Virtual X and Ghost Effects

Brian Rotman
The Ohio State University

For better or worse the whole of our environment skyscrapers, highways, emotions,
orchards, oil wells, terrorists, icebergs, tomatoes organic and inorganic, aquatic plants
and Jason Bourne, pigeons, dogs, the smog in Brentwood, and the mountain dew in
Colorado is a virtual reality. Lewis H. Lapham, 2008

Were living in a supernatural world ... Were surrounded by ghosts. Jennifer Egan. The
Keep

Within the landscapes of the new media the virtual is everywhere. Virtual space, virtual
particles, virtual waves, virtual machines, virtual memory , organisms, and environments,
virtual molecules, virtual money and capitalism, virtual shopping, virtual books, virtual
universities, virtual bodies, virtual sex, virtual reality, virtual subjects, virtual presence,
virtual history, virtual keyboards, virtual war, and so on. In short, virtual X. where X
varies with ever greater range over of familiar and previously stable objects, procedures
and arenas of social, cultural, and scientific life. Why is this? Is the virtual a necessary
result? an epiphenomenon? a collateral effect of electronic technology? Should one speak
of an ontology of the virtual? How is the virtual related to embodiment and de-
embodiment? To the unreal? To the being and non being of ghosts? How are we to think
virtuality?

1 the virtual : virtual X

The most far-reaching and profound articulation of the virtual, one which dominates its
contemporary discussion, is due to Gilles Deleuze. Citing on several occasions a
formulation of Marcel Proust he never departs from, Deleuze insists: Exactly what
Proust said of states of resonance must be said of the virtual: Real without being actual,
ideal without being abstract; and symbolic without being fictional. Deleuze understands
the real as comprising two distinct but mutually entangled and co-existent orders -- the
actual and the virtual. Bodies, sensations and processes of the world actualize the virtual
and the past/future of the virtual inheres in and allows all that is or capable of being
 2

actual to emerge. The virtual is not actual but it is unquestionably real: The virtual must
be defined as strictly a part of the real object as though the object had one part of itself
in the virtual into which it is plunged as though into an objective dimension. (Difference
and Repetition 208-9) The virtual is not, he is at pains to point out, the same as the
possible. This is because the possible is merely that which lacks realization but which in
all other respects resembles the real, whereas the virtual does not resemble, in fact is
qualitatively different from, the actual.

A part of the object can appear to have plunged into the virtual because it already owes
its being, as does all that is actual, to the virtual. The relation lies at the heart of
Deleuzes philosophy of difference, according to which reality furthers itself by
actualizing the virtual through a perpetual differing from itself which he calls becoming.
Actualization is the means of creation. The movement of actualization is the opening up
of the virtual to all what befalls it. (Grosz 27), its perpetual encounter with chance and
chaos: the new objects, states of affairs -- evolves out of the old, the real
enlarges/creates itself, as the virtual crystallizes into a determinate actuality.

Deleuze details this evolution of the world from the virtual to the actual as passing
through two stages of determination from what he conceives of as an aboriginal virtual
chaos. In the first (differentiation) the virtual becomes consistent, becomes an entity
on a plane of immanence that sections the chaos producing the event, understood as the
virtual content of an Idea. In the second determination (differenciation) this virtual
content, in all its internal relations and singularities, is actualized, its relations and
singularities governing manifest in -- objects and bodies. The event is not, he
emphasizes, the state of affairs. It is actualized in a state of affairs, in a body, in a lived,
but it has a shadowy and secret part that is continually subtracted from or added to its
actualization. The event, in other words (words he takes from the Stoics), is immaterial,
incorporeal, unlivable. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 156) It lives, or rather is lodged, is
suspended, within duration, as a meanwhile (entre-temps) where nothing takes place, an
infinite awaiting that is already infinitely past. (158)
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This understanding of the enduring event derives from Henri Bergson who developed an
idea of the virtual in Matter and Memory allied to a radical conceptualization of time as
duration (dure). According to this, the past, that is, the present that has passed, the no
longer actual, nonetheless exists and is real. Though accessed through consciousness and
reminiscence, the past exists outside its human retrieval. For Bergson two temporal
orders, two orthogonal dimensions of time preside over the real. Actual time, measured
by differences of degree, and virtual time consisting of differences of kind. Actual time,
what one might call the time of Chronos, is the familiar time of linear flow, a serial
succession of actualities, clock time measured along an infinitely divisible spatial
continuum of instants. Virtual time, a-synchronous time, what might be called the time of
Aon, is time as a simultaneity, a multiplicity of co-existent moments differing
qualitatively from each other. An infinite awaiting is thus a kind of phenomenological,
subjectivist illusion of the virtual time of duration.

