The complex juxtapositions that are inherent within extended meditations upon ‘virtual reality’, reveal an emergent landscape that is an unstable, fluidic conglomeration, and has the capacity to point out numerous directions for the theorist. In some ways, virtual reality emerges out of cyberpunk education, due to its universal use as a tool in understanding the way in which electronic mediation happens. The heroes and heroines of cyberpunk use virtual reality to explore created landscapes that contain information and routing networks in which to travel. Virtual reality may be firmly placed as central to the digital curriculum, as it is present wherever we encounter formulations that extend current teaching practises in terms of digital development. The purpose of this chapter is to clarify this movement, and to underwrite the implementation of virtual reality in the curriculum with a post-structural discourse that strategically facilitates its educational use in terms of power and agency. Therefore, the actual subject-pupil learning in virtual worlds, and the power relationships that these pupils shall encounter and establish, are fundamental to the way in which virtual reality is introduced and maintained in the digital curriculum and explored in terms of discourse.

Educationalists have embarked upon the relationship between the subject and the mediated gaming realities, by drawing out variant discourse between users of virtual reality and researchers; in so doing they have noticed the accelerated and ‘hyper’ realities that seem to ‘possess’ the users of the new technology. Learning is seen to be more opaque in these occasions, it is temperamental and subject to fits and starts, new beginnings and false endings in these virtual contexts. The truth is often masked from the outside, the meaning that we may ascribe to this activity is often hidden in a labyrinth of electronic circuitry and elaborate codes. It is caught up in an enhanced subjectivity; which is able to morphe through the learning of subtle procedural codes, and the passing from one stage to the next. The pupil could be said to be oblivious to external instruction during these moments, they are entirely goal orientated in virtual reality, yet they are located and limited by the virtual landscape that has, for this subjective time, taken on the role of the teacher.

Emergence as a theoretical construct, and that is applicable to virtual reality in a post-structural educational context, has its adjuncts in complexity theory. In biological terms, morphogenesis has a complex order in space and time that is understood as an emergent property that arises from organisational principles of an essentially simple kind. The educational system in this sense is morphogenic in terms of the development of virtual technology and a virtual cohort that are its users. The organisational principles of learning, knowledge acquisition, skill development in terms of the understanding and application of computer coding mechanisms, and the curricula content that may be ‘uploaded’ into virtual environments and interactively worked through by the pupil; are emergent and make up a complex order in space and time. It is not a question of ‘progress’, or the exigent outcomes that may be delimited due to virtual activity. The questions that shall concern this post-structural chapter of educational behaviour, are ones that involve picking through the complex order of space and time that go to make up the virtual. The theory that will be brought to bear on this problematic, derives its existence from the writing of Henri Bergson, and the use that his work has been put to by philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The complex order of space and time of the virtual, is a dynamic, morphogenic field, and one in which the characteristics of virtual reality parallel organic ‘life’, and question the metaphysical boundaries between the actual/virtual and the possible/impossible. The first task of this chapter is to describe the nature of virtual reality that is appropriate for educational post-structuralism in this context, and that makes clear the complex relationships in space and time that are being applied. Educational post-structuralism being the questioning and positioning of narrative structures that strategically infiltrate the power structures that would ‘envelop’ the discourse on virtual reality in the learning process from a singular or ´top-down´ perspective.

The ‘virtual’ oscillates between the highly theoretical and the practical extension of our everyday senses. The highly theoretical is pinpointed by physicians such as David Deutsch, who have constructed the notion of virtual reality on logical grounds. Such logical placement of virtual reality as the ‘image constructor’ through ‘tactical feedback’ (Deutsch’s expressions), leads to the notion of virtual reality as the ‘prime mover’ of the multiverse which Deutsch is at pains to prove exists. In this multiverse, the limits of human imagination are unlocked. Deutsch describes the generation of virtual realities as concerning the limits of logically possible external experience. Therefore, he excludes logically impossible experiences, for example, factorizing a prime number or the unconscious; he also excludes internal experience, such as being proud of one’s piloting abilities or experiencing colours outside the visible range. The repertoire of virtual reality according to this schema includes logically possible external experience such as piloting a plane, or the physically impossible such as flying faster than the speed of light.

Virtual reality can therefore represent the physically possible and impossible through a ‘rendering’ of specific environments, and this rendering process entails the complex mathematics and computation involved with virtual reality technology. The limits of such a multiverse (universe of that which is logically possible) relies heavily on the imaginations of the software engineers that create it, and any educational use that this multiverse will be put to, therefore also takes on the characteristics of the imaginations of the virtual reality engineers. It is these characteristics that make up the content of virtual reality, they ‘inhabit’ the complex order of time and space as logically possible external realities. However, these virtual realities do not coexist as orderly and ‘settled’ categories that may be sectioned or filed as fitting into educationally coherent curricula. Instead, the constructs of the virtual reality engineers meet in an inverted feedback system that underwrites their desire to exist in ‘other’ worlds. We find medieval ‘hell-holes’ full of monsters and deserted space-ships, abandoned and invaded by aggressive aliens. There are numerous ‘speed’ games where the contestants are required to master their joy sticks and race against each other. There are equally numerous fighting games, where the contestants are able to express violence in a mediated environment; negotiating labyrinths or arenas in order to destroy opponents. Learning takes place rapidly in these environments; it is an uncompromising and directed learning, the type of learning that is a post-modern educational marker.

It is also a type of learning that is proliferating in every aspect of society; and it circumvents any social determination in terms of the power relations that go to make up the fabric of the subject society through the virtuality which is at its core. This type of mediated learning is a problematic of environment and relation;

Learning in this sense conforms to such ‘operative rhythmics’; the translation of the curriculum into virtual reality, and the ‘digestion’ of knowledge through mediation, is not only a question of acceleration and shrinkage, but it is also a matter of understanding the inter-connectivity that occurs through complex arrangements in time and space due to the layering of reality. The question of ‘perspective’ also becomes paramount. "Even primitive VR corrodes both objectivity and personality; singularising perspective at the same time as it is anonymized." In such a way the power structures that are inherent within educational processes using virtual reality are simplified to a ‘generalised perspectivism’ (a theme that shall be developed in more depth below) and to rhythmic pulses. The connectivity that occurs due to the complex arrangements in time and space, means that linear learning schedules are replaced by the non-linear ‘optionality’ or open-ended schemas that integrate learning objectives through intensive pulses and multi-variant sensation. Learning in these virtual worlds is therefore ‘facet producing’, or productive of an itinerant dimensionality, that disregards the propensity to move in predictable non-fluid directions.

