Actual - virtual, comment on yesterday's theory quote (explanation of sorts)
Deleuze in Cinema 2 is immensely obscure (as always?), but I think, he is eager to point out that at a minimum level you cannot make a sharp distinction btw actual and virtual. I want to use him to think about virtual worlds:
In virtual worlds, we are dealing both with a representation of reality and something that is reality in itself, because it does not point to something outside of itself (it is not "realistic" or a documentation of the real world), in a way just like the fiction film . Yet as soon as we have image - or language - we have representation, mediated "reality". What the virtual reality points to is "the world" itself, of which it is a part - it asks us to construct a universe by combining the parts we are presented with, in fact a kind of never accomplished hermeneutic circle of interpretation. This is an example of an image whose "nature is double", it is virtual and actual at the same time. The moment we interact in this represented reality, our actions are already moving into the past at the same time as we are constructing the future. It is not us, who cannot discern between what is real and what is not. It is in the nature of things themselves; they refuse to be either or. Neither Reality, nor just a representation of it.
Deleuze refers to Robbe-Grillet and Bergson, Robbe-Grillet and his idea of a nouveau roman. RG wants to let the objects speak for themselves and not be contamined by the human emotions attached to them. What he does is write and work in a constant process of construction and erasure: he describes the objects and then he erases them through a new and slightly different description of them. Out of this comes perhaps "narrative", the story of the man who describes the world. Bergson and his notion of duree, time not as cut up into chronological and measurable seconds, but time as a "strecthed" now, a constant movement from the past into the future. As when we listen to (classical) music: we can only understand it by combining the node we hear "now" with our memory of the nodes that came before. "Music" is what we experience in an anticipation of what is coming and an interpretation of what we have already heard. Is that similar to how we live a virtual world? Our experience of "worldliness" is a combination of what we have already actualised and what is yet to come, what is about to actualised and what will make new actualisations possible.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 12:03