The virtual is that which is perceived entirely within the mind: it is potential, mediated by the synesthesia of past and current perceptions and experience, hyperreal and hyperfast.  At the same time, it is both inaccessible to the senses and figured - constructed - by them.  Brian Massumi states that “The virtual that cannot be felt also cannot but be felt, in its effects.  When expressions of its effects are multiplied, the virtual fleetingly appears.  Its fleeting is in the cracks between the surfaces around the images” (p. 133).  The virtual is made evident by that which is unarticulated; it is in the chasm of the unexpressed in all images, both visual and verbal: “since the virtual is in the ins and outs, the only way an image can approach it alone is to twist and fold on itself, to multiply itself internally” (p. 133).

The resulting overimage of every possible variation and digression of an image superimposed upon the center of the original creates the unity of continuous separation and reflexivity that characterizes the experience of the virtual: imagination - as a thinking feeling (or a feeling of thought in its movement), of felt-only thought beyond physical sensation - is the word that most of us would use to describe the “differentiating vagueness” of the virtual.

Massumi claims that topology - a qualitative science, not empirical, with no predictive value - is the ideal analog by which to diagram or model the virtual, a sentiment with which I agree: the topological is process only, referential only to variation, with digression and variation intimately mapped in a physical space.  It is potential, or possibility, realized, which is, perhaps, why even topology cannot fully encapsulate the virtual: it ceases to develop at some point, and while potential creates the event, a convergence of active possibilities made present and referential to one another, it cannot be exhausted fully in one instantiation.  The actual occurs where the possible (physical rules) intersects with the potential (embodied in participants and entities and ideas) and the virtual (as the sub-subconscious of alternative states). 

Deactualization: a mode of thought, processual excess over the actual.  It does not replace the actual, rather, it doubles and redoubles it, augmenting its states.  Both quantification and qualitative transformation involve deactualization: quantification participates in instrumenal reason (thinking out possibilities), and qualification is addressed by “operative reason,” which deforms into contingent reason, or “thought bending back to participate in its own emergence from sensation, imagination, or intuition in Bergson’s sense” (p. 136).  Further deactualization processes include codification, easily understood in the context of “the digital” as “zeros and ones.”  “Digitization,” notes Massumi, “is a numeric way of arraying alternative states so that they can be sequenced into a set of alternative routines” (p. 137).  He feels that this is ultimately a weakness, reducing possibility to set programmed steps.  The medium of the digital is possibility, he says, not virtuality: it doesn’t approximate potential.

In a way, I suppose, this is true, but in effect, the greater the number of zeros and ones, the larger the file, the more potential for variation.  This hearkens back to traditional deconstructive notions of language: the more words in a sentence, the further complicated meaning becomes.  Still, codification implies limitation at some point, and this is doubly true when manipulating digital artifacts within any interface, which governs what can and cannot be done to that artifact.  In the end, digital technologies connect to the virtual only through the analog: photo editors, word processors, blog applications, etc.  What is processed is not the word or the artifact, but its encoding.  The artifact itself is only apparently real upon the screen: the image of a page with words upon it: it is a real apparitional (a genuine appearance of an artifact) rather than an artifice.

Thus the web: an accumulation of analog effects codified into digital sequence.