Virtual X and Ghost Effects Brian Rotman The Ohio State University For better or worse … the whole of our environment – skyscrapers, highways, emotions, orchards, oil wells, terrorists, icebergs, tomatoes organic and inorganic, aquatic plants and Jason Bourne, pigeons, dogs, the smog in Brentwood, and the mountain dew in Colorado – is a virtual reality. Lewis H. Lapham, 2008 We’re living in a supernatural world ... We’re surrounded by ghosts. Jennifer Egan. The Keep Within the landscapes of the new media the virtual is everywhere. Virtual space, virtual particles, virtual waves, virtual machines, virtual memory , organisms, and environments, virtual molecules, virtual money and capitalism, virtual shopping, virtual books, virtual universities, virtual bodies, virtual sex, virtual reality, virtual subjects, virtual presence, virtual history, virtual keyboards, virtual war, and so on. In short, virtual X. where X varies with ever greater range over of familiar and previously stable objects, procedures and arenas of social, cultural, and scientific life. Why is this? Is the virtual a necessary result? an epiphenomenon? a collateral effect of electronic technology? Should one speak of an ontology of the virtual? How is the virtual related to embodiment and de- embodiment? To the unreal? To the being and non being of ghosts? How are we to think virtuality? 1 the virtual : virtual X The most far-reaching and profound articulation of the virtual, one which dominates its contemporary discussion, is due to Gilles Deleuze. Citing on several occasions a formulation of Marcel Proust he never departs from, Deleuze insists: “Exactly what Proust said of states of resonance must be said of the virtual: ‘Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’; and symbolic without being fictional.” Deleuze understands the real as comprising two distinct but mutually entangled and co-existent orders -- the actual and the virtual. Bodies, sensations and processes of the world actualize the virtual and the past/future of the virtual inheres in and allows all that is or capable of being