My interest here in Deleuzes articulation of the virtual is pragmatic rather than

explicatory, so that one needs to ask: how does it help, if indeed it does, to think
contemporary virtuality? How does one arrive at the adjectival formulation -- virtual X --
from the substantive, the virtual? After all, in its contemporary usage virtuality is
always relative, we call a thing virtual, we attribute virtuality to it, against something
X -- not felt or understood to be so. Moreover, to complicate matters, the thing we call
virtual is not virtual at all: virtual X like X, is a state of affairs, an actuality. Thus if X is,
for example, shopping in its customary sense, then virtual X is another actuality, a new
form of digital, on-line, electronic -- shopping. We might accommodate this relative
sense of virtuality -- virtual X in the face of X -- to the Deleuzian virtual by seeing it as
the result of a kind of reverse engineering. Thus, before any question of virtual shopping
arises we start from the fact that shopping in its customary sense, is already an
actualization of a virtual event E, an event comprising a multiplicity of virtual relations
and singularities pertaining to exchange, choice, acquisition, goods, worth
bodies, a store, and so on. But nothing is final: it is always possible de-actualize X, to
return from X to the event E which it actualized, and through a new determination, a re-
differenciation -- omitting some of the relations within E, retaining others with different
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intensities and speeds re-actualize X as virtual shopping. But then the question what
makes us ascribe virtuality to the re-actualized form when, at least from the perspective
of Deleuzes ontology, its no more and no less virtual than X?

One answer would be to understand the feeling of virtuality attributed to Virtual X, the
very reason for calling it virtual, as an effect of its co-presence with X.i The virtual event
E, their common source, evoked in the juxtaposed presence of X and its re-engineered
form and thus made visible, able to be apprehended in a way not possible in the
presence of X alone -- allows the re-actualized form of shopping to feel and be
designated as virtual. From the Proust-Deleuze formula, one might model this feeling as
one of resonance -- the apprehension of virtuality is then analogized to the hearing of an
interference between the two patterns of actuality. But its necessary to add a
directionality to this symmetry. Whatever they are subsequently understood to share,
virtual X arrives in terms of X and not conversely; it is a secondary object, one which in
some way or other re-presents or re-enacts the meaning, the sense, the power or effect of
X.

Precisely such an understanding underlies the dictionary definition due to Charles Peirce
(1902): A virtual X (where X is a common noun) is something, not an X, which has the
efficiency (virtus) of an X. This, he continues, is the proper meaning of the word, but it
has been seriously confounded with potential, which is almost its contrary. For the
potential X is of the nature of X, but without its actual efficiency. (A confusion formally
identical to that identified for the possible by Bergson-Deleuze.) He gives an example
from dynamics: A virtual velocity is something not a velocity, but a displacement; but it
is equivalent to a velocity in the formula what is gained in velocity is lost in power.
Peirce adds further examples: Edmund Burkes notion of virtual representation of the
American Colonies in the British Parliament; Miltons question as to whether angels have
virtual or immediate touch; and virtual knowledge a term of Scotus defined by him.
(1931-66, vol 6: 372) Elsewhere he characterizes animal instinct as virtual, as the
capacity to act without reasoning as if reasoning were present. Evidently, Peirces
formulation directly captures the contemporary usage. Thus, provided the sense of the
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virtus involved is identified appropriately, each of the myriad virtual somethings

confronting us in the electronic logos fits the formula: something not an X that has the
virtus (in the identified sense), the power, the efficiency, the efficacy of X.

Peirces definition is part of his semiotic, his doctrine based on the triad of a sign, the
signs object, and a sign-interpreting mind whose activity gives rise to a new sign, an
interpretant, and so on in a triangular spread he called semiosis. Within this ever-
enlarging universe meaningful thought consists of manipulating signs and their
interpretants according to procedures that are always futured: No present actual thought
(which is mere feeling) has any meaning, any intellectual value, for this lies not in what
is actually thought, but in what this thought is maybe connected with in representation by
subsequent thoughts; so that the meaning of a thought is altogether something virtual.
(vol 5: 289)

Meanings are certainly real and Peirce is distinguishing here two orders within the real:
the actual, exemplified by bodies and feelings, and the virtual, their time-bound futured
-- meanings: At no instant in my state of mind is there cognition or representation, but in
the relation of my states of mind at different instants there is. These relations between
states are not to be identified with their successive embodiments: The mind is virtual,
not a series of moments, not capable of existing except in a space of time. (vol 8: 248
emphasis added). Peirce didnt elaborate what mind either individual minds or Mind as
interpretive logos -- existing in a space of time might mean, though he did have a
concept of a universal or quasi-mind that points in that direction. Neither did he
thematize the concept of the virtual as such, but rather located its meaning indirectly in
relation to the metaphysics of Ockham and Duns Scotus, to what they called virtual
within their understanding of signification.ii Nevertheless, as is evident, the virtual for
Peirce and for Deleuze cut along many of the same joints. For each of them the virtual is
opposed to the actual as two orders of the real. Each insists (on identical grounds) on the
necessity of separating the possible (potential) from the virtual. Each makes temporal
non-seriality, a past/future simultaneity, central to the virtual nature of mind. On this
last, it does no violence to Peirces thought to identify his temporal space of co-existing
 6

times with Bergsons duration, suitably relativized to a semiotically conceived theoretical

framework.