Scott Bukatman rationalised this dimensionality as being the "desire to see the space of the computer, and to further figure it as space one can move through and thereby comprehend." This places the virtual worlds at the forefront of new frontiers, as extended boundary-crossings for exploration and examination. The ‘other-worldly’ quality that virtual worlds often possess, does lend itself to the presumption that they are part of a positivistic push to chart as yet uncharted regions (of the mind?). However, this is a simplistic rendering of a type of science fictional narrative, and though it does hold cogency in terms of a stage one appeal forr those who are culturally immersed in technological enhancement; it does not extend to the less obvious realities that hold sway in the virtual. To think of virtual reality in these terms, adds a human aspect to a landscape that is fundamentally not human. The layered and warped realities that we encounter in the virtual, are not investigated by objectivity alone, and as has been stated, objectivity is eroded in these realms; the need to designate an a priori feedback system to comprehend them (as we move), miscomprehends them even as we begin to partially exist within them. Objects themselves in the virtual are partial-objects (cf. Melanie Klein), and they are as much a part of the interpretative and perspectival processes that we bring to them as they are demonstrative of the creativity of the software engineering that has made them. Understanding of these virtual objects, therefore requires the immersive tendency to go beyond the object.

To this extent, the desire which is unleashed through and in VR, defines a complex problematic in terms of its appraisal and comprehension. Teaching though the virtual inevitably confronts this problematic, as a schema is necessary for the process of ‘border crossing’ to and from the VR worlds. The direct assessment of the process in terms of feedback, leaves out the culturally determined aspects of VR that are not responsive to feedback, or at least those which do their best to avoid it. As Simon Cooper has written, "VR tends to operate not so much as an empowering and creative environment, but as an addictive space of desire. If the construction of the virtual space as an area of plenitude only occurs through removing the subject from the problems of the ‘real’ world rather than solving these problems, how is the subject to mediate between the virtual world and the world outside?" The processes of border crossing in and out of VR signify a type of addiction, in that desire is augmented as the borders are crossed and ‘new’ landscapes are encountered. The removal of the subject as self-aware observer in these realms, means that the translation of experience from VR to the ‘real’ world and back, undermines linear transmission (of meaning, of knowledge, of power). This is not to say that VR is not useful. For example, flight simulation has transformed the process of training airline pilots, yet the skills that are learnt in the virtual environments sharpen the sense that flying a plane is a singularly directed, non-verbal multi-tasked set (or at least the synthesis of several overlaying sets depending upon the complexity of the machine). This non-verbal multi-tasked set does not correspond to any one problematic experienced outside of that environment. Therefore the translation of these processes to the classroom or pre-defined learning environments, strengthens the characterisation of the virtual classroom as being a directed and singular unit of technological divergence. These units, if established, are the places where the directivity of virtual learning, opens up a non-verbal space for accelerated and simulated knowledge and skill retention. This is in contrast to the tenets of a humanist education, that would limit the divergence and the ´difference´; which the full implementation of virtual reality learning in the classroom would extend towards in its most advanced cases. Virtual reality learning in the classroom is the realisation of previously unimagined worlds.

Talk of addiction, and the loss of self-awareness, defines a sense of recursivity that virtual worlds embrace and enhance. Perhaps most easily viewed in the spectrum of teenage arcades, the recurrent nature of the passage to and from virtual worlds, also links virtual reality with media networks, television, video, and the representation of critical images and scenes in the mediascape until they are replaced by fresh sensations. Ian A. Boal has critically analysed this process with respect to the American TV networks, "replaying on video loop the moment of death or near-death over and over again serves no functional or analytic purpose. Compulsive repetition gives the illusion of control over the repressed, yet conveniently meshes with their products and symbols (of the networks)." The passage to and from virtual reality is in this way inculcated with the processes of post-modern capitalism. Learning in this sense is inevitably involved with some kind of commercial enterprise. The activity of learning in virtual reality is recursive, in that it involves repeated attempts to master skills that allow the participants to progress or solve problems. Coexistent with this recursive action, is the augmentation of desire, which is why advertisers use these processes to slot in their product names and messages. The desire to want to exist in the virtual universe, and to want to go back and forth from virtual worlds, produces planes of interaction that are visually apparent yet discreetly fitted with subjective time. In a similar way to the pedagogic processes of pre-capitalist desire, that created a subjective realm that was full of simulated angels, saints and God and that have been replaced by stereotyped bodies, sporting heroes and news broadcasters; the planes of interaction of the virtual worlds are subjectively reproduced. Just as the viewers see the pictures of death and near death on the networks repeated until they are no longer able to produce the required audience reaction; the action in the virtual worlds is geared to produce enough sensation to make the player come back to the same location, or until they need more stimulus. This action may include the use of music or different perspectival approaches or new gadgets at the disposal of the player in the virtual world; all of these options enhance ‘difference’ and therefore the clashing of the virtual worlds and concomitantly the commercial appeal of the game. Advertising in the form of visual representation and musical sound-bite, fits into the virtual schemas by using recursivity and the ‘phase-attraction’ of the virtual; they are the eddies and complex arrangements of space and time, which may be mathematicised by using Mandlebrot sets or the Möbius strip, the virtual player therefore becoming immersed in subjectively enhanced commercial enterprise.

Baudrillard has theorised the phase attraction of the virtual by using the notion of ‘precession’ (a mathematical term denoting the gyration of a sphere when spinning under torque, as when a top slows down and begins to wobble). The mathematical figures that may be used to denote the complex relationships in space and time that explain the ‘virtual’ are not, however, just metaphors. The virtual is the space where these computational models are possible, and, as such, they are representative of the planar arrangements in the sense that a line has to be drawn in order to go from the actual to the virtual and back; and these models are present in the transition from the actual to the virtual and vice versa. These planar arrangements go in every direction, and with the increasing power of computation, more arrangements to signify the emergence into the virtual will become increasingly apparent. VR in the sense of the digitised space of computer games, is still a ‘concrete’ transitional zone. It is as concrete as Kant´s subjective objectivity was, in that there are constructions of virtual space that still occupy or inhabit the subject (as seen, heard, felt and learnt). In contrast, as Baudrillard has theorised, the world of television is less easy to define or locate, as it has seemingly merged with everyday life.... "such a blending, such a viral, endemic, chronic, alarming presence of the medium, without the possibility of isolating the effects - spectralized, like those advertising laser sculptures in the empty space of the event filtered by the medium - it is the dissolution of TV in life, the dissolution of life in TV - it is indiscernible, a chemical solution." The future of VR is similar in the sense that its introduction through the learning patterns of the current and future generations, takes it away from the ‘glitzy gadgetry’ hype of new technology that is hidden from the masses, and places it more firmly into the realm of experiential data. The notion that Baudrillard explores through his exploration of television; which is that through the complex copying of reality in technological mediums, any return to an origin (the real) becomes untenable, does apply to VR. Issues for educationalists turn away from finding the true or first ‘cause’ of a technologically enhanced effect, and round more squarely on the ways in which explicative processes may be brought to bear on the complex web of organic and technological artefacts that go to make up any such effect. This said, the explicative processes cannot seek to surround the complex web of organic and technological artefacts; as an escape route from emulsifying power concerns are necessary to leave the technology open for the enhanced subject, this is in keeping with educational post-structural bounds.

