The Centre for Modern Thought

I've been thinking about problem that came up in last week's seminar about the "virtual machine" as an application of Deleuze's "virtual" category. Specifically, I wanted to draw a clear line between talking about, for example, a Turing machine -- a "merely conceptual" class of entity -- and the virtual properties that (I think) inhere in it. A Turing machine is called "universal" because it can theoretically, given enough tape and enough time, perform any computation that can be performed. In fact, it possesses …