For my daughter Elizabeth,
so that you might always
remain curious and
remember that it is not
all about us.
Table of Contents
What would a truly democratic encounter between truly equal beings look like, what would it be—can we even imagine it?
— Timothy Morton76
Although we have addressed Locke’s criticism of substance as an occult entity not warranted by the givens of experience, the problem of the bare substratum remains. If substance is not its qualities, does this not entail that substance as such is without qualities and is therefore a bare substratum? And if substance is a bare substratum, does this not entail that all substances are identical? If this is the case, then this spells the ruin of the concept of substance for substance is supposed to account, in part, for the individuality of substance. Yet where substance is bare, all individuality is erased. If this difficulty is to be avoided, we require some way of talking about the structure or formatting of substances or split-objects without this structure consisting of qualities. Towards this end, it would prove helpful to investigate the being of a particular substance.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that my blue coffee mug sitting here on the table is a substance. When I distinguish between the virtual proper being of an object and the actual local manifestation of an object, I am attempting to distinguish between the object qua formatted structure and as an enduring unity, and the object qua qualities or properties. The virtual proper being of an object is its self-othering substantiality, its being as substance, or its being as a (more or less) enduring unity. Here it is important to bear in mind that the time of endurance is irrelevant to whether or not a substance is a substance. A substance can exist for the briefest moment before being destroyed, or for billions of years. It will be recalled that, according to Aristotle, no substance is any more or less a substance than any other. This holds no less for the difference between a rock and a human than it does for an object that is long-lived or instantaneous.
The virtual proper being of an object is what makes an object properly an object. It is that which constitutes an object as a difference engine or generative mechanism. However, no one nor any other thing ever encounters an object qua its virtual proper being, for the substance of an object is perpetually withdrawn or in excess of any of its manifestations. Rather, the virtual proper being of an object can only ever be inferred from its local manifestations in the world. By contrast, the local manifestation of an object is the manner in which a substance or virtual proper being is actualized in the world under determinate conditions. Here it is important to emphasize that manifestation refers not to phenomena or appearances for a subject, though clearly this can take place as well. When I refer to manifestation, I am not referring to givenness to a subject, but rather to actualization within a world. Objects require no subject to manifest themselves in the world. The universe could be a universe in which no sentient beings of any sort exist and manifestation would continue to take place. We are therefore fortunately relieved of playing Atlas. Consequently, appearances and phenomena, what is given, are a subset of manifestation, not the reverse. Manifestation is an ontological predicate, not an epistemological predicate.
It is my contention that traditional ontology was correct to distinguish between the substance and qualities of objects, but mistaken in how it thought about the nature of substance. It is correct to hold that objects cannot be reduced to their qualities because qualities change and shift while the object remains this substance. Traditional philosophy goes astray, however, in concluding that because substances cannot be reduced to their qualities, then substance must be the object stripped of all qualities or, as Locke puts it, a bare substratum. Where substance is conceived in this way, its concept becomes entirely incoherent.
My thesis is that the substantiality of objects is not a bare substratum, but rather an absolutely individual system or organization of powers. Powers are the capacities of an object or what it can do. The powers of an object are never something that is directly manifested in the world. And if this is so, then this is because the qualities of an object are only ever local manifestations of the object’s power. That is, the domain of power possessed by an object is always greater than any local manifestation or actualization of an object. For this reason, following Manuel DeLanda, I distinguish between the phase space of an object and the powers of an object. A phase space is a set of points that can be occupied in a series of variations. For example, as a pendulum swings back and forth, it passes through a series of points between two maxima and a minima. Each of these points is a point in phase space. Moreover, none of these points are ever occupied all at once. Likewise, we can think qualities or properties as points an object manifests or actualizes as points in a phase space. The power of the pendulum is its ability to move through this phase space, to produce these actualizations, while each point the pendulum moves through is a local manifestation of this power of the pendulum.
Two points follow from this thesis about the relationship between substance or virtual proper being and qualities or local manifestations. First, we should not speak of qualities as something an object possesses, has, or is, but rather as acts, verbs, or something that an object does. Second, knowing an object does not consist in enumerating a list of essential qualities or properties belonging to an object, but rather consists in knowing the powers or capacities of an object. As we will see in the next chapter, this entails that no object is ever fully known insofar as every object necessarily has an infinite phase space while simultaneously having a finite structure of powers.
