for example, and Rudolf Carnap’s philosophy of
science in particular (Carnap 1937), is Kantian in that sense, as I shall be suggesting
(Friedman 1992, p. 84ff). I will resort to an analysis of this type of spaces (including
those of logical positivism) to finally, and briefly, address the concept of utopia.
In science, more specifically in physics, we do not find the usual meanings of
concepts like “cause”, “substance”, “relation”, or others as they are used in philoso-
phy and even in our everyday lives, referring to material entities or events produced
by these entities. Since the language of physics is the language of mathematics par
excellence, what common sense or the unprepared philosopher assume as material
entities in physics are, in most cases, more or less complex physico-mathematical
functions which the scientist expresses through differential equations, for example.
Nor is it common to find philosophical concepts of a meta-discursive kind, like pre-
diction, indeterminism, probability, among others. This does not mean that scientists
do not use them themselves sometimes, but, when they do, they do it as philosophers
who reflect on their work (like the well-known case of W. Heisenberg’s “uncertainty
principle”). Back in his days, Russell (2007, p. 121ff) had already observed this
peculiar relationship between philosophical language and the language of science.
Philosophical concepts/categories are supposed to identify themselves with the very
function or functions in question, as was the case during a long period in the history
of the philosophy of science, or, as happened especially in the 20th century, to repre-
sent it or them, meaning to replace it or them from a philosophical point of view. If
one starts from the first fundamental perspective, in which the philosophical concept
and the scientific concept are essentially identifiable, philosophers will be greatly
tempted to think that they are not just practising philosophy but also, and above all,
1 Utopia, Ideology, and Philosophy 7

practising science. All the “philosophy of nature” in German absolute idealism, as

well as a good part of the philosophy of science of neo-Hegelian inspiration in the
late 19th century, for example, result from this temptation.
Not all philosophers of science became aware of this representative function of
philosophical concepts and, therefore, of what may be described as their topolog-
ical function. But, back in the 18th century, Kant (1998), despite finally accepting
Aristotle’s table of categories, felt the need to deduce them “transcendentally” (Kant
1998, p. 201ff). The decisive turning point in this matter, or, in other words, the
moment in which a philosophical apperception of the problems raised by said func-
tion occurred, is particularly evident from the first quarter of the 20th century on,
following the impact of the issue of the foundations of mathematics and, in particular,
of non-Euclidean geometries. The logical positivist idea according to which philo-
sophical explanation is hypothetico-deductive in the same way as scientific explana-
tion itself, and that such an explanation—again, as would happen in non-Euclidean
geometries—is mainly expressed through the so-called “implicit definitions” (Car-
nap 1956), provided an answer to these problems, although it did not completely
solve them. The first attempts at a philosophical classification of scientific terms—
like “mass terms” and “operative terms”, etc.—associating them with philosophical
language itself, occur in the ambit of the positivist movement (see Hempel 1952;
Carnap 1966).
The representational function would be of no value for the rational reconstruction
of science if, within its framework, it did not show that the concepts or categories
in question are active, or operating in science and, therefore, refer to actual and
ongoing physical processes in scientific theory and practice. And there is no other
way of doing it than to configure this theory and practice more or less analogically
within the framework of the topological space of reconstruction. Precisely because of
the status of this function, the philosopher of science has to simulate scientific activity
within his own science reconstruction framework. It follows that the philosophy of
science, in general, implies the use of discursive resources specific to rhetoric, such as
analogies (cf. Ribeiro 2014). Analogy is the specific domain of philosophical utopias
as regards science and the rhetoric which has characterized them from Descartes to
the naturalized epistemologies of the 20th century. In Ideology and Utopia, Ricoeur
incidentally drew attention to this fact (Ricoeur 1986, pp. 36, 40–41, 59). But, before
him, Nagel had already suggested this type of connections in his The Structure of
Science (Nagel 1961, p. 108ff).
For common sense, as well as for the scientist himself, the nature of the philo-
sophical reconstruction of science that I have just mentioned is, at first sight, para-
doxical. How can philosophy somehow “do science” within its own scope? For the
philosopher of science, there is a need to show that the philosophical categories of
reconstruction are not purely speculative or imaginative, but rather a constitutive
part of the science that is the object of philosophical explanation. In this sense, in
The Logic of Scientific Discovery, K. Popper mentioned an “epistemological the-
ory of experiment”, which would illustrate, as a paradigmatic example of scientific
experimentation, the application of his falsificationist methodology (Popper 1992,
p. 89). We can find a similar type of theories in logical positivism in general, particu-
8 H. J. Ribeiro

larly when it comes to “interpreting” the implicit definitions of deductive axiomatic

systems, or, in other words, when it comes to applying them to the world of experi-
ence. But, as I have suggested above, the history of this problem is much older than
the contemporary philosophy of science. When, in the second of his Meditations,
Descartes invokes the example of a piece of wax that melts under the heat of a fire-
place to justify the difference between “primary qualities” and “secondary qualities”
of bodies, and the correlative notion that mathematics and physics mainly focus on
the former, he rhetorically points to example and analogy as an illustration of his
philosophical reconstruction of science (see Descartes 1901, pp. 230–231). In his
Critique, Kant explicitly mentions “Analogies of Experience”, in which a “possible
experience” justifies the actual, ongoing experience in science and in human knowl-
edge generally (Kant 1998, p. 295ff). In Sect. 4 of this chapter, I will argue that the
aim of the philosophical reconstruction of science is not only to represent it, but also
to fundamentally reorganize it and transform it according to assumptions that are not
just epistemological.

1.3 Other Philosophical Illustrations

Now, what I am saying is that philosophical reconstructions, so understood, are priv-

ileged spaces or instances of utopias or of “non-places”. Another way, perhaps an
easier one, to put this would be to say that an “image” of science that is rebuilt,
precisely for the fact that it is an “image”, is never evidently that of science itself, but
rather a figurative model of it. Generally, philosophers of science will not entirely
accept what I have just said. Even those who have a conventionalist and antinatural-
istic mindset concerning this matter, as is the case with Popper (1992), will argue
that their own models ultimately and essentially correspond to current science, and
therefore, its corresponding reconstructions are themselves, in one form or another,
intrinsic parts of the science to be reconstructed (see Ribeiro 1987). It is somewhat
strange to find this type of argument in the present, after the institutional break
between philosophy and science, typical of the first quarter of the 20th century; but
it is indeed a fact.
It is impossible for philosophical reconstructions to no longer be essentially
utopian due to the very nature of their founding “topoi”. I am not thinking of the
well-known accusation directed to philosophers according to which they usually do
not have any training in the science they focus on in their reconstructions, and that,
for this reason, these are “caricatures” devoid of any scientific interest. In my opinion,
this not infrequent argument does not seem acceptable because it assumes that there
is a more or less radical separation between philosophy and science, which does not
correspond to the theory and practice of science itself. It often happens that, in the
ambit of his own activity, a scientist with no philosophical training does offer a simi-
lar type of reconstruction. And, whether it be in this case or in the case of a typically
philosophical reconstruction, as the history of science itself demonstrates, they can
both be useful or consequential with respect to scientific developments. In fact, what
1 Utopia, Ideology, and Philosophy 9

I have in mind is that, in general, the philosophical “topoi” that characterize each
reconstruction are themselves virtual. They are “topoi” whose “arrière-plan” does
not assume or imply the existence of any other “topoi”. In other words, insofar as,
by definition, a “place” is always capable of being seen or envisioned from at least
another “place”, one may fairly say that the “topoi” of most philosophies of science
since the modern era, and particularly since Descartes, do not have a “place”; that,
according to tradition, that which is supposed to be the matrix that configures all
“places”, paradoxically does not have a “place” itself. Philosophical “topoi” are
views or perspectives that start “nowhere”, and which have no “locus” as such.
Thomas Nagel suggests what I just said in a beautiful book called The View from
Nowhere, published almost at the same time as Ricoeur’s lessons were published in
the United States. Nagel’s thesis is that rationality in general presupposes that we
must place ourselves in an ideal, potentially universal space of justification, which
is external to each individual and the ultimate foundation of his/her actions, judge-
ments and values, whatever their domains (Nagel 1986, p. 3ff). It is in such a space
that each one of us is compelled to locate ourselves when we transcend our personal
and subjective perspectives (or our internal perspective) in order to justify them in
the most universal and objective way possible. Science is precisely one of the more
objective spaces of that external (or externalist) view that characterizes rationality
as such. It is a perspective from “nowhere” precisely because, given its typical con-
figuration, it is impossible to assign a “topos” or a specific place to it (Nagel 1986,
pp. 7–8). One could say that, for this very reason, it is a perspective from everywhere
and from every place; a perspective from which are we supposed to be able to see the
same things or objects. According to Nagel, the difference between science’s own
space and other less objective spaces, like that of philosophy or the space of every-
day moral actions, lies in our greater or lesser ability to exceed the particular and
subjective contingencies of our personal circumstances (Nagel 1986, p. 19). But it is
exactly because we are continuously forced to do this that this constraint becomes a
systematic invitation to adopt a more universal and objective view from “nowhere”,
as happens in the view of science itself. In this dynamic intersection between the
“internal” and the “external” views lies the root of utopia, characterizing the view
from “nowhere”. It is in this last sense, and not particularly in the sense that con-
cerns the rationality of science, that we must interpret the provocative title of Nagel’s
work. Therefore, I would not say that from the theory of this author we can infer that
science, independently of that dynamic intersection, is utopic. But I would add that
it is precisely this conclusion that must be draw from Nagel as concerns philosophy
and the exercise of rationality in general.
In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein was one of the first contem-
porary philosophers to draw attention, from this perspective, to the particularity of the
topological spaces of reconstruction specific to logic, including, first and foremost,
the one he presents in that book. To what extent is the founding “topos” where the
philosopher stands not subordinate to the same conditions of possibility that charac-
terize the object of its foundation (logic in the broad sense of the term in Tractatus)?
If logic is responsible for justifying the possibility of the existence of meaning, and
particularly, sense, in language in general, to what extent can logic itself as a lan-
10 H. J. Ribeiro

guage have sense? Can there be a discourse, such as logic, about these conditions of
possibility which is not a priori subordinate to these same conditions? Wittgenstein’s
answer, as we all known, is “no”, and, therefore, philosophy as a discourse and a
systematic research undertaking no longer makes sense. This absence of sense stems
from the fact that the discourse that is specific to logic implies that the philosopher
works outside the entire plan of that which is supposed to be justified by that same
discourse, his position in a “topos” that cannot in itself be essentially justified, in the
rational sense of the expression (Wittgenstein 1933, p. 79ff). This positioning is not
just typical of the philosophical discourse as a systematic research undertaking, as
it is shown in the final paragraphs of Tractatus through the famous analogy between
this discourse and climbing a flight of stairs (Wittgenstein 1933, p. 181), but it is
immanent to every step of the very exercise of rationality.
An example of what I have been saying is Kant’s concept of “pure reason”, which,
more than the Cartesian conception of reason (which, incidentally, was its starting
point, historically and philosophically), essentially dictated the fate of the philosophy
of science to this day. This “pure reason” is, basically, the ideal space which human
rationality is supposed to consist of. I say “ideal” because Kant knew that we cannot
actually find “pure reason” in/by itself “anywhere”; we can only find it, if you prefer,
in its applications, or at work, that is, in judgement and, philosophically speaking,
in what those applications are presumed to be [whether they be good, “constitutive”
and “regulative”, or bad, meaning those that characterize their “dialectical” use (Kant
1998, p. 112ff)[. This aspect is essential: insofar as we only know the applications
of pure reason by reasoning “as if ” (or assuming that) they operated in a specific
way (in this case, the one that Kant himself introduces and justifies in his Critique
of Pure Reason), we do not have any knowledge whatsoever of reason in itself.
This is why there can never be a science of pure reason but only, if anything, a
“critique” thereof. Again, reason cannot be found anywhere, it is nowhere, in no
place. It is by definition a “u-topian” “topos”. Kant states that this ideal space
which is pure reason is, in short, the domain of the “conditions of possibility”; in the
case of science, more specifically the conditions of possibility of mathematics and
physics (Kant 1998, p. 146ff). These conditions and the respective applications can
be represented in the realm of what Kant calls “transcendental logic” (Kant 1998,
p. 193ff). This is the realm in which reason looks outside itself, upon the science at
the time, and is forced to simulate the experience in question in this science, or, in
other words, to analogically configure the actual physical processes in order to be
able to justify the philosophical categories that represent them (Kant 1998, p. 295ff).
In this regard, even before reaching the critique of the speculative and dialectical
use of pure reason with its respective Ideas, Kant episodically suggests the need
for a “regulative use” of the principles of understanding (Kant 1998, p. 297ff). This
is the scope of the rational reconstruction of science, which is especially carried
out in the “Analytics” of the Critique of Pure Reason (that of “concepts” and that
of “principles”). As we know, the “transcendental deduction of the categories” is
included in the former (the Analytic of “concepts”). These categories are but the
fundamental concepts, philosophically speaking, that justify those in operation in
science itself (in mathematics, that is, in Euclidean geometry, and in physics, that
1 Utopia, Ideology, and Philosophy 11

is, in “rational mechanics”). How can pure reason deduct categories if not always
already through other categories? What is this pure reason if left to itself, in a certain
way, before being in operation in “transcendental deduction”? We could say that it
is the ideal discursive space required as an ultimate condition for the possibility of
science and of its founding enterprise. However, for all purposes, pure reason does
not exist anywhere in the proper sense of the expression “existence”; it is a necessary
fiction.
Philosophers, and philosophers of science in particular, will not accept that the
“topoi” from which their own creating thought in philosophy originates and develops
do not, paradoxically, have a place; that through these “topoi” nothing at all can be
“seen”, or that they may be, as some philosophy of science approaches began to
posit from the second half of the 19th century on, mere methodological positions
required by the need of conventionally postulating, in a hypothetical-deductive way,
the propositions that characterize the correspondent justifications of science. This,
however, should be indifferent for a theory of philosophical utopias about science
(if such a theory is possible). The point is that, irrespective of their form, each of
the “topoi” of philosophy cannot be, I won’t say “seen”, but rather “envisioned”
from the position of other “topoi” which are supposed to be (and this is an essential
requirement) constitutionally identical. It would be perfectly natural that, if such
a thing could happen or if each of us could place ourselves, simultaneously with
the philosophers themselves or not, in their respective “topoi” (for example in the
Cartesian “cogito” or in Kant’s “pure reason”), not only would we “see” the same
essential things and make the same deductions from them, but we should also be
able to intersubjectively envision, so to speak, our partners’ “views”. And that, as
far as I know (I would even say “as far as we all know”), does not happen, because,
by definition, it cannot happen. (Outside the scope of the philosophy of science,
but closely connected to it, Husserl’s phenomenology (Husserl 1999), for example,
radicalizing the reduction implied in the Cartesian “topos” (the topos of the cog-
ito) and decontaminating it from spurious psychological implications, assumed, at
least at first sight, that it was possible, that we could all see, enjoy and share the
same essences. I will simply note that this great philosopher, or any other follower
of phenomenology after him, has never provided any proof of this, and therefore
Husserl’s “eidetic reduction” is a fiction). Note that the very movement of placing
ourselves in these “topoi” and the reconstruction of science that follows it cannot be
intersubjectively reproduced, and that in some philosophies it entails a conceptual
‘gymnastics’ and/or an imagery that the philosophers in question will not hesitate
to characterize as belonging to the ambit of analogy, that is, figurative thought. This
does not mean, of course, that we cannot describe and analyse what they see and the
deductions they make from that for instance, in rhetorical terms. On the contrary: it
is precisely because philosophical topoi have no place and are u-topoi, in the sense
that I have explained above, that such (rhetorical) descriptions and analyses are pos-
sible and (even) necessary. So, apparently, the old, naive claims of ontology (not of
metaphysics) are necessarily doomed.
12 H. J. Ribeiro

1.4 Utopia, Ideology, and Philosophy

That the philosophical “topos” itself be, to a certain extent, a u-topos, as I shall seek
to explain in detail, is of the utmost importance for a theory of philosophical utopias.
It should not simply be taken for the “no-place” or the “nowhere” of current utopias,
whether they be literary, philosophical, or other, and, in particular, it should not be
mistaken for those categories as they are found in the early studies of the theory of
utopia, including Mannheim’s and Ricoeur’s. The main difference is that this new
concept of utopia allows the decentralization of utopia, as happened since Marx with
the study of the concept of ideology, from the supposed object of utopian configura-
tion—without ever losing sight of it—to the subject who produces the configuration
itself. This methodological inversion is also essential to characterize philosophical
utopias. But more than that, this inversion may help clarify, from a completely novel
perspective, the complex relationships between utopia and ideology which, from the
authors just mentioned to the present, has remained generally obscure. It is under-
standable that there is a close, more or less intrinsic connection between the two, even
if it is not perfectly obvious. As a result, it is frequent for ideology to be confused
with utopia today, and vice versa.
Just a couple of brief words in this respect before we continue. The topic we
are dealing with is complex, as I explained, and therefore, for prudential reasons,
brevity is mandatory. Contrary to what Mannheim (and, to some extent, also Ricoeur)
postulates, it is far from obvious that the essential distinction between ideology and
utopia stems from the apparent fact that the former’s imaginary, unlike the latter’s,
lacks the prospective ability to transform reality, emerging basically as a form of
legitimizing a previously given social, cultural, and political reality. (In Mannheim’s
time (the 1930s), where the focus was particularly laid on the political ideology of
Soviet communism, it was in some sense legitimate to envisage ideology as a more
or less static system of beliefs, that is, not subject to evolution or transformation
(cf. Mannheim 1976, p. 215 ff)). Given that not all utopias contain or imply a polit-
ical ideology, for the fact that, among other reasons, not all utopias can become a
power legitimizing discourse, all ideologies are inspired by a more or less utopian
though and, as such, they are originally and intrinsically utopian; otherwise, they
are nothing but a legitimizing discourse, depleted of the essence of their own func-
tion. Indeed, as we know, this often happens with political ideologies. For example,
as already suggested, it happened recently with the communist ideology of the so-
called “Eastern bloc”. Contrary to what the authors mentioned believe, the direction
should therefore be from utopia to ideology, not the opposite, since the more or less
dynamic and functional character of any ideology is essentially based on utopia.
Utopia becomes ideology when it emerges as a more or less totalizing and symbolic
system of beliefs, which incorporates human “praxis” in general, because it concerns
the aims, values, and norms of human action. Language and rhetoric are included
in this fundamentally positive function as essential means or instruments for the
legitimation of ideological discourse. This understanding of the concept, which was
emphasized by Ricoeur in his critique of Mannheim (Ricoeur 1986, pp. 269–283),
1 Utopia, Ideology, and Philosophy 13

suffices to show that it is inadequate to think of ideology as “false consciousness”,

as a thought that deforms reality, as Marxism did with Marx and Engels (2004), or to
construe it as something opposed to science, as did, among others, some 20th century
neo-Marxists, for whom, in contrast with ideology, science was supposedly the open
realm of an objectivity to be explored experimentally (Althusser 1974). Science, as
indeed philosophy itself, is no stranger to ideology, not by any means, insofar as
it may, for example, have an extremely important functional role in supporting the
establishment and preservation of the system of beliefs in which ideology consists.
As we know, Marx had seen this as regards philosophy and German idealism in par-
ticular; however, his negative concept of ideology neglected the ideological function
proper to philosophy.
This understanding of utopia, as far as philosophy is concerned, is contrary to
its current acceptation, for which, irrespective of the practical meaning of utopia or
lack thereof, its “non-place” is basically a product of imagination which refers to
something “not yet come”; an idealized “nowhere”, more or less active or with the
potential to transform reality itself. This is the definition we find in Mannheim and,
despite everything, also in Ricoeur. I obviously do not ignore this understanding of
the concept which is particularly evident in literature, because it occurs also in the
domain of the philosophy of science, which, as I described it above, is by definition,
or constitutionally, utopian. Since the 17th century philosophers of science, as well
as scientists themselves, have repeatedly dealt with not only, or simply, what took
place or happened in the world, but also with, from their more or less intellectually
well-founded approaches, what was supposed to happen, i.e., what could and/or
should speculatively happen, either because they did not agree with their coeval
scientific theory and practice or because they sought to lead it along this or that
specific direction. As concerns the philosophy of science, that is particularly evident
in the reconstruction of science carried out both by logical positivism in general
and by Popper’s falsificationism (Popper 1992), as well as, to a certain extent, by
the naturalized epistemologies of the 20th century, as is the case of Quine’s (1969).
The more or less latent idea was that, with that reconstruction, the edifice of science
should be presented not so much as it really was but rather, fundamentally, as it
“could and should be”. Contrary to what is often claimed (Stillman 2001), my point
is that the restriction of the concept of utopia to eventuality or the future is not at
all essential to its definition, and that utopia is inscribed in the very core of what is
supposed to happen. This inscription is visible in the realms of the social, the cultural,
and the political when utopia becomes ideology and when the latter takes up the
role of an interpretation of reality (deforming it or not), because what characterizes
this transformation is precisely the introduction of the future into the present, the
prospective re-dimensioning of the latter as a function of the former. My contention
is that something similar happens with scientific utopia. But, letting aside the concept
of ideology for now, I suggest that the sense of utopia that I have mentioned is valid
both in the ambit of philosophy and in the ambit of science itself. In this respect, the
history of science up to the 20th century is laden with u-topias [and it would suffice to
recall the development of the concept of “ether” prior to Einstein’s theory of relativity
(see Schaffner 1972, pp. 3–20)]. In the specific research carried out in some scientific
14 H. J. Ribeiro

fields such as theoretical physics or astrophysics, especially in particular borderline

areas (the ultimate constitution of matter, the origins of the universe, etc.), there
is no true criterion, regardless of this or that explanatory theory, to discriminate
what does not happen from what actually occurs. In other words, what happens
in those borderline areas, where prediction cannot be experimentally confirmed, is
always already that which, according to a given theory, is supposed to happen or
to take place; and scientific theories, particularly when included within the scope
of what a Hungarian philosopher (I. Lakatos) called, in mid-20th century, “research
programs” (Lakatos 1978), are not immune to specular thought, to imagination, or
to ideological factors (including, as suggested above, ethical and political factors as
such). If that is so, and in my modest opinion I believe that we have all the reasons
to believe that it is so, the relationship between what would ideally happen, and
which is typical of the object of u-topian configuration, and what happens or is
supposed to happen, which is specific to science in the borderline areas mentioned
above, is by no means a relationship of contrast or opposition (as it was perceived in
the past for example by those who identified utopia with fantasy), but rather, to all
intents and purposes, a relationship of progressive integration and complementarity.
Well then, it is exactly this relationship of integration and complementarity between
the “u-topos” and the “topos” that to a certain extent characterizes both science
and its respective philosophy from modernity to virtually the present. It can only
be identified and recognized provided one gives the “u-topos” that characterizes the
utopian object a positive dimension rooted in the very nature of philosophical “topoi”,
in its immanence (or non-transcendence) vis-à-vis these same “topoi”.
I have been suggesting that it is through the specific nature of the philosophical
reconstructions of science, of the way science is imagined and configured through
them, that we can grasp both the concepts of utopia and ideology and their mutual rela-
tionship. Imagining and representing analogically what actual scientific experience
as such is supposed to be, the experience that pertains to philosophical reconstruc-
tion could never completely coincide with it. And this happens for a fundamental
reason, which I will just mention briefly, even though its importance for a theory of
philosophical utopia is crucial. Philosophical reconstructions of science, whatever
they may have been since Descartes, do not confine themselves to ideally remaking
what already exists, as when, if I may use this analogy, we fit the pieces of a puzzle
together after it has been broken down before our eyes. In point of fact, only very
rarely did that happen in the history of the philosophy of science Since the 17th
century, reconstructions were generally motivated by two types of factors: the first
is epistemological and the second ideological. The espistemological factor includes
the philosophers’ more of less essential ambition to reformulate decisively, in this
or that respect, in this or that more or less extensive scientific domain (and physics
is what I specifically have in mind), the scientific theory and practice of their time
through their reconstructions. The concepts of space, time, force, and movement
are often-cited examples of that ambition from Descartes to the early 20th century.
Similar examples, with a no less relevant philosophical bearing, could be given in
this century. However, I shall only mention the most important: in the first quarter of
the 20th century, quantum mechanics and the disagreements among scientists that
1 Utopia, Ideology, and Philosophy 15

seemed to follow from the interpretations of physics respectively pertaining to this

specific mechanics and to the theory of relativity (see Jungnickel and McCormmach
1990, p. 304ff). The assumption behind reconstructions in general is that the scien-
tific edifice as a whole lacks this reformulation in order to be coherent or consistent,
and ensure that the aims that are deemed fundamental for scientific research are
fulfilled. Thence the imperative need for reconstruction. I believe that the whole phi-
losophy of science since Descartes, all the philosophical reconstructions of science
arise from these epistemological reasons. This is why, as I shall exemplify below (in
my conclusion) with Kuhn and Quine, the philosophy of science is constitutionally
utopian.
The second type of factors in philosophical reconstructions of science, as men-
tioned above, is of an ideological nature. This is a complex topic, although funda-
mental for a theory of philosophical theories. It seems obvious to me that reconstruc-
tions were guided by this type of factors. The history of the philosophy of science
shows that the schematic model for the representation and analogical configuration
of scientific experience, which I have analysed in the second section of this chapter,
is not immune to ideological factors and is aligned, in each different period, with
the framework (which includes beliefs, norms, and values) typical of the society to
which the philosopher belongs. Indeed, as Mannheim showed in his famous book,
and as shown after him in the vast bibliography available on the philosophy of sci-
ence, what science itself is at a given time forms part of the foresaid framework, of
which it constitutionally depends (cf. Mannheim 1976, p. 247). As I have suggested
elsewhere, expanding on the conclusions of Ideology and Utopia from my perspec-
tive (Ribeiro 2012), the social, cultural, and political representations that national
communities, for example, produce of themselves are essentially utopian constructs,
which, insofar as they aim to legitimate a certain form of political power (whatever it
may be), are, for that very reason, also ideological. Among such representations must
be included the self-representations of scientific communities. In this broad sense,
science is a cultural artefact like any other artefact. Philosophical reconstruction may
simply legitimate the above-mentioned framework, but it may also (which is what
happens most often when the philosopher has a real impact and influence) endeavour
to reformulate it and to change it in more or less depth. To give some examples: this
is perhaps what happened with the reductionist and verificationist program in the
philosophy of science adopted by the Viennese logical positivists in the mid-1930s
(with the idea that all the propositions of science can be reduced to atomic propo-
sitions, and that these should in turn be verified empirically), which was used as a
weapon, partly for political reasons uphold by one of its subscribers (O. Neurath),
not only against idealism in philosophy but also against idealism as an understand-
ing of the world socially, culturally, and politically configurated (Cartwright et al.
1996, p. 56ff). The same apparently happened with Popper’s critical rationalism in
The Logic of Scientific Discovery and The Open Society and its Enemies, and his
renovation, in new terms, of democratic ideals against the authoritarian societies
of the “Eastern bloc” and the closure of western democratic societies themselves
(Metogo 2014, p. 261ff). Or even: a similar reformulation of the above-mentioned
framework seems to have occurred in the case of Quine’s conceptions (and, indi-
16 H. J. Ribeiro

rectly, Kuhn’s) on the indeterminacy of meaning—conceptions which, in the long

run, would philosophically found contemporary multiculturalism within the con-
text of what is now usually called “post-modernity” (Patterson 1996, pp. 158–59).
As these three examples show, the traditional distinction: starting from ideological
assumptions or gaining ideological implications without having them in the first
place, whether the philosophers involved were aware of it or not, is fictive and even
fallacious. Philosopher of reconstruction, whoever he has been, has always thought
while immersed or imbued in an ideological environment, be it the one he accepts
and aims to legitimize, or the opposite one (see Koertge 1991). The frontier between
ideology and the philosophy of science, which, as I have been suggesting, can only
be understood from the perspective of a theory of philosophical utopias, is neither
territorial, like our geographical borders, nor categorial. Thus, I do not oppose both
things as if they were contrary and essentially different concepts. All the philosophy
of science, insofar as it is utopian, is to some degree ideological.

1.5 Epilogue: Utopia and Deconstruction of the Philosophy

of Science

The second half of the 20th century signals the end of the philosophy of science in
the traditional sense of the concept of philosophy, i.e., as systematic research, and,
simultaneously, the end of the traditional concept of science, that is to say, of the
idea that what essentially defines the latter is an objective, ontological basis, in the
world, which the moderns (Galileo and Descartes) used to call “nature”, and which
allowed not only to justify epistemologically the theories that dealt with it (and,
through them, the “philosophy of science” itself), but also to demarcate science from
the other areas of culture (Ribeiro 1998). K. Popper’s thought, at least till the 1960s,
pointed to this decisive, fundamental conclusion, explicitly drawn by Kuhn (1996,
1977) and by Quine (1969) at around that time, and by Feyerabend (1987, 2002),
one decade later. If such a foundation does not exist, as the author of The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions suggested after having read his own conceptions in the light
of those held by the author of Ontological Relativity and other Essays, then nothing
exists, except sociological factors (such as the agreement among the members of
scientific communities), to help us differentiate science and witchcraft—a striking,
controversial suggestion, which means precisely what I have been suggesting: that
whatever science (particularly theoretical physics) is or is not essentially entails the
concepts of utopia and ideology. Based on Popper, Kuhn and Quine, Feyerabend
(1987), more incisively and provocatively than all the others, generally dismisses
rationality as such. As a whole, after Mannheim (1976) and Ricoeur (1986), the way
was paved for us to rethink science in the light of the said concepts.
Kuhn is arguably the major contemporary reference for a theory of philosophical
utopias as concerns science. His entire work can indeed be considered a progressive,
systematic deconstruction of the notions according to which there is something like
1 Utopia, Ideology, and Philosophy 17

a “philosophy of science”, and therefore, that a rational reconstruction of it is pos-

sible (cf. Kuhn 1977, pp. 3–19). I will not mention his decisive contributions in this
respect, although it would be well worth to do it from the point of view that I adopted
above. I will just note that the type of history and of sociology of science brilliantly
inaugurated by Kuhn in the early 1960s can be read—and I indeed did that to some
extent in this chapter—not only as a deconstruction of the idea of a “philosophy
of science”, which I have mentioned, but more generally, as a long commentary on
the whole issue of the relationships between utopia, ideology, and science, from the
point of view of that same history and sociology. The opposition between what Kuhn
designates as “normal science” in contrast to non-normal or “revolutionary” science,
can indeed, or perhaps should, be interpreted from the standpoint of the relationship
between ideology and utopia, with “normal science” being, in line with what the his-
torian broadly understands as a “paradigm”, a characteristically ideological process
aiming to legitimate the established scientific theory and practice—a process which,
due to the reasons I have mentioned, we now understand as encompassing the social,
cultural, and political spheres (cf. Kuhn 1996, pp. 23ff, 136ff); and “revolutionary
science”, on the other hand, the fundamental vehicle for the emergence and the
affirmation of utopia (Kuhn 1996, p. 92ff). From this viewpoint, as the philosopher
suggests, while revisiting (in the light of Quine) his conceptions in The Structure, if
the paradigms are incommensurable, that is, in Quine’s language, if it is not possible
to translate the language of one into the language of the other, and, as a consequence,
there is no neutral place (topos) from whose perspective they could be compared (this
is what explains the revolutionary character of the emergence of new paradigms),
then science (and not just the philosophy of science) is constitutionally utopian (cf.
Kuhn 1996, p. 198ff). On the other hand, again, as I claimed in the previous section,
also in Kuhn the source of ideology (“normal science”) is utopia (“revolutionary sci-
ence”), the dialectic specific to the historical process of the development of sciences
consisting precisely in the inevitable transformation of utopia in ideology, followed
by the de-structuring of the latter through the emergence and establishment of a new
utopia.
Quine’s theory, like Kuhn’s, is that what we call the “philosophy of science” has
collapsed or died, and it no longer makes sense as a systematic research undertak-
ing on the world. The idea, which comes principally from Descartes and Kant, that
there exists something like a nature divorced from scientific language, or, when this
language is reconstructed by philosophy, divorced from the categories by means of
which we interpret it, is for Quine a pernicious dogma that cannot be justified philo-
sophically and which has led to all the known, repeated failures of the philosophy
of science throughout its history (Quine 1969, pp. 26–67). Consequently, there is no
world on the one side and science and philosophy on the other; instead, world and
science constitute a sole reality or totality composed of inextricable elements. (This
is what Quine shows by means of his two indeterminacies of meaning: the indeter-
minacy of translation and the indeterminacy of reference). It follows, as we might
say (over Quine’s own head), that utopia consists exactly in thinking the opposite,
that is, in thinking that there is, there before us and distinct from us, a world to be
explored and founded, philosophically speaking. Such a utopia does not make sense
18 H. J. Ribeiro

and it should be eradicated from philosophy, opening the door to naturalized episte-
mology, which will fundamentally be based on the interpretation of the world—by
philosophers and scientists, side by side—following the procedures and conceptual
schemes of science itself, as, according to Quine, is supposed to happen with schemes
of a behaviourist and physicalist type (see Quine 1969, pp. 69–90). Now, if it is true
that Quine’s naturalized epistemology signifies the end of the philosophy of science
myth as it was conceived since Descartes, this does not imply for him that the very
idea of rational reconstruction has completely come to an end. It is still possible to
practice epistemology and to conceive the objectivity of science within the scope of
the behaviourist and physicalist schemes that I have just mentioned, and therefore
it is still possible, in a certain way, to reconstruct science. This conclusion is some-
what surprising because what followed from the idea of the end of the philosophy
of science, announced as early as the 1950s by Quine in certain of his texts (Quine
1953, pp. 1–45), appeared to be exactly the opposite. However, the philosopher main-
tains that when scientific objectivity is conceived of according to that framework,
the reconstruction that characterizes his naturalized epistemology is ontologically
inoffensive. In some of his books, such as From Stimulus to Science (Quine 1995) he
himself contributed significantly to the positive aspects of this new way of working.
It is debatable whether with it we will not become involved in the same problems of
the philosophy of the past. For my part, I am convinced that Quine’s reconstruction
ultimately means that utopia is not dead.

References

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Carnap, Rudolf. 1937. The Logical Syntax of Language. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Carnap, Rudolf. 1956. Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic. Chicago,
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Cartwright, Nancy, Jordi Cat, Lola Fleck, and T.E. Uebel. 1996. Otto Neurath: Philosophy Between
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Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers (First published in German in 1906).
1 Utopia, Ideology, and Philosophy 19

Jungnickel, Christa, and Russell McCormmach. 1990. Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical
Physics from Ohm to Einstein: The Now Mighty Theoretical Physics: 1870–1925. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
Kant, Immanuel, 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. ed. and trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press (First published in German in 1781).
Koertge, Noretta. 1991. Ideology, Science and a Free Society. In Beyond Reason: Essays on the
Philosophy of Paul Feyerabend, ed. Gonzalo Munévar, 225–242. Dordrecht: Klüwer Academic
Publishers.
Kuhn, Thomas. 1977. The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change.
Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Kuhn, Thomas. 1996. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd ed. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press (First published in 1962).
Lakatos, Imre. 1978. Philosophical Papers: The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes:
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Kegan Paul (First published in German in 1929).
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man in 1935).
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bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Quine, Willard van O. 1969. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press.
Quine, Willard van O. 1995. From Stimulus to Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ribeiro, Henrique J. 1987. Karl Popper: A epistemologia como ‘terra-de-ninguém’, ou da tarefa de
reconstrução da ciência. Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 3–4: 71–108.
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Portuguesa de Filosofia 3–4: 395–428.
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Coimbra 41: 199–246.
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Approaches to Argument by Analogy, ed. Henrique J. Ribeiro, 275–290. Heidelberg: Springer.
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20 H. J. Ribeiro

Henrique Jales Ribeiro is associate professor at Coimbra University’s Faculty of Letters (Portu-
gal), Department of Philosophy, Communication and Information. His core areas of research are
logic, argumentation theory and philosophy didactics. His main publications include: Inside argu-
ments: Logic and the study of argumentation (2012); Aristotle and argumentation theory (2013);
Systematic approaches to argument by analogy (2014); Retórica, argumentação e filosofia: Estu-
dos sistemáticos e histórico-filosóficos (2016).
Chapter 2
Phenomenology and the Challenge
of Virtuality

Daniel O’Shiel

Abstract This piece explicates some chief modes of consciousness in phenomenol-

ogy in order to show that a very significant challenge of virtuality surfaces both
within, as well as outside of, the discipline. This issue is of no small importance
today, where the difference between perception and imagination, real and irreal, as
well as presence and absence, are all becoming increasingly vague because of new
technologies and the intrinsic virtualities involved therein. In this context, the ques-
tion is: Where does virtuality fit in such a picture? I will argue that phenomenology
can start to account for such developments, although much more explicative work
will be required in the future. With this in mind, sections two to four will articu-
late an initial phenomenology of perception, phantasy, and image-consciousness, as
found chiefly in works by Husserl and Sartre. Then, section five will question the
preceding phenomenological theory through some phenomenological (Heidegger)
and non-phenomenological (Bergson and Deleuze) thinkers, who all seem to have a
concept of virtuality at the heart of their work. Lastly, in the final two sections I will
suggest a difference between real and irreal virtualities, and briefly mention some
current virtual technologies in order to show that there is a constant and complex
interplay between the real, irreal, and the virtual in many of our everyday experi-
ences—an interplay that needs to be investigated much further if we are to make
sense of how it is changing how we think and behave.

2.1 Introduction

Virtuality is fast becoming the base mode of many of our lives. Portions of humanity’s
youngest generation might be the first to be more familiar with chatting to their friends
online than in person; a video game named Rocket League always has around 80,000
players online, no matter the time of day or night; and in 2016, one individual, Tom
Currie, quit his job in New Zealand in order to play Pokemon Go full time. These
everyday examples already show that virtual technology is changing many people’s

D. O’Shiel (B)
Instituto de Filosofía, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 21

J. Braga (ed.), Conceiving Virtuality: From Art To Technology, Numanities - Arts
and Humanities in Progress 11, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24751-5_2
22 D. O’Shiel

behaviour, but it is also changing what is accessible to us, how it is, as well as when
and to whom.
The concept of virtuality is used across a wide range of disciplines. First of all,
outside the humanities it is of concern in fields from psychology to computer science.
Indeed, there are technological foci on virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (VR,
AR, and MR respectively—cf. Plascencia 2015), gaming, and ubiquitous computing
(for instance: Alce et al. 2014; Boland and McGill 2015); psychological studies of
on- and offline behaviour (Błachnio et al. 2016; Knop et al. 2016; Sioni et al. 2017);
as well as explorations into the use of virtual technologies in fields like education
and medicine (Bujak et al. 2013; Kleinsmith et al. 2015; Yilmaz 2016).
The issue of virtuality is also spread throughout the humanities, from anthropol-
ogy, social science and media studies (Bolter and Grusin [1999] 2000; Harper and
Savat 2016; Nardi 2015; Shields 2002) to philosophy of technology (Gualeni 2015)
and large Oxford compendiums (Grimshaw 2015). An international conference at
the University of Coimbra, Portugal, in October 2016, demonstrated this immense
diversity. What was also clear, however, was that virtuality is a very tricky concept
to pin down in any cohesive manner. I believe phenomenology can help greatly in
this regard.
A comprehensive phenomenological account of virtuality has never been carried
out. There are very interesting pieces on specific subjects (for instance: de Warren
2014; Staehler 2014; Turkle [2011] 2012), and the philosophies of Bergson ([1896,
siglum: MM] 2012/2005) and Deleuze (for instance: [1966, siglum: B] 2011/2014)
have it as a very central, metaphysical concept. Notwithstanding these works, the
complexity and dynamism of the concept remain relatively understudied and under-
developed.
This paper aims to articulate the main initial considerations required for any sub-
sequent and comprehensive phenomenology of virtuality, simultaneously demon-
strating such a project’s relevance for the contemporary issue of virtual technology
and its increasing predominance in many of our lives. Considering these points, I
will first of all need to explicate the phenomenological nature of both perception and
phantasy in Husserl. This has to take place within the larger discussion of Gegen-
wärtigung (presentation) and Vergegenwärtigung (presentification or making-present
or re-presentation). Secondly, I will be able to hone in on the problem of image-
consciousness (Bildbewusstsein), analysing its phenomenological nature according
to Husserl. A third section will then challenge Husserl’s assumption of a differ-
ence in kind between image-consciousness and phantasy through Sartre’s 1940 work
L’imaginaire. Here Sartre, while holding an equally—or even stricter—delineation
between perception and the imaginary (i.e. Husserl’s phantasy), nevertheless seems
to collapse the distinction between image-consciousness and the imaginary in that
the former becomes a subsection of the latter. This ultimately means, for Sartre, that
2 Phenomenology and the Challenge of Virtuality 23

there is a difference in degree, and not in kind, between (for instance) watching a
tennis match on television, and imagining a totally irreal one in your head.1
Sartre’s stark opposition between perception and the imaginary will then be ques-
tioned in its own turn, initially through a Heidegger-inspired notion of forked being,
and then through the more general trope of virtuality, as found in Bergson’s work and
Deleuze’s study thereupon. Here, although the virtual and virtuality are not really
terms to be found in classical phenomenology, I will start formulating the argu-
ment that there is an incredibly rich theory therein, one that moreover has image-
consciousness—as well as all the virtual technologies it makes possible—as its most
powerful element. In this manner, virtuality may nuance the classical phenomenolog-
ical differences between perception and phantasy, real and irreal, present and absent,
as well as actual and possible. Indeed, I may even contend that virtual technology’s
harnessing of the power and captivation of image-consciousness is starting to blur
such basic distinctions, if not totally invert their power.
Notwithstanding the rise of virtual technology, I will then argue for three types
of real virtuality (namely self, world, and others) that our perceptual experiences
are never without. Here I will suggest that it is actually these three broad categories
of self, world, and others that virtual technologies take up and irrealize, whereby
one can, for instance, perpetually represent the ‘best side’ of oneself on a Facebook
profile photo. Indeed, in some final remarks I will conclude with a call for a more
concerted work on these issues, in order to ultimately try and capture the many clear
powers and advantages of such technologies—but also some potential dangers.

2.2 Perception, Presentification, and Phantasy in Husserl2

One may safely claim that the nature of perception is an ever-recurring theme in
Husserl’s thought. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of pages on the subject
matter; it is a base mode of consciousness that seems to ground all other forms.
Nevertheless, it is not without issues of its own. Indeed, Husserl begins his Passive
Synthesis with an apparent paradox of perception:

1 Eugen Fink, particularly his long essay ‘Vergegenwärtigung und Bild’ ([1930] 1966), is a very
important thinker with regard to all of these issues. This shorter investigation will however restrict
itself to Husserl and Sartre.
2 Section Abstract—This section explicates the phenomenological nature of perception,

presentification (Vergegenwärtigung), and phantasy in Husserl. Perception is essentially

about presence, its objects are inexhaustible, and it is always situated and perspectival. Absence
can be experience on the perceptual level thanks to its essential horizonal structure. However, I
argue that absence is only properly evoked in acts of presentification (imagination in a broad sense),
in which category phantasy (imagination in a narrow sense) is included. Phantasy has an essential
as-if character, neutralizes reality, and presentifies us with unreal objects. There is thus a stark
opposition between perception and phantasy, which can then be questioned through Husserl’s own
concept of image-consciousness (Bildbewusstsein), to be dealt with in the next section.
Keywords—Absence, Husserl, Perception, Phantasy, Presence, Presentification.
24 D. O’Shiel

External perception is a constant pretension to accomplish something that, by its very nature,
it is not in a position to accomplish. Thus, it harbors an essential contradiction, as it were.
My meaning will soon become clear to you once you intuitively grasp how the objective
sense exhibits itself as unity <in> the unending manifolds of possible appearances; and
seen upon closer inspection, how the continual synthesis, as a unity of coinciding, allows
the same sense to appear, and how a consciousness of ever new possibilities of appearance
constantly persists over against the factual, limited courses of appearance, transcending them.
([1918–1926, siglum: PS] 2001/1966: 39/3)

Perception both presents the object tout court and yet, strictly speaking, one is only
ever directly aware of one aspect (Abschattung) at any given moment. This is a riddle
that kept Husserl occupied throughout most of his intellectual life, and it actually
gave rise to an incredibly rich theory of perception that we are still trying to fully
come to terms with.
First of all, perception is about presence. In our everyday external sense-
perceptions (my focus here) an actually present, physical thing is given immediately
and directly:
[T]he <natural> experience that is presentive of something originarily is perception, the
word being understood in the ordinary sense. To have something real given originarily and
“attentively to perceive” and “experience” it in an intuiting simpliciter are one and the same.
We have originary experience of concrete physical things in “external perception,” but no
longer in memory or in forward-regarding expectation[.] ([1913, siglum: Id.I] 1983/2009:
§1)

Here there are already hints regarding how perception is different from memory or
expectation—in short and as we shall see further, various types of presentification
(Vergegenwärtigung). Moreover, if memory and expectation are types of presentifi-
cation, perception is the quintessential type of presentation (Gegenwärtigung—cf.
[1898–1925, siglum: Hua23] 2005/1980: 108/101). Perception is thus always about
physically present objects—things; this is indeed a main tenet of perception. This,
however, also brings other laws of perception with it.
First of all, our perceptions are truly inexhaustible. Husserl goes as far to say that
even God would not be able to perceive an object all at once (cf. PS: 56/18–19),
for it is in the very nature of perceiving that only certain profiles, aspects or sides
are actually given to consciousness at any one moment, no matter how omnipotent
this latter may be in other respects. In Husserl’s own terms, ‘[w]e can never think
the given object without empty horizons in any phase of perception’ (PS: 56/19);
perception is always situated, always perspectival, which means, also, that perception
always presupposes a perceiver—in Husserl’s terminology a Leib, a lived-body.
Along with being an absolute Now, Husserl’s Leib is also essentially characterized
as an ‘absolute Here […] of all spatial orientation’ (PS: 584/297), which moreover
always carries the ‘I-can’ of a conscious agent (cf. [1893–1917, siglum: T-C/Zb]
1991/2013: §18; Id.I: §27). These essential characteristics of our lived-bodies mean
that we can all probe and investigate the things of perception indefinitely (so long as
we are alive of course). In short, perceptual consciousness always already presup-
poses an embodied agent, situated in a spatial world. Such spatiality, we have seen,
is necessarily horizonal in the sense that there are always inner (e.g. looking closer)
2 Phenomenology and the Challenge of Virtuality 25

and outer (e.g. looking beyond) horizons to absolutely everything we perceive (cf.
PS: 43/6–7).
Spatial horizons are just one dimension of perceptual horizon. Indeed, one of
Husserl’s major achievements is to show how perceptual consciousness is always
already in a complex temporal horizon as well, thereby demonstrating that the two,
space and time, are inextricably intertwined in our perceptual experiences. This is
Husserl’s well-known analyses of time-consciousness (see, for instance: de Warren
[2009] 2011), where for every moment of perception there essentially belong three
moments that are nevertheless always already fused together in a continuum of our
actually lived experience (cf., for instance: T-C/Zb: §14). These moments are the
primal Now, retention (i.e. the just-passed), and protention (the just-not-yet), and
indeed they go a long way in explaining how an implicit notion of absence, as well
as actuality and potentiality, are all already implied and experienced on the perceptual
level, precisely through the latter’s ever-variable spatial-temporal horizonal nature.
I contend that experiencing absence on the one hand, and explicitly evoking
absence on the other, is one of the chief distinguishing factors to consider when
thinking of the difference between perception (the paradigmatic case of presenta-
tion—Gegenwärtigung), and various kinds of presentification (Vergegenwärtigung).
Indeed, although the horizonal nature of perceptual consciousness clearly demon-
strates that absence is immediately and implicitly experienced on this level (exam-
ples: the back side of an object; the moment to come when about to strike a ten-
nis ball), I contend that absence is only properly evoked in certain performances
of presentification. I say certain performances because Husserl has a number of
modes of presentification, not all of which always have explicit shades of activity. In
fact, Husserl has no fewer than five main types of presentification: remembering or
recollection (Erinnerung); visualising in the present (Mitvergegenwärtigung—e.g.
explicitly visualising the back side of the object); expectation (Erwartung); phantasy
(Phantasie); and empathy (Einfühlung). The first three correspond exactly to—and
arise genetically out of—Husserl’s three sorts of empty presentations (Leervorstel-
lungen). These latter are retention, co-intending (i.e. the implicit awareness of other
sides to a thing), and protention. They are constantly at work in the essentially auto-
matic—which is to say passive—temporal structure of perception. Here there is a
crucial difference then: empty presentations are an integrally passive part of per-
ception, whereas presentifications are essentially not perceptions in that they need
imagination in the broad sense—i.e. presentification, the general capacity to evoke
absence—in order occur at all.
This goes for the other types of presentification as well. Empathy is essential
for our ability to experience other minds, and phantasy—imagining in a narrower
sense—is our capacity to irrealize and neutralize reality in a manner that opens up a
whole new realm of imaginary objects (e.g. a unicorn). Hereby, although various types
of presentification might have various mixtures of passivity and activity (for instance
empathy can be quite automatic, but also at times an explicit effort—cf. the Fifth
Mediation in Husserl [1929] 1995), it is safe to say that all types of presentification
explicitly evoke something that is not (and may never be) immediately and implicitly
given. Whether this is a memory, an explicit image of something co-present, an
26 D. O’Shiel

expectation, a phantasy, or another’s state of mind, these are all details of content as
opposed to a more universal and formal structure of presentification as such.
In Husserl’s own terms, presentification always concerns experiences where
objects are not, strictly speaking, perceptually given:
Perception is that consciousness which, so to speak, seizes a present with both hands by its
shock of hair; it is a consciousness of presenting originaliter. In contrast, there are different
modes of presentification. In and of itself, a presentification refers back to a presentation,
though it is not a presentation. It allows something presentified—in our example, the memo-
rial object—to appear “as if” it were present once again.3 (PS: 591/304)

This quotation should clarify how perception is always contrasted with various forms
of presentification in Husserl. This latter issue is a complex one, for the various
characteristics of various types of presentification can vary quite considerably, with,
for instance, passivity and activity being variable, as well as the as-if tone in empathy.
What should be clear, however, is that all presentifications go explicitly beyond the
perceptually given—i.e. that which is simply present (gegenwärtig).
Our capacity for phantasy is a case in point here. Indeed, Husserl repeatedly
characterizes the as-if quality of phantasy (see, for instance: Hua23: 606–607/505);
phantasy always already neutralizes and brackets the perceived precisely in order
to explicitly evoke absent, irreal, or even ideal objects that are decidedly not (fully)
given in perceptual experience, and may never be:
Phantasying is set in opposition to perceiving and to the intuitive positing of past and future as
true; in short, to all acts that posit something individual and concrete as existing. Perception
makes a present reality appear to us as present and as a reality; memory places an absent
reality before our eyes, not indeed as present itself, but certainly as reality. Phantasy, on the
other hand, lacks the consciousness of reality in relation to what is phantasied. (Hua23: 4/4)

Phantasy is thus opposed to perception because the former has to do with non- and
irreal objects, the latter with real ones. Indeed, real objects are precisely real because
they are perceived (e.g. a chair); irreal ones because they are phantasized (e.g. a uni-
corn). This is quite a stark opposition that creates conceptual problems for Husserl’s
account of image-consciousness (Bildbewusstsein), which seems, somewhat contra-
dictorily, to contain elements of both reality (perception) and irreality (phantasy).

3 Translation modified—‚Wahrnehmung ist das Bewußtsein, eine Gegenwart sozusagen selbst beim

Schopf zu fassen, es ist originaliter gegenwärtigendes. Demgegenüber gibt es verschiedene Weisen

von Vergegenwärtigungen. Eine Vergegenwärtigung weist in sich selbst auf Gegenwärtigung zurück,
ist aber keine Gegenwärtigung. Sie läßt das Vergegenwärtigte, in unserem Fall das Erinnerte, so
erscheinen, „als ob“ es wieder gegenwärtig wäre.’.
2 Phenomenology and the Challenge of Virtuality 27

2.3 The Problem of Image-Consciousness4

Image-consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) is indeed characterized by Husserl as a curi-

ous hybrid that seems to contain elements that both exist (are real, perceivable) and
do not (are irreal, phantasizable). When I look at a photograph, for example, there are
actual, perceived elements that are evidently there before me—and yet the photo also
depicts something or someone that is decidedly not there, and perhaps can never be
again. In Husserl’s own terms, image-consciousness has a structure of its own, with
three essential components that nonetheless always already interlock in the actual
lived experience:
1) [T]he physical image, the physical thing made from canvas, marble, and so on; (2) the
representing or depicting object; and (3) the represented or depicted object. For the latter,
we prefer to say simply “image subject”; for the first object, we prefer “physical image”; for
the second, “representing image” or “image object.” (Hua23: 21/19)

Husserl is talking about a sculpture or painting or photograph here. However, this

basic structure holds for a whole host of media that came after Husserl—televisions,
computer screens, smartphones and so on. There is even a case for arguing that this
form of consciousness extends beyond the primarily visual; perhaps certain physical
soundwaves (physical image) are sensed (image object) in a manner that gives one
intentional access to a certain song (image subject—e.g. ‘Yellow Submarine’), which
latter is only made present through the specific, physical version one is listening to. In
this manner, this structure of image-consciousness always has a tripartite structure:
the physical image (physische Bild) as the physical matter involved, which places (at
least part of) the experience squarely in the realm of the perceivable; the image object
(Bildobjekt) as all the sensuous experience stemming from the physical image; and
the image subject (Bildsujet), which allows one to transcend what is immediately
given towards something or someone that is not perceptually there, and may never
be (again). If the physical image is clearly in the realm of the perceivable, and the
image subject is only accessible thanks to our capacity to presentify (i.e. imagine),
the middle aspect, the image object, has a somewhat ambiguous status.
Indeed, and as already mentioned, this mode of consciousness with three inter-
linked components covers a whole range of media, media that are actually coming to
predominate in many of our lives. To take a contemporary example, imagine watch-
ing a tennis match on television. Here the television, its physical assemblage, is

4 Section Abstract—This section hones in on the problem of image-consciousness (Bildbewusstsein),

analysing its phenomenological nature according to Husserl. I summarize Husserl’s characterization

of image-consciousness, explicating that it is always made up of a tripartite structure of physical
image, image object, and image subject. Using an example (watching a tennis match on television) I
show that: the physical image is the TV; the image object is the phenomena you experience emitting
from the TV; and the image subject is the actual match taking place. Image-consciousness thus
allows one to be pseudo present somewhere one is not. The physical image belongs to the perceptual,
the image subject to the phantasized, but the image object has an ambiguous status that requires
further analysis.
Key Terms—Bildbewusstsein, Husserl, Image-consciousness, Image object, Image subject,
Physical image.
28 D. O’Shiel

clearly the physical image. One’s experience of the images emitting from the TV
are then what is known as the image object here—which can again be seen as the
phenomenal experience of watching a certain thing that is nevertheless not there,
not in your room. It is not there because this structure of consciousness also has the
third component, the image subject, which is the actually occurring match in Roland
Garros or Wimbledon or wherever. If I were to be at the match, I would be perceiving
it; our capacity for image-consciousness however allows me to be pseudo present at
the match through the technology (TV—physical image) and my experience (image
object) of it.
What is this mode of consciousness, then? It is clearly not a straightforward case
of perception, because in perception I do not transcend towards something that is not
physically there. Actually it is often very difficult—if not impossible—to perceive
the ‘pure sense data’ of a painting or photo or a TV emission; one normally always
already sees an image as an image. This already points to a structure of experience
over and above perception.
It does not seem, however, to be a straightforward case of phantasy, either, because
in this latter I can simply close my eyes and imagine a tennis match (for instance)
without any reliance on a television or computer screen or whatever. For Husserl,
then, straightforward—or at least ‘pure’—cases of phantasy do not seem to require
a physical image and, thereby, if there is an image object or something similar, then
this latter is not tied to the former.
Perhaps image-consciousness is simply a hybrid then, a mixture between percep-
tion and phantasy, whereby to call it a bit of both or neither (in the latter case it would
be a structure or mode of consciousness in its own right) could both be acceptable
characterizations. Or perhaps we need a new term for this experience, one more con-
temporary than Husserl had access to, like virtual or ‘artificial presence’ (cf. Wiesing
2005). Indeed, perhaps Husserl was at pains to express a mode of experience that
has grown exponentially afterwards, both in number and complexity.
I feel unable to commit to a definitive answer at this point, because there is some-
thing with the image object that is still highly ambiguous and therefore hard to clearly
characterize. Indeed, Husserl himself seemed to struggle quite a bit with this aspect,
in that the image object was sensuous, phenomenal data that was nevertheless some-
how linked and conditioned by something that was not strictly speaking there (the
image subject). This kind of halfway house between a full-blown perception and
a phantasy also seems to have links with Husserl’s rather murky characterizations
of ‘phantasms’ (cf., for instance: Hua23: 281–282/232)—a kind of parallel to per-
ceptual sensation in phantasy that was to be largely abandoned later in favour of
emphasizing the neutralization capacities of the latter (cf., for instance: Hua23: 605,
689–692/504, 571–574). All in all, then, this middle ground in the experience of
image-consciousness—which as already intimated is a category of experience that
is becoming increasingly important to understand—is not yet clear enough, and thus
I propose a relatively lengthy excursus in order to get partially to the bottom of the
issue.
2 Phenomenology and the Challenge of Virtuality 29

2.4 Sartre: Perception and the Imaginary5

If Husserl had already drawn a clear distinction between perception and phantasy,
Sartre did this with even more force: one is either perceiving or phantasizing, never
both at once. The question with regard to the status of image-consciousness then
becomes even more pressing, and Sartre’s answer is rather clear: it belongs to the
realm of phantasy—or in his terms it makes up a significant portion of the imagi-
nary. Actually, Sartre collapses the Husserlian distinction between physical image
and image object, replacing these with his own concept of the analogon, whereby
watching a tennis match on TV, for example, and imagining one in one’s head, are
both imaging experiences with the same fundamental formal structure and thereby
do not ultimately differ in kind. Thus while Sartre maintains a strict division between
perceiving and imagining, for the latter Sartre sees no structural difference when con-
sidering external from internal images. It is going to take some explication of Sartre’s
1940 work L’imaginaire to arrive at his reasons for this, as well as its consequences
for us.6
Like with Husserl (or any phenomenologist for that manner), for Sartre conscious-
ness is an absolutely necessary condition by and through which a world can appear.
In order for this to occur, consciousness must also be defined, for Sartre, essentially
as non-coincidence; by the very fact that a world and its objects appear to a con-
scious subject already demonstrates that such ‘consciousness of…’ is not itself the
world and its things. In this sense, the advent of consciousness introduces a kind of
gap allowing for a basic and all-pervasive capacity for awareness, by and through
which all can appear precisely to such fundamental awareness. This is the language
of intentionality, now in Sartrean terms, whereby the elemental activity of conscious-
ness constitutes a general ground out of which consciousness can be conscious of
something.
A well-known Sartrean example highlights this point: when I look for Pierre in
a café, the café is automatically constituted as a ‘ground’ ([1943, siglum: BN/EN]
2005/2012: 33/44) out of which things arise through the direction of my gaze, with
each individual thing then being ‘thrown back to nothingness’ (BN/EN: 35/45) when

5 Section Abstrct—This third section challenges Husserl’s assumption of a difference in kind

between image-consciousness and phantasy through Sartre’s 1940 work L’imaginaire. Indeed,
while holding an equally—or even stricter—demarcation between perception and the imaginary,
wherethrough recurrent themes like experiencing and evoking absence reappear, Sartre nevertheless
collapses the distinction between image-consciousness and phantasy, in that both become domains
of the imaginary. This is primarily done through his notion of the analogon, which presentifies
something absent or irreal through materials that are present. Such present items can be TV screens,
but also more mental phenomena like pieces of knowledge. This ultimately means that although there
is a strict difference in kind for Sartre between perception and the imaginary, there is now
also only a difference in degree between external and internal imaginations.
Keywords—Absence, Analogon, Image-consciousness, Imaginary, Perception, Presence,
Sartre.
6 A significant portion of the paragraphs that follow are updated and refined versions of a subsection

of my Ph.D. thesis, ‘Magical Being: a Sartrean account of emotion and value, using the case of
disgust’, defended at KU Leuven, Belgium, in May 2016.
30 D. O’Shiel

I realize that they are not what I am looking for, Pierre. If Pierre is in fact there, I
would be ‘suddenly arrested by his face and the whole café would organize itself
around him as a discrete presence’ (BN/EN: 34/44). In short, I would perceive Pierre,
greet him, and sit down.
However, Pierre is not there, and once I have searched the whole café this place
is ‘thrown’ in its own turn because I have seen that the café does not contain him. In
other words, I experience Pierre’s absence ‘from the whole café’ (ibid.).
I have already argued, with Husserl, that in the realm of the imaginary proper,
absence is not simply experienced but is evoked in a manner that transcends reality.
Extending upon Sartre’s own example, I may here say that after I have left the café,
I, whilst walking down the street, start to wonder where Pierre is, and here I may
imagine him, for instance, on a bus. In an instant I evoke the image of Pierre on a bus
whilst walking down the street. Such an imaging act is a spontaneous creation of my
consciousness that has no necessary link with my very real act of walking (though it
does, in this case at least, have a non-strict causal link to the preceding event, namely
looking for Pierre in the café and not finding him). Sartre goes as far as to say that
the real (perceived) and irreal (imaged) necessarily exclude one another (cf. [1940,
siglum: IM] 2004/2005: 120/131)—and yet, at the very same time the imaginary
always arises through consciousness irrealizing the real. Clarifying these points will
require another example.
Sartre claims that it is one thing to perceive that an arabesque continues behind
a cupboard, and another to imagine what the arabesque behind the cupboard might
actually look like. In the first case it is quite clear, says Sartre, that there is always,
in any given perception, an emptily intended project of perceiving that continues
beyond the actually given content of the present perception. In other words, there
always exist elements that are not actually perceived in the present moment but
are nevertheless always implicitly there—and they can always, if we so choose, be
perceived (in this example, by looking behind the cupboard). This is completely in
line with Husserl’s theory of horizons, with the underside of an ashtray on a desk being
one of Sartre’s own examples (IM: 121/233). With regard to the arabesque, it means
that if I perceive only half of it on the wall, then, according to the phenomenological
laws of perception I automatically have an empty intention of the hidden half in the
one and the same perceptive act of the visible half. Such empty intentions have their
basis in our knowledge, Sartre says, which always has to do with being present before
a certain thing (e.g. half an arabesque) or truth.7
Perception (and knowledge) thus revolve around presence for Sartre. Imagining
the arabesque behind the cupboard, on the other hand, is an act of positing that
radically excludes any emptily intended perception of it. Indeed, in general imaging
tries to make something which is absent, present. Here the part of the arabesque
behind the cupboard is no longer a mere empty continuation of the present perception,
but is on the contrary directly aimed at, albeit as imaged. In other words, I isolate
the absent part of the arabesque and aim directly at it through the imaging act. Such

7 More specifically, our knowledge has its source in memory, or in implicit (‘unformulated’ or
‘antepredicative’) inferences—cf. IM: 121/233.
2 Phenomenology and the Challenge of Virtuality 31

an act involves a necessary neutralization of the perceptive attitude for the imaging
one to occur.
In this manner, imagining an object necessarily excludes emptily intending it
because it is now directly aimed at as imaged. Even further, imaging excludes acts
of perception in general; indeed try it, try to perceive and imagine something simul-
taneously. Here I think one will find that although the world does not completely
disappear when we phantasize, it is clear that the details within a normal percep-
tive attitude, as well as its objects in any of their particulars, more or less fade into
the background. Think of daydreaming, where someone might be ‘miles away’ (i.e.
from their immediate world of perception) or ‘staring into space’ because they are
consumed by their own phantasizing. In this way, imaging consciousness is an act
whereby I both make explicit and degrade my (empty) perception in a spontaneous
act that posits, for instance, the arabesque behind the cupboard in a complete though
irreal manner (cf. IM: 122/234).
It is important to note here that irreal does not mean purely fictional; irreal objects
are simply objects of imaging consciousness and can be ideal (e.g. a circle), actual
(e.g. a tennis match), or fictional (e.g. a unicorn). In short, in the imaginary I do
not emptily intend the arabesque behind the wall but ‘see’ it through my imaging
consciousness of it. Perception and the imaginary therefore necessarily exclude one
another for Sartre because reality must be irrealized—which is to say neutralized—if
an imaging act is to arise at all.
How, more specifically, is such irrealizing made possible? Sartre’s answer is that
absence—or nothingness—can be evoked only through materials that are present to
us. Such materials form an analogon for the absent or non-existent thing. Indeed,
under the heading analogon one needs to think of all the physical (a painting, a
photo, an actor etc.—cf. IM: 17–53/40–112), psychophysiological (affectivity (viz.
feelings and emotions) and kinaesthetic sensations (e.g. moving one’s closed eyes
in order to imagine a moving tennis ball)—cf. IM: 68–83/135–164.), and psychical
(knowledge of something, for instance—cf. IM: 57–68/115–135) materials imaging
consciousness utilizes in order to constitute its image. Let us read Sartre on the matter.
When trying to ‘capture’ my absent friend Pierre, I try to (1) mentally represent (i.e.
phantasize or imagine) him; (2) look at a photo of him; and (3) look at a caricature
of him:
We have employed three procedures to give ourselves the face of Pierre. In the three cases
we found an ‘intention’, and that intention aims, in the three cases, at the same object. This
object is neither the representation, nor the photo, nor the caricature: it is my friend Pierre.
Moreover, in the three cases, I aim at the object in the same way: it is on the ground of
perception that I want to make the face of Pierre appear, I want to ‘make it present’ to me.
And, as I cannot make a direct perception of him spring up, I make use of a certain matter
that acts as an analogon, as an equivalent of perception. (IM: 18/41–42)

Imaging acts, whether they use external (e.g. pictures), psychophysiological (mainly
feelings and emotions), or even purely psychical (non-affective memories and knowl-
edge) materials, all ultimately have the same structure for Sartre: to show that an
‘object is given, when absent, through a presence’ (IM: 85/170). Such presence is
32 D. O’Shiel

nothing other than the analogical material (photo, feeling, etc.) of the specific imag-
ing act. Indeed, the analogon contains all the present materials used in order to make
an absent (or non-existent or reality-neutral) object appear before consciousness in a
way that denotes ‘consciousness of an object as imaged and not consciousness of an
image’ (IM: 86/171–172). The image, therefore, is the active form of consciousness
through which the object (Pierre) is given as imaged as opposed to perceived (or
conceived8 ).
It is important to understand that the analogon does not have be made up of one
specific type of analogical material; on the contrary there more often than not exists
‘a plurality of differentiated qualities in the analogon’ (IM: 85/168). Although these
qualities, such as pieces of knowledge, bodily movements, feelings and so on can
all be distinguished in the abstract through analysis, in the actual imaging act such
qualities form the analogon entirely, once and for all, each and every time, in the
‘unity’ (IM: 137/263) of the same imaging act. The analogon therefore neutralizes or
modifies aspects of reality (first moment) so consciousness can then use this material
to evoke its imaginary object (second moment). Indeed, a feeling of sadness as real is
the precise tonality of the feeling, made possible by a consciousness thereof; a feeling
of sadness in missing someone who is not there uses the feeling as analogical material
for the missing object. The first instance is perceptual; the second has entered the
imaginary.
This is what Sartre means when he states that the feeling, portrait, and the like all
‘cease[…] to be an object’ (IM: 22/51) of perception; they ‘function[…] as matter
for an image’ (Ibid.). In other words, there are always materials of the world and
of consciousness which, when perceived, are felt as directly there. However, such
materials can also be used to evoke something that is not there, and might never be
(again). It is in these latter cases that such materials, because they are presences used
to evoke absences, come to stand for something else, and thus become irrealized in
an imaging act that evokes something absent, irreal, or ideal.
In Sartre’s words, ‘the two worlds,9 the imaginary and the real, are constituted by
the same objects; only the grouping and the interpretation of these objects varies’ (IM:
20/47). Such groupings and interpretations are thanks to the two different structures
of perceptual and imaging intentionality, whereby the former is soaked through with
reality (physical presence), the latter with irreality (transcendent absence). Thanks
to the real materials that are capable of being used by imaging consciousness in an
analogical way, a whole irreal realm opens up, which is full of both enchantments and
pitfalls. Indeed, imaging consciousness is ‘constituting, isolating, and annihilating’
(IM: 181/348) all at once—it is that ‘great irrealizing function’ (IM: 3/13) as Sartre
himself stated.
My question, now, is where image-consciousness would fit in this schema. I think
it should be quite clear; image-consciousness makes up a part of the imaginary
for Sartre, which means there is no difference in kind between this and phantasy.

