Hi Chris==
> If the Ideal game is only ideal with respect to a
> certain goal (i.e. ideal
> is relative), can we call an Ideal game *a* virtual
> game? Would it still be
> a virtual game if it got actualised? I think so.
I'm not sure what you're asking here... By "Ideal" I
just meant the idea of chance taken to its limit, so
it's not really tied to a goal at all. I guess I was
misleading in claiming that Deleuze offers this
concept to help us think pure chance.
> Thanks for confirming my suspicions that I was on
> the wrong track with the
> virtual as the repressed angle.
There's still a sense in which you're right... A
great deal of the virtual remains "repressed" because
the virtual turns the most "useful" portion of itself
towards experience in the course of its actualization.
This, however, leads to a very different notion of
repression than the one Freud sought to formulate.
Namely, it leads to the idea of differenciations of
forms of life along active lines of engagement. We
don't repress because we are castrated or because we
can't stand the dark truth of our desire, but because
the repressed just doesn't do us any damn good for the
form of engagement were caught up within. Think about
how much this notion of repression would change
individual, group and couples therapy! It would no
longer be a question of getting at the repressed and
horrible truth blocking relations, but of questioning
the nature of practices themselves and opening up
virtual fields of memory that would allow different
practices, rhizomatic practices to be formed.
> I'll have to seek out this Bogue.
Bogue is really worth reading for a very clear and
very accurate introduction to D&G.
> Thanks so much for the explication beginning from
> what work does the
> "virtual" do. It really does help. I folow the
> argument from the
> impossibility fo the void. but why can't there just
> be a void, (or failing
> that, cyclic displacements)? More to the materialist
> point -why can't there
> simply be pressure gradients, effected by energy
> imbalances (that is chaos)?
> Why can't the non-existent simply take up no space?
> Still puzzled as to the
> necessity of the v. But it is a beautiful concept.
> Truly. Like Heraclitus? I
> still can't get this stuff re: Alice. Once again, I
> suspect I have an
> addiction to temporal linearlity. But this is
> helping. Shimmeringly. Hence
> the co-futurity of the virtual? Still working my way
> out of the banalities
> of material monism. But its an unfolding of material
> monism, no? Not a new
> dualism?
I like your material monism. Ok, on the question of
the virtual, you present not one, but two options.
First, you suggest atomism in the void with the
clinamen. I personally don't find classical atomism
appealing for three reasons: First, I tend to
advocate David Bohm's conception of matter in terms of
vibrations and foldings between an implicate and
explicate order, but that's neither here nor there.
Second, I think that the notion of an atom as a
self-identical being that only produces novelties
through combinations with other self-identical
entities is just the model of recognition taken to the
infinitely small. Such a view leads to the paradigm
of analysis which thinks that we can understand
actualities through the analysis of their parts, and
is thus unable to deal with complex and emergent
processes like life and hurricanes. Finally, third,
atoms falling through the void are still subject to
all the problems of motion because we still have to
ask how they manage to move in a continuous movement
at all, rather than just being a collection of monadic
and unrelated differences? On the other hand, I like
your tendency towards forces and pressure gradients
very much and think that it describes the "splendour"
of materialism. But ask yourself this: where do you
ever come across something like a force within
actualized experience? Nowhere! In actual experience
the only things we know are the effects of forces and
not forces themselves. But, of course, forces are no
less real for that, because contrary to good Baily,
seeing is not believing. Conclusion? Forces are
virtual! Now, if we read Deleuze from the standpoint
of his works through the sixties, we will be inclined
to conceptualize the virtual in terms of motion,
memory, and problems (with the exception of the book
on Nietzsche). But it seems to me that the works with
Guattari enhance the notion of the virtual and take it
in the direction you're talking about, thinking it in
terms of forces of production, creating ordinal
intensive differences, and their accompanying
qualities. For example, a field of forces between
fire and water, an ordinal difference being a boiling
point or particular temperature, a quality being
answering the "what it is like" question for water to
boil.
Best Regards,
Paul
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