It's time to try and sum up virtual objects as best we can. I'm still uncertain I really understand the psychoanalytic context of this concept, but at least we've explored it a little. Now we'll try to use those ideas from Freud, Klein, and Lacan to better situate virtual objects in their proper place in Deleuze's scheme. We should bear in mind two things in what follows. First, the problem is: how do you make a self? Second, we've already met the paradoxes of the virtual once before; the pure past is virtual totality, a past that never was present, a mythical, immemorial past. The pure past is not a collection of memories of former presents, but like the space of all possible presents. We can use some of that understanding to further elucidate the virtual objects.
Let's start with the problem. We've got an infant. They are just a bundle of passive local egos -- drives -- that are the product of pre-existing habits of evolution. Gradually, that goo becomes a person. On some level, we might consider this development from a bundle of joy to an integrated unity as another of evolution's habits, a duplicate version of the first passive synthesis that takes as its building blocks the initial habits. For reasons I'm not entirely clear on right now, we're going to look at this development as a whole new type of passive synthesis -- the second passive synthesis of memory. This makes the second passive synthesis into something more like learning. The infant gradually learns to recognize objects in the real world, and learns to recognize its self and corresponding body as objects. We are no longer in the domain of self-fulfilling habits, but are now asking how habits get established. It's as if we've discovered the elements that become contracted in a habit need to have some sort of prior capacity to relate in order for them to get linked together at all, but that this only became apparent when we wondered how those habits themselves get linked into a larger structure.
Habit is the foundation of time, the moving soil occupied by the passing present. The claim of the present is precisely that it passes. However, it is what causes the present to pass, that to which the present and habit belong, which must be considered the ground of time. It is memory that grounds time. We have seen how memory, as a derived active synthesis, depended upon habit: in effect, everything depends upon a foundation. But this does not tell us what constitutes memory. At the moment when it grounds itself upon habit, memory must be grounded by another passive synthesis distinct from that of habit.
The second synthesis splits into two distinct but interdependent directions. Both posit some object (you might even say some substance or "substantive") that holds together various parts of a whole. On one side, reality is synthesized as something the infant needs to actively go get to satisfy its most important drives and keep its nascent self in business. Hence the infant learns to distinguish real objects which hold together enough to hold itself together. On the other side, the various drives can be put into relation to one another by locating them in the virtual space of memory. Virtual objects are like attractors in memory space capable of drawing together the drives. This 'drawing together' is the second passive synthesis of memory.
In fact the child is constructed within a double series: on the basis of the passive synthesis of connection and on the basis of the bound excitations. Both series are objectal: one series comprises real objects which serve as correlates of active synthesis; the other virtual objects which serve as correlates of an extension of passive synthesis. The extended passive ego fulfils itself with a narcissistic image in contemplating the virtual centres.
So far I've outlined what are basically the general job descriptions of the real and the virtual. They are the stuff or material that is necessary for the infant to develop a world and a self. Agglomerations or attractors in 'reality space' define real objects external to the infant or parts of its world. These become the goals of an active ego. Likewise "centers" in 'memory space' define virtual objects which are internal to the infant or parts of its self. These become objects that an extended passive ego contemplates (without acting) to form itself. These two sets of objects, and their corresponding types of ego, interact, and the full Ego is built from this interaction.
... the infantile world is in no way circular or egocentric but elliptical; that it has two centres and that these differ in kind, both nevertheless being objective or objectal. In virtue of their dissimilarity, perhaps a crossing, a twist, a helix or a figure 8 is even formed between the two centres. What, then, would be the ego, where would it be, given its topological distinction from the Id, if not at the crossing of the 8, at the point of connection between these two intersecting asymmetrical circles, the circle of real objects and that of the virtual objects or centres?
Deleuze spends most of the time talking about the strange virtual objects needed for the second passive synthesis, since we mostly (think we) know what a real object is and how it governs our activity. Ultimately, what makes virtual objects so strange and paradoxical is that the stuff they are made of -- the space of memory, the pure past -- is not real.
We cannot say that it was. It no longer exists, it does not exist, but it insists, it consists, it is.