8Icannot enter into Sartre’s interesting ideas with regard to conception here—see: IM: 8–9/24–25.
9 Sartre
later states that the use of world is ‘inexact’ (IM: 132/254) with reference to the imaginary,
because it cannot possibly contain the inexhaustibility of the real causal world.
2 Phenomenology and the Challenge of Virtuality 33

In fact, these two—image-consciousness and phantasy—would make up the two

main realms of Sartre’s imaginary. To clarify, let us take a straightforward case: to
perceive a tennis match, I simply go and watch it, in the flesh; to watch a tennis
match on television however, I use my capacity for image-consciousness to witness
an absent event through the analogical material provided to me (i.e. the TV images);
and finally, to phantasize a completely irreal tennis match, I need only make use of
my knowledge of tennis, as well as perhaps the movement of my eyes (Sartre’s claim
is that you cannot properly imagine a tennis ball moving without moving your eyes
somewhat), which thereby function as present analogical materials that evoke the
inexistent match.
Now, although there is a difference in kind for Sartre between watching a tennis
match in the flesh and watching one on TV—the first is a case of perception, the
second is a mode of the imaginary—for Sartre there is no formal, structural difference
between watching the match on TV and phantasizing a completely irreal one. This
is because, even though the image subject is real in the first instance but can be
fictional in the second, the basic structure remains the same for him. This structure
is that of the imaginary: feelings, sensations, our knowledge and physical things like
televisions can all help constitute imaging acts, which always transcend towards the
absent (i.e. the match through the TV) or inexistent (the phantasized match) object
through these very materials. Thus the structure is the same; in the imaginary there is
always analogical material (TV, movement of eyes, knowledge etc.) which is all used
to presentify something not there. Whether the absent object—the image subject—is
real, fictional, or ideal, regards the content of the act, not the structure. For Sartre it
is crucial that this latter remains fundamentally and formally the same, and thereby
essentially opposed in nature to perception.
According to Sartre, then, image-consciousness makes up a part of the imaginary,
because the imaginary always uses physical (TVs, brain activity) and phenomenal
experiences thereof to the extent that these two are not really distinguishable in any
useful sense for him. Thus, Husserl’s physical image and image object are collapsed
together and are in fact replaced by Sartre’s concept of the analogon, which can be
(a combination) of anything from televisions and computer screens, to brain activity,
emotions, and pieces of knowledge. The combination of analogical materials evoking
transcendent objects remains the same in all cases; whether the image is an actual
tennis match, or a unicorn, is of secondary importance to this more basic structure.
34 D. O’Shiel

2.5 The Challenge of Virtuality10

For Husserl image-consciousness seemed to contain components of both perception

and phantasy. Indeed, he even goes on to call it ‘perceptual imagination’ (Hua23:
85/79). For Sartre, we have just seen that image-consciousness makes up a significant
portion of the imaginary, even with its physical components. This is because these
latter are not used to perceive, but are precisely used as analogical materials to
presentify something that is not there.
There remains, however, a nagging feeling with regard to the either-or dichotomy
between perception and phantasy (Husserl) or the imaginary (Sartre), even with these
clarifications of the trickiest case, that of image-consciousness. Indeed, I believe an
important concept drawn from Heidegger, plus some explorative remarks into the
idea of virtuality in the philosophy of Bergson (and Deleuze’s study thereupon),
might show how the remaining tension between Husserl and Sartre may be framed
into an overall more dynamic picture that nonetheless keeps some of the most crucial
distinctions, albeit a bit more fluidly.
The Heidegger-inspired concept is that of forked being. In his long analysis of
Plato’s cave allegory (as well as the Theaetetus) Heidegger finishes ([1988, siglum:
ET/WW] 2009/1997: §44) with an intriguing and under-emphasized idea. The whole
work may be seen as a detailed exegesis, using Plato, of our dual capacity to see and
perceive on the one hand, but also be knowledgeable and imaginative on the other. In
short, the work concerns how we are always more than mere perception. This indeed
culminates with the idea of forked being,11 where the two tines of the fork are,
precisely, presentation (Gegenwärtigung) and presentification (Vergegenwärtigung):
‘the double-meaning of doxa: its forking into presentation and presentification’12
(ibid.). For Heidegger, our doxastic lives are a constantly lived dynamic between
these two basic elements:
The fork is the condition of the possibility of untruth, but at the same time the condition of
the possibility of truth; both are subject to the same conditions. What does the fork mean? It

10 Section Abstract—Sartre’s stark opposition between perception and the imaginary is questioned
here in its own turn, initially through a Heidegger-inspired notion of forked being, and then through
the more general trope of virtuality, as found in Bergson’s work (and Deleuze’s study thereupon).
Indeed, for Heidegger our existence is always forked between presentation and presentification,
which I argue can provide a more general and complementary metaphysical backdrop to the more
specific acts of perception and phantasy that Husserl and Sartre seemed to be primarily concerned
with. For Bergson, experiences rest metaphysically on two poles—pure perception and pure
memory—both of which not only essentially entail virtuality, but which also meet in a constant
dynamic of actualization. This hereby sets the stage for reconciling such a notion of virtuality
with a phenomenology of perception, phantasy, and image-consciousness—and I actually think it
can improve the latter, as I begin to explain in the subsequent section.
Key Terms—Actual, Bergson, Deleuze, Forked being, Heidegger, Pure memory, Pure
perception, Virtuality.
11 This precise expression is mine, although as one may see from the following it is quite directly

inspired by Heidegger’s text.

12 Translation modified—‚des Doppelsinns von δóξα: ihre Gabelung in Gegenwärtigung und Verge-

genwärtigung’.
2 Phenomenology and the Challenge of Virtuality 35

is the image of the fundamental constitution of human Dasein, of its essential construction.
(ibid.)

Under this interpretation, such forking between presentation (perception et al.) and
presentification (phantasy et al.) stands as the ‘image’—the symbol—for the ‘funda-
mental constitution’ of human reality (presentation) and irreality (presentification)
alike. Now one needs to ask: How might such claims tie in with Husserl and Sartre?
Does the idea of forked being not fly in the face of the earlier claims that either
one perceives or phantasizes, either one is occupied with the real or the non-real? I
believe there is no grand conflict here; actually I believe such a concept might com-
plement the afore-running. This is because I think Husserl and especially Sartre were
more concerned with individual acts of consciousness, and here it seems phenomeno-
logically accurate that, for the vast majority13 of the time, either one perceives or
one phantasizes at a given moment. Heidegger, on top of—or alongside—this, nev-
ertheless seems to emphasize that our general being is pervaded by a dual capacity
for both acts of presentation and presentification. One may even say that the present
and absent run on a continuum and thus there is no real difference in kind between
perception and imagination here. Nonetheless, when looking closer I believe Heideg-
ger’s main point is little different from—or at least can be reconciled with—Sartre’s
claim in the conclusion of L’imaginaire that the real presupposes the irreal just as
much as vice versa (cf. IM: 185–188/356–361). Therefore, under this interpretation I
propose there is a metaphysical, third-person backdrop to our lives that is a constantly
lived forked dynamic between presence and absence, reality and irreality, actuality
and possibility—while at the same time individual acts of perception and phantasy
are precisely that, individual, first-person acts within a more complex and dynamic
whole.
In fact, the concept of virtuality might by that precise conceptual bridge required
between the poles of real and irreal, present and absent, actual and possible. If it
is focused on, I think virtuality, although very challenging to comprehend in any
comprehensive manner, could bring some fluidity into important distinctions that do
remain overly rigid at times. In this manner, pure perception and pure image might
ultimately be two conceptual poles of one and the same lived dynamic, even though
within this dynamic you can still have phenomenological experiences of perception
as opposed to phantasy.
It is in the philosophy of Bergson where one finds the potential for a dynamic
concept of virtuality articulated with its most force. Bergson’s invaluable challenge
is that there is no such thing as a pure perception in praxis; pure perception is on
one conceptual pole (pure memory on the other) of a highly complex dynamic that is
ceaselessly played out between the dualistic realms of matter and memory, whereby
both nevertheless always already inform and format our lived bodily experiences.

13 I will not enter into well-known cases of illusion and hallucination (cf., for instance: Smith 2002),

although I will say that these can only be fully understood once one takes the temporal and interactive
aspects of both perception and imagination into account.
36 D. O’Shiel

Bergson begins his account with an apparent monism of the image. Indeed, even
matter is ‘a collection of “images”’14 (MM: 9/1) for Bergson. Bergson starts this
way to avoid both idealism and realism; the former slips into traps because it overly
focuses on representations, the latter on things. Bergson’s technical use of image tries
to establish a medium ground between these two—for him—unwarranted extremes:
‘by “image” we understand a certain existence which is more than that which the
idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing – an
existence situated halfway between the “thing” and the “representation”’15 (ibid.).
This means all objects are images for Bergson—indeed even ‘the brain is an image’
(MM: 19/13)—because it is too far to assert they are definitely like that without any
observer (i.e. a thing), but not enough to say that they are merely subject-dependent
phenomena (i.e. a representation).
Bergson’s monism of images might lead one to imply a monism in general. How-
ever, he goes on to articulate two poles to experience that differ not in degree but in
nature (cf. MM: 67/69). These are metaphysical hypotheses (see, for instance: MM:
34–35/31) used to found and ultimately explain our everyday lived experiences. The
first is pure perception:
[A] perception which exists in theory rather than in fact, which would have a being placed
where I am, living as I live, but absorbed in the present, and capable, by eliminating memory
in all of its forms, of obtaining a vision of matter both immediate and instantaneous.16 (MM:
34/31)

Pure perception is a hypothetical form of perception without any mediation of mem-

ory; it is a pure coalescence and immanence with matter itself. Such perception
‘would veritably be a part of things’17 (MM: 65/67).
On the other conceptual extreme, as already mentioned, is pure memory. This is
the realm of spirit or mind, no longer affected or effected by perceptions, affections,
and bodies—it has no need or concern for praxis and remains purely ineffectual in
the proper sense of the term (cf. MM: 142). Ultimately it is a type of pure, matterless
contemplation.
These two hypotheses provide a metaphysics to help us understand the basic
extremes that make our experiences possible. Bergson, however, is also well aware
that our actual experiences are always already a mixture of these extremes. Indeed,
‘there is no perception which is not full of memories’ (MM: 33/30). Through our
lived, conscious bodies, which are by nature constituted for praxis, pure perceptions
are always already contracted and limited through what is useful for action (cf. MM:

14 Translation modified—«un ensemble d’ «images»».

15 Translation modified—«par«image»nous entendons une certain existence qui est plus que ce que

l’idéaliste appelle une représentation, mais moins que ce que le réaliste appelle une chose – une
existence située à mi-chemin entre la «chose» et la «représentation»».
16 Translation modified—«une perception qui existe en droit plutôt qu’en fait, celle qu’aurait un être

placé où je suis, vivant comme je vis, mais absorbé dans le présent, et capable, par l’élimination
de la mémoire sous toutes ses formes, d’obtenir de la matière une vision à la fois immédiate et
instantanée.».
17 Translation modified—«ferait […] véritablement partie des choses».
2 Phenomenology and the Challenge of Virtuality 37

20/14); and pure memory, which is the ‘survival of past images’ (MM: 66/68), only
surfaces out of latency and purity if it again becomes useful for such actions (cf. ibid.).
Perception thus pulls memory into action, and memory contracts certain perceptions
into focus—all of this because of that lived, situated actuality that is our conscious
bodies, the ‘privileged image’ (see: MM: 661/3) at the crossroads of matter and mind.
Till now, there seems to be little mention of virtuality. Virtuality is, nonetheless, a
crucial and quite pervasive, if at times a rather implicit, concept running through all
of this. Indeed, on the side of our perception, which ‘measures our possible action
upon things’18 (MM: 56/57), all of those that are ‘separated from our body by an
interval’ (MM: 57/57) are ‘virtual action[s]’ (ibid.). In this manner, ‘[t]he objects
which surround my body reflect its possible action upon them’ (MM: 15–16)—
the objects in my vicinity constantly reflect my possible actions through my very
perception of them. This means there are virtual actions wherever I look, move, and
so on.
Virtuality has immense sway on the side of pure memory too. In fact, all mem-
ories—and the life of the mind in general—that are not pulled into action through
perception are in a ‘virtual state’ (MM: 240/270); they have the potential to be actu-
alized but are not (yet).
It would then seem that the realm of actuality is on the immediate axis of the
conscious body, where pure perception and pure memory intersect into a lived reality.
Even here, however, there are elements of virtuality for Bergson: ‘we have to take
into account the fact that our body is not a mathematical point in space, that its
virtual actions are complicated by, and impregnated with, real actions’ (MM: 58/59).
Indeed, one of Bergson’s overarching dictums in his philosophy is to start to think
of life in terms of lived time (durée) rather than in spatializations of such time.
And indeed, in duration there are constantly, by necessity, interstices of virtuality
within the very fabric of our lived realities. This is because conscious bodily life
is, indeed, on the crossroads of forces that pull, contract, and expand from both
directions; the actual lived moment is always already informed and conditioned by
virtualities that have been and will come to be—not too dissimilar to Husserl’s theory
of time-consciousness on this score.
Under this conception, then, it is not so much about real and irreal, present and
absent, but more about actual and virtual as the two most basic categories. And indeed,
Deleuze’s study of Bergson picks up and emphasizes this point. Here the virtual is not
in fact opposed to the real at all—‘the virtual as virtual has a reality’ (B: 100/103)—
but to the actual (actuel). In this manner, virtuality plays a key structuring role in
the various processes of actualization that govern not only our experiences, but also
the very constitution of our realities (and irrealities). Indeed, somewhat forgetting
virtuality on the side of pure perception, Deleuze focuses on the virtuality in what
he sees to be the three ‘major stages of the Bergsonian philosophy’19 (B: 13/1),
namely duration, memory, and the élan vital (see: ibid.). All of these are on the side
of a subjectivity (mind) that is never completely actual and is thus essentially rooted

18 Translation modified—«mesure notre action possible sur des choses».

19 Translation modified—«grandes étapes de la philosophie bergsonienne».
38 D. O’Shiel

in a reality of virtuality, which also ceaselessly has elements becoming actualized

through that which—for Deleuze—is the ‘absolute’ (B: 35/27): difference. Indeed, it
is precisely because life and its duration is so variegated and diverse that it essentially
has to be a ‘virtual multiplicity’ (B: 83/83), meaning that actual, current elements
make up only one non-independent—a moreover a very small—portion of a more
general and complex process of virtuality and actualization.

2.6 Real and Irreal Virtualities20

What to make of this, then? How could Bergson and Deleuze’s claims with regard
to virtuality be reconciled with the phenomenological perspective? Should one even
try to do this? What would be the point? I think that, although virtual and virtual-
ity are not terms used in phenomenology, one can, through minimal interpretation,
show how an implicit concept of virtuality is already at work therein. Moreover, I
think phenomenology can actually show that there are various types of virtuality,
not least real and irreal virtualities. Such an emphasis would not only show how
phenomenology can account for virtuality; it would also provide a very promising
initial framework through which we may address various contemporary issues, not
least the rise of virtual technologies and the potential changes and problems they are
introducing.
In this manner, and with Bergson’s and Deleuze’s emphasis on a more funda-
mental actual-virtual distinction notwithstanding, I maintain that phenomenology
still shows clear differing structural laws between perception and imagination, even
given a larger overall framework. Indeed, in contrast to Bergson phenomenology
starts, methodologically, from concrete first-person experiences. However, on top of
this I believe the idea of forked being has shown that there can be a more general meta-
physical backdrop to the individual phenomenal experiences, one governed more by
impersonal dynamics between presence and absence, real and irreal, actual and pos-
sible in general. In like thought, therefore, the metaphysical analyses of Bergson (and
Deleuze) can be seen to supplement, develop, and indeed challenge this basic phe-
nomenological stance through a rich notion of virtuality. In this manner, a focus on
virtuality may be able to enhance our understanding of our perceptual and imagina-

20 Section Abstract—Here I argue that although the virtual and virtuality are not really terms to be

found in classical phenomenology, I can start formulating the idea that there is an incredibly rich
theory therein, one that moreover has image-consciousness—as well as all the virtual technologies
it possibilizes—as its most powerful element. In this manner, virtuality may nuance the classical
phenomenological differences between perception and phantasy, real and irreal, present and absent,
as well as actual and possible. Indeed, I may even contend that virtual technology’s harnessing
of the power and captivation of image-consciousness is starting to blur such basic distinctions,
if not invert their power—and not always for the better. Regarding this, I discuss how real virtualities
on the perceptual plane get taken up and irrealized on the imaginary plane, whereby the virtual is
precisely those imaginary (irreal) objects that have a tendency to be real.
Key Terms—Imaginary, Irreal virtuality, Perception, Phenomenology, Real virtuality, Virtual
technology.
2 Phenomenology and the Challenge of Virtuality 39

tive experiences in order to give a more thoroughgoing and nuanced phenomenology,

as well as show how such insights may also contribute to our understanding of rising
virtual technologies and the manners in which they might be changing the ways we
think and behave.
In general, one may say that even very basic structures of perception and imag-
ination are becoming less clear-cut, whereby virtual technologies use their ever-
increasing powers to create and maintain images that increasingly approximate and
encroach upon our everyday perceptions. Indeed, certain portions of humanity might
be the first where digital imagination and the expansive virtual objects that come with
it are fast becoming the base materials for many people’s most significant experiences,
thereby supplanting—or at least partially merging with—the previously predominant
perceptual layer. Even further, with the latest brand of virtual technologies, although
strictly speaking their core remains imaginary (i.e. irreal, absent, and now primarily
digital objects), they have become increasingly anchored in webs of actual people
and machinery that arguably ultimately wish to annul the distinction between real
and irreal altogether. Indeed, their very names—virtual reality, augmented reality,
mixed reality—emphasize the apparent reality of such experiences, even though they
use real things (computers) to presentify experiences that can feel somewhat real but
are still, phenomenologically, ultimately of the irreal, imaginary register (i.e. tran-
scendent digital objects). Much of such technology—including Facebook’s mantra
of ‘connecting people’—is hereby trying to supplant the real (perceived) with the
irreal (imagined), in ever-elaborate ways. This is indeed what virtuality with regard
to such technology is: irreal (imaginary) phenomena with a strong tendency towards
actuality and reality, to the point of mimicking, enhancing, and even supplanting the
same.
Social media, online gaming, and upcoming VR, AR, and MR technologies are
thus cases in point here, where whole webs of people from all over the world become
united through so many virtual networks, even to the point of addiction. Contem-
porary philosophy thus needs to take the issue of virtuality very seriously, because
ever-innovative technologies are changing the very structures of some our most basic
conscious experiences, not least the perceived and imagined. I claim that it is still
very important to know this distinction, so that individuals and groups are less prone
to get carried away with the numberless irrealities that are constantly being fed across
the virtual wavelengths. Indeed, although a virtual world is now literally at many of
our fingertips, there is a normative issue of control here that might not be as clear-cut
as it seems.
To explain these points in a manner more related to the theory in question, I would
like to maintain that there still are important differences between reality and irreality,
and that, in fact, each has their own type of virtuality—types which moreover should
not be conflated.
With regard to the realm of perception, I may already provisionally outline three
fundamental types of real virtualities, which the history of philosophy has always
engaged with, but which I may now frame in a contemporary technological context.
Here we have the notions of self, world, and others. Each are essential elements of our
everyday perceptual experiences that we can never really be without—even though
40 D. O’Shiel

we never experience any of these categories directly. This is indeed the crux of such
perceptual, real virtuality: there is an essential ‘almost’ character to our experience
of it. Sometimes this is quite literal; ‘I’m virtually finished!’ means I am almost
finished. More generally though, the virtual in perception seems to be that which is
present without actually being fully so. With Bergson and Deleuze this was clear; the
actual is always already conditioned by the virtual, which can be actualized at any
moment from either matter or mind. With phenomenology it is less explicit, but it is
there too; Husserl’s pages and pages on the temporal and spatial horizonal natures
of perception, where there is always more to the object than actually given, thus
yielding the utter inexhaustibility of perception too, was fully endorsed by Sartre
and shows that there are always real virtualities in perception, whether this be further
aspects of my self (personality), the world and its things, or others. This was then
pushed further in Heidegger as a more general structural dynamic. All in all though,
even with Husserl and Sartre real virtualities on the perceptual level are all those
phenomena that are always sort of present but, when being strict, they are only every
given through things that actually are so.
To explicate a bit further, we experience our selves through our lived-bodies, our
personal reflections (ego), and our past; we experience the world through things and
causal laws that always already have Husserl’s horizonal structure of perception at
their core; and we experience other people through their bodies and their language
(both verbal and non). My whole self, the world as a whole, and the minds of others
are never actually, directly, and completely given to me, but they often feel as if they
are precisely because they are always indicated through so many related specific and
concrete phenomena. These, therefore, are the three broad categories of real virtuality
that our concrete experiences are never without. Indeed, they are real because the
structure our everyday perceptual (i.e. real) experiences; but they are also virtual
because they are never experienced fully or directly themselves. In Husserl’s terms,
they are horizonal; in Bergson and Deleuze’s, they border and constantly influence
the actual.
The three categories of real virtuality can then be distorted. On the real plane,
this can happen in cases like addiction and trauma where one’s self, world, and
relationship to others can greatly modify, often to very damaging and extreme lengths.
In addiction I think a type of hypervirtuality takes place where one privileged object
(or set of objects) starts to hold sway over everything one does and wishes for. In
traumas a kind of hidden virtuality can occur where a traumatic event governs one’s
sleeping and waking life without being able to be fully captured—and laid to rest,
forgotten—itself.
More significant here though is another type of distortion of our real virtualities,
namely the fact that there is an growing realm of irreal virtualities which are never-
theless tending ever towards the real. Indeed, in VR gaming for instance, the ultimate
aim in many seems to be to want to become experientially indistinguishable from
the real (i.e. the perceptual). In Facebook engagement is another instance, where
the idea often seems to be to supplant the need of actually meeting the person one
is chatting with in person. Such virtual technologies, no matter how advanced, do
remain irreal virtualities in the Sartrean sense of being imaginary however, because
2 Phenomenology and the Challenge of Virtuality 41

there is always analogical material through which one then experiences absent, irreal,
or reality-neutral things. Nonetheless, the pretension is there, from gaming to Face-
book, to supplant the perceptual world with an increasingly complex virtual world
that pretends to have all the benefits of the former and more—even though, actually,
it is of a different structure, of a different, imaginary nature.

2.7 Final Remarks

To finish, then: the trinity of real virtuality is self, world, and others. We are never
without them in our everyday perceptual experiences, even though none of them
are ever directly and fully given to us. Many of our foundational experiences only
exist because of these real virtualities; our personal, physical, and social realities
are always already preformatted by past, co-present, and future experiences which
constantly exert their influence on us at every turn. However, it is also these three
categories that are, thanks to the imaginary, irrealized onto a precisely irreal and
increasingly digital plane. On this plane the virtual is when the irreal tends towards
being, or at least supplanting, the significance of the real. Simply put, one might not
have to worry about one’s actual self and friends if one has a popular avatar in World
of Warcraft or Second Life; on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and the like one can
also create a persona to share with virtual others by representing an ideal version of
yourself through specific, favourable, and heavily curated images. With the growing
power of computer technology, who knows what is next around the corner here.
The boundaries between mind and machine are getting closer, and indeed we
might already be witnessing the first generation that talk more to their friends online
than irl. One would do well to remember, however, that the categories of the per-
ceived and the imagined are still proper phenomenological, experiential categories,
in that they are structurally different experiences, even if our capacity for image-
consciousness and its employment in so many virtual technologies is making the
lines more blurred and seemingly fluid. Whether such increasing fluidity is an over-
all good development remains to be seen. Before I can decide, I believe it is crucial
to further investigate the differences—and relations—between my acts of perception
and practical engagement on the one hand, and all of my screen-gazing and imaging
on the other. This, then, has sought just to make an initial exploration into a much
larger issue.

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Daniel O’Shiel, originally from Ireland, obtained his doctorate in philosophy at the Husserl
Archives, KU Leuven, Belgium, in 2016. The dissertation was entitled ‘Magical Being: a Sartrean
account of emotion and value, using the case of disgust’. After working in Leuven and then the
University of Sussex, Dr. O’Shiel now holds a three-year postdoctoral research position at the Uni-
versidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile. He researches the nature of perception and imagination
and how virtual technologies might be changing their relation. He has publications mainly in the
field of phenomenology, with more to come.
Chapter 3
Personality, Dissociation
and Organic-Psychic Latency in Pierre
Janet’s Account of Hysterical Symptoms

Edmundo Balsemão Pires

Abstract A definition of virtual or virtuality is not an easy task. Both words are
of recent application in Philosophy, even if the concept of virtual comes from a
respectable Latin tradition. Today’s meaning brings together the notions of potential-
ity, latency, imaginary representations, VR, and the forms of communication in digital
media. This contagious, and spontaneous synonymy fails to identify a common vein
and erases memory as a central notion. In the present essay, I’ll try to explain essential
features of the concept of virtual, taking the investigation of memory troubles in Pierre
Janet’s work as an exemplification. Pierre Janet’s work represents a rare combination
of medical observation and description of symptoms of mental illnesses, therapeutic
guidance in hypnosis and philosophical writing about the main psychological themes
of an epoch in transition from a Metaphysics of the Soul to the modern Experimental
Psychology. Pierre Janet’s intellectual evolution since the 1880s until the end of his
life (1947) is dominated by the philosophical project of a theory of the psychic system
supported by three basic pillars: a concept of personality, a theory of memory and a
sketch of a general theory of conduct. Such complex endeavour cannot be abstracted
from the initial connections with Jean-Martin Charcot’s school at La Salpêtrière
which meant a turning point in the tradition of the “animal magnetism” concerning
the treatment of epileptic-hysterical symptoms along with the contributions of Hyp-
polite Bernheim’s “Nancy School” of hypnotism. J.-M. Charcot’s or H. Bernheim’s
theorising about the organic and psychological aspects of the hypnotic treatment of
the hysterical symptoms was already aware of the difficulty in dealing with the extent
of the dissimulation of the patients regarding the symptoms of the illness, under hyp-
notic suggestion, even if Charcot insisted in the identification and cataloguing of the
organic expressions, such as contractures or the posture of the body in arc during the
attacks. The precise location of the “great hysteria” in the organic-psychic corridor
was itself a riddle. If a symptom is a special type of sign, in the case of the “great
hysteria” nobody knew for sure what it stood for. The clinical symptom of the attack
stood for an organic trouble with cerebral causes, a psychological interruption of
the normal sensorial and muscular movements or a disguise of the female desire?
Pierre Janet described many hysterical patients, somnambulism and multiple per-

E. Balsemão Pires (B)

Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 45

J. Braga (ed.), Conceiving Virtuality: From Art To Technology, Numanities - Arts
and Humanities in Progress 11, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24751-5_3
46 E. Balsemão Pires

sonality since his articles in La Revue Philosophique de la France et l’ Étranger,

a Journal founded by the philosopher, experimental psychologist and his intellec-
tual predecessor Théodule-Armand Ribot. The description of the case of the “great
hysterical” Lucie, treated by him, is an example of a theoretical hypothesising on
multiple personality and discontinuity of memories fragments. There are more cases
revealing the same relation between hysteria, somnambulism, personality dissocia-
tion and “alternating memory”. Decisively inspired by and corroborating P. Janet’s
ideas, S. Freud conceived also the essential of the hysterical sicknesses as disorders of
memory. The theme of memory came even more to the foreground in the dissertation
L’Automatisme Psychologique (1889). Here, the strange world of somnambulism
was scrutinised along with hysterical contractures and convulsions, anaesthesia, the
compulsion to repetition, obsessions, “automatic writing” in hysterical patients, mul-
tiple personality and “alternating memories”. In the depicted cases memory could
not be taken as a homogenous series of remembrances or as a stock of disposable
information but as a variable of the depth of the personalities’ inner formation. The
so-called “seconde existence” of some somnambulists referred not only unconscious
representations and unconscious thoughts but complete or inceptive latent personali-
ties provided with multiple virtual existences and multiple memories. Hypnosis was
the privileged technique to access to such multiple memories ignored by the official
personality. Later and after the writing of his M.D. Dissertation, Contribution à l’
Étude des Accidents Mentaux chez les Hystériques (1893), P. Janet addressed again
the themes of memory and alternating memories in a series of lectures at the Collège
de France (1927–28) but now according to the larger framework of a general theory
of conduct which included a description of the social actions participating in the
narrative construction of personal memories, and the role of social memory.

3.1 Conceiving the Virtual

3.1.1 Conceptual and Systematic Views

My approach consists in a dynamical, systemic view on the psychological operations,

sequentially organised, mobilising distinctions where the virtual can be identified as
a pole.
I’ll not search for things in themselves, such as “the virtual” in a metaphysical
dimension beyond the actuality of the psychic operations. I’ll deal with dynamical
distinctions that specify virtual elements in order to organize operational references
in cognitive sequences. The distinctions relying on operations are, in a particular
(operative) sense, always actual.
The objective of this study is not the discovery of forces beyond empirical phe-
nomena, but the identification of the psychological operations that use virtual or
virtuality as marks in distinctions emerging or vanishing with their own endurance
3 Personality, Dissociation and Organic-Psychic Latency … 47

as dynamical distinctions. Force, potency and other influences of the imagination,

transferred to the metaphysical domain, are not our concern.
Firstly, we need to identify the operations which mobilize distinctions referring
to a virtual side. In our conceptual notation, the notion of virtuality applies to a simi-
larity of functions referring to these operations in a variety of dynamical systems. A
consequence of our constructivist endeavour is the thesis of the virtual as an outcome
of distinctions in particular types of cognitive sequences of dynamical systems.
Secondly, comes the definition of the system’s identity. A dynamical system is
a unit of sequential processes whose elements consist of material components with
physic-chemical and (or) semiotic properties arranged by a program in order to per-
form particular sequences (as biological or artificial systems); or psychic systems
defined as dynamical units which elements are conscious acts (Erlebnisse) sequen-
tially oriented according to self-perceived meanings with their own semiotic lines;
or social systems characterised as dynamical units made of communications con-
nected with each other in a variety of semiotic sequences, under diverse symbolic
and semantical constraints and under conditions that pertain to the evolution of the
structure of society.
Processes running in each of these systems represent possibilities to the others, as
sources of information. The concrete changes of possibilities into actuality depend
on the cognitive outcomes of the systems’ sequences regarding what the system
takes as actual or possible in itself or in its environment for the processing of further
dynamical sequences.
Here, emerges a first notion of the virtual, as the possible in the environment of
systems.
Let me clarify how the virtual in dynamic systems reflects a determination of the
possible vis-à-vis the actual in concrete sequences.
Dynamic systems need to process information by distinguishing between attended
and not-attended events.
In psychic systems, such difference is ruled by an operation called attention. What
one calls attended events is an outcome of attention as a psychic operation responsible
for the discrimination of information under the attended/not-attended distinction.
Latency is a constructed reference to what is not the focal point of a perception
within the attentional frame. A description of the attentional frame shall include the
sensory-motor field of the perception with its halo. The sensory-motor dynamic of
perception is the responsible for the unceasing rotation of the latent to the focus
and from the focus to the latent. Accordingly, the attentional frame is bifacial. The
evolution of the focusing perspective with the incorporation of both sides makes the
progression of perception across its own history.
In psychic systems, the notion of the possible, as a predicate of events in the envi-
ronment of conscious acts, relies on attention and on its connection to perceptions,
as actual contents of consciousness, and the formation of an actuality/possibility
distinction for the processing of further psychological meaning.
In the organisation of knowledge, the concept of latency denotes the possibility
along its process of becoming. Latency is the concept of the attentional movement,
according to which what is now recognised in conscious attention was formerly an
48 E. Balsemão Pires

overlooked aspect of the environment, is occurring, can occur or already came to

actuality and faded out. In psychic systems, conscious attention is the frame where
the many combinations of the possible and the actual are organised in order to give to
perceptions a sequential orientation. A reference to latency entails the self-reflection
of the attentional sequences and the acknowledgement of their internal consistency
as part of the history of the perception.
One of the most familiar psychological operations that differentiates the virtual
from the real is memory.
Memory is already present in the attentional frame, if a dynamical processing
of psychological meaning is really at stake. The uses of memory are of paramount
interest for the description of central features of the virtual. They are related to the
construction of time and time intervals in dynamical meaning systems.
The close articulation of memory and time is much more complex than the com-
mon hypothesis of a consciousness that develops along a time arrow and memorises
events or representations.
There is memory outside psychic systems.
But let me exemplify with psychic systems for the purposes of the present essay.
If one follows basic aspects of the meaning of virtual one sees that they are related
to the scope of memory as an operation.
In a plain explanation, the virtual, in connection to memory, signifies the process of
saving and retrieving images of events in recollection. Differently from the compari-
son of a box containing items, in psychic systems memory is an active organisation of
the personal history, entails the self-reference of a person and a set of temporal marks
that are relevant for the self-recognition of the person. The temporal marks acquire
the form of images of events, seem to denote something in an inner environment, but
these are not independent of the image of the self. Memory’s virtuality includes the
articulation of self- and hetero-reference that produces the materials for biographies.
On the other hand, but along a path with crosscuts with memory, latency refers to
the scales of attention with its operational distinctions.
Many connections between memory and attention and operative cooperations are
conceivable. Here, the complex web of liaisons explains the use of virtual and latent
as conceptual equivalents.
I’ll propose the terms virtual and virtuality in connection to memory. Latent and
latency are to be applied to attention, and its distinctions, and to the attentional frame.
Between the history of perception and the personal history, attention and memory,
flows an intertwined stream.
Memory and attention reflect their results in each other, attention in memory and
memory in attention, because each of them defines what the other can attend to.
Possible and possibility are terms with a larger and more diffuse meaning. A con-
structivist approach to possibility avoids the conversion of terms, such as “possible”,
in transcendent realities. Thus, whenever one uses possibility one should be denoting
a system’s reference that can be equated with virtual or latent dimensions in opera-
tions entailing memory or attention. This is the right method to avoid metaphysical
hypostasis of analytical concepts.
3 Personality, Dissociation and Organic-Psychic Latency … 49

If the virtual is a mark of an operation (memory) and not an object or thing, the
best way to understand and describe its meaning is to describe the operation itself.
The same applies to latent and latency in regard to attention.
Massive uses of memory in dynamical systems, generally speaking, are related
to learning. Here, is a large domain of investigation of virtual dimensions relying on
two basic uses of memory, commonly converted in types—operative or dispositional
memory and representational or semantic memory. Both uses promote overlapping
references to virtual elements, virtual possibilities, and virtual environments.
In psychic systems, dispositional memory was depicted as sensory-motor, mus-
cular, organic and unconscious memory. Experimental psychologists devoted a sub-
stantial amount of scientific efforts in the description and measurement of the traces
of movements, stimulus and organic responses to inner and outer events. What Pierre
Janet tried to decipher under his “Automatisme Psychologique” is also included here.
Semantic memory, on the other hand, entails the use of concepts or representations,
of words and phrases.

3.1.2 Historical and Theoretical Materials

In my essay An Aesthetics of Movement (1870–1930) (Balsemão Pires 2018: passim)

I have described the main lines of the History of the concept of movement of the
Experimental Psychology, at the turn of the XIX century. I have examined the forma-
tion of the notion of the unconscious in close relation with the increasing appraisal
of the role of body’s movements in the formation of perceptions, especially after
Hermann von Helmholtz’s contribution to Physiological Optics, on one hand, and
in connection to the evolution of the treatments of the hysterical symptoms (with
Jean-Martin Charcot and his school), on the other hand. The rich Conceptual History
one finds in this context demands a fine scrutiny through a careful reading of the texts
of the authors that paved the way for the Freudian concept of the unconscious (Freud
and Breuer 1955: passim).
Many authors interested in psychological experimentation saw in the fact that
body’s movements, eye’s movements, sensory-motor displacements produce cog-
nitive consequences at the perception level, due to the influence of the mechanism
of attention, an argument to defend the view of a physiological unconscious. This
was justified mainly because they were convinced that there is not a continuous con-
sciousness of the movements but only the awareness of their final outcomes in the
present moment of the psychological attention—the perception’s content.
This means that the actuality of a conscious perception is certainly ruled by atten-
tion. However, attention depends on body’s displacements and organic rhythms which
cannot be contained in the actual moment of the consciousness identified with the
perception’s content. A vast domain of unattended sensory-motor events is envisaged
and latency or virtuality were among the earliest conceptual candidates to identify and
locate the traces of movement in the psychic system and in dispositional memories.
50 E. Balsemão Pires

Thus, organic movements, voluntary and involuntary, are seen as dimensions

responsible for knowledge production and knowledge substructures. Even if the
cognitive contents are assigned to verbal judgements and to the syntactic possibilities
of the subject-predicate relation, the general state of the psychic system is invested
with activity irreducible to the propositional “is” declared about a propositional
content.
The meaning of the traces of the organic movements in psychic systems becomes a
central psychological and clinical theme which will be crucial in the investigation of
memory and memory troubles, for instance in patients with dissociative or hysterical
distresses in XIX century Clinical Psychology (Janet 1892: passim).
In memory, the virtual is an aspect of the psychological dynamic put in activity
by sensory-motor events and it has no meaning if this activity ceases or is ignored
in psychological theory. The binaries conscious/unconscious, personal/impersonal,
voluntary/involuntary add further complexity to the reference of the virtual in mem-
ories (dispositional and semantic).
Richard Semon’s book Die Mneme (Semon1904: passim) was a descriptive essay
on the structure and operations of memory regarding the individual and the transmis-
sion of hereditary traits in the species. It was one of the first attempts to understand
the structural connections of memory to latency and an effort to observe memory at
a biological, evolutionary scale, anticipating Richard Dawkins’s ideas. R. Semon’s
notions about the transformative effect of the engrams in the reactive organic sub-
stances, the distinction between a first and a second “state of indifference” of these
substances, the action of the engrams in the transformation of the state of the organ-
ism, the latent phase and the activation mechanisms are still present in recent studies
on memory.
Cognitive psychologists proposed descriptive models for the psychological mem-
ory in the 1980s and 1990s. Douglas Hintzman, Bennet Murdock, Gary Gillund,
Richard Shiffrin and Walter Kintsch are leading authors in the field of mathematical
models of memory, carry on the seminal intuitions of R. Semon.
The operations of memory were basically conceived as recognition and recall
of images, previously stored. The mathematical modelling applies to the calculus of
probability in decisions regarding familiarity between items in recall and recognition.
Some of W. Kintsch’s studies on semantic memory were focused in recall and
recognition of words, in connection to the cognitive aspects of the understanding of
texts and textual contexts (Kintsch 1988; Kintsch, Welsch, Schmalhofer and Zimny
1990). The empirical data have shown that the activation processes mobilised during
the search and retrieval of stored semantic predicates of words and the decisions on
familiarity rely on associative chains in an associative semantic net, which is context
sensitive.
A connectionist reformulation of the tradition of the psychological association-
ism seems to be in accordance with the computational models and the semantic
webs of words search and recall. Gillund and Shiffrin (1984) claimed already that
the operations of recall and recognition of memory items cannot consist in direct
comparisons between stored and sample (target) items. The arousal of the impres-
sion of familiarity is more complex than a direct comparison and demands a “global
3 Personality, Dissociation and Organic-Psychic Latency … 51

model of familiarity” (Gillund and Shiffrin 1984: 8) entailing many links between
images-nodes activated in parallel. According to the psychologists, the images in
the web (i) include contextual information needed for the temporal recognition and
the temporal location; (ii) information concerning the item itself; (iii) information
inter-item which is used to link images to other images.
W. Kintsch’s essays follow also the associative model of memory recall and recog-
nition and conceive knowledge in associative nets, “the nodes of which are concepts
or propositions” (Kintsch 1988: 164–165). In this model, the nets of cognitive distri-
bution make a “coherence network” of meaning arousal whose levels are not limited
to the syntactical structures of the phrases in texts but reach the stock of the relevant
knowledge needed for an adequate understanding of the context of the text and of
the world’s situation. Such levels go across a surface structure to the text-base and
the “situational model” where the associative paths between nodes are discriminated
with different weights of probability for a decision regarding item’s familiarity. Every
actual decision about familiarity of items activates nodes at these levels according to
different relevancies.
In the generality of the recent computational models of memory recall and recog-
nition words’ meanings are compared to images, namely to semantic images of a
semantic memory. The authors did not address the difficulties of the conversion of
imagistic elements in semantic elements (psychic images vs. words). Consequently,
they seem not especially concerned with the kinetic substructures of the conscious-
ness of images and their semiotic weight.
However, the simple suggestion of a separation of a psychic image from the body’s
movements seems delicate and motivates logical resistances.
The psychological effects of the overlapping of dispositional memories and
semantic memories and the common virtual semiotic horizon were ignored. Nev-
ertheless, the presence of these effects in the formation of psychological meaning
from memories is a major theoretical challenge.
The common virtual horizon of the dispositional and the semantic dimensions
of memories joins the development of the image of the selves as representatives of
the identity of the system as a whole (ego in psychic systems) and not as a unity of
representations succeeding in the time’s arrow.
If the modelling of the convergence/divergence of image’s meanings and word’s
meanings is a problem for the Semiotics and Pragmatics of Language, it was already
one of the concerns of the French experimental psychologists at the turn of the XIX
century and Josef Breuer’s and S. Freud’s initial enigma regarding the clinical cases
of hysterical patients with language troubles (Freud and Breuer 1955: passim).
In the writings of the doctors, psychologists and philosophers developing their
ideas in the context of the clinical experimentalism of La Salpêtrière, the hysterical
patients represented a living laboratory for the exploration of theoretical hypothesis
about personality, memory and memory troubles, sensory-motor influence on the
flow of ideas, persistence of ideas, automatic effects in organic centres, the relations
of the dispositional and the semantic memory dimensions, etc.
52 E. Balsemão Pires

3.2 Mental Stigmata in Hysteria—Observing Memory

Troubles and Personality Dissociation with Pierre Janet

When J.-M. Charcot remodelled the Clinique at la Salpêtrière as a centre devoted to

the treatment of cases of hysteria with hypnosis, along the 1880s, a long semantic
evolution of the word “hysteria” was matured (see Arnaud 2015: passim).
In this semantic evolution, the differentiation of the somatic from the psychic was
a major theme, even if the qualification of the exact organic location of the causes
was doubtful and the psychological meaning of the patient’s acts an enigma.
In 1561, supported on a suggestion of Plato’s Timaeus 91b-92b Ambroise Paré,
a surgeon and anatomist, described the “suffocation of the uterus” as an organic
symptom caused by abdominal vapours induced by the movements of an animal
inside the female body. The pressure of the vapours coming from the lower parts
produces the spreading of the air towards the head occasioning epileptic attacks and
catalepsy. Some XVI century authors conceived the uterus as a “wanderer animal”
seeking satisfaction. From a disease caused by unpredictable female vapours its
semantic features evolve to include moral and religious dimensions, the semantic
lines of enthusiasm, or political and religious fanaticism along the first half of the
XVIII century, before the firming of the nosology suggesting a female sickness at
the beginning of the XIX century. The semantic scope of the word “hysteria” in
clinical and common uses comprises common traits with epilepsy and its cerebral
location but also moral components related to social habits, luxury, sexual behaviour,
frequency of sexual intercourse, dietary regime and also demonic possession.
According to the needs of the clinical observation, classification and description
Philippe Pinel (Paris) and Joseph-Marie Vigarous (Montpellier) gave scientific cred-
ibility to the interpretation of the symptoms of hysteria as female predicaments, at
the beginning of the XIX century. The detailed article “Hysteria” in Charles-Joseph
Panckoucke’s Dictionaire des Sciences Médicales (1818) follows the common ety-
mological definition of hysteria as uterine disorder or “suffocation de matrice, etran-
glement de l’ utérus, mal de mère (…) névrose utérine” and identifies its cyclical
phases.
Due to the influence of Franz Anton Mesmer’s ideas and techniques, an increasing
curiosity in the thaumaturgical influence of the physical environment in the mood and
mental states of suggestible people, through the action of a fluid, is easily traceable
at the end of the XVIII century. The Marquis de Puységur, a F. A. Mesmer’s follower,
systematised the moves of the magnetiser in order to induce certain mental condi-
tions in the patients. It is commonly believed that was de Puységur that accidentally
discovered hypnosis and the impact of hypnotic suggestion in the arising of the arti-
ficial somnambulism. Hypnotism as a technique that gradually developed from the
schools of “animal magnetism” can be summed up as a way to induce somnambular
states.
In La Médecine Psychologique (Janet 1923: passim), Pierre Janet remembers the
essential traits of the evolution of the hypnotic techniques from the magnetisers to
3 Personality, Dissociation and Organic-Psychic Latency … 53

J.-M. Charcot’s school in order to establish the role of the memory in the hysterical
disorders.
It is in the therapeutic context of the artificial somnambulism induced by hypnotic
passes, that lies the common interests about subconscious traumatic situations which
trigger deep sensory changes in the patients, including anaesthesia, contractures or
loss of muscular control that are visible in the spontaneous somnambulism.
According to P. Janet, memory studies had always been a central concern of the
magnetisers when they intervened in cases of provoked somnambulism. The notion
of traumatic memory was born when some organic effects were conceived as the
results of an emotional excess that causes psychic imbalances. J.-M. Charcot was
already interested in these phenomena where strong emotions, organic anomalies
as concomitant states and memory disturbances were patent. When signs of the
rupture of memory’s continuity get into the centre of the personal consciousness
their behavioural outcomes are known as psychological dissociations which P. Janet
refers to as “sub consciousness by breakdown.”
Fixed ideas are generated and repeated, automatisms get control over conscious
states fixing bunches of associative lines of the psychic life, escaping from the power
of will and personality. To the extent that these returning clusters of memories are
isolated from the rest of the psychic life of a person, one shall speak of dissoci-
ated blocks of memory. Many hysterical patients revealed a propensity to develop
dissociated memory clusters together with psychological automatisms.
Spontaneous somnambulism carries a special feature that the psychologist empha-
sises, namely the discontinuity of the memories of the patients and a more or less
accentuated separation between the conscious personality and the deeds and thoughts
of the somnambular.
If the natural occurring hysteria expresses itself through somnambular states of
mind, hypnosis can convert a lucid state of a hysterical patient in a somnambular one
in order to inspect the memories and locate the discontinuities and dissociation. This
was a common belief among the practitioners of hypnosis.
P. Janet also believed that hypnosis puts on hold the activity of consciousness,
usually identified with the awakened consciousness of the ego, replacing the usual
flow of mental associations by another stream of consciousness. Thus, hypnosis is a
gateway to the psychic meaning that ego does not remember when vigilant.
Assuming a version of the associative theory of memory, he wrote in La Médecine
Psychologique: c’ est quelquefois une autre vie, un autre caràctere, une autre
mémoire que est évoquée à la place de la conduite ordinaire; pour déterminer l’
hypnose on profite encore de la disposition de certains tendances à s’ activer d’ une
manière automatique à propos la moindre stimulation (Janet 1923: 72).
In the context of the hypnotic arousal of memory clusters we face two different
concepts of memory.
Common memory entails forgetting. There is no memory without forgetting. As
a psychological operation memory refers to an integration of recall and forgetting.
Memory relies on the concrete mental process of forgetting events.
Recall is a technique to deal with forgetting that constructs the forgotten. In com-
mon memories, recalling is the construction of the forgotten in order to bring it to
54 E. Balsemão Pires

conscious attention. The bringing of the forgotten to attention is the achievement of

the integration of recall and forgetting. A suitable integration of both poles brings
together the virtual aspects of memory and the latent aspects of attention. The associa-
tive theories of memory explain the linking mechanism that cross memory extraction
and the reference to the latent by the identification of semiotic paths between signs in
memory recalling and the attentional acts of denoting items. However, the common
path passing through memory and attention, the virtual and the latent, supposes the
active construction of the continuity of the psychic life. This is not possible in the
absence of a persona provided with a biography.
The existence of clusters of discontinuous memories puts difficulties that the
associative theories of memory can only partially address.
According to our interpretation, discontinuous memories express disarticulation
between the attentional mechanisms and memory in recall that is particularly evident
with dissociative troubles or personality split. In the context of the psychological
theories of the Psychotherapy of the hysterical symptoms, dissociative troubles must
be envisaged as phenomena occurring in the psycho-physical parallelism—organic
events produce psychological resonances, and the converse.
P. Janet considered that hypnosis favoured the formation and transformation of
tendencies. However, the concept of tendency is not very consistent and can be
charged with the attributes of the old metaphysics of potentiality, even if its use is in
conformity with the scientific worries about psycho-physical causality.
Ascribing to T. Ribot the responsibility to have reflected more maturely about the
role of the psychological tendencies in the psychic life, P. Janet could not avoid the
notion of potentiality in his concept of tendency. Such almost confessed conceptual
imprecision proves that he was very close to the understanding of the psychic system
as a system made of meaning differences, connecting images, memories and semantic
associations and not based on a substance or on energy levels separated from concrete
meaning sequences.
He was aware of the serial, sequential orientation of the tendencies as psycholog-
ical phenomena related to organic conditions: (…) la tendance est une disposition de
l’ organisme à produire une série de mouvements particuliers dans un ordre déter-
miné à la suite d’ une certaine stimulation sur un point dans la périphérie du corps
(Janet 1923: 72).
Nonetheless, a problem to be envisaged is the connection of force with meaning.
His conceptual analysis of tendency is detailed and even imperative in saying that
the tendencies “have a willingness to perform a series of movements in a particular
order”. It is added that this orientation is bound to a force “capable of producing this
series of movements” and the associated thoughts (Janet 1923: 73). We discover in
the content of this quotation a variety of notions and not a simple relation between
a force and its expression.
In the characterisation of the energy of the tendency, he continues: chaque ten-
dance semble être un réservoir d’ une certaine quantité de force en rapport avec la
complexité et l’ importance de l’acte qu’ elle determine (Janet 1923: 73). The prox-
imity to T. Ribot is even more evident when the author shows that the tendency is
loaded in its primitive relation to the body and communicates a part of that load to the
3 Personality, Dissociation and Organic-Psychic Latency … 55

secondary (psychological and meaningful) elaborations of the drive. The remaining

charge is put on hold, it is virtualised. A similar vision was supported by S. Freud
in his early essays on psychological topology, giving the impression of a substantial
inspiration on hydraulic models of the psychic system.
Even if he was mainly interested in the associative linkage of the tendency, justified
by his own version of the associative theory of memory, P. Janet followed the common
interpretation of the tendency as an organic force, provided with a load that can be
directed to goals, transferred, or delayed. The forces participating in the psychological
dynamism can be placed in reserve (becoming latent) can be spent or recovered.
Energy in reserve is mobilised to what the author calls “latent tendencies”.
As a technique to access forgotten events, hypnosis cancels the influence of the
higher psychological meaning elaborations over the lower levels in order to re-enact
the primitive investment of the organic force, with its primitive associations, caus-
ing the move of memory portions from their virtual stance to the centre of the actual
psychic life, especially visible in bodily expressions. Hypnosis can re-enact the asso-
ciative linkages of the force by annulling the control of the self over the recalling
process. The portions of memory items associated to the force may emerge as freed
signs of the primitive investment. This view on the transference of blocks of memory
from the initial associative clusters of the forces to an organic-psychic re-enactment,
without the self’s awareness, relies on the theory of the psychological automatism
and psychological repetition elaborated in 1889 in the dissertation L’ Automatisme
Psychologique.
In order to maintain his own version of the psychological energy, the psychic
system as system of charges, discharges and reserve P. Janet had to retouch the limits
of the autonomy of the psychological facts regarding physiology and had to rebuild,
according to his own purposes, T. Ribot’s concept of the organic personality(Ribot
1885: 161). This is the case, even if the obscure compound of psychological facts
with observations of organic correlations was precisely what he considered the mis-
take of the tradition that unfolded since mesmerism to J.-M. Charcot’s school at La
Salpêtrière.
The thesis remains the same previously supported. The knowledge of the physio-
logical conditions of conduct demands the possession of its psychological manifes-
tation and meaning. The talk about energy or psychic energy, or load, is inspired on
the concepts of physiology. However, physiological conditions are only revealed in
psychological signs, according to psychological elaborations, conscious or uncon-
scious. The transmitted idea of the clinicians worried by the oddity of the hysterical
symptoms was that if something escapes the power of the will and personality is
because its existence misses the psychological synthesis and consequently belongs
to the organic realm.
The dualism of the organic and the psychic remains.
One may be wondering why the hysterical afflictions seem bizarre. The bizarre
comes from the unpredictable of the natural causation of organic forces or from the
behavioural formations?
The dualism is reproduced in the concept of the hypnotic technique and also
in the conventional descriptions of the hysterical symptoms. Physiognomic ideas
56 E. Balsemão Pires

contained in J. M. Charcot’s or Paul Richer’s views on the connections of Hysteria

and Art (Charcot and Richer 1887) are revelations of the dualist’s inaccuracies, but
not a coherent new systematic proposal. In the particular context of the estimation of
the hysterical symptoms, the dualism of the organic and the psychological domains
has impact in Epistemology, Therapy and Nosology.
Hypnosis had a double value in the treatment of hysteria: in modifying the exci-
tatory state of the body to facilitate responses to stimuli, and in inducing matrixes-
images that lead to memory traces, emotions and sensations which activate the general
cycle of thought and action.
Such duality of hypnosis partially comes from its origins in mesmerism. When
applied to individual patients diagnosed with hysteria it reaches its full capacity in
the producing of its own splitting symptoms in the patients’ body, acts and talk—
somnambulism and memory dissociation.
In the clinical setting of the Paris school, the interesting thing with dissociation
and dissociative disorders is P. Janet’s claim that the kind of memory virtualisation
in hysteria, or obtained by hypnosis, corresponded to a particular type of psychic
reality, shaped deep inside the official persona of the patients as parallel, partially
unattended, personalities.
The psychologist interpreted the virtual memories of the hysterical patients as
manifestations of latent aspects in psychological meaning, modifying and converting
the mechanism of the reference to virtual elements (in memory) into the mechanism
of the reference to latent elements (in attention).
A latent memory exists. But how? How can the latent be, in some disguised way,
actual?
The essays addressing these questions show the scope of the dualistic approach to
hysterical symptoms and dissociations and perhaps may legitimate it, but equivocally,
by conceiving an “organic unconscious” as a part of the psyche located in the body.
It is the psychic environment of the psychic system that is here at stake and not an
organic location.
The case of J.-M. Charcot’s and P. Janet’s common patient “Madame D.” is an
example of an uncommon case of anterograde amnesia.
Madame D. was afflicted by the traumatic event of the false announcement of the
death of her husband. As a consequence of a panic attack, now the patient ignores
the main events of her life after a precise date (the Fourteenth of July 1891). She
couldn’t tell her personal story after this Fourteenth of July, because she was not able
to memorise new facts after that traumatic date. She has lost the memorising faculty.
Yet, she talks and thinks normally. According to P. Janet’s own presentation of this
clinical case in 1892 in the International Congress of Experimental Psychology, the
patient was not a hysterical.
By hypnosis and psychotherapy, the psychologist attempted to recover her mem-
ories. In her artificial somnambulism Madame D. remembered precisely those dates
and events that she has forgotten during the conscious states. Some pieces of her
loose talk mentioned events that she was not able to reconstruct if demanded in her
normal state of consciousness. Automatic writing and automatic speech proved to
be a method to make explicit her personal history after the 14th of July.
3 Personality, Dissociation and Organic-Psychic Latency … 57

In his presentation, P. Janet added a theoretical conclusion to the clinical descrip-

tion. Memory dissociation in memory loss is an effect of a deficient personality
synthesis (“perception personnelle”), but the memories are there (Janet 1892: 29).
Do memories have a location?

