The Virtual
A philosophical concept, derived primarily from Bergson and developed by Deleuze (and amplified by Brian Massumi), referring to the real and materially embedded trace of potential that exists alongside or within the world of proper things. The virtual is “real but not actual” — it does not disappear when expressed, but withdraws back into itself, constituting simultaneously the just-past of an effect and the to-come of the next. It operates in the gaps between chronological moments, in a nonlinear, recursive time of its own.
In the context of the Undercapital thesis, the virtual is understood as a “generative experience of nondual potentiality”: an intensive rather than extensive mode of experience that involves a breakdown of subject-object boundaries. It is processual, qualitative, pre-representational. To encounter the virtual is not to escape the material world but to inhabit it at a different register — one which has immense creative power subjectively and real logistical power insofar as it moves bodies and collectivities.
The virtual is not supernatural: protocol undergrounds demonstrate that it is available for direct, demystified encounter. The task is not to quarantine it in religion or art but to recognize it as a ubiquitous feature of material dynamics — and to build economic and organizational systems around access to it. Concealment and capture of virtual energies is a vector of control; mutual knowledge of and horizontal social engagement with the virtual is a passage of collective liberation.
The virtual stands in contrast to the actual (the world of discrete, measurable objects and states). Both are equally real; the virtual is the pool of difference from which the actual crystallizes.