But we are still left with a question. If the virtual has always been the source of the real,
an essential core of the never-ending business of becoming, as Deleuze says, why is it we
are now so steeped in it? Why has virtual become a universal modifier within present
day reality? Obviously, it is the advent of electronic media and computational
technologies, their alterations and disruptions of bodies and their re-engineering of states
of affairs, that is responsible for a new irruption of the strange not quite real -- affect
which we designate as virtual. The contemporary virtual is always relative to something:
some actuality has been modified, virtualized. In which case it is Peirces sign-oriented
version of virtuality, framed in media terms -- virtual X is a re-mediated X -- rather than
Deleuzes ontology that provides a more immediately usable vocabulary. Ill return to
contemporary effects of re-mediation later, but before this, I want to ask about the
virtual before the electronic era,. What about previous eras? Does a virtual, not-quite-
real, affect emerge as an effect of previous re-mediations? What might this be for the
medium of alphabetic writing? For spoken language itself?

2 ghost effects
The human world is full of supernatural beings, real, quasi-real, and/or imagined entities
such as ghosts, specters, spirits, demons, devils, gods, and angels each with its own
(disputed, problematic) relation to presence and agency. The attributes of the virtual we
have encountered real not actual, strange, no-quite-real, incorporeal, a-temporal,
immaterial, unlivable, imaginary, disembodied suggest that virtual things and ghosts are
intertwined, that the virtual -- incorporeal idea behind/inside and hidden in the actual,
invisible structure and image of thought -- is inseparable from ghost effects. One site
where these effects emerge, where the virtual/actual nexus gives rise to them, is when a
medium any suitably complex communicational medium impinges on itself.
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Observe that any communicational medium posits a universal, virtual user, a figure as
distinct from an actual embodied user as an algebraic variable is from any particular
number substituted for it; a figure which presides over all past and future users of the
medium. Given the right context, this virtual being can be reified, hypostatized as a ghost
an autonomous, free-standing agent with the power to manifest itself in the world of
human actuality. A simple example occurred in the context of the electromagnetic
unheimlich associated with the medium of telegraphy (Erik Davis, 68), where the
mediums virtual user, an arbitrary, invisible and unknown sender, was identified with
the spirit of a dead person, a spirit able to telegraphic its presence by transmitting
information through a human medium who shaman-like accedes to or is possessed by
its presence. Telegraphy is an electric form of written communication, its ghost spirits
reflect and ride on the back of much older ghost effects witnessed in the uncanny
presence of a voice stored in a scroll waiting to be ventriloquized into living speech. And
behind this lies the incomparably more ancient ghost effect that comes into being with the
advent of symbolic language, as an effect of human speech. So, two re-mediations, a
double layer of virtual X: the alphabetic virtualization of speech, and then further back,
spoken language itself as a virtualization of a prior medium, the iconic and indexical pre-
speech language of gesture.

The more recent layer is the once ghostly but now naturalized voice of alphabetic writing.
Within our textually dominated logos, the virtus of speech is identified with its meaning,
what it signifies, its cognitive or intellectual content. In this sense writing perfectly fits
Peirces formula as virtual speech: something not speech but with the efficiency of
speech. Writing virtualizes speaking; texts are frozen -- virtual -- utterances. But not
actual ones: writing is not speech. Its value and use, as a communicational medium, lies
in its projective capacity, speech at a distance, speech after itself, speech whose sense
and content is resituated from the time, place, and circumstances of its production to
elsewhere, to other times, to unknown future contexts. It achieves this opening across
space-time by a systematic de-embodiment: substituting for the here-and-now, breathing
presence of the one who utters an abstracted, invisible author. Cutting speech loose,
severing it from the voice, replaces an analogue spoken stream which unfolds and has a
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character and intensity and is modulated over time by a sequence of discrete word signs
(themselves artifacts of writing). Alphabetic writing offers static inscriptions in place of
the dynamics of speech. It ignores the movement, manner, style, and modulation of an
utterance. It is deaf to the vocal affect projected/induced by tone namely, the entire field
of mood, feeling, passions, and attitudes. This is because it is unable as a notational
system to record sonic effects which extend beyond the single word -- the hesitations,
silences, changes of pitch, rhythm, emphasis, timbre, sharpness, and musicality that
convey tone. In short, tone is the presence of the body inside speech, an auditory
metonym of the gesturing body. Knowing nothing of tone, the alphabetic writing machine
introduces the possibility of a de-embodied, affectless form of communication.iii

Could there be a being who communicated thus? A being whose voice was that of
alphabetic writing? Yes, indeed. The God of the Torah, Jahweh, the one who announces
himself on Sinai with the enigmatic formula I am that I am and instructs Moses that he
be named to the Israelites as I am, is precisely such a self-ventriloquizing being. There
is a double reflexivity at play here. The reflective act of self-enunciation, the
saying/writing of I, and the recursion inherent in the peculiar form of Jahwehs self-
naming.

Self-enunciation is medium specific. Spoken and written I are radically distinct: they
have different relations to embodiment, operate differently in their milieus, and preside
over distinctive forms of subjectivity. The classic definition of the former I refers to
the act of individual discourse in which it is uttered and it designates its speaker
(Benveniste) -- has no parallel for the I of a text. There is no unique act of individual
discourse, no physical body tied to it, and no necessary connection (let alone identity)
between the one who may have written, or caused to have written, I, and the one or
thing or fiction that might or might not be designated by it. In short, in relation to the I
of speech, the written I is virtual.

