Over on our technophilia blog I recently posted this short introduction and translation of Christian Fauré’s recent commentary on the concept of the virtual:
Last week Christian Fauré, of Ars Industrialis, posted a new blog post concerning what he has called the techno-anthropological virtual. The main substance of his argument, I suggest, is that the conceptualisation of the virtual that we can understand through the work of scholars such as Bergson, Deleuze and Stiegler is founded on technics, as a default of origin for the human. We must therefore understand the virtual in relation to the human as a techno-anthropological issue – it is realised through processes of exteriorisation, as mnemotechnics, and thus intimately bound up with the ways in which human development (becoming) has extended beyond the body-environment relationship and is tied to the creation of organised inorganic matter. The techno-anthoropological virtual is the potentialities that emerge in the associated milieu of trans-individuation, the becoming of assemblages of bodies, technologies and environments, and is concretised in the recording of traces, as language. For humans, then, ‘the virtual’ is the means by which ‘the real’ is articulated and enunciated. Continue reading “The techno-anthropological virtual”