3.3 Alternating Memories and Multiple Personalities

[Inner Alter-Ego(s)]. Some Conclusions from Clinical
Data

Théodule Ribot was interested in the theme of the “subjective awareness of the
organic states,” notion he ascribed to Condillac and Maine de Biran (Ribot 1885:
25–26).
The neurological links in the brain’s cells, the physiological functions and the
sense of personality are entangled in the organism through a “coordination of ner-
vous actions” or by the equivalent of a “physical personality” (Ribot 1885: 161)
that develops spontaneously, but never leaves a full image of itself. The conscious
personality is a coordination of coordinations built on the “physical personality” and
ultimately relying on the brain. Coming from the organic personality no uniform
conscious information follows.
T. Ribot regarded the relation of the conscious person (the conscious self) to the
organic personality as akin to what a topographic survey plane is vis-à-vis the country
it represents—un levé de plan topographique par rapport au pays qu’ il représente
(Ribot 1885: 165).
When coming into the detail of the analysis of the “affective personality disorders”,
T. Ribot claimed that personality is the result of the influence of two factors—the
body’s constitution with its tendencies and feelings, and memory.
If these two factors fail to converge in their development or if the first factor
evolves but not the second, then a more or less severe dissociation may emerge
with a metamorphosis of the ego. A disruption may develop even further leading to a
complete separation of the self and its organic bases. Famous examples of personality
dissociation were the Lady of Mac Nish and the Felida X, reported by the doctor
Eugène Azam.
From 1885 to 1888 P. Janet wrote some articles about cases of hysteria, somnam-
bulism, memory dissociation and double personality, including many theoretical
comments close to T. Ribot’s notion of the unconscious and to his predecessor’s idea
of a discontinuous terrain between memory, movements and the sense of the body.
The narratives of the clinical cases of double personality were motive of scientific
curiosity in late XIX century. In his The Principles of Psychology (1890), William
James quoted substantially P. Janet’s experiments with the patient “Lucie”.
The case of Lucie, whose name is spelled L. in the early descriptive articles, is
again depicted in the second edition (1911) of L’ État Mental des Hystériques as an
58 E. Balsemão Pires

example of triple personality with anaesthesia and absence of a distinct muscular

perception in the awakened state.
Due to her anaesthesia and other motor troubles Lucie suffers from a disorder
common to all hysterical patients that P. Janet called narrowing of the field of con-
sciousness—“rétrécissement du champ de la conscience” (Janet 1911: 101). The
sensorial condition of many hysterical patients is frequently different of the ordinary
people, since they alternate their predominant sensorial type from the somnambular
to the awakened states. If their type is predominantly visual in the awakened condi-
tion it is expectable that during somnambulism they behave like predominant motor
persons.
The alternating value of the sensory-motor type corresponds to alternating memo-
ries and associative series operating as imperative clusters of sequences of meaning.
Such rule is verified if the doctor submits the patients to post-hypnotic suggestions,
observes and describes their behaviour.
Once under suggestion in the somnambular or awakened states the patients exe-
cute instructions that they forget immediately after. The actions they accomplish
are in the proper sense subconscious (Janet 1911: 219) but they are not mechanical
reflexes. On the contrary, they are described as “intelligent acts” and as such con-
nected to sensations and memories. The experiences with induced automatic writing
under post-hypnotic instructions are counted among the best proofs of the subcon-
scious intelligence. The doctor observes the articulated symbolic thought and the
corresponding actions.
In the first article on the case of L. (Janet 1886a) P. Janet concluded that the progres-
sion and repetition of the hypnotic sessions led the patient to a loss of consciousness
of the fact of being influenced by suggestions. The absence of a consciousness of the
post-hypnotic guidance accentuated the automatic execution of the demanded acts
until the psychological automatism takes the complete control over the person.
Consequently, the dissociation of the personality’s images and the dissociative
memories emerge and deliver behavioural traces.
After a prolonged use of hypnosis Lucie revealed three different personalities
with distinct memories. Additionally, the memory’s clusters seem to orbit around
the personalities. In 1886, P. Janet described these phenomena under the notion of
unconscious processes.
The hysterical spontaneous somnambulism was normally described as a dissocia-
tion of two associative streams occurring simultaneously. The simultaneous charac-
ter of the flow of the dissociated streams was inferred form the fact that the patients
reported feelings in the third person, similar to those occurring in the popular descrip-
tions of demonic possession.
Feelings in the third person are special signs of dissociative troubles. However, in
the case of Lucie/Adrienne the personality’s split was larger. Applying to her his the-
ory of the multiple streams of consciousness P. Janet diagnosed a multiple personality
disorder with three different personalities with their own memory’s clusters.
His conclusive diagnosis relied on the observation and description of the appar-
ent gravitational structure of the clusters of memory and their personalities attrac-
3 Personality, Dissociation and Organic-Psychic Latency … 59

tors. Each memory cluster referred to a unifying vector identified with a personal
biography.
The diagnosis of Lucie’s multiple personalities is not the most critical. The psy-
chologist mentioned Lucie, other cases of his own and from the published clinical
information as illustrations of the correlation between his theory of personality and
his theory of memory.
P. Janet’s hypotheses are rich in consequences in a contemporary account of the
connections between memory’s recall, recognition and self-reference of the system
that mobilizes memory resources. Undeniably, psychological operations dealing with
memory cannot be abstracted from the formation of images of a self. On their own
basis, images of the self are attractors of memories as agents of the virtual-real
distinction of the psychic system.
Clarifying, let us regain P. Janet’s clinical data.
If the doctor postpones the execution of the post-hypnotic instructions to a future
period of time and gives to the patient an order to do so and so 13 days later, for exam-
ple, the patient will keep the instructions in the latent memory of the corresponding
personality accountable for the accomplishment of the deeds. These instructions are
present in the latent personal memory (block 2) but they are missing in the actual
personal memory (block 1). The hypnotic provoked somnambulism is a technique to
deal with the distribution of latency and actuality in the awakened person, forcing, in
the hypnotic sleep, a new distribution of the virtual-real distinction in the memory’s
dissociated blocks. This is the main reason for the use of the difference latent-actual
(in attention) as equivalent to the distinction virtual-real (in memory).
In the case of Lucie’s automatic writing under hypnosis the splitting of the con-
sciousness is completed and articulated with a person (Adrienne) that apparently is
ignored from the official persona when awakened. From her memories and associa-
tive remembrances, the other memories vanished.
The personal memories are constructed according to discontinuous separated
blocks. What is registered in one associative block is completely absent from the
other and there is no available superior synthesis for the disjoint memory blocks.
Except in the episodes of disruptive behaviour, also the mechanism of recall seems
to obey to the principle that links the representation of the inner persons and the
corresponding memory clusters. Our clinician argued that these disjunctive memo-
ries and their cyclical emergence and breakdowns prove not only the existence of
an unconscious intelligence but a real separation of the inner personalities that are
associated to the memory blocks which also emerge and disappear in the same cycles.
Later, and clarifying his former views, P. Janet defined personality as a human
construction instead of a metaphysical substance that owes its stability to the active
articulation of psychological, social and temporal dimensions of a psychic system
connected to an organism. A person is an operative synthesis of operations and
functions designed in order to ascribe these operations and functions to itself as a
centre.
Here, a challenge is a clearer understanding of the prolonged use of the hypnotic
techniques that may accentuate the splitting of the personalities. Is the splitting solely
due to the prolonged hypnotic intervention?
60 E. Balsemão Pires

He believed that at a certain extent hypnosis did not modify essentially the patient’s
personality disorders, that were already there. On the other hand, he affirms that one
has only access to the unconscious by inference.
If the existence and the determinations of the virtual personalities are only granted
by inference, the hypnotic techniques are some of the inferential tools mobilised in
the revealing of the dissociated memories. The use of artificial somnambulism in
the restoring of a psychological synthesis is a well-known technical consequence of
this idea of an inferential access to the unconscious entailing a general instruction to
avoid externalisations of psychological concepts in theoretical modelling.
However, the problem of the meaning of a virtual existence with no possible
actualisation remains. In the terms of P. Janet’s early writings this question is very
difficult to solve, mainly because the author seems to hesitantly assume a realism of
the lost memories in parallel to the inferential status of the unconscious.
He suspected already that it would be not very coherent, if at all suitable, a realism
of pure virtual determinations in parallel with an operative and narrative model of
the psychic system, personality and memory.
In a more consistent formulation one would claim that the lost memory blocks were
inferred from the cyclical failure to actualise their complete content and they have
no other determinations except those discovered exactly when the efforts to grasp
their full determination fail, with hypnosis or not. What has been said with respect
to memory blocks shall be emphasised regarding the observation of the unconscious
personalities.
In 1887 and 1888 in two articles published in the Revue Philosophique de la
France et de l’ Étranger P. Janet resumed the case of L. to say that automatic writing
is unconscious, outwardly. What is really there is a personality formed within another
personality, in which one of them is unaware of what the other does or thinks. The
notion of the unconscious must be attributed to the actions or thinking processes
that took place in a personality with ignorance of the other(s). The unconscious is
that which cannot be described in the awakened state of one of them and which is
accessed, says P. Janet, “by hypothesis” (Janet 1887: 452).
With respect to L. what can be said is that a set of acts and thoughts of this type
are grouped around a new psychological synthesis that should be called personality.
Adrienne, this new personality, makes herself known through automatic writing. This
is her outer signature.
In 1888, in the last of these articles before the book on Psychological Automa-
tism, P. Janet retakes the discussion of the concept of unconscious in connection to
somnambulism, automatic writing and hypnotic suggestion, referring again the case
of L. (Adrienne). It is in the 1888 article that the psychologist suggests a model of
the formation of memories and psychic meaning in general in three differentiated
layers, according to the degree of depth reached by unconscious acts. Henceforth,
the relation of memory blocks to personality is the basic configuration mobilised in
the description of the dissociative disorders.
The clarification of the problem of the existence of virtual determinations will
guide us along a brief reading of the Lectures on the Evolution of Memory and the
Notion of Time delivered by P. Janet at Le Collège de France, in 1927–28.
3 Personality, Dissociation and Organic-Psychic Latency … 61

Le passé n’existe pas. Il est mort (Janet 2006: 188) said the philosopher
W. Hamilton according to a quote in the Lectures.
In the Lectures, the philosopher seeks to prove that memory relies on narration
and that without a sequential history there is no structure for operations dealing with
memory.
There are no real doubles in the mind. It is our use of the past in narrations that
produces memories and memory troubles, creating the illusion of doubles (inner-
egos) demanding or commanding actions to the official persona.
The Lectures entail a dialogue with H. Bergson’s Matière et Mémoire (Bergson
1896, 1939) and a critique of Bergson’s realism of the virtual as well as an overcoming
of the author’s own hesitations in the 1880s. Approximately, we can describe this
intellectual evolution as a move from a unique concept of memory to the later dualism
of repetition and memory and the transfiguration of the former memory disorders in
the diseases of narration.
These are complex moves in the path toward a pragmatic understanding of the
psychic system relying on the concepts of energy, meaning and conduct and on
the approach to the social dimension of personality. P. Janet could not use the con-
temporary tools of Narratology in his own approach of the narrative order of the
psychological memory. But his references to this point are an inspiration for the
proposal of a narrative turn in the studies of memory in the Cognitive Sciences.
If passive conservation is not a predicate of memory, which role shall we reserve
to those motor phenomena that seem oriented to a restitutio ad integrum, especially in
the movements and in automatic repetition? Are psychological automatisms mechan-
ical reflexes?
P. Janet rejected this solution, because, as W. James also pointed out, the move-
ments of the somnambular hysterics were followed by feelings (James 1890 I: 229).
What P. Janet calls restitutio ad integrum in automatic repetition is neither a reflex
nor representative memory.
The first step to a narrative theory of memory is the differentiation of repetition
and true memory which P. Janet accomplishes along a critical comment to Henri
Bergson’s distinction of “motor remembrance” and “representative remembrance”
in Matière et Mémoire.
Firstly, he argues that there is movement in the representative remembrances
and says that the notion of representation in the remembrance is the hard tribute
H. Bergson paid to the concept of memory as intuition of the past. Secondly, he
corrects his own former notion of memory sustaining a new distinction between
automatic repetition and true memory.
The clinical case of Irène exemplifies the negation of the death of her mother by
amnesia of the death circumstances. Initially, observing the structure of the memory
trouble the psychologist thought that Irène was a patient with no remembrances.
After a few weeks of treatment, she begun a ritual around a bed, where an imaginary
dying person was agonising. Irène’s repeated movements obeyed to the rules of
Joseph Grasset’s polygon of the psychological automatism: once an element (vertices
in the polygonal figure) is invoked the others follow in an associative sequential
linkage. The repeated movements in the mourning deeds of her ritual were automatic
62 E. Balsemão Pires

expressions like motor memories of an absent representative remembrance, like a

virtual halo of the past?
The persistence of a halo or a mysterious influence of past events in the present
of consciousness is a thesis ascribed by P. Janet to H. Bergson’s notion of the present
(Janet 2006: 309). Some popular interpretations of S. Freud’s unconscious have
supported an equivalent version of the virtual halo. However, a definition of such
halo is impossible and if one sustains that memory entails narration across a personal
history, the presence of a halo is excluded.
Two hypotheses can be outlined from the Lectures.
1. Repetition, psychological automatism in memory and somnambular repetition,
especially, realize in the body and in movements what the representative memory
associated to the discourse and the structure of verbal judgements has blocked
in the intellectual images. The clinical practice reported what can be recognised
as a rule: an obstruction in the completion of a representative remembrance is
counterweighted by the exaggeration of the details of the automatic acts (Janet
2006: 166–167).
2. Even if one states that psychological automatisms are not pure reflexes they are
not real memories, because they cannot bring narratives to a conclusion. I propose
to call them the memory’s representamen, or memory’s token.
In somnambulism, the psychological imbalance between automatisms and dis-
cursive memory shows to the psychologist that true memory is never identical with
automatic repetition. Thus, it is not appropriate to talk indifferently of memory and
restitutio ad integrum of the automatic movements.
Going further, P. Janet’s new thesis in the Lectures allows us to say that when
one talks about a returning rest this is always the rest of the discourse, a non-said of
the said, the virtual of the symbolic real and there is no other sense in talking about
virtual beings, as such.
Taking into consideration the role of the images of the self in the narrative pro-
cesses attached to the mechanisms of recall and recognition, a part of a theory of
psychological memory demands the appropriate concept of person.
New difficulties are awaiting in the articulation of personality and memory clus-
ters. One of these is the problem of the discrimination of the social aspects of per-
sonality that are implied in the psychological persona with its memories.

3.4 Social Conducts—The Outer Alter-Ego(s)

From the case of Irène’s mourning P. Janet inferred three main theoretical thesis.
Firstly, it is the whole of the conscious life as represented in the present of a course
of action that selects remembrances for the narratives of the self, linking actions
and events in the continuity of a biography; secondly, automatic remembrances and
memory are distinct in that memory entails a socialised ego-alter meaning; thirdly,
restitutio ad integrum and memory are at opposed sides in the role of keeping the
3 Personality, Dissociation and Organic-Psychic Latency … 63

continuity of mental and social life and restitutio is frequently the symptom of psycho-
asthenia or incapacity to begin or terminate actions’ sequences meaningful to others.
In the Lectures, the consideration of the social dimension of personality gave
also a special emphasis to the communicative dimensions associated to memory, in
retention, recall and recognition mechanisms embedded in defined communicative
operations, as the commissions.
One of the essential features of social life according to P. Janet’s Lectures is the
relation of a command to a consequence of a command in interpersonal actions
mediated by language and socially shared symbols.
Memory is active in interpersonal actions, as social memory, whenever alter is
absent from the space/time environment of ego and such absence is processed in
observations and anticipations of perceptions. The scrutiny of the social treatment
and communicative processing of the absence of the interlocutors is relevant in cases
of deferred transmission of messages or in mediated transmissions, mobilising third
parties. To communicate in the assumption of the absence of the addressees is also the
beginning of society as an autonomous meaning system. Also in the social setting
is true that operations dealing with memory are linked to operations dealing with
attention.
Many social actions are commissions developing in the absence of the addressee
(alter). Spatial absence demands transportation and motor delivery efforts, and tem-
poral absence a more or less complex anticipation of the psycho-social mechanisms
of time deferring and of their impact in the energy of the person(s) available for
the articulation of functions. P. Janet claimed that a fully developed self-conscious
personality, as articulation centre of psychological operations and functions, can
only emerge from the awareness to the social demands of interpersonal commissions
dealing with the absence of someone in the space/time.
The notion of memory is a social construction in such a strong sense that one
explicitly denies relevance to the habitual psychological convention (H. Bergson) of
a psychological memory—un homme seul n’a pas de memoire et n’en a pas besoin
(Janet 2006: 219–220). Discussing the distinction of “acts of presence” and “conducts
in absence”, the psychologist conceived memory as a struggle against absence that
can be defeated in cases of a failure of adaptation to the social needs of the measure of
the time’s blocks of public time. Communicative incapacities seem to be associated
to inconsistencies in the psychological integration of public time with its effects in
the construction of personal time and personal memories.
According to a communicative meta-modelling of the action’s sequences, in the
Lectures the study of interpersonal commissions led the author to the analysis of the
psychological function of the alter’s absence from the (space/time) psychic environ-
ment of ego and the psychic traces of the temporal deferring of actions.
Marcel Mauss’s study of the social-temporal structure of the rituals of beginning
and termination in tribal societies led P. Janet to the conviction that the beginning and
termination of actions are not psychological creations but social ceremonies relying
on the social utility. Even if the Lectures did not offer a detailed conceptual analysis
of the social-psychic interdependence of the construction of the temporal duration,
the idea of the social ceremonialisation of duration segments is a major discovery.
64 E. Balsemão Pires

Ceremonialisation of time is a very complex notion and surely demands a great

amount of psychic energy and the actualisation of socialised mechanisms of narra-
tion. Consequently, memory is not a primitive fact neither in the phylogenetic acqui-
sitions nor in ontogenesis. According to the levels required for the socio-symbolic
articulations occurring in public time’s recognition and psychological integration,
the animals do not have memory but reflex conservation of automatisms.
Durée means a defined block of time with its own social and psychological den-
sity, like a sequential structure of meaning which is a product of observations and
of a measure of time accessible to internal observations. Both, the beginning and
termination of la durée are defined by social ceremonies of beginning and termina-
tion that cause psychological stress, demand a focus of attention and concentrated
neuro-muscular efforts, in contrast to H. Bergson’s reference to an inner flow.
The absence of a competent psychological integration of the social demands of
time’s ceremonialisation is commonly the cause or the effect of P. Janet’s “explosive
acts”, he observed in the epileptic attacks (Janet 2006: 70–71).
In epilepsy, there are no signs of beginning acts or termination acts, properly
defined. The sudden attacks are like “primitive acts”, occurring ex abrupto, similar
to reflex responses. The therapist follows their symptoms in psychoses, some neuro-
sis, and in epilepsy. Perhaps emphatically, P. Janet uses the notions of “neurosis of
beginning” and “troubles of termination”, considers melancholia a general inability
to act and prolonged morbid mourning as a sign of an incapacity to terminate. Some
symptoms in these diseases represent a malformation of the social meaning of time
and denote incapacities in the realisation of the outer alter-ego in the social envi-
ronment of the ego’s psychic system. The incapacity to realise the alter-ego in the
outer social environment entailing a competent time measure regarding delivery of
messages or execution of actions discloses itself in the regressive orientation to the
“primitive acts” of the automatic responses, in motor repetition and in the memory
troubles of psychological automatisms.
P. Janet’s communicative meta-modelling of the actions’ sequences enlightens
the conversion of an ego-alter space/time coordination into an addresser/addressee
relation. In the Lectures (1927–28), the consequences of the conversion were not fully
scrutinised. A central consequence, grasped by the psychologist, is the following of
the analogy between the accomplishing of an action and a satisfactory delivery of a
message.
Many accidents can happen in the delivering of messages in interpersonal com-
munication. Some of them are due to deficient motor efforts. These are psycho-motor
failures that have communicative impact which produces again a psychological re-
entry. Other obstacles pertain to the use of communication itself. However, both
reveal a lack of the realisation of the outer alter-ego and an insufficient notion of the
symbolic shared social reality.
It was in 1937 in a speech delivered to the Congress of Psychology, “Les Con-
duites Sociales”, published in the following year, that P. Janet addressed the theme
of the psychological re-entries of the social actions with reference to the delusion
of persecution or more specifically the verbal hallucination in persecutory delirium.
According to his interpretation, the delirium of persecution and the corresponding
3 Personality, Dissociation and Organic-Psychic Latency … 65

verbal hallucinations refer to the censorship that the patients make about themselves.
Gaëtan G. de Clérambault was a pioneer in the examination of the psycho-social cor-
ridor in the study of projected self-censorship. Both P. Janet and G. G. de Clérambault
were interested in the development of psychological automatisms related to the phe-
nomena of personalities’ fusions in persecutory hallucinations or in the bizarre cases
of “theft of thought”. The situations in which people feel guilty about everything that
happens or cases of subjective over-account are “problems of social objectivation and
subjectivation” (troubles de l’ objectivation et de la subjectivation sociales).

3.5 Conclusions

Allow me a reconstruction from a systemic perspective, with an implicit prolepsis

to future work.
1. Psychic and communicative systems are evolving forms provided with operative
autonomy whose elements are organised according to sequential R-O-I series
(representamen—object—interpretant, according to Charles Sanders Peirce’s
semiotic terminology) and agreeing to the distinction actuality/possibility. Due
to observations, each system drives also a cognitive orientation of the meaning
sequences. Cognition is a form that adapts meaning sequential elements and
the actual/possible distinction to an inner/outer; system/environment difference.
This binary can be rebuilt inside itself (re-entry), generating virtual inner/outer
twin binaries—inner alter ego(s) in psychic systems. Communicative systems
and psychic systems co-evolve through semiotic chains and such co-evolution
produces cognitive rebuilding of cognitive forms from one system into the other
in many ways.
2. Alternating memories in somnambulism and in dissociated personalities are
aspects of the withdrawal of communication to the inner environment of the psy-
chic system, keeping the characteristics of the non-delivered signs or incomplete
signs cut from their mental or communicative interpretants. As typical psychic
formations, the multiple personalities are in the true sense virtual constructions—
they are those to whom ego could not speak or those who could not speak to the
ego. Notwithstanding, the personae are captured within the addresser-addressee
form distinguishing an ego and alter, like a psychic shadow of the communica-
tion between real people. They are literally virtual alter-ego(s) also because they
emerge as buried memories in the process of narration. Buried memories are not
objects in the proper sense but coagulated semiotic silhouettes of non-delivered
messages orbiting around virtual personalities. P. Janet used the metaphor of the
capsule of time which is appropriate to describe such encapsulated personalities
with whom ego repeats the gestures of its incapacity to accomplish a direct talk,
when telling first-person stories through the distressed body’s signs.
66 E. Balsemão Pires

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Van Dijk, Teun A., and Walter Kintsch. 1983. Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. New York:
Academic Press.
Wundt, Wilhelm M. 1892. Hypnotismus und Suggestion. Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann.

Edmundo Balsemão Pires is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Coimbra. Concluded

his Licenciatura in Philosophy (1980–1985), Master and Ph.D. studies at the Faculty of Letters of
the University of Coimbra, Portugal (M.A.: 1986–1990|Ph.D.: 1991–1999). Authored six books on
themes of his specialization—Hegel, Luhmann, Theory of Society, Theory of Systems and Aes-
thetics. From 2007 to the present has anchored his research on three projects—Individuation of
Modern Society, Foundations of Modern Aesthetics, Sequentiality of Meaning.
Chapter 4
Sonic Virtuality, Environment,
and Presence

Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard

Abstract The article presents a brief introduction to the concept of sonic virtuality,
a view of sound as a multi-modal, emergent perception that provides a framework
that has since been used to provide an explanation of the formation of environments.
Additionally, the article uses such concepts to explain the phenomenon of presence,
not only in virtual worlds but also in actual worlds. The view put forward is that
environment is an emergent perception, formed from the hypothetical modelling of
salient worlds of sensory things, and it is in the environment that we feel present.
The article ends with some thoughts on the use of biofeedback in computer games
as part of the immersive technology designed to facilitate presence in such worlds.

4.1 Introduction

Sonic virtuality is a concept that provides a means to think about sound in a way that
includes thinking on the phenomenon of virtuality. The concept provides a framework
that allows developments to be actualized in light of the practical virtuality that forms
the experience of our everyday lives and that also forms the experience of artificial
worlds such as those found in Virtual Reality and computer games.
I have been developing the concept of sonic virtuality since it was first formulated
(Garner and Grimshaw 2014; Grimshaw and Garner 2014a, 2015) by expanding it
to include thinking on environment and presence both in actual worlds, that is, our
everyday, non-computer-mediated experience, and those worlds typically termed
virtual. The concept itself grew out of a theoretical framework that was designed
to explain the practice of sound in computer games, particularly those with a first-
person perspective, and that illuminated the function and experience of sound in such
worlds (Grimshaw 2008). Not only has it proved to be a useful concept to drive the
development of systems leveraging biofeedback between the player and the audio-
processing capabilities of game engines (Garner and Grimshaw 2013; Grimshaw and
Garner 2014b; Garner 2016) but it has also proven useful as a means to understand our

M. Grimshaw-Aagaard (B)
Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 69

J. Braga (ed.), Conceiving Virtuality: From Art To Technology, Numanities - Arts
and Humanities in Progress 11, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24751-5_4
70 M. Grimshaw-Aagaard

everyday experience of presence. This is particularly important to bear in mind given

the current push to converge our experience of virtual worlds with our experience of
actual worlds.
This article provides an introduction to the concept of sonic virtuality. It also
provides examples of how the concept has been used to explore aspects of experience
such as environment and presence and how its use might be expanded in biofeedback
scenarios. It begins with a brief but necessary clarification of some terminology used
throughout.

4.2 Clarifying the Terminology

4.2.1 Computer Game

Wherever in this article I refer to the artefacts and perceptual effects of computer
games, I use the exemplar of first-person perspective computer games, particularly
those that are multi-player. Such artefacts include audio, non-player characters (bots),
and the visual and interactive components of the game world while perceptual effects
include environment and presence—some of these terms are clarified further in this
section. My reason for concentrating on this form of gaming is that such games
typically attempt to provide the player with an experience mediated via the game’s
immersive technology that is similar to the presence that is experienced in the actual
world. In particular, I am concerned with the perceptual experience of presence; it is
the case that first-person perspective games approach this experience by, and in part,
placing the player visually and aurally at the centre of a world of sensory things—this
is close to how it would be in everyday life—rather than, as in many other forms of
computer games, providing the player with a third-person perspective on the game
world and their character.

4.2.2 Sound and Audio

Here, I distinguish strongly between the two. As will become clear below, the concept
of sonic virtuality proposes that sound is an emergent perception. This perception
arises through optional sensory stimulation (the sensation of sound waves especially
but also sensations from other sensory modalities) and cognitive factors (for example,
experience, knowledge, memory, and reasoning). Audio, in the case of computer
games, refers to the digital files that are recordings of sound waves (or previously
synthesized audio) or to the digital artefacts produced by real-time audio synthesis
while the game is in progress. Audio is virtual potential that is actualized during
gameplay as a sound wave and this wave is one of the sensory stimuli that can lead
to the perception that is sound.
4 Sonic Virtuality, Environment, and Presence 71

4.2.3 World and Environment

The terms world and environment are often used synonymously especially in the lit-
erature on computer games where virtual environment and virtual world are typically
interchangeable. In a recent conference paper, Mads Walther-Hansen and I found it
useful to separate into two concepts world and environment (Walther-Hansen and
Grimshaw 2016). This distinction revolved around matters of saliency and perception
and was used in that paper to formulate our concept of environment as something
perceptually constructed rather than sensorially actual. In any world, there is a set
of sensory things (objects and events) that are available to be sensed. I do not sense
all such things at all times because of the limits of sensory horizons. Nevertheless,
it is useful to take account of those things that are not directly and immediately
sensed because of their causal potential somewhere down the line (it is useful for the
understanding of actual worlds and for the design of virtual worlds). In the virtual
world of a computer game (of the type I clarify above), I might not (and probably
do not) sense all that another player senses but there are likely to be short-term and
long-term consequences for me as the other player reacts to those sensory things [in
terms of diegesis regarding the consequential effects of computer game audio, I have
in the past referred to this as telediegesis (Grimshaw 2008)]. Thus, it is sensible to
define world as the set of things that can be sensed by any one actor sensing in that
world; this is as true for actual worlds as for virtual worlds.
Regarding environment, Walther-Hansen and I defined it as a perceptual and
dynamic construct based upon a sub-set of sensory things within the world whether
that world is actual or virtual (Walther-Hansen and Grimshaw 2016). This sub-set is
delimited by our sensory horizons or, in computer games, the sensory horizons the
computer game engine provides based on the position of the player’s character in the
game world, but is further delimited by our saliency horizons. Thus, not all sensory
things within our sensory horizons (that is, the sensory world) are attended to and
those that are (that is, the salient world) are attended to according to the exigencies
of the need to act within the game world. Conceptually separating world (the set of
sensory things that can be subdivided into sensory world and salient world) from
environment (a dynamic, constructed perception of the salient world) allowed us to
state that the formation of the environment was the process of individuating self from
nonself. Indeed, we stated further that the environment functioned as a metonym of
the nonself, creating a space in which to act and thus to be present in. As a metonym,
the environment functions as a metaphorical tool with which to make use of the
“ineffable and ungraspable whole” (Walther-Hansen and Grimshaw 2016, 77).
There is one other advantage conferred by distinguishing world and environment
and this concerns the terminological differentiation between real world and virtual
world found in much of the literature on Virtual Reality and computer games. Fol-
lowing the standard concept of Deleuzian virtuality, Walther-Hansen and I preferred
to state that all worlds are real and the real distinction lies in the question of whether
the world in case is actual or virtual (Walther-Hansen and Grimshaw 2016, 78). In
the actual world (popularly known as the real world), the sources of sensation, the
72 M. Grimshaw-Aagaard

sensory things, are actual and material. In a virtual world, although there are sen-
sory things on which to construct our environment, the provenances of sensations
are not actual but virtual and immaterial; that is, in the case of audio, it is virtual,
pure potential, and must be actualized as a sound wave (the sensory thing) in order
to be sensed—nor is the gun on the screen the actual source of the auditory sensa-
tion (that source is, in fact, the audio transducers of the headphones or loudspeakers
placed at some remove from the computer screen). Despite distinguishing between
actual world and virtual world, there is no distinction between actual environment
and virtual environment. There are only environments and these are dynamically
constructed perceptions based upon a foundation of sensations, regardless of the
provenance of those sensations, and thus we are afforded a means to assess the effi-
cacy of the construction of those environments in a virtual world when compared to
the environments of the actual world.

4.2.4 Immersion and Presence

As with world and environment, there is often a conflation between the terms immer-
sion and presence; again, this is particularly the case in the literature on computer
games (for instance, Ermi and Mäyrä 2005; Brown and Cairns 2004) and in the
marketing hyperbole that surrounds the medium. It is useful, though, to distinguish
between the two so as to grasp more securely the distinction between cause and effect.
This distinction has been made by Slater (2003) who defines immersion, in terms of
virtual worlds, as the capabilities of the software and hardware in providing a level of
“fidelity [of sensory stimuli] in relation to real-world sensory modalities” (1). Thus,
while immersion is objective, providing a means to measure the level of sensory
fidelity, presence is the “human reaction to immersion” (2) and so a subjective expe-
rience. Presence itself has a number of definitions that typically involve a feeling
or sense of being in a place and being able to act in that place (see Minsky 1980;
IJsselsteijn et al. 2001; Slater 2003). Waterworth and Waterworth (2014) argue that
presence arises “from an active awareness of our embodied environment in a present
world around us” (590)1 and provide a further gloss on this by stating that it is the

1 Although not explained in the text, I assume the ‘present’ in ‘present world’ refers to immediacy,
the here-and-now and ‘to-handness’ of objects and events in that world. This is a little problematic
as it does not take into account the time delay (often consciously noticeable) between modally
different sensory stimuli from the same sensory thing. For example, while the time lag between
reflection of light off a sensory object and its impingement on our visual system is perceptually
negligible for most practical purposes, a sound wave in air at 20 °C takes a second to travel about
344 m and the speed of travel of odiferous chemicals can be highly variable depending on air
currents but is always slower than the speed of light. Thus, our ‘present world’ of sensory objects
and events is anything but immediate and certainly it is not synchronized in the apprehension of
sensory stimuli from those objects and events. In the perception of sensory things, though, there is
a synchronization in the conjoining of variously time-lagged, external sensory stimuli into discrete
perceived objects and events. (At 0 °C, this time disparity is even more noticeable because, at that
temperature, sound in air travels at about 332 m/s.) This is why I prefer to use ‘salient world’ rather
4 Sonic Virtuality, Environment, and Presence 73

feeling that “distinguishes self from nonself” (589). In our thinking, Walther-Hansen
and I, while we agree that presence is the feeling of being in a place and being able
to act in that place, disagree with Waterworth and Waterworth and instead state that
presence itself arises from the distinction between self and nonself (Walther-Hansen
and Grimshaw 2016, 81). Thus, the perceptual process of forming the environment is
a process of individuating self from nonself and, using the environment as a metonym
for the nonself, we are then able to be present, to feel in and be able to act within the
perceived environment of a salient world. Where “distinguishing between self and
nonself is part of the process that leads to the active awareness of embodiment in a
salient world” (Walther-Hansen and Grimshaw 2016, 82), ultimately, we were able
to define presence as that situated, active awareness.
Among many presence theorists, there is an assumption of direct proportionality
between immersion and presence. This is implicit in Slater’s equation between the
fidelity of the virtual world’s sensory technology to ‘real-world sensory modalities’
and is also found in IJsselsteijn and colleague’s concentration on “more accurate
reproductions and/or simulations of reality” despite there being a consensus that
“presence is a complex, multidimensional perception, formed through an interplay
of raw sensory data (sensations) and various cognitive processes” (2001, 180–181).
Thus, there is the belief in a direct cause and effect relationship between the immer-
sive technology and the feeling of presence. I feel that such an equation—increase
the fidelity of the sensation produced by immersive technology and presence is
increased—is too simplistic. I am not the only one to suggest that presence is not nec-
essarily automatically attained once a given threshold of sensory quality is reached.
Waterworth and Waterworth (2014) argue that one can have a feeling of “absence”
rather than presence despite being surrounded by the rich sensory stimulation of the
actual world (589) and those developing Real Virtuality systems (as opposed to Vir-
tual Reality systems) work towards an “‘appropriate’ level of sensory stimulation”
(Chalmers 2014, 605) across several sensory modalities rather than aiming for the
perfection of a ‘realistic’ level.2 Similarly, Calleja (2014) claims that “while high
fidelity systems are an important part of enhancing the intensity of an experience,
they do not in themselves create a sense of presence” (225).
In a 2011 article, colleagues and I proposed the notion of the Uncanny Wall as
a replacement for the Uncanny Valley.3 Here, our contention was “that increased
habituation with the technology used in the attempt to create realistic, human-like
characters only serves to draw a viewer’s attention to differences from the human
norm [and] technological discernment on the part of the audience generally keeps

than ‘present world’ because the former phrase shifts the emphasis of perception (and thus the
process of environment-forming) away from the perception of stimuli at a particular, immediate
point in time to attending to, and perceiving, stimuli across time spans.
2 The concept of such a threshold of an appropriate sensory stimulation level also allows for the

suggestion that one is either present or one is absent; there are no half measures when it comes to
presence.
3 The Uncanny Valley proposition (Mori 1970) suggests that the human observer will experience

negative, uncomfortable feelings at that point where a robot is almost indistinguishable in appearance
and behaviour from humans.
74 M. Grimshaw-Aagaard

pace with technological developments used in the attempt to create realistic, human-
like characters such that, ultimately, the perception of uncanniness for such characters
is inevitable” (Tinwell et al. 2011, 328, 339). Walther-Hansen and I made use of this
to suggest that “increasing technological familiarity and discernment trumps preten-
sions of presence in virtual worlds” (Walther-Hansen and Grimshaw 2016, 83) and I
later went a little further in proposing, if one only concentrates on improving sensory
simulations of realism, the idea of a Presence Wall (Grimshaw-Aagaard 2019). Pres-
ence, therefore, is much more than a matter of providing precisely realistic sensory
stimulation.

4.3 Sonic Virtuality

The definition of sound in the concept of sonic virtuality is that “sound is an emergent
perception that arises primarily in the auditory cortex and that is formed through
spatio-temporal processes in an embodied system” (Grimshaw and Garner 2015,
1). The need for a new definition grew out of a dissatisfaction with the standard
acoustics definition of sound (detailed in Grimshaw 2015) that neither accounts
for many anomalies in the experience of sound nor for our everyday experience
of sound. (Some of these anomalies are given as examples below.) The need also
grew out of empirical research regarding biofeedback and computer game audio (e.g.
Grimshaw et al. 2008; Nacke et al. 2010; Garner and Grimshaw 2013) leading to
the realization that the real-time creation or processing of game audio in response to
the player’s psychophysiology required a more holistic view of sound other than it
was a sound wave. As the rationale for, and details of the definition and concept, has
been dealt with extensively elsewhere, here I provide only the briefest of accounts
of the fundamentals of sonic virtuality that are necessary to the ideas presented in
this article.
The emergent perception that is sound arises from the sonic aggregate. This is
conceptualized as potential, in virtual terms, and elements within this aggregate
can be subdivided into two groups: external factors potentially contributing to the
emergence of sound, the exosonus; and internal factors contributing to the emergence
of sound, the endosonus. The exosonus comprises the sensations of sensory things
from the salient world and, in addition to sound waves, these can be sensations from
other sensory modalities. The endosonus comprises the cognitive input to the sonic
aggregate; factors such as experience, knowledge, memory, and reasoning.
Sound is actualized as an emergent perception from the virtuality of the sonic
aggregate through the effects of saliency. In a sensory world of sensory things, cog-
nition gives form and meaning to the sensations we attend to of the multiplicity of
sensations impinging on our body. These sensations, as a group, are multimodal and
this multimodality is required to some degree to force the emergence of sound: by
attending to the image of a Geiger counter, the sound that emerges acquires the form
and meaning of a Geiger counter rather than, for example, the sound being that of
corn popping in a hot, covered pan (which is an answer I have often been given when
4 Sonic Virtuality, Environment, and Presence 75

playing the audio clip without any visual guidance). As another example (one that
I have also used in the past), I might play students or conference delegates a series
of audio clips and these are variously identified as alarm, camera, manual saw, and
chainsaw. In point of fact, the audio is a recording of the Australian Lyrebird, one of
the animal kingdom’s master mimics.
A number of other examples can be provided that support the need for a different
concept of sound than that provided by physics:
• There is a well-known aural ‘illusion,’ the McGurk Effect. In this, there are two
video recordings of a person’s mouth repeatedly speaking respectively the syllables
‘ba’ and ‘fa.’ One video is left unedited while the ‘fa’ video has its original audio
replaced with the ‘ba’ audio. Concentrating on the image of the articulating mouth,
subjects unfailingly hear the sound ‘ba’ from the unedited video and ‘fa’ from the
edited video even when they know that the audio clips, and thus the sound waves,
are identical.
• What is known in the field of psychoacoustics as the ventriloquism effect (see
Warren et al. 1981) has been described in the realm of cinema by Chion (1994)
as synchresis (it can also be experienced in many other areas such as computer
games). Despite image and sound wave source (that is, the loudspeakers of the
cinema’s auditorium) being physically separate (and often significantly so), we
still unify images and sound waves into perceptual events located on the screen.
• Play subjects a silent film of some clearly typically sounding action, perhaps the
striking of a hammer on an anvil, and, with each strike, they display brain activity
in the auditory cortex similar to when they actually sense the audio that has been
muted (e.g. Raij et al. 1997; Hoshiyama et al. 2001; Voisin et al. 2006).
A number of points can be drawn from the above examples that demonstrate some
divergence between human everyday experience and the definition of sound provided
by physics. For the purposes of this paper, I provide two of the most pertinent here:
• Our everyday experience of sound is that it is the object (or event) that gives rise
to the sound wave we sense. No-one, in their everyday experience, describes a
sound by acoustic parameters such as fundamental frequency, overtone distribu-
tion, amplitude envelope, and so on.
• People do disagree about what a sound is, particularly in the absence of information
from another sensory modality, or might even be unable to identify the sound
wave source despite all sensing the same sound wave. Once provided with the
identification as to the original sound wave source, the correct identification is
then recalled at the next exposure to the sound wave.
From these observations, sonic virtuality makes some further assertions beyond
those noted above:
• What is described in the auditory neurological literature as aural or auditory
imagery is in fact sound. Thus, the exosonus is not necessary for the emergent
perception of sound.
76 M. Grimshaw-Aagaard

• Where acoustics and psychoacoustics claim that localization of sound is the local-
ization of the sound wave source relative to our auditory system, sonic virtuality
asserts that we actively locate the emergent sound on a source that our experience
and reasoning dictate as most likely or useful. This can even occur in the absence
of a sound wave [there is a locational relationship between the silent hammer and
anvil and the imagined sound—see action on screen; imagine appropriate sound
to action; synchronize imagined sound (auditory imagery) to hammer on anvil].

4.4 From Sonic Virtuality to Presence in an Environment

In conceiving of sonic virtuality, Garner and I had the aim of providing a nuanced
concept of sound as a perception. In the years since, I have started to develop this
perceptual model of sound into a perceptual model of the environment. In particular,
I have started to use this second model to attempt to explain the phenomenon of
presence as a prelude to thinking about how to design immersive technologies of
virtual worlds which will truly lead to an emulation of the presence we feel in the
actual world. Some of this thinking is evident in the ideas Walther-Hansen and I have
recently developed (detailed above) but these ideas on the environment as perception
continue to be the focus of my work. Specifically, I have recently sketched out a
framework of the environment that takes its inspiration from the model of sonic
virtuality that Garner and I devised (Grimshaw 2018, forthcoming).
As with the sonic aggregate comprising exosonus and endosonus, I have proposed
that the perceptual environment might be conceived of as an exo-environment and an
endo-environment. That is, the environment emerges from an environmental aggre-
gate formed from external sensations and internal cognition. From the environmental
aggregate, hypotheses are formed that are candidate models of the salient world. The
notion of hypothesis-modelling of the world in which we are follows previous theo-
rizing about the acquisition of knowledge about that world (e.g. Clark 2013). In my
conception of the environment, hypotheses of the salient world are modelled from the
environmental aggregate through an imaginative process. That is, each hypothesis
is an imagining of a world, an imagining that might be an environment in which we
can be present, a model of sensory things in a salient world to which imagination,
using the cognitive components of the endo-environment, gives form and meaning.
Because the need to be in a world is a pre-requisite for action and success in that
world, the modelling of hypotheses is time-pressured. Thus, an increasingly refined
hypothesis is eventually selected as the environment; an adequate model of the salient
world given form and meaning and so providing the conditions, the space, in which
to be present.
In an essay on the virtuality of the Kanizsa Triangle, Massumi (2014) explains the
‘pop-out’ of the triangle in terms of a release of tension within the virtual cloud of
potential that the arrangement of figures on the page implies. According to Massumi,
the emergence of the triangle is the end result of the resolution of “a force field
4 Sonic Virtuality, Environment, and Presence 77

of emergence” (62) within the virtual cloud. I view the processes at work on the
environmental aggregate in similar terms but specifically identify imagination as the
driving force actualizing the virtuality inherent in the aggregate. Hypothesizing is
imagining how things might be that allows for the testing of the veracity of that
imagining; hypotheses as candidate models of a salient world are imaginings of that
world conjured up from the environmental aggregate and, if a hypothesis allows for
presence, the feeling that allows for action in a salient world, it is selected as the
environment.

4.5 Concluding Remarks

As previously mentioned, I have an interest in biofeedback in computer games. While

it is all very well to speculate on what an environment is, the processes of its for-
mation, and how we become present within it, I like to use the resultant concepts
and frameworks for practical purposes. In this case, to model and drive the devel-
opment of biofeedback systems that provide the conditions necessary to presence
when playing a computer game. I conclude, then, with some brief remarks on how
the concept of the environment sketched out in this essay might be used to improve
the immersive technologies used to create virtual worlds.
The perception of the environment is, in sensory and cognitive terms, a multimodal
perception. The virtual worlds of computer games, though, comprise sensory stimuli
that are purely visual and auditory (and, occasionally, haptic). This means that the
elements of the salient virtual world fall far short of the elements available in a
salient actual world. Furthermore, the monitor used to display the visual elements
of the computer game is limited in size or, with Virtual Reality headsets, limited
in its image resolution. Additionally, the audio of the computer game is limited in
its capacity to be processed in ways that can match the effects on sound waves that
the actual world imposes while the use of headphones or loudspeakers is a poor
substitute for the unencumbered experience provided by our auditory system in the
actual world. Current technology is good, and is improving in leaps and bounds, but
is not yet up to the task of enabling an experience of salient virtual worlds that can
match that of the actual world.
If it is imagination that drives the process of environment formation from the
highly limited exo-environment experienced when playing a computer game, then, I
suggest, that imagination can be aided through the use of biofeedback that can actu-
alize the potential inherent in the endo-environment (comprising experience, knowl-
edge, memory, and reasoning—based not only on the worlds of computer games but
also, and importantly, on actual worlds and everyday experience). Biofeedback tech-
nology comes in various guises from simple galvanic skin response and heart-rate
monitors to electromyography and electroencephalography, the data from which can
be used by the computer game engine to process artefacts of the virtual world in
real-time according to an assessment of the player’s psychophysiology.
78 M. Grimshaw-Aagaard

In other words, in a survival horror computer game, if the game engine senses
that the player is not frightened enough it will respond accordingly. Preliminary
work has been done on this in the realm of audio (see Garner and Grimshaw 2013;
Garner 2016) where the player’s arousal was assessed and, if it was not deemed
sufficiently high, the game engine processed audio by enhancing parameters of that
audio known to increase tension. I propose that it would be possible to use such
techniques in order to increase the possibility of true presence when experiencing a
computer game by manipulating the endo-environment such that it becomes possible
to facilitate the player to efficiently and easily imaginatively create the environment
of the salient virtual world to a level that matches the environments formed when
experiencing the actual world. This is some way off in the future—at the very least
there would need to be a real-time assessment of the player’s sense of presence and
the ability to isolate and identify cognitive components of the endo-environment,
testing how the player uses experience, memory, knowledge, and reasoning to form
environments—but there is no time like the present to begin work on making this
scenario a reality.

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Grimshaw, M., and T. Garner. 2014a. Imagining Sound. In Proceedings of the 9th Audio Mostly
Conference. New York: ACM. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2636879.2636881. Accessed
30 April 2017.
Grimshaw, M., and T. Garner. 2014b. Embodied Virtual Acoustic Ecologies of Computer Games.
In The Oxford Handbook of Interactive Audio, ed. K.E. Collins., B. Kapralos, and H. Tessler,
181–195. New York: Oxford University Press.
Grimshaw, M., and T.A. Garner. 2015. Sonic Virtuality: Sound as Emergent Perception. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Grimshaw, M., C.A. Lindley, and L. Nacke. 2008. Sound and Immersion in the First-Person Shooter:
Mixed Measurement of the Player’s Sonic Experience. Paper read at Audio Mostly 2008, Piteå,
Sweden. http://www.acagamic.com/wp-publications/grimshaw2008/. Accessed 30 April 2017.
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cephalographic Study. NeuroReport 12: 1097–1102.
IJsselsteijn, W.A., J. Freeman, and H. de Ridder. 2001. Presence: Where are We? Cyberpsychology
& Behavior 4: 179–182.
Massumi, B. 2014. Envisioning the Virtual. In The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality, ed. M. Grimshaw,
55–70. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Mori, M. 1970. The Uncanny Valley. Energy 7/4:33–35.
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Experience and Psychophysiology in a First-Person Shooter Game. Interacting with Computers
22: 336–343.
Raij, T., L. McEvoy, J.P. Mäkelä, and R. Hari. 1997. Human Auditory Cortex is Activated by
Omissions of Auditory Stimuli. Brain Research 745: 134–143.
Slater, M. 2003. A Note on Presence Terminology. Presence Connect 3: 1–5.
Tinwell, A., M. Grimshaw, and A. Williams. 2011. The Uncanny Wall. International Journal of
Arts and Technology 4: 326–341.
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tory Areas: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study. The Journal of Neuroscience 26:
273–278.
Walther-Hansen, M., and M. Grimshaw. 2016. Being in a Virtual World: Presence, Environment,
Salience, Sound. In Proceedings of the 11th Audio Mostly Conference. New York: ACM. http://
dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2986425. Accessed 30 April 2017.
Warren, D.H., R.B. Welch, and T.J. McCarthy. 1981. The Role of Visual-Auditory “Compellingness”
in the Ventriloquism Effect: Implications for Transitivity Among the Spatial Senses. Perception
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Bodies. In The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality, ed. M. Grimshaw, 589–601. New York: Oxford
University Press.

Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard is the Obel Professor of Music at Aalborg University, Denmark. He

has published widely across subjects as diverse as sound, biofeedback in computer games, vir-
tuality, the Uncanny Valley, and IT systems and also writes free, open source software for virtual
research environments (WIKINDX). Mark is series editor for the Palgrave Macmillan series Stud-
ies in Sound, and his books include the anthologies Game Sound Technology & Player Interac-
80 M. Grimshaw-Aagaard

tion (IGI Global 2011) and The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality (Oxford University Press 2014),
and, with co-author Tom Garner, a monograph entitled Sonic Virtuality (Oxford University Press
2015). A two-volume co-edited anthology, The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination, was
published in 2019 from Oxford University Press as was the co-authored The Recording, Mixing,
& Mastering Reference Handbook.
Chapter 5
Imagination and Virtuality. On Susanne
Langer’s Theory of Artistic Forms

Joaquim Braga

Abstract This text attempts to analyze and inquire the relationship between virtu-
ality and imagination in Susanne Langer’s art theory. One of my main purposes is to
know whether the “actual-virtual” binomial can be applied, without any theoretical
concern, to artistic objects and art in general. Since, in Langer, the symbol theory is
directly connected with a theory of perception, it remains to scrutinize how aesthetic
experiences mediated by the several artistic modalities imply the transformation of
works of art into virtual objects. That such a transformation carries the effective
power of imagination is a capital condition inherent to all artistic symbolization pro-
cesses. That these latter, however, do not always express a linear dynamic of the
“actual-virtual” binomial is, as will be seen, a critical point of view that must be
applied to the aesthetic formulations and concepts developed by Langer.

5.1 Introduction

The whole philosophy of Susanne Langer is supported by a symbol theory, largely

constructed after the thought of Ernst Cassirer and Alfred North Whitehead. Although
Langer acknowledges such a philosophical legacy, she will privilege an area of reflec-
tion that has not been systematically developed by the two philosophers mentioned:
it is, in this specific case, the subject of art. Cassirer, rather than Whitehead, devoted
some attention to the questions of art and aesthetics within his Philosophie der sym-
bolischen Formen, but he did not systematically formulate a reflection on the spectrum
of the various artistic forms. Whitehead, in turn, refers to art only in some excerpts
of his works, being in this sense conceived more as an example of his philosophical
formulations than, indeed, a specific subject of study.
However, the key question that applies to any symbol theory lies in its application
to the artistic world, namely how artistic objects and the aesthetic relations they

J. Braga (B)
Research Unit Instituto de Estudos Filosóficos, Faculdade de Letras,
Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 81

J. Braga (ed.), Conceiving Virtuality: From Art To Technology, Numanities - Arts
and Humanities in Progress 11, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24751-5_5
82 J. Braga

provide can be interpreted as symbolization processes. How can we distinguish these

processes from those other concerning cultural forms?
It is due to the intention of answering these questions and simultaneously present-
ing criteria for aesthetic demarcation between the various artistic forms that Langer
aligns to her symbol theory a theory of virtuality, or rather, a theory of virtual objects.
At first glance, such a connection between symbolization and virtualization may sug-
gest a theoretical approach anchored only in the concept of “representation”; and this
is still the subject of multiple criticism by those who think that representation—and
the idea of symbol in general—is insufficient and even harmful to categorize the
world created by art. This is not, however, the path chosen by Langer. As we shall
see, the author rejects a merely “figurative” approach to artistic objects and conceives
the virtuality of these objects in close relation with the sensory spectrum of our per-
ceptual experiences. Strictly speaking, concerning Langer, the virtual is the operative
nexus that unifies and differentiates artistic objects as objects that are individuated
by aesthetic experiences.
As with a significant part of Western philosophical thought, the concept of “vir-
tual” is determined by Langer as opposed to the concept of “actual”. It is precisely
in the scrutiny of the relations between both concepts that the author will find each
artistic form’s individuation morphology. And it is also there, in such a relational
sphere, that imagination acts inside aesthetic experience and more specifically in
what unites it to perception and sensory data. Hence, as I want to show, the virtuality
of artistic objects cannot, regarding Langer, be thought without the active role of
imagination. It remains to inquire, however, to what extent the multiple articulations
of the “actual-virtual” binomial substantiate the aesthetic dynamics of works of art
and, in a broader sense, philosophy of art itself.

5.2 Virtuality and Illusion

For Susanne Langer, artistic objects are true virtual entities, and, therefore, all aes-
thetic theories must always take into account the distinction between the actual and
the virtual, as well as the relations between these two modalities in the individuation
of each art form. “Anything that exists only for perception—the author states, and
plays no ordinary, passive part in nature as common objects do, is a virtual entity.
It is not unreal; where it confronts you, you really perceive it, you don’t dream or
imagine that you do” (Langer 1957b: 5). The concept of virtual has, according to
Langer, some connections to the “virtual space” of optics; and Langer even gives
the example of projected images in the mirror. However, artistic virtuality differs in
much from these phenomena of physical reality, since it does not project an already
given reality, as that projected by mirrors.
Langer moves away from a purely psychologist analysis of the work of art, solely
based on the relationship between artist and viewer. Instead, her aesthetic theory
is grounded on the symbolic construction of the art object itself. Here, after this
assumption, we can find a great influence of Cassirer’s symbol theory. The German
5 Imagination and Virtuality. On Susanne Langer’s Theory … 83

philosopher, in his formulations on art, also distances himself from such a psycho-
logical approach, namely from the emotivist theses on the aesthetic relations between
artist and spectator. Instead, what guides Cassirer’s aesthetics—and his Philosophie
der symbolischen Formen in general—is the construction of the articulation between
sensible signs and sense modalities.
To this end, Langer begins by relying on the concept of “Schein”, present in
Friedrich Schiller’s aesthetics, since it “liberates perception—and with it, the power
of Conception—from all practical purposes, and lets the mind dwell on the sheer
appearance of things” (Langer 1953: 49).1 For Schiller, it was nature endowing
humans with the ability to access the realm of the Schein, in particular through
the sensory modalities of seeing and hearing. Sensible objects mediated by these
two modalities are, in this philosopher’s conception, those engendered by the mind,
unlike, for example, the sense of touch, which is externally imposed. So, as he
reiterates, “What we see through the eye is different from what we feel” (Was wir
durch das Augen sehen, ist von dem verschieden, was wir empfinden) (Schiller 1983:
40). Langer’s aim is to conceive illusion, not as a mere effect following from the art
object over the perception of the viewer, but rather as the ultimate structure of the
object itself. In Schiller’s theory, the assumption of a conversion from the sensible
given to the purely aesthetic is already implicit, as it is simultaneously responsible
both for the autonomy of the art object and the positive dimension of the illusion that
it carries.
Langer seems to support her concept of virtual on the same assumption. In her
philosophy of art, the concepts that best introduce and clarify the actual-virtual
binomial are those of “materials” and “elements”. The first has a connotation with
the concept of actual and the latter with that of virtual. Essentially, this distinction
is due to the fact that Langer wants to show that the tangible materiality of the
work of art is penetrated by meaning-making processes, which in turn are able to
give rise to the true individual status of the artistic object itself. The elements of
the work are, thus, virtual inscriptions of meaning in the actuality of the material
object. As the inscription of the illusion should not be confused with a mere mimetic
disposition of the artwork, the virtuality of the art object is a creation, not a mere
re-creation. “Appearance” is therefore a concept that does not imply the idea of
optical illusion, as it is the case in the perspective painting of the Renaissance. It is
quite the opposite. From her point of view, “All forces that cannot be scientifically
established and measured must be regarded, from the philosophical standpoint, as
illusory; if, therefore, such forces appear to be part of our direct experience, they
are ‘virtual’, i.e. non-actual semblances” (Langer 1953: 188). Like Cassirer, and
also Whitehead, Langer intends to delimit artistic objects and aesthetics in general
from other cultural forms, whose symbolic nature can, as in the case of science, be
apprehended according to purely logical and abstract principles.
So, according to Langer, the concept of illusion does not illustrate something
that has a deceptive disposition, nor does it report to hallucinatory mental states.

1 Onthe influence of Schiller’s thought on Langer’s aesthetic theory, see, for example, Wilkinson
(1955).
84 J. Braga

Illusion is not, in this narrow sense, synonymous with “delusion”. Moreover, in

Problems of Art, Langer finds, in the term “apparition”, the closest equivalent to the
term “illusion”, as to enlighten it and avoid any semantic misunderstanding. Langer’s
main theoretical concern is to overcome the mimetic theory of art and, in this respect,
the virtuality of artistic objects is its seminal alternative. This idea is very outlined
in Langer’s following formulation, when she states that as we observe a painting,
“we neither believe nor make believe that there is a person or a bridge or a basket
of fruit in front of us. We do not pass intellectually beyond the vision of space at
all, but understand it as an apparition.” Therefore, as the author adds, our ordinary
visual perception, “is suspended by the circumstance that we know this space to be
virtual, and neither believe nor disbelieve in the existence of the objects in it. We see
it as a pure perceptual form, created and articulated by all the visible elements in it:
an autonomous, formed space” (Langer 1957b: 32).
As the aesthetic-artistic illusion implies a conversion of a material object into
something purely apparent, the process that is at its core can be described as the form
through which the art object articulates perception with imagination. Thus designed,
this articulation process can no longer be dependent on empirical criteria. The active
role and aesthetic autonomy of imagination gives the artwork a real unshakeable
status within reality itself.
For a better understanding and theoretical enlightenment of the scope of the con-
cept of illusion, we can find in Langer the seminal distinction between “image” and
“model”. For the purposes of the author, an artistic image should not be confused
with a model, since the former makes “the appearance of its object in one perspec-
tive out of many possible ones” feasible, regardless of whether it is a visual image,
a sonic image or a tactile image. A model, conceived by a conventional selectivity,
conversely implies a primacy of its operational functionality over the aesthetic vir-
tuality of its object. The creation of images, mediated by human imagination, is a
mental activity imposed on the sensible data of our perception, and, therefore, lies,
in cognitive terms, in a stage prior to the use of models. Rather, the use of models
is connected to a “higher level of conception, the level of discursive thought delib-
erate and analogical reasoning” (Langer 1975: 63). Here again, as it is evident at
the core of this statement, Langer highlights her seminal distinction, present in her
work Philosophy in a New Key, between “discursive symbols” and “presentational
symbols”. These latter are, according to the author, those who most contribute to the
manifestation of mental activities and the meaning-making processes that support
them.

