Learning to swim in the Dirac Sea: Bill Ross's Order and the Virtual

Abstract

In this review of Bill Ross’s Order and the Virtual I draw attention to his careful reflection on Deleuze’s provocative critique of the second law of thermodynamics, which Ross examines and ultimately aligns with using resources from cosmology and quantum physics. Most notably, Ross draws on the physicist David Bohm’s distinction between explicate and implicate orders and argues that these bear strong similarities to Deleuze’s actual and virtual respectively. To lay the groundwork for an exploration of this claim I turn to Ross’s defence of the infinite creative potential of the quantum dynamisms that give rise to the spatiotemporal order – what Deleuze would describe as non-exhaustive intensive differences that are only apparently cancelled out in extensity. Here, with reference to Deleuze’s distinction between the divine and human games and their respective distributions of chance, Ross proposes that whereas the emergent regularities of the macroscopic world are inexorably bound to the arrow of time and thus to the law of entropy, this is not the case for the divine game that takes place within the quantum foam and that it is here that the Eventum tantum takes place in which all of chance – including said laws – are continuously redistributed. Turning to the continuous nature of this evental dynamism, I close by considering Ross’s eschewal of chaos and dynamic systems theory in favour of quantum-theoretic resources and suggest that perhaps both can be usefully employed in order to pursue the fascinating lines of flight he has opened up within both Deleuze and Guattari studies and the philosophy of cosmology.