Deleuze 4 The virtual and time

Part of a conversation in a separate blog with two colleagues, Mary and CeCe.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Some days the words just won’t come. Today is one of those days. I feel restless and bad tempered, partly through lack of sleep. I want to write about time, but things aren’t flowing. So I’ll just dump some stuff, and hope I can come back to it in another post when things are flowing a bit better.

In an earlier post (The Present Moment), I wrote about some of the things going through my mind as I cleared a space in the garden. It was a moment full of thoughts and feelings from the past.

And now I’m thinking about Deleuze and Berger and what they say about time, about the present moment’s relationship with the past, of it being filled and formed by everything that has gone before, only a tiny fraction of which enters the consciousness. 

I’ve been reading more from a book on Deleuze, where I found the following:

This is where Deleuze draws on Henri Bergson. The past for Bergson is not the repository of a linear series of passing presents, but an a-temporal bloc where each and every past event co-exists with all the others. For Bergson, it is not just in memory that one event can be connected with any other, irrespective of their respective places on a time-line: in the Bergsonian past, past events themselves co-exist, inhabiting a realm that Bergson calls the virtual: the past as a virtual whole (or as a bloc) is the condition for actual events to take place in the present, just as—for example—the language-system as a virtual whole (or what the structuralists call a structure, langue) is the condition for actual speech acts to take place in the present. (Eugene W. Holland, Deleuze and Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus': A Reader's Guide, Kindle location 359)

For Deleuze the virtual is is made up by way more than a personal past. It’s the whole of what has past (not just the personal), it’s the whole of what is present, and it is also infused with aspects of the future. There are connections here with Jung’s collective unconscious, though there was something human-centric about Jung’s notion (I think) that isn’t present in Deleuze’s.

And it’s that presence of past, present and future that I think our story The Poetry Lesson was attempting to include. The past is present in Jess’s thoughts about Mary and the room, Andrew’s note from his girlfriend, Jamila’s relationship with her father, Helen’s visit to Greece … and these are just the tiniest tip of the virtual that is present as Jess reads the poem to the class.

This post seems hardly worth posting. It’s saying nothing that I haven’t said before, and it’s clumsy. But it’s a part of a Deleuzian conception of the classroom, and in particular the English classroom, that I’m wanting to try to build. The virtual, the body without organs, the rhyzome, desiring machines, multiplicities, assemblages, flows … these are some of the components of this conception. 

I’ll return to them when the words are flowing a bit better!