One such complex web is the introduction of computers into the classroom, and the concurrent effects of mediation on learning. One may be in no doubt that computational mediation provides ample opportunity for the acceleration of certain types of learning, and the increase in mathematical ‘intelligence’ (Anderson, Boyle, Corbett and Lewis, 1990). Such learning represents a generalised ‘becoming-computer’ of the human mind which may be seen to be happening in various areas of society where the computer and work are intrinsically linked. There is no evidence to assume that this kind of learning is replacing other types; or that powerful Artificial Intelligence programs are going to sweep across the curriculum, replacing teacher instruction, with simulated intersubjectivity between computer and individual learners. Collaborative educational psychology questions whether simulated intersubjectivity is possible, and emphasises the social and cultural grounding of learning. Charles Crook, for example, suggests that we should consider educational solutions that propose computers as a context for social interaction. Discourse about computers, the effects of computers, and the issues that computers highlight in the educational process; represent an aspect of learning that involves language acquisition (the integration of computer terminology into natural language), and conceptual analysis (the comprehension of computer organisation). Classrooms, considered with or without computers in them, are ‘zones of proximal development’ (ZPDs), in which learning shall take place that incorporates new cultural artefacts in a social and personal context. The propositions of Vygotsky about cognitive functioning are not threatened by the placement of computers in the classroom, as the social aspects of learning may be encouraged and expanded by these artefacts. The point of the introduction of computers into the schools, is that new worlds of learning, such as those made apparent by VR, become part of a technologically mediated digital curriculum for the pupils. This point reinforces the idea that VR is akin to Kant´s argument about the objectivity of subjectivity. The subjective realm that VR opens up, develops the notion that there is a schematic framework for understanding the subjective in terms of its objects. We may have to posit VR as a synthetic construction, but it will work in this way when the objectivity of what is learnt and felt in VR.

The new learning aspect for educationalists to consider when having VR in the classroom, is that the traditional distinction between interior and exterior learning is reversed. When a learner reaches out for assistance in their particular problem solving enterprise, they are adjusting their own internal version of problem solving to that of proficient problem solvers in a culture (this is the classic schema for the learning profile of the ZPD). However, what if a socially accepted body of problem solvers have learnt through virtual reality, and the learners, when reaching out for assistance look to these ‘experts’, and therefore learn the VR process as exterior? For example, experiments with the modelling of economies, have shown that the numerous assumptions and generalisations necessary for the modelling process (which is performed in VR), make the relation to ‘real’ physical processes complex. Learners looking at this economic modelling may misunderstand that the mathematical assumptions about reality do not figure reality, but they are a virtual simulation about reality. VR complexifies the learning processes about reality, in that ‘other’ realities become apparent, which make any final exterior social worlds mediated by the passages to virtual worlds; so, it could be said that the processes to knowledge in ZPD fluctuate or oscillate through mediation in VR. This in part addresses the issue of power in VR. VR produces tiers or eschelons of power, that cover and reveal the way in which traditional power structures deliver and accept knowledge. Relationships are reversed and put back as they were; this is because VR accelerates and intensifies the passage to reality, leaving it seemingly unchanged, but digitally altered and enhanced inside a transformed subjective space. Knowledge therefore is able to find its way to the social world, yet not without the possibility of expansion and devolvement on other planes, or in other mediated VR constructions.

Bernard J. Poole foresaw the use of virtual reality as a resource for the ‘enrichment’ of existing lessons. Geography lessons on volcanic activity, or literature lessons on the romantic poets, may be embellished and enhanced through the use of virtual reality technology. Virtual reality could be seen to be a ‘standing reserve’ of knowledge and educational experience given that the resources and access to the technology is universal. The power of virtual reality in education is that it has the ability to simulate environments, and this simulation adds a dynamic and exciting element to the description or two dimensional representation of those environments. In this way, the curriculum may be reproduced in virtual reality, and ‘flat’ lessons are given technological ‘life’ through virtual reality. Virtual reality opens up the ‘interactivity’ of the classroom in that it may produce more detailed and three dimensional representations of the curriculum, which pupils may examine and move within. It is ‘the next step’ for educationalists after use of television, video, or material derived from the internet or though video-conferencing, in that pupils are given the chance to actually experience what they are learning about. The participation in an interactive environment to this extent defines a sense of virtual power, and the empowerment of digital synthesis.

The two major drawbacks to the ‘more is better’ next-step approach to education are, 1) that this technology is still expensive, and will therefore expand the divide between establishments which may afford the technology, and those to which it is still a dream, and, 2) that it is unclear how learning in VR affects the memory. The question therefore arises, that given the complex interactive processes involved in VR, wouldn’t it be simpler to present the information that the students are being asked to learn in a straightforward, no-nonsense text-based manner? The solution to the first pragmatic problem in education is one that has been tackled by social scientists such as Kevin Robins and Frank Webster. Funding for new technology in schools will in part come about through partnerships between industry and education, as government has recognised. This need for partnership reflects in part the process of virtualisation that is happening in the workplace; where it has been understood that VR is an important environment in which to work. We need to have it in schools, if students are to confidently use it in work. Robins and Webster provide a sceptical approach to the question of IT in schools, in that placement of more computers in schools does not directly mean that there will be more jobs for the pupils when they finish school even if they have competent IT skills. They question the commercial intent behind placing computers in schools, and wonder about the sociological change that is being initiated by IT processes in the classroom and in the workplace. Given that capital exploits subjective knowledge and the mediation that virtual reality affords, the educational intent behind its use can be vague and easily covered by the more powerful intentions of the computer companies. To avoid the application of factory mentality to virtual reality, and the exploitation of virtual value by postmodern capitalists; a real difference has to be set in place between IT and the repetitive processing of information, and VR and the creation of new worlds in learning.

The change in skill behaviour which is occurring due to VR in education is different in kind to the question of skill behaviour in IT in education. VR does not concern the expansion of menial jobs which basic IT skills gives rise to. It is an altogether more complex sociological and, by degrees ontological question; and it is one which is being addressed in tandem throughout this chapter. The complexification of time and space that VR represents, also applies to the linear passage from school to work and vice versa; and to the many intricate patterns of ‘lifelong-learning’ which are occurring. These are, in part, testament to the application of virtual worlds in learning and knowledge. They also show the ways in which the memory is being transformed due to the virtualisation of the learning process. For short-term memory testing, the revision of plainly stated ‘facts’, is still perhaps the most effective way in which to rate candidates. For more contemporary courses, which include and promote the dynamism and diversity of modern media and the virtual; plainly reproductive memory processes are not enough. The use of testing in the sense of such virtual courses engages with the processes of learning in virtual reality, and cannot be ‘other’ to the complex regimes of space and time that are being addressed: an example of these types of courses are those being conducted by the University of Austin in the multimedia department under the supervision of Allucquere Rosanne Stone. The pragmatics of learning in VR defines an ontological logic which diverts the impetus of linear instruction, with its logic of rote learning, copying and reproduction. The modernist nightmare visions of Orwell or Kafka, where the mass processing of information created a parallelism that conformed humans into herds of torture and painful mental elongation, are placed through a prism in VR. This distortion produces planes of knowledge and skill adaptation that are laterally connected, yet separate and distinguishable. The processes which students learn in VR are intricately meshed with the ways in which computers are evolving in terms of ontological status and mental distance. These processes are also productive of parallel yet laterally connected interactive planes whereby agents may choose lifestyle, direction and learning patterns that define entirely different moral codes.

