The virtual and the actual AI

Why Deleuze’s virtual is not simply an unreal possibility or a machine-learning latent space.

For Gilles Deleuze, the virtual is real without being actual. The distinction belongs to his account of how determinate things and events come into being, particularly in Difference and Repetition.

A possible object is often imagined as an already specified object awaiting existence. Deleuze’s virtual instead concerns differential relations and tendencies from which actual forms emerge. Actualization is a productive process, rather than selecting a finished item from a catalogue of possibilities.

This matters for the phrase “latent writing.” A model’s learned representations can support many different outputs, but this technical capacity does not establish an identity with Deleuze’s metaphysical concept. A latent vector is a mathematically specified representation; the virtual addresses the conditions through which actual identities arise.

The comparison in the essay is an invitation to ask about emergence and unrealized expression. Treating virtual, latent, possible, and imaginary as interchangeable would erase the distinction that makes the comparison interesting.

Further reading

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Gilles Deleuze, especially the discussions of Bergsonism and Difference and Repetition.