Deleuze and virtual continuum

Found at The Topology of Deleuze’s Spatium by Louise Burchill

One of Gilles Deleuze’s major ontological categories is that of a virtual continuum which, much like Spinoza’s substance, presents two sides-pure extension and thought-or, rather, two powers: the power of being and the power of thinking. This virtual continuum receives a variety of designations throughout Deleuze’s corpus: “intensive spatium” in Difference and Repetition, “ideal or metaphysical surface” in The Logic of Sense, “plane of consistency” in A Thousand Plateaus (written with Félix Guattari) and “plane of immanence” in What is Philosophy? (equally coauthored with Guattari). While these diverse terms may be argued to accentuate different aspects of the continuum so designated, Deleuze’s characterization of the latter remains, nevertheless, fundamentally constant-such that, as one commentator puts it, the various “objects” in question (spatium, surface, plane of immanence or, again, hyperspace) are all rigorously homothetic. Such a continuum is, accordingly, consistently described as a pre-extensive, non-qualified “milieu” or “space-stratum” enveloping complexes of differential relations, pure intensities and singularities, with Deleuze seeking to determine in this way an impersonal and pre-individual transcendental field that, assembling the conditions of real-and not merely possible-experience, would neither resemble the corresponding empirical fields (with their correlation of a consciousness and its objects) nor amount to an undifferentiated “depth” or groundlessness (sans-fond indifférencié) identified as pure chaos.

Although I refer to the concepts ‘plain of consistency’ and ‘plane of immanence’, here they acquire a different signification. ‘Plain of consistency’ depicts the actual instantiations that are possible and performed within the given linguistic-cultural material; it refers to the language in its socially grounded form, used by any speaker of a given community. ‘Plane of immanence’, on the other hand, refers to the logic that allow the connections and linkages between the elements found at the plain, it is, in this sense, to ex-plain. These elements are the outcome of different arrangements, configurations, and sedimentation phases: the plane of immanence constitutes the condition of possibility of these configurations.