The complex regimes of space and time that are inhabited and produced by the Diasporan journeys to and from the virtual, have been theorised philosophically as a result of the work of Henri Bergson. These journeys are unregulated wanderings that are occuring at ever increasing frequencies as the pace of technology warms up. The technology that has evolved since the theorisation of the virtual that is contained in Bergson, and has produced the virtual reality which is our subject; is a result of the simulation programmes that have been developed by the language of computer programmers. The use of the work of Bergson, and the way in which it has been taken up recently by Gilles Deleuze, gives a broader understanding to any education about virtual reality. It is not the case that the technological artefacts, their inventors and the reality that they have given rise to, are involved in the philosophical project to comprehend the way in which time and space have been rationalised in relation to questions about ‘the virtual’ or ‘the subjective’; but yet the coincidence of terminology, is a linguistic signal of intent. Indeed, the way in which Bergson (who took his notion of time from a close understanding of the work of Zeno), and latterly Deleuze, have both sought to ‘dehumanise’ the thought of the virtual, by inculcation with time, and through the abstraction from interior possession or ‘the subject’; parallels and complements the intrusion of computer technology in the shape of virtual reality when considering the artificial extention of ‘the mind’. Virtual reality could, therefore, be rewritten as, ‘the time of the virtual’ in the sense that its spatial parameters have been removed.

The problem of the virtual, (and problems in general), is a matter of constituting the correct composites and conditions by which the problem may be posited. In terms of Bergson and Deleuze, this is a creative activity, and one that often requires even more effort and precision than the solution:

Questioning teachers on this point, highlights the difficulty of the technique. Teachers who value creative activity above all else, and who have the patience and time to allow pupils to set up the problem that is to be solved, agree that it is this activity that focuses the class on the subject at hand. Teachers with increasingly congested schedules in which to fit burgeoning examination content, are more likely to accept the validity of the problem, and to work on the method of solution as class activity. To fit the time of the virtual into the struggle for examination success, is to reconcile creative intuition (as Bergson termed it), with an educationalist’s need to achieve recognisable examination results ‘across the board’. The encouragement of this type of creative problem designation, is a recognition of the importance of an individual’s perception of time which is always effectual and in some cases determinate in creative work; and the individual’s perception of time demonstrates an understanding of the memory through duration, or, "the continuation of what no longer exists into what does exist."

The immersive nature of virtual reality, does give rise to the thought that it is a reality that is acting on a different axis to the spatial. The way in which the simulated reality ‘becomes’ real through perception, participation and navigation; adds weight to the claim that we are extending a sense of duration or continuity. The ‘lack’ of extension (in the real world) is compensated and addressed by the action of the memory; that is to say that the simulated reality is reinvented through creative intuition, and the user of the VR technology ‘crosses-over’ into a time based intuitive process and reality. Empirical studies of pupils working on computer games and through virtual reality, enforce the sense that the learning involved is responding to this axis of duration....... "as the game progresses they (the pupils) begin to internalise a taxonomy of objects and behaviour and are delighted to be challenged by good software designers, who vary the behaviour of objects and cause the children to evolve sub classes that vary the prototypical behaviour." This process of internalisation, is often overlooked in classroom education, as it seems difficult to account for or to examine socially or universally. Yet it is a skill and practice that many children are becoming competent; in the future, teachers themselves may need to ‘catch-up’ in the area of learning through virtual reality, and to develop the intuitive power to learn through duration, in order to be able to function on the profound subjective level which the new technology increasingly demands.

Duration is non-chronological time that constitutes interiority, and it is a time of excess with relation to the subject. Deleuze explains this Bergsonian concept with reference to Proust; when he states that duration is productive of states of virtuality, that are "real without being actual, ideal without being abstract." The moments of pure recollection that we find in Proust, give us an insight into the nature of duration; it is at these times that the subject collapses into the creativity associated with these time-related processes that stand on their own though the positive differentiation of the virtual. It is here also, that we find the much vaunted and villified Bergsonian ‘vitalism’. The élan vital of Bergson is presented by Deleuze as being, "always a case of a virtuality in the process of being actualised, a simplicity in the process of differentiating, a totality in the process of dividing: Proceeding ‘by dissociation and division,’ by ‘dichotomy,’ it is in fact the essence of life."Deleuze insists through these arguments that the élan vital is entirely empirical, that it is something which by necessity has to be lived. It is in this sense the vital interest that we have in space and time, yet it circumvents homogeneous conceptions of them, because the separation between things, objects, and environments is neither absolutely definite nor clear cut, as "the close solidarity which binds all the objects of the material universe, the perpetuality of their reciprocal actions and reactions, is sufficient to prove that they have not the precise limits which we attribute to them." Bergson also distinguished between the analysis which stands back from the object and accumulates data on it, and the act by which one becomes one with the totality and hence its duration. This distinction also marks out the action that is necessary to travel within the worlds of VR, and hence to learn through its interiority; as the objectivity of VR is a false perspectivty that is always in the process of becoming ‘other’ through the clashing of planes that VR interactivity defines.

We can therefore move to assimilate learning through virtual reality (mediation), with the understanding of duration and the élan vital of Bergson. Bergson presents an analysis of cognisance, that critiques natural perception, and provides the subject with a powerful ‘stock’ of virtual action that is brought to bear through the attention of perception in duration. It is a schema that suggests the involvement of becoming through continuous movements of time; and that has the power to liberate the memory from the mundane to the creative. As computers develop exponentially, the miniaturisation and concentration of functions into ever more powerful memory chips, also signifies the transition from the repetitive to the creative. It is as if we were writing intuition into our intelligent machines by making them productive of highly complex virtual realities that immerse the user in the process of learning through intensity. Educational studies of this type of learning miss the point if they waver around the moral aspects of the new technology; as the learning involved hits a different aspect of cognition. This aspect highlights the interiority of learnt time, and opens up a multiplicity of possible becomings, rather than more simple understandings of linear becoming through direct perception.