The virtual is, it has an effect, but it does not act, and so in that sense is not real. Because the virtual objects are not real they have many other strange and wonderful properties. Some of the psychoanalytic concepts we've talked about can help illustrate these.
To begin with, a memory is obviously not like an external object, but something closer to the internal objects we saw Melanie Klein describe. We have to be slightly careful with the way we construe this analogy because we don't want to presume the existence of the Ego we're trying to construct; the dividing line between inside and outside has to emerge. Remember that the type of pure past we're talking about doesn't belong to anyone. It's not a particular memory of a particular moment some individual once actually experienced as a present. It's more like the space of possible experiences, possible presents that could incarnate that memory in different ways. Which is also in a sense the space of possible selves who can have that experience (should we call these experimenters?).
[Now suddenly I understand the sentence just before the quote about habit and memory I used at the beginning of this post. The second synthesis has to provide a measure for the relationship between the possessor and its possessions. It has to simultaneously produce a subject and an object, which is why Deleuze calls the second passive synthesis transcendental.
The first synthesis, that of habit, is truly the foundation of time; but we must distinguish the foundation from the ground. The foundation concerns the soil: it shows how something is established upon this soil, how it occupies and possesses it; whereas the ground comes rather from the sky, it goes from the summit to the foundations, and measures the possessor and the soil against one another according to a title of ownership.
]
Though they exist "objectally" (they are not simply created by the subject) memories are like internal objects in the sense that they relate to what it feels like, on the inside, to interact with some real external object. But because they are possibility spaces -- immemorial memories that never were any subject's experience, and possible selves that might have that experience -- these internal objects differ in kind from the external ones. Like two mirrors facing one another, the possible experiences reflect the possible experimenters that reflect the possible experiences ... and so on. Like every good paradox, they directly capture a sense of movement. In addition, as potentials, the virtual objects aren't subject to a binary either/or logic, but obey a logic of indefinitely iterated addition. Deleuze cites Klein's idea of the "good and bad object", to which a principle of non-contradiction does not apply.
It lacks its own identity. The good and the bad mother -- or, in terms of the paternal duality, the serious and the playful father -- are not two partial objects but the same object in so far as it has lost its identity in the double.
The same recursive structure we saw where each part of a fractal past reflects the whole and implies an "ever-increasing coexistence of levels of the past" also means that the virtual object is never complete. This is like the flip side of the possibility of addition. There's always some more of a virtual object that's missing, as befits a pure potential. Just like the virtual object is added to reality or "planted in it like trees from another world", as another possible experience of the real object, it is also subtracted from reality. Neither procedure produces a whole though. They only give us a partial object -- part of the real object, part of our self, and part of itself because of its perpetually unfinished circulation between these two parts.
We see both that the virtuals are deducted from the series of reals and that they are incorporated in the series of reals. This derivation implies, first, an isolation or suspension which freezes the real in order to extract a pose, an aspect or a part. This isolation, however, is qualitative: it does not consist simply in subtracting a part of the real object, since the subtracted part acquires a new nature in functioning as a virtual object. The virtual object is a partial object - not simply because it lacks a part which remains in the real, but in itself and for itself because it is cleaved or doubled into two virtual parts, one of which is always missing from the other. In short, the virtual is never subject to the global character. which affects real objects. It is -- not only by its origin but by its own nature -- a fragment, a shred or a remainder. It lacks its own identity.
Conversely, these virtual objects are incorporated in the real objects. In this sense they can correspond to parts of the subject's body, to another person, or even to very special objects such as toys or fetishes. This incorporation is in no way an identification, or even an introjection, since it exceeds the limits of the subject. Far from opposing itself to the process of isolation, it complements it. Whatever the reality in which the virtual object is incorporated, it does not become integrated: it remains planted or stuck there, and does not find in the real object the half which completes it, but rather testifies to the other virtual half which the real continues to lack.
