For an ethnography toward the virtual: Deleuze's transcendental empiricism and nonlinear ImMedia

Abstract

In this paper, I pursue a method of ethnographic media research that foregrounds the relation of embodied experience to what Gilles Deleuze called ‘transcendental empiricism.’ For Deleuze the critique of Kant's theory of a transcendental subject grounding space-time moves thought toward an intuition of the time of becoming, the being of time itself: it is not we who constitute time, but time constitutes and reconstitutes subjectivity. The aim of such a method is to understand the organization of sensory-motor circuits that stabilizes the movement of becoming as clichés entrenched in habit. I argue that Deleuze's transcendental empiricism is a robust method to diagram South Asian media's empirical field in terms of its various circuits between the virtual and the actual. This method allows us to pragmatically diagram the doubleness of the mobile – as intensive potentializer and biopolitical control grid – in which media form dynamic feedbacked assemblages with the body's sensorimotor processes. Mobile connectivity is unmediated and direct, which is why it is both virtual and actual at once. Thus, it has a definite history while also being part of the body as a center of indetermination (virtuality).