This multiplicity of becomings is better known as the unconscious. Computerised education and the education that it encourages through the digital curriculum, has begun to stray into this area through the production of virtual reality. As Jerome Bruner expresses the notion, it is "like the fish who (according to the proverb) will be the last to discover water.....our problem is achieving consciousness of what we so easily do automatically, the ancient problem of prise de conscience." Bruner lists the various strategies of contrast, confrontation and metacognition as being appropriate to the narrative solutions to this problem. In other words, narratives may contrast different perspectives of the same event to highlight consciousness of them, or they may confront the reader into their own awareness of what is happening, or they may alternatively construct a metacognitive approach to reality that converts it into a basis for knowledge (and in so doing, this approach achieves an interpersonal negotiation of meaning). In the specific terms and through the conceptual understanding of Bergson; the unconscious is not the problem to be ‘solved’ or unravelled through the enlightenment and training of culture, but it is already in the process of producing the solution through its inherent complexity. The various narrative strategies that are listed (and there are many possible others as the processes of narrative are invariably entangled), are themselves productions of the unconscious and creative intuition. The élan vital is in a ceaseless state of invention, and just as one narrative or reality in the case of virtual reality is produced; it is rearranged and reorganised and a combinatory example incorporating its elements will be designated as signifying the work of the unconscious.

Virtual reality responds to this ceaseless rearrangement, though its axes are more directly corporeal than those of narrative in the visual sense (they are also less metaphorical than words). The unconscious multiplicities and subsequent ‘play of forces’ that are present in virtual reality, incorporate instinctual elements that are set in post-modern scenarios (e.g. sexuality and violence). These multiplicities reinforce the feeling that what we are experiencing through virtual reality is a communal ‘unveiling’ of force that has been locked in the unconscious, and that virtual reality is providing an ‘interiority’ in the outside world where this unveiling may take place. This is perhaps why there is a struggle to accept the educational validity of virtual reality, as social pressure mounts to counter the growing prevalence of the unconscious in the exterior. The type of game playing and learning that is being enjoyed by the players of virtual reality, is unpalatable to educational forces intent on the preservation of social and textual codes which this type of game playing transgresses. Yet, in a similar and parallel manner to the debate over the loss of meaning (signification) in culture between postmodernists and the guardians of literary canon; where ‘new’ literature such as science fiction or horror is reused and reinvented in other mediums, for example, cartoons and films and thus provides the basis for the argument that literary meaning is fluid and not dependent upon context, - there is no reason why the learning of virtual reality cannot be incorporated into existing literary based curriculum, or the expansion into the digital curriculum. The two are not mutually exclusive sets, but ‘cross-over’ in as many ways as they are separate and complex; for example, computer games often use motifs and ideas from literature and history, science fiction and cyberpunk often include the notion of virtual reality as an important feature of their narrative format. If VR attains the characteristics of duration as has been described by Bergson, then it would provide a stable enough platform to become canonical, and it would be written into the digital curriculum. This knowledge, however, would incorporate the principles of inversion, distortion and virtual transformation as piecemeal to the processes of becoming that the journey to VR signifies.

The Deleuzian interpretation of Bergsonian multiplicities does itself respond to a hybrid canon, that could neither be said to be traditional nor entirely original. He uses Nietzschean plurality to focus the way in which multiplicities act through the duration of the unconscious. Nietzschean force is never singular, it is always thought of as a differential between other forces. This qualifies Nietzsche’s interest in the ways in which schemes or perspectives "interact, attract, convince, corrupt, and incorporate one another." There is no one perspective that is incommensurate to all others (e.g. God, meta-truth or ‘science’), but all perspectives actively participate in a coagulation of truth. Nietzsche critiques the unitary notion of the will as a repudiation of any will (against Schopenhauer); instead we are left with a field of willing, where the differential between forces defines systems of domination (will over will) and ultimately hierarchy and value that arise out of complex field dynamics. Deleuze uses this plurality to designate the active and creative multiplicities of Bergsonian time that surge and pulse to inhuman, rhythmic forces. He also uses the mathematical distinction between actual and virtual multiplicities.

Actual multiplicities are numerical and discontinuous, virtual multiplicities are continuous and qualitative (this corresponds to his notion of simplicity). Bergsonian time fits into the second category, where, as Deleuze terms it, we encounter the true Bergsonian problematic which is; "What is the multiplicity that is peculiar to time?" Bergson’s ‘solution’ to this problematic is the notion of virtual multiplicities that express the coexistence of simultaneous fluxes. The coexistence of simultaneous fluxes divides into elements that differ in kind; these elements also only exist insofar as the division itself is effectively carried out. This is because, if our consciousness terminates the division at a given point, there also terminates divisibility. To illustrate this point, Bergson describes the scene of sitting on the bank of a river; in this situation we have the flowing of the river, the gliding of a boat and the flight of a bird, "the uninterrupted murmur of our deep life, are for us three different things or a single one, at will....." Each element of this characteristically pointillist scene, is a continuous multiplicity or a flux; these fluxes are simultaneous and therefore coexist in a kind of ‘inner time’, which may be merged into one or differentiated as the ‘dream-like’ backdrop through which the elements taking their movement-places are subsumed in the duration of the scene. In a contrasting and complementary fashion, Boccioni´s futurist manifesto takes this Bergsonian characterisation of ‘movement-places’ to a sharper and more relevant (in terms of virtual reality) edge. His concentration of the multiple forms of urban and modernist environments, accelerates the sense of movement-places, and develops the theme that technological augmentation acts as a catalyst for the unconscious in mass mediated society.

Updating this tranquil picture further and into the clashing emergence of virtual reality; we may experience the continuity of lived time through electronic fluxes shaped as grand prix cars, we may find fantastic monsters hidden in their labyrinths, we may engage in combat with armed and dangerous opponents. These multiplicities are an expression of force, yet this force is not unitary, it is action contained within a field of forces; the action of the virtual demonstrates the ability to extract the particulars of the flux from other virtual elements, and therefore to manipulate the flux with respect to the shifting electronic environments within which multiple flux relations are present. We bring to the virtually constructed environment, this ability to differentiate between elements, and through this skill we experience duration, which the process of differentiation can fall back into, as the basic creative process or intuition that defines learning in virtual reality; and extends the virtual from the digitally repressive or recursive. Virtual reality is an enhanced form of the simultaneity of fluxes of which Bergson wrote; as the effect of mediation through electronic perception, is to increase and emphasise the link with consciousness in duration, as action in virtual reality is time based rather than spatial and discontinuous. Furthermore, the perceived time in virtual reality is more clearly conceived time, in the sense that we are not experiencing natural perception in virtual reality; as the environment is entirely constructed, and that movement within this environment depends upon the analysis of coexistent electronic data.