Finally, our discussion of Lacan and his object a gives us the most succinct image of a structure that inherently lacks completeness in itself yet sets everything in perpetual motion. This was supposed to be a "substantial lack", a perpetually missing piece, an object that we only find as lost. All of these are descriptions of the partial, unfinished, and hence simultaneously creative nature of the virtual. For Lacan, what causes desire, the object-cause of desire, was also a memory, but precisely a hazy sort of memory from a time before we were a fully formed subject. So again, this memory comes to us as something that doesn't really belong to us, in the proper sense of the term. It's a fragment of our formative infant experience from before there was an us to experience it. But this possible experience sets in motion the search for a possible self to whom it would correspond. This would be exactly whatever self it is that would enjoy this lost ur-experience. The possibility on both sides of this equation is always just a part of the object or the self, and not those finished products in themselves. In some ways it's more than just the object or self, since it includes variations of those (the lack could be construed as a surplus). But in another sense it's always less than they are, since they never actually correspond to it directly but to aspects or parts of it. Either way you look at it, I think the key concept is the sense of perpetually unfolding recursion of two mirrors facing another. In fact, I think this is almost always the key concept in Deleuze.
Although it is deducted from the present real object, the virtual object differs from it in kind: not only does it lack something in relation to the real object from which it is subtracted, it lacks something in itself, since it is always half of itself, the other half being different as well as absent. This absence, as we shall see, is the opposite of a negative. Eternal half of itself, it is where it is only on condition that it is not where it should be. It is where we find it only on condition that we search for it where it is not. It is at once not possessed by those who have it and had by those who do not possess it. It is always a 'was.'
I don't know whether I've really done justice to virtual objects and their relationship to psychoanalysis, but at this point we have to move on. It's not as if we won't see all this same structures again and perhaps improve our description. To set up the next section, though, we have to deal with one last point, which is the link between the virtual and the symbolic.
We've already hinted at this in discussing Klein's partial objects. These seemed to relate to what various objects in the infant world meant to the infant. I almost want to say what they 'represent' to the infant, but this is a very specific word in Difference & Repetition, and I think we are still investigating how a representative view could be formed. The partial objects are (partially) an "isolation or suspension that freezes the real in order to extract a pose, an aspect, or a part".
Deleuze continues this line of thought when he quotes Lacan talking about Edgar Allen Poe's The Purloined Letter. It isn't actually a very interesting story in my opinion, but it does work well as an image for something that is hidden by being in plain sight. The letter in question is eagerly sought after by a detective who searches every possible secret hiding place of the suspect's residence without success. The armchair detective hero of the story deduces that this valuable letter is hidden not because its location is concealed, but because it is laid in the open and disguised as a worthless scrap of discarded paper. This illustrates Lacan's ideas that there is a lack, a piece inevitably missing from the center of the story.
In this sense, Lacan's pages assimilating the virtual object to Edgar Allan Poe's purloined letter seem to us exemplary. Lacan shows that real objects are subjected to the law of being or not being somewhere, by virtue of the reality principle; whereas virtual objects, by contrast, have the property of being and not being where they are, wherever they go:
what is hidden is never but what is missing from its place, as the call slip puts it when speaking of a volume lost in the library. And even if the book be on an adjacent shelf or in the next slot, it would be hidden there, however visibly it may appear. For it can literally be said that something is missing from its place only of what can change it: the symbolic. For the real, whatever upheaval we subject it to, is always in its place; it carries it glued to its heel, ignorant of what might exile it from it.
We'll get a lot more explanation of the symbolic in the next section. But we can already sketch some of its important characteristics. A symbol is like a memory in that it never was anything concrete. There's a double arbitrariness to the symbol, so to speak, in that it can use any old signifier to refer to a whole class of signifieds. For example, I can use a whole bunch of distinct sounds or combinations of little marks to symbolize 'table', and each of these different instantiations of the symbol can refer to an infinity of different physical objects that would fall into the category 'table'. In other words, the symbol "table" is not a one-to-one correspondence like we usually think of it, but actually a many-to-many correspondence. It links possible tables to possible experiences of pointing to tables. The missing aspect of the symbolic, its mobility or ability to change place, is like the flip side of this observation. The 'same' idea 'table' always appears in some different disguise. It's impossible to pin down or hold in place. Being able to move around like this -- ultimately not being anything more substantial than this motion itself -- is literally the essence of something being symbolic.
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