ABSTRACT
Following the exploration of the phenomenology of our experience of the virtual world in the previous chapter, we consider Deleuze’s reconception of virtuality, not as something opposed to the real but integral to it, in its inextricable relation to the actual. What emerges is a notion of the simulacrum no longer conceived as a static object that duplicates something else but an animated center of emergence that stands at the threshold of perception. Constellated by a set of microperceptions that obeys no prior model, it constitutes a radical transmutation that is capable of madly proliferating differences, as Brian Massumi puts it. We thus describe the ontology that this reveals in the rhizomatic play of an underlying vitality of the real. The primacy of difference over sameness that this produces overturns the Platonic dualism responsible for the polarized conceptions of the virtual examined in Chapter 3. In the end, we examine the philosophical and psychological implications of this newfound ability to modulate the virtual (i.e., our having now such precise control over what aspects of reality we avow and what we choose to disavow) in our digital lives.