In line with post-modern theories of education, the critique of natural perception that we derive from Bergson, undermines models of perception that would reduce the activity and becoming of perception to a centred subject. This is parallel to and ready for the decentred subject that we find inhabiting the electronic worlds that are fuelling the imaginations of many young learners (see Chapter One: the Electronic Body). Bergson writes that... "to perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of an intense life, and in the summing up of a very long history. To perceive means to immobilise." It is a creative activity, that involves considerable expenditure (more than a singular perspective), and the focus of many minds. It is also an activity that brings to the fore the Bergsonian conception of memory. Bergson’s thinking of time as duration is one in which the emphasis is on the virtual character of time, and in particular on time’s past which always ‘grows without ceasing’ and which possesses an infinite capacity for novel re-invention. The memory is involved with this re-invention, as the reality of the past is a deep and productive unconscious that evolves automatically. The Bergsonian memory is not a process of representation, as the past is not directly ‘shifted’ into the present, but it is implicated in the future through the past’s becoming. It is not a psychological faculty of recollection, as it cannot be switched on and off intermittently; to summarise this conception, the memory could be said to be a system property; the memory is not necessarily attached to agency, but it belongs to duration and to the ‘variable essence of things’ which provides Deleuze with his complex ontological reading of Bergson.

This complex ontological reading of Bergson, allows Deleuze to posit the ‘inner time’ of duration into the ‘time of the universe’. Rather than seeing this as an inherent contradiction in the schema of Bergson and Deleuze; the extension of the notion of duration into the variability of ‘things’, provides a methodology where the multiplicities of time that are produced by the automatic accumulation of experience in the unconscious, may be seen to ‘work’ pragmatically in the outside world. In the world of education, these time based multiplicities are providing ‘planes of becoming’ that define the future of learning. Virtual reality is one such plane of change, and the duration of the time based learning that happens in virtual reality, provides the multiplicities that are ‘released’ through the educational processes of virtual reality in learning environments. The Deleuzian critique of Hegelian dialectic, is concurrent with his Nietzschean affirmation of being. The Hegelian dialectic enforces reason through the negation of nature. It also leads to the movement towards knowledge through time in the sense of a power dialogue between master and slave. Nietzsche was certainly writing against what he saw as the restrictive and repressive forces that followed and defined power as we find it in Hegelian dialectics. This movement produced the structure that was a Hegelian hierarchy (an immense master-slave dialectic, where slaves were in the process of becoming masters through reason) and a power system; its adherents and disciples came to dominate the nineteenth century German education system. A Hegelian would certainly counter the positive affirmation of a Nietzschean figure (simply explained as the release of primal force in an unrestricted multiplicity emanating from the unconscious), as being a movement towards schizophrenia, and not the unity of knowledge in an educated individual. Yet the theory of duration and multiplicity which we derive through Deleuze and via Bergson; is not about agency, nor is it about the unity of the self, but it is a considered attempt to trace the becoming of multiplicity in time. How far it reaches ‘into the universe’, depends upon the loci of becoming that are posited when setting up the problem in the creative manner that was stated at the beginning of this section about Bergson. An unrestricted problematic of learning in virtual reality, extends the field of enquiry to encapsulate multiple becomings in a complex ontology. VR in this sense is an unmannered release of the type that Nietzsche portrayed and figured; it is the search for knowledge or the truth that is unbounded and outside of societal concerns and the notion of a civilised or static individual. It is a postmodern nomad created through the digital curriculum.

Expectations that we might achieve stable ‘knowledge’ about learners in virtual reality, are hereby realigned to ‘follow’ the release of unconscious multiplicities (the molecular to utilise Deleuze’s term). This process takes the Deleuzian project of difference seriously; it is a philosophical enterprise which looks to open up areas of thought through hybrid transposition. In the field of learning through virtual reality, positive difference of the qualitative type that this project requires; is an internal difference that is ‘experienced’ via the duration of the electronic flux. Expression of this learning extends the difference into exteriority, where the electronic flux becomes inculcated with the environment (for example, as we find in the simulacra of Baudrillard). The ‘effects’ of learning through virtual reality are felt throughout the educational system to the extent that the ‘substance’ of learning (the curriculum) responds to the forces of virtual reality, and to the unconscious multiplicities that are released through the creative action of the élan vital. Simultaneous curriculum innovation, leads to the notion that all subjects of the curriculum may take part in parallel distributed computational models of becoming (connectionist), where virtual reality gives extra breadth to the interdisciplinary learning regimes that are possible (for example, the use of parallel computation in the determination of the origins of order in chaos by Stuart Kaufmann). Yet the virtual is not a field of potentia, which is easily absorbed by the idealism of technological progress; but it is a complex crossing-point, which has the characteristics of actuality mixed up with the intense technological enhancement of a digital universe.

Virtual reality is in this sense ‘perspectival’, in that the virtual gives rise to the idea that linkage between subjects is increasingly relevant and easily achieved. It is an extension of ‘what the mind can do’, and, to this extent, it is a zone in which the advanced experimentation of the imagination can figure and refigure the most complicated problematics that are placed in front of it. It removes the hindrance of the unified subject or agent (which was augmented through the various auspices of humanism/liberal democracy and the Enlightenment); and provides a plane on which the radical rearrangement and application of process through the imagination may proceed without adherence to the needs of transcendence or moral order; although these are still possible and not excluded. The perspectivism of virtual reality is a non-extended ‘space’ where the motion of thought may be placed without ties to linear text or mechanical replication, that would diminish the power of immanent diversification to come up with novel productions. It could be seen to be a type of intense design studio, where technical knowledge may interplay with creative writing, or advanced ‘imagistics’ may enhance the representations of history. As such, virtual reality is at the cutting edge of technological industry; it is where the future is reinventing the past, and the past is reinvested as a stock of productive material. The question of value in time is set onto a different perpectival plane in virtual reality. The ways in which our understanding of the past and the future alters due to VR; it is a ‘looking glass process’ for learning, it is a digital reinvestment of what may be productively used to expand the freedom of learning on the zero digital curriculum plane.

Through the use of computer technology in the classroom, the dynamism of virtual learning and the cultural influence of the leading edge of techno-capitalism clashes with relatively sedate educational mores. Difference is locatable in these classrooms, as time is accelerated and decelerated; virtual reality attests to the duration and continuity of the electronic flux, and the simultaneity of coexistent forms produces the post-modern pressure of higher achievement (globalism). The actualisation of the virtual plane, results in escape routes from the past, the divergence and unpredictability of the future, the digital imagination and game playing in the fantastic. In Deleuzian terms, the difference that is apparent is a type of differentiation, as internal difference is enacted with the fully explosive force of life, though without recourse to full presence as the activity is bounded by the digital arena of virtual reality. The social construction of previous educational models of becoming are resistant matter to this differentiation, yet they are inevitably incorporated through communication, with divergence, by association, in resemblance; and they will exist in some form in virtual reality. The resultant differences of learning in virtual reality, ‘grow without ceasing’; as they are not external differences that are possible to categorise into phyla. Instead, they are kept in the Bergsonian memory, and play with the constructions of the mind like a demonic child. This process of internalisation produces a community of subjects that corresponds to and is in a reciprocal relationship with the digital artefacts that are creating it. This does not merely point to the loss of control associated with the rational subject, but makes way for the routing context of digital tribalism. The digital curriculum in this sense exploits VR through the ways in which the expansion of the internal micro-communities offers expanded and prevalent communication options, (this is silicon parallelism or the mediated swarm effect).