But if, as at Sinai, there is an appropriate context of enunciation, these differences can be
and were nullified, and it becomes possible for the writer and speaker of I to be
 9

indistinguishable, for the actual and virtual to coalesce. A new kind of ontologically
ambiguous entity, a hybrid agency, fusing an embodied speaking I with the floating,
disembodied presence of the textual I, comes into existence: an actual being with a
virtual voice, a virtual being who speaks. Interestingly, according to Pascal Boyers
evolutionary anthropology of gods and ghosts, hybrid beings which violate an ontological
attribute but allow all others not affected by the violation to remain in place, are to be
found in diverse human cultures.

Jahwehs self-declaration I am that I am and the initial fragment of it I am are

circularly related: each refers to the other for its signification: designation and designator,
medium and its user, existence and its enunciatior are folded into each other and become
One. The effect is to conjure Jahweh into existence as a singular and unique autochthon
of alphabetic writing. By transposing ancient performative word magic let there be light
from speech to its alphabetic inscription, Jahweh arises out of the written declaration of
himself as an existent being. The move is a recursion made possible by and only
exploitable within a form of writing. One might note that computer engineers, not
coincidentally refer to a recursive operation within a program as the program calling
itself.

What, then, might be the attributes of a being who speaks in a voice absent of all toneiv?

Human speech incorporates and is addressed to the other. It assumes an addressee, a

speaking body like itself who listens. Tone metonymically witnesses the speakers body
and signals awareness of the expected presence of a similarly voiced listener. But how
could a voice neutral in tone flat, expressionless, lacking all rhythm, having zero affect
- acknowledge or exhibit awareness of the presence of the other? Would it not, on the
contrary, evince total indifference to the very existence of a listener? And would not such
a neutral voice, one that does not, has no means to recognize my being, induce in me an
emptiness, an experience of absolute that is, inhuman -- terror. Moreover, prosodic or
tonal differentiation voice -- is from infancy one of the principal means by which
humans individuate themselves and tell each other apart. In the absence of prosody, the
 10

bearer of such a voice is unknowable in an auditory sense as an individual, as a speaking

being among others. Voice, Italo Calvino says, means that there is a living person ...
who sends into thin air this voice different from all other voices. (Quoted Caravero
2005, 1) Thus it is with the alphabetic God who exists and speaks only as a voiceless
writer. Short of invoking a plurality of indistinguishable and interchangeable speakers
(like identical atoms or geometric points or arithmetical units), a toneless voice can only
invoke a singularity, a one-and-only, self-identical entity comparable to nothing outside
itself; a monobeing who is not merely one of a kind, but is its kind.

Thus, regardless of the truth or otherwise of the theological narratives that account for
them, two of Jahwehs principal features, a presence too terrifying to behold and his
unique, monotheistic status, There is no other ... no God but me, are media effects, the
inevitable characteristics of a ghost revealed and known only reflexively within an
alphabetic text, which from then on has served as a fetish for his invisible presence.

I turn now to an earlier reflexivity, one that engendered a more personal, less global and
monolithic kind of supernatural spirit, what could be called the ghost of language. Weve
seen how writings ghost emerges out of the oscillating co-presence of the actual and the
virtual via two self-enunciations, the spoken and written I, which by a confusing of
media project a hybrid speaking/writing agency, the monobeing Jahweh who for so long
has haunted the alphabetic logos of the West. Is there any analogous effect within
language? An oscillating co-presence of actual and virtual agencies to be found
inhabiting human speech, a ghost effect of orality itself, which arises from the very
practice of spoken language? One that might likewise emerge from a juxtaposition of two
self-enunciations a spoken I and a pre-linguistic I, that is, an a-linguistic dumb Me.

Evidently, each of these enunciations is a sign with an object and operating in an

interpretive universe, a logos or mind as Peirce puts it, which accorded it significance.
In signifying itself the Me folds the medium of enunciation back on itself, the signs
object is the body of the mediums user. The only possibility for an interpretive universe
within which such an I before speech could be uttered is the pre-human mind
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presided over by gestural communication. Such an I, The Me of homo gesturalis would

denote a kinesthetically and haptically experienced self mediated via reflexive touching
and pointing. In terms of Peirces by now familiar formula, if X is the field of pre- human
gesture then virtual X is speech. Thus as texts are the virtual forms of utterances which
yield speech at a distance so utterances yield gestures at a distance by virtualizing the
touching, pointing and signaling of the semiotic body.

What type of sign is the gestured I ? Peirce identified three modes of sign use -- iconic,
indexical, and symbolic -- according to whether their referents resembled, were
contiguous with, or conventionally linked to their object. Any manner of self-
enunciation, here the declared Me, is always indexical, it points to the physical presence
of the signer; the gestured I is also iconic, being a signifying movement of the body
bearing a resemblance to its object. But it does not function in Peirces third mode: the
gestured I is not symbolic if, as seems generally accepted, symbolic reference seems
inseparable from indeed defines -- spoken language. The coming into being of speech
appears, then, as the acquisition of virtual communication, the achievement of symbolic
thought from the iconic-indexical actuality of gestures. But how did the leap from actual
to virtual gestures, the semiotic jump from homo gesturalis to the sapient use of symbols
come about?v

