Another World Is Virtual

The chapter defines and explores the concepts of the possible, the potential, and the virtual through the writings of Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze. It puts these ideas into conversation with an audio medium that is both old and radically new: the people’s microphone, employed by the Occupy Wall Street movement in the autumn and winter of 2011. The people’s microphone is a special kind of speech-act, an actualization of the principles of collective democratic process. It is potential, both a dramatization of political change and the means of its enactment. It is also virtual, a medium that is no mere simulation, since it imagines, invents, and actualizes the changes that are spoken through it.