The incorporation of other models of educational becoming into virtual reality, is part of the tendency towards global capitalism that is mediated by virtual technology. These forces, that are making routes from the stock of virtual becomings, and being actualised in the way in which business is operating, act as a counter to the application of Deleuzian difference to the field of learning in virtual reality. This counter is apparent to the extent that the intention of virtual becoming is aligned to the wishes of a proto-paternalistic industrial elite (e.g. Bill Gates, Rupert Murdock, Sony, etc.). The globalisation of such wishes diminishes the élan vital of the technology, and increases the likelihood that the multiplicities of the unconscious are retrained and directed into automated perspectives of virtual allegiance (consumerist). Education using virtual technology includes the role of understanding the important task of encouraging divergence, and ensuring that virtual becoming follows multiple exit routes from virtuality, so that the products of virtual endeavour are the actualisation of lateral and unexpected desire. This creative action is a delimitation of the potentia of the virtual, and places virtual reality at the heart of a revised and revalued curriculum, where its interdisciplinary position is a complex ontological crossing-point.

The creative system for the virtual which we derive from Bergson, is accelerated and updated by the assertion that the virtual maybe reconciled as a system or machine philosophy. This machine philosophy is working throughout society and creating planes of interaction where the action of the virtual is apparent. The learning process is one such plane, and it is one where the virtual produces lines of flight that are defining the directions of the virtual in complex yet ‘mappable’ orders. This mapping process is structured by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, a Thousand Plateaus, as responding to the function of ‘abstract machines’. These abstract machines are diagrammatic representations of the complexities of change in society, coexisting with the changes; they do not exist as Platonic forms of society, or teleological programmes for the ‘shepherding’ of progress along set technologically mediated paths, but the abstract machines are simultaneous productions, existing as "singular and creative, here and now, real yet nonconcrete, actual yet noneffectuated-that is why abstract machine are named and dated (the Einstein abstract machine, the Webern abstract machine, but also the Galileo, the Bach or the Beethoven). Not that they refer to people or to effectuating moments; on the contrary, it is the names and dates that refer to the singularities of the machines, and to what they effectuate." The ‘concrete assemblage’ (orders of convergence and divergence) that go to make up learning in virtual reality, are the parts that are abstracted into its singular machine, and the heterogeneous body that is the object of this section.

Pierre Lévy has set about the mapping of the concrete assemblage of the virtual in terms of the way in which the actual is being ‘virtualised’ in contemporary society. The technological processes that he approaches are apparent ‘across the board’ in the collective intelligence that he designates as signifying our society, which pinpoints the movement towards the virtual as being a derivative of technological progressivism. This is the type of theory that allows and encourages a utopic functionalism regarding the introduction of virtual technology into the learning process; and therefore could be designated as being an uncritical appraisal of the virtues of the new technology. Yet simultaneous, and perhaps because of such an extremity of opinion, there is an inevitable nihilism, that concedes the virtual is to be placed into the processes of society as a kind of destiny of the real; the lineage of technology stretching back to the use of the first machines by mankind, and the virtual being only the latest and most monstrous of our shared creations;

Lévy takes the view that virtualization is to be addressed through art, and that the ‘truths’ that are revealed through the exploration of virtualization, will help us to come to terms with the peculiar and latest technological developments that he lists as being associated with vitualization; including the virtual hyperbody. Yet the processes of virtualization in the assemblage that makes up the abstract machine of the virtual, are not merely tied up with the ‘act of questioning’ through art. They are not uniquely human. They are inhuman and historical. Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus take the axiom of virtualization and incorporate it into the fold of capitalist organisation. Precapitalist society overcoded the flows of the technical machines and cast them in such a way so that they could never achieve any independence (for example, the blacksmith or the astronomer). Capitalist organisation decoded the flows, resulting in a deterritorialisation of the flows which has allowed them to enter into automatic machines; this process is now controlled by computers. Traditional codes that limit and control social relations and production, such as kinship systems, class structure, religious beliefs, folk traditions, customs; are inevitably subverted by capitalist organisation, so that they may enter into its processing organism. The automatic machines which effect this processing have increasingly internalised the flows of code, until they have entered into a field of forces which depend on a science and technology, and an intellectual labour, distinct from the manual labour of the worker. The digital axiom of the virtual can be seen to be fed into the social axiom of capitalist organisation, which itself corresponds to the digital ‘on’ and ‘off’ of capitalist modes of production. The social axiom of capitalism organisationally determines the path of decoded flows, including the scientific and the technical.

Michael W. Apple has indicated that educational mores are also being incorporated into the fold of capitalist organisation. He is concerned by capitalist reproduction, and by the way in which the curriculum is subverted by the concerns of accumulation, legitimisation (of the state), and the modes of capitalist production in general. Schools are, according to this perspective, ‘used’ by outside forces in order to reproduce the codes of the dominant classes in society at the expense of other less dominant classes. They are tools at the bequest of "middle-managers, semi-autonomous employees, technicians, engineers, accountants, government employees," who are reproducing their majoritarian credentials through the legitimisation of the state in schools. Apple indicates that the emphasis on competency based education, systems management, career education, futurism (a codeword for manpower planning), national testing programmes and technical colleges in general,is the outcome of the decoding of traditional codes, and the processing of education in favour of capitalist production (and reproduction). Creative, singular, perspectival education can be seen to suffer as a result of this processing; the processing of the virtual through capitalism is, in this sense, a homogenising force that destroys individuality and is at odds with the self-determination of schools. The abstract machine of the virtual (that is not always abstract), does involve this tendency; but, in contrast to the theoretical approach of Apple, it does not respond to the notion of ‘schools as sites of resistance’. The process of reproduction of code happens ‘across the board’ to the extent that the virtual forms a plane of consistency, and this plane is able to be designated as existing (in schools, in the workplace). It is a historical, irreversible process, and homogeneous to the extent that desire (for its results and process) is generated in society. Learning in virtual reality (most clearly and quickly by children through games), may remain heterogeneous to the extent that we keep at the ‘bottom-up’ end of its process (where children are learning), and do not veer theoretically into the perspective of the plane of consistency, where learning in virtual reality decodes values and substitutes traditional codes for its own - and, importantly - as theorists and educationalists, we do not designate this side of the process as being paramount. From that side of the equation, the abstract machine of the virtual is a powerful political tool, irrevocably tied up with political/social/military concerns; as it gives the intensified subject individual models of mediation as ‘kits’ for learning on its own terms.