5.3 Primary Illusions and Secondary Illusions

To see how virtuality is connected with imagination, let us take, as main example,
painting as an art. Before this, however, it should be remembered that Langer does
not depart from a negative ontology of pictorial configurations, largely based on
the alleged iconic similarity between picture and represented object. The picture
5 Imagination and Virtuality. On Susanne Langer’s Theory … 85

is not, therefore, an illusion which, in turn, disappoints, as in the formation of the

Bildbewusstein in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology (Husserl 2006: 48–53); and
hence imagination ceases here to be conceived as a faculty first immersed in the
alleged indistinction between representation and reality, between the symbol and the
symbolized. On the contrary, what unites imagination to the picture is the positive
capacity of the first to generate a mediation autonomy of the second. The sensible
discontinuity between the pictorial space and the physical space that surrounds it
generates, according to Langer, the “primary illusions” of painting and the plastic
arts in general. Regardless of the material nature of its inscription surface—whether
it is two-dimensional or three-dimensional—the picture disposes of an autonomous
space, configured and articulated through the elements that make it into a “total
form”. So, here, there is, in a first moment, a transformation of the actual materials
into virtual elements. As imagination has an active role, it is also through its action
that the transformation of the material dimensions into the virtual existence of the
artistic object is initially possible.
In the case of painting, for example, such symbolic conversion is described by
Langer as “the process of transforming the actual spatial datum, the canvas or paper
surface, into a virtual space, creating the primary illusion of artistic vision” (Langer
1953: 80). And, referring to the so-called non-representational art, like Malevich’s
square paintings, she even adds that some avant-garde painters reduced the picture
surface only to the creation of this virtual space. That is, the structural virtuality of
the picture is simultaneously reinforced and expressed, to the point of serving as the
main theme for what it presents and the way the presentation itself occurs.
The primary illusions are necessarily primary because they are, ab initio, the main
virtual structure and the individual aesthetic status of each art form. If, concerning
the plastic arts, the “virtual space” is the basic structure of their images, for music, on
the contrary, it is the “virtual time” that, first, defines the articulation of its elements.
Following up on this main idea, in Feeling and Form Langer tells us that every artistic
form—as, for example, dance—in order to be considered structurally independent,
must have “its own primary illusion”. This means, first of all, that every artistic form
requires a different change profile from the actual to the virtual, from the materials
to the elements. Langer supports the view that, although artistic forms build several
interpenetrations, primary illusions are the ones that distinguish them from each
other. Moreover, as the author underpins, “to insist ab initio that the fundamental
distinctions among the several art genders are unimportant does not make their close
interrelations more evident or more lucid; on the contrary, it makes them inscrutable”
(Langer 1957b: 41).
However, it is with the concept of “secondary illusion” that, strictly speaking,
Langer reiterates the virtual autonomy of each artistic form. All those elements that
are not part of the virtual genealogy of any artistic form, but nevertheless can pen-
etrate it, are designated by Langer as secondary illusions. For instance, a sensation
of musicality raised by the colours of a Kandinsky’s painting can presumably affect
the perception of the viewer. Notwithstanding, the virtual existence of this art object
does not depend, directly and primarily, on the development of such feeling. There-
fore, as reiterated by Langer, secondary illusions normally have a double aesthetic
86 J. Braga

morphology: are invasive because they come from the outside of the virtual realm of
the artistic form; are, in turn, evasive, because, not being structurally constant, tend
to dissipate, or in the words of the author, they’re both “coming into existence from
nowhere” as “fading again into nothing” (Langer 1975: 240).
Secondary illusions are not, however, mere cognitive adornments of the artwork.
Although they come from an external virtuality, they “heighten its livingness, even
to a degree where the form in its entirety seems to be changed” (Langer 1975: 240).
In this respect, Langer even says that they are, paradoxically, as the “sublimation”
of the primary virtual structure of each artistic form. In addition, they also allow
to bring forth a kind of communicative aura among the various artistic spheres,
which is not, of course, that of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, but always presupposes
a differentiated basis.
Since identity and diversity form the dialectical core of artistic objects, secondary
illusions give these a true “indefinite potentiality”. As life is imbued with possibil-
ities—and, as such, it can be described as “the progressive realization of potential
acts”—also in artistic forms “the elusiveness of secondary illusions serves to give
the work as a whole something of that same character; it seems to have a core from
which all its elements emerge—figurations and rhythms and all the qualities to which
these give rise” (Langer 1975: 206). That is, the negative background that, within
the primary virtuality of the artwork, is formed by secondary illusions, paradoxically
gives to the work multiple dynamics to feed its own virtuality. Given these peculiar
properties of secondary illusions, Langer can then deduce that, in communicative
terms, they generate a kind of ineffable aura around the sensible experiences raised
by artistic objects. Since these illusions tend to show up as subjective impressions,
they will hardly become able of being shared by two different viewers.

5.4 Feeling and Imagination

Now, if, in Langer’s assumption, virtuality covers the condition of those objects that
are created to be perceived, how, then, can they arouse a corresponding perception,
that is, a perception of the created and not of the mere given? So, here appears the
crucial query of whether or not Langer conceives the concept of virtual according to
the traditional idea of something that, although not being an actual entity, generates
the same effects of something else that already exists.
The idea, widely held, that the virtual provides the same effects as something
that has an empirical substrate is indeed at various levels equivocal. In particular, it
prevents us from properly applying the domain of virtuality to the sphere of meaning-
making processes. What, conversely, comes out from this idea is only its applicability
to an epistemological ontology based on the alleged opposition between the real and
the virtual. The seed metaphor seems to be the basis of this analogical conception
(given by the effects) between them. In fact, if we conceive the virtual as synonymous
with Aristotelian potentiality, then we have to assume that the “effect” is already
5 Imagination and Virtuality. On Susanne Langer’s Theory … 87

included in the “cause”, and, therefore, also predicates the metaphysical existence
of eternal substances.
Langer connects the functions of art in general with the creation of a universe con-
ducive to the expression and articulation of feelings. “Feeling” means, in Langer’s
words, “everything that can be felt, from physical sensation, pain and comfort, excite-
ment and repose, to the most complex emotions, intellectual tensions, or the steady
feeling-tones of a conscious human life” (Langer 1957b: 15). The use of the term
“feeling” is, consequently, only a theoretical solution, as had William James used the
term “thinking” to refer to all mental states. The author approaches William James’
solution and, in the early part of her work Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, reit-
erates, once again, that feeling encompasses all the conscious cognitive activities
(Langer 1975: 21–22).
In this regard, Langer points out that art symbolizes—and does not imitate—the
vitality of feeling. But, as she points out, “To keep virtual elements and actual mate-
rials separate is not easy for anyone without philosophical training, and is hardest,
perhaps, for artists, to whom the created world is more immediately real and impor-
tant than the factual world. It takes precision of thought not to confuse an imagined
feeling, or a precisely conceived emotion that is formulated in a perceptible symbol,
with a feeling or emotion actually experienced in response to real events” (Langer
1953: 181). It is not, consequently, a process of make-believe, able to take the viewer
to have purely equivalent reactions to the everyday experience. It is, rather, in the
transformation process of the actual into the virtual that lies the arising of aesthetic
feelings. This process is mainly correlated to how the first perception of the artwork
is articulated: the immediate apprehension of the artistic object is always a perception
of the whole, of the virtuality of all its elements, and not of the isolated elements.
It is also in this sense that the art object should be considered “a single symbol, not
a system of significant elements which may be variously compounded. Its elements
have no symbolic values in isolation” (Langer 1975: 84). If the opposite happens,
then the virtual elements would be grasped, solely and exclusively, by the same
meaning-making articulation of the actual materials. If the perception of the work
of art carries a process that goes from its “total form” to their particular elements,
then, as Langer tells us, each work can resemble, by analogy, to a body, to an organic
structure (cf. Langer 1957b: 44–58).
Although Langer and Whitehead seem to choose music as the artistic form that
best exemplifies symbolic processes—since music will tend, in a suggestive way,
to illustrate the symbolic balanced fusion of perceptual experience, both authors
describe aesthetic experience as the symbolic domain where a primacy of the whole
over the parts takes place. Whitehead, in his assertions on art and aesthetics, shows us
the importance of the whole. Conversely to what happens with logic—which reveals
an “enjoyment of the abstracted details”—“The movement of aesthetic enjoyment
is in the opposite direction. We are overwhelmed by the beauty of the building,
by the delight of the picture, by the exquisite balance of the sentence. The whole
precedes the details” (Whitehead 1968: 61). Nevertheless, as expressed in Adven-
tures of Ideas, the fact that the details contribute to the whole does not prevent its
aesthetic individuality. Every detail—and “detail” can already be seen as an indi-
88 J. Braga

viduation of parts—“manifests an individuality claiming attention in its own right”

(Whitehead 1967: 282–283). In Whiteheadian terms, there is therefore a “value of
discord” between the whole and the parts. Such value “arises from this importance
of the forceful individuality of the details. The discord enhances the whole, when it
serves to substantiate the individuality of the parts. It brings into emphatic feeling
their claim to existence in their own right. It rescues the whole from the tameness
of a merely qualitative harmony” (Whitehead 1967: 282–283). Hence, the idea of
process is not associated, in this case, with a discrimination, in which the parts are
progressively dissociated from the whole. On the contrary, the aesthetic process
presupposes a seminal inversion: the parts are only articulated through the whole,
through the immanence that it creates in relation to the sensible features of the artistic
object itself.
Cassirer often resorts to the example of landscape painting to refer to the primacy
of physiognomic perception in the aesthetic experience provided by art objects.
Through it—physiognomic perception—the whole is imposed in relation to the parts,
thus generating an atmospheric aesthetic effect. The painter, as Cassirer reiterates,
“does not portray or copy a certain empirical object—a landscape with its hills and
mountains, its brooks and rivers. What he gives us is the individual and momentary
physiognomy of the landscape. He wishes to express the atmosphere of things, the
play of light and shadow” (Cassirer 1944: 185).
Thus, according to Langer, artistic feelings are imagined, that is, they belong to
the symbolic structure of the artwork and, consequently, cannot simply be relegated
to the realm of actual experience. Neither the thesis of emotional mimetism nor the
thesis of make-believe are able to sustain Langer’s approach. Quite on the contrary,
both are strongly criticized by the author. Art symbols, being described by Langer as
presentational forms, allow us to uncover an archetypical semiotic process, that is,
they lead us to the fundamental relationship between imagination and symbolization,
whose main result is the world of fantasy. Langer criticizes vehemently such con-
ception that reduces symbol to a merely representative function. The value of art lies
not in mimesis or in representation, but rather in the power to create an autonomous
symbolic field, which is at the same time expressive of vital foundations that support
the organization of the life of human beings.
Unlike the propensity to enlighten the appearance of the art object through the
visual arts, Langer starts with music to show the virtual creation of art in gen-
eral. Hence, from all art forms, Langer chooses music as the one that best repre-
sents the semiotic dynamic of presentational forms. Since it “is preeminently non-
representative”, it also exemplifies, in a comprehensive way, how artistic meaning-
making processes are linked “to the sensuous percept itself apart from what it osten-
sibly represents” (Langer 1957a: 209).
Respecting her symbol theory, Langer owes much to Cassirer and Whitehead. In
particular, her distinction between presentational forms and discursive forms high-
lights the symbolic singularity of artistic forms, which is already present in the works
of the two mentioned philosophers. Music is, for Whitehead, one of the artistic forms
that best define the subjective relation that the symbolic reference awakens in the
percipient (cf. Whitehead 1967: 249). Langer will follow this intuition of White-
5 Imagination and Virtuality. On Susanne Langer’s Theory … 89

head, especially when she comes to the premise that “Music is a tonal analogue of
emotive life” (Langer 1953: 27). But it should be once again stressed that aesthetic
feelings, regarding Langer, are conceived as imaginative feelings—an expression
Langer draws from Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1978: 263)—and not as mere
symptoms of the artist.2
Although Langer insists on the structural analogy between emotive life and musi-
cal symbols, between the symbolized and the symbol—which, in fact, emphasizes
the Whiteheadian dictum that, for symbolic reference, there must also be a kind of
structural isomorphism between causal efficacy and presentational immediacy, she
does not fail to assume, however, that artistic symbols in general are symbols that
do not want to be symbols. In this sense, it is the sensible dimensions of the symbol
that, to a large extent, prevent a complete fulfillment of the symbolization process.
Thus, for Langer, the idea of “unconsummated symbol” (Langer 1957a: 240) is, in
fact, the theoretical display of the sui generis articulation of artistic forms.
It is possible to show, through the relation between Whitehead’s theses on art and
aesthetics and those of Langer, how this paradoxical semiotic nature of artistic sym-
bols is created. But before that, it is useful to return to a theoretical trait present in the
main articulation of symbolic reference. Whitehead tells us that the perceptual expe-
rience modes (causal and presentational) or “schemes of presentation have structural
elements in common, which identify them as schemes of presentation of the same
world”. However, as Whitehead adds, we must assume that there are “gaps in the
determination of the correspondence between the two morphologies. The schemes
only partially intersect, and their true fusion is left indeterminate” (Whitehead 1985:
30). The two perceptual experience modes are not completely determined by the
process of symbolic reference. This leads us to say that the idea of unconsummated
symbol, present in artistic forms, intensifies the degrees of indeterminacy of pre-
sentational immediacy and causal efficacy inside the articulation and unification
provided by symbolic reference—and thanks to this, of course, also the active role
of imagination is fostered.
Thus, this conception of Langer is supported by Whitehead’s “symbolic refer-
ence” theory, in particular in the fusion of perceptual experiences between the mode
of presentational immediacy and the mode of causal efficacy. For Whitehead, the
formation of the symbol is dependent on a first individuation of the sense-data, that
is, it requires a kind of structural primacy of the presentational dimension of the
symbolic reference; only in this way can the symbol form a relation to the sym-

2 Although the importance of music derives largely from Whitehead’s thought, Langer, to defend
herself against the mimetic aesthetic theories, explicitly implies the Cassirerian concept of symbolic
form: “Our interest in music arises from its intimate relation to the all-important life of feeling,
whatever that relation may be. After much debate on current theories, the conclusion reached in
Philosophy in a New Key is that the function of music is not stimulation of feeling, but expression
of it; and furthermore, not the symptomatic expression of feelings that beset the composer but a
symbolic expression of the forms of sentience as he understands them. It bespeaks his imagination
of feelings rather than his own emotional state, and expresses what he knows about the so-called
‘inner life’; and this may exceed his personal case, because music is a symbolic form to him through
which he may learn as well as utter ideas of human sensibility” (Langer 1953: 28–29).
90 J. Braga

bolized. However, artistic symbols accentuate even more the sense perception, the
contemporary temporality of the perceptum and the percipient, since they open, so to
speak, a temporal hiatus in the causal process of the symbolic articulations. Before
referring to anything out of itself, the work of art refers to itself, to its own sensible
constitution.

5.5 Materiality and Virtuality

There is, however, in Whitehead’s formulations on the symbol, a certain idealistic

inheritance that is not completely outdated. This is the question of the materiality of
the symbol. Whitehead, for example, seems to disregard the material nature of the
symbol, when, early on Symbolism, its meaning and effect, asserts that “the mere
sound of a word, or its shape on paper, is indifferent” (Whitehead 1985: 2). Thus, as
he adds, the meaning of a linguistic symbol “is constituted by the ideas, images, and
emotions, which raises in the mind of the hearer” (Whitehead 1985: 2). Cassirer, on
the other hand, while giving great emphasis to the sensible dimensions of symbol
formation processes, rarely considers the material surface of symbolic media. Strictly
speaking, he only touches on some relevant considerations when dealing with the
universe of artistic symbols.
The idea drawn by Langer that aesthetic imagined feelings depend on some kind
of suspension of the actual materiality of the artwork in favor of their virtual elements
may, however, raise a number of issues. In particular, one can question whether this
assumption does not yield a dematerialization of the art object itself. Langer gets to
say that the more “perfect” the artwork is, the more its actual materiality tends to
disappear from our perception. This is the case, for example, of dance—“the more
perfect the dance, the less we see its actualities” (Langer 1957b: 5–6). But, is this
not yet the main conception of Schiller, namely the seminal idea that nourishes his
Ästhetik des Scheins, by which the “appearance” of the form presupposes, inevitably,
the “disappearance” of its material medium?
Some Langer interpreters acknowledge such an hypothesis. Sammuel Bufford,
for example, deduces, equivocally, that in Langer’s theory, the artistic objects “do
not have material existence, while other things do. We abstract the appearances of
such things as buildings and pots from their material existence to consider them as
works of art” (Bufford 1972: 11). In other words, in Bufford’s account, the aesthetic
status of the artwork depends on a mere mental abstraction. Langer, however, states
that art symbols are symbols that do not want to be symbols, that is, the material
elements are never, strictly speaking, completely eliminated by the main passage
of the actual to the virtual. Since the artistic symbol is not fully a symbol, it can
then, according to Langer, be referred to as an unconsummated symbol. Then, the
symbolic complexity of artistic forms embraces its physical surface, since “they are,
indeed, not abstractable from the works that exhibit them. We may abstract a shape
from an object that has this shape, by disregarding color, weight and texture, even
size; but to the total effect that is an artistic form, the color matters, the thickness of
5 Imagination and Virtuality. On Susanne Langer’s Theory … 91

lines matters, and the appearance of texture and weight” (Langer 1957b: 25–26). It
is still in this sense that the author also makes a clear distinction between copy and
original: “A work of art is and remains specific. It is ‘this’, and not ‘this kind’, unique
instead of exemplary. A physical copy of it belongs to the class of its copies, but the
original is not itself a member of this class to which it furnishes the class concept.”
And, as the author further adds, the thematic classification of a work of art, unlike
a scientific work, does not call into question its physical individuality: “We may, of
course, classify it in numberless ways, for example, according to its theme, from
which it may take its name—‘Madonna and Child’, ‘Last Supper’, and so on. And
as many artists as wish may use the same theme, or one artist may use it many times;
there may be many ‘Raphael Madonnas’ and many ‘Last Suppers’ in the Louvre.
But such class-membership has nothing to do with the artistic importance of a work
(the classification of a scientific object, on the other hand, always affects its scientific
importance)” (Langer 1957b: 177).
Being a faithful heir to Cassirer’s conception of symbolic form, Langer knows that
the German philosopher always made reference to the individual material nature of art
symbols. The concept of “immanence”, used by Cassirer to characterize the symbolic
structures of art, presupposes precisely that sensible and material individuation of
each artwork.3 Of course, the seminal passage of the actual to the virtual—and not
vice versa, as happens in the Platonic theories—preserves, in some way, the material
dimension of art objects.
So, where lies the main problem with the materiality of the medium in Langer’s
theory?
From an aesthetic point of view, we can precisely place it in the seminal passage of
the actual to the virtual. Langer, when designing such transformation, uses the same
assumption as Schiller, who tells us that the aesthetic autonomy of the appearance
means the complete overcoming of the heteronomy of sensible reality. This assump-
tion prevents Langer from outlining a dynamic relationship between the actuality of
materials and the virtuality of elements, which does not involve, solely and exclu-
sively, the mere submission of the first to the second. As Richard Wollheim rightly
points out, “the supposition that the image totally anticipates the picture” has always
been a semiotic fallacy that has contributed to the linear subordination of the physi-
cal existence of pictures to the consciousness of their figurative contents (Wollheim
1990: 42) or, in the old language of Aristotelian causality, to the primacy of the causa
formalis over the causa materialis. Although Langer disregards mimetic theories and
considers, at the heart of her theory, non-figurative art, she does not realize that one
of the aesthetic features of the avant-garde art of the twentieth century is rooted in
the primacy of the medium over the form. That fact has contributed to the expansion
of the relationship between materials and elements, to the inscription of the medium
in the form itself—the (paradoxical) re-entry of the actual in the virtual. Above all,
the concept of virtual is used by Langer to overcome the mimetic theory of art, espe-
cially the transparent correspondences that it presupposes between the symbol and

3 For more detail on this, see Braga (2012: 169–206).

92 J. Braga

the symbolized. But if, in mimetic theory, the materiality of artistic forms is entirely
cast aside, the same also “tends” to happen with Langer’s proposal.
Langer’s excessive dichotomous conceptualism—materials-elements, image-
model, primary illusions-secondary illusions, copy-original, etc.—seems, to a large
extent, to determine all of her theoretical background, to the point where it is evident
that she confuses the internal and linear sequence of binomials with the description
of the analyzed phenomena themselves. If this were not the case, Langer would
have taken into account the twofold task that Cassirer prescribes to artistic forms:
the creation of an autonomous aesthetic cosmos allows, in turn, the rediscovery and
preservation of an “immediate intuitive approach to reality” (Cassirer 1979: 154).
The virtuality of the work of art is thus projected into the unknown materiality of the
world. Because, after all, art has not only the function to take us to a world that does
not exist (that of fiction), but also to that which exists and we cannot actually see.

References

Braga, Joaquim. 2012. Die symbolische Prägnanz des Bildes. Zu einer Kritik des Bildbegriffs nach
der Philosophie Ernst Cassirers. Freiburg: Centaurus Verlag.
Bufford, Samuel. 1972. Susanne Langer’s Two Philosophies of Art. The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 31 (1): 9–20.
Cassirer, Ernst. 1944. Essay on Man. An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New York:
Doubleday & Company.
Cassirer, Ernst. 1979. Symbol, Myth, and Culture. Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935–1945,
ed. Donald Phillip Verne. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Husserl, Edmund. 2006. Phantasie und Bildbewußtsein, hrsg. und eingeleitet von Eduard Marbach,
Text nach Husserliana, Band XXIII. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.
Langer, Susanne K. 1953. Feeling and Form A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New
Key. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Langer, Susanne K. 1957a. Philosophy in a New Key. A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite,
and Art, 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Langer, Susanne K. 1957b. Problems of Art: Ten Philosophical Lectures. New York: Charles Scrib-
ner’s Sons.
Langer, Susanne K. 1975. Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, vol. 1, 2nd ed. Baltimore and London:
The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Schiller, Friedrich. 1983. Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen
[1795]. Stuttgart: Reclam.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1967. Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1968. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1978. Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology, Corrected edition,
ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1985. Symbolism, its meaning and effect, Revised edition. New York:
Fordham University Press.
Wilkinson, Elizabeth M. 1955. Schiller’s Concept of Schein in the Light of Recent Aesthetics.
German Quarterly 28: 219–227.
Wollheim, Richard. 1990. Art and its Objects, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
5 Imagination and Virtuality. On Susanne Langer’s Theory … 93

Joaquim Braga is Invited Assistant Professor and FCT-Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the
Department of Philosophy of the University of Coimbra. He is also a member of the Research Unit
Instituto de Estudos Filosóficos. His graduation in Philosophy took place at the Faculty of Letters
of the University of Coimbra. In 2010, at Humboldt University of Berlin, he finished his Ph.D.
with a thesis based upon the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer. Currently, his research activity cov-
ers the fields of Picture Theory, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Culture and Modern Philosophy, with
a special interest in symbolic thought. His works include, among others, Die symbolische Präg-
nanz des Bildes. Zu einer Kritik des Bildbegriffs nach der Philosophie Ernst Cassirers (Freiburg,
2012), Rethinking Culture and Cultural Analysis—Neudenken von Kultur und Kulturanalyse (with
Christian Möckel, Berlin, 2013), Leituras da Sociedade Moderna. Media, Política, Sentido (with
C. A. Carvalho, Coimbra, 2013), Símbolo e Cultura (Coimbra, 2014), Bernard de Mandeville’s
Tropology of Paradoxes: Morals, Politics, Economics, and Therapy (with Balsemão Pires, New
York, 2015), Antropologia da Individuação. Estudos sobre o Penamento de Ernst Cassirer (with
Rafael Garcia, Porto Alegre, 2017).
Chapter 6
The Virtual as Precondition for Artistic
Creation

Michaela Ott

Abstract This article presumes that contemporary artistic practices relate in

different ways to reality. Or, in other words, through their aesthetic compositions, they
not only represent, but co-constitute different realities. Diverse examples of present-
day artistic practices make us realise that there is neither one art nor one reality and
no defined relationship of the two things to one another. Thanks to the application
of digital media, but also the vast array of research methods, artistic practices today
not merely combine aesthetic signs to futuristic heterogeneous time expressions, but
actually produce time-creating or time-diversifying audiovisual articulations. They
underline the time-dependent and metamorphotic character of reality. This is the
reason why in certain philosophical readings of these art practices the term “utopi-
an” is replaced with the term “uchronic” articulations. In order to provide a more
general understanding of these time-diversifying artistic processes, the article aims
at reintroducing the old philosophical concepts of “virtual” and “actual” reality as
unfolded by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and later on by Gilles Deleuze.

A recent exhibition entitled EXOGLOBALE at ZKM, Karlsruhe (Germany, 2015/16)

featured artistic practices that presented quasi-scientific experiments: for instance,
the chemical syntheses that are supposed to have contributed to the Big Bang were
reproduced, and research into the improvement of plant growth or the cultural his-
tory of the domestication of cattle was presented alongside images of genetically
manipulated life forms. These artistic experiments represented responses—curious,
critical, or parodic—to the imperative created by multiplied and actualised knowl-
edge production. They also produced or themselves simulated novel products. Unlike
the scientific kind, these artistic procedures expand our understanding of reality, by
investigating the sensory qualities of the materials or playing with technological
feasibility possibilities, enquiring into their aesthetic, idea-based and social implica-
tions, problematising the way they constitute reality, and operating in a conditional
way, dependent on mediatising processes.

M. Ott (B)
Academy of Fine Arts, Hamburg, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 95

J. Braga (ed.), Conceiving Virtuality: From Art To Technology, Numanities - Arts
and Humanities in Progress 11, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24751-5_6
96 M. Ott

Metachemische Forschung (“Metachemical Research”) by Ursula Biemann, for

instance, seeks to penetrate into the materiality of water, with the artist allowing
herself to be challenged to create new representational forms by water’s sensory
quality. On the other hand, she opens up a field of investigation into the water prob-
lems of Egypt, by collecting statements on the situation there—some from nonhuman
speakers—and aiming to make the space of resonance visible and audible. The artistic
project invokes “an ensemble of practices incorporating chemical, biological, metal-
lurgical and philosophical dimensions, as would be the case for the original Egyptian
term Al Khemia, long before the strict division of disciplines and sub-disciplines”
(Biemann 2012, 156). Egyptian Chemistry is also conceived as part of the interna-
tional art and research project Supply Lines: a project concerned with the geography
of resources that aims to invent a non-human-centric aesthetic vocabulary to record
said resources.
In Kassel’s Fridericianum and in Berlin’s Kunstwerke, the artworks Images and
Secret Surface—Wo Sinn entsteht (“Where Meaning Arises”) in March/April 2016,
curated by Susanne Pfeffer, once again explored different aspects of the real. Their
theme is imaging processes in terms of their materiality, their attribution of meaning
and their relationship to viewers. In Two Minutes Out of Time, Pierre Huyghe and
Philippe Pareno raise questions concerning the appropriation of images presenting
a Manga figure whom they have commercially bought and whom they present as a
childlike living person. By doing so, they also question the production of collective
imaginations and expectations in terms of images and viewers. In the plastic sculpture
Double Hunt, Seth Price presents the migration of Paleolithic motifs from the caves of
Lascaux, via their reproduction in a second cave, to his own reproductions on different
carrier materials such as plastic and glass cubes, thus creating a change in their
messages occasioned by historic and aesthetics factors. The artistic images collected
together at the Berlin exhibition, on the other hand, are to be deciphered as testaments
to secretive non-metaphysical differential, and, under certain circumstances, non-
visual creations of meaning.
Aside from the production of new visual surfaces—not always related to technol-
ogy—artistic processes of this type seek to draw attention to different ways of reading
images and other attitudes. The first of these artworks adheres to a philosophy of
not producing artworks in the traditional sense, but instead investigating social and
scientific practices for their sensory affective and meaning-generating quality, their
implicit value assignments and possible consequences. They depend upon the self-
analysis of contemporary imaging procedures, and reflect their mediatising processes
in order to generate insights concerning changing frames of reference to reality, far
beyond the realm of art.
These diverse present-day artistic practices make us realise that there is neither
one art nor one reality, no general singular for either one of the fields and no defined
relationship of the two things to one another. If we see art and reality confined here
within a single posed question, it is in order to enquire into how the artistic pro-
cess relates to—or co-constitutes—reality today. Since, today, the arts and sciences
concentrate less on the projection of fantastic non-places and alternative societies
or ways of life than on time and media-related displacements of meaning, and the
6 The Virtual as Precondition for Artistic Creation 97

presenting of selfreflective experimental arrangements that display temporal asyn-

chronies and speed divergences, the old term “utopian” gets often replaced with
the new term “uchronic”. In particular, mediated movements and time-based artistic
researches produce non-static, alternating, progressively changing aesthetic articu-
lations. This phenomenon may be so far advanced that artistic practices not merely
combine heterogeneous time situations in order to bring about a new synthesis of past
and future, but actually produce time-creating or time-diversifying reality images.
By doing so, they not only expose the permanent audiovisual transition between fig-
uration and de-figuration, but often create futuristic articulations which seem to have
already happened and bring about situations which have been called “past future”
or “future II”. The degree of what can be called artistic “uchronia” thus depends
on the manner in which aesthetic moves forward and back in time are interwoven
in audiovisual expressions, the rhythm with which they accelerate or move apart,
the type of coherence or disparity shown by the visual and auditive signs, and, all
in all, the reality status of the aesthetic composition. Uchronic artistic compositions
tend to emphasise the arrhythmia and non-connectivity of different speeds and (pos-
sibly culturally influenced) tempos; their theme is the distorting, displacing aspect
of temporal power, its capacity for generating voids. But they also present temporal
reversals portraying the future as something already happened and revive a certain
past as something never seen before. Its is their quality of being lifted out of time,
for which the term uchronia appears appropriate.
In this sense they approximate another term which is used more often in recent
theories: the term heterotopia which designates the multiplication of diverse and
not synchronized temporal processes within an art work, a society or a psychic
experience. Whereas heterotopia is used as a positive designation accentuating the
diversification of temporal processes in an advanced technological society, uchronia
points at dystopic developments in societal and psychic entities.
Today, the multiplication of artistic reference points for reality is generated by
the experimental character of the real as presented also by natural science itself, but
above all, by contemporary socio-technological displacements. One might sum up
by saying that the disciplinary boundaries of both fields are currently being broken
down in the same immanent way, as they abandon their traditional epistemologi-
cal distinctions and permit—or even encourage—interwoven relationships between
classifications hitherto regarded as unrelated, so that no defensible ambiguous or
uncontroversial reality reference point now exists. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
reinforce this tendency theoretically when they claim in Mille Plateaux (1980), that
from an epistemological perspective it is more fruitful to dismiss the old taxonomical
classifications based on visual distinctive characteristics and to look instead from a
transdisciplinary point of view at entanglements and transversal affections between
species considered hitherto as separate entities. Today, the research in terms of bio-
diverity moves into this direction and promotes approaches which throw a closer
look at the interdependence of species across taxonomical borders and underline the
necessity to widen and to diversify the field and objects of scientific research.
Consequently, artistic practices can be read as a symptomatic expression of what
is taking place today in all areas of humanity’s increasingly complicated existence.
98 M. Ott

We see ourselves embedded in a network of reference points expanded by ecolog-

ical and biodiversity concerns—but that is not all. We also see ourselves included
in global migration movements and confronted with uchronic social and epistemo-
logical developments. Thus, we can offer only differing reference points on reality
that are dependent upon our point in time and our level of perception. To summarise
once again, it can be stated that, epistemologically, reality appears to be gaining
more dimensions, opening up an ever more diverse space for reflection and cultural
symbolisation between its presumed preexistence and the present day longing for its
actualisation and discovery. From certain physics perspectives, the cosmic reality is
showing us that it is far from being entirely comprehensible, that we are forced to
speculate and coin terms fit for Hollywood, such as “dark matter” and “black holes”.
On the other hand, reality has become the name for the spectrum of everything to
which we give some kind of temporal frame, everything we make visible and audible
via technological media, and everything whose status we either confirm or question.
As we must therefore presuppose an elastic relationship with reality dependent upon
ideas of scientific interpretation, but also aesthetic creativities, certain philosophies
will be discussed here that have exposed the ambiguity of the real. With a view
to creating a deeper understanding of the relationship between art and reality, the
following philosophies are presented here.

6.1 Uchronia—Virtuality

The philosophical term “the virtual” is here reintroduced and revived to refer to these
media and time-related, uchronic and heterochronic articulations and to provide an
epistemological foundation for them. The term is a rather classical philosophical
concept, but for some reason does not correspond to any root Greek word. It is
not understood here in the abbreviated sense defined by German media theory in
the 1990s: that is, it is not equated with electronic simulations which enclose users
via technological gadgets in a visual alternative world that is as immersive as pos-
sible. This sort of simulation has been interpreted by philosophers such as Jean
Baudrillard as an ultimate invention intended to signal the vanishing of reality. The
new (non)reality reference points have been attributed to the so called postmodern
world, described in the media jargon of the time as a mirror world.
Here, in opposition to this approach, the intention is to revive a concept of virtuality
that allows us to think of the real as a twofold process and a varying configuration
between the modes of actualisation and virtualization of time. Together with its
corresponding term, “the actual”, the virtual provides an understanding of reality
as something preexistent and at the same time partly unknown, always to discover.
What we are able to grasp of the temporal processes and the unknown aspects of
reality depends upon the chosen epistemological levels and the technological media
framing today. In any case, the twofold character of the real induces all sorts of
scientific and artistic researches aiming at highlighting phenomena which have not
6 The Virtual as Precondition for Artistic Creation 99

been perceived and reflected until now. Reality is an adventure from the point of
view of its virtuality.
The term of the virtual was already deployed in making fine epistemological
distinctions in 13th-century European philosophy, and was distinguished from other
adverbs for this purpose: Thomas von Aquinas distinguishes the term “virtual” from
“actual”, “formal”, and “express”. The virtual already described something both
implied and specified; as part of a predicate, it refers to something tacitly approaching
the subject. It is used to determine the different personae in the Christian conception
of a unique God as well as to analyse the unclear relationships between causes
and effects. That an effect can be virtually contained in a cause without necessarily
being actualised by it is a thought construct frequently encountered in early modern
European philosophy. Its uchronic potential lies in the fact that it is not used to invoke
a teleological inevitability according to the Aristotelian understanding, which states
that potentiality or “dunamis” inevitably strives to realise and perfect itself through
its own purpose or “energeia”.
Instead, the term virtual introduces a new distinction, outside of any possibil-
ity/reality opposition; one that no longer contains the assumption that a seed—genetic
information, for instance—will necessarily realise itself in a particular form. The term
“virtual distinction”, first coined in the 14th century, opens up a new epistemological
perspective: the aim is to distinguish between two modes of the real, a virtual and an
actual way for things to be. It also means that self-realisation is no longer equated
with the implementation of an inborn nature and with its unidirectional unfolding.
This insight seems to be is verified today by the contemporary studies of genomics.
The philosophical relevant point is that both, the virtual and actual, are considered
both real, each representing a different mode of the time-based reality. In the context
of theological efforts to validate the Christian concept of Trinity, it was stated that
the Divine, which is in itself indivisible, may be virtually diverse in other respects:
for instance, in terms of its effects.
This new concept of an epistemologically divisible ontological non-divisibility is
relevant to contemporary explorations of mediatising and subjectivising processes.
After all, in our present day, we increasingly encounter organic and biodiverse micro-
processes (primarily owing to more refined technological observation and recording
instruments) that are scientifically subdivided into human and non-human elements,
even though, with a view to the consistency of the whole, their coexistence appears
indissoluble. For instance, billions of bacteria live in the human body; these are clas-
sified as being of different, nonhuman species, and yet, in terms of human survival,
they are inseparable from the human body.
Similarly, contemporary genomics confirms the virtual/actual condition of the
genome, in the sense that the actualisation of human genetic information is a vari-
able copy, paste, and transposition process coeffected by bacteria and viruses and
dependent upon eventualities. Today, the genetic code is understood as virtual infor-
mation that cannot be readily related to the phenotype or to an individual’s fate,
since the way they achieve their own specific actuality depends on temporal inter-
actions and feedback processes taking place between DNA, RNA, proteins and cell
plasma. It is the relationships between the components—not temporally specified,
100 M. Ott

and special in each case—that is considered to be of more significance than the

material composition of the code: so-called “transposons” cut information out of
the DNA and reattach it in another location, thereby effecting a “flexibilising of the
configuration of the genome” (Kim et al. 2001, 193), which can be understood as
temporal biodiversity on the genetic level. The constitutive self-differentiation of the
genome therefore rests upon uchronic mediatising processes taking place between an
unknown Virtuality X and an Actuality X that is never definitively achieved, thanks
to the temporal dynamics of indeterminate multiples.
In his philosophical discourses on human understanding, G. W. Leibniz draws on
the noun “virtualitas” (which goes back to the 15th century) in his discussions of
human reason, using it to determine human “inclinations, dispositions et habitudes”
(Leibniz 1949, 122). In the German translation: “Geneigtheiten, Bereitschaften, Fer-
tigkeiten” (Leibniz 1949, 122). In this translation, “virtualités naturelles” is rendered
in German as “natürliche Möglichkeiten/natural possibilities/potentialities” instead
of “natürliche Virtualitäten/natural virtualities”. This is somewhat misleading, in the
sense that it obscures the aforementioned epistemological difference between the
virtual and the Aristotelian “dunamis”, usually translated as “Möglichkeit” or “po-
tentiality”. In Aristotle’s understanding, to say it once again, the potential gets necce-
sarily and identically translated into the actual without any time-based change. Leib-
niz’ idea, in contrast, introduces the possibility of deviation, of a temporal unfolding
which includes a certain range of interpretation. After all, Leibniz’ supposition of
innate ideas, introduced to combat John Locke’s sensualism, does not refer to any
kind of unambiguous pre-determined existence. Instead, it refers to infinite virtual
items of information, “more clearly” or “less clearly” actualised depending on the
temporal (self)affection of the perceptions—with this creating the difference between
the individual monads. To state this again in a different way: the monads are sup-
posed to virtually contain the whole world, but are different according to the specific
actualisation of its perception. Here, the uchronic aspect comes from the assertion
that “in our spirit there is much that is innate, because we are so to speak innate in
ourselves” (Leibniz 1949, 121), but the manifold nature of our innate aspects and its
capacity for temporal actualisation is unknown to us, and thus can surprise us. This
concept has an affinity with uchronia because the human monads—as a compressed
version of Leibniz’ metaphysics of the infinite—are an endless actualisation of their
virtual innateness, and thus make more complex versions of time a possibility.
For the in-itself-innate to experience itself as a wild thing is not strange to a con-
temporary person who has undergone psychoanalysis. The Freudian concept of the
unconscious, for instance, articulates an also time-based selfalienation of the human
individual that has sometimes been understood as creative potential, sometimes as
a generator of suffering. Since the unconscious and its inscriptions are referred to
different pasts by Freud himself, to processes of preindividual and even prehuman
traumatisation, it does not come as a surprise that the psychic development of the
human being can also be interpreted as an oscillation between virtuality and actuality.
In this sense one thought is not yet taken to its conclusion: the statement of Leibniz
that the human individual is to understand itself as a multiple self-different coherency
containing an “actual infinity of parts” (Leibniz 1986, 377) which may possibly prac-
6 The Virtual as Precondition for Artistic Creation 101

tice affective participation with one another. As we can see here the human individual
is not understood as an undivided entity free of temporal influences, but on the con-
trary as a sort of infinite dividuation which combines and recombines its different
actual and actualized parts.
This Leibnizian assumption is an epistenologically very modern one and one, as
I would like to argue, that is exploited and further dynamicised by the contemporary
technological media. The virtual as understood by Leibniz, expressed in euphoric
exclamations such as: “what an infinity of infinitely repeated infinities, what world,
what a perceptible universe in every miniscule body that one could envision!” (Leib-
niz 1986, 381) can fully actualise in and of itself—in contrast to contemporary
mediated subjectivities. The envisioner or mediatiser of the “multiplicity of affec-
tions and of relationships” (Leibniz 2002, 115) in the monads is identified with the
“appetition”, “striving” or inner “unrest”—a translation of physics theory relating to
conservation of movement (Leibniz 1971). This appetition is believed to contribute
to the multiplication of actual affections and to “effect the change or transition of
one perception to another” (Leibniz 2002, 117). Today, in contrast, the creation of
new perceptions or affections is no longer connected with virtuality capacities and
the idea of an infinity of actual parts in the human body. Instead, sociotechnological
agents are called on to interconnect these with the appetitions of different persons,
and, additionally, to intensify the capacity for—and the force of—affection. Interest-
ingly, this is associated with subjects’ hopes for increased happiness, just as it was
in Leibniz’ time.
In the mid of the 20th century, the philosophical thought approaches first of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and then of Gilles Deleuze equate the virtual now with tem-
porality. Temporality itself is no longer understood as a linear development between
past and future, but as an uchronic entanglement of past and upcoming moments
bringing about a vast field of “heterochronic multiplicity”. They identify the paired
terms “virtual” and “actual” with Bergson’s conception of time as a double track, so
that the virtual manifests as its infinity of future/past, and the actual as its continued
other present-moment synthesis. Perceptions that bring with them something new
are supposed to actualise themselves as differentiated syntheses of instants via repe-
tition of past virtual memories and their reactualisation for and in actual perceptions.
Like Proust’s novel A la recherche du temps perdu, lost memories return then as they
have never been experienced, in an unknown essence.
In a philosophically more relevant sense the double track of a virtual past and
an actualized present and their mutual presupposition help to unfold the philosoph-
ically required figure of “self-constitution”. This necessarily paradoxical figure of
self-constitution is indispensable for philosophical reflection because it has to pro-
vide a possible foundation of its ontological assumptions. Since the death of God
and the lack of a supposed first creator, it became difficult for the philosophers to
prove the legitimacy of their assumptions. In the dogmatic era of philosophy, in the
17th and 18th century, philosophers tried to provide axioms as first and basic true
sentences very much like in mathematics and natural sciences. But for a modern
thinker like Merleau-Ponty such a dogmatic and arbitrary beginning is no longer
possible; a self-reflexive figure is required, which at the same time that it constitutes
102 M. Ott

itself questions its self-constitution, de- and reconstructs itself in eternal processes of
self-repetition and -affection. For Merleau-Ponty time and its timing processes are
this self-reflective figure, given since ever as infinity and at the same time creating
itself in endless syntheses of self-affection, repetition and differentiation. This is the
reason why he enthusiastically claims: “If time is the subject, then self-constitution
is no contradiction. (…) Time is ‘affection of itself by itself’; (…) here affection and
being affected are the same” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 425f). Time is considered a circu-
lar and paradoxical process insofar as it must already be given in order to bring about
itself in processes of timing. Infinite by definition and therefore always advancing
its actual presentifications, it constitutes itself by repeating a forever lost past and
by synthecizing it into present sensual moments. Without using the paired terms
“virtual” and “actual”, Merleau-Ponty traces the movement of time taking place as
one of (actualising) self-repetition and self-affection of (virtual) time “in” time, in
which it appears to resemble vital processes. It is always already given and always
appearing anew. In its endless forward flow and in the ever different repetitions of
its past, he believes it to be fundamental (to itself) and to unfold its ever changing
dynamic. Thanks to a rushing “pressure” it is supposed to strive toward the future
and necessarily bring forth the new, which, he believes, then virtualises itself anew
in heterochronic processes of timing.
Gilles Deleuze’s time philosophy, as unfolded in Différence et Répétition and in
the “cinema books”, Cinéma 1. L’Image-Mouvement (1985) and Cinéma 2. L’image-
temps (1985), is a direct prolongation of the temporal ontology of Merleau-Ponty. For
his part, Deleuze declares time to be the foundational figure and the subjectivity as
such, which thus takes the place of human subjectivity: “La subjectivité n’est jamais
la notre, c’est le temps, c’est-à-dire l’âme ou l’esprit, le virtuel/The subjectivity is
never ours, for it is time; that is, the soul or the spiritual, the virtual” (Deleuze 1985,
111). Unlike Merleau-Ponty, he does not start with the question of self-constitution
and self-affection of time, but infers these from actual affects, from moments given
“in” time: “L’actuel est toujours objectif, mais le virtuel est le subjectif: c’était
d’abord l’affect, ce que nous éprouvons dans le temps, puis le temps lui-même, pure
virtualité qui se dédouble en affectant et affecté, ‘l’affectation de soi par soi’ comme
défintion de temps/The actual is always objective, but the virtual is the subjective:
it was initially the effect that we experience in time, later time itself, pure virtuality,
which divides itself into affecting and affected, ‘Self-affection through self’ as the
determination of time” (Deleuze 1985, 111). Deleuze is convinced that we can only
start “inbetween”, within given temporal processes; starting with a certain affect we
can go back and forth and gradually unfold the idea of time as a process of self-
affection and self-differentiation, of heterogenesis. The discussion of the two modes
of reality begins in the actual’s midst, with repetitions, only to return to folded-in
infinity, to the differentiality of the virtual, in which the actual bases itself whilst at
the same time de-grounding and distorting its processes of timing. Important ist the
idea that both aspects of reality and time are always given, but in different ways: in
an actualized and in a latent, virtual mode, and that they permanently exchange their
status: the actualized becoming virtual and the virtual becoming actualized. It is the
idea of an eternal return, but not as the same, but as a differentiated mode.
6 The Virtual as Precondition for Artistic Creation 103

In Difference and repetition (1968/1997) Deleuze tries to delve into the consti-
tution of organic beings and explains their “becoming” once more as a process of
self-constitution and -repetition between virtual and actual modes. He conceives of
the field which is supposed to constitute itself together with vital processes as one
where initial differences inscribe themselves as “passive syntheses” (Deleuze 1997,
71), an expression coined by Edmund Husserl and applied to basic human auto-
perceptions. In Deleuze’s perspective, the non-human field of first passive syntheses
starts to develop a certain dynamic thanks to inner tensions within the syntheses which
differentiate themselves and bring about minimal “active egos” who accompany the
passive organic, later on the humanising processes. These small contemplative egos
are somehow the virtual part of the non-human and human Egos, acting and contem-
plating unconsciously in our actions and perceptions, bringing about our habitudes
and contemplations and further differentiations of our capacities: “We speak of our
‘self’ only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within
us: it is always a third party who says ‘me’. These contemplative souls must be
assigned even to the rat in the labyrinth and to each muscle of the rat. Given that
contemplation never appears at any moment during the action—since it is always
hidden, and since it does nothing (…)—it is easy to forget it and to interpret the entire
process of excitation and reaction without any reference to repetition” (Deleuze 1997,
75f.). Between these two sides of passivity and activity and their mutual repetitions,
processes of “contraction” and “contemplation” are supposed to stimulate further
growings of capacities: “The role of imagination, or the mind which contemplates in
its multiple and fragmented states, is to draw something new from repetition, to draw
difference from it. (…) True repetition takes place in imagination. (…) Difference
inhabits repetition. (…) In every way, material or bare repetition, so-called repetition
of the same, is like a skin which unravels, the eternal husk of a kernel of difference
and more complicated internal repetitions” (Deleuze 1997, 76). This alteration of
repetition and difference gradually brings about active capacities, more extended
organic entities and finally human beings as complex entanglements of passive and
active processes: “We can distinguish two simultaneous dimensions in such a way
that there is no movement beyond the passive synthesis towards an active synthesis
without the former also being extended in another direction, one in which it utilizes
the bound excitation in order to attain something else (…). Moreover it seems that
active syntheses would never be erected on the basis of passive syntheses unless these
persisted simultaneously (…), finding new formulae at once both dissymmetrical and
complementary with the activity” (Deleuze 1997, 99). Deleuze here introduces the
concept of a “virtual object” (Deleuze 1997, 99) following the theory of Melanie
Klein which has to govern or to compensate the progresses or failures of the human
activity and its ambition to integrate its different parts. The virtual object, also called
partial object, has to play a role in the combination of the different drives in human
subjectivation and to hinder the totalisation of its different capacities: “In short, the
virtual is never subject to the global character which affects real objects. It is (…)
a fragment, a shred or a remainder. It lacks its own identity. (…) Whereas active
synthesis points beyond passive synthesis towards global integrations and the sup-
position of identical totalisable objects, passive synthesis (…) points beyond itself
104 M. Ott

towards the contemplation of partial objects which remain non-totalisable” (Deleuze

1997, 101). As we can see, the virtual remains connected with the pure past which at
the same time has to found the upcoming presences, to diversify their presentification
and to hinder their coherent constitution of a presence which can be identified. In
a more general sense, the processes of thinking, perceiving and affecting are con-
sidered as continuous differentiations on the basis of repetitions, as actualisations
of given virtual ideas and concepts, percepts and affects, very much like in Leibniz
ideas of human understanding. For Deleuze, it is indispensable that the field of not
only human expressions eventually brings about itself as a continuous heterogenesis
which on the one hand unfolds wider processes of timing until time transcends the
heterogenuous field and constitutes itself as time per se, on the other hand contin-
uously reinvests the field with partial and virtual objects and differentiates time as
ever smaller syntheses of time.
“In order so sum up the ontology of Deleuze, Constantin Boundas states, that “in
Deleuze’s ontology the virtual and the actual are two mutually exclusive, yet jointly
sufficient, bodily mixtures and individuals. The virtual/real are incorporeal events and
singularities on a plane of consistency, belonging to the pure past—the past that can
never be fully present. Without being or resembling the actual, the virutal nonetheless
has the capacity to bring about actualisation and yet the virtual never coincides or
can be identified with its actualisation. (…) The variety of characterisations given the
virtual by Deleuze raises the question of how the virtual ought to be understood and
the extent to which each characterisation is complicit in the text That the virtual is
the Bergsonian durée and élan vitalstems from the basic agreement between Deleuze
and Bergson regarding the structure of temporality. Any actual present passes only
because all presents are constituted both as pesent and past. In all past presents the
entire past is conserved in itself, and this includes the past that has never been present
(the virtual)” (Boundas 2005, 296–298).
The unfolding of these processes requires aesthetic articulations, if not organic
bodies. Deleuze insists on the idea that everything has to begin within, within the
actual expression in order to gradually discover the underlying and constitutive rep-
etition and the virtual objects within. The practices of fine art are the best possi-
ble mode of unfolding the virtual, partial, non-normative aspects of given aesthetic
expressions since they can deconstruct visual and auditive clichés, can deconstruct
given visual stereotypes, can discover and enlargen unheard sounds, can perform the
asignification of certain literary expressions. Therefore Deleuze discovers processes
of virtualisation in modern literature, when he underlines the minorisation of the
protagonists in Beckett’s novels, when he exposes the different ways of “becoming-
other”, of becoming larval subjects or animal in the novels of Virgina Woolf, of
Karl-Philippe Moritz or Hugo von Hofmannsthal: the writing itself minorises its
expression, starts to stutter and transforms the text into virtual articulations, looses
its function of representation in order to become pure movement.
Deleuze while writing also on painting nevertheless prefers time-based art works
and mainly film. Ambitious articulations encountered in these art practices present
themselves as timecreating compositions between actuality and virtuality. They use
the indeterminacy of the real that they open up to dramatise uchronic and hete-
6 The Virtual as Precondition for Artistic Creation 105

rochronic creations and exhibit mutually deviating speeds and dynamics, with their
corresponding frictions.
In particular, Deleuze sees the filmic “crystal image/l’image-cristal” (Deleuze
1985, 109) as characterised by continuous switching between actual and virtual
modes of the image. The multifaceted nature of the geologically produced crystal
form fascinated him. The crystal then becomes a concept that he methodologically
uses in his consideration of time and film image; the concept of the “crystal-image”
is enmeshed with the idea that the figure of the crystal is representative of specific
states of temporality, with the exchange or better “coalescence” between the actual
and the virtual, a condition in which the two become interchangeable and eventu-
ally indistinguishable. Deleuze speaks of a dynamic “twofoldedness/dédoublement”
(Deleuze 1985, 109) of this sort of film image. He also equates the crystalline structure
with the nature of self-reflexivity of certain feature films and the temporal medium
as such. Thanks to the ambiguous connection between visual actualisation and re-
virtualisation of what is shown, time can present as a multiplicity of deviation and
diversification and as a shimmering uchronia.
Deleuze cites various filmic processes, including longduration single takes,
panoramic tracking shots, interval formation between image and sound, different
rhythms in montage techniques, and intensities provide by images of affection in
order to describe how time displays itself in unaccustomed uchronic compositions,
as timecreator and multiplier, as audiovisual heterogenesis and therefore once again
as virtuality. He rediscovers the “descriptions” of the Nouveau Roman, a literary
method which, instead of providing a representation of reality, absorbs and consti-
tutes its object at the same time. He speaks of bigger and smaller circuits between
the actual and virtual images until they reach a limit where the visual modes become
indistinguisable. One film he mentions as an example of this indistinguisable charac-
ter and as a prototype of the crystal image is Lady from Shanghai of Orson Welles: in
its last scene the protagonists move and act between mirrors and multiply their images
up to the point where it is no longer obvious which image is a simple reflection and
which is a meta-reflection. This crystal-image displays itself as a disastruous prison,
the protagonists shooting each other and destroying the multifaceted coalescence of
the actual and the virtual.
In Time-Image, Deleuze describes a threefold system for the crystal’s variations
of past-present-future. Together with the Bergsonian concept of time as a “thought-
image”, Deleuze discusses the crystal-image as a modality of knowing time and its
possible constitution. Over time, the effects of time alter the molecular structure of
things and the crystal-image is employed to encompass vast shifts in meaning caused
through the exchanges of temporal dimensions. Filmically ambitious time images
become uchronias because the reality that they manifest is presented as (de)figuring
in indeterminate space-times, and therefore not subject to any prescribed progression.
Because of its continual metamorphosis, Deleuze denies that the film image has
the character of an individual, using the term “dividual” to sum up its subdivison and
ongoing recombination of the aesthetic signs and their infinite transformation. While
on the one hand the expression of an “image of affection” changes permanently, on
the other hand it is neverthelss unique and indivisible. Like for a musical composition,
106 M. Ott

Deleuze insists on the dividual character of the filmic art work, being metamorphotic
and singular at the same time. The temporal displacement, aesthetic subdivision and
changing participation in the audiovisual signs that he emphasises has still greater
relevance to a linear, temporally-transversal and uchronic compositions.

6.2 The Foundation of Mediatising in Virtuality

This second part of the article argues that the process of mediatising itself is based
on the duplicity of the actual and virtual reality which can be observed in all sorts of
time-based and therefore metamorphotic expressions. It also introduces the concept
of the dividual as explained in the film philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, a concept
which contains a certain critique of the idea that an art work is an individual entity or
created by an individual person. Instead it features the idea that (not only) time-based
expressions continuously (re)divide and transform themselves, but participate today
in other articulations and therefore can only be called dividual practices. The text
also criticizes the critique of technological expressions of Dieter Mersch by arguing
that every expression today is a process of coding and decoding, as demonstrated by
actual audiovisual art works.
The possibility—and also the necessity—of mediatising human and non-human
articulations is founded in the distinction between an actual and virtual reality and
its time-based interdependence on one another. The actualisation of the real is only
possible via a selection from the preexisting infinitive processes of timing and via
their media reinforced repetition and variation.
Due to its dependence on the preceding virtual process, the actualisation of the real
can only be understood as a dividual process as explained in the film philosophy of
Gilles Deleuze. In the realm of filmic articulations, the “dividual” reflects on the one
hand the non-fixed, ever changing and time-dependent character of filmic images
and sounds, especially today where they are brought about by digital technology.
i.e. by infinite calculation. In comparison with Deleuze’s time and his reflection
of analog image production, the digital images today consist of definitely unstable
and ever changing “aesthetic re-divisions, of temporally transversal participations in
each other and in other articulations” (Ott 2018, 235). Their dividual character is the
result of their permanent recombinations and redynamicisings of the aesthetic signs.
The dividual as unfolded by Deleuze places the accent again on the time-dependent
repetitive character of every articulation: from this perspective, the impossibility of
undividedness is as evident as the necessary and frequently uchronic participation in
the virtuality of time.
If one does not apply a technologically abbreviated concept of media in terms of
the supposed facts, time-generating mediatisations that are in principle new are taking
place. If reality as understood by Leibniz is thought of as an infinitely folded-in and
unfoldable screen, the unknown may be manifested dependent on time situations and
media reinforcing factors, and mediatisations become aesthetically and epistemically
relevant. Owing to the time-occasioned indeterminacy of mediatisations, they are in
6 The Virtual as Precondition for Artistic Creation 107

principle unforeseeable, and therefore cannot be equated with the digital processes
that aspire to predictability, which offer calculated and therefore limited new insights
into reality.
One questionable aspect of the contemporary equating of mediatising with dig-
ital processes is that digital processes fixedly determine the virtual according to
algorithm-based programming, allowing this programming to take the place of tem-
poral self-interpretation. In this context, it is not only the technological appropriation
and temporal anticipation of human wishes and future-related projections that appears
questionable, but also the orientation of artistic experiments toward the scope and
feasibilities of digital apparatus.
On the other hand, the refined digital observation instruments themselves work
towards the virtualisation of reality: under the microscope, a life form that, from
the normal human perspective, appears demarcated and self-identical with clearly
defined outlines appears as a teeming mass of countless microorganisms whose
boundaries and specifics cannot be easily given. In this sense, the technological media
contribute to the re-virtualising of familiar assumptions about reality. Their creative
capacity should therefore not be neglected or underestimated. When Dieter Mersch, a
German philosopher and media-theorist, objects to digital media by arguing that “they
‘distort’ what they make possible, and open up by restricting” (Mersch 2013, 20),
one can recognise an argument for the rediscovery of the sort of comprehensive and
extended virtuality with a capability for heterochronia as we have explained above.
On the other hand, it raises the question of whether the counter-rotating and negating
process he is deploring don’t apply to all mediatising processes, including that of our
own senses. And isn’t it in fact part of the possibilities that exist for epistemological
and aesthetic compositions? After all, opening up always goes hand-in-hand with
restriction, and enabling under the heading of time always goes hand-in-hand with
distortion, since there is no such thing as a true, undistorted expression of time.
Mersch’s criticism is justified if he is speaking of the binary interconnection and
decision systems that exhaust their energy in “circular causality” (Mersch 2013, 39)
tending to exclude heterochronia, to enclose themselves in predictions and probabil-
ity assumptions, and thus subjugate and functionalise time, robbing it of the capacity
to produce the unforeseeable. His warning that the technological promise of par-
ticipation that lures the human user ultimately ends in de-participation is likewise
justified providing that one equates the articulation of resistance with disruption and
interruption of interconnection, and does not have a view to artistic re-purposings of
the algorithm program and uchronic compositions.
The video artworks of the German artists Hito Steyerl and Harun Farocki are a
prominent reminder that digital image productions can invite us to engage in artis-
tic/critical reflections and re-virtualisations. This is because they both engage with
and critically deconstruct the equipment-based and aesthetic “finishes” of digital
articulations, the perception and affect of users framed and influenced by the pro-
grammed codes and their visual restrictions; they critique the attendant “deforma-
tions” and forms of de-participation like Dieter Mersch. Harun Farocki started his
work with a critical questioning of aerial views of Auschwitz produced by the US-Air
Force during World War II and wondered why they did not react to the photographs
108 M. Ott

they had taken and why they did not bomb and destroy the railways leading to the
concentration camp. His assumes that they might not have been interested in doing
so, but why then, why did they not use their knowledge to curtail the massacre?
Hito Steyerl, instead, questions the colonial German past in her film November
by deciphering the imperial facades of certain bourgeois buildings in Berlin, among
others the palace in which the Congo Conference of 1884 has taken place which was
responsible for the “Scramble of Africa”. She connects these film sequences with
shots of the actual situation of non-German workers building the skyscrapers of the
Potsdamer Platz in Berlin after the fall of the wall. And she reflects on the continuity
of a certain German state of mind vis-à-vis the foreigners suggesting that the colonial
experience has not been handled in Germany until now.
Of equal significance for our topic are recent video artworks by John Akomfrah,
which feed on historic, crosscultural, uchronic processes in a strict sense, profil-
ing them in media terms and implementing them antithetically in artistic terms. In
Tropikos, a 37-min film created in 2016, he composes montages of staged time images
combined with literary texts from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Milton’s Paradise
Lost and others. By so doing, he creates a knotty aesthetic problem, referencing
the 16th-century English slave trade between harbours in the south of England and
African bases located in Ghana, and explicitly presenting no linear narrative. Instead,
he establishes references reaching back to largely unknown spaces/times, and uses
contemporary views of the English Tamar Valley to create an attractive panorama that
produces intensity by combining painterly views and melancholy textual passages
in numerous rhythmic repetitions and variations to achieve a uchronic and unsettling
expression, relocated into infinity.
In such unconventional artistic processes, it can be stated that digital media prac-
tices, thanks to the critical and artistic space-time compositions that they make pos-
sible, permit virtualisations of the image-sound-conventions and allow connections
with a multifold reality that has hitherto not been seen in this way. This gives us an
idea of the kind of reality reference points we can expect in the future: an abundance
of uchronic and heterochronic compositions, because the virtual demands the expo-
sure of its differential temporality, but also culturally transversal actualisations in
times of globalisation where time-divergent and multidynamic entanglements will
become the common experience of everyone.