Here I return to the blue mug with which I began this section. Within the ontological framework I am proposing, it would be inaccurate to suggest that the mug is blue or that the mug possesses the quality of blue. Rather, if we had an ontologically accurate language, we would instead say that “the mug blues” or that “the mug is bluing” or that “the mug does blue”. The blueness of the mug is not a quality that the mug has but is something that the mug does. It is an activity on the part of the mug. Nor would it be accurate to claim, at the level of the mug’s virtual proper being, that “the mug has blue power”. The mug does not have blue power, but rather coloring power. If this is the case, then it is because the mug always has the power to produce a broader range of colors than the shade it produces at any given time.
The decision to think qualities of an object as acts or doings rather than as possessions, along with onticology’s rejection of the thesis that the mug has blue power rather than coloring power, is motivated by two interrelated concerns. First, qualities are acts on the part of objects precisely because qualities vary. If it is inaccurate to suggest that the mug is blue, then this is because the mug is a variety of different colors as a function of the exo- relations with light the mug enters into. As I look at the mug under the warm light of my desktop lamp, it is now a very dark, deep, flat blue. Now I open the shade to my office window, allowing sunlight to stream in. The mug becomes a brilliant, bright, shiny blue. Sharing a romantic moment with my coffee mug by candlelight, the colors are deep and rich as they were under my office light, but now the blue flickers and dances in response to the shifting intensity of the candle flame. And finally, I blow out the candle and the mug becomes black.
Here there are a couple of points worth making. First, in pointing to the manner in which the qualities of the mug change, I am not making the claim that these qualities are unreal or that the mug is truly one shade of blue and that these other shades are distortions or deviations from the mug’s true color. Rather, these qualities of the mug are entirely real and the mug is all these colors. Indeed, we can say that in principle the mug is potentially an infinite number of colors because there is no limit to the exo-relations into which the mug can enter. Consequently, we cannot say that we would finally get the true being of the mug by adding up all the qualities that it actualizes. The being of the mug is not the sum of its qualities, but rather qualities are unique events that a substance produces.
Second, what is true of the color of the coffee mug is also true of all its qualities or properties. For example, the spatial shape of the mug, while certainly far more enduring than the color of the mug, is no less variable, in principle, than the color of the mug. The mug tends to have a relatively stable spatial or extensional structure because it exists within a stable regime of attraction or set of exo-relations. Change the temperature or gravity of the mug’s exo-relations and the extension or spatial shape of the mug will also change.
Here, then, we encounter one of the central ways of distinguishing between the virtual proper being of an object and its local manifestations. Where local manifestation is geometrical, virtual proper being is topological. As described by Steven Connor,
Topology may be defined as the study of the spatial properties of an object that remain invariant under homeomorphic deformations, which is to say, broadly, actions of stretching, squeezing, or folding. [It is] not concerned with exact measurement, which is the domain of geometry […] but rather with spatial relations, such as continuity, neighborhood, insideness and outsideness, disjunction and connection. Because topology is concerned with what remains invariant as a result of transformation, it may be thought of as geometry plus time, geometry given body by motion.77
Where geometry treats fixed metric properties and shapes, topology, by contrast, treats of structures capable of undergoing variation through operations of stretching, squeezing, or folding while retaining its structure. Here the distinction between topology and geometry should not be understood mathematically in terms of two different ways of approaching space, but rather philosophically as two distinct aspects of substance. The topological domain refers to the domain of how the virtual powers of a substance are organized, whereas the geometrical refers to how substances are actualized in locally fixed qualities. There is no less a topology and geometry of colors in substances than there is topology and geometry of spatial qualities in objects. As a consequence we can say—and I’ll have much more to say about this in section 3.5—that the virtual proper being of objects is characterized by a topological plasticity that is nonetheless absolutely individual and concrete.
The coloring power of the mug is not a Euclidean property of the mug, a geometric property of the mug—which is to say, a fixed property—but is rather a topology or series of variations that are a function of the exo- relations the mug enters into with other objects (different photons of light). For this reason, we must say that the mug blues, that it “does” blue, rather than that the mug is blue. The bluing of the mug is the local manifestation of the mug. Likewise, if we don’t say that the mug has blue power, but rather has coloring power, then this is because the mug has the topological power to produce a whole range of colors ranging from black to brilliant blue. This range is the power of the mug, while every point or variation within this range is the phase space of the mug. Finally, the actualization of a point within this topology or phase space is a local manifestation of the mug. Aristotle’s formal cause must be rescued from its fixed-structure Euclideanism and placed soundly within the field of topology or structures that contain the potential for a series of variations volcanically locked within substances. And this is why I refer to objects as “difference engines” or “generative mechanisms”, for objects are these powers of producing differences in the world at the level of qualities or local manifestations.
