The Reality of the Virtual: Bergson and Deleuze

Questions relating to subject and object, to their distinction and their union, should be put in terms of time rather than of space.

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

Time is not the interior in us, but just the opposite, the interiority in which we are, in which we move, live and change . . . Subjectivity is never ours, it is time, that is, the soul or the spirit, the virtual.

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image

Bergson: Understanding the Virtual

In his 1966 text Bergsonism, Gilles Deleuze wrote that, "A philosophy such as this assumes that the notion of the virtual stops being vague and indeterminate" (B 96; 94). Today, however, the notion is widely treated in imprecise and ill-defined terms, namely, as all the other stuff that is not actual, something like the universe in its totality and unfathomable complexity. Such a view of the virtual, however, distorts the crucial insights Henri Bergson is forging in Matter and Memory (henceforth abbreviated to MM). For Bergson it is the part that is virtual and the whole that is real. He strips matter of virtuality in order to show that, strictly speaking, a virtual life belongs only to subjectivity (we have virtual perception, virtual action, and virtual memory). For Bergson, individuated matter, what he calls a living center of action or zone of indetermination, develops in terms of a virtual-actual circuit (O 249; MM 104). In other words, the individuated and living body is the site of the condition of possibility of the virtual. In Bergson and Deleuze, the notion of the virtual works in the context of specific problems and operates on a number of different planes. In this respect it requires a pluralist ontology since one can speak of diverse modalities of the virtual, even though one is, in fact, speaking of a being of the virtual: for example, one can speak of the virtual or partial object, of the virtual image, virtual memory, and so on. In the first section of the essay I shall focus attention on the subject of the virtual as we encounter it in Bergson; in the second section I shall turn my attention to Deleuze's treatment of subjectivity in the case of virtual memory.

Of prime importance to Bergson in MM is "the progress of living matter," which is said to consist in a differentiation of function that leads to the production of a nervous system and its increasing complexification, involving the canalization of excitations and the organization of action. At the end of MM, Bergson configures his argument concerning the difference between matter and memory in relation to the duality of freedom and necessity. He maintains that although it is erroneous to construe freedom in nature as an "imperium in imperio," nature itself can be regarded as a neutralized and latent consciousness (O 377; MM 248). When the first gleams of an individual consciousness are thrown upon it they are said not to do so in terms of an unheralded light. This is because such a consciousness simply removes an obstacle by extracting from the real whole a part that is virtual. The more that living matter complexifies, the more it transforms this virtual into spontaneous action and unforeseen movements. As the higher centers of the nervous system develop, there takes place a significant increase in the number of motor paths among which the same excitations allow a living system to choose or select. This results, on the one hand, in increasing latitude to movement in space and, on the other, a growing and accompanying tension of consciousness in time. A complex system is one that lives with an intense life since it contracts an expanding number of external moments in its present duration. It thus becomes capable of creating free acts—acts of inner determination—which are spread out over a multiplicity of moments of matter and that pass through the meshes of necessity.

Freedom, then, has to be seen as intimately organized with necessity, and memory is bound up with matter. For Bergson, while a more complex organization of the nervous system assures a...