Theorists have devoted more interest to questions of "the
virtual" recently. This is due, in part, to growing familiarity with the
scientific concepts necessary to its interrogation, as well as the
philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and those of philosophers he
has resurrected, such as Spinoza and Bergson. But this interest is also
the result of growing dissatisfaction with current theoretical
approaches that rely on "top-down" methods unable to effectively account
for the emergence or mutation of systems. Manuel DeLanda, for instance,
has referred in his writing to oversimplifications that attribute causes
to posited systems such as "late capitalism" without describing the
causal interaction of their parts, which would change in different
contexts. In his introduction to
Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi argues that cultural theory's over-reliance on
ideological accounts of subject-formation and coding has resulted in
"gridlock," as the processes that produce subjects disappear in
critiques that position bodies on a grid of oppositions (male-female,
gay-straight, etc.). In one of his more exceptional examples, Massumi
argues that Ronald Reagan's success as the "Great Communicator" was not
due to his mastery of image-based politics to hypnotize an unwitting
public. The opposite was the case. Reagan's halting speech and jerky
movements were the source of his power, the infinite interruptions in
his delivery so many moments of indeterminacy or virtual potential that
were later made determinate by specific receiving apparatuses, such as
families and churches. In short, interactions among non-ideological
parts produced ideological power. Critiques that consider only the ends
of ideology are unable to examine the very processes that create
constraining subject-formations in the first place.
Cached
A REVIEW OF: Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy,
