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Three Propositions on Informational Cultures 27Pierre Levy. 29 The virtualization of a process involves opening up areal understood as devoid of transformative potential to the actionof forces that exceed it from all sides. In an informational sense, thevirtual appears as the site not only of the improbable, but of theopenness of biophysical (but also socio-cultural) processes to theirruption of the unlikely and the inventive.What lies beyond the possible and the real is thus the openness ofthe virtual, of the invention and the fluctuation, of what cannot beplanned or even thought in advance, of what has no real permanencebut only reverberations. Unlike the probable, the virtual can onlyirrupt and then recede, leaving only traces behind it, but traces thatare virtually able to regenerate a reality gangrened by its reductionto a closed set of possibilities. Whether it is about the flash-likeappearance and disappearance of the electronic commons (as in theearly Internet), or the irruption in a given economic sector of a newtechnology able to unravel and disrupt its established organizationof production (as in the current explosion of file-sharing systems), orwhether it is about the virtuality of another world perceived duringa mass demonstration or a workshop or a camp, the cultural politicsof information involves a stab at the fabric of possibility, an undoingof the coincidence of the real with the given. In this sense, if we cantalk about a cultural politics of information at all it is not becauseof new technologies, but because it is the reduction of the space ofcommunication to a space of limited and hardly effectual alternatives(as in the postmodern sign) that poses the problem of the unlikelyand the unthinkable as such. The cultural politics of information isno radical alternative that springs out of a negativity to confront amonolithic social technology of power. It is rather a positive feedbackeffect of informational cultures as such.NONLINEARITY AND REPRESENTATIONFrom our previous discussion of entropy as a measure ofuncertainty it seems reasonable to use the conditional entropyof the message, knowing the received signal, as a measure of thismissing information. 30Proposition III: Information implies a nonlinear relation between themicro and the macro.