References

Biemann, Ursula. 2012. Mission Reports. Künstlerische Praxis im Feld, Nuremberg: Verlag für
Moderne Kunst.
Boundas, Constantin V. 2005. Virtual/Virtualiy. In The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. Adrian Parr,
296–298. Edinburgh: University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1985. Cinéma 2. L’image-temps, 92–128. Paris: Ed. De Minuit.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1997. Difference and Repetition. London: The Athlone Press.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1949. Vorrede zu Neue Studien über den menschlichen Verstand, Die
Hauptwerke, 117–129 (122). Stuttgart: Kröner Verlag.
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Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1971. Neue Abhandlungen über den menschlichen Verstand. Hamburg:
Meiner Verlag.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1986. Unendlichkeit und Fortschritt. Kleine Schriften zur Metaphysik,
365–386 (377). Frankfurt/M.: Insel Verlag.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 2002. Monadologie. Monadologie und andere metaphysische Schriften,
(French-German), 111–151 (115). Hamburg: Meiner Verlag.
Kim, Jan T. et al. 2001. Biodiversitätsmessung bei Pflanzen anhand molekularer Daten. In Biodi-
versiät. Wissenschaftliche Grundlagen und gesellschaftliche Relevanz, ed Peter Janisch, Mathias
Gutmann and Kathrin Priess, 181–234 (193). Berlin/Heidelberg: Wissenschaftsverlag.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception, Trans. Smith, Colin. London/New
York: Routlegde & Kegan Paul.
Mersch, Dieter. 2013. Ordo ab chao—Order from Noise, 20. Berlin: Diaphanes.
Ott, Michaela. 2018. Dividuations. Theories of Participation. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Michaela Ott is Professor of aesthetic theories at Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Germany.
Main research topics: French philosophy, historical and contemporary theories of aesthetics, aes-
thetics of film, theories of space, affection and affects, theory of dividuation, biennial research,
postcolonial theories, art and knowledge. Main publications: Deleuze—Zur Einführung, Hamburg:
Junius Verlag, 2005; Affizierung. Zu einer ästhetisch- epistemischen Figur, München: edition text
und kritik, 2010; Timing of Affect. Epistemologies of Affection, hg. mit Marie-Luise Angerer und
Bernd Bösel, Zürich: diaphanes Verlag, 2014; Re*: Ästhetiken der Wiederholung, hg. mit Hanne
Loreck, Hamburg: materialverlag/textem Verlag, 2014; Dividuations. Theories of Participation,
London/NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Chapter 7
The Virtuality of Cinema: Beyond
the Documentary-Fiction Divide
with Peter Watkins and Mark Rappaport

João Pedro Cachopo

Abstract Drawing on Deleuze’s account of the “virtual” as no less “real” than the
“actual”, this article considers Peter Watkins’s and Mark Rappaport’s cinematic oeu-
vres in view of a more general discussion as to whether and how cinema captures or
expresses reality. Despite their differences, both filmmakers share an intense interest
in the entwinement of fiction and documentary, whose peculiarity the concept of the
“virtual” may help clarify. In particular, they both made films about non-fictional
people and events—artists, battles, revolutions—which cannot be labelled as docu-
mentaries due to their formal characteristics. In the end, these works suggest that the
strength of cinema consists in breaking the vicious circle of the actual and the possi-
ble. Rather than mixing reality and fiction, cinema would express the impossibilities
of the past and the contingencies of the future, whose virtuality insists through the
interstices of the world as its everlasting shadow.

The “virtual” is among the concepts that most fascinate me since I first walked into
the terrain of philosophical thought. Along with the “simulacrum”, the “untimely”,
or the “transcendental” (the latter if understood in a social-historical manner), the
“virtual” displays philosophy’s uncompromising capacity to disclose the contingency
of reality instead of accounting for its alleged ultimate foundation. This is also true
of aesthetics insofar as philosophy may shed light on how art shakes our beliefs and
assumptions about the world.
As for the “virtual”, it first aroused my interest when I was reading Deleuze’s
Différence et répétition. It is worth mentioning, for the sake of the argument to
be developed in this text, what exactly caught my eye in Deleuze’s approach to
this concept. According to him, I quote, “le virtuel ne s’oppose pas au réel, mais
seulement à l’actuel. Le virtuel possède une pleine réalité, en tant que virtuel…”
(Deleuze 1967: 269). What follows this definition is no less relevant. So, to quote the
entire passage in English: “The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The
virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual […]. Indeed, the virtual must be defined

J. P. Cachopo (B)
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
e-mail: [email protected]
University of Chicago, Chicago, USA
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 111
J. Braga (ed.), Conceiving Virtuality: From Art To Technology, Numanities - Arts
and Humanities in Progress 11, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24751-5_7
112 J. P. Cachopo

as strictly a part of the real object—as though the object had one part of itself in the
virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension” (Deleuze 2005:
208–209).
So defined, in its opposition to the “actual” rather than to the “real”, the “virtual”
seems to enable an account of change and transformation (one that is primarily onto-
logical, albeit filled with political overtones) that is independent from the category
of the possible. As Zourabichvili (2003) wrote, the “virtual” is the insistence of the
not-given. But whatever the not-given is in the case of the virtual, that something
is entirely distinct from the possible (i.e. what may happen in the future). Indeed,
a stronger and deeper connection—even an elective affinity—exists between the
“virtual”, as an insistence of the not-given, and what did not happen in the past or
may not happen in the future. In other words, the impossibilities of the past and the
contingencies of the future, as far as they insist—no matter how remote or unlikely
they might be—should also be taken into account. It should be added, however,
that Deleuze’s approach is first and foremost an ontological one. Therefore, while
bringing its ontological and historical implications together, it is fair to say that I am
interpreting Deleuze’s virtual in a quite singular way, incidentally one that will allow
me to bring it closer to Benjamin’s concept of history.
Be that as it may, I can now spell out the purpose of my paper in much clearer terms.
Drawing on Deleuze’s insight that the “virtual” is no less “real” than the “actual”,
my aim is to bring the notion of the “virtual” to bear on the discussion of certain
cinematic practices in which the “reality of facts” and the “reality of non-facts”
cannot be distinguished clearly. This will lead me to the discussion of the distinction
between documentary and fiction—a much-debated topic these days (LaRocca 2017)
that involves the labelling of sub-genres such as “docudrama”, “docufiction”, or
“pseudo-documentary”, while entailing questions such as the following: is the notion
of a clear-cut boundary between fiction and documentary obsolete? What does fiction
add to documentary that it cannot achieve by itself? Does such a blend of fiction and
documentary entail a decrease of commitment to reality?
These questions provide an important background to the discussion that follows.
By the same token, given that no claim to originality can be made for these questions
as such, I will try to draw new, hopefully thought-provoking consequences from
them, while taking the concept of the virtual as my conceptual guiding thread. In
doing so, I will not reflect in the void. Quite the contrary, my reflections will take
the form of a diptych revolving around two filmmakers: Peter Watkins and Mark
Rappaport. Despite everything that separates them, they share an intense interest in
the entwinement of fiction and documentary, which the concept of the virtual may
help clarify. In particular, they both made films about actual persons and events from
the past—artists, battles, revolutions—which, for reasons yet to be explored, cannot
be labelled as documentaries, and whose definition as docudramas or docufictions
raises more difficulties than one expects in the beginning.
This said, I guess that Rappaport and Watkins have something else in common—
besides their idiosyncratic interest in the dissolution of the fiction/documentary
divide. They are both rather unknown filmmakers. This fact justifies a few lines
of introduction to their work and career.
7 The Virtuality of Cinema: Beyond the Documentary-Fiction Divide … 113

Peter Watkins, to begin with the eldest, was born in Norbiton, near London, in
1935. He joined the BBC after making three short features—The Web (1956), The
Diary of an Unknown Soldier (1958), and The Forgotten Faces (1961), in which his
obsession with the experience of war and the sufferings it causes is already apparent.
For the BBC he directs Culloden (1964), which depicts the last battle opposing the
Scottish and English troupes in 1746 and ending with the massacre of the support-
ers of Bonny Prince Charlie (the Catholic pretender to the throne) (Cull 2001). The
comic element that pervades this feature, in which we see a reporter covering the
events, along with the historical distance of the events themselves, might have con-
cealed the harshness of Watkins’s retrospective look at history. This characteristic,
however, would come to the fore in his next project even more sharply: The War
Game (1965), a documentary-like film about the consequences of a nuclear attack to
Britain in the sixties. The film, which laid bare the total unpreparation of the coun-
try for such a disastrous event and showed the devastating consequences it would
have, was censored by the government, which forced BBC to banish the film for
over twenty years. Ever since then, Watkins lurched from controversy to controversy
(as well as from country to country): he films Privilege (1966) in Britain (on the
latent fascism of pop culture); The Gladiators (1969) in Sweden (depicting a reality
show where groups representing different countries fight each other to death); The
Punishment Park (1971) in the US (a fake documentary on parks where political pris-
oners are forced to engage into extremely hard, eventually deadly missions, including
traversing a distance of over 50 miles in three days without any support whatsoever).
Meanwhile he also makes two biographical films about Edvard Munch (1973) and,
more recently, August Stringberg (1994). His last project, filmed in France, is La
Commune (1999): a re-enactment of the Commune of Paris, where, just as in Cullo-
den, the spectator follows the revolutionary turmoil through the perspective of two
journalists and a camera man who “cover” the events (see Baecque 2012: 159–204;
Cull 2001; Jovanovic 2017: 113–167).
Rappaport, on his turn, was born and lived most of his life in Brooklyn, New
York, until he moved to Paris about fifteen years ago. Although many aspects of his
cinematography accompany his production throughout his career (Rappaport 2008),
it is possible and perhaps useful to divide it into two periods: a first period from
the seventies until the late eighties, where he directed about five experimental fea-
tures (which may be characterized as parodies of classic melodramas), and a second
period, from early nineties until now, during which Rappaport dedicated himself to
the creation of false autobiographies—or, as Rappaport (2013) terms it in French,
“(f)au(x)biographies”—about actors, actresses and directors from Hollywood: Rock
Hudson’s Home Movies (1992), From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995), or more
recently Becoming Anita Ekberg (2014), The Vanity Tales of Douglas Sirk (2015) or
I, Dalio (2015).
At this point, we may wonder what the main differences and similarities between
the two filmmakers are. Starting with the former, it seems clear that not only their
nationalities but also their temperament, obsessions and modi operandi differ. Rap-
paport has often commented on his difficulties in dealing with actors and non-actors
(and with the whole of process filming as such), whereas Watkins is pretty well
114 J. P. Cachopo

known for his impressive capacity of organization and extraordinary ability to inter-
act with the actors and non-actors so that they come to perform in a way that is both
realistic and theatrical. Their approaches are also distinct when it comes to theory.
Rappaport maintains a vague, sometimes ironic, relationship to the theorization of
his work. Even when he writes about it, which he did (2013), he would answer to a
question on his early motivations with a “well, I can’t remember what I was searching
for” (Marques and Lisboa 2015). Watkins, on the other hand, has always be keen
to reflect about his own practice and makes no secret of the political/social/critical
motivations that underlie his cinematographic work, which he has summarized in
plenty of texts (some of which have been brought together in The Media Crisis).
All this notwithstanding, what they do have in common is the experimentalism
of their cinematography, the mastery they both show when it comes to editing, the
aura of controversy surrounding their careers, and—last but not least—the way in
which their films, in reworking the documentary/fiction dichotomy, defy qualifica-
tion. Indeed, Rappaport film essays on Hollywood stars are not simply false-, fake-,
or pseudo-autobiographies (which is why the “f” and the “x” are between brackets
in “(f)au(x)tobiographies”). They actually revolve around the lives and careers of
actual people: Rock Hudson, Jean Seberg, or Marcel Dalio… The same applies to
Watkins, whose Culloden (1964) and La Commune (1999) are not simply false-,
fake- or pseudo- documentaries either. This would be the case if these films dealt
with fictional figures and situations. On the contrary, they portray historical events
(and they actually try to do it in a “faithful” manner): the battle of Culloden in 1746
near Inverness; the insurrectional events of 1871 in Paris. The question thus arises as
to what, in that case, prevents us from characterizing these films as documentaries?
The reason is simple: an element of fakery pervades them through and through. This
element, however, is not to be searched on the level of contents—which are actual
events and people—but on the level of form.
This is immediately apparent in Rappaport’s false autobiographies, such as Rock
Hudson’s Home Movies (1992) and From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995), if
only because the person we see and hear talking in the first person about his or
her own life and career against the background of sequences taken from films she
or he actually participated in is not the actual actor or actress—who, in fact, were
already dead when the films were made—but another actor or actress playing their
role (Picture 7.1).
As for Peter Watkins, it suffices to remember in this regard—that is, to render
apparent the element of explicit fakery that prevents us from categorizing these films
as documentaries despite their dealing with non-fictional events—that his last, now
almost twenty-years old production was a film on the French Commune of Paris in
1871, which included “live interviews” with the participants in the events (events, of
course, that took place long before TV saw the light of day) (Picture 7.2).
In their attempt to “articulate the past historically” (Benjamin 1940: 391), both
Watkins and Rappaport seem to appeal to an “as if”… Instead of “recognizing [or
trying to recognize] the past the way it really was” (Benjamin 1940: 391) they proceed
as if we could look at what happened in the French Commune through a televised
7 The Virtuality of Cinema: Beyond the Documentary-Fiction Divide … 115

Picture 7.1 Eric Farr as Rock Hudson in Mark Rappaport’s Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992)

Picture 7.2 TV Reporters in Peter Watkins’s La Commune (Paris 1871) (1999). Photograph by
Corinna Paltrinieri

report, as if Rock Hudson or Jean Seberg, resuscitating from the world of the dead,
could perform his or her own role in a biographical film.
Yet the films take a further step: they intimate that the element of ignorance that
the “as if” both discloses and transforms is not only accidental but also necessary. We
cannot—we could never—know how Rock Hudson or Jean Seberg really thought
or felt about their lives and careers; we could never know it, even if—and this is
crucial—they were still alive and decided to take part in a film on their own life and
116 J. P. Cachopo

career. Just as we cannot—we could never—know the way it really was in the Paris
Commune, even if we could have had journalists interviewing people at that period,
even if, instead of the commune, we were talking about what is happening nowadays
in Syria. What we can—perhaps should—do is to question media, disciplines, and
genres that lay a claim to transparency, objectivity, or authenticity when it comes
to recognizing the way it really was: from mass audio visual media to uncritical
approaches to historiography and biography.
In this sense, Watkins’s and Rappaport’s films do not limit themselves to play
with the ambiguity between what did happen (reality) and what did not happen but
could have happened (fiction). Right from the beginning, two things are made clear
to the spectator: first, that the subject matter is real (it consists of actual people and
events); second, that the form of representing them is fake. What this paradoxical
device enables us to grasp about the people, their feelings, the tragic or happy events
they actually took part in, is what we seek to clarify with the help of the concept of
the virtual. Rappaport’s and Watkins’s films suggest that reality is more than the sum
of actual and possible events. There is also what insists beneath, above and through
the interstices of those circumstances—incidentally, Rock Hudson’s homosexuality;
Jean Seberg’s frustrations; the affinity between the concerns, hopes and enthusiasm
of those who formed the Commune and those who participated in Watkins’s filmic
re-enactment of its major episodes—but all this, and this is the point where the
notion of fakery becomes crucial, as neither Rock Hudson and Jean Seberg, nor the
Parisians of the nineteenth century, nor the actors and non-actors who collaborated
with Watkins would be able to formulate.
At this point, I would like to bring the concept of the virtual to bear on Watkins’s
oeuvre as a whole: so, considering not only the films on actual events and people (For-
gotten Faces, Culloden, Edvard Munch, The Free Thinker, La Commune) (Baecque
2012: 159–204; Cull 2001), but also the films that extrapolate from what is hap-
pening today what may happen in the near future, thus working as dystopias of the
present (War Game [on a nuclear war starting in UK in the sixties], Privilege [around
a fictional pop singer], Gladiators [on a faux reality show], and Punishment Park [on
a non-existent prison yard]). What seems to insist in all of these films are either the
most forgotten impossibilities of the past or the most neglected contingencies of the
future. In other words, what the films show, what they consistently denounce, what
they protest against is (1) what came to happen in the past (the becoming “actual” of
war, misery, and catastrophe) and (2) what may still happen in the future (the remain-
ing “possible” of barbarism, of fascist-like societies, of the very self-destruction of
humanity). By the same token, what they intimate—thanks to an element of fakery
that undermines the logic of documentary on the level of form—is the exact opposite:
the most wished for, and in many case the most threatened impossibilities and contin-
gencies of the past and the future. They haunt the present as a reminder of hope that
the notion of the virtual may help us theorize in that it stresses that the consistency of
those impossibilities and contingencies is real, their non-actuality notwithstanding:
they are much more than just the result of nostalgic mourning and wishful thinking.
What could have happened but did not happen in the event of the Commune remains
real: the promises it contained and the experiences it triggered were real. This is all
7 The Virtuality of Cinema: Beyond the Documentary-Fiction Divide … 117

the more so—to recall Benjamin—when we acknowledge that history may well be
told from the perspective of the defeated rather then from the perspective of the vic-
torious. There is nothing unrealistic about brushing history against the grain (even if
it is impossible to turn the defeated into victorious and vice versa). The same applies
to the future insofar as what may not happen because of the present’s stubbornness,
negligence, and selfishness is no less real than the most probable and dreadful events.
Back to Rappaport, we must say that the tone running through his films is much
lighter in its allusions. If Watkins’ obsessions revolve around war, modern and con-
temporary history, the mass audiovisual media and their crisis, those of Rappaport
are the history of cinema, the sub-genre of melodrama, and the lives and myths
surrounding famous actors and actresses—as well as, of course, the deconstruction
of their mythology. Meanwhile, both filmmakers developed a love-hate relationship
with television and cinema, which led to personal estrangements, self-imposed exiles,
and recurrent conflicts with as emblematic institutions as the BBC (in the case of
Watkins) and Hollywood (in the case of Rappaport). If the diptych formed by these
two figures is worth exploration, the reason for this is that it shows that the scope of
such an overcoming of the fiction/documentary divide (when cinema does not limit
itself to play with the ambiguity between the actual and the possible but embraces
the virtual forces that pervade reality), is broad and flexible enough to focus both on
the individual and the collective, to entail moments of self-reflexivity and objective
representation, and to unfold in a tone of seriousness and playfulness alike.
If the world were nothing but a totality of facts and possibilities, it would be
the reign of actualization. Cinema—as an art—has the ability to question such an
understanding of the world. Through fakery it breaks the vicious circle of the actual
and the possible. Such may well be the strength of cinema that the concept of the
virtual brings to light: in its relation to reality, it does more than simply replacing
actual facts with possible facts; it captures and expresses the virtual shadow that
follows and constitutes reality wherever it goes.

References

Armitage, David. n.d. The Anarchist Cinema of Peter Watkins. http://www.historians.org/

publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december-2013/the-anarchist-cinema-of-
peter-watkins. Accessed May 1, 2017.
Baecque, Antoine de. 2012. Peter Watkins, Live from History: The Films, Style, and Methods of
Cinema’s Special Correpondent. In Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema, 159–204. Trans.
Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff. New York: Columbia University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 1940. On the Concept of History. In Selected Writings, Vol. IV 1938–1940.
Trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 389–411. Cambridge:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Cull, Nicholas J. 2001. Peter Watkins’s Culloden and the Alternative Form in Historical Filmmking.
In Retrovisions: Reinventing the Past in Film and Fiction, ed. Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter,
and Imelda Whelehan. London: Pluto Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1967. Différence et répétition. Paris: Seuil. English edition: Deleuze, Gilles. 2005.
Difference and Repetition. Trans. Patton, Paul. New York: Continuum.
118 J. P. Cachopo

Jovanovic, Nenad. 2017. Peter Watkins: Intuitive Brechtianism. In Montage and Theatricality in
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Peter Watkins, and Lars von Trier, ed. Brechtian Cinemas,
113–167. New York: SUNY Press.
LaRocca, David (ed.). 2017. The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth.
Lanham: Lexington Books.
Marques, S.D., Mendonça, L., Vieira Lisboa, R. 2015. Mark Rappaport: ‘Interessa-me o ponto
de vista da lagarta sobre a maça’ (interview). http://www.apaladewalsh.com/2015/05/mark-
rappaport-interessa-me-o-ponto-de-vista-da-lagarta-sobre-a-maca/. Accessed May 1, 2017.
Rappaport, Mark. 2008. Le Spectateur qui en savait trop. Trans. Jean-Luc Mengus. Paris: P.O.L.
Rappaport, Mark. 2013. (F)au(x)tobiographies. Kindle edition.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. 2017. Fictional Biography as Film Criticism: Two Videos by Mark Rap-
paport. http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2016/11/fictional-biography-as-film-criticism-two-
videos-by-mark-rappaport/. Accessed May 1, 2017.
Watkins, Peter. n.d. Media Crisis. http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/index.htm. Accessed May 1, 2017.
Zourabichvili, François. 2003. Le vocabulaire de Deleuze. Paris: Ellipses.

João Pedro Cachopo is currently a Marie SkŁodowska-Curie Fellow with joint affiliation at the
Universidade Nova de Lisboa and the University of Chicago. He earned a degree in Musicology
(2005) and a Ph.D. in Philosophy (2011) from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He is the author
of Truth and Enigma: Essay on Adorno’s Aesthetics, which won the First Book Award from the
Portuguese PEN Club in 2013. His work has also appeared in journals such as New German Cri-
tique and Opera Quarterly. He is co-editing a volume on Rancière and music (forthcoming in
Edinburgh University Press) and preparing a monograph on opera and film.
Chapter 8
Digital Fabrication and Its Meanings
for Photography and Film

Matthew Crippen

Abstract Bazin, Cavell and other prominent theorists have asserted that movies
are essentially photographic, with more recent scholars such as Carroll and Gaut
protesting. Today CGI stands as a further counter, in addition to past objections such
as editing, animation and blue screen. Also central in debates is whether photog-
raphy is transparent, that is, whether it allows us to see things in other times and
places. I maintain photography is transparent, notwithstanding objections citing dig-
ital manipulation. However, taking a cue from Cavell—albeit one poorly outlined in
his work—I argue this is not so much because of what photography physically is,
but because of what “photography” has come to mean. I similarly argue digital tech-
nologies have not significantly altered what cinematic media “are” because they have
not fundamentally modified what they mean; and that cinema retains a photographic
legacy, even when it abandons photographic technologies to digitally manufacture
virtual worlds.

8.1 Introduction

In the post-WWII era, a number of prominent scholars suggested film is essentially

photographic (e.g., Bazin 1951; Cavell 1979). Since then individuals such as Carroll
(1996, 2008), Gaut (2010) and Jarvie (1987) have charged it is not, and for reasons
not easily challenged. Without disputing this, I aim to highlight the extent to which
movies retain a photographic legacy, even in an age when CGI can be used to fabricate
virtual worlds. In other words, I hope to show that the photographic legacy continues
to define what movies mean to us, even in cases when photographic technologies are
left behind.
Though anticipating some resistance to this thesis, I take for granted that most
accept that photography is historically linked to the development of cinema. I there-
fore presume that a thorough understanding of cinema entails a discussion of pho-

M. Crippen (B)
School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]
Department of Philosophy, Grand Valley State University, Michigan, USA
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 119
J. Braga (ed.), Conceiving Virtuality: From Art To Technology, Numanities - Arts
and Humanities in Progress 11, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24751-5_8
120 M. Crippen

tography, and in examining the latter, I defend the transparency thesis. That is, with
thinkers such as Santayana (c. 1900–1907), Bazin (1951), Cavell (1979) and Walton
(1984), I argue that photographs allow us to see things in other times and places,
notwithstanding objections citing digital manipulation. However, taking a cue from
Cavell—and one poorly laid out in his work—I argue this is not so much because
of what photography physically is, but because of what “photography” has come to
mean. I similarly maintain digital technologies have not radically shifted what cin-
ematic media “are” to us because they have not fundamentally altered our concepts
of movies; and this, in part, because filmmakers continue to emulate older, estab-
lished modes of production in CGI invented worlds, not to mention cartoons, though
I attend only briefly to the latter.
I begin by explicating my approach, which considers what photography is—
whether digital or photochemical—by examining what it has historically meant to
us. While defending the transparency thesis, I dispute some prominently cited bases
for it. Specifically, I argue that proponents of the transparency thesis and the related
indexical view, which holds photographs are imprints of the world, tend to overem-
phasize the physical nature of photography and neglect cultural-historical meaning.
I also argue that adversaries do the same, and further that it does not make sense
to advance claims about the ontology of photography—a human, cultural product—
apart from historical-cultural interpretations of what it is and what it means. After this,
I consider the extent to which meanings of photography enter into our understand-
ings of what cinematic media are. I focus on how digital technologies are pressing
conventional concepts of film, yet also how art forms retain historical lineages and
therewith established meanings about what they are.

8.2 Photography and a Plea for History

The indexical view of photography, as Atencia-Linares (2012, p. 19) summarizes

without fully endorsing it, holds that photographs “bear a causal relation to their
content,” much “like shadows and fossils.” This means that content “in photographs
depends causally, and counterfactually, on the object that was in front of the camera,”
and also that content “is not essentially dependent on the photographer’s intentions.”
Defenders of this position hold that compared to paintings, which are interpretive,
photographs are not products of imagination. Sontag (1973), to give one example,
writes that
a photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real;
it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, never does
more than state an interpretation, a photograph never does less than register an emanation
(light waves reflected by objects)—a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting
can be (p. 120).

Numerous defenders of the indexical view advance comparable ideas, emphasizing

physical processes involved in making photographs. Key claims are that the photo-
8 Digital Fabrication and Its Meanings for Photography and Film 121

graphic image depends counterfactually on what was in front of the camera and that
images are produced through automated mechanical processes and consequently not
subject to interpretation.
Building on this kind of outlook, some also argue that photographs are transparent,
meaning they are windows allowing us to see into times and spaces removed from
our own. Santayana suggests that photography gives us the “unalloyed fact” (c.
1900–1907, p. 397), and Bazin observes that seeing things by means of motion
photography is akin to seeing them through “mirrors” (1951, p. 97). Walton (1984),
who is most famous for advancing the transparency thesis, offers a comparable
analogy, comparing photographs to “telescopes and microscopes [that] extend our
visual powers” (p. 255). He adds that with the assistance of photography, we can
“see into the past” (p. 251). Cavell (1979) echoes the point, writing that “reality in
a photograph is present to me while I am not present to it; and a world I know, and
see, but to which I am nevertheless not present […], is a world past” (p. 23). That the
photographed world “does not exist (now) is its only difference from reality” (p. 24).
What is common to these accounts is that they all hold that to see a photograph
of, say, an actress is to see the actress herself, as opposed to a mere representation
of her. As with advocates of the indexical view, moreover, transparency proponents
maintain that photographs register emanations from the world, upon which they
counterfactually depend.
Though sympathetic to such accounts, and while I defend them later, I see a prob-
lem with how many are constructed, namely, that explanations focus on how pho-
tographs are physically made, less on what “photography” means, which is related
but not identical to the material processes. Interestingly and at the same time, some
contesting the transparency thesis do the same. Gaut (2010, p. 89), for instance, high-
lights problems in Walton’s account by means of illustrations emphasizing physical,
causal relations. Gaut, in one case, describes two clocks, with the hands of clock B
radio linked to those of A. This means that B’s movements are automatic, mechanical
facsimiles of A’s. As such, they counterfactually depend on A’s, and are not a product
of human interpretation. In a second illustration, he talks about an indistinguishable,
mechanically produced plaster cast of an artifact. Gaut points out that few would
claim that in seeing Clock B, they see A, or in seeing the cast, they see the original,
even though this should follow from Walton’s account. Although I accept Gaut’s
criticisms of Walton, I hope to show later that a transparency account emphasizing
what photography has historically meant is more robust.
A separate line of attack acknowledges a relation between the transparency thesis
and meaning, particularly as influenced by culture, but then questions it on such
grounds. For example, Alcaraz (2015), drawing on André Rouillé, suggests the
transparency thesis is a questionable belief that emerged as a counter to the “cri-
sis of truth” that surfaced “after the Romantic period” when “doubt in objectivity
appeared” (pp. 7–8), with photography seeming to offer one avenue out. The obser-
vation itself may be correct, and might form a basis for a critique of a culture that
attributes greater objectivity to outcomes divorced from human judgment; and it is
indeed because photographs are products of automatic mechanical processes that
many have given them greater epistemic value than paintings. Statistical analysis is
122 M. Crippen

comparable insofar as p-values of 0.05 or 0.001 are automatically adopted without

critical judgment by the scientific community; using other values, even if appropri-
ate to research, is rejected as subjective bias. It cannot be denied, moreover, that
erroneous views have arisen for cultural reasons. This happened, for instance, when
people clung to geocentric models partly because of religious beliefs that located
humans at the center of the universe, although it is worth adding that such models
can accord with data (see Crippen 2010, pp. 484-485, 501, fn. 2). At the same time,
however, no comparable mistake has occurred in significant degree with photog-
raphy, whether photochemical or digital, for experts and most educated laypeople
have more or less known how it works all along. Moreover, it does not make sense to
advance ontological claims about photography—a human, cultural product—apart
from historical-cultural interpretations of what it is.
Cameron (2004) makes this point generally of artifacts. Paraphrasing the philoso-
pher and archeologist R. G. Collingwood, Cameron asks us to suppose
that an archaeologist at work upon a site between Tyne and Solway were to uncover yet
another elongated section of shaped rock, aligned with others, that might seem to have been
part of the wall. What must the archaeologist do to come to understand what has been
uncovered?
The archaeologist must acknowledge that the object is an artefact that was constructed by
human beings in the past to serve as a means towards ends they had wished to accomplish.
[…]
To learn how an artefact was intended by its makers to mean (to be used), therefore, an
archaeologist must engage unexceptionally in the evidentiary and open-ended task of coming
to imagine better how its makers had tried to solve the historically specific problem they had
faced by making it as they did (2004, pp. 6–7).

This highlights a difference between investigations of human artifacts versus physical

nature per se. With the solar system, accounts likely improve as we focus more on
physical nature alone and leave culturally based interpretations behind, however
unavoidable they may be. With a Roman artifact, however, physical analysis in the
absence of cultural-historical explanation yields little. After all, knowledge of what
the artifact is entails a sense of how it was used and what it meant to the culture that
produced it.
The same holds with photographs, which are artifacts. Consequently those either
defending or attacking transparency accounts based on what photography physically
is while neglecting cultural significance adopt equally mistaken approaches. So too do
those challenging transparency accounts because they are cultural. This is something
like noting that a sharp tool intended by a past culture as a writing instrument would
have been more effective as a weapon, and then concluding therefore that it is not in
fact a writing instrument, but instead a weapon.
8 Digital Fabrication and Its Meanings for Photography and Film 123

8.3 Photography and Meaning

As early as Santayana and continuing with others such as Bazin, Cavell and Walton,
theorists have argued that photography allows us to see things that exist in other times
and spaces. In this section I offer a defense of the position, and in the next consider
what it might mean for cinema, especially in light of recent digital advances. However,
rather than a protracted discussion, I here provide an abbreviated illustration drawn
from an empirical experiment (see Crippen 2015, 2016). In addition to brevity, the
experiment helps show that the question of what photographic media are is a question
about their meaning.
The experiment begins with two paintings of Jesus in which he looks different.
When asked whom the paintings are of, the response is always “Jesus.” Following
this first step, people are presented with photographic stills with two different actors
playing Jesus and the same question. In this second instance, people hesitate to say
the stills are of Jesus, instead stating they are of the performers playing him. This
is noteworthy because there is no record of what Jesus actually looked like, which
means the performers in the photographs could, in principle, have also modeled for
painters.
Cavell’s (1979) analysis cast light on why people respond differently to the paint-
ings and photographic stills. In his own example, he argues that upon encountering a
building in a painting, we do not take its existence for granted, recognizing it may be
a product of imagination. If we conclude it exists, it is typically because of external
information, as when recognizing it as a well-known site such as the White House.
In Cavell’s words, it accordingly “only accidentally makes sense” to ask “what lies
behind it, totally obscured by it” (p. 23). However, the same question has histori-
cally been appropriate in the case of photographs because people have historically
understood “photography” to mean something showing things that exist or once did.
Testifying to this is the fact that many objected that something unphotographic was
misleadingly presented as photographic when the Giza pyramids were repositioned
to better fit a 1982 National Geographic cover. In the words of an editor in chief from
the same publication, a “firestorm” resulted (Goldberg 2016), and similar reactions
have occurred more recently when digitally doctored images have been presented
as photographs (see Cooper 2007; Safi 2016). This indicates that upon encountering
what we understand to be a photograph, as opposed to a photorealistic painting or CGI
image, people have overwhelmingly taken for granted that the building or whatnot
in it exists or once did and that the image has not been manipulated post hoc. Upon
learning that an image is doctored, people have, at least in the past, questioned the
legitimacy of calling it a “photograph.” Paintings have a different meaning, and are
not taken as truth claims about what they portray, and this helps explain why people
unhesitatingly identify Jesus in the paintings: they at least tacitly recognize the images
might be products of imagination. So even if models were used, the paintings are
principally of Jesus and of models accidentally, and we only feel confident models
were used through information not in the painting, for instance, comments in an
artist’s journal. By contrast, the models are internally and perhaps analytically related
124 M. Crippen

to photographs in that we understand that things called “photographs,” by definition,

show things that exist or once did.1
Notice also that the fact that photographers use different film stocks, focal lengths,
lighting and so forth—all standard objections to the transparency thesis (see, for
example, Carroll 1996, pp. 47, 57–58)—does not alter this meaning. That is, regard-
less of these variations—unless perhaps so extreme as to destroy recognizability—
people consistently behave as if photographs of friends and family are a means by
which we see them. This makes sense because the aforesaid variations could be intro-
duced if we peered at the performers through a telescope, darkened pitted glass or in
sunshine versus incandescent light, and in such cases few would claim they are not
seeing them. Lack of retinal disparity and motion parallax are not objections either
since both would drop out if we gazed at models while motionless with one eye close,
and once again few would deny we are seeing them. One feature that has, however,
historically made people question the legitimacy of using the term “photograph” is
post hoc manipulation such that images are not produced through automatic mech-
anisms. This highlights that the physical processes by which photographs are made
relate to what we understand photography to mean. However, examining the physical
nature of photography alone will not tell us much about its meanings, nor what it is
to us. Gaut’s earlier cited examples in fact indicate that physical parameters alone
do not dictate how we encounter things, for people do talk as if they see loved ones
by means of photographs; and the experience of seeing through time is palpable for
those who have discovered, for instance, precious 8 mm home-movies of grandpar-
ents from decades past. However, it is unlikely people would experience radio-linked
clocks or indistinguishable plaster imprints of artifacts in comparable ways.
How much does digital photography change this? Against what some maintain, I
argue very little. Thus, for example, Alcaraz (2015) writes that although “analog and
digital images seem … very similar or even the same, when perceiving a digital image
we can never be sure that it is true” (p. 1). She adds: “We can no longer believe in the
truthfulness of digital images, since we can never be sure to what extent they represent
the world around us[…], or whether they might be simulacra” (p. 11). The claim itself
is of course true, but it was also true before the advent of digital photography, with
doctored images around almost as long as photography has existed. The National
Geographic cover is one example. A variety of others abound. Early on pointillist
and impressionist images were rendered with photographic technologies. Advertisers
airbrushed makeup models before the advent of photoshoping. Moreover, Atencia-
Linares (2012) observes a protracted history of blending photographs to create the
impression of entities that do not exactly exist, as when Wanda Wultz mixed a feline
face with hers. Atencia-Linares also discusses artists creating images by passing
light over film emulsions, in effect drawing with light, and adds that this “is indeed
a photographic process” (p. 22). However, this is arguably a misuse of words, and
the process is more accurately characterized as “photochemical” because almost
nobody will perceive the result as a photograph, just as many will question whether

1 Some of the explanation offered here paraphrases and elaborates on that offered in Crippen (2015,

pp. 84–85; 2016, p. 170).

8 Digital Fabrication and Its Meanings for Photography and Film 125

they are really encountering a photograph if they see a human-feline face, or behold
an image, then learn portions were digitally altered in significant ways, superimposed
or removed. In short and to repeat, calling something a “photograph” has historically
meant making a tacit truth claim about objects seen by means of it, namely, that they
exist or once did. When this is drawn into doubt, so too is the legitimacy of using the
word “photograph.”
Having said this, digital technologies have added new means of trickery, even if
trickery itself is nothing new. Barbara Savedoff (2008), in a balanced assessment,
writes: “In a world where digital manipulation—digital collage—has become the
norm, we may simply come to assume that a photograph has been altered if it is
at all challenging to read it as straight” (p. 137; see also Benovsky 2014, p. 722).
However, while the threshold that challenges is increasingly lower, digital cameras
are predominately employed as their photochemical predecessors were: to capture
the world. Hence we still take digital recordings of misdeeds as evidence, whereas
paintings have never been accepted. In legal proceedings, perhaps, we would wish
to verify digital photographs, but this would also be the case with photochemical
images if doubts about authenticity existed. That digital photographs are taken as
evidence also explains the surge of selfies with celebrities or at famous sites.
To understand something as “photographic” is still to tacitly accept a truth claim
about what it shows, which is why, for instance, Reuters fired a top photo-editor
and removed Adnan Hajj’s photographs from its site after some were found to be
digitally manipulated (see Cooper 2007). Digital media have, to be sure, made it
easier to manipulate results post hoc. For example, people might easily brighten eye
color in selfies, but this is only a more ubiquitous variation of what has occurred all
along, as in airbrushed glamor shots. For this reason, the meaning of “photography”
is perhaps changing and may depart widely from currently established meanings
in the future. However, so far it has not changed in significant degree—hence the
uproar over Hajj’s images or the more recent banning of climbers from Nepal for
producing doctored images of an ascent of Mount Everest (see Safi 2016), something
that would not have happened had a painter rendered a portrait of them at the summit.
The possibility of manufacturing photographic-looking products was always there;
digital technologies just make it more effortless.

8.4 Movies and Meaning

Casablanca (1942), excepting a few animated sequences with maps and the like, is
a film produced by means of motion photography; and according to the conception
of photography advanced through the Jesus example, this implies that when we see
Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart through the screen while viewing the film, we
see performers who once lived, wearing garments that actually existed, doing things
they did on past movie sets. When Bergman smiles, when Bogart lights a cigarette,
we witness events that really occurred. Thus while engaging us with a fictional story,
the movie also confronts us with a world that is anything but fictional—a world we
126 M. Crippen

can see without it being present in our space. In this regard, at least, Casablanca is
within the domain of motion photography, and to that extent, arguably transparent.
However, many films are obvious counterexamples. In spite of this, I still want to
argue that photography remains connected to what film means, indeed, even in cases
when photographic technologies are largely abandoned.
Perhaps the most obvious counterexample is cartoon animation. When we screen
scenes from “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in Disney’s Fantasia (1940) we do not see
anything that ever existed before the camera. Cavell says the projected world is a
world of the past, a world that does not exist now, and that apart from this, “[t]here
is no feature, or set of features, in which it differs” (1979, p. 24). Yet reacting to the
first edition of The World Viewed, Alexander Sesonske (1974) responds that every
feature differs in the case of cartoons: “Neither the space nor the laws of nature are the
same” (p. 564). The events in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” do not closely approximate
anything we would see in the world, and “there is no past time at which these events
either did occur or purport to have occurred” (Sesonske 1974, p. 564). Cartoon
animation raises a clear objection to those either applying the transparency thesis to
film or arguing movies are photographic, as Bazin and Cavell claim. Animation also
raises questions about the purported importance of realism in cinema—by which I
just mean that things look real, even if stories are preposterous, as in many superhero
and sci-fi flicks. Animated cartoons obviously do not manifest this kind of realism,
but nonetheless captivate. Few laugh when Bambi’s mother gets shot. Moreover,
films departing even further from both realism and photographic technologies can
be made. One could, for instance, use the scratch techniques of Len Lye to render
abstract images onto celluloid by hand, and then forgo the step of photographically
mass-producing the finished result. While this perhaps would not count as “a movie,”
regarding it as an instance of “film” or “cinema” is perfectly intelligible.
In addition to all this, there are many “middle-cases” that challenge the notion
that film is either photographic or transparent. When we see dinosaurs in Jurassic
Park (1993) or gigantic creatures in Avatar (2009), we see a range of entities that
never existed in front of the camera. The images may be partly photographic, as when
human performers flee digitally constructed beasts. Hence the end product is not the
unadulterated result of photographic automatism. So Gaut (2010), among others, is
right when he says in reference to CGI that “cinematic art now deploys a possibility
that painting already possesses, since it does not require some independently existing
object in order to create expressive content” (p. 50). But while technically correct,
this is nothing new to cinema. Over a century ago, audiences saw colored bursts of
hand-tinted gunfire in shootouts in The Great Robbery (1903). A culminating scene
from Anchors Aweigh (1945) pairs Gene Kelly with Jerry the mouse, blending live
action with cartoon animation, and Zelig (1983) combines elements from different
photographic worlds, inserting Woody Allen into old footage with Adolph Hitler.
In the original Star Wars movies (1977, 1980, 1983), Harrison Ford retreats from
weapons’ fire he never actually encountered. Forest Gump (1994) goes further, albeit
this time with the aid of digital technologies: not only is Tom Hanks’s image intro-
duced into archival footage with John F. Kennedy, but the brightness of the pixels
8 Digital Fabrication and Its Meanings for Photography and Film 127

around Kennedy’s mouth are manipulated, making movements better match lines
provided by screenwriters.
Gaut (2010) adds that “traditional film is ontologically realistic,” insofar as it is
of things that were and events that actually happened, “but digital film is not in all
cases” (p. 68). Only traditional film is not always ontologically real, as most of the
above examples illustrate. In uncounted movies and for a long time, we have seen
things that did not exactly happen, and not merely as a result of special effects, but
also through montage or editing. Suppose, to borrow from Pudovkin (1926), that a
man is filmed,
…falling from a [fifth-story] window into a net, in such a way that the net is not visible
on the screen; then the same man is shot falling from a slight height to the ground. Joined
together, the two shots give in projection the desired impression [of a man falling from an
appalling height] (p. 85).

In the individual shots we here see events that actually happened, but not in the
combination of the two. The man did not plummet five stories. “The catastrophic
event … is the resultant of two pieces of celluloid joined together” (p. 85).
So a few things to note: in the digital era, film is often not fully photographic and
consequently not properly transparent, yet it almost never has been in its century plus
history. The question I want to address is the extent to which the advent of digital
filmmaking and especially CGI has changed what movies are to us; and while the
claim that film is essentially photographic is untenable, the position, especially as
developed by Cavell, highlights an important point: that ontological questions about
film relate to or are the same as questions about what film means to us. Cavell suggests
just this in the first pages of the World Viewed when he explains that he came to see that
“the answer to the question ‘What is the importance of art?’ is grammatically related
to, or is a way of answering, the question ‘What is art?’” Import relates to significance
and meaning, and questions about something’s importance are historical quandaries.
History of course changes, and meanings evolve. Once film was something you
“shot.” The earliest films were, in fact, composed of a single shot. Later, shots were
strung together, but largely as a matter of convenience—due to a scene change or
because the scene’s length exceeded that of the reel and so on. It was not long, how-
ever, before editing became an aesthetic device. It was used to create continuity (and
in some later cases, discontinuity), to structure scenes, to moderate mood and tempo
and as a means of constructing events not actually recorded on film; it became an
expository device (e.g., establishing shots), a narrative device, a way of building sus-
pense and tension and a way of conveying simultaneously occurring events, as when
cutting between fleeing outlaws and a pursuing posse. Editing changed how films
were made and how cinema functioned as an expressive medium. Films, Pudovkin
(1926) would say, are “not shot but built, built up from the separate strips of cellu-
loid that are raw material” (p. 24). “The foundation of film art is editing” (p. 23).
“Every object must, by editing, be brought upon the screen so that it shall have not
photographic, but cinematographic essence” (p. 25). Whether editing makes for cin-
ematographic essence is a matter of debate, and one that Pudovkin is likely to lose
today, but his basic observation that editing changed how films are made and how
128 M. Crippen

they communicated to audiences, that is, his assertion that editing shaped what films
and filmmaking have historically become and therefore what we understand film to
mean, is a claim not easily disputed.
Editing is one tendency that remains constant throughout most of the history
of filmmaking. Another longstanding constant—albeit less so—is that makers have
tried to create the appearance of reality, cartoons and abstract films being exceptions.
This has sometimes involved counterfeiting reality, but notice it is the appearance
of reality that has been counterfeited. In superhero movies and sci-fi fantasies, for
example, the overwhelming aim is to make preposterous and fictional events appear
as they might if they actually happened. “Explicit artifice is,” as Cavell observes,
“quite rare; not just rare, but specialized” (1979, p. 196), as in the case of the partly
animated dream sequence in Vertigo (1958), where the departure from photographic
realism is intentionally obvious. Most of the time such departures are avoided, and
when filmmakers employ artifice, they do so with the hope of making it invisible.
If an airplane flies across the screen, and it is obvious that it has been digitally
inserted, then the special effects department has likely not succeeded in its job. The
conspicuousness of artifice is here its failure.
It is clear, then, that pre-digital and digital filmmakers have both overwhelmingly
endeavoured to create the appearance of reality, whether everyday or fantastical.
Sometimes doing so involves counterfeiting it, as in cases just discussed, but also in
more recent instances such as Rogue One (2016) where CGI is used to a significant
extent. At the same time, cameras remain prevalent in this movie and others precisely
because creating the appearance of reality with them is less labour intensive, more
cost effective and usually just more convincing. Furthermore, motion photography
has an influence even in cases when not used. It is felt distinctly, for example, in
cartoons since animators import editing techniques from motion photographic film-
making. A lesson here is that art forms do not abandon historical legacies even when
relinquishing old modes of production.
The photographic legacy indeed remains in digitally constructed virtual worlds. As
Mullarkey (2009) notes: “lens flare—an artefact of ‘conventional’ filmmaking that
was once avoided but eventually became a stylistic cliché of the 1960s and 1970s—is
these days reproduced artificially” in computer-generated productions (p. 54). This,
he goes on to explain,
… is one attempt to emulate the imperfections of the optical in order to be real—its flaring,
its blurriness. Indeed, the optical and analogical are inherently limited (one can only move
so fast, one can only go so high in a crane shot), and the shortfall from perfection, no matter
how curtailed by effort, is also the index of material power. It is the weightlessness of CGI—
the ability to see anywhere in focus and move anywhere at speed—that fails to convince us
because it offers no material resistance, no material freedom (p. 195).

Gaut (2010) elaborates on the same point:

What is striking about the notion of photorealism is that it does not employ a comparison of
the image to how a real object would look to provide a standard of realism […], but rather
compares the image to a photograph of an object. This notion of realism is, then, a derivative
one. The use of the photograph as the standard is illustrated by the introduction by digital
animators of such things as film grain, motion blur… and lens flare into digital images.
8 Digital Fabrication and Its Meanings for Photography and Film 129

These are not things that accompany our normal seeing of an object, but are artefacts of
photography. Often the standard of photorealism is set by the traditional photograph, rather
than the digital one. For instance, film grain is a feature of traditional film, because of
the silver salt deposits used, but does not occur in digital photographs […]. Other features
employed in digital animation are common to traditional and digital photography: motion
blur occurs because the exposure time of a shot is sufficiently lengthy that the object has
discernibly moved during it; and lens flare happens when some light from a light source
bounces away from the lens, instead of going through it. In the case of digital animation,
there is no film grain, no motion blur (the represented objects are constructs, rather than
independently existing), and no lens flare, since the lens is a “virtual” one, being merely a
point of view onto the constructed digital world (pp. 66–67).

This is to say, graininess, blur, lens flare and the like make the experience of watching
CGI films even more removed from what we would see if we witnessed events
in person since such phenomena would be absent. They are nonetheless added, to
re-quote Mullarkey, in an “attempt to emulate the imperfections of the optical in
order to be real.” That is, they are added because they are a part of photochemical
filmmaking and photography, which has ubiquitously been taken to have privileged
access to reality. At this point in time, moving images accordingly seem less real
without these imperfections, and this because of the earlier history of photochemical
filmmaking.
This illustrates, once again, how the photographic legacy remains in film even
when it abandons photographic technologies. It suggests, in other words, that photog-
raphy is not easily subtracted from what films mean to us and how they are made—in
short, what they are. Discussions about the making of Avatar (2009) illustrate the
point in detail. The moviemakers digitally manufactured lens flare and blurriness;
they limited depth of field and added the appearance of overexposure—all unneces-
sary in CGI. The production team, moreover, endeavoured to make the director and
audience feel as if conventional cameras were employed. Joe Letteri, a visual effects
supervisor, explained in a 2010 documentary that a system was set up to allow the
director to behave as if on “a live action stage.” Rob Legato, a virtual cinematography
consultant, added: “And the camera can do anything. It can be a crane, it can be a
steady-cam, it can be all just purely handheld…. It’s basically as close to live action
as one can get in a CG invented world.” Notice that while the virtual camera can “do
anything,” the makers of Avatar mostly imitated constraints of conventional cameras,
and fabricated optical imperfections linked with them. In terms of performance cap-
ture, they limited themselves similarly, with director James Cameron remarking in a
2010 interview that they took a human performance “with no diminishment what-
soever, and then added to it,” for example, by introducing features of fictitious alien
species. So when asked “what percentage of the actor’s performance came through
in the final character, [he] say[s] 110%.”
Recently digital technologies have been used in even more extraordinary man-
ners. Facial performance capture, in combination with a body double, was employed
to create a young version of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator Genisys (2015).
Similar techniques were used to resurrect Peter Cushing from the dead to play his
1977 character Moff Tarkin in Rogue One. At the same time, barring circumstances
like these and that of Avatar, conventional cameras and recording devices remain an
130 M. Crippen

easier and more effective method of creating the appearance of reality than digitally
constructing minute ripples of muscle and subtleties of line, shadow, tone and count-
less other alterations undulating in the human face. This is evidenced by the fact that
filmmakers avoid such techniques most of the time because using them is laborious,
expensive and often not that convincing. Moreover, Schwarzenegger and Cushing’s
faces were impassive because of their roles and thus easier than usual to construct,
and performance capture was still used, meaning actors were essential.
Many filmmakers currently bypass the camera when, due to costs or feasibility,
they are unable to produce some kind of event in front of the camera in a way that
looks photo-real, and notice that the makers of Rogue One used old footage—not
CGI—from the movie made 30 years earlier when out-takes were available for some
of the fighter pilots. Though one might debate the credibility of many computer-
generated effects and movies that rely heavily on them, it seems that a desire for the
visual appearance of reality is often the very thing that drives filmmakers away from
the camera. It is also a large part of what keeps them attached to it: the camera is still
the most reliable and generally effective means of producing the appearance of reality,
and this may not change for some time to come. Cameras with optical lenses—and
not CGI—remain overwhelmingly ubiquitous even after the introduction of digital
technologies. Filmmakers, in short, still largely aim to achieve the same results as they
did before digital technologies became common; and though images are typically
recorded digitally these days due to cost, ease of editing, manipulability and more,
cameras with optical lenses are still the primary way that performances and events
are captured, and even when they are digitally constructed, the overwhelming aim is
to make them appear photographic. For such reasons, digital technologies have not
radically altered what movies “are” to us, or more accurately, what they mean.
Meanings are not, to be sure, disconnected from technologies, so that filmmaking
and photography would not mean what they do if not for the automated mechanical
processes and unprecedented ease with which images can be made to show the
world. However, meanings are not solely determined by technologies, much less
by philosophers. Far too many philosophers neglect this last point, including even
Wittgenstein, whose supposed examples of everyday language were not everyday
but schematized and one might say, essentialized (see Cameron 2004). Realism,
a standard established in cinema because of its development out of photographic
technologies, remains a mainstay. It is what people often expect and a part of what
movies mean to them, even to the point that imperfections in old ways of doing things
are intentionally introduced to digitally constructed images. Filmmakers continue to
rely on optical cameras, and even when digitally producing fabricated, virtual worlds,
cinema retains a legacy from photographic traditions.

References

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Atencia-Linares, Paloma. 2012. Fiction, Nonfiction, and Deceptive Photographic Representation.

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70: 19–30.
Bazin, André. 1951/1967. Theatre and Cinema—Part Two. In What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh
Gray, 95–124. Berkeley: UC Press.
Benovsky, Jiri. 2014. The Limits of Photography. International Journal of Philosophical Studies
22: 716–733.
Cameron, Evan. 2004. From Plato to Socrates: Wittgenstein’s Journey on Collingwood’s Map. AE:
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Carroll, Noël. 1996. Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carroll, Noël. 2008. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The World Viewed, enlarged edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Cooper, Stephen D. 2007. A Concise History of the Fauxtography Blogstorm in the 2006 Lebanon
War. The American Communication Journal 9: 1–34.
Crippen, Matthew. 2010. William James on belief: Turning Darwinism Against Empiricistic Skep-
ticism. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 46: 477–502.
Crippen, Matthew. 2015. Pictures, experiential learning and phenomenology. In Visual Learning,
vol. 5: Saying by Showing, Showing by Saying – Pictures, Parables, Paradoxes, ed. András
Benedek and Kristof Nyiri, 83–90. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Publishers.
Crippen, Matthew. 2016. Screen Performers Playing Themselves. British Journal of Aesthetics 56:
163–177.
Gaut, Berys. 2010. A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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n.p. [editorial precedes pagination].
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Matthew Crippen’s research integrates a number of schools and eras, including pragmatism,
embodied cognitive science, phenomenology, Greek thought and more, while drawing resources
from psychological, biological and occasionally physical sciences. Much of it also revolves around
value theory, especially aesthetics but also ethics and politics. Matthew has published in lead-
ing journals, and has a forthcoming book with Columbia University Press, titled Mind Ecologies:
Body, Brain, and World. He is affiliated with Humboldt University’s Berlin School of Mind and
Brain, and holds a visiting professorship at Grand Valley State University. Outside the academy,
he has worked as a musician, mandolin and guitar instructor and gymnastics coach.
Chapter 9
The Reality of the Virtual in Deleuze’s
Transcendental Empiricism

Paulo M. Barroso

Abstract Is virtual related with transcendental empiricism? If so, how and why?
The aim of this approach is to conceptualize and problematize the reality of the
virtual (not virtual reality) as a transition or a changing process through signs/images,
like Bacon’s image-sensation. Following a theoretical research, this paper explores
and questions Deleuze’s perspective about virtual as a part extracted from real and
embedded in real. Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism is critical to the conditions
of possibility of experience proposed by Kant. Deleuze’s perspective goes further
and admits the virtual must be defined as a strictly part of the real. The virtual is
fully determined and necessary; a virtual field represents the necessary conditions to
actualize the actual experience.

9.1 Introduction

Le virtuel ne s’oppose pas au réel, mais seulement à l’actuel. Le

virtuel possède une pleine réalité, en tant que virtuel. […]
Le virtuel doit même être defini comme une stricte partie de l’objet réel.
Gilles Deleuze, Différence et Répetition.

We are presently living in a full age of development and improvement of the tech-
nique. As in the etymological sense of the Greek word techne, the term “technique”
commonly means an art or regular way of making or doing something, satisfying
human needs and changing the way of seeing and thinking reality. Innovative ways
of making or doing things emerge permanently and, therefore, human experiences
also change.
In a global and increasingly technological culture, it wouldn’t be necessary to
mention the development and improvement of the technique to emphasize the way
of seeing, thinking and feeling reality, namely through images. Considering that (i)

P. M. Barroso (B)
Department of Communication and Art, College of Education,
Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, Viseu, Portugal
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 133

J. Braga (ed.), Conceiving Virtuality: From Art To Technology, Numanities - Arts
and Humanities in Progress 11, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24751-5_9
134 P. M. Barroso

there have always been images and images exist before the technological develop-
ment; (ii) there are different kinds of images with sufficient realism or intensity to
make reality and virtuality perceptibly indistinct; and (iii) there are not only ways
of seeing, as Berger (1972) states, but also “ways of making worlds”, according to
Goodman (1978)—“making” in the poetic sense of producing (from the Greek poien,
to produce) or creating something from nothing (to make an image of the world is
to produce a “world”), thus it is enough and relevant to mention an idiosyncratic
case: the painted images that give rise to a torrent of life and perception about human
experience, rather than reality itself. This idiosyncratic case is that of Francis Bacon’s
image-sensation as an art or stylistic way of making or doing something (not just
art), i.e. a way of making visible and sensible human experience. Bacon’s paintings
allow viewers to see and feel strong sensations. The artist is not interested in reality
or the reproduction of reality; he simply shapes reality through painted, fixed and
intensive images.
Deleuze is the philosopher of the virtual, according to Zizek (2004). What matters
to Deleuze is not virtual reality, but the reality of the virtual. While virtual reality
implies the idea of imitating reality and reproducing its experiences in an artificial
medium, the reality of the virtual “stands for the reality of the virtual as such, for its
real effects and consequences” (Zizek 2004).
Bacon’s case is the best example of Deleuze’s perspective about virtual, visibility
and transcendental empiricism, which is the focus of this paper. The justification
for this focus is due to the gradual transformation of culture through techniques
as ways of making or doing something. Culture is transformed by technique in a
global, technological (digital), and more and more visual culture. In such culture,
technique is not only omnipresent in everyday life, but also exerts influence, ranging
from the micro-chip and the particle accelerator to the broader field of the internet,
video games and digital TV. Technique brings more specifically an unprecedented
range of virtual reality devices, possibilities and software to be experienced for the
contemporary common citizen.
Considering Deleuze’s (1985) “civilization of image” as a civilization of cliché
(as well the ubiquity of images in the contemporary visual cultures), the relevance of
this subject is justified by the current tendency of global cultures to become more and
more visual and digital, eventually concealing reality, rather than being a medium to
uncover it. If we live in a “civilization of image” or in “the age of the world picture”,
according to Heidegger, it is the modern age in which the world has become a
picture, i.e. a systematized and representable object of techno-scientific rationality.
The “world picture” does not mean a picture of the world, but the world conceived and
grasped as a picture (Heidegger 1977). For Heidegger, this phenomenon (tendency
or pictorial turn) is a historical transformation equivalent to the Modern Age: “The
world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but
rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence
of the modem age” (Heidegger 1977).
There are many research questions, but the starting-question of this paper is: Is
virtual related with transcendental empiricism? If so, how and why? This question
raises a host of other questions: How images and virtuality affect our perception of
9 The Reality of the Virtual in Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism 135

reality? How we continue to experience and perceive reality (and what surrounds
us: other people, objects, images and all data we receive daily in several ways and
means) in a more a more visual and digital culture? Are the effects of images on
people indifferent whether they are real or virtual images and based on real or unreal
referents? In what way the experience may be real and yet not actual in Deleuze’s
perspective? Why does the virtual necessarily stand in opposition to something that
is only possible? What is the reality of the virtual?
In addition to this questioning, which guides both the approach and the discussion,
the aims of this paper are (a) to argue the contemporaneity of Deleuze’s transcendental
empiricism relating the conceptions about the virtual and experience; and (b) to
demonstrate the relevance of Deleuze’s approach concerning the virtual. These are
two small and close goals, because this approach is restricted to Deleuze’s perspective
on the virtual.
The strategy to do this is conceptual and reflexive. Firstly, the option is to clarify the
concept of “virtual” and relate it to other equally important concepts (image, image-
sensation, crystal-image, time, being, becoming, dynamics, intensity); secondly, to
underline Deleuze’s perspective about the virtual as the opposite from the common
sense (for whom the virtual is linked with the potential and opposed to the real).
Following a reflexive methodology, this research assumes the aporias subjacent to
the prior questioning. Working within the framework of the virtual, this paper reports
on a theoretical approach and the method adopted is a critical discussion about the
virtual connected to Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism.

