The first example Deleuze gives us of a virtual object turns out to be the virtual mother. The mother as a virtual object appears as if it were a second and simultaneous goal of an activity like walking. However, the virtual object is never really the goal of an activity the way a real object is because it functions more like the mirrored self-contemplation of the subject that would be interested in this particular goal to begin with. What kind of self wants to walk to mom? What's so great about mom that she can mobilize an activity as complex and integrated as walking?
A child who begins to walk does not only bind excitations in a passive synthesis, even supposing that these were endogenous excitations born of its own movements. No one has ever walked endogenously. On the one hand, the child goes beyond the bound excitations towards the supposition or the intentionality of an object, such as the mother, as the goal of an effort, the end to be actively reached 'in reality' and in relation to which success and failure may be measured. But on the other hand and at the same time, the child constructs for itself another object, a quite different kind of object which is a virtual object or centre and which then governs and compensates for the progresses and failures of its real activity: it puts several fingers in its mouth, wraps the other arm around this virtual centre, and appraises the whole situation from the point of view of this virtual mother. The fact that the child's glance may be directed at the real mother and that the virtual object may be the goal of an apparent activity (for example, sucking) may inspire an erroneous judgement on the part of the observer. Sucking occurs only in order to provide a virtual object to contemplate in the context of extending the passive synthesis; conversely, the real mother is contemplated only in order to provide a goal for the activity, and a criterion by which to evaluate the activity, in the context of an active synthesis.
It bears emphasizing again what problem leads Deleuze to introduce virtual objects. Obviously, the specific problem here is, "how do we learn to walk?" But this is a subset of a more general problem, which is, "how do we make a self capable of any activity?" In fact, this whole chapter should be read as an attempt to ask, "how we can manufacture any identity in a world of pure difference?" Bear in mind that this is why we're talking about psychoanalysis and early childhood development to begin with. The sequence of infant development provides the most concrete study of how an Ego forms itself. In childhood, we go from not having an ego to having an ego -- our selves get built. This is exactly the process we're interested in, and you can think of it alternately as a construction or a learning.
I think the virtual mother is meant to function as a symbol of just what it is that's desirable about the mother as an object. What pleasures do we expect to get from her that would be capable of organizing all our little passive local egos into a whole that's unified enough to go seek her out? In other words, how does she makes us feel, overall?
This may seem like a dumb question at first. I mean, don't we want mom because she has the food? Isn't that just 'instinctual'? Yes, certainly it is on same level. But the question is what we mean by instinct. We've already identified instincts or drives as the product of the first passive synthesis of habit. They are like evolutionary and biological habits that bind together simple forms to create local passive egos. We might even think of these as reflex arcs. Newborn grasping and suckling behavior fit this description. Before we become unified egos or individuals, we are born into this world of evolution's habits, which come prior to our own. The infant is at first just the loose collection of all these local passive egos and their drives to suck, grasp, shit, and startle. There may be a biological whole to which these instincts refer, but there is no 'infant ego' as such that carries out these activities.
This type of description won't get us as far as walking though. Somehow these reflex arcs have to be integrated into larger motor programs. This requires a second level of synthesis and the formation of objects that pull together the various sub-rountines. For as much as we may sometimes refer to walking or talking as instinctual, these are not immediate "endogenous" behaviors that can be traced directly to the pieces of our biological morphology. We have to learn these things.
Deleuze's idea is that this learning synthesis requires the creation of two types of objects. We already saw objects that were posited as the goal of the activity in reality -- defined as objects capable of bringing us pleasure consistently. But why do those particular objects bring us pleasure? Because they satisfy enough of the various habits or drives of the passive local egos. I want to walk towards mom the real object because it satisfies my touching-self, my sucking-self, my grasping-self, etc ... These are the traits that turn a real object into mom, for lack of a better way to put it. Mom has a sort of global object permanence that brings a global ego pleasure precisely because she combines all these traits or aspects. Just like there is no ego for the infant, there is also no mother at first.
Since each of these aspects of mom is a pleasure associated with some local passive ego, these traits don't fundamentally belong to mom, but compose her. In fact, the first synthesis demonstrated that the form of these egos was inseparable from their fundamental narcissistic pleasure of self-repetition. These passive local egos had no other goal or object than themselves. The more global object that contains them, or that, as Deleuze will later put it, they are "planted in", is desired just because it reflects back enough of these little selves well enough to satisfy us.
The "us" here is actually constructed through this process of reflection. Deleuze calls it the "extended passive ego". We'll see later that there is a real noodle-baking interaction between the subject constructed from the integration of these reflections of the parts of itself bouncing off of a real object, and a real object defined as containing enough of these reflections to create a subject. That sentence alone should make you dizzy. Right now, I think the important thing is just to understand the high level view that the virtual object is ultimately a piece of our emerging self as it begins to contemplate and bind together the little selves (drives, reflexes) that will compose it. This self will become the subject that seeks out the real object.
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. One series would not exist without the other, yet they do not resemble one another. For this reason, Henri Maldiney is correct to say, in analysing children's movement, that 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.
The two centers in question here are the real object, and the virtual subject. This latter is synthesized from a passive contemplation-contraction of the virtual objects that correspond to the local passive egos, which is why we're not using the word 'subject' yet. We'll come back next time to the interweaving of these two series.
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