This is the question Terrence Deacons account of the evolution of human speech
addresses. Language did not arrive out of thin air, for no reason Deacon insists. Symbolic
communication arose to solve a problem. It was driven by the need to regulate
reproductive behavior in order to benefit from group hunting practices. This required the
establishment of alliances and social contracts that only some form of symbol, albeit
rdimentary and experimental, could represent. Once initiated, however, symbols would,
Deacon argues, have become more prevalent and complex by a process of bio-cultural or
Baldwinian evolution. The brains capacity to signify and the cultural environs in which
it operates co-evolved in a series of feedback loops. Changes in the newborns brain,
manifest in its cognitive abilities, work to determine which features of language it is
capable of using and which not. These exert a selective pressure on the brain to develop
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along certain lines, which further impose/facilitate semiotic possibilities of spoken

language available to the newborn, and so on. Deacon maps out the neuro-linguistic
itinerary whereby symbolic reference grows out of and is distributed among layers of
symbol-like tokens representing relations among indexical referents.vi The outcome of
this co-evolutionary cycle, iterated over an unknown number of growingly less dumb
generations, is fully symbolic human speech.

Speech entwines two forms of self-reference, an actual and a virtual, which alternate and
impact each other; an interaction experienced by all talking beings as an ever-present
self-doubling. The virtuality introduced by human speech ruptures the pre-linguistic
subjectivity, the gesturo-haptic umwelt, of homo gesturalis. In this it allows an escape
from the upper reaches of what Merlin Donald calls the mimetic stage of cognitive
development (1991, 1998), from the Me into the symbolic domain of oral thought, at the
same time as it projects this subjectivity into every spoken utterance.

Beyond its inescapable co-presence with the Me, the spoken I cannot but fold within
itself the co-presence of other selves, the you and the generic they, to whom utterance
is addressed and without whom human speech is impossible. On the understanding that
human language evolved to solve problems of intersubjective agency and social alliances
this seems conceptually inevitable: One cannot conceive of oneself as oneself without
also conceiving others as self-directed, egocentric agents. (Corazza 348) This
interfolding of actual and virtual reference, which shadows the uttered I and enters into
every occasion of linguistically mediated auto-reference, might be the basis, Deacon
suggests, for a biology of ghosts or ghostliness, a natural origin for the psychological
salience and subjective reality of non-mortal, non-natural entities: The symbolic
representation of self, he says, provides a perspective on that curious human intuition
that our minds are somehow independent of our bodies; an intuition ... translated into
beliefs about disembodied spirits and souls that persist beyond death. [454]

3 a third wave of the virtual

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Plainly, the gesturo-haptic Me does not disappear with its virtualization. On the contrary,
homo gesturalis lives within us, enjoying/suffering new forms of corporeal affect and
unspeakable subjectivity music, dance, theatre, art -- made possible by but
inexpressible within language. Writing virtualized speech, it didnt overthrow or
marginalize it. On the contrary writing augments, disrupts, and recreates speech no less
than displacing it. Likewise speech doesnt put paid to gesture and dumb self-presence. In
short, though each unfolds from its predecessor, gesture, speech, and writing co-exist and
continue their mediations according to their own logics. We are now confronting a third
wave of the virtual, a new universe of virtual X engendered by parallel computational
technologies and networked media. It too will both transform and co-exist with all
previous medial domains.vii In a diagram of successive logoi and their feedback
virtualizations:

gestural oral textual computational

| | |
X <------- speech | |
--------- X <------- writing |
--------------------- X ------- networks

For brevity Ive spoken of virtual X where X is taken to be an entire medium. This is
shorthand for a distributed, heterogeneous global phenomenon, namely the coming into
being of entire assemblage of virtual Xs as X varies over the objects, worlds, processes,
practices, and states of affairs the actualities presided over by the medium in question;
what is more, not only the medium in question but all previous media, so that numerous
Xs are themselves results of prior virtualizations, and so on. Though no doubt the re-
mediations can be extended further back along a chain of earlier modes of embodied
communication and expression, we start here with gesture.viii Thus speech virtualizes
individual and local actualities, states of affairs, held in place by gestural communication.
The result is a gesturo-oral interpretive universe or logos. Writing likewise virtualizes the
actualities given meaning and held in place in this latter universe to produce a gesturo-
oral-textual universe of meaning. The actualities of this universe over which X ranges are
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variously gestural (dance), gesturo-oral (shopping), and gestoro-oral-textual, namely the

myriad cultural objects, institutions, and practices of the alphabetically literate West, their
virtualizations ushering in an electronic universe of interpretation.

Unlike the advent of speech and writing which, however diverse and complex their
effects, are de-limitable as single media with an internal coherence, the contemporary
scene comprises an entire ecology of electronic media effects which produce
virtualizations of varying and divergent intensities and consequence. I shall consider
two quite different sites within the electronic logos -- money and the psyche. In the first,
X is the medium of monetary exchange and virtual X has a highly material, geo-political
dimension in relation to capitalism, in the second X is the lettered self fashioned by
alphabetic writing and virtual X has a phenomenological dimension on the level of
individual subjectivity.

