The significance of signs: virtual ontology/actual experience: part II

We “are made up of lines”, we are dynamic relationships; lines move us, and the most strange line of becoming is the one that carries us across many thresholds towards a destination which appears unpredictable. This line is “not foreseeable, not pre-existent. This line is simple, abstract, and yet the most complex of all … the line of flight and of the greatest gradient. … [T]his line has always been there, although it is the opposite of a destiny” because the third term in the relation guarantees not the reproduction of the sameness but the repetition, or iteration, of the difference. It is the “transversal communications between different lines [that] scramble the genealogical trees” leading to the emergence of novelty. For Deleuze, “there is no other truth than the creation of the New: creativity, emergence”. In one of his books on the analysis of cinematic images, Deleuze equates mystical experience with an event of a sudden actualization of potentialities, that is, awakening of perceptions, such as seeing and hearing, by raising them to a new power of enhanced perception; a percept which is future-oriented. Such “a vision and a voice…would have remained virtual” unless some specific, affective, conditions in the real experience that are necessary for the actualization of the virtual would have been established.