9.2 When Virtual Is Real

Virtual is an odd-job word. The etymology of the word “virtual” is polysemic and
equivocal. The origin of the word reveals that virtual comes from the medieval Latin
virtualis, meaning energy, strength, power (to produce an effect), but also from the
Latin virtus, virtutis, meaning human quality, courage, value, merit (as in the case
of “possessing certain virtues”, i.e. moral excellence). But virtual also means what
exists as a “possibility of something”; what only exists in potency or as a faculty; not
existing in reality or with a real effect; what may be, what may exist, happen or be
practiced (a simulation of something created by electronic means). The “possible”
is what may become a fact, what is capable of being used (have a function) or put
into exercise.
This paper does not intend to approach the virtual reality, but the virtuality as
a transition or transformer process from the actual or real to the virtual, i.e. the
virtualization of reality (Deleuze 1968; Zizek 2004; Lévy 1995).
In Différence et Répétition, Deleuze emphasizes that the virtual is extracted from
the real and it is also incorporated into the real. The virtual is not the opposite of
the real, because the virtual enjoys a full reality. “Le virtuel ne s’oppose pas au réel,
mais seulement à l’actuel. Le virtuel possède une pleine réalité, en tant que virtuel”,
says Deleuze (1968). He adds: “Le virtuel doit même être défini comme une stricte
136 P. M. Barroso

partie de l’objet réel—comme si l’objet avait une de ses parties dans le virtuel, et
y plongeait comme dans une dimension objective” (Deleuze 1968). In Deleuze’s
perspective, the virtual is an integral part of the real. The reality of the virtual is
composed of elements, differential relations and singular points that correspond to
it. These elements and relations form a structure and this “structure is the reality of
the virtual” (Deleuze 1968).
For Deleuze, virtual is characterized by being actualisable and not by being real-
izable or materialized. In the transition from the virtual to the actual, i.e. in the
actualizing process, the nature of the virtual differs and the virtual differs even from
itself. But virtual does not transcend the actual nor exist outside of it; the virtual
inhabits and overflows the actual.
We could reasonably understand the possible as existing prior to the actual or the
fact, i.e. the possible as a lack of reality. The possible is defined as something that may
possibly become something else, something factual, real, concrete. Therefore, the
possible is always before something, never after something; whatever exists now must
have been possible before it was actual. However, Deleuze denies all this perspective,
stating that the possible does not imply anything to which existence is added later. For
Deleuze, the possible contains already the real, like the idea of inexistence contains
already the idea of existence. Instead of the real as a resemblance of the possible, it
is the possible that resembles the real. The possible is the reflected image of the real.
In Différence et Répetition, Deleuze distinguishes the virtual from the possible,
saying that: first, the possible is opposed to the real; the virtual is not; second, the
possible has a process of realization; the virtual is a process of actualization, because
the virtual has a proper and fully reality. The existence is produced from the very
reality of the virtual.
According to Deleuze (1968), “le seul danger, en tout ceci, c’est de confondre le
virtuel avec le possible. Car le possible s’oppose au réel; le processus du possible est
donc une ‘réalisation’. Le virtuel, au contraire, ne s’oppose pas au réel; il possède
une pleine réalité par lui-même. Son processus est l’actualisation.” As per Deleuze,
there is a big difference between virtuals and possible forms: while the former define
the immanence of the transcendental field, the latter actualize them (the virtuals:
virtualities, events, singularities) and transform them into something transcendent
(Deleuze 2001).
As per Lévy’s Qu’est-ce que le virtual?, Deleuze’s distinction between the virtual
and the possible is fundamental. The possible is already constituted, but it remains
in the limbo (Lévy 1995). The possible will be done without nothing changing in its
determination or in its nature. It is a ghostly and latent real. The possible is identical
to the real; it only lacks existence. The realization of a possible is not a creation,
because the creation also implies the innovative production of an idea or a form
(Lévy 1995). Therefore, the difference between real and possible is purely logic.
The virtual is not opposed to the real, but to the actual. Unlike the possible, the
static and the already constituted, the virtual is the set of tendencies or forces that
accompanies a situation, an event, an object, an entity, etc. that needs or demands an
actualizing process.
9 The Reality of the Virtual in Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism 137

9.2.1 Transcendental Empiricism and Image-Sensation

In Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, the most crucial is the experience and the
conditions of a real experience (not the conditions of a possible experience). For
Deleuze, the transcendental is related to describing the virtual and not, in opposi-
tion to Kant, to defining the conditions of experience. Virtual represents the neces-
sary conditions under which real experience is actualized. Deleuze’s transcendental
empiricism is critical to the conditions of possible experience proposed by Kant and
it goes further: it admits that the virtual must be defined as a narrow part of the real
object. Therefore, instead of being undetermined, the virtual is, for Deleuze, fully
determined and necessary.
Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism is the apprehension of the thought of exces-
sive differences, i.e. differences in intensity and strength as an immanent transcen-
dental principle. That is why Bacon’s image-sensation is perfect to show how, in an
ontological perspective, the sense of being is expressed in the difference, as Deleuze
demonstrates in Francis Bacon: logique de la sensation. Deleuze discusses the fun-
damental concepts of becoming and difference based on Bacon’s images.
The transcendental empiricism means that the discovery of the experience sup-
poses an experience in the strict sense; it does not mean the common or empirical
exercise of a human faculty: living (or empirical) data do not inform the thought
about their potentialities. The human faculty is driven to its limit and philosophy
only fulfils its vocation rising itself to the transcendental.
The transcendental empiricism is based on the purpose of philosophy, which is
not to rediscover the abstract, the eternal or the universal, but to find the natural
conditions under which something new is produced. Philosophy is not intended to
indicate the conditions of knowledge identified in nature or functioning as a rep-
resentation; philosophy must find the conditions of creative production. This is a
pragmatic perspective: philosophy should be a theory about what we do, not a theory
of what exists.
The concept of transcendence does not mean, as Deleuze says, that the faculty is
directed to objects outside the world, which is the common sense of the transcen-
dent. On the contrary, the faculty apprehends in the world what concerns to it. The
conditions are never generic; their decline is according to the particular case and we
can never speak a priori of all experiences.
According to Deleuze’s own words: “l’empirisme devient transcendantal […]
quand nous appréhendons directement dans le sensible ce qui ne peut être que
senti, l’être même du sensible: la différence, la différence de potentiel, la différence
d’intensité comme raison du divers qualitatif” (Deleuze 1968). He concludes say-
ing that “le monde intense des différences est précisément l’objet d’un empirisme
supérieur” (Deleuze 1968).
In Deleuze’s perspective, the transcendental is separated from every idea of con-
sciousness; it is an experience without either consciousness or subject: a transcen-
dental empiricism, in Deleuze’s paradoxical expression. “La forme transcendantale
d’une faculté se confond avec son exercice disjoint, supérieur ou transcendant. Tran-
138 P. M. Barroso

scendant ne signifie pas du tout que la faculté s’adresse à des objets hors du monde,
mais au contraire qu’elle saisit dans le monde ce qui la concerne exclusivement, et
qui la fait naître au monde” (Deleuze 1968).
The ordinary and everyday human experience may become transcendental. Over-
coming the image-sensation due to its excesses and forces is an example, when the
simple image and the deepest sensation contained in the image are connected.
A sensation is an immediate experience of direct contact with the world; it has
the status of a “pure presence”, an imprint of data. Deleuze opposes sensation and
representation. He does it with Bacon’s paintings. Bacon has repeatedly stated that
he tried to overcome the narrative, the identifiable and the mere figurative painting.
According to Lotz (2009), “what makes Bacon’s art of painting so interesting is not
that it establishes a non-intentional relation to the spectator (which it undoubtedly
does too); rather, the interesting point is that his paintings in some sense are dealing
with and are about this relation.” Deleuze was looking for direct and factual effects of
painting on the human nervous system and he found such effects in Bacon’s paintings.
The main characteristic of Bacon’s painting is the connection between sensation and
image. From this connection comes the so-called image-sensation.
The image-sensation is opposed to the image-representation. The paradoxical
sense of Deleuze’s approach is that a logic of sensation is antagonistic to a mimetic
representation between the representative (the canvas) and the represented (the real).
In this mimetic representation, signs reproduce the forms (features) of things in an
image-sensation like Bacon’s paintings. However, the immediate presentation (i.e.
without mediation, unlike the representation) of forces is more privileged, rather than
the representation or reproduction of forms. All representation follows the semantic
transitivity aliquid pro aliquo. An image is a representation and it is also a sign.
Thus, an image necessarily represents something. Although Bacon prefers sensa-
tion instead representation, his images can’t avoid representation; they necessarily
represent something and what is represented is always understandable by someone.
Presupposing that all representations are virtual (because they follow the mentioned
semantic transitivity aliquid pro aliquo) the virtual represents “another reality”. Such
“another reality” consists in signs, a form of language, a medium to represent some-
thing through something (a sign, an image), or a way of making or doing something
(“another reality”), giving rise to the exploitation of the possibilities of language to be
efficient and effective to represent with conviction (certainty) and criteria (features).
Deleuze emphasizes Bacon’s way of making or doing images, i.e. images-
sensations that make visible the excesses and the forces of representation. According
to Deleuze (2003), this is the task of painting that Bacon materializes with his images:
to produce signs that push us out of our pattern of perception about reality, according
to the representations we create and that affect us as something that (e.g. in art) exists
imperceptibly, as if it were there without being there, as if it were virtual. It is the
sign that forces the thought as it is assumed as involuntary and unconscious, that is,
transcendental. Thus, the violence of the signs on thought is in the genesis of the act
of thinking (Deleuze 1968). The object of the sensibility (the sensible, what can be
felt) is the intensity, which is in the sign.
9 The Reality of the Virtual in Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism 139

For Deleuze, the act of thinking is provoked when the thought is stimulated by
signs. The classic model of representation is refuted. The thought and the act of
thinking are different. The sign forces us to think and this force correspond to the
violence of the sign in provoking the act of thinking as a possibility of creation
(Deleuze 2014).
For Bacon and Deleuze, the human experience is the most important. The virtual
is the life and it is committed to the actualizing process of the immanent and the real.
According to Deleuze, the virtual is already in life, i.e. in the reality itself. “A life
contains only virtuals”, because “it is made up of virtualities, events, singularities”
and “what we call virtual is not something that lacks reality, but something that is
engaged in a process of actualization following the plane that gives it its particular
reality” (Deleuze 2001).
Bacon’s images-sensations provide live sensations because they have a virtual
nature. They are more than simple and ordinary artistic images; they are even more
than signs-images representing something. In Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism,
Bacon’s images-sensations are images that force thought to a virtual experience. This
is a new concept of thinking or way of thinking, in which a new image of thought (the
thought without image) is contrasted to the conception of thought as a representation.
Deleuze analyses the representational image of thought. He recognizes Plato as
the origin of this representational image of thought, due to the distinction between the
world of ideas (or essences) and the world of appearances. Deleuze (1969) develops
the Platonic distinctions between essence and appearance, intelligible and sensible,
idea and image, original and copy, model and simulacrum. The relation between the
Platonic concepts of essence and identity determines the representational thought
and relating the real and the virtual is to distinguish between the world of essences
(what remains identical to itself over time) and the world of appearances.
In short, the transcendental empiricism is the logic of sense and sensations; it is an
opponent of the Kantian transcendental philosophy. The transcendental empiricism
is constructed and based on the immanence.

9.2.2 Francis Bacon’s Aesthetic Experience Between

the Lived and the Thought

The artistic objects (the images) created by Bacon are basically defined by deformed
figures; a stylistic innovation of brush strokes and colors; and a rupture of expec-
tations, thematic canons and patterns of representation. These artistic objects are in
the frame of an idea or concept of art. However, this idea or concept of art is princi-
pally due to the ambiguity and, more paradoxically, referentiality (an indication of
conformity between the image—which is not a mere image, but an image-sensation
and image-thought—and reality).
140 P. M. Barroso

We are not sure about what Bacon’s images mean at first sight. Bacon’s work has
what Eco (1986) calls the “additional meaning”. This additional meaning is due to
the ambiguity of the images.
The ambiguity (from the Latin ambiguu, amb + ago, “between two”, “to impel
for both sides”) arouses two or more interpretations. With ambiguity, images and
signs, which can be taken in different senses, are ambiguous, vague, raise doubts and
misunderstandings about what they mean.
Questioning the referentiality of Bacon’s pictorial language, one wonders if it is
really what it suggests, the designatum (what the sign refers to and can be a real
object or just an idea). It is the reference that links the sign (which triggers the
process of representation or signification) to its referent (what the symbol represents
or replaces), according to Ogden and Richards (1923). The reference is the indirect
relation between the symbol and what it means, which justifies that painting is an
indirect language for Merleau-Ponty (1999). If language is a duplication of the whole
structure of reality (Ogden and Richards 1923), the referentiality implies relations
between thought, words and things or objects (reality) or just between expression
(language and thought) and reference (reality). The example of different expressions
or signs for the same referent or even for a non-existent referent is paradigmatic.
How the relation between Bacon’s images and its referents (past events) is estab-
lished? How perception and sensation of reality are created in the image? How does
the transition from sign to meaning, from concept to perception/sensation happens?
What exists in the image that operates this transition? What does the image do? What
makes the image (as a sign) the image of something real? How can a virtual image of
something inexistent legitimize the claim to serve as a reference of reality? Is there
any relation between the real perceived in the world and the sensation provoked by
Bacon’s pictorial images (images-sensations not concerned to represent forms, but to
create excesses or forces provoking sensations)? Is it possible to avoid or to surpass
the representation in the image?
The excesses and forces of Bacon’s images are in the ability to puncture our sen-
sations in a direct and immediate way, as Barthes (1980) denominates by punctum
that “something” in the photograph that leads the observer to have a stronger emotion
when he sees the image. Bacon’s images puncture those who observe them, because
the painter expressed the tragedy, violence, anguish and crudity of the human con-
dition through these images. He did it in a realistic way without being a realistic
style painting. Bacon’s painting is not subordinated to a representation of specific
appearances or real situations. Bacon’s images puncture not necessarily through a
dramatic and abstract force. According to Ficacci (2007), these images mean, on
the contrary, the hidden and unrepresentable sense of individualism and intimate
existence, because the representation of the sense of existence inevitably results in
an expression violently tragic. It is a sense transformed into an immanent and dis-
turbing reality, more real than any realistic representation, while the objective reality
of human life becomes an apparition, where only through the practice of painting
it can become a flagrant and actual value (Ficacci 2007). The subjectivity of exis-
tential experience reaches the deep sensibilities of the observer. Bacon’s images are
9 The Reality of the Virtual in Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism 141

motivated by the real experience of empirical life, i.e. the reality of a past event is
resolved in the reality of the artistic action (Ficacci 2007).
For example, Bacon’s work Three Studies for Pictures at the Base of a Crucifixion
corresponds to the expression of an excessive violence and feeling of horror that
unites the three figures (each one with its canvas). This work does not represent
any violent act; it represents an indefinite and inhuman violence that occurred in an
invisible space and at a time outside the limits of the picture (Ficacci 2007). It is a
triptych, a composition separated into three distinct canvases, but coordinated with
forms and colors (orange color scattered in space, causing a sensation of blindness
and making space perceived more at the psychic level than logical) disturbing the
observer and imprinting the motive (the horror). According to Ficacci (2007), the
observer is violently affected by this composition of shapes and colors.
The deformation of the three figures makes them ambiguous and enigmatic, pre-
venting any particular understanding of its meanings. These meanings are not explicit,
but implicit. This triptych corresponds to the lacerating and the incomprehensible
expression of a cry. For Bacon, painting is not a medium to imitate the apparent
reality; it is an independent and an artificial act emerging from the most intimate and
instinctual human experience and need. The sensation has an obscure origin and it
is impossible to identify the visible individual in the image. Therefore, the image
invalidates, on the one hand, any type of representation and penetrates, on the other
hand, at the faster and more intuitive level of the mind (Ficacci 2007). This level
is that of sensation. Sensations are more deeply rooted and precede logical ratio-
nality. Bacon renunciates the natural logic. Bacon’s painting is the revelation of the
unconscious and the individual existence. The deformed figures in Three Studies for
Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion are traumatic expressions of horror that have
origin in the deepest feelings of human existence. The true subject of pictorial repre-
sentation is the expression of horror, which is superior to any specific transitory cause
(Ficacci 2007). In this perspective, Bacon conveys the most universal or transcendent
expression of the horror experience through the expressive force of painting. Bacon
attributes a form and an expression to subjective sensations and experiences. His
figures do not show actions. It is the implicit expression of the figures that demon-
strates the most essential of human nature and experience. It is the transcendental
empiricism mentioned by Deleuze.
In the painting entitled Study of a Baboon (1953), Bacon explores a higher and
more explicit level of violence in the image. This image shows a rude and grotesque
figure, with monstrous proportions. The reactions are due more to the structural
components of the work than to the figurative details. Bacon seeks to stimulate the
sensation of existence in painting, transcending the normal state of human existence
and experience and creating another state of hypersensitivity.
142 P. M. Barroso

9.3 Conclusions

Answering the starting-question, virtual and transcendental empiricism are related.

The ordinary and everyday human experience may become transcendental if (what
Deleuze calls) the virtuals (i.e. virtualities, events, singularities) define the imma-
nence of the transcendental field. The virtuals are different from the possible forms.
These possible forms actualize the virtuals and transform them into something tran-
scendent.
The experience is fundamental in Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, as well
in Bacon’s paintings. An experience is an accumulation of knowledge, practice or
skill obtained from direct participation in events or activities. In this perspective, it
is what Heidegger (1976) states when he explains the meaning of “to do an expe-
rience” as something that happens to us, strikes us, overcomes us, knocks us down
and transforms us. For Deleuze, the most important is the experience (that may
become transcendental) and the conditions of a real experience (not the conditions
of a possible experience). That is why Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism is critical
to the conditions of possibility of experience proposed by Kant. The transcendental
is related to describing the virtual and not to defining the conditions of experience.
Virtual represents the necessary conditions under which real experience is actualized.
This approach conceptualizes and problematizes the virtual as a transition from
the actual or real to the virtual, i.e. Deleuze’s perspective presented in Différence
et Répétition about the virtual as something extracted from the real and embedded
in this real. Considering the profuse production and use of signs/images, reality
and experience are both virtualized through these signs/images (like Bacon made
in a non-digital and artistic way with his images-sensations). Such virtualization of
reality and experience features a standard iconocracy of contemporary visual and
technological (digital) cultures.
In Deleuze’s “civilization of the image”, the actual is not opposed to the virtual
nor the virtual is opposed to the real, because the virtual enjoys a full reality as
virtual. Deleuze admits that the virtual must be defined as a strict part of the real
object. The virtual is fully determined and necessary; a virtual field represents the
necessary conditions to actualize the actual experience.
Deleuze’s approach is based on the idea that the virtual is something which is not
given, i.e. the virtual is (the power of) what is not given, because only the actual is
given. The actual is also given in the form of a possible (a substitute, an alternative)
that divides the real and gives immediate experience to a possible field (possible
under the transcendent form of the necessary). Therefore, the virtual shows that not
everything is given, nor everything is likely to be given.
The virtual also means that everything (events, happenings or activities) can only
come from the immanence of the world. There is only the actualization of the real.
The virtual must be seen, therefore, as an actualization of something else which then
can be confused with that of which it demarcates by definition: the transcendence. It
is from what is given that the virtual is presented from the perspective of a thought
about the experiment, i.e. the data.
9 The Reality of the Virtual in Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism 143

The boundaries between reality and virtual, between what is real and what is
unreal, between “being” and “appear to be” are increasingly tenuous in a visual
and technological (digital) culture. Due to the above-mentioned development and
improvement of the technique and the evolution of cultures towards the visual and the
digital, the technique is indistinctly and imperceptibly everywhere. If the technique is
so, so are its effects and consequences. There are more and more images everywhere;
we perceive them daily without being able to distinguish if they are real or virtual, or
if they are based on captures of the reality (like a photograph) or computer-generated
virtual environments (someone or something unreal, that does not exist).
However, there are also images that are essentially sensory, not representative
or significant, but capable of allowing a better understanding of reality and human
experience than reality itself. These images are perceptively intense, like the so-called
Bacon’s image-sensations, paintings that break with the traditional representative
field of art. An image-sensation is an image of a certain reality or everyday situation
carrying sensations so vivid and strongly expressive that they can be revived by those
who observe them. Bacon’s paintings are an excellent example of these images-
sensations and, therefore, an application of Deleuze’s conception about the virtual
as something that may transcend its own immanence.
An image-sensation evokes and actualizes reality, transforming the immanence
into a transcendence. In this type of images, reality transcends the immanence. The
actualization of the immanent is demonstrated through Bacon’s paintings, where only
the sensations recreated by this artist in his figurative paintings offer an experience
that is transcendental and virtual; an experience barred in the proper experience of
the real. It is because of this specificity of Bacon’s images-sensations that Deleuze
elected them as paradigms to question the dualities living/non-living, thought (think-
able)/unthought (unthinkable), speakable/unspeakable, visible/invisible, and vir-
tual/actual.

References

Barthes, Roland. 1980. La chambre claire. Paris: Seuil.

Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1968. Différence et répetition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1969. Logique du sens. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1985. Cinema 2: l’image-temps. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2001. Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. New York: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2014. Proust et les signs. Paris: Presse Universitaire de France.
Eco, Umberto. 1986. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Indiana University Press.
Ficacci, Luigi. 2007. Francis Bacon. Colónia: Taschen.
Goodman, Nelson. 1978. Ways of World Making. Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company.
Heidegger, Martin. 1976. Acheminement vers la parole. Paris: Gallimard.
Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Age of the World Picture. In The Question Concerning Technology
and Other Essays, ed. William Lovitt, 115–154. New York: Harper & Row.
Lévy, Pierre. 1995. Qu’est-ce que le virtual?. Paris: Éditions de la Découverte.
144 P. M. Barroso

Lotz, Christian. 2009. Representation or sensation? A Critique of Deleuze’s Philosophy of Painting.

Canadian Journal for Continental Philosophy 13 (1): 59–73.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1999. La prose du monde. Paris: Gallimard.
Ogden & Richards. 1923. The Meaning of Meaning. New York: A Harvest Book.
Zizek, Slavoj. 2004. Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. NewYork: Routledg.

Paulo M. Barroso Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain

(2007); post-doctorate researcher (6 years) at the University of Minho, Portugal; assistant profes-
sor at the Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, Portugal (College of Education, Department of Commu-
nication and Art), teaching Semiotics, Sociology, and Ethics; integrated researcher at the Inves-
tigation Centre in Communication, Information and Digital Culture (CIC-Digital) of the Faculty
of Social Sciences and Humanities, New University of Lisbon; and current research interest in
Semiotics, Argumentation and Rhetoric, Ethics, Media Languages, and Theories and Models of
Communication, having published several articles and participated in international conferences in
these fields (e.g. Grammar, Expressiveness, and Inter-subjective Meanings: Wittgenstein’s Philos-
ophy of Psychology. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing).
Chapter 10
The Scope of the Virtual in the Treatment
of Melancholia

Cláudio Alexandre S. Carvalho

Abstract As widely demonstrated by personal and clinical accounts, the onset of

melancholic episodes is sometimes incomprehensible at light of present life cir-
cumstances, suggesting, as remarked by Freud, that in opposition to mourning the
endured loss is not fully acknowledge or remains inaccessible to the conscious sub-
ject. Putting aside the question of whether the triggering of melancholic episodes
has endogenous origins, Psychoanalysis sustained that this inaccessibility, due to the
fact that the melancholic ego develops an identification with object, means that the
subject was and remains incapable to mourn the lost object, unable to symbolically
elaborate on its absence. Therapy depends on the ability to provide such a work of
morning and the introjection of the lost object. Accordingly with various psycho-
analytic theories, melancholia is marked by unconscious attempts to revive the lost
object, by incorporating it inside oneself, in order to safeguard an original phantasy,
which results in the general impoverishment of one’s vitality and ability to enjoy as it
is attested by the prevalence of chronic symptoms of motor inhibition and asymbolia.
The affects and drives of the subject became imprisoned in the relation with the first
objects of the identificatory process, and the ego is under attack, constantly menaced
by fragmentation, for he deemed himself unable to retain the more precious. One of
the major problems in a theoretical approach to melancholia, relates to the plethora
of meanings, conceptions and terminology it involves. In the present work, I will try
to overcome, or at least minimize, this difficulty by privileging J. Kristeva’s account,
relying mostly on her magnificent work Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia
(1987). In various works, Kristeva proposed a valuable model to access pre-linguist
affects and drives that remain entrapped in an uncompleted or wounded identifica-
tory process. She considered two forms of antidepressants—Psychoanalysis and Art
(poetic language and music)—that, under specific conditions, can access and retrieve
the relation with the ambiguous object amending such a bound by introjection and
sublimation. Kristeva’s contribution has been invaluable in expanding our sense of

The research for this article was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Fundação para a
Ciência e a Tecnologia with reference SFRH/BPD/116555/2016.

C. A. S. Carvalho (B)
Institute of Philosophy,
University of Porto, Porto, Portugal
e-mail: [email protected]
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 145
J. Braga (ed.), Conceiving Virtuality: From Art To Technology, Numanities - Arts
and Humanities in Progress 11, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24751-5_10
146 C. A. S. Carvalho

the corporeal and imaginary dimensions of the unconscious. But despite the depths
of her analysis of the way the semiotic processes influence moods and conscious
representation, sometimes she seems to lose sight of the communicative dimension
of the illness, not only in the therapeutic session but also in aetiology and everyday
symptomatology. What we consider the scope of the virtual in therapy relies on a
particular kind of negativity capable to grasp and transform the constitutive bifacial-
ity of the subject, its psychic and communicative dimensions. It is from that junction
that the patient is summoned to expose his feeling and thoughts providing them
with new meaning. The therapeutic exploration of affective blockages grounded on
the identificatory process, as it happens in melancholia, depends upon the recursive
and retroactive access to the sequences and selectivity of meaning systems, not only
psychic but also communicative. This access requires the virtualization of repressed
elements surpassing extreme resistance to analytic transference. Instead of a full-
blown exposition of the unconscious processes or the postulation of its presumed
truth, the medium of therapy relies on the conditions to receive and transform ele-
ments prompt in the course of the therapeutic session. Despite its transformative
techniques, the dynamic of this interactive medium differs from ordinary forms of
conversation and support precisely by relinquishing a linear or pre-established path
for amelioration.

10.1 Introduction

Contemporary attempts to conceive and treat melancholia, including various syn-

dromes of major depression, inherit and continue a rich tradition of therapy. In the
transition to modern society, particularly with the differentiation of medical discourse
(in its various paradigms) the concept of melancholia benefited from a greater pre-
cision, both in its aetiology and symptomatology. Such development privileged the
likeness, continuously contested, between melancholia and depression.1 Personal
complaint became increasingly important in order to understand melancholic trou-
bles, particularly once it became evident that its affections were rooted in intrapsychic
conflicts that could hardly be contained within a strict biophysiological approach.
Most of the classic tradition of depiction, interpretation and treatment of Melancholy
tended to insist on an expressive model where organic causality and symptoms are
perfectly aligned with the wide range of its psychic manifestations. In those mod-
els, grounded on a metaphysics of the soul, the psychic dimension of melancholy
is a translation of a temperament marked by the prevalence of black bile. Ancient

1 Itis possible to argue that this increase of precision, which one can associate with the advent of
Psychiatric observation and experimentation on the 19th century, leads to an impoverishment on the
previous valence of melancholia as an irreplaceable condition that provides the ability to conceive
and reconceive the world. That tradition had always seen melancholia “as a form of malaise that
denounces the imbalances between some members of a given society (Kehl 2009: 74). This aspect
is particularly salient in the frequent associations between the melancholic temperament and the
satiric or even the utopian.
10 The Scope of the Virtual in the Treatment of Melancholia 147

theories attributed it mostly to an innate imbalance of individual constitution but

latter, with the onset of modernity, come also to be considered a result of the recur-
rence of some noxious habits.2 Contemporary descriptions, personal accounts and
therapeutic models discredited that long-lasting description, and made evident that,
in its various forms, melancholia presents the difference and discontinuity between
biological, including cerebral physiology, and the psychic processes associated with
it, both as a temperament and a pathological condition.3
Already in the influent transformation of “mechanized” and brutal forms therapy
endorsed by the subscribers of “moral treatment”, generalized in the transition to
the nineteenth century, the social dimension of the melancholic condition became
evident as a crucial element in its understanding, relief and cure.4 Resorting on var-
ious forms of treatment focusing on individual sensibility and memory, those con-
ceptions tried to access and change the private configuration of the psychic system.
However, the full implication and repercussions of the social dimension as origin and
eventual source of relief for melancholia only became discernible with the advent of
experimental Psychology and Psychoanalysis. These new disciplines discovered that
the imaginative and relational dimensions of this condition needed to be addressed
directly and dealt within their own field. These disciplines can be seen as the first
representatives of a novel pedagogic orientation which sustains that the recovery of
one’s autonomy and self-determination is unconceivable outside the relational con-
struction of expectations and practical duties formulated and contracted along the
course of therapy.5
At the same time, melancholic and depressive afflictions provide a fruitful field
for the evaluation of the impact of the gradual transformation of the model of indi-
viduation on the construction of identity and search for meaning. The transition for
a society functionally differentiated evidences and intensifies two intertwined chal-
lenges at the core of the melancholic illness. On the one hand, the individual is
no longer sustained by the force of social bounds founded on tradition, a cohesion
that favoured the integration on the community and a seemingly synchrony between
individual and social unconscious. But if this absence of a unifying version of the
Other and the urgency of a fundamental question regarding his desire—Che Vuoi
(?), a question he can evade but can never ignore, grants freedom and responsibility

2 The medical writings of Mandeville are an exemplar landmark on a long transition from the
Hippocratic and Galenic models to a new epistemology able to account for the role of the individual
both on the particular configuration of his illness and on the therapeutic process (cf. Carvalho 2014).
3 Here we leave aside the possibility of a strict distinction between melancholia, as a form of

psychosis, and depression, a form of neurosis, cf. Kehl (2009, 191 ff), Radden (2009: 80–85).
4 However, one must bear in mind that the transition to comprehensive methods was gradual and

“the relation of the doctor with the melancholic oscillated between indulgent generosity and brutal
severity (…). Alternating between complaisant and harsh methods [the doctors] tried to achieve
the most reliable efficacy to break the defenses and reach the conscience of the sick” (Starobinski
2012: 179).
5 Cf. Balsemão-Pires (2015, 2016), Ehrenberg (2009, 201–204); Biegler (2011).
148 C. A. S. Carvalho

for one’s life’s project, it can also turn the journey for “authenticity”6 into a burden
filled with doubt and guilt, precisely the dominant feelings of neurotic syndromes
(cf. Kehl 2009: 53 ff.; Ehrenberg 2009: 101–192).

10.2 The Reality of the Virtual in Therapy

What I refer as the virtual scope of therapy is not directly related with the non-real or
the simulation of real/actual; what Giuseppe Riva designates as the Medical clinical
uses of virtual worlds, particularly relevant in Cybertherapy with the creation digital
interfaces and virtual environments that aim the total or partial immersion of the
patient in order to access and treat particular conditions.7 In Psychoanalytical terms,
I address what can be called the “reality of the virtual”.8 Instead of departing from
an opposition between a presumed real to the non-existent, the reality of the virtual
refers how various systems have an inherent virtual dimension in their constitutive
relation towards their environment and in their self-referencial processes (observation
or description).
Therapeutic medium grounds its autonomy on conversational recursivity. In the
following, my aim is to explore and circumscribe the virtual dimension of this
medium, particularly the way it enables the virtualization of psychic and communica-
tive configurations inherent to the melancholic condition. Psychoanalysis advanced
the groundings of this enterprise, but it maintained a wavery position concerning the
autonomy of the communicative dimension and its role in retrieving and transforming
a wide range of melancholic complaints.
Contrary to other generalized therapeutic offers, conversation and observation
of the psychoanalytical medium of therapy proceeds through an undetermined and
uncertain path, although strictly contained and regulated. Instead of presenting a way,
a predetermined path towards relief and self-determination, Psychoanalysis aims a
dynamic discovery, or attending to von Foerster’s distinction, a creation of cognitive
and practical possibilities (von Foerster 2003). These are not necessarily repressed
or negated in the ordinary sense of these terms. They can only be thought through
the insertion of the subject on a virtual field of self-determination that readdresses
his own selectivity. This reframing of one’s own selectivity, namely the ability to
adhere to a conception or insight and “forming”, “reinforcing” or “rejecting” a current
disposition, is not entirely transparent to the analyst nor the analysand, neither of them
can fully foresee the evolution of a problem or disorder presented at the beginning

6 Here we can add the immense variety of terms available in the jargon of self-help literature. On
the semantic clusters organizing the variegated and diffuse field of contemporary offers of positive
therapies see the work of Illouz (2008: 105 ff.).
7 I explored the theoretical dimension of the virtual in Cybertherapeutic settings in a previous work

(cf. Carvalho 2015).

8 I use this concept in the similar way it way applied in System’s Theory (cf. e.g. Fuchs 1998).
10 The Scope of the Virtual in the Treatment of Melancholia 149

of the therapeutic process. Not even the greatest commitment of the patient with the
therapeutic process is able to circumvent this condition.
What confers the virtual its proper context in the therapy of melancholia concerns
the work through a negation that is implied in the relation towards a lost object
invested with intense drives and projections. Contrasting with ordinary morning, in
melancholia “the patient is aware of the loss that has given rise to his melancholia,
but only in the sense he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him
(Freud 1917: 245). This failure to acknowledge the importance and extent of a loss
is not due to a cognitive hindrance but to the fact that the relation towards such
an object is primarily retained in unconscious representants of the libido and, since
the subject tries to save the object by identifying with it and retaining it inside
oneself, any empirical or imaginary contour of the object is erased. In a certain
sense, the interiorization of the “partial objects” that relate the infans with to the
body of the mother, particularly the breast, depends on the virtualization of certain
qualities projected on the objects that satisfied the first needs, moulding the path
of the primal drives. But according with Freudian theory this first identification of
the ego must endure the crude reality of the absence of the ideal object and, finally,
“the verdict of reality that the object no longer exists” (Freud 1917: 255).9 Contrary
to the manic ego, which triumphs over the disappearance of the love-object,10 the
melancholic reinforces his phantasies, idealizing its ability to satisfy and fetishizing
its drawbacks. This originates initial forms of counter-investments of the libido on
the ego, a primary wound that requires the withdrawal from the lost object, that is
mourning.11 The only means for this “open wound” to heal is by introjecting the good
traits of the lost object,12 namely its connection with bodily pleasure, and expelling
any source of pain, at the same time that he “accepts” that the object of the previous
cathexes is lost.13 If for some reason the subject refuses or is unable to lose his
affective attachments with the object, namely due to an excessive investment of the
mother’s love leaving no room for the frustration of the baby’s needs, it will try to

9 “[P]eople never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is
already beckoning to them.” (Freud 1917: 244).
10 “[T]he manic subject plainly demonstrates his liberation from the object which was the cause of

his suffering.” (Freud 1917: 255).

11 As we will see this is “the wound the melancholic attempts to hide, wall in, encrypt” (Abraham

and Torok (1994: 135).

12 “The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies—

which in the transference neuroses we have called ‘anti-cathexes’—from all directions and emptying
the ego until it is totally impoverished.” (Freud 1917: 253).
13 In analogy with the mourning person facing the dead of a loved one, infans should leave the object

to rest, replacing the warmth of its presence with its “memory”. Not only is this replacement deemed
unacceptable by the melancholic, he considers it unfaithful to the unblemished love attributed to the
object. The apory of making memory and tribute was underlined by Derrida: “[e]ach time we know
our friend to be gone forever, irremediably absent, annulled to the point of knowing or receiving
nothing himself of what takes place in his memory (…). For never will we believe either in death
or immortality; and we sustain the braze of this terrible light through devotion, for it would be
unfaithful to delude oneself into believing that the other living in us is living in himself: because he
lives in us and because we live this or that in his memory, in memory of him” (Derrida 1989: 21).
150 C. A. S. Carvalho

save it by incorporating it on the ego, however the realization that the object became
inconstant and ultimately lost its qualities leads to various forms of self-reproach.14
It is the context of this incorporation of an ambivalent object that Freud advances
the idea of an inner division of the self, between the ego and the “ego ideal” that
will reappear, at the introduction of the second topic, under the denomination of
superego (see Green 1999a, b: 115). This change has considerable consequences
for the conception of melancholia since the superego agency becomes “heir to the
Oedipus complex”, operatively and energetically autonomous towards the ego in the
repression/sublimation of erotic attachments (1923: 26).15
In the melancholic, “one part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it
critically and, as it were, takes it as its object” (Freud 1917: 247). Freud narrates the
tribulations exposed by the melancholic patient; he “represents his ego to us as worth-
less, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself,
vilifies himself and expects to be punished. He abases himself before everyone and
commiserates with his own relatives for being connected with someone so unworthy”
(Freud 1917: 246).
This “pre-history” of the subject has further consequences in his psychic struc-
turing, namely concerning his development along the oedipal stage and the identifi-
cation with the parental figures. This is why Freud considers melancholia as a kind
of arrested narcissism, based on the maintenance of the promise of completeness,
always at the expenses of suffering, the melancholic shies from the dialectics of pro-
jection and introjection of other ideals. It is rooted on a “primordial desertion from the
Other” (Kehl 2009: 169) that can oscillate between the extremes of a self afflicted by
the cruelty of the archaic superego and the display of omnipotence and indifference
towards the emptiness of words, becoming a participant in language, what Torok
and Abraham called “communion of empty mouths” (1994: 197–198). In its basic
dimension, the operation of interdiction to the maternal object was incomplete or
it became problematic since the psychic system remained connected to a particular
image or idea, not primarily fantasying about its ideal qualities but trying to retaining
and actively hiding it.
As remarked by P. Fédida, melancholia is not so much the regressive reaction
towards the loss of the object as it is “the fantasmatic ability to relate to the object
and keep it alive as lost object” (1972: 126). That is the paradox of melancholia:
only the constitution of the ego as individuated enables a certain kind of imaginative
recreation and retrieving of fantasies of that loss. Only the active retrieving and

14 Therefore, it is important to remark that “[u]nlike the hysteric, it is not the object that the melan-
cholic devours, but his own ego, confused with the object by identification” (Green 1999a, b: 114).
15 “At the very beginning, all the libido is accumulated in the id, while the ego is still in process of

formation or is still feeble. The id sends part of this libido out into erotic object-cathexes, whereupon
the ego, now grown stronger, tries to get hold of this object-libido and to force itself on the id as
a love-object. The narcissism of the ego is thus a secondary one, which has been withdrawn from
objects” (Freud 1923: 46).
10 The Scope of the Virtual in the Treatment of Melancholia 151

recomposition of memory traces, can aim to revive the object at the expenses of the
depleted self, menaced by delirium of guilt and persecution.16

10.3 Kristeva’s Project

One of the greatest merits in Kristeva’s retrospection on the history of treatment of

melancholia is the way she understood the pre-linguist and pre-judicative dimen-
sion of the psychic system, what she conceived as the semiotic. Semiotic refers to a
dynamic conception of the play of signs, that explains the functioning of significant
practices irreducible to language as an object, i.e. a system of signifiers arbitrar-
ily connected with the signified (Kristeva 1974: 41–42). In dealing with pathology
(but also in artistic creation, namely poetic and musical) the linguistic elements are
irreducible to their formal elements and connect to the exteriority of psychic and
somatic orders. Here, if we return to the Freudian model, we see a translation of
unconscious instincts and drives in primary processes in their linguistic articulation
of metaphor and metonymies. The psychoanalytic session is able to explore this
significant process by promoting the exploration of its layers of meaning by an ego
or psychic system. This has been understood by Kristeva as the dynamic relation
between semiotic and symbolic as the possibility, aimed in the analytic relation, of
establishing a new order of the subject.
Besides the depths of her analysis, Kristeva captures the essential dimensions
of melancholia, and despite adopting a psychoanalytical perspective, it holds room
for analogies with the phenomenological tradition of psychiatry and psychopathol-
ogy.17 In the strict domain of Psychoanalysis Kristeva captures not only the classical
approaches of Freud (1917) and K. Abraham (1971) but also the perspectives of M.
Klein (1940) and is easily adapted to Bion’s theory of the transformative function.18
Normal pathology of melancholia is grounded on a freezing of the re-entry of
excluded elements, interdicts the access to a creative elaboration of the repressed
elements and the rhythms of primary processes. This is the major argument guiding
the tension between the semiotic and the symbolic at The Revolutions of Poetic
Language (1974), which Kristeva recovers in her approach to melancholia. In her
latter work, apropos melancholia, she elaborates upon this latency between what she

16 Following Soler (2002: 52–62) we can present the particular admission of guilt in the melancholic

subject, whereas the paranoid repels any fault for the Other, the melancholic reclaims all the fault for
himself. “His posture is in itself really inverse and stays in opposition to sublimatory elaboration. The
delirium of indignity in itself, whch is all that remains of symbolic realaboration in melancholia (…)
locates in the christalized fixity of guilty consciousness whose inertia contrasts with the interpretative
dinamism of the paranoid delirium” (Soler 2002: 62).
17 Particularly the grounding works of Binswanger (1960) and Tellenbach (1961).
18 In the present work, I have no opportunity to fully explore the particularities of these currents

and will only sketch a mapping of the virtual dimension implied (and necessary) in the treatment
of melancholia.
152 C. A. S. Carvalho

names chora19 and a particular arrangement/topos of the subjective position (stase).

Chora is the unnameable, undetermined and pre-linguistic ground, in the context
of developmental organization it refers an undifferentiated psychic space marked
by the drives’ motility and immediate needs, feelings and perceptions. This first
stage, where there is no distinction between the inside and the outside, self and other
evolves and achieves a stable, yet precarious order, through the subject’s enunciation
and adherence to a symbolic mandate, receiving and assuming of a name. Adapting
this model to systemic terms, therapy has its possibility on the transformation of the
constitutive re-entry of self-reference on this medium previous to the formation of
meaning.
In the history of psychoanalysis Kristeva provides a fruitful theory that deals with
the core problem enunciated by Freud in An Outline of Psycho-Analysis: “[w]e know
two kinds of things about what we call our psyche (or mental life): firstly, its bodily
organ and scene of action, the brain (or nervous system) and, on the other hand, our
acts of consciousness, which are immediate data and cannot be further explained
by any sort of description. Everything that lies between is unknown to us, and the
data do not include any direct relation between these two terminal points of our
knowledge” (1940: 144–145). Freud exposes an ineluctable gap in our knowledge
whose consideration is decisive for psychoanalysis both as a theory model and a
therapeutic technique, recognizing the corporeal nature of psychic processes and the
immediacy of the acts of consciousness. The innovation of Kristeva lies on the way
she addressed this problem by developing a model to access this gap considering
corporeal and pre-linguistic signs never fully exposed into language and symbolic
structures. At the same time, she recognizes that the configuration and functioning
of the psychic system cannot be accessed without some level of symbolic general-
ization.20 The unconscious can only appear to the narrowness and superficiality of
consciousness, to which it is unpredictable, as a translation or transposition. The fact
that certain processes and experiences have no adequate propositional description
and are hardly satisfying from a communicative standpoint is made more conspic-
uous in melancholic illness and is key to understand the way therapy relies on a
particular kind of negativity. Instead of presuming an exposure of the repressed or
denied elements of the unconscious, Kristeva’s model of negativity highlights the
way the psychoanalytic setting sets in motion a modalization of those elements and
their selectivity.
Following Hegel’s exposition of the dialectical process in the Science of Logic,
Kristeva underlines how it values the negative, namely the subjective dimension as
an essential part in the development of the Idea. In fact, she refers that “negativity”
should be considered the forth term of the dialectical process (Kristeva 1974: 105).

19 This concept is adapted from platonic myth of the cosmogenesis in Timaeus.

20 Concerning its unconscious dimensions, Fuchs (1999: 16–17) says that in that pre-linguistic level

of the psychic system “there is no speech, no silence, just possibly a drift upwards toward the spheres
where language has already become effective and is retroactively conferring onto the nonmeaning
having penetrated here a contingent meaning”.
10 The Scope of the Virtual in the Treatment of Melancholia 153

Along this path she will focus on the re-appropriation of the operation of negation
as Aufhegung attempted by Freud (1974: 108 ff.).21
On his little manuscript On Negation, Freud develops a point we already sketched
in Mourning and Melancholia. He notes that, in the course of the analytic session, the
use of negation frequently preserves the ability to intellectually accept the repressed,
despite maintaining the distinct trait of the repression, its emotional refusal (1925:
235–236). Freud showed that through the peremptory refusal another intentional-
ity is revealed, comes to consciousness elicited by the mechanisms of suggestion,
dream-work and free association of ideas. It points to a primitive form of judg-
ment associated with the “destiny” of oral instincts, an evaluation which opts for the
incorporation or expulsion a certain object (1925: 214–215). According to Freud this
“judgement of attribution” is the genesis of the division between the inside and the
outside.22 But there is no operation of negation in the primary drive-impulses of the
unconscious, i.e. expulsion and the corresponding “destructive drive”, which Freud
contrasts with the instinct of unification, must not be confused with the operation of
negation whose efficiency relies on repression and results from a “judgement of exis-
tence”.23 The acknowledgement of this division between the affect and the instituted
intellectual function shows that the ego is always grounded on a méconnaissance
of itself. Additionally, this brings forth the realization that only the “judgement of
existence” is able to thematize an object as absent or exterior.
In this respect, we must note that what distinguishes the melancholic is that
instead of negating the primal object or his constitutive split, he expresses a dis-
avowal [Verleugnung] of the loss. Furthermore, he is unable to replace or admit
symbolic representants of the drives and affections that were associated with the
maternal object whose good parts he tries to preserve through their incorporation.
Therefore, “[d]isavowal of the fundamental loss opens the land of signs but, in gen-
eral, morning is incomplete. It destabilizes the disavowal and brings the signs to
memory rescuing them from the signifier’s neutrality. It charges them with affects
which turns them ambiguous, repetitive, simply alliterative, musical and sometimes
foolish” (Kristeva 1987: 53). Due to the ambivalent nature of these drives, whose
signs are reactivated in one’s “memory”, what could be an unrestrained immersion on
the imaginary becomes a nostalgic submission to an object that lost all its contours,
a Thing.24 This idea is further developed by Kristeva, namely in the hypothesis of a
developmental phase following the immersion with the mother’s body. That phase,
propelled by the identification of repression, will be punctuated by a dialectics of
abjection: “considering the incertitude of the identities that specify the archaic bound

21 “[N]egation is a lifting of the repression [Aufhebung der Verdrängung], though not, of course, an

acceptance of what is repressed” (Freud 1925: 235–236).

22 In his interpretation of the Freudian essay, Hyppolite (1955: 884–885) stressed that this presumed

division is a myth.
23 “There is no stronger evidence that we have been successful in our effort to uncover the uncon-

scious than when the patient reacts to it with the words ‘I didn’t think that’, or ‘I didn’t (ever) think
of that’” (1925: 239).
24 In Pouvoirs de l’horreur (1980) Kristeva developed the idea that along the acquisition of identity

the spectrum of the abject will be a continuous threat.

154 C. A. S. Carvalho

of the ego [moi] towards the other, speaking of an abject [abjet], instead of ego and
the object already there, would maybe more pertinent. The future subject constitutes
himself in a dynamics of abjection of which the ideal face is fascination” (2000: 78).
When he tries to recover It in language, the melancholic can only do so through gaps,
in dissociation with the body, without certainty nor belief. Kristeva states that “Freud
implies that complete repression (if it was possible) would have consequences in pre-
venting the symbolic function” (1974: 148). So, according to Kristeva, an integral
negation of negation is impossible, for repression never attains a full suture of the
pre-linguistic organization of the drives and can be retrieved. The truth of the Real,
prior to the advent of the signifier, can only be glimpsed between the lines or in the
supra-segments elements of speech. Analysis or poetic language can aspire to this if
they are able to regain access to the threads of the drive’s circuit as a rhythm, a tone
or a timbre.
Kristeva understands this possibility as an eruption of the semiotic on the welding
between signifier and signified instaured by the symbolic, renouncing the exposure of
an original truth, its transgression or negativity can only glimpse the “remains of the
first symbolizations” (1974: 47 ff.). “This explosion of the semiotic on the symbolic,
far from being a negation of the negation, an Aufhebung that would suppress the
engendered contradiction through technic, to install in its place an ideal-restorative
positivity of the pre-symbolic immediacy, is a transgression of the position, a retroac-
tive reactivation of the contradiction that established this position itself” (1974: 68).
A significant part of Kristeva’s conception of melancholia is indebted to M. Klein
writings on the depressive position, both in her distancing from Freud’s conception
of primary narcissism25 and by providing a vivid picture of the role of fantasy in
child’s development.26 Influenced by Ferenczi’s hypotheses, instead of assuming a
direct investment of the infans on his own body, Klein maintains that the roots of
identification depend on investments on what is yet to be marked as the “outside”,
through which he shapes the reference to his own organs. In this relation towards
outside objects whose “cathexis precedes differentiation and cognitive discrimina-
tion” (Green 1999a, b: 75), phantasy and symbolic elaboration shape the libidinal
investments forming the inner psychic world of the child.

25 That is, the hypothesis, always contested by Klein of a inobjectal state: “The hypothesis that a stage

extending over several months precedes object-relations implies that—except for the libido attached
to the infant’s own body—impulses, phantasies anxieties, and defenses either are not present in him,
or are not related to an object, that is to say, they would operate in vacuo. The analysis of very young
children has taught me that there is no instinctual urge, no anxiety situation, no mental process which
does not involve objects, external or internal; in other words, object-relations are at the center of
emotional life. Furthermore, love and hatred, phantasies, anxieties, and defenses are also operative
from the beginning and are ab initio indivisibly linked with object-relations. This insight showed
me many phenomena in a new light.” (Klein 1952: 52–53).
26 This influence is reassessed in the second volume of her Le Génie féminin. La vie, la folie, les

mots. Reviewing Lacan’s arid conception of the imaginary, Kristeva values the heterogeneity of the
internal objects detailed by Klein: “conglomerate of representations, sensations and substances”
irreducible to Lacan’s scopic model of the constitution of the “ideal ego”; a “theoretical impurity
compensated by its clinical fecondity” (Kristeva 2000: 70).
10 The Scope of the Virtual in the Treatment of Melancholia 155

The depressive refuses, at least unconsciously, the separation with the mater-
nal object, produces, nourishes and stores fantasies of an ideal union with it. Klein
showed that this object is always embedded in the oscillation between joy and decep-
tion. “The ego is driven by depressive anxieties (…) to build up omnipotent and
violent phantasies, partly for the purpose of controlling and mastering the ‘bad’,
dangerous objects, partly in order to save and restore the loved ones” (Klein 1940:
349). Psychic development requires conflict and tarrying with the loss. The interior-
ization of that object, along pre-Oedipal phases, is the consequence of the weening
process, stabilizing the intense dynamic between projection and introjection in the
early relation with the mother.
“An inner world is being built up in the child’s unconscious mind, corresponding
to his actual experiences and the impressions he gains from people and the external
world, and yet altered by his own phantasies and impulses. If it is a world of people
predominantly at peace with each other and with the ego, inner harmony, security
and integration ensue” (Klein 1940: 345). Klein insisted on the difficult return of a
projection without adequate recipient or container, even if one must acknowledge
that children: “are so much dominated by their internal world that their anxieties
cannot be sufficiently disproved and counteracted even by the pleasant aspects of
their relationships with people, severe mental difficulties are unavoidable” (Klein
1940: 346). However, the reparative drives can only be unleashed if the mother
reassures the projection providing undoubtful signs of love/care.
This point of departure categorises melancholia as a resistance towards fragmen-
tation of the self, a return to the schizo-paranoid phase where the ego is continuously
menaced by the assaults of the sexual drives withdrawn from the good object in the
form of death drives that it tried to project to the outside. Due to the hallucinatory
effect of the psychic pleasure, produced by the circuit of the drive from the organic
sexual pressure to an outside organ leaving a psychic mark of its satisfaction, for
the child the absence of the object is always associated with the appearance of bad
objects of his psychic environment. Instead of finding ways to amend and repair the
hole leaved by the absence of the lost object, through play and symbolization infans
remains obsessed with its idealized qualities refusing its exchange. André Green
exposed this problem proposing the imago of the “dead mother”: [t]he object has
been encapsulated and its trace has been lost through decathexis; primary identi-
fication with the dead mother took place, transforming positive identification into
negative identification, i.e. identification with the hole left by the decathexis (and not
identification with the object), and to this emptiness, which is filled in and suddenly
manifests itself through an affective hallucination of the dead mother, as soon as a
new object is periodically chosen to occupy this space (Green 1986: 155).
One essential requirement for the process of introjection that characterizes the
depressive position is the repairing of the good object. This repair takes place by the
mechanism of projective identification, vital for the restructuring of the binaries that
constitute the precarious ego, the distinction inside-outside and the differentiation
between ego and super-ego. Kristeva considers the projective identification as the
“universal field of psychic stimulation” (2000: 78), consisting in the projection of
good parts of the ego to the other, particularly a caring figure, so that they remain
156 C. A. S. Carvalho

protected from the menaces of annihilation. This conception opens a revision of the
idea that the symbolic reparation of the object can only ensue from fear of castration
posed by the father as representative of the law.
In accordance with the ontogenetic reading proposed by Klein, we can take this
melancholic disposition as a personality structure that can remain dormant and erupt
at some point of adult life, particularly when facing grief or considerable challenges
or changes that the subject is unable to cope with, putting his identity into question.
That constitutive inability to lose, to let go,27 can be triggered by an ordinary event
and, associated with the rigid clinging with a memory or particular theme and evolve
to the loss of sense and value of the self, towards its own devitalization.
According to the classical narrative of Psychoanalysis, the attempt to control the
object, by the consolidation of the drives’ circuit around the erogenous zones, has
been finally blown by repression of the gratification when the father enters the scene
and breaks the dyad or fusion between the infans and the mother. But the depressive
suffers the “irreplaceable apperception of a place or a pre-object that enchains the
libido, cuts the bounds of desire” (Kristeva 1987: 23). The enclosure around the
mother, that has emerged as a whole figure, and as so remains a frequent target of
reproaches, was supported by infans’ assumption that he is her only object of love.
The father as the representative of law and language forces infans to refrain from the
mother as a source of sexual gratification and, figuratively, the oppressive security
of her lap. For the melancholic this forced detachment implies a reluctant opening
to other objects and the construction of desires. Sorrow and disillusionment are the
precarious shell of the symbolic identity of the melancholic, they hold a generalized
aggressiveness towards the figures deemed responsible for the detachment (Kristeva
1987: 75).
For infans this seems to pose a kind of exclusive disjunction: either the bereave-
ment of the gratifying mother takes place from his place within the symbolic,
transforming the unconscious representants of the libidinal investments into “signs,
images or words”, or he refuses this denial of the object attempting to retain and
control it (Kristeva 1987: 74). If according to Freud the first possibility requires the
withdrawal of libidinal investment from the object into the ego, an energy that will be
reinvested in the identification with the ego ideal. The latter “choice”, however, leads
to a freezing of his affects due to an attempt to convert their binding with the object
in an interior tomb that, henceforth, he will hold in secrecy. The signs of this can
be witnessed in some forms of speech delays but it be expressed in more pervasive
strategies, namely through the “active destruction of representation” (Abraham and
Torok 1994: 132), the refusal of any figurative language or metaphor, since these are
the evidences of the proposed change between the mouth full with the good objects
of the breast and the empty mouth filled with the void of words. But this inscrutable
inside, refusing the articulation of linguistic meaning, leaves semiotic traces not
only regarding the libidinal investment of certain parts of the body that punctuate the

27 Some of the most impressive descriptions of this melancholic symptom can be found in Ph. Pinel’s

Medico-philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation (e.g. 1809, 167).

10 The Scope of the Virtual in the Treatment of Melancholia 157

prevalence of bodily stupor, but also in mutism and the constant interruption in the
enchainment of speech.
Kristeva subscribes the bases of Lacan’s scheme of identification. The symbolic
identity is conferred by the insertion in the differential chain of signifiers, it implies
that the subject depends on the representation of a signifier for another signifier.
This operation can reinstate the reference to the subject through the actualization
of signs in the differential chain. From the imaginary process of identification with
the father, the symbolic retains the assuming of a name, however the reference to
the imaginary elements that ground one’s sense of identity remains decisive. Despite
being “closer” to a presumed substance of the subject, the elements of imaginary
identity are grounded on a virtual field of possibilities that achieves a stable con-
figuration, although it requires constant actualization. For Kristeva, the imaginary
register not only holds the promise of access to archaic traces of libidinal investments
and fragments of one’s projections and introjections, its exploration can also open
the possibility to new forms of identification.
Following Klein, Kristeva considers an alternative way to reenact the connexion
with the object avoiding the need of its introjection, by reparation or forgiveness.
Beauty, by its supervenient quality is the best candidate to re-enact the libido of the
lost object into an object not tainted by ambiguity. But for the melancholic mind this
form of sublimation is always on the verge of deriving in deliriums of omnipotence
and the aggressive display of superiority over the others.28 Only exceptionally is this
“reparative re-binding” (Green 1999b: 233) successful, and for Kristeva the greater
representant of its possibility is Proust’s writing and his emblematic phrase: “[i]deas
come to us as the successors to griefs”.29
Beyond judgement and calculation, the analytic listening is the other candidate
to untie and reconstruct the relation to loss and the corresponding “vivification” of
the dead object. Inspired by Dostoyevsky’s novels, Kristeva presents forgiveness as
the opportunity for the “unconscious to be inscribed into a new story that is not
the eternal return of the death drive in the cycle crime/punishment” (Kristeva 1987:
214). For this reconfiguration all the previous remains of imaginary idealization are
liable to be mobilized, for according to Kristeva’s distinctive motto: the unconscious
“is not structured as a language but as all the marks of the Other [comme toutes les
marques de l’Autre], and comprises mostly the most archaic, ‘semiotics’, marked
by preverbal autosensuality that restores the narcisic or loving experience” (Kristeva
1987: 214–215). A third, the analyst, is required to mediate the relation between the
defiled object and its punisher(s). On the part of the analyst, this implies the need to
refrain from of any attempt of abasing the value of the lost object, whose faithfulness

28 This has to do with the difficulty of including, like Klein does, the sexual drive as part of the

sublimation of the lost object. Green exposed the problem: “on the one hand, sublimation appears
to be a vicissitude of the sexual drive, a purified form which has its place among other possible
vicissitudes but which remains within the patrimony of Eros, and, on the other, sublimation is the
adverse counterpart of Eros which, far from serving its aims, sides with those forces which are
antagonistic to its purposes (Thanatos). The paradox cannot easily be overcome, and this is the path
which Freud’s work (the product of his sublimation) will follow” (Green 1999b: 219).
29 See in particularly the forth study of Proust and the Sense of Time (Kristeva 1993: 77–98).
158 C. A. S. Carvalho

toward the subject is generally never questioned by the patient. Inversely, due to the
fragile self-image of these patients, the strategy of the analyst “must” be to make
the patient “realize” that any harm on himself would be unbearable for the ideal
object itself. Instead of being a representative of the law, the analyst aims “prior to
words and intelligence, the emotions and the injured bodies” (Kristeva 1987: 216).
For Kristeva this transferencial process can only happen with a resignification of the
abject with signs that echo a new dynamic of the semiotic motility. Analysis should
promote the musicalization and re-sensualization of the previous libidinal relation
towards the interior objects.
Dialogue is the mode of access that influences primary displacement and con-
densation of the unconscious processes, by modulating the relation towards the
other/object at the liminal register of the imaginary. It is a liminal domain for it
preserves the link with the pre-linguistic and imagetic groundings of the psychic
system through the coordination of the grammatical-logical processes. This inter-
vention has a transformative force on the stream of consciousness, and impacts on
two major figures of melancholia: the silence without ideation and ideational chaos
without order.
As seen in Revolutions of the Poetic language, this is the scope of intervention and
structuration of drives. What Kristeva calls the semiotic register of meaning operates
at the constitutive border of the psychic system, between drives motility (and stases)
and the fixation of a subjective position in the symbolic order. Therapy oscillates
between redundancy and novelty with self-reflective speech under the mandate of
free association of ideas, as the instrument of discovery and change. Its relational
structure puts into motion new possibilities of the unconscious in its relation with
biological processes. That means that the Analyst must remain attentive not only to
the logical order of speech, but also non-verbal aspects of signification.
Even when he talks, the melancholic has a monotonous speech, unable to enchain
the words in a fluent and coherent whole, he displays: “[a] repetitive rhythm, a
monotonous melody comes to dominate the broken logical sequences transforming
them in recurring litanies, enervating one’s” (Kristeva 1987: 45). The proximity
of the therapeutic listening of the pain of the melancholic, a feeling distinct from
anxiety,30 favours the resuming of the relation with the object and reconsideration
of the affective detachment bringing it to signification.
Within the psychoanalytic discourse, Kristeva is reframing an opposition already
explored in communication studies, between the digital and the analogical, the
way any access to discrete elements is selected within a grounding continuum of
sequences, what one can name as mood disposition (Kristeva 1974: 67–68). Both
of these categories are essential to grasp the virtual reconfiguration of meaning and

30 According to Green this distinction is already clear to Freud which “maintains that pain is the

proper reaction to the loss of the object, whereas anxiety is the reaction to the danger that this
loss entails, and consequently a displacement, the reaction to the danger of the loss itself. Thus
the loss of the object produces pain by the irruption of an uncontrollable quantity into the ego,
which provokes a feeling of helplessness (Hilflosigkeit). To avoid pain and helplessness, the signal
of anxiety anticipates the catastrophe and orders the ego to set up defensive operations capable of
controlling the disorganizing threat” (Green 1999a, b: 68).
10 The Scope of the Virtual in the Treatment of Melancholia 159

relational structure in the stream of consciousness in the work of therapy. “In ana-
lytic cure, that importance of the supra-segmental register of the word (intonation
and rhythm) should conduct the analyst on the one hand to interpret the voice and, on
another, to disarticulate the chain of signifiers, vulgarized and devitalized, to extract
from it the hidden meaning of the depressive speech, that dissimulates itself in lex-
emes, syllable and phonic groups, that have been semanticized in an uncanny form”
(1987: 67).
The primary processes ground the possibilities or upper processes, which in a
way are always metaphoric and whose order of sequence is coupled by common
signifiers. Those processes are, in themselves, inaccessible and their influence on
the flow of consciousness is always indirect. This is another way of saying that
they depend upon a negation, a negation that is constitutive of the subject as a being
always already immersed into language, into signifiers that now mediate the access to
one’s own blind spot. In melancholia something goes wary and the subject remains
stuck in some signifiers (images, thoughts and words) that retain the connection
with interdicted elements, a basal dimension of what we could refer as memory that
is better conceived as kind of receptacle (or container) that structures and stores
affective connections (associations). In a retrospective reading, through the process
of analysis it becomes clear that those elements can only be preserved by melancholic
disposition. They affect the basic process of identification, the name, and impose a
rigid model of self-reference characterized by the degrading of one’s value. Indeed,
primary identification with the father is absent or is frail.
That means that re-entry preserves and reinforces the value of the object precisely
through a devaluation of oneself, beginning with the reproach that the ego is unable to
preserve the good object. The refuse/inability to talk about that object is the condition
of its preservation from linguistic platitude, the vital debilitation (through the refuse
to eat and lethargy) are ways to punish this ego that is the cause of deprivation and
the condition of defence of the object.