Why, then, are we inclined to say that the mug is blue rather than that the mug blues and has coloring power? I think there are three reasons for this, one cognitive, another sociological, and a third having to do with logoi, local ontological situations, or regimes of attraction in which objects manifest themselves. Cognitively our thought and perception is geared towards action and therefore what interests us. As Bergson so nicely puts it,
[m]y body […] acts like an image which reflects others, and which, in doing so, analyzes them along lines corresponding to the different actions which it can exercise upon them. And consequently, each of the qualities perceived in the same object by my different senses symbolizes a particular direction of my activity, a particular need.78
In relating to other objects, there’s a way in which our body reduces objects, simplifies them, as a target of its own aims, needs, and desires. As a consequence, variations in objects are ignored and the object is reduced to a geometric identity most congenial to its desired action. As we will see in the next chapter, this is not a peculiarity of human or animal nature, but rather is true of all inter-object relations, whether animate or inanimate, whether human or animal, whether living or non-living. The reduction or simplification of one object by another object is a general ontological feature of how objects relate to one another. In short, this sort of simplification is not an epistemological peculiarity of human beings.
Sociologically, philosophers, as writers and scholars, do a lot of sitting. This is also true of those times when we pause to reflect and wonder what objects are. Everything is still. Rather than acting on objects, we look at objects. Where acting on objects tends to produce qualitative differences in the objects, gazing at objects tends to reveal fixed properties (especially if we and the object are sitting still). As such, when we cast about for objects to contemplate, our tendency is to encounter objects in relatively fixed circumstances. The philosopher picks up the first item that is about or nearby, such as my blue mug. But as a result of these relatively fixed circumstances characterizing reflection, we encounter qualities not in their changes or transitions, but rather as abiding qualities possessed by an object. We then build this lack of engagement with objects and the consequent non-variation into the very foundations of our ontology without realizing it. In this connection, Gilbert Simondon suggests that a prejudice for fully constituted local manifestations or the geometric reflects the social hierarchy of Greek philosophy.79 Likewise, in works like Pascalian Meditations, Pierre Bourdieu shows how what he calls “the scholastic disposition” leads us to systematically distort questions about the nature of practice.80 The claims of Simondon and Bourdieu hold not only for ancient Greece and sociological questions of practice, but also for our contemporary historical moment and questions of ontology. Intellectual work today, no less than in ancient Greece, is dependent on a certain distribution of labor that renders academic life possible by relieving a particular segment of society largely independent of manual labor. This, in turn, leads objects to be encountered in a particular way insofar as the academic, by and large, does not encounter the volcanic potentials hidden within objects by virtue of not directly acting on objects. As a consequence, this leads to a systematic distortion of ontological questions and what constitutes an object.
Finally, third, the objects that populate our world tend to exist in fairly stable sets of exo-relations or regimes of attraction. For example, gravity, pressure, and temperature are fairly stable on our planet—at least in the environments where we most commonly act. This entails that there is very often very little variation in the qualities of the objects that make up the furniture of our daily experience. This, no doubt, is one reason that the confusion of objects with their qualities is such a persistent tendency of thought. If Aristotle was able to think the formal cause of objects in largely fixed Euclidean or geometric terms rather than in dynamic topological terms, then this is because there is often a sort of détente of exo-relations among objects leading to fairly stable qualities or local manifestations among objects. If I am led, for example, to think my body as possessing a rather fixed form, then this is because the atmospheric pressure produced by the Earth’s gases pressing down upon me is fairly constant. If, by contrast, a mad scientist were to place me in a room that slowly decreased atmospheric pressure, the form or shape of my body would change in subtle ways up to the point where I would finally decompress and become a plurality of objects. Likewise, the form of my body changes in subtle ways with changes in temperature, becoming now more compact when it is very cold and somewhat swollen when it is very hot. Even the spatial form of my body is an act on the part of my body, something that my body does, not something my body has or is. This is why I refer to logoi, local ontological situations, or regimes of attraction rather than logos. These logoi or local ontological situations are relatively stable exo-relations among objects that tend to generate, as a consequence, enduring and stable qualities in objects.