If X is monetary exchange might one expect its virtualization to exhibit effects, in some
way analogous to those of speech and writing? Not necessarily the linguistic emergence
of disembodied spirit selves or the textual coming into being of an autonomous,
mysteriously external thing, but some more abstract and difficult to grasp type of ghost-
effects associated with the virtualization of money? Certainly, the medium of monetary
exchange is no stranger to autonomous, mysteriously external forces and invisible
agencies. Contemporary money presents itself in two forms: actual money, the familiar
circulating money of goods, services, and paychecks underlying the current workings of
modern (still largely production-based) capitalism; and the electronically transformed,
networked version of it the virtual money of the transnational financial markets.

My focus is virtual money, but there is an aspect of actual money, its orientation to itself,
particularly relevant to the theme here. Money operates reflexively, it recursively folds
onto itself, precisely when its used to buy and sell itself; when a price can be assigned to
it, when it becomes the object of its own mediation. The price assigned to capital is the
interest on it the amount charged/paid to own it over time. Charging interest on money
usury -- was evil, a grave sin within medieval Christianity which banned the practice on
 15

the grounds that usury created something out of nothing, a power only God could
possess. Interest has thus an affect of the unnatural by reflection: money got by a satanic
inversion of Jahwehs powers, Christianity has long since abandoned its ban and made
friends with usury. (Observe, however, the interdiction of interest survives, on religious
grounds not dissimilar to Christianitys, as a central principle of contemporary Islamic
banking.ix An obvious question: does virtual capitalism, insofar as it operates reflexively,
exhibit anything analogous to the phenomenon of interest? I suggest the answer is that it
does, the phenomenon is a derivative contract.

As their name indicates, derivatives options, futures, swaps, and a host of lesser known
and arcane instruments -- are secondary or meta-objects which derive their value from
other assets. One buys or sells an option (or futures) contract, for example, which in turn
allows one (requires one) to buy or sell some underlying asset at a certain price at a
specified future date. Mathematically engineered, complex and frequently opaque with a
strangely imaginary or virtual character, derivatives have been increasingly recognized
as the crucial determinant of a new virtual -- phase of capitalism which feeds off what
is perhaps the only new territory open to late capitalism -- its own future. Certainly,
their constitution as instruments and the economic power of derivatives lies in their
engagement with the future, with their handling of financial contingency articulated in
the form of risk. They trade risk as a commodity with a price calculated on yet-to-occur
events. Derivatives, it is said, use uncertainty by virtualizing it. (Arnoldi 23)

For derivative markets to come into being and reproduce themselves three
transformations -- virtualizations -- each now an intrinsic element of contemporary
capitalism, had to be put in place: (a) an instantaneous and frictionless storage and
movement of capital, (b) a radically re-conceptualized understanding of financial risk,
and (c) a model for assigning a price to derivative contracts based on this risk.

Ad (a), a suitably frictionless form of monetary exchange was initiated in 1973 when
actual money was virtualized -- made inconvertible, transnational and electronically
mediated. The dollar was severed from gold to float and become a commodity priced
 16

against other currencies. Financial capital could flow without hindrance in a web of
global markets, an on-line virtual space of instantly executable electronic transactions not
located geographically and operating outside the economic control of nation states. Ad
(b), a new conception of risk, virtual risk, emerged from modern portfolio theory.
Traditionally, risk concerns the likelihood that some future state fall in price of an asset,
rise of ocean temperature will occur. Financially, this would be a prediction, based on
the valuation in terms of its fundamentals, that the asset would lose value. Risk of this
sort is actual risk. Virtual risk is not concerned with the predicted loss of value, the
market price of an asset, but with the assets relative unruliness, the size of its variation
over time. In climate terms, actual risk might concern a feared temperature increase or ice
loss; virtual risk abstracts this into the frequency and size of weather extremes. Virtual
risk is a mathematical entity which conceptualizes risk as variance of return on assets
where variance (more accurately co-variance) is a stochastic, purely statistical measure of
the volatility of an assets price over time, the magnitude of swings in a price around its
mean; a measure, in other words, of relative, internal variability of an assets price and
not of its absolute change. (LiPuma and Lee 77) Ad (c), 1973 also saw the introduction of
the Black-Scholes model for pricing options. This put the concept of virtual risk, applied
to the derivatives underlying asset, at the center of the contracts price which included a
baseline interest rate (of non-derived actual money) and the amount or frequency of
volatility over the time-period built-in to the derivative contract.

Derivatives are the means by which virtual money prices itself. They allow virtual
capitalism to act on itself, buying and selling a fragment of the/its future every time a
derivative is traded; a reflexivity internalized in their meta-leveled structure of recursive
trading: buying/selling contracts to buy/sell an underlying asset. Like interest derivatives
price money over a time period, but unlike interest on actual money the price is not
future-neutral but impacts and is impacted by future states of itself. Derivatives, one can
say, are a virtual form of interest.

