Especially commendable in A Thousand Plateaus is the insistence of the authors on real living actors proliferating experience ever outward. Against the reductive currents of psychoanalysis and state philosophy that seek to hem us in, D+G develop a model of individual potentiality that is not focused on form but on intensity. We do not speak of subjectivities, we instead speak of intersections. We name the individual as a “haecceity” (261), and in so doing recognize a mode of speaking about “individuation” as something distinct, “not of subject, thing, or substance.” (261) The recognition by D+G that there is a way to speak of the individual not as a ‘thing’ subject to enslavement but rather as a line on a plane, as “the sum total of material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude)” is immensely important to understanding how they are able to conceive of the virtual as they do. There is a long and regrettable critical tradition of ignoring the productive power of the virtual, in particular with virtual technologies. Instead of analyzing technologies critically and interrogating them with an eye towards understanding them, we dismiss technologies of distance and virtual representation as inadequate world-screens filtering out the ‘real’ elements from our consciousness, leaving only its traces. The virtual is always defined downwardly in public critical discourse, as if it were a mechanism only capable of representing and mimetically producing, a mechanism utterly incapable of creating. D+G rightly recognize that nothing could actually be farther from the mark than this perspective. When we interface with new technologies we are experiencing the world(the ‘real’ world) through the use of a virtual prosthesis in a NEW WAY, a way that was previously impossible for us. When we do this, we establish a new and distinct connection to the world of things through a virtual medium. This is not mere word play, it is about whether or not we give value to the technological potential to experience and become. One couldn’t see a photograph of oneself standing in a field before the camera was invented. When one views said photograph one is experiencing the virtual: an always potential relation, but a NEW one between the various elements in play. The very experience of being able to see a photograph of oneself is virtual. It is a play of intensities, it is a realm of NEW experience opened up technology. Traversing the virtual gulf. D+G are useful for media critics and for those concerned about thinking seriously about technology because they take seriously the transformative potential of the virtual in ways Virilio and Baudrillard do not allow for. Virilio for example constantly makes broad general statements about the nature of technological vision in his War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, seeing all aerial reconnaissance vision technologies as equilibrate to one another. Close analysis shows that this is not the case. Some technological systems produce certain affectual orientations, different intensities in their operators than others do. The bomber plane where you drop a bomb and leave before you see the carnage it causes is not the same as the drone, from which you may survey at a safe distance the havoc your weapon has wrought. The cinema screen is not the moving surface of a photograph. The technologies are distinct and distinctly VIRTUAL. Technologies of the virtual are irreducible to one another and each demands its own rigirous analysis. Susan Buck-Morss her essay The Cinema Screen as Prosthesis of Perception writes that,

what fascinated the first filmmakers was precisely the fact that it could be a matter of indifference whether what is perceived [on the cinema screen] is real or not. On the screen the moving images have a present meaning despite the absence of corporeal bodies, which thereby becomes a matter of indifference. What counts is     the simulacrum, not the corporeal object behind it. In the prosthetic cognition of the cinema, the difference between documentary and fiction is thus effaced…they inhabit the surface of the screen as cognitive equivalents. Both the real event and the staged event are absent…In Baudrillard’s terms, the code takes over and dominates the meaning: “the code no longer refers back to any subjective or objective ‘reality’ but to its own logic.” …once the simulated imminence of the  reduced cinema object is the source of meaning, then a certain kind of violence becomes possible…I am speaking of the violence of the prosthetic perception itself (50-51)

Critics arguing against the productive/intersectional capacity of virtual technologies make an argument similar to this. They set a technology of interaction on a plane of equivalency with the cinema screen. Such a theoretical move is reductive and materialist in its critical thrust as it sets up a ‘screenification’ of the world, seeing equivalencies between two visual forms appearing on screens and goes no further than that. When a critic such as Baudrillard bemoans the ethical perils of reducing the world to a ‘screen’ unresponsive to ethical norms, he does not realize that by ignoring the actual technological aspects that differ between a cinema screen and a screen of another technological apparatus that he makes his argument a self-fulfilling prophecy. In refusing to actualy engage the ever changing factors the virtual holds in flux, he misses the rhizomatic productive capacity of the virtual entirely.

-Brian Ehrenpreis