No one has explored this anterior side of substance—in the transcendental, not the temporal, sense—more profoundly than Gilles Deleuze. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze names this dimension of substance that is formatted or structured without possessing qualities the virtual. Here the virtual is not to be confused with virtual reality. The latter is generally treated as a simulacrum of reality, as a sort of false or computer generated reality. By contrast, the virtual is entirely real without, for all that, being actual. The term “virtuality” comes from the Latin virtus, which has connotations of potency and efficacy. As such, the virtual, as virtus, refers to powers and capacities belonging to an entity. And in order for an entity to have powers or capacities, it must actually exist. In this connection, while the virtual refers to potentiality, it would be a mistake to conflate this potentiality with the concept of a potential object. A potential object is an object that does not exist but which could come to exist. By contrast, the virtual is strictly a part of a real and existing object. The virtual consists of the volcanic powers coiled within an object. It is that substantiality, that structure and those singularities that endure as the object undergoes qualitative transformations at the level of local manifestations.
However, in evoking Deleuze’s concept of the virtual, we must proceed with caution for two deeply opposed tendencies animate Deleuze’s discussions of the virtual. On the one hand, Deleuze often speaks of the virtual in terms of an ontological monism that suggests he is committed to the thesis that there is only one substance that is then broken up into discrete entities through a process of actualization. Monism tends to come in one of two variants. One variant of monism has it that only a single substance exists and that everything that exists is a property or quality of that one substance. Spinoza’s monism, for example, argues that only a single substance exists and that all entities (modes) are expressions of this one substance. Another variant of monism has it that there is only a single type of being, but that being is populated by numerically distinct entities of this type. Lucretius, for example, could be construed as a monist of this sort, as he holds that only atoms and their combinations exist, not two distinct ontological types such as Plato’s world of the forms and the fallen world of entities or appearances.
Deleuze often appears to advocate this former sort of monism, while object-oriented ontology and onticology might appear to be committed to the latter type. Throughout Deleuze’s work, we find the theme of a single substance that somehow comes to be formatted into discrete entities. By contrast, object-oriented ontology advocates the thesis that being is composed only of discrete entities or substances. DeLanda articulates this variant of Deleuze nicely when he remarks that,
Deleuze distinguishes the progressive unfolding of a multiplicity through broken symmetries (differentiation), from the progressive specification of the continuous space formed by multiplicities as it gives rise to our world of discontinuous spatial structures (differenciation). Unlike a transcendent heaven which exists as a separate dimension from reality, Deleuze asks us to imagine a continuum of multiplicities which differentiates itself into our familiar three-dimensional space as well as its spatially structured contents.81
I will discuss Deleuze’s concept of multiplicity momentarily, but for the moment it is important to note that “multiplicity” is among Deleuze’s terms for the virtual. The suggestion here is that the virtual seems to consist of a single continuum, such that there is only one virtual, one substance, that is then partitioned into apparently distinct entities. And indeed, as Deleuze remarks, “all [multiplicities] coexist, but they do so at points, on the edges”.82 Moreover, Deleuze’s constant references to the virtual as the pre-individual suggests this reading as well, for it implies a transition from an undifferentiated state to a differenciated individual. If the virtual is pre-individual, then it cannot be composed of discrete individual unities or substances. Here the individual would be an effect of the virtual, not primary being itself.
On the other hand, Deleuze speaks of the virtual as a part of the real object. Here Deleuze seems to move in the direction of the second sense of the monism, where monism entails that being is composed of a pluralism of distinct entities, all of the same type. As Deleuze remarks, “the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object—as though the object had one part of itself plunged as though into an objective dimension”.83 Deleuze goes on to ask,
How, then, can we speak simultaneously of both complete determination and only a part of the object? The determination must be a complete determination of the object, yet form only a part of it. Following suggestions made by Descartes in his Replies to Arnauld, we must carefully distinguish the object in so far as it is complete and the object in so far as it is whole. What is complete is only the [virtual] part of the object, which participates with other parts of objects in the [Multiplicity] (other relations, other singular points), but never constitutes an integral whole as such. What the complete determination lacks is the whole set of relations belonging to actual existence. An object may be ens, or rather (non)-ens omni modo determinatum, without being entirely determined or actually existing.84
In treating the virtual as a part of the object and as completely determined (structured), Deleuze seems to suggest that the virtual—far from constituting a pre-individual continuum that is then parceled up into discrete entities—is, in fact, purely discrete and individual. Under this reading, multiplicities or endo-relational structures would be discrete, existing individuals. Here there would be no transition from the pre- individual virtual to the individual actual, but rather the relation between endo-structure and actuality would be a transition between unexercised power and actualized quality within an individual.