Since the early 1970s the volume of derivatives has grown exponentially to many trillions
of dollars, far in excess of the circulation of capital needed to service real trade; a
 17

volume swollen by a derivatives built-in leverage: its low price (in actual money)
relative to the multiplicatively large amounts of derived -- virtual money it puts in play.
Trading derivatives offers means of insuring or hedging against risk. But if derivatives
use uncertainty by virtualizing risk, they also, it seems, abuse it. As the functional form
speculative capital assumes in the market place (Nasser Saber, quoted LiPuma etc 24)
derivatives appear to add to the very forms of risk they are insuring against.x Whether this
is the result of a self-fulfilling, feed-back and feed-forward mechanism - hedge trades
and speculation adding to the kinds of uncertainty they are designed to neutralize, a risk
which in turn requires further hedging, or the result of some other dynamic of expansion,
virtual capitalism has created an autonomous, eerily opaque financial instrument devoid
of productive labor or material resources, a ghostly means of perpetual financial motion.
Traditional ghosts come from the past, revenants, spirits of the dead that return to haunt
the present. Derivatives reverse the flow. As weve seen they deal in futurity, they
introduce the not-yet into a present. A present which as Rich Doyle points out is thus
permanently disciplined by the future, one in which the (not yet dead) body can be the
site of a futures contract on itself (with an unspecified settlement date) through the yet-to-
be-realized magic of cryonic re-generation.xi

Enough about money in the electronic universe. I want to finish with the second example
I mentioned, namely the virtualization of the self. Since its inception, reasoning and
thinking in the West (historical, legal, religious, philosophical, literary) has taken place
in/through alphabetic texts, resulting in a written discourse so pervasive and constitutive
of what it mediates that its effects have been, from within it, almost invisible. Among the
less obvious objects of alphabetic mediation is the self. Since the Middle Ages, Illich and
Sanders observe, one can always avoid picking up a pen, but one cannot avoid being
described, identified, certified, and handled like a text. Even in reaching out to become
ones own self, one reaches out for a text. (1988, x), an effect only recognized, it
seems, in face of the threat to the text a clash of logics -- posed by contemporary
technology.
 18

The logic of alphabetic discourse is serial and atomistic. Serial in two senses: the
sequentially ordered lines of text which project the temporal order of speech into a linear
space and the principle of alphabetic ordering that makes possible dictionaries, indexes,
and the numerous other devices of post-printing textual discourse. Atomistic because the
alphabet notates meaningless phonemes, sound bits that are irreducible, self-contained
and unrelated to anything outside themselves. Both these attributes are nullified by the
connectivity of computational networks. The logic of networks is parallel, it governs
many actions at once not one after the other; and it is distributed, it points outward to an
indeterminate plurality rather than inward to an irreducible monad. Thus, if the model of
the lettered self is a unitary, enclosed, free-standing book which, like the bible, refuses
pictures of a world outside itself, its virtual analogue, a network of open-ended text
fragments interlaced with images (themselves operating according a logic of
simultaneity), is internally and externally plural.

An internally plural psyche has been thought before. Among others, William James wrote
of an inner mental multiplicity, Friedrich Nietzsche called for a multiplicity of subjects
whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness My
hypothesis: the subject as multiplicity. (1968, 260). Earlier David Hume likened the
mind to a kind of theatre and the soul as comparable to a republic or commonwealth,
in which several members are united by the reciprocal ties of government and
subordination. (1951) What gives these ideas contemporary truth is their engagement
with external multiplicity, with the ecology of distributed effects and parallel
computational and imagistic -- processes within which the virtual self operates.
Ultimately, the inner and outer multiplicities engage as the separations between internal
subjective and external technological, individual and social, the I and the we/they
become ever more porous. The inner experiential and outer mediated forms of
collectivity enfold each other. The private, monadic and individual is invaded by the
public, the historical, the social; what was the outside world of events enters (and reveals
itself as having always entered) the individual soul in the mode of personal destiny.
 19

Evidently, a large-scale and radical transformation in the meaning of human is taking

place. Long-held ideas of human nature, the self, of subjectivity, of the human-
technology nexus, of autonomy and agency, of communication, of the body and its mind,
articulated over the course of nearly three millennia of textual discourse, are being
overhauled, disrupted, transformed. We are undergoing a discontinuity in the human
condition whose aftermath, for those who read transformed human as humanity left
behind, announces the advent of the post-human. But the prefix post conveys a
progressive or teleological sense that misrepresents the situation. Better alongside rather
than beyond.: from what has been said about re-mediation, nothing is left behind. The era
of speech obviously followed and fashioned itself against gestural communication, but it
is no more beyond or post-gestural than writing is post-oral. In each case the actual and
its virtualized forms co-exist and interact. Likewise, the logos being put in place by the
parallel computational technologies and distributed electronic media both disrupts and
works in parallel with the preceding logoi. Thus a more apt label, one which honors the
dynamic of this co-existence, as well as the intrinsic parallelism of its contemporary
mediation, might be para-human.

Para-humanity, then, would be a collectivity of para-selves, a pan-human assemblage of

psyches, each conscious of its newly recognized status of being no longer an
autonomous, serially proceeding monad inside an impermeable boundary. A para-psyche
which recognizes the exteriority of its interior, sees its origin and destination, its coming
into being and future, as simultaneously inside and outside itself. A psyche which
recognizes its plurality, a Nietzschean construct consonant with the formulation the
subject as multiplicity, and experiences itself as a play of multiple, divergent and
mobile parallelisms. A psyche which recognizes its own virtuality, understands itself as
the actualization of the event of being here and narrates itself accordingly as an
actual/virtual interstitial beingxii. In other necessarily paradoxical words, a self which re-
cognizes itself as its own ghost. Elsewhere (2008) Ive sketched an idea of what the
advent of such a para-self might feel like as it accedes to these multiple re-cognitions and
enters a psychic space of becoming beside itself.
 20

