However widespread and ubiquitous its effects, virtualization today is almost always and everywhere construed and undertaken from the perspective of actuality. … In the Theatre of Cruelty, by contrast, action can never be measured, either positively or negatively, in terms of actuality. Virtualization, as a defining characteristic of the plague, no longer has any goal whatsoever – neither the greatest nor the smallest. On the contrary: what it attacks is not actualization as such, but its specifically modern condition of possibility: appropriability. The virtualization that takes place today, in the media and elsewhere, cannot be separated from the economic dictates of what is called globalization, which in turn is tied to a very definite, if problematic, goal: that of the maximization of profit. Profit, however, entails not just the production of “value” in general, but of value that is appropriable. Capital therefore continues to impose its goal upon virtualization, which by and large is permitted to develop only insofar as it serves this particular end.
Artaud’s virtual Theatre of Cruelty explicitly challenges this goal or telos – that of profit or appropriation, in all senses.
– Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium, Fordham University Press, NY, 2004, pp. 290-291
Note: Might not this appropriability of the virtual to virtualization invoke the reification of a preferred concept which Frederic Jameson says permits conceptualization? And note the doubling-redoubling of representative schema which is by definition the capitalizable. As if the System of the World rests on this Image of Thought.