It is not my aim here to provide a commentary on Deleuze’s ontology nor to remain true to his thought, but rather to determine how it is possible for substance to be formatted without this formatting consisting of substance’s qualities. My contention is that the transcendental condition (in the transcendental realist sense) under which it is possible for an object to be out of phase with its qualities lies in a formatted structure that is not itself qualitative. It is only in this way that the bare substratum problem can be avoided and Aristotle’s insight that substances are capable of carrying contrary qualities can be vindicated. However, paraphrasing Karen Barad in her discussion of Niels Bohr, “I propose an ontology that I believe to be consistent with [a number of Deleuze’s] views, although I make no claim that this is what he necessarily had in mind”.85 Consequently, Deleuze’s thought is only relevant here insofar as it advances our understanding of the split-nature of substance. In chapter 1, I take it that I have demonstrated the ontological necessity for the existence of discrete or individual substances. Contra Deleuze’s Spinozist monism and his continuum hypothesis with respect to the virtual, this necessity follows above all from the requirement that objects be separable from their relations to other objects if experimental activity is to be intelligible. In order for experiment to be possible, it is necessary that it be possible to form closed systems in which objects can express their powers. If objects or generative mechanisms were merely expressions of a continuum that is itself one, then it is difficult to see how this condition could ever be met. Yet given that it seems that this condition is regularly met, it seems that Deleuze’s monism must clearly be mistaken.
Approaching Deleuze’s thought more directly, two difficulties seem to besiege his monist continuum hypothesis. First, if the virtual is a single substance that is then partitioned into discrete entities, it is difficult to understand why the virtual ever departs from itself to become “alienated” in individuals at all. Deleuze’s tendency is to speak of the actual, of the individuated, as that which contributes no differences of its own but which is merely a sort of sterile secretion of the virtual. As Deleuze puts it,
[d]ifference is explicated, but in systems in which it tends to be cancelled; this means only that difference is essentially implicated, that its being is implication. For difference, to be explicated is to be cancelled or to dispel the inequality which constitutes it. The formula according to which ‘to explicate is to identify’ is a tautology. We cannot conclude from this that difference is cancelled out, or at least that it is cancelled in itself. It is cancelled in so far as it is drawn outside itself, in extensity and in the quality which fills that extensity. However, difference creates both this extensity and this quality.86
The terms “implication” and “explication” should be read etymologically here, rather than literally. “Explication” denotes not the activity of explanation, but rather “to unfold”. Here, then, the emphasis should be placed on the term “plication”, which indicates that which is folded. Consequently, the term “implication” should be read not in the sense of a possible logical inference from a given fact, but rather as denoting that which is enfolded or hidden in something else. From this we can derive the following table:
Following Simondon, Deleuze arrives at this conception of being and the relationship between the virtual and the actual on the grounds that “[i]t is notable that extensity does not account for the individuations which occur within it”.87 When Deleuze refers to an extensity, he is referring to an entity with qualities situated in time and space. Returning to the example of my blue coffee mug, simply by examining my coffee mug here and now, I cannot determine how it came to have the shape it has, the color that it has, why it is sitting here on my desk, etc.
Deleuze’s suggestion is thus that because extensity does not account for the individuations that occur within it (the qualities and structure that make it this individual), we must refer to another dimension, the implicit, the virtual, to account for these individuations. Furthermore, since the extensive consists of individual or individuated entities, Deleuze concludes that this supplementary dimension must be pre-individual. As Deleuze remarks, “[t]he individuating is not the simple individual”.88 However, in making this move, Deleuze renders the motivating grounds of individuation thoroughly mysterious. If the virtual is, as Deleuze suggests, a continuum and a whole populated by potent yet unactualized differences, and if the actual is merely a secretion or excresence of the virtual, what is it that leads the virtual to ever ex-plicate itself, to unfold itself, or to leave itself and fall into the sterile, actual individual? Difference comes from the domain of the virtual, not the actual, for the actual is precisely that domain where difference is canceled. Here, then, we encounter a problem similar to the one that haunted Plato’s theory of the forms, where we are left to wonder why the world of imperfect creatures ever comes into being and why the world of the perfect forms doesn’t simply reside in tranquil and unmoving eternal existence.