Notes

1 Abstractly, this evocation can be described in terms of the difference, emphasized by

Peirce in his logic of relations, between the instantiation of a relation and the relation as
such, that is, the relation severed from the particular states of affairs that actualize it.
Kalaga 2003 makes relation in this sense the basis for an articulation of Deleuzes
virtual as arising from relational fibers that constitute the basic stuff the
infrastructure of the virtual. See also Kalaga 1997 for the semioticism that underpins
this idea of infrastructure.
ii
Likewise, though the virtual appears in Immanuel Kants thought, he wrote, for
instance, of the soul that its presence in the world is not spatial, but virtual (quoted
Welsch 6), he didnt develop any systematic account of the concept either as an adjective,
or as in this example as a substantive. For an interesting explication of Deleuzes
troubling notion of the virtual by way of a comparison between his project of
transcendental empiricism and Kants transcendental critique, which converts Kants
argument from possibility to virtuality. See Shaviro 2008
iii
Of course, this is not to say that alphabetic texts (notably, in what follows, the Torah)
cannot project their own forms of affect. They do and have done so from the beginning,
precisely in response to a recognition of writings inescapable omission of tone: literature
(in a media-logical sense) being the creation by mimesis through written poetry and
transduction through prose styles -- of textualized affect.
iv
To claim that Jahwehs voice is without affect seems at odds with the Biblical depiction
of him as jealous, angry, merciful, vengeful and so on. Two things need to be said. First,
this is a depiction not of Jahweh the one who enunciates/creates himself in writing --
but of El, the oral god of the region adopted as their own by the Israelites. Second,
Jahwehs affect is conveyed in a narrative permeated by tropes, figures, and rhetorical
devices externally: Jahwehs speech/writing voice employs no such literary means;
except, that is, for certain grammatically coded affects such as enunciation I am and
interdiction Thou shalt not of the commandments. Over the course of two millennia
Jewish mystical and philosophical thought downplayed and all but eliminated the
presence of El within the alphabetic voice of God. See my 2008, chapter 5 for an
elaboration of this point.
v
Levy 1998 refers to the advent of language as the virtualization of the present, that is,
the virtualization of a real time that holds the living captive in the here and now,
thus allowing humans to inhabit a virtual space temporal flux taken as a whole that
the immediate present only partially and fleetingly actualizes. We exist ( 91 ) All of
which is true. However, virtualization does not operate on abstractions such as the
present or time but on actualities, X to virtual X, which by their co-presence make the
virtual event of the present visible or apprehensible. For virtual X to share a virtus with
X both must belong to the same form of the real. This means that language is the
 21

virtualization of a species of meaning-production and transmission which I have taken

to be gesturo-haptic communication
vi
Lenoir 2008 provides or an excellent summary of Deacons bio-cultural account of how
these tokens arise from their iconic-indexical substratum to furnish symbolic language,
vii
One might compare this to the sequential unfoldings of the subjective experience of
self during infancy charted by Daniel Stern (1985). The sequence emergent self, core
self, subjective self -- that precedes the verbal self of speech are not stages, Stern
emphasizes, like Freuds oral, anal, genital stages of sexuality, but co-existent domains
which, though each prepares for its successor , continue to develop alongside each other
and speech throughout life.
viii
Its possible to go further back. Susan Langer observes that gesture is the basic
abstraction whereby the dance illusion is made an illusion that is a realm of power
not actual, physically exerted power, but appearances of influence and agency. In other
words, gestures in dance are certainly actual movement but insofar as they are dance-
gestures, are virtual self-expression. (1983, 28-9) It is reasonable to suppose that the
gesturo-haptic communicational universe contained dance, for example the circle dance.
In which case, homo gesturalis on Langers account could be said to be a symbol-user.
The dance, composed of bodies enacting it, would be a virtual self-expression, the
collectivity symbolically enunciating itself. To itself. To the gods,.
ix
The nature of Islamic banking and the financial strategies it is in the process of
constructing to circumvent the interdiction of interest payment is explored in Maurer
2005.
x
See Mackenzie 2007 for an examination of the social and material construction of
derivative markets including the legal maneuvers, different but overlapping in the US and
UK, necessary to distinguish trading them from gambling as defined in those two
domains.

xi
See Doyle 2003, chapter 3 where the death/future nexus activated by cryonics is
explored in relation to a particular and highly significant class of derivatives, the so-
called exotic or OTC (Over The Counter) derivatives. These are contracts that are not
marked-to-market, and traded only on non-public networks making it difficult for them to
be assigned an objectivevalue comparable to their exchange-traded analogues an
unnatural and strange and as it turns out dangerously unstable status for a financial
object. These networks form a $40 trillion shadow market whose unregulated excesses
and financial opacity are, as I write, being anathematized in the New York Times,
(What Created This Monster, Business section, March 21, 2008) as the source of the
current credit meltdown and recession in the United States.
12
What is involved here is an engagement with an actual/virtual simultaneity of affect.
One might juxtapose it with Brian Massumis characterization of affect as such, his
 22

making this simultaneity the definition of affect. Affect is the simultaneous participation
of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the virtual as seen from the side of the
actual thing. Affect is the virtual as point of view. (2002, 35)

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