10.4 Co-implication of Psychic and Communicative

Elements

Sometimes depressive illness becomes an adaptive mechanism, not only in the sense
of compensating for a loss or breakdown, but also in order to cope with expectations
associated with the diagnosed condition. This means that, from the systemic point of
view, the mechanism of “learned helplessness” refers to a deeply entrenched habit
whose recursions are a way to assure a reduced complexity, at least in the coupling
with the communicative system (cf. Radden 2009, 53ff.).
The general complaint of the melancholic reveals a degradation of experience, a
sense of disconnection with the body and a temporal constriction of possibilities.31

31 Recently Fuchs (2005) explored the experience of melancholia focusing on its embodied dimen-
sion, and highlighted the increasing sense of entrapment and heaviness of one’s body. This intense
160 C. A. S. Carvalho

Melancholia can be understood as a suspension of the normal temporality of expe-

rience, both in terms of its linearity and fluency. As explored in H. Maldiney’s work
(1991: 313–315), the horizon of experience of the melancholic becomes closed to
the reconsideration of one’s affective investments and cognition, but also towards the
other. The investment on the lost object and the simultaneous deprivation of the self,
blocks or limits the ability of a productive resonance of the interior objects. That is,
the enchainment of psychic elements loses the capability to project or retrieve those
objects into other cognitive and practical possibilities.
In melancholia, we face a double rigidity in the constitutive borders of the psychic
system. On the one hand, towards the interior objects, some of which play an impor-
tant role as constitutive of the subject’s identity, as we saw insisting and arresting
further activity and desire with ambiguity, repetitiveness and arbitrariness.32 On the
other, and as a consequence to (or in conjunction with) that first opacity, communica-
tive insertion, the place of the subject in the symbolic order is always unsatisfactory
or mechanic, completely disconnected from any enjoyment.
A particular aspect latent in Kristeva’s reading but explicit in Tellenbach’s work
concerns the frequent indistinction between psychic and communicative elements
already at the onset of melancholia. This is something conspicuous at the prodro-
mal phase of the typus melancholicus, where the subject is increasingly unable to
acknowledge and manage various expectations concerning his/her adequate role (Tel-
lenbach 1961: 60–80). This inability tends to aggravate in some forms of delirium
where the demands imposed by the subject on himself are contradictory (one can
think of the concept of “double bind”) and/or impossible to fulfil. Some of the cases
explored by Kristeva (1987: 83ff.) had these features and covered the most devas-
tating episodes of melancholic episodes which tend to be triggered by bereavement,
postpartum depression and demands of professional adaptation, unemployment or
retirement. But other life changes have also been described by recent psychiatric lit-
erature, namely the abrupt change of country (sense of uprootedness) or the so-called
empty-nest syndrome.
The overlapping between psychic and communicative is not only the source of
the problem, with ferocious demands associated with that indistinction, but also the
key of the access and transformation the melancholic condition.
The strict equivalence between the personal identity and the social/professional
role is frequent in melancholia and this is probably a way for the subject to com-
pensate for the precarious shell of his identity, as exposed in the previous section.
Tellenbach noted how the subject obeys and reproduces the norms with a reduced
capacity to interpret them or put them into question, he reinforces them as a safe
way to avoid uncertainty or ambiguity (Tellenbach 1961: 51ff.) but we can also add
the manifestations of the fierce superego as cause of a pre-emptive conformity. The

sense of one’s concretude and special circumscription was already explored by previous phenomeno-
logical psychiatry.
32 In his “Discours de Rome” Lacan considered the challenge the depressive posed to the Analyst

was how to overcome his “empty word”, “the mirage of the monologue” in which the associative
process is disconnected from the unconscious knowledge (Lacan 1966: 247–265).
10 The Scope of the Virtual in the Treatment of Melancholia 161

adherence to a rigid and idealized order turns the perspective of challenges and adap-
tation an unmanageable burden, for the individual privileges actuality, on can say his
objective “being”, over potentiality, using the grammar of existentialist philosophy
his “project”. Some coping behaviour derives from the necessity to prevent new pos-
sibilities or change. This psychic blockage of selectivity is frequently accompanied
by psychomotor manifestations, somatizations of one’s emptiness tend to affect the
appetite and voice,33 normally initiated prior to the development of obsessions with
one’s bodily functions and organs.34 The complete identification with a social role
is a defence mechanism, a way to suppress ambiguity through the reiteration of an
unquestioned answer to one’s function and worth. This rigid form of identification
represses any insight on one’s feelings, freezing motivation on the exterior side of the
constitutive bifaciality of the psychic system. This general depiction configures what
Kraus (1991, 2016: 196–200) designated as hypernomia and heteronomia. The first
referring an unconditional and rigid following of external rules and the established
order, the latter an acritical acceptance of the expectations the melancholic projects
on others, which leads to an intolerance to be in debt (Tellenbach 1961: 82) and an
overidentification with one’s role (Tellenbach 1980: 465).

10.5 Notes Concerning the Virtual Dimension

of Therapeutic Processes

The specific characteristics of melancholia, first of all the selectivity that grounds
its categorization and identification, demand a certain adaptation of that particular
design, namely the ability to thematize a problem through individual complaint and
a way to irritate psychic processes in order to induce a transformation. As such,
melancholia does not subsist outside the observation of this system. In melancholia
and depressive syndromes the therapeutic system, particularly Psychoanalysis, works
on a double opacity: towards oneself (its unconscious processes and objects) and
towards the symbolic mandate of the subject. Both of these knots entail the possibility
of a virtual transformation of latent aspects of individuation, through imaginary
reconfiguration and through the repositioning in the symbolic order. This is only
possible through communicative medium, the “interpersonal” connection established
in the particular conditions of the session. The process cannot be reduced to the
intentional or representational dimension, it is the coupling with communication
that levers the psychic sequence, enabling the access to discursive gaps and holes.
The adequate thematization and scrutiny of the operative distinctions guiding
therapeutic sequences is a necessary condition for the individual efficacy of the path

33 Already at the “Draft G” Freud (1895: 99) sees anorexia as a form of melancholia.
34 Inhis comparative studies Kleinman (1988) showed that in non-western cultures the concept
of depression is primarily supported in bodily manifestations. On the other hand, one must refer
the deep historical connexions between melancholia and hypochondria, always associated with the
sense of unworthiness (Noyes 2005).
162 C. A. S. Carvalho

of therapy. Ultimately, this means that the transformative capacity to address and
treat melancholia depends also on the self-observation of the therapist and the way
the operating distinctions of therapy’s observation and interventions are object of
reflection (Ferro 2011). An effective access to the deep “anchoring” of melancholic
personality, namely the relation with the primary interior objects or, more precisely,
the consequences of the abrupt cut with the primal object, requires the grounding on
this level of self-observation. It depends on the modal thematization of distinctions,
for instance, if the free association of thoughts is approaching a relevant element of
one’s phantasy, the therapist must be able to prepare the elaboration of certain key
elements. But beyond the sensitivity that must guide the first order of observation
along therapeutic conversation, sometimes the second-order observation is required
to the acquisition of new competences.
We can simplify and say that the communicative source of psychic irritation pro-
pels towards self-organization, that is, a new order of understanding and disposition.
Besides the connection established towards the other, the effective transformation
depends upon the transformation of self-understanding of one’s position through the
recovery and virtualization of elements that concern one’s identity. The repressed
mnesic traces, namely those derived from the relation towards the primal objects, are
no longer open to integral restoration.
Another aspect of melancholia depends on the way the subject confronts the
absence of the object, the Thing without contours, the void of desire or the reception
of the empty return of psychic projections. This absence in the imaginary field of the
psychic system does not imply the interruption of primary processes of displacement
and condensation. On the contrary, they are the pre-intentional sources of recombi-
nation of the elements of the enchainment of the psychic stream. The Therapy’s task
has been understood by various currents of psychoanalysis as consisting in assuring
that this reordering of the projective and receptive flow of consciousness occurs in a
kind of recasting of the original scene, namely through the ability of the analyst to
put him/herself in the place of the first Other. But to break the narcissistic shell of
the melancholic, igniting a new kind of passion, not only must the analyst confirm
himself as a transactional object, he must also be awaked “by the analysand, giving
proof of his vitality by the associative links he communicates to him, without leav-
ing his neutrality. For the capacity to support disillusion will depend on the way the
analysand feels himself to be narcissistically invested by the analyst” (Green 1986:
163). This requirement of neutrality invites us to reconsider a seminal question of
psychoanalysis tackled by Ferenczi (see infra), which concerns the admissibility of
the analyst’s active promotion of promising disclosures. How to attune the imperative
of neutrality with the task of (re)activating some psychic knots?
A peculiarity of the task of therapy in the cases of depression concerns the pos-
sible ways to re-establish the ability to select and work previous points that ground
self-reference precisely through its particular medium. Conversation, that is a “con-
tained” dialogical form (independently of its asymmetry), has the ability to promote
a virtualization of one’s fixations, exploring their latency with actual elements, grant-
ing them a dynamic. A third aspect, connected with this, is relative to the fact that in
melancholia the ability to acknowledge one’s condition is sometimes very marked.
10 The Scope of the Virtual in the Treatment of Melancholia 163

The problem is that this acute realization of the condition is restricted to the epis-
temic dimension and disconnected from affect and the ability to change one’s psychic
disposition through action.35
For the semiotic process taking place in sequences of therapy it will be decisive
to know if in the coupling between the psychic and the communicative systems, the
first has enough interpretants to manage and process the creation of meaning and
the interventions of the therapist. This is much more determinant in the possible
access to a second order observation, that is, the access to a self-reflexive stance
that observes motives and duties and, with a diagnose of dysfunctions, addresses
new possibilities of selection. Presented in this way this may seem as a distanced
and apathetic observation, but frequently this kind of path can trigger deep affective
responses with the return and re-composition of unconscious/repressed material.
The work of carving up the adequate discrete elements of discourse is important
but it can hardly be reduced to a scientific technique, it depends on the autonomous
sequence of communication of themes that takes place in therapy. It is within this
path that, according to the therapist/analyst selectivity, the themes and elements that
must be highlighted and submitted to suggestive or explicit reconsideration. Again,
the path is uncertain, it can lead to fruitful irritation or to unsurmountable resistance,
in the forms of mutism or active dissimulation (lies). In this sense, following his
reading of Freud’s Negation, Ferro compares it to a “dam” since it “prevents flooding
downstream: what cannot be metabolized and transformed and whose irruption on
the scene would be disastrous for the psychic apparatus is ‘negated’” (Ferro 2011:
223).
The access to second-order observation in therapy, that is, the thematization of the
motives and possibilities of the participants in conversation, can never be superim-
posed. The problem can be reframed in the following way: how to adjust therapeutic
constraints in order to productively explore the virtuality of the associative stream of
consciousness? Even when patiently prepared, “active therapy”, the classical model
of instigating an insight proposed by Ferenczi, runs the risk of collapsing the progress
and the efficacy of psychic work. On the one hand, this is due to the way it overloads
the ability to work on repressed material, but primarily relates to the activation of
self-censure. Ferenczi considered this danger was not restricted to the possibility
that suggestion replaced the psychic work based on the free association of thoughts,
returning to “cathartic-abreaction therapy”, but it also encompassed the use “of other
pedagogical means of assistance, of which praise and blame are to be considered the
most important” (Ferenczi 1920: 215). This resort on moral language, which raised
the worries concerning the use of authority, was envisioned by Ferenczi as a means
to enhance the efficacy of therapeutic dialogue. Encouraging the purposive enacting
of certain memories, with associated gestures and emotions, and restraining others
considered unstructured, could be a way to access and organize material that would
otherwise remain masked in organic or automatic responses. This method relies on

35 William Styron’s impressive account of his own ordeal with melancholia stresses this discrepancy

between the psychiatric knowledge and the paralysis of one’s ability to act (2008: 104). For the
phenomenological particularities of this sense of incarceration see: Ratcliffe (2014: 59–70).
164 C. A. S. Carvalho

the possibility that the reverse side of the undoubtful triggering of repression covers
only certain elements while releasing other impulses and drives. With particular rel-
evance in the case of melancholia, where the affective investment of the lost object
is so entrenched, setting up “psychic crypts” (Abraham and Torok 1994: 130),36
Ferenczi adverts that the use of such method requires a sensitivity to the ability of
the ego to endure the frustration of its drives “for a long time the ego must be treated
with forbearance or at least treated with circumspection, for otherwise no working
positive transference will occur” (Ferenczi 1925: 219).
We see that the virtual scope of therapy depends on the way the therapeutic
system designs its own borders, the way its communicative sequences convoke its
participants, particularly through a coupling with psychic systems in the shared
medium of language.

10.6 Final Remarks

Therapy relies upon a complex process of cross-reference between psychic and com-
municative systems where the inspection and transformation of actual (or brute)
elements and structures requires the thematization mnesic traces, particularly those
related to intense or traumatic events, and latent identitary marks in order to consider
new patterns of thought and action. Even when therapy succeeds in overcoming con-
scious and unconscious resistances of the analysand, one must bear in mind that the
access to the subject’s “pre-history” is always an imaginative recreation with con-
siderable autonomy towards the originary primary relations with the objects and the
affective value they carried. This doesn’t mean that those originary relations had a
reduced importance or were indifferent! Quite the contrary, the fact that they consti-
tute the “matrix” of the individual psyche means they are, by definition, unobservable.
Therefore, one should reformulate the problem and ask how genuine are the psychic
representants, registers of the primordial motility of the drives and identificatory
processes, and how can they make their appearance to the constituted subject.
There is no doubt that the biological dimension has an eminent role in the depres-
sive condition, but one can only access and adjust its influence (for instance with
psychopharmacs) with the interpersonal mechanisms improved along the differen-
tiation of the therapeutic medium conceived as a particular system with a specific
form of sequentially and self-reference. Interpersonal therapy suspends the biolog-
ical by working on the anchoring of the psychic system on a reference to a double
environment. One relates to the opacity of “interior” psychic affections, the other
concerns the symbols and references grounded on communication.
The repression of the maternal object is rarely complete; there remains a reference
to it through sublimation. The melancholic tries to save that object resisting its
exchange with representations of external world, the acquisition of language and the

36 Abraham and Torok (1994: 125) mark their objection to Klein’s theory for supposing that such
encryptation of the lost object can take place prior to the differentiation of the ego.
10 The Scope of the Virtual in the Treatment of Melancholia 165

attribution of a relational identity. The refusal of the signifier, of the poor translation
of the primal objects into signifiers (signs), what is called disavowal of repression
(negation of negation) of primal drives towards the mother, preserves the object. This
leads to a constant and increasingly reproach of the individuated self since he holds
himself responsible for the loss of that object. The ego is at mercy of negative drives
because he is in the ambivalent position of obstacle and condition of the access to
the maternal object.
The scope of the virtual in the treatment of melancholia provides access to an
alternative approach of the linearity and univocal causality of some neurological and
biochemical explanations. This alternative is valuable not only on melancholia as a
pathology, but also as a creative disposition, evocative of the tradition of melancholia
generosa (see: Kearney 2003: 171–177). Instead of leading to despair, the loss and
impotence felt by the subject are the condition for a transformation that departs from
the instable chaos that is the environment of conscious perception and achieves a
new form of observation inaccessible in ordinary perspectives.
Some forms of depression may be seen as responses to certain events or life
conditions and, as it happens when melancholic episodes occur when facing the
difficulties of “maturation phases”, have a role (not necessarily a natural one) in
transforming one’s psychic structure and relation to the world. This is all the more
evident when depression is triggered by psychogenic aspects of loss and impotence
to achieve expectations. Psychopharmacs may replace or distort those integrative
routines, promoting the normalization or even the suppression of psychic conflict.
Concomitantly, descriptive models, whose operativity lies on statistic correlations
and regularity, tend to limit the relevance and depth of the patient’s complain and
account, conforming them to a pre-established selectivity. Furthermore, the domi-
nance of these therapeutic apparatus reduces its observation to outside behaviour of
the subject, implicitly refusing the internal split of the subject and his positioning in
communication.
Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry influenced by Phenomenological and Anthropo-
logical tradition played an important part in considering psychic suffering and the
personal experience of the melancholic as decisive for alleviating and treating his
symptoms. Despite the variety of depressive syndromes it addresses, the therapeutic
process of melancholia highlights the need for a “negative capability” that overcomes
the rigidity of certain affects. This can only occur if the subject accepts the task to
revive and work through the pain of loss, elaborating on its meaning and replacing
the feeling of guilt with the ability to acknowledge and forgive. Our attempt to illus-
trate such a challenge of change points to a therapeutic commandment that resists
generalization. At the same time, referring the individual configuration of melan-
cholia, it highlights the inability of therapeutic models that consider a single level of
observation of the subject.
166 C. A. S. Carvalho

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168 C. A. S. Carvalho

Cláudio Alexandre S. Carvalho is a Doctor in Philosophy (University of Coimbra, 2012), in the

field of Ethics and Political Philosophy, with a thesis devoted to the study of the concepts of kin-
ship and gender in the transition to modern society, with incidence in Hegel and contemporary
interpretations of Lacan, Judith Butler and Niklas Luhmann. From 2006 to 2015, he was a mem-
ber of the Institute of Philosophical Studies at the Department of Philosophy, Communication and
Information at the University of Coimbra. After finishing his Ph.D., he has been devoted to the
study of the philosophical bases of psychotherapy, delving into Systems Theory and Cognitive
Science. He worked as an Assistant Professor at UBI—University of Beira Interior and remains an
external consultant of its Ethics Committee. Currently he is a Researcher at the Institute of Philos-
ophy (University of Porto), on the research group “Aesthetics, Politics & Knowledge”. His post-
doctoral project, supported by a fellowship of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technol-
ogy, aims at understanding the constitution of the therapeutic medium of modern society, attending
to the scientific, social and political contexts.
Chapter 11
The End of the Virtual? A Hermeneutical
Approach to Digitality

Alberto Romele

Abstract The purpose of this chapter is to offer the grounds for a double rehabilita-
tion: that of hermeneutics on the one hand, and of the virtual, a concept that became
popular especially between the 1980s and 1990, on the other hand. More precisely,
hermeneutics will be used to lay foundations for the hypothesis according to which
the virtual never ended. The argument will follow three steps. In the first section, the
author accounts for theories on the end of the virtual, distinguishing between those
who think that the real has invaded the virtual and those who say that it is rather
the opposite. The second section, entitled “The Virtual Never Ended”, is a tribute to
Philip K. Dick and his crazy idea that the Roman Empire never came to an end. The
digital works through representational distanciation and performative appropriation,
and it is precisely this process that makes the virtual a valid concept that still gives
rise to thought, and which allows hermeneutics to be used in the context of digitality.
Finally, in the concluding section, the author will briefly present the epistemological
and ontological advantages of such a perspective.

11.1 Introduction

No one really likes hermeneutics because it is a bastard discipline, like the god
Hermes to whom the etymology of the term is often traced back. Too “soft” to
be admitted among the philosophies of substance, but still too “hard” to be part
of the philosophies of becoming. Furthermore, because of this “comma” episode,
hermeneutics has done nothing but aggravate its own situation, opening an internal
quarrel that has done almost nothing but serve its detractors (Vattimo 2000).
Now, it is precisely because of its mixed nature that hermeneutics has not been able
to find space of its own in the contemporary debate on digitality, with a few excep-
tions of course (Capurro 2010; Diamante 2014; in the context of digital humanities
see, for instance, Van Zundert 2016; in the field of digital sociology, see Gerbaudo
2016; regarding Big Data, see Mohr et al. 2015). Indeed, if the Internet, the digital

A. Romele (B)
Lille Catholic University, Lille, France
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 169

J. Braga (ed.), Conceiving Virtuality: From Art To Technology, Numanities - Arts
and Humanities in Progress 11, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24751-5_11
170 A. Romele

technology par excellence, is a network of networks, why should one use a theory
that has undoubtedly given importance to relationship, though clearly not enough?
Let us consider for a moment two currents in the philosophy and sociology of
technology, that is to say postphenomenology (which some have also called “material
hermeneutics”1 (Verbeek 2003), probably unaware that the expression had already
been used by Peter Szondi), and the actor-network theory (ANT) as developed by
Bruno Latour. The former places technologically mediated relations between the
subject and the world at the center of its reflections—as will be shown later. The latter
is based on a “principle of symmetry”, according to which humans and nonhumans
(i.e. technologies, but also nature and institutions) must be integrated within the same
conceptual framework and be acknowledged the same capacities of action. Social
reality is therefore a “flatland”, as in the title of Edwin Abbott’s book, in which
human beings, technologies and other things of the world are networked (Latour
2005: 172).
From the point of view of the actor-network theory, postphenomenology can only
appear as primitive and hierarchical. Primitive, for it is capable of considering only
one relation at a time; hierarchical, insofar as it distinguishes between three types of
beings: humans who interpret the world, technologies that mediate human access to
the world, and objects of the world. Indeed, in postphenomenology, only individual
human beings may separately engage in a technologically mediated relation with the
world.2 In the actor-network theory, instead, each interpreter is by essence already
entangled in a complex network. Moreover, humans are not the only interpreters and
technologies are not only mediators but can be “actants” in their own right.3
There are also some problems specific to classical hermeneutics, which postphe-
nomenology offered to fix. First, there is what might be called an “idealism of matter”,
especially the matter of language. Authors such as Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur
(but the same could be said of Saussurian linguistics and its inclination towards the
concept and the acoustic image) are interested in language but do not care about
its materiality. Suffice is to mention the difference between the Ricœurian way of
thinking metaphors (among the hermeneutic philosophers, Ricoeur is undoubtedly

1 Interestingly enough, Law (2009) has presented ANT as a “material semiotics”. The use of the term

“material hermeneutics” in the specific context of digital technologies can be found, for instance,
in Rastier and Bachimont (1998).
2 To say the truth, Verbeek (2005: 161–168) has demonstrated that postphenomenology and ANT

can enrich each other. ANT is focused on the multiplicity of the relations, while postphenomenology
is interested in their depth. Furthermore, Latour (2013) has recently criticized some exaggerations
of ANT.
3 It is noteworthy how Verbeek (2013: 51–54) has misunderstood Latour’s notion of mediation.

For Latour (1994), indeed, of the four forms of mediations he presents—translation, composition,
reversible blackboxing and delegation—the latter in certainly the most important. In delegation,
techniques do not properly mediate a present human action; they rather work in the absence of those
who wanted, created and installed them. One could say that they still represent human intentions,
since the term “delegate” means precisely “representative”, “deputy”, “emissary”. But one could
even argue that they are henceforth “un-tied” from those intentions. Through a process of emergence,
there is then a shift from mere mediation to autonomy; it is precisely such an autonomy that Verbeek
refuses to recognize, partially against Latour, to the technologies (Floridi and Sanders 2004).
11 The End of the Virtual? A Hermeneutical Approach to Digitality 171

the one that pushed the exteriority and materiality of language the furthest) and the
way of Lakoff and Johnson (1980), according to which metaphors always depend on
the embodiments that mediate our relationship with the world.
A second problem is what we may call a universalism of language. Compared
to Husserlian phenomenology, the merit of hermeneutics is to have understood that
all access to the world is already and invariably an “Auslegung, an exegesis, an
explication, an interpretation” (Ricoeur 1991: 43), in other words a mediation. And
yet, its limit consists in having considered language as the sole mediator. Certainly, in
digitality, presumably all that is between the input and the output is “writing”, but this
is a figurative way of speaking. First, because digitality is made of a particular kind of
signs, i.e. double entry signs: readable by human beings, on the one hand, executable
by the machines on the other. Second, because the code is often unattainable, and
digitality, in this sense, is more a matter of practice than of linguistic interpretation.
It is thus easy to understand why today, one prefers to approach digitality through
Simondon, Deleuze, Foucault or even Derrida rather than through Ricoeur, Gadamer
and Heidegger—the latter being in addition responsible for a deterministic and pes-
simistic reading of technology and, in his 1962 conference “Traditional Language
and Technological Language”, having accused information cybernetics to be the
most violent and dangerous aggression against logos. It is also understandable that
one favours the fluid notion of information rather than the mechanical terminol-
ogy of hermeneutics (because eventually the hermeneutic circle remains a gearing,
entangling as much as maintaining distinctions).
The purpose of this chapter is to offer the grounds for a double rehabilitation:
that of hermeneutics on the one hand, and of the virtual, a concept that became
popular especially between the 1980s and 1990, on the other hand. More precisely,
hermeneutics will be used to lay foundations for the hypothesis according to which
the virtual never ended. In the literature dedicated to online environments between
the 1980s and 1990s, the term “virtual” indicated, more or less implicitly, three things
at once. First, a “spaceless space”, as Manuel Castells defined it, i.e. a dimension
separated from real life and its physical and social constraints. Second, the virtual
was viewed as an opportunity to experience new possibilities, options and actions
without the risks of “true life”. This second meaning is closer to the etymology of the
word. Indeed, “virtual” comes from the Latin “virtus/virtualis”, a direct translation
of the Greek term “dynamis”, which can be transcribed as “ability”, “potentiality” or
“power”. In his commentary to the beginning of the ninth book of Aristotle’s Meta-
physics, Heidegger (1995) translated dynamis with “Kraft”, “force” in English, as
well as “Vermögen”, a word which means “ability” but also “capacity” and “capabil-
ity”. As such, the virtual is not opposed to the real, but rather to the actual—“actus”
in Latin, used to translate the Greek word “energeia”. And this is precisely the third
meaning of the term: virtual as individual and social empowerment. In other words,
“virtual” and “virtuality” would refer to the effects, rather positive than negative, of
online experimentations on real life.
Today, digital technologies, especially social media, are no longer seen as tech-
nologies of choice and freedom, but rather as control and surveillance devices. This
surveillance, of which we are in some way complicit (Romele et al. 2017), is exercised
172 A. Romele

by our peers, therefore in a “horizontal” way, and by sociotechnical systems (i.e. the
companies that use our data or make them available to other private companies or
public agencies), here thus in a “vertical” manner. In addition, digital technologies
are no longer viewed as alternatives to real life, but rather as a continuation, and often
a strengthening, by other means, of the daily dynamics at work in the recognition
of authority, conflict, power and social exclusion. In other words, digitality today no
longer represents a way out of social reality, but on the contrary, is, par excellence,
where the social makes its voice heard to the single individuals/users/consumers.
Within the imaginaries of the Internet, we have shifted from utopia to ideology, from
the liquidity and lightness to the harshness and heaviness of a society that, through the
technologies of the Internet, Web, e-mails, smart phones, etc., mobilize its members
(Ferraris 2014).
The real has therefore invaded the virtual but, interestingly enough, this was made
possible because the virtual had invaded the real in the sense that digital technologies
are now part of our being-in-the-world, our Mitwelt, as is obvious when considering
the importance of social media, but are also a part of our Umwelt (the Internet of
Things, the smart cities, etc.) and Selbstwelt (the Quantified Self, etc.).
The thesis that will be defended in this chapter is that if the frontiers between the
real and the virtual are at the moment more “porous”, they yet exist and still resist.
The argument will follow three steps. In the first section, I will account for theories
on the end of the virtual, distinguishing between those who think that the real has
invaded the virtual and those who say that it is rather the opposite. The second section,
entitled “The Virtual Never Ended”, is a tribute to Philip K. Dick and his crazy idea
that the Roman Empire never came to an end. The digital will be approached from
a hermeneutic perspective. The digital works through representational distanciation
and performative appropriation, and it is precisely this process that makes the virtual
a valid concept that still gives rise to thought, and which allows hermeneutics to
be used in the context of digitality. Finally, in the concluding section, I will briefly
present the epistemological and ontological advantages of such a perspective.

11.2 The End of the Virtual

11.2.1 The Virtual Invaded the Real

As mentioned, the idea of the virtual as a place apart from reality, a spaceless space,
dominated the literature of the 1980s and 1990s. According to Boyd (2001: 3–4):
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many academics imagined that virtual environments would
offer a utopian world where sex, race, class, gender, age, and sexual orientation ceased to be
relevant. […] As digital pioneers, Donna Haraway, Sandy Stone and Sherry Turkle imagined
the possibility of life online as a way to transcend physical identity and marked bodies.
Cyberspace became a site, or series of sites, in which identity might be deliberately and
consciously performed. (a la Judith Butler)
11 The End of the Virtual? A Hermeneutical Approach to Digitality 173

Yet, the birth and development of the social web during the 2000s has increased
the realism and reliability of the information provided, while making concealment
more complex. In this connection, researchers have spoken of a shift from anonymity
to “nonymity” (Zhao et al. 2008). According to Rogers (2009), the end of the virtual
can be traced back to a specific event, the case of LICRA (International League
Against Racism and Anti-Semitism) and UEJF (Union of Jewish Students of France)
against Yahoo! in 2000. These two organizations found out that it was possible to buy
Nazi objects at auction from France through yahoo.com, in violation of the French
penal code. They decided to file a complaint against Yahoo! with the Tribunal de
Grande Instance of Paris. On November 21st, 2000, the court sentenced Yahoo!
“to take all measures likely to discourage and render impossible any consultation on
yahoo.com of the auction services of Nazi objects and any other site or service which
constitutes an apologia for Nazism or a questioning of Nazi crimes”.4 The technical
consequence of this verdict was the development of technology that geographically
locates an IP address to direct content nationally. Today, by accessing google.com on
a web browser in France, we are automatically sent to google.fr. Similarly, the content
of platforms like Youtube, Spotify and Netflix are different for each country. This
territorialization of the Web (it would be interesting to know what Carl Schmitt would
say of a “sea of information” re-conquered by the earth) is today evident, among other
things, in European policies on the right to be forgotten which determines variations,
on a geographical basis, of online information access.
From the perspective of Rogers, the end of the virtual is not necessarily a bad
thing. There is indeed at least one great advantage: at the age of the end of the
virtual, we can use digital traces to study social reality—or even reality itself. The
best-known case is the Google Flu Trends, a service that was launched by Google in
2008 to estimate and predict influenza activity in more than 25 countries, not through
conventional statistical data but by aggregating Google search queries (Lazer et al.
2014). As a consequence, we no longer need to go back “to the things themselves”,
because the digital representations are sufficiently reliable. Today we have different
approaches, such as “computational social science”, “digital social research”, “digital
methods”, “digital sociology”, and “cultural analytics”. Beyond the methodological
and “ontological” (in the sense of the privileged portions of reality) specificities,
all these approaches support more or less explicitly the end of the virtual from an
epistemological point of view.
But many others have a decidedly negative vision of the end of the virtual, in
a scale ranging from lukewarm nostalgia to the announcement of an imminent or
already active apocalypse. According to Beaude (2014), the end of the Internet as
we know it can be guessed from various points. First, as it has been suggested, we
must acknowledge the abolition of space and the re-emergence of territory. Secondly,
we are witnessing the end of the freedom of speech and the transformation of the
Internet into a global panopticon. After Edward Snowden, who revealed the details
of several American and British mass surveillance programs like PRISM, we are

4 See“LICRA contre Yahoo!”, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/LICRA_contre_Yahoo. Accessed 15

June 2017.
174 A. Romele

certain that we can be spied at any moment by means of a massive collection of

Internet data. According to Foucault (1995: 202), the Panopticon operates mainly
through a dissociation of the couple see-being seen: “in the peripheric ring, one is
totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without
ever being seen”. In other words, its effectiveness lies not in the actual exercise of
power, but in knowing that power can be exercised at every moment. In this sense,
the revelations of Snowden are not the negation but rather the full realization of the
global panoptic project, if there really is one such thing.
Third, we have gone from the Internet of collective intelligence and shared skills
to new forms of exploitation, called digital labor: i.e. under-qualified work, as in
the case of Amazon Mechanical Turk, often unaware, as with reCaptcha, and some-
times with the aggravation of mixing with the pleasure of sociability, as is the case of
Facebook Likes. Moreover, must also be added the illusion of independence and self-
determination that leads people to be exploited by platforms like Uber and Foodora
(Scholz 2013; Fuchs 2014). Fourth, the Internet is no longer the kingdom of gratuity.
If platforms for sharing online music such as Napster symbolized it, today’s suc-
cessful paying services like Spotify perfectly illustrate the end of the “digital gift”
(Romele and Severo 2016). People are more and more inclined to pay for services
and products they considered free until a few years ago. In 2017, for instance, Google
will launch a new version of Google Contributor, a service first introduced in 2014,
which allows users to pay for not seeing ads on their own favorite sites.
Fifth, we know that the Internet was born as a military project, but that almost
immediately, perhaps thanks to its “intrinsic politics” (Winner 1980), that is to say
an essentially anti-hierarchical network structure, was adopted by the American Left
and academic researchers as a model and medium for sharing and disseminating
knowledge. It is on this decentralized infrastructure that new centralities have been
built at the scale of the Web. In principle, one may visit any site and become a
protagonist on this stage; in reality, we always visit the same sites, and most of us
remain a passive and silent spectator. The Web is based on a hierarchical principle
of recognition of authority—“translation” would say Callon and Latour—as Larry
Page and Sergey Brin well understood when they invented the Google PageRank
(based on hyperlinks and not, such as old search engines like AltaVista, on indexing).
And as those who do academic research know (PageRank is actually inspired by
scientometrics), authority creates even more authority, and the last will remain last,
if the first are unreachable.
Finally, the Internet is no longer a place of separation and protection, especially
of privacy, but an exposure, and probably even an intensification, of the vulnerability
of individuals. Our lives are immediately put on display to the performative gaze
(Foucault emphasizes precisely this double nature, “epistemological” and “ontolog-
ical”, of the Panopticon) not only of the others, but also of the “Other”, that is to say
the socio-technical system of which we always play, more or less consciously, the
game.
11 The End of the Virtual? A Hermeneutical Approach to Digitality 175

11.2.2 The Virtual Has Invaded the Real

As already mentioned, others believe that it is rather the virtual that has invaded the
real. The philosopher Luciano Floridi, for instance, introduced the notion of “fourth
revolution”. The Copernican revolution has taught humans that they are not at the
center of the universe; Darwin placed them within the animal kingdom, to which
they did not think they belonged; the Freudian revolution made them understand
that they are not transparent to themselves, nor master in their own homes, contrary
to what Descartes thought. However, from the 1950s, computer science profoundly
changed our understanding of both the world and ourselves: “In many respects, we
are not standalone entities, but rather interconnected informational organisms or
inforgs, sharing with biological agents and engineered artefacts a global environ-
ment ultimately made of information, the infosphere” (Floridi 2010: 9). The term
“infosphere” can be understood in two ways. First, it may indicate the field of the
technical production of meaning: “Minimally, infosphere denotes the whole informa-
tional environment constituted by all informational entities […]. It is an environment
comparable to, but different from, cyberspace, which is only one of its sub-regions
[…]” (Floridi 2014: 41). Second, the infosphere coincides with everything that is
informational in nature: “Maximally, infosphere is a concept that can be also used
as synonymous with reality, once we interpret it informationally” (Floridi 2014: 41).
The digital is what makes the two definitions collapse, in favor of a new way for
humans to inhabit the world: “we are probably the last generation to experiment a
clear difference between online and offline environments. Some people already spend
most of their time onlife” (Floridi 2014: 92). The Onlife Manifesto, an abridged ver-
sion of which is currently available in five languages on the European Community
website, begins by noting “the blurring of the distinction between reality and virtual-
ity”, along with, within a post- and maybe transhumanist perspective, “the blurring
of the distinctions between human, machine and nature”.5
We live in an era where, thanks to digital technologies in particular, the whole
world seems to us to be increasingly “ready-to-hand”. Our intentions are more eas-
ily satisfied, our actions are more effective, we feel more comfortable because the
world finally seems to better coincide with our expectations. We are therefore in
the process of bridging the gap between phenomenon and noumenon, between will
and reality, between epistemology and ontology. A new era of homology between
thought and being is soon to come. But all that shines is not gold, and the authors
of the Manifesto know it. Indeed, the invasion of reality by the virtual can lead to
negative consequences, such as the loss of attentional capacities, information over-
load, the end of private life as we know it, or “liquid surveillance”. In this case too,
Internet utopias have dystopic or, although this term deserves a separate discussion,
ideological counterpoints.

5 https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/sites/digital-agenda/files/Manifesto.pdf. Accessed 20

June 2017. The Manifesto has been originally edited by Floridi for Springer. An extended version
of the Manifesto, with further analysis and comments, is freely available at https://link.springer.
com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-04093-6.
176 A. Romele

11.3 The Virtual Never Ended

11.3.1 Mimesis

The thesis defended in the second part of this chapter is, as has been said, that if
the boundaries between the real and the virtual are today probably more porous, yet
they exist and still resist. Digital technologies are hermeneutic in nature, whereas
“hermeneutics” indicates a process of performative interpretation based on a double
movement of distanciation and appropriation.
Paul Ricoeur clearly highlighted the way in which the Gadamerian “fusion of
horizons” must be anticipated by a “methodical” moment, a distanciation from the
object of analysis. For this reason, the French philosopher prefers writing and texts
to dialogue, or even worse, to monologue. Indeed, the text is autonomous in relation
to the author’s intentions, that is to say not “autonomous” in the structuralist or
deconstructivist sense where one deals with the differential relations among signs.
Moreover, if this were the case in the digital world, we would have ontological
and epistemological problems: ontological, insofar as the computation would have
a goal in itself, while we know that it has an input and, at least in most cases,
the good ones, an output; epistemological, because otherwise we would have to
give credit, for example, to the fake news that flourish in social networking sites.
It has been opportunely observed that, especially thanks to the (new) media, “the
postmodernists’ dreams were realized by populists” (Ferraris 2014).
The text is rather autonomous because it refers to a world that is no longer the
world of the author but “the world of the text”. Besides, if Ricoeur defended the
necessity of articulating truth and method in the field of human and social sciences,
where the method used in this instance was that of the structural sciences, we might
today say the same of digital humanities. They represent, in fact, a new hope of
“scientificity” for the human sciences, but they too are most often closed within
internal, statistical results, with no possibility to open up to the world they reveal.6
A world which, incidentally, resembles less the world of the Ricoeurian text, still
haunted by the Heideggerian and Gadamerian ontology, than the social reality to
which Peter Szondi referred to in his literary hermeneutics.
In this section, we will not consider so much truth and method, but rather narra-
tivity and its heuristic function. According to Ricoeur, narrativity is made of mimesis
and mythos, and it is precisely these two movements that one will seek in the digital
(Ricoeur 1984). The term mimesis does not refer to mere imitation, but to a threefold
movement of figuration, configuration, and reconfiguration. Figuration consists in
textualizing human action, that is, in transposing action into a written form or in
treating action as a quasi-text. Configuration is the moment when the textualized
elements of action are articulated according to a spatiotemporal coherence. This is

6 Inthe first volume of Time and Narrative, Ricoeur has criticized quantitative history and its use
of databases, computers, and information theory. According to him, quantitative history should be
understood as a methodological detour, whose aim is to bring to an extension of our collective living
memories.
11 The End of the Virtual? A Hermeneutical Approach to Digitality 177

where the movement of mimesis meets that of mythos, which is “emplotment”, that
is to say a combination and recombination of the representing actions in order to give
them meaning. Finally, reconfiguration is the moment of application and therefore
the return of the text to life with its heuristic force. Indeed, a discourse is never,
according to Ricoeur, “for its own sake”, for its own glory. Narratives have always,
more or less directly, new reference effects on readers. Reading, we are confronted
to the actions and choices made by the characters in a story; we judge them and
subsequently end up judging our own life and seeing it differently, reconfiguring it
spatiotemporally.
Mimesis is at the heart of digital technology, because digital technologies are
based on a process of dynamic representation of reality. Technologies are often
surrounded by an “illusion of transparency” that has been denounced by authors
like Heidegger, McLuhan, Latour, Feenberg and post-phenomenologists Ihde and
Verbeek (Van Den Eede 2010). Despite their affordances and effects, technologies
tend to shy away from conscious attention. This is all the more so in the case of digital
technologies, perhaps because of their omnipresence and low materiality—or at least
the detachment between infrastructure and “superstructure”. Those who believe in
the end of the virtual are somehow victims of this same illusion.
The American philosopher Ihde (1990: 72–112) distinguishes four types of tech-
nologically mediated individual-world relations: (1) embodied relations, such as
when we use glasses, a technology that becomes almost transparent after a period of
adaptation; (2) hermeneutic relations, for example those established by maps, ther-
mometers or aircraft instrumentation. Here, technology provides a representation
of the world to be interpreted; (3) alterity relations, for example by playing video
games, where the relationship with the world is suspended and technology becomes
our interlocutor; (4) background relations, when technologies determine the condi-
tions of our being-in-the-world. This is the case, among others, of urban illumination
and heating.
Obviously, digital technologies cover all these mediation modalities. Yet, their
effectiveness rests on their ability to represent and, therefore, interpret the world,
and this regardless of whether digital is considered from the most superficial layer of
user interfaces or the deep layer of digital traces. In all cases, digital gives an “image”
of the world that interprets and transforms it (and can in turn be interpreted). This
perspective goes beyond the alternative between representativeness and performa-
tivity: digital technologies are based on a principle of “editorialization”,7 which is
both reading and transforming the world. Basically, no hermeneutics is more effec-
tive than a digital hermeneutic. Similarly, we go beyond the alternative of choosing
between the virtual and the end of the virtual, as it is only because the digital takes
some distance from the real that it can also appropriate it.

7 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ditorialisation. Accessed 15 June 2017.

178 A. Romele

11.3.2 Mythos

It is on this distanciation-appropriation that the mythos of the digital is based.

The logic of the software has strong analogies with the emplotment of narratives.
Manovich (2013: 9) says that the software is behind all discussions about digital
technologies: “If we limit critical discussions to the notions of ‘cyber’, ‘digital’,
‘Internet’, ‘networks’, ‘new media’, or ‘social media’, we will never be able to get
to what is behind new representational and communication media and to understand
what it really is and what it does. If we don’t address software itself, we are in dan-
ger of always dealing only with its effects rather than the causes”. Software is the
foundation for all digital expressions, from the creation and sharing of cultural and
social artifacts (a video on YouTube, a Wikipedia entry, a comment on Facebook,
etc.) to how companies and institutions use digital traces left by users-consumers for
commercial, surveillance, and other kinds of purposes.
As for the logic of the software, Manovich (2013: 211) shows that it depends
on two elements, the database and the algorithms: “To make an analogy with lan-
guage, we can compare data structures to nouns and algorithms to verbs. To make
an analogy with logic, we can compare them to subjects and predicates”. Today we
refer mistakingly either to algorithms or (big) data. The function of algorithms is
precisely to emplot, that is to organize and reorganize the data according to a certain
spatiotemporal coherence: an Instagram image, for example, is a set of pixels to
which different filters are applied; an Excel sheet of scientometric data downloaded
from Scopus is a database on which several visualization algorithms can work; even
the Web is, from a user perspective, a database on which algorithms like Google
PageRank operate. This remains true even for algorithms of machine learning and
pattern recognition, to which we must even attribute a way of “thinking”, as well as
some autonomy and moral adaptability.

11.4 Conclusion

The virtual has never ended because, as has been argued, the digital and its technolo-
gies are based on a double movement of distanciation and appropriation. Without
distanciation, the digital simply could not have any effect on the world. In other words,
from a material point of view, it is his ability to “transcode” everything that enables it
to organize and reorganize the order of things. From a more phenomenological point
of view, it is in its capacity to offer new patterns to human reason—increasingly a
“computational” reason (Bachimont 2010)—that determines its heuristic function.
A hermeneutic understanding of the digital has advantages of both ontological and
epistemological order. From an epistemological point of view, it allows us to study the
similarities and differences (the “transductions”, in the language of Gilbert Simon-
don) between reality and its representations, against any simple homology (Romele
and Severo 2014). From an ontological point of view, it allows us to account for
11 The End of the Virtual? A Hermeneutical Approach to Digitality 179

the “transductions” (the term, in Simondon, has an epistemological and ontological

meaning) between human beings and machines, that is to say to establish differences
starting from a new principle of symmetry. Indeed, while the principle of symmetry
in Callon and Latour was still based on extrinsic properties, today we have to admit
that humans and certain nonhumans have the same ability to figure, configure and
reconfigure, i.e. a narrative and above all imaginative (in the sense of the Kantian
productive imagination) capacity (Romele 2018). It is therefore the term “virtual”
which takes a radically new meaning. If in the 1980s and 1990s, the word referred
mainly to human powers, capacities and capabilities (digital was no more than an
opportunity to reconfigure oneself), it should entail today that digital technologies
have capacities and capabilities by themselves. They are able to act on us, positively
or negatively, individually or collectively, and are increasingly independent from us,
from our way of interpreting and understanding.

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Chapter 12
Virtuality Beyond Reproduction.
Remarks on the History of Metaphysics

Simone Guidi

Abstract This essay focuses on the ontology of the virtual, looking especially at
its historical connection with today’s technology. The work begins by discussing
the metaphysical structure of the Aristotelian dynamis, understood as the conceptual
root of the Latin virtus. Reading Aristotle, especially through bergsonian concepts,
I show how his dynamis allows a proto-deterministic account of spontaneity, strictly
related to goal-oriented processes of human serial production and with the possibil-
ity of a homogeneous area of manipulation. Thus we stress how the ‘reproductive’
model works in every ontological account of the virtual and especially in the Renais-
sance ones, connected with the idea of a full “enginerization” of the real. The core of
metaphysical virtuality seems to lie rather in an ontological account of “form” that
denies its processual becoming and its process of stabilization through an infrastruc-
ture. Finally, I reject any ontological use of the virtual in teleonomy, especially in
its metaphysical attempt to identify autopoiesis and mechanism, and I conclude by
stressing how current digital technology is fully oriented to the reproductive model,
conceptually rooted in a metaphysical account of the virtual.

12.1 Introduction

In the popular understanding of technology, “virtual” and “digital” can be treated

as synonyms, even though the two notions cover different conceptual fields: digital
technology always belongs to the “virtual”—that is, it finds in the “virtual” a higher,
ontological possibility of realization—but not everything “virtual” finds its realiza-
tion in digital technology—that is, the “digital” is a specific kind of enactment of a
wider region of the “virtual”.
Such a structure inherits the premise of a classic metaphysical hypothesis about the
reality-technology relationship, that is the demand to think of technological activ-
ity—and especially of technological representation—as placed within an already
onto-technical area (the “virtual”). Reality would be ontologically (and not only

S. Guidi (B)
Instituto de Estudos Filosóficos, Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 181

J. Braga (ed.), Conceiving Virtuality: From Art To Technology, Numanities - Arts
and Humanities in Progress 11, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24751-5_12
182 S. Guidi

practically) manipulable, that is it would be naturally used in goal-oriented pro-

cesses; accordingly, there would be a specific region of reality that is homogeneous
to the processes of technological transformation, allowing us to understand the latter
as provided with its own, “secondary” reality that can be put in continuity with the
“primary” one. By operating within the domain of the “virtual”, technology would
establish a stable and complete area of reality, a “world”, provided with its own
objects and activities. Hence, the technological “world” would own an independent,
internal phenomenology, able to make of it a fully technological and virtual “sec-
ondary” reality.
In the following pages, we critically examine such a specific understanding of
virtuality, trying to show that: (1) the idea of the “reality” of a technological simulation
comes from the improper, ontological qualification of the concept of “virtual”; (2) that
of the “virtual” is nothing but a regulative concept and its ontological understanding
is the root of many metaphysical misunderstandings; (3) the very concept of “virtual”
strictly depends on the way of operating of technological infrastructures and it even
represents, from an abstract point of view, the improper ontologization of this way
of operating.

12.2 Rejecting Spontaneity: Aristotle’s Mirage

Our common meaning of the “virtual” finds its roots in Aristotle’s thought, even if it
actually does not come entirely from him. The very invention of the word virtus must
actually be attributed to medieval Aristotelianism, pushed to coin such a concept for
philological and theoretical reasons. They were seeking a name for a notion that
Aristotle theoretically introduced, leaving it without a specific name.
Medieval philosophers derived the world virtualis from the Latin vis (power),
from which the word virtus, “capability, strength”, derives. That of “capability” may
nowadays seem like a familiar concept, but—rather than its self-evidence—such a
popularity shows its nature as a metaphysical fossil. The genesis of the Latin virtus
is nevertheless tied to a major conundrum in the History of Philosophy, as virtus is
actually thought of as a specific translation of the Greek dynamis—the Aristotelian
potency—as it is taken in contrast with the passive form of the verb, the dynaton—the
Aristotelian “possible”. The latter is something that can be produced, enacted, by
a power that Aristotle demands to be in a dynamis understood qua dynamis, that is
before the very, actual process of the energhein. Thus, the word virtus gives a name
to a paradoxical “active power” of being a potency (see Met.  1, 1046 a 19–29) that
did not have a specific term in the Greek doctrine, even if it was partially theorized
by its author.
Among many texts, Heidegger’s reading of Metaphysics , 1–3 (1995) is the
sharpest in showing how crucial is the context in which the concept of capability is
philosophically justified. From a theoretical point of view, Aristotle’s point is by no
means obvious, and it actually represents one of the most crucial theoretical choices
12 Virtuality Beyond Reproduction … 183

in the entire History of Metaphysics, that is the granting to the concept of act and
potency an ontological value, rejecting the possibility of a true spontaneity.
The act-potency couple allows many possible uses and interpretations. Among
them, there is one consistent with a fully non-Platonic idea of nature: a descriptive,
non-ontological value of both the concepts that understands the process of transfor-
mation qua process, and avoids introducing any transcendental, prescriptive entity,
or making this process a stable region of being. Let us read this concept in the words
of Henri Bergson, the first author that directly superseded the ontological approach
of Plato and Aristotle:
This reality is mobility. Not things made, but things in the making: not self-maintaining
states, but only changing states, exist. Rest is never more than apparent, or, rather, relative.
[…] All reality, therefore, is tendency, if we agree to mean by tendency an incipient change
of direction (Bergson 2002: 274).

According to this conception: (1) all processes would be ontologically free and
spontaneous; (2) in their being, it would be impossible to isolate any “moment” or
“part” from the whole of their “being-a-process”; (3) act and potency, entelechia
and dynamis, could be individuated only relatively, since their individuation would
be logical, and not ontological; (4) the entelechia and the dynamis will be nothing
but two indivisible sides of the same entity; (5) the essence of such a reality, as well
as the essence of all its objects, would be the radical multiplicity resulting from the
multiple “moments” making up each event.
In this world, there would not be room for any ontological or metaphysical under-
standing of conservation and substantiality that could easily be reduced to the contin-
uous repetition or variation of the same-but-always-different process. The concept
of “repetition” is here borrowed from the lexicon of Bergson, Tarde and Deleuze
(see Jankélévitch 1959, Ansell-Pearson 2001, Vitali-Rosati 2009: 163–69; 2012)
where it is used as a synonym of variation and as an opposite of “replication” and
“reproduction”.
Substantiality does not lie in the concretization of an abstract similarity—the
replicability of something previously prepared for happening—but rather in variation,
a repetition that keeps its internal multiplicity unaltered, as well as its continuous
difference and novelty:
The likeness between individuals of the same species has thus an entirely different meaning,
an entirely different origin, to that of the likeness between complex effects obtained by the
same composition of the same causes (Bergson 1944: 247).

Two stones can fall in the same way, but this does not imply that their “sameness”
has an ontological value. They act regularly without expressing any metaphysical
“regularity”. Even the common or recurrent causes of that behaviour can be clearly
understood without granting to their causality any ontological or prescriptive value
(X is the cause of Y), but only a descriptive one (X acts as the cause of Y).
Such a model understands indeed physical phenomena without assuming their
inner intelligibility, and strictly reduces their essence to their behaviour. From an
ontological perspective (what phenomena are), it is misleading to postulate in physi-
cal things a (metaphysical) essence, a cause or a “reason” of their behaviour; instead,
184 S. Guidi

on a practical level (what phenomena do), one can easily and rightfully describe them
from their “effects”.
Conversely, the “Aristotelian” understanding of physical change finds its roots in
the (still-Platonic) demand for a logical preeminence (see especially Met.  8) of the
state of actuality (the effects); and, accordingly, for the idea of a previously, teleo-
logical determination of every process (the “causes” and their actualization) towards
their outcomes (X acts as the cause of the generation of Y, since it metaphysically
is its cause). Such a structure asks Aristotle for an ontological understanding of the
potency (X is the potency of Y, instead of X makes Y), able to individuate in the
process X some specific and ontological causes for the generation of Y (and not Z),
as if the process could be reversed and started again ad infinitum.
In this sense, Aristotle’s turning point comes especially in Metaphysics  3, with
the confutation of the Megarics’ doctrine (1046 b 29—1047 b 37). Here he denies
any possibility for the potency to be reduced to its enactment, and thus to an actual
energheia (the making, not ontologically) oriented toward its entelechia (Met.  3,
1047 a 18—1047 b 37). A musician is a such even when not enacting his playing,
as his capability persists beyond the end of its actualization.
As Heidegger argues, the Aristotle-Megarics debate is developed along the inter-
nal modulation of a common philosophical parenthood. Their common term is a
philosophy of being rooted in eleatism, including its need to explain movement and
generation within an ontological conceptual framework. Heidegger’s idea is that
Aristotle pursues Plato’s breaking with Parmenides’ denials of movement, providing
a new perspective, able to give dignity to change in being. But he seems to forget
that providing an explanatory model of something does not coincide with the under-
standing of it. Aristotle’s account comes actually within a (very refined) version of
the same eleatic model, and this makes his solution nothing but a reduction of the
problem to its demanded explanatory framework.
What Heidegger disregards is indeed that the background of Metaphysics  3 is not
the simple “presentialist” account of becoming—in which Aristotle and the Megarics
are actually opposed (as the first predicates the reality of the potency and of change
whereas the second argue its continuous reference to the act)—but rather a common
eleatic denial of a pure spontaneity of generation and kinesis. Both Aristotle and the
Megarians exclude a priori the possibility of a radical, uncontrolled and unfinalized
process of change (that nevertheless has a specific outcome), inseparable from that
actual reality it continuously renews.
The Megarians’ solution is to think of generation as strictly predetermined by
the act: potency has no reality but that of the enactment (as energeia). By a more
subtle strategy, Aristotle does nothing that is actually different. Even in theorizing
an ontological independence of the dynamis qua virtus from its actual enactment
(Met.  3, 1047 a 17–24), he introduces in the logic of the process the need for the
dependence of the potency on a logical (Met.  8, 1049 b 12–19) and a teleological
(Met.  8, 1050 a 7–10) pre-determination, which makes it fit perfectly with the
subsequent act.
Paradoxically, the Aristotelian dynamis qua dynamis, the principle of change,
is always logically the virtus of something pre-determined (playing, swimming,
12 Virtuality Beyond Reproduction … 185

reading, living, etc.…) whereas, from the ontological side, it is conceived in a the
“negative” form of the unenacted capability (see especially Agamben 2014): the
musician is the one who may not be currently playing, as the eyes are able to not see
anything (for the possible as non-impossible see Met.  4). Anyway, this account
of the dynamis excludes the possibility of a pure, spontaneous (that is: not logically
pre-determined or ordered) dynamis (that would coincide, instead, with the very act
of “being in the making”):
that which is ‘capable’ is capable of something determined and at some time in some way
(with all the other qualifications which must be present in the definition). (Met.  5, 1047 b
35–1048 a 2)

Thus, Aristotelian processes of change are self-controlled and self-ordered but

not spontaneous, since they are meant as actualized by an agent that has the virtus
of something logically represented exactly as it would be in an act. Accordingly, the
act is doubled: it is (1) in the act itself as the actualization of a “potency”, and (2) in
a previous potency, prepared to it from its very essence. Using Deleuze’s words, “to
the extent that the possible is open to ‘realisation’, it is understood as an image of
the real, while the real is supposed to resemble the possible” (Deleuze 1994: 212).
In such a way, Aristotle manages to reserve an ontological dignity for a specific
model of spontaneity (or random happening) that he calls automaton (Ph. II, 4, 195
b 31). This word can be translated as “acting by itself”, since it comes from the
Greek autós and the indo-european (méntis, thought), meaningfully revealing
the idea of an action continuously led by an inner logical principle that pre-orders
its own activity. According to Aristotle’s famous explanations (Ph. II, 5–6; Met. Z,
1032 b 22–31), spontaneous “automatic” activities (like those happening by chance)
are nothing but teleologically (previously) oriented processes, deviated by accidents
towards the failure of the expected outcome (see the “in vain” of Ph. II, 6, 197 b
23–32) and the constitution of another teleological-like event (a goal).
Significantly, Aristotle holds that accidents are (accidental) causes of spontaneous
goals, but since they have no determined cause, their cause is undetermined (Met. 
30, 1025 a 24–25; Met. E 2, 1027 a 5–8) and they are even “akin to non-being” (Met.
E 2, 1026 b 21).
Because of their nature, accidents cannot operate on the level of the “natural”
teleo-logic of the virtus, which continuously determinates the substantial events.
Accordingly, Aristotle theorizes what we might call a logical determinism (every
process is logically finalized), even if not a physical determinism (within such a
logical structure, the becoming can or cannot go towards a specific direction (see
the famous De int., 9, 19 a 30–33) and can be altered by accidents). Therefore, all
“normal” processes are thought of as ruled by an “operational scheme” finalized to
the goal of a determined outcome, which Aristotle improperly attributes to the level
of being, instead of to those of action.
186 S. Guidi

12.3 Teleologies, Homogeneity and the Symbol

A masterful analysis of such a misunderstanding is provided again by Bergson in

Time and Free Will (2001 but see also the very relevant Bergson 2016: 17–68, for a
comprehensive analysis of the discontinue nature of symbols; see already Bergson
2014). Here Bergson dealt with the metaphysical rejection of spontaneity, describing
it as the reduction of “sequences” to “simultaneities”, as the transformation of “pro-
gresses” and “directions” into “things” (Bergson 2001: 113), and as the substitution
of the “trajectory” for the “path”. The conversion of freedom into the “mechani-
cal oscillation between two points”—two pre-figured choices—is nevertheless, for
Bergson, the common core of determinism and dynamism, as it shows a teleological
structure. “Once the figure is constructed”, explains Bergson, “we go back in imag-
ination into the past and will have it that our […] activity has followed exactly the
path traced out by the figure” (Bergson 2001: 181). The “sequence” of the being-
in-making (that is radically multiple, free and not logically pre-determined) is thus
substituted by the “simultaneity” of the reconstruction, in which the becoming is
divided into “moments”, linked in a succession oriented toward the (already-got)
goal.
Such a psychological remark will gain a metaphysical dimension especially in
The Possible and the Real, where (inspired by Jankélévitch 1959: 2), Bergson will
directly attack the concept of “possibility”:
As reality is created as something unforeseeable and new, its image is reflected behind it into
the indefinite past; thus it finds that it has from all time been possible, but it is at this precise
moment that it begins to have been always possible, and that is why I said that its possibility,
which does not precede its reality, will have preceded it once the reality has appeared. The
possible is therefore the mirage of the present in the past (Bergson 2002: 229).