These observations lead to a second problem. As Hallward notes in his controversial study, Out of This World, Deleuze’s ontology essentially conceives being in terms of creativity and creating. This, according to Hallward, leads Deleuze to distinguish between the creating and the creature, the individuating and the individual, with the creature and the individual being granted a derivative status to that of the creating and individuating. As Hallward puts it,
Almost every aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy is caught up with the consequences of this initial correlation of being, creativity and thought. Roughly speaking, it implies: (a) that all existent things or processes exist in just one way, as so many distinct acts of creation or so many individual creatings; (b) that these creatings are themselves aspects of a limitless and consequently singular creative power, a power that is most adequately expressed in the medium of pure thought; (c) that every creating gives rise to a derivative creature or created thing, whose own power or creativity is limited by its material organisation, its situation, its actual capacities and relations with other creatures, and so on; (d) that the main task facing any such creature is to loosen and then dissolve these limitations in order to become a more adequate or immaterial vehicle for that virtual creating which alone individuates it.89
Hallward’s third point here is particularly salient. In treating difference, the virtual, the implicit, as that which is responsible for individuation, and the explicate, the actual, the individual as the product of individuation, Deleuze inevitably grants the creature or the individual a derivative place within being. The individual becomes a product of being, an effect of virtual difference, but certainly cannot be treated as a motor of difference in the world. Like the trail of slime left behind in the wake of a snail or slug, the individual is merely the remainder or excresence of a differential process of individuation that has already moved on.
What we thus get in Deleuze’s thought is a sort of vertical ontology of the depths. Rather than entities or substances interacting with each other laterally or horizontally, we instead get an ontology where difference arises vertically from the depths of the virtual. As a consequence, the individual takes on a secondary status as a mere effect of the genuine processes that all occur at the level of the virtual.
In a philosophically rich review of Hallward’s book, John Protevi contends that Hallward illicitly flattens the complexity of Deleuze’s ontology. As Protevi remarks,
The relations among actual, virtual and intensive form the most important issue in explicating Deleuze’s ontology. I would argue that we should consider the intensive as an independent ontological register, one that mediates the virtual and actual, which are its limits. Even if one doesn’t accept this and insists on a dualism of the virtual and actual, one would have to say that the intensive belongs with the actual.90
Protevi goes on to argue that,
Spatio-temporal dynamisms, that is, morphogenetic processes exhibiting intensive properties, are processes of individuation, of emergence from pre-individual fields. The paradigm cases for Deleuze are embryos and weather systems. In the biological register, the “field” of individuation (the gradients of which are laden with pre-individual singularities) is the egg, while the process of individuation is embryonic morphogenesis; in the meteorological register, the field of individuation is the pre-condition (the bands of different temperature and pressure in air and water) to the formation of wind currents or storms, which are the spatio-temporal dynamisms. […]. Any resident of Louisiana will be able to locate hurricanes for you in terms of their spatio-temporal co-ordinates. To be fair, we do have to distinguish between the location of a hurricane as embedded in a geographic co-ordinate system—its extensive properties—and the thresholds proper to its intensive properties. It’s only at certain singular points in the differential relations among air and water temperature and wind currents that thunderstorms, tropical depressions, tropical storms, and hurricanes form. Nonetheless, the point is that the weather system itself is the intensive process by which those singularities are actualized, and that this intensive process operates here, in this world.91
Quite right. What Protevi doesn’t seem to notice, however, is that this treatment of the relationship between the virtual, the actual, and the intensive requires a significant revision of Deleuze’s ontology. In his reading of Deleuze’s ontology, we note that Protevi perpetually refers to discrete and actual substances or individuals that interact with one another and perturb each other in a variety of ways. Far from a monistic virtual continuum that is then cut up into discrete entities, Protevi’s parsing of Deleuze’s ontology requires the existence of discrete substances or entities that interact with one another and evoke virtual powers within one another through these interactions. And here, in passing, we should recall Deleuze’s constant polemics against the concept of causality. As Deleuze remarks,
It is sufficient to understand that the genesis takes place in time not between one actual term, however small, and another actual term, but between the virtual and its actualisation—in other words, it goes from the structure to its incarnation, from the conditions of a problem to the cases of solution, from the differential elements and their ideal connections to actual terms and diverse real relations which constitute at each moment the actuality of time.92
If Deleuze is so quick to reject the notion of causality, then this is because causality works laterally or horizontally, from object to object, whereas the virtual works vertically from the implicate to the explicate. It is precisely this thesis that must be rejected under Protevi’s account. If Deleuze’s account of time in the relation between the virtual and the actual is here embraced, it is difficult to see how the actual terms evoked in Protevi’s characterization of Deleuze’s thought can have the sort of causal efficacy Protevi attributes to them. Rather, under Deleuze’s model of virtual time, any causal relation between actual terms can only be apparent or a sort of transcendental illusion. My point here is not that Protevi is mistaken in his account of the relation between the virtual, the actual, and the intensive, but rather that Deleuze’s account of virtual time, of the time of actualization, must be abandoned if something like Protevi’s account is to remain coherent. It must be possible for actual terms to causally interact with one another and for the actual to affect the virtual.
