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eference, (psychological theories of a child’s natural development) philosophy
works from a ‘plane of immanence’ that rather uses this speed to produce even
more and different concepts.
’Philosophy proceeds with a plane of immanence or consistency; science
with a plane of reference’ 14
Deleuze’s philosophy wants to retain the speed and the infinity of chaos and tries
to do so through the creation of concepts that give consistency 15 to the virtual.
Science tries to slow down the infinite speed through the creation of a reference
that actualizes the virtual through functions. The virtual child could be seen,
from the point of view of a philosophy described above, as a perpetual creation of
concepts out of the virtual, concepts that for a moment at least give a consistency
to the virtual, and then leave room for other ones to come. The virtual child
would be a child that through the creation of different concepts would be born
again – all the time. Now, when we speak of a virtual child as a possible child,
being born from the chaos through this way of producing concepts from a plane
of immanence, we are using what could be understood as fantasy. But whilst we
tend to separate fantasy from reality, we do not make a difference between the
virtuality and the reality, the virtuality is – in the case of Deleuze’s philosophy
– just not yet working concepts that give consistency to the virtual for a while,
and – in the case of science – just not yet actualized functions working through
references. And we could believe in this production as much as in any ‘reality’.
Virtuality, as much as, what we call ‘reality’, carries the promise of change.
Now, what the concept of virtuality can do in the context of pre-school practices
is perhaps to open up more possible ways of being a learning pre-school child.
If the virtual is a continuous speed of birth and disappearance, the learning preschool
child could perhaps be born to disappear, a little more frequently than
he or she is today.
Stella Nona a virtual child
I would like to close my argumentation with an example of how a virtual child
could function in practice. Before I do that, though, I would like to make some
clarifications on what the concepts I have used and the following example are
meant to do. They serve as a means to imagine how this kind of ‘experimentation’
with identity could work. I am not proposing a new identity of a learning
pre-school child, and I am not proposing any kind of ‘virtual’ game with our
identities, where we run around in constant and desperate agony to change and
find new identities all the time. Anyway as Deleuze says;
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