The “possible” which Bergson is referring to is a traditional notion, but it clearly

finds in Aristotle’s dynamis qua dynamis a metaphysical turning point. It is not by
chance that, in On Interpretation, the dynaton can be found as strictly joined to
the virtus, the capability of animated or inanimated things of triggering determined
processes, led by logical teleologies:
‘Possible’ itself is ambiguous. It is used, on the one hand, of facts and of things that are
actualized; it is ‘possible’ for someone to walk, inasmuch as he actually walks, and in
general we call a thing ‘possible’, since it is now realized. On the other hand, ‘possible’ is
used of a thing that might be realized; it is ‘possible’ for someone to walk, since in certain
conditions he would (De int., ch. 13, 23 a 8–23 a 13).

In both its senses, the logical possibility is thought of as radically connected with
the pre-determination—and even with the definition—of its possible actualization.
Something can walk since it is actually walking, or because it has the capability to
walk, and specific conditions for the actualization are granted (see Met.  5, 1048
a 15–24). Hence, in its purest form, the “possible” is the ontological nihil obstat for
the actualization of something logically determined and pre-figured in the current
capability of an agent or in a given context (Met.  7, 1048 b 37—1049 a b 18). Such
12 Virtuality Beyond Reproduction … 187

a virtus can later remain unenacted or be enacted, providing two different forms of
the same, abstract possibility.
Even the famous sea-fight of On Interpretation, 9 looks like a consequence of
that conceptual framework. According to Aristotle, a given X (the sea-fight) can be
enacted (XA ) or not (X¬A ), and even if “no necessity is there, however, that it should
come to pass or should not”, “what is necessary is that it either should happen
tomorrow or not” (De int. 9, 19 a 29–32). But such a conclusion finds a crucial
premise in the representation of the sea-fight as a virtual contingency, independent
of both its happening or non-happening (De int. 9, 18 b 20–25). Accordingly, XA and
X¬A are thought of as two independent possibilities, whereas the “fork” should rather
oppose the actual, positive happening of X (the battle) or the actual, as much positive
happening of X1 , X2 , X3 , etc. (something else; Bergson 1944: 254–258). In this case,
there is not any ontological necessity that either X and XN should occur tomorrow
or not, but only the logical necessity that the abstract, non-ontological possibility of
X will correspond or not with an independently-generated, actual, matter of fact.
By the introduction of an ontological abstraction, the virtus—which would inter-
mediate between transformation processes and their result in the entelechia—Aris-
tole manages to explain why, in any process of change, a logical substantiality would
be (teleo-logically) kept stable by the regularity of the concrete natural processes of
generation. This also allows him to avoid placing the logical level that orders the
kinesis, what is possible, as abstracted to the process of generation. In Metaphysics
 4, indeed, Aristotle openly established that the dynaton depends directly on what
can be really enacted. Hence the logical possibility derives from the capability of
the natural agents of doing something (or not); but such agents are already directed
towards specific goals, prescribed by their virtus.
It is worth noticing that the metaphysical action of the Aristotelian virtus seems
really close to those criticized by Bergson’s concept of “homogeneous time”: an
intermediate entity between duration and space through which the process, in its
becoming, is always represented “under the form of simultaneity” (Bergson 2001:
180). In “homogeneous time” the sequence, the action, is continuously understood
as a line of already-given integral points, a network of simultaneous instants seen
from above their flowing. Yet, such an overlapping is made possible especially by
a symbolic entity, geometry, that provides an abstract level on which the becoming
can be divided and repositioned.
In order to analyze the concept of virtus, the ontology of the fractive–and–recon-
structive mechanism attributed by Bergson to the geometrical space is crucial.
According to Bergson, the geometrical space is nothing but an “interruption” of
duration, a discontinuity generated from the limitation of the sequence (pure multi-
plicity), which converts the qualitative into a quantitative dimension. “Extension”,
Bergson explains, “appears only as a tension which is interrupted” (Bergson 1944:
267) and geometry is a “diagram of infinite divisibility” (Bergson 1991: 206).
A crucial point is that such an “interruption” is realized by perception in the
symbolic activity of coordinating a schematic motion, a reflex movement, with reality.
In Matter and Memory, Bergson thinks indeed of perception as fully finalized to
action, an automatic scheme of the body that receives the input of external objects
188 S. Guidi

and immediately converts it into the output of a re-action. Hence, by acting on the
plan of a pure operation, perception uses geometry as an order of “symbols”, a
homogenous language able to finalize the mind for matter and matter for the mind.
Perception ideally “covers” reality with a Cartesian plane, treating it as if its essence
was geometrical, and acting towards its goal in the same language as geometry:
in order to divide the real in this manner, we must first persuade ourselves that the real is
divisible at will. Consequently we must throw beneath the continuity of sensible qualities,
that is to say, beneath concrete extensity, a network, of which the meshes may be altered to
any shape whatsoever and become as small as we please (Bergson 1991: 209–10).

So, unlike Aristotle’s dynamis, Bergson’s homogeneous space does not work as
a metaphysical entity but rather as a logical map of finalized action, a symbolic
diagram of possible (understood operatively) goals:
The distance which separates our body from an object really measures, therefore, the greater
or less imminence of a danger, the nearer or more remote fulfillment of a promise. And,
consequently, our perception of an object distinct from our body, separated from our body
by an interval, never expresses anything but a virtual action (Bergson 1991: 56–57; see also
Ibidem: 144 and Bergson 1944: 228 ff).

Like Aristotle’s the concept of “virtual” is used here by Bergson with the meaning
of “possible”; but also, unambiguously, as a circular activity, whose ontology is fully
reducible to action. Its virtuality is not ontological, but performative. The virtual is
the purpose of a goal launched outside in matter and then teleologically recovered
as a relationship between the mind and its object, as measuring. On the “screen” of
this map perception can ideally convert the free process in terms of simultaneity, in
a collection of crystallized moments of action, as if it was already finished.
Bergson’s concept of space is thus less far than one could think from Heidegger’s
ready-to-hand. But what is relevant here is the idea that action can be projected only
in the homogeneous, representative space of symbols. Classic metaphysics instead
misunderstands the symbol as an “image”, inevitably falling into a deterministic
view: “we give a mechanical explanation of the fact”, and a mechanical scheme of
action too, “and then substitute the explanation for the fact itself” (Bergson 1944:
181).
Therefore, Bergson’s symbolic homogeneity perfectly describes the performa-
tive and “active” ontology of the virtus without including it in reality. The symbolic
scheme acts introducing a teleology, and “finalizing” things toward possible actions.
Thus, it converts the process into a circuit, spreading its sequence on the “eter-
nal present” of simultaneity and continuously breaking-and-rebuilding the original
continuity of the performance into an operative-oriented space. But its improper “on-
tologization” in the Aristotelian virtus leads us to think of the always-new repetition
as an essential repeatability of the phenomenon, based on a teleo-logical capability
of its causal conditions.
12 Virtuality Beyond Reproduction … 189

12.4 The Worker and the Creative

A meaningful question is now: why did classical Metaphysics attribute an ontolog-

ical value to a scheme that properly works for goal-directed actions? Because the
model adopted by Aristotle to think of spontaneous generations is actually taken
from human production. It is not by chance that Aristotle’s model is perfectly under-
standable in explaining goal-directed human actions, but, when it tries to explain the
ontological essence of natural, non-human activities, it triggers the paradoxical need
to place in the object’s ontology the regulative, symbolic representation of the virtus.
The presence of a hidden technical scheme under Aristotle’s teleological model
is nevertheless suggested by Bergson again, and thus developed by Simondon. Berg-
son’s contribution is crucial especially in pointing out the metaphysical connection
between technology and teleology, which Simondon would think of as an “inner res-
onance” of technological artifacts (Simondon 1958: 20). Nevertheless, in Creative
Evolution he criticized teleology as a theory that “likens the labor of nature to that
of the workman, who also proceeds by the assemblage of parts with a view to the
realization of an idea or the imitation of a model” (Bergson 1944: 99). And again, in
The Possible and the Real, he remarked how insurmountable metaphysical problems
“arise […] from our habit of transposing into fabrication what is creation” (Bergson
2002: 226).
It is not by chance that Aristotle—save for human free actions led by desire—treats
natural and artificial teleological events exactly as having analogous causes of gener-
ation, that is the non-rational or the rational agents, whose actions are teleologically
oriented. Aristotle openly argues that teleology joins both technical production and
natural generation (Ph. II 8; Met. Z 7) and also that artificial goal-directed processes
provide us with a model to think of natural ones (Ph. II 8, 199 a 16–19).
It should not be forgotten that, in the Aristotelian world, the main actor of teleology
is the eidos, or form. Aristotle seems to be continuing that of Plato, who tried to think
of a productive process as aimed at a stable (and even separate) logical goal, and such
a goal as nothing but the logical portrait of the “productive scheme” of teleological,
artificial processes. As Cassirer remarks in his Form and Technology,
when Plato develops the relationship between “idea” and “appearence” and seeks to justify
it systematically, he does not seek to ground it in the shapes of nature but in the products
and organization of téchne. The art of the “craftsman”, the “demiurge”, provides him with
one the great motifs with which he represents the meaning of the idea (Cassirer 2012: 19).

Simondon (1958: 241) also points out that Aristotelian hylomorphism represents
“the transposition into philosophical thought of the technical operation, drawn from
labor and taken as the universal paradigm for the genesis of beings”. This “analogic”
model of explanation implicitly represents the becoming acting like a workman who
shapes some clay, repeating a specific sequence of actions depending on the model
he wants to reproduce.
Such a model obviously works fine as long as it is considered as an operative
scheme for planning actions, or at least a model to understand spontaneous events as
190 S. Guidi

if they were produced by man. Acting teleologically in the world, we introduce-and-

find in reality a project that is in our mind, a general “simultaneity” of the process
that works only as our “map” in acting (so, it is restricted to the operative ontology
of action). We develop our activity following this map, and then we recognize it as
if it was previously marked out in reality; a real diagram of production which would
come before the process itself.
As in the case of Bergson’s symbolic-driven actions, “animated” actors are able
to project and goal-direct a process of production since they can control and use
a symbolic apparatus, the mind, which allows them to “homogenize” the external
reality and action, thinking of reality as if the action was pre-contained in it. But, as
soon as we try to make productive teleology the model for a natural generation pro-
cess, a paradox arises: where is the symbolic scheme contained? For the Aristotelian
dynamis qua dynamis, it lies in the capability of the agent, or, literally, in a current
status of things that makes (the nihil obstat) the potency possible. Metaphysics  12
even defines potency as “a source of movement or change, which is in another thing
than the thing moved or in the same thing qua other” (1019 a 15). Aristotle’s pure
dynamis introduces the idea of a real scheme of the process, a general nihil obstat
of reality that converts it to a screen on which the agent can symbolize the action in
the form of simultaneity.
Such a “presence” of the potency in another thing, or in the same thing qua other,
could be understood in many ways, even if without ever actually going out of the
“productive”, teleological scheme in which the virtus is radically thought of.
In its entry for Baldwin’s Dictionary (1902) Peirce, inspired by Scotus (see infra),
defines the virtual as “something, not an X, which has the efficiency (virtus) of
an X”, being the first to stress how such a notion “has been seriously confounded
with ‘potential’ which is almost its contrary”. A virtual velocity, Peirce explains,
“is something not a velocity, but a displacement; but equivalent to a velocity in
the formula, “what is gained in velocity is lost in power’” (Pierce 1902: 763–4).
According to Peirce, a virtual Z is thus a Y able to act in X as a Z, that is producing
the same effects as Z. It is not hard to see that Peirce’s definition is also based on the
Aristotelian understanding of the virtus as the capability of producing a determined
X, based on which a cause Z of X can be replaced by another cause Y, given its
abstract equivalence in terms of causation.
Pierce’s entry notoriously inspires Deleuze, who will merge it with Bergson’s
concept of virtual, proposing the virtual as an “obscure and distinct” coexistence
of multiplicity, an inner difference and—he says—an area of differentiation. Even
if coming from Bergson’s and Simondon’s philosophy of the process, Deleuze’s
attempt to think of the virtual on a “univocist” ontological background thus risks
paradoxically reanimating metaphysical positions.
Especially Badiou (2000) has stressed how the virtual is, for Deleuze, a different
name for Being, and how the author reveals a proximity even with neo-Platonism.
The Deleuzian virtual would act as a “ground” beneath the actual and as a neoplatonic
One, a unity, a totality of differentiation. Ansell-Pearson (2001: 96 ff.) has perfectly
remarked that Badiou’s judgement needs to be corrected recognizing that Deleuze’s
‘Being’ is not transcendent nor emanative like the neo-Platonic One.
12 Virtuality Beyond Reproduction … 191

Nevertheless, Deleuze thinks of the virtual both as an immanent area for differen-
tiation and as the fact that any being cannot get a complete determination. The virtual
is this ontological “coexistence”, in which all beings differentiate themselves from
others without converting differentiation into this completeness, in an individual sub-
stance or differentiation. Such an area is hence a positive place of the difference, and
together the condition of a differentiation that is originally thought of as combined
with indeterminacy.
Deleuze notoriously opposes the virtual to the actual (but not to the real) because
of its non fully completed determination. He argues as if not being fully determined
was equivalent to not being fully determining. Deleuze’s virtual thus acts like a cause,
and signally as an immanent efficient, productive presence of the formal distinction
as the cause of beings thought of as the results of the very formal distinction.
The core of Deleuze’s argument is the overturning of Bergson’s “operative” notion
of virtual. Bergson starts to use this term univocally in Matter and Memory, so in the
years in which he knows Tarde and his works (see especially 1895, 1910). Inspired
by Leibniz, Tarde often uses ‘virtual’ to talk of forces of action or generation, what
he defines as “sources of possibilities” (1910: 12) or a “surplus of the potency on
the act” (1910: 15). According to Tarde, the laws of physics “virtually” open an
ontological door to the many possibilities of bodies’ behavior, like hunger.
This concept again takes its roots in the Aristotelian dynamis, and it seems really
close to Deleuze’s account of virtual as an “area of problematization”. Yet Berg-
son uses Tarde’s notion always referring to activities and never attributing to it an
ontological meaning. A single recollection exists, for Bergson, in the state of a vir-
tuality because it can be operatively “extracted” from memory; but memory does
not represent—as Deleuze (1991: 55–72) claims—a preliminary ontological area.
The ontological preeminence is rather placed by Bergson in multiplicity: quality,
memory, sensation are intrinsically multiple, thus single qualities, memories, sensa-
tions are virtually enactable from this multiplicity. Furthermore, Bergson’s famous
rejection of the “nothing” (1944) coincides with the idea of a pure actuality, in which
an act passes into another one. The virtual comes from the multiplicity of the act and
not as an inner engine of their difference.
On the contrary, Deleuze makes the virtual and the multiplicity coincide in his
concept of “internal difference”: multiplicity would flow out from a demanded ‘vir-
tual’ essence just as the virtual is the “internal” differentiation of a multiplicity; its
reproduction. What in Bergson was the “positive” account of difference is an onto-
logical multiplicity that comes before the virtual, and not a logical, even if immanent
force, the virtual, with which multiplicity produces itself. We can fairly say, hence,
that Deleuze “ontologize[s] the conception of creative evolution” (Ansell-Pearson
2001: 113) and, overall, that he ontologizes Simondon’s concept of “pre-individual”.
What Deleuze seems not to grasp is that the historical failure of classical, fun-
damental ontology does not mereley lie in its bad understanding as unity instead
of multiplicity, but rather in a demanded prescriptive nature, which it takes from a
productive, teleological model.
Hence, we can agree with Badiou in seeing a connection between Deleuze and
classical philosophy of Being, even if the major reference should be sought in Spinoza
192 S. Guidi

and—especially—in Scotus. Deleuze’s “One”, the virtual, is not emanative but imma-
nent only because it develops itself using Scotus’ formal distinction (two beings can
be distinguished—or differentiated—even if they are actually unseparated—or not
differentiated), which was dormant in Peirce’s definition of the virtual. This would
allow Deleuze to think of determination as a pure free process if he did not rein-
troduce a prescriptive substance. He indeed doubles the formal making of formal
distinctness, the ontological virtual understood as Being-only-as-formally-distinct,
a condition of possibility for formal distinction, the virtual being understood as the
expression of this virtuality.
Such a movement allows Deleuze to retrieve Spinoza too, thinking of the ‘formal’
as a substance, a canvas entirely coinciding with its wrinkles. The doubling of the
formal dimension hence entails the reintroduction of an ontological self-causation
that is a form of circular predetermination: the formal distinction comes as always
contained in its own identity, as it was causally predetermined by its double pres-
ence, both in the formal distinction, as the result, and in its coincidence with the
immanent distinctness that it funds, as the retrospective cause. A recursive circle
here ‘causalizes’ the formal distinction, transforming it into a logical stability. The
canvas is made up of its wrinkles. The wrinkles are the cause of a canvas made up
of its wrinkles.
It is not by chance that Deleuze’s rhizomatic ontology has been commonly iden-
tified with an ontology of autopoiesis (which we will discuss infra), especially of
networks and systems, and with an ontological (mis)understanding of cybernetics
(Marks 2006). Processes, individuation, organization would be ontological since
multiple Being is coincident with the multiple becoming of its beings. But here
again the virtual keeps in itself the teleological idea of a productive force recognized
ex post, or during the activity; so one can fairly talk of the virtualization of something
during an actualization—like Bergson and, for instance, Lévy (1995, 1998)—but we
are not allowed to talk of the virtual, as an ontological structure for a new univocity
of the Being.

12.5 Infrastructure, Formalization and Control

The analysis of the Aristotelian dynamis qua dynamis revealed its fundamental con-
nection with the idea of a logical “presence” of the future in the present—in the
potency of the agent’s capability, or in given, positive conditions of the present state.
Nevertheless, according to Metaphysics  12, the “source of movement” and enact-
ment of the potency literally is in the context, as an ontological, symbolic scheme
available for the teleological action. Now, such a logical presence of the process’ goal
in both the present and the future, seems granted by Aristotle’s believing that: (1)
everything has a formal organization that works like the logical driver of teleologies;
(2) all the teleologies are forms acting towards other specific forms; (3) the current
(innate or acquired) formal organization of things grants them specific capabilities,
that can also be found in nature; (5) the virtus would always be the capability of
12 Virtuality Beyond Reproduction … 193

“forming” something; (6) hence, this capability is an ontological feature of things

(the musician is capable of playing, even when not actually playing).
Hence, in Aristotle’s idea, the logical (and supposedly real) dimension of the
“forms” acts like a natural but abstract, homogeneous “geometry”, through which
the becoming is spontaneously divided into “states” or “things”; each of these present
segments would be logically oriented by the presence of a capability or a potentiality,
towards the generation of other logically-given “states” or “things”. Accordingly,
Aristotelian reality develops itself along a logical web of logical connections; and
things are continuously wrapped in the virtual dimension of formality: they are
themselves but, at the same time, they are also the (re)production of a potency,
contained in a previously actual state: they are real but their essence and functioning
is logically ideal, the effect of an eidos.
In order to better analyze the metaphysical roots of the concept of “virtual”, we
would like to show that the very idea of a stable, metaphysical reality of forms comes
from an improper “ontologization” of a teleological model of “production”, and thus
from the misunderstanding of a operative stabilization as an ontological stability.
Especially, we will argue that: (1) form can be understood as the emergent out-
come of an operative, non-ontological process of “formalization” and as the very
process of metastabilization of this process; (2) indeed, the form can be improp-
erly considered as ontologically real—as Aristotle does—only thanks to the real
and recursive shaping action of an apparatus of stabilization of this homogeneity,
which is an infrastructure teleologically aimed at it. The hidden function of an activ-
ity of shaping is thus fundamental to converting something into its formal model,
allowing metaphysics to improperly claim that: (2.1) the same X would lie, at the
same time, in two different places (the virtual and the actual), as it was originally
a reproduction of a model (as if there was not an original); (2.2) that this supposed
reproducibility, would be natural instead of the outcome of a recursive process of
maintenance-and-repetition.
The specific feature of the metaphysical understanding of the “forms” is the
request for a formal reality, that is an environment in which its formality can be
considered as real. Reality would be continuously self-formed, self-formal and self-
formalizable, a regular environment in which all forms are kept stable and identi-
fiable, and the formal “transferability” of the virtus (Y is in X) from one form to
another (YZ has become Z) is granted. Given the constant becoming of things, such a
formal regularity can only be the result of an ordering activity that can be thought of:
(1) as immanent to nature’s processes (as Aristotle does); (2) as external to nature’s
processes. In the first case, we are back to the paradox of the metaphysical reality of
forms: how can such a metaphysical activity be naturally oriented towards “produc-
tions” and keep forms stable and identifiable without an already-formal environment?
Let us consider the second possibility.
In the metaphysical model, implicitly inspired by teleological, productive activi-
ties, we have seen that the virtus needs a subject or rather a substratum in which to
operate, like an actual context or an agent. The substratum is itself (a given X), but
its reality is also used as a formally homogeneous “screen”, whose disposition (or
194 S. Guidi

nihil obstat) makes the emergence of the goal (Z) possible, and so it makes the virtus
of Z (YZ ) “real”.
That is because the metaphysical understanding of the concept of virtus (YZ )
improperly recognizes an ontological stability to the process of using a substratum (X:
for instance, the Aristotelian hyle) in order to shape and recursively metastabilize the
organization, or “formalization” that individuates something else (Z). As Simondon
remarks (2005: 46), the hylomorphic scheme takes nothing but the extremities of
the technological activity, forgetting the “mediation” of the process itself; such a
mediation lies especially in a process that can never free itself from an abstract
side (Simondon 1958: 19–49), and that can increase or decrease its level of internal
determination, but never really deny its shaping activity (Ibidem: 74–5).
A letter is written on a paper sheet, used as the substratum of writing; its “formal”
reality comes not from its metaphysical structure, but rather from the fact that the
sign “can” continuously be reproduced thanks to an availability of paper sheets. Only
thanks to given conditions—that is to the availability of a passive substratum, is a
“matter”—the act of formalization of something (Z) instituted and repeated, making
a “form” permanently “possible”. Given the (neutralized) substratum X, the same Z
can indeed be obtained at will, converting its concrete “repeatability” into an abstract
“reproducibility” and also making possible the emergent, “virtual” presence of YZ
in X (that is, the possibility of generating Z at will).
We can formalize, for instance, what ideally happens to a sphere S on a downhill
road using Galileo’s inclined plane, P. A collection of single throws (T1 , T2 , T3 ,
Tn ) on a real road would cause single, non-formalizable experiences (“repetitions”);
but the availability of P, projected as a homogeneous environment for the action of
measuring, makes it possible to understand them as “reproductions” (T1,2,3,n ) of the
phenomenon; that is: as they would all follow a unique “simultaneous” scheme of
(re)production. Thanks to the substratum P, indeed, the “form” T has been logically
generated, and the various T1 , T2 , T3 , Tn have been converted into a series, generated
by the “virtual” presence of T in P (that is, out of the ontological understanding: the
availability of P for the “serialization” of T).
The reality of formalities lies therefore in nothing but their possible reproduction
in a substratum, and thus it firstly depends on the possibility of acting unimpededly
towards a goal on that substratum. Yet, such a possibility is neither ontological nor
strictly logical, but operative—since it is the full and constant availability of a passive
substratum for an specific action. Hence, the logical root of form lies in its actual
implementation, and the latter is nothing but the fact that we have complete, stable
and total control of something that is reduced to a substratum, now aimed at the
virtual (re)production of the formalizable X.
But is there something that is ontologically a substratum? Or what makes this
substratum a substratum? The idea of an ontological substratum, a pure hyle that
virtually hosts all the possible forms and that a virtus can naturally shape in all the
directions, is metaphysical and naïve, and it again seems to come from the improper
misunderstanding of technical production and natural generation. In the logic of
productions the first substratum is obtained from the “capture” of a “resource” (for
12 Virtuality Beyond Reproduction … 195

instance, the geological status of rocks, or the biological life of trees or animals) and
from a mechanism of stabilization of such a domain.
This mechanism, which we will call “infrastructure”, always implies the use of a
symbolic apparatus that individuates something as a substratum, and teleologically
uses on it goal-oriented tools (a hammer, a saw, a fence, etc.). Once it is implemented,
the “infrastructure” allows us to deal with the resources as they were naturally aimed
at our goal, that is, as they permanently had an essential “form”, teleologically
oriented towards a specific production.1 Thus, the substratum is understood as the
“matter of”, stabilizing the repeated action as a “capability” and clearing the way for
an ontological (mis)understanding of the “virtus of”.
Aristotle’s idea of a given virtus seems indeed to metaphysically portray a soci-
ety in which the workforce and its maintenance are given and are kept steady and
regular by slavery (see Simondon 1958: 86–8). A zero-degree of the system keeps
our capability to do some actions unaltered. There is no real change in society, the
order is permanent and logic can crystallize, describe and universalize it, discarding
the processes that maintain this energy stable.
Like pure dynamis, the slave is, for Aristotle, an “instrument” and “not his own,
but totally another’s” (Pol. I, 4). He is part of the social workforce, but he is radically
excluded from government and the management of the city (Pol. I, 5). Likewise,
the musician is born as a musician, so he does not need to continuously practise to
keep his capability. The slave is simply naturally oriented to slavery, he is energy to
automatize and teleologically confirm some environmental conditions.

12.6 Allopoiesis Generalis

As we sketched before, a relevant feature of Aristotelian dynamis qua dynamis lies

in its supposed capability of processes to teleologically control themselves (as) from
the outside, as if they were moved by an inner project and technologically steered
to (re)production of logically given “forms”. The “homogeneous”, representative
space of the virtual is supposed to be in reality, continuously working in containing
spontaneity within a linear chain of reproductive relationships. Over and over again,
dynamis would shape the actual in the reproduction of “possibilities” determined by
the actual status, ordering the first towards the second.
What is crucial here is therefore how the reality of the dynamis qua dynamis helps
Aristotle to metaphysically hypothesize a conservation of an order of the process
out of the process itself. Potency would have the capability of being spontaneously
under the control of the act, and of transmitting this order to the following one. It
ideally keeps stable any generation, converting its spontaneous multiplicity into the

1 Later,
the concept of “infrastructure” can be also be used relatively and mereologically, since it
can individuates an already-formed techno-teleological apparatus—for instance, the collection of
technologies A1 (A1.1 + A1.2 + A1.3 , etc.)—ordered in the view of the formalization (that is, the
“reproducibility”) of a “secondary” one, A2 (in turn, A2 can be the “infrastructure” of A3 , as well
as A0 could be the infrastructure of A1 , and so on).
196 S. Guidi

flowing of pre-ordered, (re)productive series. It is not by chance that, especially from

the Middle Ages, the notion of virtual will be developed in connection with the idea
of God as a universal Architect of the world, and his ordered or unordered power of
generation.
Historically, the concept of virtual shifts little by little from Aristotle’s dynamis
to Scotus’, Peirce’s (and actually Deleuze’s) notion. Since its function is to control
processes, it can be reduced to a formal name for a fully overdetermined causation,
a formal dimension opened by the statement that the whole of the possible process
always happens within a logical order that reflects a real one. Accordingly, virtuality
becomes a full teleology (whatever God wants is virtually already done) that wraps
and prepares ontology, projecting in it an entire world of possibilities (formally
predetermined actions with a virtual existence).
We can find this account of the “virtual” already sketched in Aquinas’ dealing
with the distinction between God’s attributes. Such a distinction can be made, even if
none of them actually have an independent existence from the others, as well as from
God’s substance. Similarly, Aquinas defines as “virtual” the status of the whole of
Creation in God’s essence, “in which originally and virtually every being pre-exists
in its first cause” (ST I, q. 79, a. 2), and we can especially find the virtual at work in
the concept of quantitas virtualis. This expression indicates a position in the space
in which something—especially God or angels—can produce specific actions from
a distance as if it actually was in the place. Angels (and other metaphysical entities)
are thus virtually located in space—as they are not materially extended but—at the
same time, they have the ability and power to be causally active on material bodies.
A similar but stronger use can be found in Scotus, through which all modern
thought, especially Suárez and Peirce, would receive an account of virtuality focused
on ordered and overdetermined production.
According to Scotus, a virtual thing—e.g. the First Object who virtually contains
all the truths of the habit of science—“does not depend on another but other things
depend on it” and, “in its containing, it does not depend on other things but other
things depend on it, that is, that if, per impossibile, all other things in the idea of
the object were removed and only it remained understood, it would still objectively
contain them” (Duns Scotus 1954, Prologus, a. 2, 144). This is the reason why
he claims, regarding perception, that “no object will produce a simple and proper
concept of itself and a simple and proper concept of another object unless it contains
this second object essentially or virtually”. The first object transcends the second,
predetermining and containing in its possible activity all the actual being of the other.
In the light of the reading of Metaphysics  12, it is not hard to see that Sco-
tus’ “containing” is nothing but the capability of a preeminent cause X to formally
(re)produce the entire reality of an effect Y, including its possibile effects Z as a
cause. The actual existence of Y and Z is therefore totally reduced to a productive
virtus, on which the possible production of Y depends as a totally overdetermined
reality. What is relevant is that Scotus’ account is based on the belief that Y exists
only as the product of a goal-directed process of reproduction of a given possibility,
that is: the virtus of Y makes Y possible and, if enacted, it makes it actual.
12 Virtuality Beyond Reproduction … 197

Within this model, the sixteenth century would show a tendency to openly declare
the link between virtuality and the formal disposition of its instruments. Suárez—who
often uses the concept of “virtual”, stressing its continuity with eminence and formal-
ity—goes for instance to the extreme consequences of Scotus’ position. The Jesuit
significantly uses the notion of “virtuality” especially in his discussion of proximate
causes, (Suárez 1856–61, d. 18) claiming that the virtual existence of something
is such “only as an external label”, because “that virtual being is nothing but the
existence of the instrument” (d. 18, s. 7, § 2). As shown before, virtuality is openly
thought of as the idea of a set or a chain of preordered instruments, even reducing
its being to the ordered and therefore teleologically aimed chain of instruments.
Scotus’ and Suárez’s understanding of the virtual is on the way to what Heidegger
would describe in The Age of World Picture, (Heidegger 1977) as the reduction of
the world to its reproductive, technological representation, that is “measurement” or
what we called a “formalization”. Basing on the misunderstanding of generation and
production, the “analogical” value of the technological explanation is raised to the
level of a “real” explanation. Our explanation is, indeed, analogical to technological
processes, but generation is analogical to the latter.
Beings are thus conceived as products of a general technological process. They
are chains of ordered causes for which each segment is virtually overdetermined
by the oriented causality of the previous one and can be replaced by its “formal”
productive scheme. Hence, a technologically-driven experience of reality, like the
measurements of scientific experiments, can even fully take the place of the access to
the real causes, since the artificial, epistemological explanation is able to explain all
the effects and it is virtually the same of them. As Cassirer remarks (here especially
about Galileo),
the genuine explanation of […] facts is that theoretical activity and technological activity
do not only touch each other externally, insofar as they both operate on the same ‘material’
of nature, but, more importantly, they relate to one another the principle and core of their
productivity. The image of nature that thought produces is not captured by a mere idle
beholding of the image; it requires the use of an active force (Cassirer 2012: 43).

General metaphysics is implicitly converted in a general allopoiesis of the world,

which seems to be the root of Renaissance and modern engineering. Reality is rep-
resented as a machine, virtually projected and realized by a Great Engineer; thus,
engineering can extend, or carry on, God’s work without ever going outside natu-
ral limits. These limits are the limits of a virtual that is already identified with the
entire ontology, in a general “naturalization” of the technological model. We find a
meaningful summary of this view in Browne’s Religio Medici:
…Nor do I so forget God, as to adore the name of Nature; which I define not with the
Schools, the principle of motion and rest, but, that straight and regular line, that setled and
constant course the wisdome of God hath ordained the actions of his Creatures, according to
their several kinds. To make a revolution every day, is the nature of the Sunne, because that
necessary course which God hath ordained it, from which it cannot swerve, but by a faculty
from that voice which first did give it motion (Browne 1645: s. 16, 31).

Hence, nature can be totally reduced to a “straight and regular line” of (vertically)
ordered, productive activity. This because God himself acts according to a techno-
198 S. Guidi

logical model, formally disposing and ordering “secondary” causes as (replaceable)

instruments:
God is like a skilfull Geometrician, who when more easily and with one stroke of his
Compasse, he might describe, or divide a right line, had yet rather do this in a circle or
longer way; according to the constituted and forelaid principles of his Art: yet this rule of his
he doth sometimes pervert, to acquaint the world with his prerogative, lest the arrogancy of
our reason should question his power, and conclude he could not; and thus I call the effects
of nature the works of God, whose hand and instrument she only is; and therefore to ascribe
his actions unto her, is to devolve the honour of the principall agent, upon the instrument;
which if with reason we may do, then let our hammers rise up and boast they have built our
houses, and our pens receive the honour of our writing (Ibidem: s. 16, 32).

And, accordingly:
…nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of his
providence: Art is the perfection of Nature: Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there
were yet a Chaos: Nature hath made one world, and Art another. In briefe, all things are
artificial, for Nature is the Art of God (Ibidem: s. 16, 33–4).

In the light of God’s absolute and eternal virtus, nature and art are nothing but
two different varieties of production. Reality can thus be thought of according to
the model of a formal project that pre-contains all the possible realities, an absolute
formal representation, distinct from a mere “imitation” only by the eminence of its
Cause.
A project virtually and formally “contains” all the possible behaviors of each
of the components of a machine. It virtually is the engine because of its capability
of (re)producing in all its possible workings before they happen and as if they had
already happened. It does not matter that the machine can actually work only because
the (re)presentation has previously prepared its implementation in the logic of simul-
taneity. A machine’s work is supposed to be in time and out of time at the same
time, as it controls the time of the entire process, addressing it to the homogeneous
membrane of the virtual.
In the Renaissance context, a new, crucial approach in Aristotelian metaphysics
starts to focus on the essential role of the “secondary causes” as the efficient, proxi-
mal instruments of an absolute, divine pre-disposition and overdetermination of the
world (Carraud 2002). Like an engine, reality would work as a chain of predeter-
mined relationships between efficient causes and their effects, without breaks in their
continuity.
The mechanization of space, conceptually converted into the homogeneous lan-
guage of Euclidean geometry, will complete this identification, straightening the
demand for a self-controlled reality, which every pre-controlled instrument, appara-
tus or environment can “virtually” (re)produce; for instance in Descartes’ theory of
“figuration” (Rule XII), which rebuilds in the mechanical model the classic, Aris-
totelian semiotic of the form; or in Leibniz’s concept of monad as a virtual, tabular
container of the whole of reality, in which reality and formalization are continuously
overlapping; more broadly, in these Baroque philosophies that reveal the paradoxical
equivalence of the formalization with a reproduction in continuously confusing its
hermeneutical models, theatre, representation or image with reality itself.
12 Virtuality Beyond Reproduction … 199

In Symbolic Exchange and Death (1993: 50) Baudrillard would masterfully place
this trend as the first of his “orders of simulacra”, basing it on a semiotic of the “coun-
terfeit”—“the dominant schema in the ‘classical’ period, from the Renaissance to the
Industrial Revolution”—which precedes and allows the semiotic rise of “production”
and “simulation”. We might say indeed that Baudrillard’s concept of “hyper-reality”
also finds its roots here: in the movement with which the world is, at the same time,
thought of as the consequence of a vertical ordering and a free becoming along the
lines of this order that continuously reproduces itself.
Especially in early modern mechanism, the Aristotelian virtus seems to finally
find a definitive ontological modelization. The virtus is fully exhausted in the always-
predisposed structure of a machine-reality, but such a reduction claims there is no
actual reality that one cannot convert into its “virtual” representation, that is into
a stable, operative pattern. There is no room anymore, for any virtus, power or
force that cannot be represented and pre-scribed as a network of causal, proximate
relationships, continuously reproducible and reproducing within the same scheme.
To paraphrase Korzybski’s famous sentence, the territory has become the map.
Such an exclusion of any difference between reality and its (re)productive rep-
resentation would mark the final eclipse of spontaneity, gradually reduced to the
Aristotelian “automatic” predisposition of the physis to its operative scheme. As
Bergson remarked in his Time and Free Will, this principle is thought of as a power,
and especially as a power of representation of a prefigured action that can always
be (re)produced. As Leibniz said in his Confessio Philosophi, “spontaneity comes
from potency, freedom from knowledge” (1994: 83): here we can see at work all the
paradoxical identification of change with its representative and reproductive scheme;
a Möbius’ strip in which the early modern era (and sometimes the contemporary)
would not be able to fully distinguish a truly free actor from a predisposed one.

12.7 Unlike a Machine

Nowadays, an unwitting recovery of the metaphysical virtual can still be found in

teleonomy. This concept was widely discussed in biology and cybernetics, especially
starting from the ’70s, and often received in ontological, misleading terms.
Unlike Aristotle’s telos, teleonomy’s circular activity of (re)production would not
come thanks to a logically external process, since it would be in the system itself as
its ontology. A process’s “external” processuality, or even the hidden technological
model of the process, is denied not so as to recognize its technological structure, but
so as to include it as a part of the working system.
This model seems able to keep a homogeneity between technology and spontane-
ity, applying to the second the circular form of the first. Natural systems are supposed
to have a natural capability of balancing themselves, and to be able “by nature” to
virtually reproduce the environment and interact with it. They are supposed to be
intentional and to reveal that spontaneous goal-directed actions come from the same
operative dispositions as the structure. The virtual dimension establishes a homo-
200 S. Guidi

geneity, an equivalence in the effects that allows us to postulate an equivalence of

the causes.
There are two points we would like to stress regarding this perspective: 1) stabil-
ity and ergonomics cannot take on the form of an essential property or a telos; this
would be to mistake progress and performance with a thing—as Bergson claimed—
giving an onto-teleological justification of currently working systems. As we said,
virtual-actual processes are at most teleological tendencies, circuits of actions that
simulation allows us to repeat and that may continuously need to (re)stabilize them-
selves. They are able to enhance or weaken their activity, but never to reach an
ontological independence from the environment they take as their substratum.
As Suárez openly admitted, the Aristotelian virtual is completely solvable in the
maintenance of a teleological order of the tools (they are disposed for the goal); there
is not any stable, separated “capability” in things, even if we can processually stabilize
(but not “ontologize”) this tendency isolating the action within the boundaries of
a productive (re)presentation, that follows the supposed capability or virtus. This
means that they need to be intrinsically eco-logical, since they are bound to the
oikos in which their activity lies; 2) the base of interaction remains a (re)productive
formalization, renamed as “information” or “communication”.
Like Aristotle’s dynamis, teleonomy also seems to implicitly sneak the techno-
logical pattern into spontaneous processes. Recognizing them as spontaneous-as-
purposeful; spontaneity would be intrinsically techno-teleo-logical, and the goal-
oriented model an ontological model for reality.
Some crucial remarks on this point are obviously those by Maturana and Varela in
their Autopoiesis (1980). Autopoiesis, the phenomenon in which systems “maintain
constant, or within a limited range of values, some of their variables” thanks to a
feedback effect “internal to them” (78) is for them fully separable from teleonomy,
a “descriptive and explanatory” (85) notion, “adequate for the orientation of the
listener towards a given domain of thought” (86) but completely useless as causal
elements in the functioning of this phenomenon. The use of the machine “belongs
to our description of the machine in a context wider than the machine itself” (77–8).
Maturana’s and Varela’s rejection of teleonomy is epistemologically crucial since
it helps us to think of automation beyond its metaphysical analogy with human tech-
nology and its teleological patterns. Automata can maintain a stable homeostasis
even if they are not programmed to this behavior as their specific purpose. They can
be phenomenologically described as machines only for their regular behaviour—and
this also involves the possibility of a range of regularity—and as long as such regu-
larity is expressed. In this perspective, every regular behaviour can be analogically
considered an automaton: the Solar System, cells, the water cycle, etc.
Such a perspective implies avoiding the use of “machine”, rather adopting a non-
ontological category of “automata”. Machines (including Aristotelian automaton)
do indeed work thanks to their project; automata are, by contrast, systems producing
stable patterns. It is possible that something stays stable without being designed to
be stable, without attributing such a possibility to its ontological capability.
Thus, we can more easily talk of: (1) onto(teleo)logical automata, or machines—
this concept entails the ontological, original virtuality of their project as the core of
12 Virtuality Beyond Reproduction … 201

their functioning; (2) analogical automata—regular, spontaneous things, that simply

show, without any ontological commitment, a regularity in their behavior, or in
specific relations, without postulating a metaphysical capability.
In the first case, ontology can easily be converted into simultaneity without any loss
of reality. In the latter case, regularity is the outcome of a completely different account
of simultaneity: the regular behavior of these automata can indeed be recognized only
from the synchronicity between two different processes (external simultaneity, say
a cell and a clock), or as a simultaneity between multiple sub-processes in the same
process (internal simultaneity, say several chemical bonds that constitute the same
cell); yet such a simultaneity comes not before the processes but during them, as
their effect. They are not coordinated, but they are coordinating.
This organization is formal since it does not follow a previous scheme but rather
because we are here epistemologically isolating (in the definition) only its simultane-
ous elements. Accordingly, such an “analogical” simultaneity is not a homogenous,
ontological area of virtuality pre-existing before the processes involved, but rather
an emergent homogeneity and virtuality opened, in a general perturbation, by the
simultaneous, non technological coexistence of spontaneous and different processes
or sub-processes.
Under “Aristotelian” influence, Western culture is instead so used to overlapping
the two concepts, and so the two kinds of simultaneity, that even Maturana and
Varela’s discussion seems to lack the proper difference between “machines” and
“automata”. According to them, the reason for an epistemological distinction between
machines and living systems “can be easily disqualified” because it would imply a
previous, undemonstrated belief, “that living systems cannot be understood because
they are too complex […] or that the principles which generate them are intrinsically
unknowable” (83).
Maturana and Varela’s argumentative strategy is to reduce living beings (analogi-
cal machines) to autopoietics, in order to demonstrate an identity between autopoiesis
and machines (onto-teleological machines) and thus to argue the equivalence between
living beings and machines. Once again, it is the implicit introduction of virtuality
in the explanation of autopoiesis that allows commutation. Although the two authors
strongly reject teleonomy, their demand for an equivalence between living autopoietic
systems and machines is achieved through an only partial reduction of autopoietics
to its functioning. In shaping their concept of “autopoietic machines” Maturana and
Varela define them as:
a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (trans-
formation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (i) through
their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of
processes (relations) that produces them; (ii) and constitute it (the machine) as a concrete
unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain
of its realization as such a network (Ibidem: 78–9).

Focus especially on the first part. The definition introduces an element, organiza-
tion, that is “descriptive and explanatory” at least as teleonomy. Autopoietic systems
would be organized—rather than organizing—toward the process of production of
something. This “something” is nothing but themselves—we recall that Aristotelian
202 S. Guidi

dynamis also worked “in the same thing qua other”—in their “fundamental variable
which they maintain constant” (78). They would have a capability, a virtus, that
comes from their organization, to “continuously regenerate” themselves as the cause
of their following regeneration.
Focus now on the second part. Here Maturana and Varela try to avoid a retrieval
of teleology by reducing this organization to the spatial topology to the components.
But these components are previously thought of as organized. At point (ii) the def-
inition specifies that the constitution is that of the machine, but it is actually that of
the machine “organized as a network of processes, etc.”. So the machine is consid-
ered here twice: (1) as the organized machine (the virtual machine, the machine as
organization); (2) as the supposed non-teleological machine that follows the virtual,
the abstract organization of the first, recreating it in space and topology (actually).
The reduction of the machine to the (organized) components is nevertheless,
nothing so new. It can already be found, as we showed, in Scotus’ and Suárez’s
definition of the virtual. The virtual is formally nothing but “the [ordered] existence
of the instrument” (Suárez). Accordingly, such a topological organization would
virtually contain (Scotus) the real object and even its reality.
Likewise, Maturana and Varela’s definition places organization in a leading
position in relation to topology, making their “machines” “self-referential, self-
reproductive monadic entit[ies]” (Ansell-Pearson 1997: 141–142). As Simondon
remarked (1958: 47), every equivalence between autopoietic beings and machines
is ontologically misunderstanding, since the logical structure of human technology
implies teleological goal-directedness. Accordingly, if living beings are analogous to
human apparatuses, they are intrinsically teleological; if they are not teleonomical—
as Maturana and Varela accepted—they are machines in an equivocal meaning, that
is that of what we called “analogical automata”. Outside of the conceptual tools of
“classical” metaphysics, autopoietic systems do not show an onto-teleological capa-
bility—a metaphysical assumption—of reproducing and maintaining themselves;
they show the fact that they are continuously reproducing themselves.
Another interesting example of the surreptitious reintroduction of the virtual
into living systems through a ‘mechanical’ account of teleonomy is Monod’s. In
the renowned Chance and Necessity Monod (1972) presents teleonomy as able to
finally found an “objective” model of nature, that systematically rejects any goal-
directedness (20–2). At the same time he still defines teleonomy as the “transmission
of content of invariance” (15), basically reducing teleonomic structures, organization
and performance to information.
Monod is really accurate in thinking of teleonomy as a process—which he defines
as “oriented, coherent and constructive” (45) and not as a preconceived project—
but he seems not to grasp the need to distinguish, on these very bases, between
living automata and human machines. The ontological overlap between the two is
argued for again because of an ontological use of information, which is nothing
but the Aristotelian virtual. Information is able to codify and transmit an invariable
teleonomical organization, yet such an invariance is not contained in information,
as a property, but rather through some information, as an always new reproduction
process.
12 Virtuality Beyond Reproduction … 203

Baudrillard (1993: 59) would attack Monod’s position as a “metaphysics of the

code” in which “life is […] ruled by the discontinuous indeterminacy of the genetic
code, by the teleonomic principle”. In such a model “finality is no longer at the end,
there is no more finality, nor any determinacy. Finality is there in advance, inscribed
in the code”. According to Baudrillard Monod indeed entails a “phantasm of nature”
that is “no longer a metaphysical sanctuary for the origin and substance, but this time,
for the code”. Monod is thus a “strict theologian of this molecular transcendence”,
in which
the phantasm of the code, which is equivalent to the reality of power, is confused with the
idealism of the molecule. Again we find the hallucination or illusion of a world reunited
under a single principle – a homogeneous substance according to the Counter-Reformation
Jesuits (Baudrillard 1993: 80).

By contrast, outside of any substantialism, we can say instead that spontaneous

systems teleonomically stabilize a previously non-teleonomical organization using
information, whereas human machines are completely reducible, from the beginning,
to their informational structure; they were designed as an information-simulation
diagram. Nevertheless, as Simondon stressed, a “perfect” mechanical automatism
has its core in a total reduction of indetermination (the demanded, never-really-
achieved ontological coincidence between the system and its information), but such a
reduction implies the erasure of any possible variation, with the consequent loss of any
signification (Simondon 1958: 139–40). The machine becomes a project expressing
nothing but a process itself (as in Deleuze’s Spinozism).
To avoid any misunderstanding, we stress that we are not denying mechanical
patterns in nature, but rather that it can be assumed as ontological. Mechanism can
spontaneously flow from freedom, or chance, practicing and maintaining an order
in it, but it cannot exhaust it as its ontological scheme. What biology stresses is that
living systems (not ontologically technological or reducible to technology) are seen
to practice some reproductive, teleonomical patterns, shared, as a scheme of action,
by both analogical automata and ontoteleological machines.
This realisation does not require or allow us to reduce the whole ontology of
these beings to the mechanisms they produce. This would lead us to reintroduce an
ontological virtuality—what metaphysics did—as a common plan for the equivalence
of the two. We must rather say that both, in equivocal ways (the first is a production
and a use, the second is the very structure) perform these patterns.
Unless we want to represent these mechanizing systems as given, that is cre-
ated, we are forced to recognize that they come from a non-already-mechanized
process. Otherwise, we illegitimately identify autopoiesis (the process), with cyber-
netics (the control system). These systems organize themselves using cybernetic
practices, although they are not this organization.
As a branch of technology, cybernetics can legitimately work to achieve more or
less complex control-systems, as well as try to reproduce, in technological terms,
what one can find in spontaneous systems. But as soon as it appoints itself as an
ontology of non-technological systems, it immediately falls into the mistakes of
“engineering” metaphysics. Onto-cybernetics cannot find a real distinction between
204 S. Guidi

a thing and its reproduction and it is forced to start an infinite work of recursive
optimization trying to epistemologically reproduce what actually is an ontological
level; every time it finds something interesting, it claims it has discovered something
about natural systems.
Conversely, non-mechanist autopoiesis recognizes that spontaneous processes
(automata) can control and organize themselves without this previously being an
aim for which they are set up. It is all about recognizing that such order does not
come from an ontological scheme but rather on an epistemological practical, level.
It is all about reducing automatism to an emergent form of spontaneity (translated
by autopoietic mechanism in terms of perturbation) and avoiding any ontological
equivalence between spontaneous technological processes and our cybernetic orga-
nizations.
As we claimed, the definition of automata as analogical apparatuses is fully based
on their internal or external simultaneity and the latter opens an emergent virtuality,
which equivocally allows us to categorise them as machines. Such virtuality indeed
represents a space in which an organizing simultaneity, without losing its nature as
a process, can be actually stabilized through an organized topology. The machine
is hence organized by the process and within the process, in the stabilization and
control of some of its free patterns.

12.8 Digital Baroque

Even if the idea of a “technological” nature properly represents a philosophical

misunderstanding, technology has found in it—and especially in the metaphysical
account of the virtus—a complete validation of its inner (operative) ontology, as
well as of its operative structure, oriented towards the concepts of simultaneity and
reproduction.
Digital technologies seem especially to concretize, in the form of technology, the
metaphysical idea of a stable—rather than stabilized—virtus.
Software packages are fully-controlled and fully-formalized environments, able
to overdetermine all their possible, formal objects, funding an actual virtual ontology.
Technology would be finally capable, by themself, to institute a “new reality”, or a
“secondary” reality, within the specific domain of a “formal” reproduction.
Moreover, objects filling this ontology are entirely formal, and entirely manipula-
ble, as they were intrinsically products of the shaping system, and their reality would
entirely depend on the “efficiency” of that system. In this, digital technologies take
to its extreme the idea of an inner and infinite reproducibility of things, and espe-
cially that this reproducibility is always a copying. Thanks to the fully controlled
and ordered nature of the system, the software owns an ontology in which one can
copy a file losing every distinction between the original and the copy. The object is
taken as “a file”, that is in the natural reproducibility of its “form”, abstracting from
any physical circumstances of individuation.
12 Virtuality Beyond Reproduction … 205

Just because of its direct derivation from the metaphysical model of technol-
ogy, such a view keeps hiding the “real” virtus, that is the availability of a controlled
substratum. In this sense, the digital actually is a vertical, ordered sequence of instru-
ments; but its functioning and ontology should be understood exactly as opposed to
how metaphysics understood it. Its movement does not start from the above, that is
from a logical overdetermination of a production, but rather from below, that is an
operative process of “shaping” and technological formalization of nature.
Behind the “virtual worlds”, the “virtual objects” and the full, homogeneous
control of the “digital” environment, lies a permanent process of maintenance of an
“infrastructure”, which keeps stable the organization of the conditions required for the
digital technologies’ functioning. These conditions are not taken for granted, as they
rely on the availability of other substrata and infrastructure. From this perspective,
they are the outcome of a process that happened between the seventeenth and the
twentieth century, when mechanization and engineering have taken on a leading role
in the homogenization of chronological, geographical, anthropological, economic
coordinates and many others. Such a development of infrastructures provided to
technology an entire and stable operative ontology; a general system—and a general,
concrete metaphysics—which meant thinking of humans, animals, artifacts, natural
events, biology, as different sketches on the same diagram.
Hence, the digital represents the conclusive form and the apogee of a process
of “naturalization” of technology that starts with the process of industrialization,
able to transform environment, spaces, work, living, into the working parts of a great
machine, (re)producing itself by the means of everyday life, correcting and “forming”
spontaneity in a designed totality. Such an “idealism” of the machine has been able
to hide the organized work of millions of living beings, representing its outcome as
an ontology, as a category of a supposed natural economy or natural cybernetics.
On that previous mechanization, the digital sets its virtus, but formalizing all its
substrata as mere infrastructures. Laid on this transparent homogeneity, the digital
exists nowadays as “the” virtual, as a pure simulation, as a pre-controlled system of
ordering, as a reproduction of a mechanical disposition of the “parts” and, finally, as
the reproduction of this disposition in every field of society and nature.
It is not by chance that such a totality took, in a first phase, the form of a new
Baroque. The first part of the history of digital virtuality—especially most of the VR
projects from the ‘60s to the ‘90s: Sensorama, Aspen Movie Map, Active Worlds,
Second Life—are characterized by this open simulation form, and so by the aim (not
so far from Browne’s view) of building a virtual-as-fictional reality. Their virtuality
is hence essentially interface-based, as a pure manipulability given in its simplest
form.
Baroque machines acted by pre-controlling the interaction patterns of viewers.
Their main tools were visual “machines” like anamorphosis, perspective, deforma-
tion, but these tools ask the viewer to take a specific posture. Accordingly, the early
digital started working by persuading users they had an additional power that kept
their previous organization unaltered (a “second” life), but it basically took billions
of people in front of a screen, set on a chair. It reorganized our daily spaces and times
placing them on the homogeneous, formal plane of simultaneity, and converting
206 S. Guidi

them into infrastructures of the functioning of the digital. Here—that is starting from
this technological premise—it unchained new forms of differentiation, identities and
economies.
Such an operative strategy also had other applications than the “digital” and did
not leave today’s technology even in its further, current evolutions.
Like Baroque machines, the aim of contemporary robotics, cybernetics and AI is
nevertheless that of “replicating” living automata, starting still from their efficiency.
Robotics “virtually” understands man as a set of capabilities, and “formalizes” it
trying to replicate these spontaneous behaviours and activities. According to such an
old scheme, the equivalence in the effects (the “performance”) provides a “formal”
notion, or a “formula” of man, that would allow us to “reproduce” it at will. Hence,
measurement acts like a “homogeneous” symbolic plan, on which the actual behavior
can be transposed, “formalized” and reproduced.
Even the main goal of Artificial Intelligence seems not that of developing a new,
non-human form of consciousness and thinking, but rather that of reproducing its per-
formances, until they are indistinguishable. It is not by chance that Turing’s famous
test finds its roots in a Cartesian paradox, that of “parroting”, that is to establish
if a machine-animal, able to talk (“performance”) is also able to think (“causes”).
According to Descartes, these machines
could never use words, or put together signs, as we do in order to declare our thoughts to
others. For we can certainly conceive of a machine so constructed that it utters words, and
even utters words that correspond to bodily actions causing a change in its organs. […] But
it is not conceivable that such a machine should produce different arrangements of words
so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as the
dullest of men can do (AT VI, 56–7; CSM I, 240).

Descartes’ idea was that speaking is not uttering, since the first reveals a different
capability of “reasoning” and the latter only expresses (in men) or imitates (in animals
and machines) such a virtus, that is a conscious intelligence (and, for Descartes, a
substantial consciousness). Therefore, Descartes’ machines are not humans since
they cannot reproduce or imitate such a given capability, and this reveals that they
do not possess it. The reproduction and even the imitation of a performance would
require, indeed, a specific capability, and only beings provided with this capability
are able to do that. Actually, for Descartes, one cannot reproduce intelligence without
showing intelligence, and so being actually intelligent: there is no proportionality
between being intelligent (mechanical) and non intelligent.
The approach of AI uses intelligent behaviors as a stable maximum grade for gen-
erating a scale of intelligence, and, on that measurement, for formalizing it. Human
intelligence is previously considered, repeating a metaphysical understanding of the
concept of capability, as a “formal” cause of such a maximum grade, as if the effects
shown in the intelligent behavior would depend on an “efficiency” able to re-produce
them in the scheme of simultaneity. Thus, conscious and intelligent thinking would
be not an action, but the effect of a pre-determined capability that can be reached.
Accordingly, software that is able to reproduce the effects of human intelligence
would thereby be considered as really “thinking”, even if such an attribution can
be only analogical. It can be said “thinking” like humans can be called “thinking”,
12 Virtuality Beyond Reproduction … 207

on a scale that has previously understood thinking as a “capability” inferable from

“effects”, placing humans at the top of such a scale. Just as in the Baroque model, the
analogy is coined on the level of “effects”, then it is transposed back to the “formal-
ization” of a supposed natural “efficiency”, and finally it is “naturalized” in arguing
the common descendence of both the artificial and the natural from a given virtus.
But the “ghost” of the Baroque can be found also in today’s mobile communi-
cation technologies where the Baroque machine is parceled out, taking the new-old
form (as much Baroque) of the symphony. Billions of devices, or infrastructures, are
coordinated, and always pre-ordered, by a general simultaneity, acting as parts of a
single formalizing apparatus, and as multiple enactments of a single, general virtus.
This simultaneity is again still granted by a formalization that relies on common
infrastructures able to provide a technological form of memory.
It is worth noticing that, for Bergson, memory represents the ultimate form of
(non-classic metaphysical) virtuality, since there the past information is contained
as an indefinite plurality that at most can be used by the virtual action conceived by
perception:
Whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up some period of our history, we
become conscious of an act sui genesis by which we detach ourselves from the present in
order to replace ourselves, first in the past in general, then in a certain region of the past
– a work of adjustment, something like the focussing of a camera. But our recollection
still remains virtual; we simply prepare ourselves to receive it by adopting the appropriate
attitude. Little by little it comes into view like a condensing cloud; from the virtual state
it passes into the actual; and as its outlines become more distinct and its surface takes on
colour, it tends to imitate perception. But it remains attached to the past by its deepest roots,
and if, when once realized, it did not retain something of its original virtuality, if, being
a present state, it were not also something which stands out distinct from the present, we
should never know it for a memory (Bergson 1991: 133–4).

According to Bergson memory is therefore

essentially virtual, it cannot be known as something past unless we follow and adopt the
movement by which it expands into a present image, thus emerging from obscurity into the
light of day. In vain do we seek its trace in anything actual and already realized: we might
as well look for darkness beneath the light (Ibidem: 135).

Conversely, technological memory is conceptually close to what Bergson terms

“memory image”, or memories associated with a scheme of recognition-and-action.
This memory is virtus, fully aimed at the recall of a virtuality that is already pre-
pared by the operative schemes of perception. Likewise, technological memory is
essentially a “formalized” scheme of (re)production of data, as here information
is stored within an ontology (that of the software) that gives its objects the struc-
ture of the reproducible “form”. Data are thus goal-oriented virtualities, ready to
be copied, visualized and reproduced, but first of all they are “analogical” repro-
ductions of something happening in the physical, natural environment, captured and
“formalized” in the form of data.
Mobile devices act as a swarm of measuring infrastructures, appointed to “formal-
ize” reality in its technological, reproducible form. Thanks to them, the theatrical,
“virtual” Baroque of the ’60s has been converted into a dynamic theatre in which
208 S. Guidi

real and virtual actions are basically inseparable. Digital devices import reality into
the symbolic apparatus of technological memory, making it manipulable, and overall
aimed at an unlimited reproduction. It is indeed such a reproducibility that makes
of images, sounds, texts, and many other experiences a homogenous “stage”, the
analogical model and a measure for the understanding of reality.
The user acts as if this reproduction was the equivalent, the “virtual” represen-
tation of real, and he teleologically aims his actions at this reproduction, at such a
formal, reproducible image of reality. On the ubiquitous stage of this analogy, of this
multimedial theatre, the user is both the actor and the audience of such a reproduc-
tion, and, little by little, he becomes at the same time the substratum and the agent
of the reproduction of this form:
Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy.

This wide and universal theatre

Presents more woeful pageants that the scene

Wherein we play in.

(William Shakespeare, As You Like It—Act II, Scene VII, 6)

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Simone Guidi is currently FCT Post-Doc Research Fellow at the University of Coimbra’s Insti-
tuto de Estudos Filosóficos (IEF). He has taught Aesthetics of the New Media at the New Fine Arts
Academy (NABA) of Milan, Italy (2013–2017). He is the managing editor of the international
peer-reviewed WoS journal of Philosophy Lo Sguardo and an editor of Azimuth. Philosophical
210 S. Guidi

Coordinates Between Modern and Contemporary Age. In 2013 he received a Ph.D. in Philosophy
from La Sapienza, University of Rome. Among his publications are L’angelo e la macchina. Sulla
genesi della res cogitans cartesiana, FrancoAngeli, Milan 2018; H. Bergson, Lezioni di metafisica.
Spazio, tempo, materia e teorie dell’anima (translation, Mimesis, Milan 2018) and many essays
and encyclopedia entries on Medieval, Modern and Contemporary philosophy.