But if this is the case, then we can no longer say that the virtual is the pre-individual and the actual is the individual. The virtual is not something that produces the individual, but rather must strictly be a dimension of the individual. It is precisely the individual that precedes the virtual—transcendentally, not temporally—not the virtual that precedes the individual. If it is to be possible for substances or individuals to perturb each other, then being cannot consist of a whole or a continuum, but must instead come in discrete packets or substances. Moreover, it follows that the actual dimension of the entity cannot mark the erasure or cancellation of difference, but must instead itself be an instigator of difference in other entities and one of the mechanisms by which the volcanic, yet unactualized, powers of the virtual are released and set forth in the world. And here I note that when outstanding commentators on Deleuze such as Protevi and DeLanda set out to analyze the world, it is precisely in these terms that they speak. Far from treating the actual and substances as derivative, they instead display a profound attentiveness to the differences that individual substances make. Here the ontology of theoretical practice belies the ontology espoused when striving to describe what they’re doing in their practice.
In an interview Deleuze once remarked that,
Philosophers introduce new concepts, they explain them, but they don’t tell us, not completely anyway, the problems to which those concepts are a response. Hume, for example, set out a novel concept of belief, but he doesn’t tell us how and why the problem of knowledge presents itself in such a way that knowledge is seen as a particular kind of belief. The history of philosophy, rather than repeating what a philosopher says, has to say what he must have taken for granted, what he didn’t say but is nonetheless present in what he did say.93
It is in this way, I believe, that we should approach Deleuze’s deployment of the concept of the virtual. In short, what is the problem to which Deleuze’s concept of the virtual responds? However dimly Deleuze might have discerned the problem himself, the problem to which the concept of the virtual seems to respond is that of the split in objects between withdrawn being and qualities, coupled with the problem of the bare substratum. It appears that Deleuze clearly recognized that the being of substance cannot be identified with its qualities and actualized structure. Because substance changes, because it is capable of carrying contrary qualities, substance, in its proper being, must differ from its qualities. However, if substance is to differ from its qualities, then it requires a form of structure that is formatted without being qualitative. Without this other dimension of substances, we fall into the bare substratum problem discussed in the last chapter, where substances are completely blank, completely indifferent, and therefore, absurdly, all identical to one another.
It is precisely this domain of being that the virtual names, for the virtual is structure and potency without quality. However, having dimly glimpsed this problem, Deleuze immediately falls into a set of errors that lead his account of the virtual into incoherence. Oddly, these problems seem to arise from conceding far too much to actualism. Having recognized that the domain of the actual or qualities and extensities is incapable of accounting for the individuality of the individual or the substantiality of substance, Deleuze nonetheless treats the actual as the sole domain of the individual or primary substance. As a consequence, he’s led to characterize the domain of the virtual as the pre-individual, when he should instead treat the domain of the virtual as the domain of the individual, the substantial, or that which persists through change. The consequences of this decision are profound. By treating the domain of the virtual as the pre-individual and the domain of the actual as an effect of the virtual, Deleuze is left without an account of why the virtual actualizes itself at all (despite his impressive efforts to the contrary), and is led to treat the actual as a mere product, an excresence, that itself has no efficacy within being. What is required, by contrast, is an account of the virtual that treats it as a dimension of primary substances or discrete individuals, where substance precedes the virtual (transcendentally, not temporally) not the reverse, and where actual entities are capable of interacting with one another. It is to this account of the virtual that I now turn.
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze remarks that “[t]he virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual. Exactly what Proust said of states of resonance must be said of the virtual: ‘Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’”.94 Within the framework of onticology, the claim that the virtual is real is the claim that the virtual is always the virtuality of a substance or individual being. Put differently, the claim that the virtual is real is not the claim that the virtual is a potential being, but rather the claim that the virtual is always the virtuality or potentiality of a being or substance. Here the genitive is of the utmost importance. The virtual always belongs to a substance, not the reverse. Moreover, the virtual is always the potential harbored or carried by a discrete or individual being. In this regard, we must distinguish between the two halves of any object, substance, or difference engine. On the one hand, there is the actual side of an object consisting of qualities and extensities, while on the other hand, there is the virtual side of substances, consisting of potentialities or powers. In claiming that the virtual is “ideal”, Deleuze is not claiming that the virtual is mental or cognitive—though minds too have their virtual dimension—but rather that the virtual is relational. These relations, however, are not relations between entities, but constitute the endo-structure of an object, its internal topology. Finally, we can claim that it is entirely possible—if not common—for actually existing entities to remain in a state of virtuality such that they are fully real and existent in the world, fully concrete, without producing any qualities or extensities. Only on this condition can we make sense of Bhaskar’s claim that it is possible for generative mechanisms, difference engines, or substances to be real while remaining dormant such that they are out of phase with their qualities or events.
How, then, are we to understand this dimension of substance that is formatted without possessing qualities? Two features in particular render Deleuze’s concept of the virtual particularly well suited for theorizing this withdrawn dimension of substance. On the one hand, Deleuze is careful to emphasize that the virtual shares no resemblance to the actual. “Every object is double without it being the case that the two halves resemble one another”.95 If the actual is treated as embodying qualities and geometrical structure in the sense specified in section 3.1, then this captures the manner in which the virtual dimension of a substance differs from anything qualitative, thus providing us with substance that is structured or formatted without being qualitative. To illustrate this lack of resemblance between the virtual and actual halves of split objects, Deleuze gives the illuminating example of genes. “[G]enes as a system of differential relations”, of which virtual multiplicities are composed, “are incarnated at once in a species and the organic parts of which it is composed”.96 Genes, as a contributor to the overall form that an actualized organism embodies form a set of differential relations and singularities that share no resemblance to that actualized organism. Genes are among the conditions for the form the organism will take, but in no way resemble that organism.
On the other hand, the concept of virtuality allows us to theorize the manner in which substances are always individual substances without requiring reference to other substances or beings. According to Deleuze, the virtual is composed of “multiplicities”. I will have more to say about multiplicities momentarily, but for the moment it bears noting that according to Deleuze, “‘[m]ultiplicity’, which replaces the one no less than the multiple, is the true substantive, substance itself ”.97 Deleuze draws the concept of multiplicity from the differential geometry of Friedrich Gauss and Bernhard Riemann. As explained by Manuel DeLanda,
In the early nineteenth century, when Gauss began to tap into these differential resources, a curved two-dimensional surface was studied using the old Cartesian method: the surface was embedded in a three-dimensional space complete with its own fixed set of axes; then, using those axes, coordinates would be assigned to every point of the surface; finally the geometric link between points determining the form of the surface would be expressed as algebraic relations between the numbers. But Gauss realized that the calculus, focusing as it does on infinitesimal points on the surface itself (that is, operating entirely with local information), allowed the study of the surface without any reference to a global embedding space. Basically, Gauss developed a method to implant the coordinate axes on the surface itself (that is, a method of ‘coordinatizing’ the surface) and, once points had been so translated into numbers, to use differential (not algebraic) equations to characterize their relations.98
The concept of multiplicity is of great significance not for only mathematics, but ontology as well. For through enabling us to think the internal structure of a space without reference to a global embedding space, the concept of multiplicity also enables us to think the being of an individual substance independent of its relations to other substances or its exo-relations. It is for this reason that I refer to the virtual proper being of substance as consisting of endo-relations, an endo-structure, or an endo-composition. The point is not that all substances are spatial—when we discuss flat ontology we will see that this is not the case—but rather that multiplicity allows us to think individual substance in a purely immanent fashion detached from any sort of global embedding space or set of exo-relations. While substances can and do enter into relations with other substances, their being qua substance is not constituted by these exo-relations. Exo- relations often play a crucial role in the qualities a substance comes to embody at the level of local manifestations, but the being of substance in its substantiality is something other than these exo-relations. As an additional consequence of this concept of multiplicity, the Kantian conception of space and time as containers must here be abandoned as well in favor of a model of space and time arising from substances.
In defining multiplicities Deleuze remarks that “the utmost importance must be attached to the substantive form: multiplicity must not designate a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organisation belonging to the many as such, which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system”.99 A moment later, Deleuze goes on to explain that multiplicities must “thus be defined as a structure”.100 If multiplicities must be defined as a structure or a system, then this is because the elements that compose them,
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