The three segments of the capitalist reproduction process were joined by Deleuze and Guattari in a paraphrase of Marx; these segments define the three aspects of the immanence of reproduction: 1) The extraction of human surplus value, based on the differential relation between decoded flows of labour and production. 2) The extraction of machinic surplus value, based on flows of scientific and technical code. 3) The absorption and realisation of the two forms of surplus value by maximising the emission of both and injecting anti-production into the production apparatus - this is especially cogent in the timetabling, curriculum and control mechanisms of schools. The capitalist process takes the analogue flows of functional human mechanisms, for example, education, and continually introduces discrete elements into their functioning, digitising the continuum of reproduction to constrain it beneath the immanent force of ‘on’ and ‘off’ - this is the ‘top-down’ mechanism of social and governmental inspection. The introduction of discrete elements into the learning process, forms binary chains of coupled ‘desiring-machines’. These are series, which take the multiplicity of relations in society and subjects them to a recording plane, whereby the coupling may be understood, for example, a mouth as eating-machine or breathing-machine or speaking-machine, a school as a thinking-machine or a training-machine or a conditioning-machine. The coupling also makes the elements more likely to be analysed, processed, accelerated and set to work in the machinic functioning of capitalist society. It takes learning in virtual reality and subjects it to educational efficiency, making the abstract machine of the virtual more likely and able to be used as a killing machine; this is because educational efficiency derives power from the homogeneity of the process that can only expand through the will to dominate or extermination of the ‘other’. This is the ‘top down’ side of the learning process, that has at its ultimate goal a fully automated system that works in terms of the education of a technical elite expressing a unified will. As a post-structural analysis, this reworking of the digital curriculum looks to underwrite such elements with their tribal and primitive precusors which are simultaneously released alongside the will to technological advancement and domination. The strategies and narrative techniques that expand and increase the prevalence of minor narrative portrayal in the theoretical realisation of a digital curriculum; hinder the development of the capitalist coopting machine. Virtual reality is a vital component of this machine, and, as such, it must be dealt with in terms of education, where it is learnt about. This is the battle for the process through which the toolkits for individuals to learn about their own potentia in VR are disseminated and understood.

The virtualization of war that we are witnessing through the development of ‘smart machines’ such as cruise missiles with long range guidance systems; is a direct result of the decoding of the practices of war, and their processing by computers. The studies of Daniel Pick or Manuel de Landa, have shown how the theoreticians of war such as Clausewitz, have been updated and uploaded in computer technology. Computer games do have an almost unhealthy predilection for war games, and learning in virtual reality already has this tendency written into its codes. Yet the translation of learning through the virtual into military hardware, is not a direct one. The heterogeneous end of the abstract machine of the virtual, at the base level of the individual learners in virtual reality; dissipates the desire for war into simulated and often fantastic scenarios that enact war situations. In contrast, the construction of highly technological killing machines, necessitates the homogenisation of material resources and intellectual skill through the auspices of government and industry. The two processes are therefore disparate, and whilst sharing content, are separated by an immense material gulf. This gulf may be bridged by the construction of an abstract machine of the virtual that ‘channels’ a smooth plane of material reinvestment from the seriousness of death to the fun of leisure. The immanence of capitalist reproduction works in this sense through the involvement with virtual value. The extraction of machinic surplus value through the parallel series that are formed as capitalism codes and overcodes hosts cultures and practises, devolves a plane where virtual value may be elicited. This is most prevalent in the technical language of the new machines, that, for example, are used in the writing of computer programmes to guide missiles. The reproduction of capitalism in schools produces the necessity for virtual value as it codes the practises and values of teachers and their interaction with their pupils. Capitalism in this sense interrupts the analogue relationship between communities of learners in the digital curriculum, and simultaneously produces singular instances of virtual value that are disparate from host communities. Contained in these singular instances that are analogue, yet teachable as digital in the digital curriculum, are the diagrammatic representations of abstract machines; which demonstrate the ways in which VR is immanent without being prone to reproduction. These are the most creative uses of VR (for example, cyberpunk, virtual art).

The field of immanence peculiar to capitalism also realises a technical language that corresponds to the generalised decoding of flows instead of referring, directly or indirectly, to despotic overcoding (as would have been the case in pre-capitalist society). The electric flow is one such flow which enters into a relationship when conjoined with other flows, one defining content, the other expression. Here the capitalist sign means nothing, it acts to deregulate the process, functioning within economic parameters as a medium for transcoding and co-ordinating various components of the circuit of production, exchange, distribution and consumption. This is not capital qua capitalism, but the sign of capital qua capitalism, which floats in the flow of signs and symbols, is mixed up and designified just like all the others. The electric flow can be conjoined with flows of words, images, music or digital commands in the controlling technical machines (computers). The conjoining of flows is also meaningless, it merely channels the flows in different directions; unless the capitalist automata is scraped (this is capital qua capitalism), which is, as Deleuze and Guattari term it, the "schizophrenic point of desire". In education, the electric flow is a decoding of the content and expression involved with the construction and delivery of the digital curriculum. In and through this site of decoding it may be uploaded into virtual reality; where it is accessed through the initiatives to place computers into the classroom, and the desire of educationalists to provide pupils with the necessary skills to equip them for the future workplace. This is a place of relativity where values become mixed up and trans-coded, so that we are unable to directly predict the outcomes of educational programmes; the learners begin to learn for themselves in virtual reality, to the extent that they become part of a fluidic system of coded flows. The capitalist sign (but not capital) does not sit upon this process as a despotic signifier, but enters into the learning process as a meaningless differentiator between technologically enabled subjects. The technologically enabled virtual learners shall be increasingly introduced to a blindingly complex digital curriculum; here desire is translated to a flat global plane, and refers to the processes of knowledge in terms of immanence.

Deterritorialised flows of content and expression in capitalist production are in a state of conjunction or reciprocal precondition that constitutes binary figures as the ultimate units of both content and expression. This deterritorialisation is increasingly entering into a relationship with education through the use of computers and the media in the classroom. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, the computer is a machine for "instantaneous and generalised decoding". Content and expression, like voice or writing are not necessary to data processing, the electric flow is not determinate as either content or expression. In terms of the digital and the virtual, the flow of signs of the new technical language machines, as Michel Serres wrote, correlate to production defined by information. This production is the immanence of capitalism in Anti-Oedipus; coexistent with virtual organisation, binary flows of capital, the assimilation of money into time or space or information. The production of information combines with the power to turn the machines ‘on’ or ‘off’, or to relocate or rechannel or to make the process more streamlined. However we understand it, computers are a central combinational element of capitalist organisation, and the process of data accumulation is a dispersed axiomatic to continued proliferation at all levels. The virtual is in this sense the accumulation of experiential information, and the irreversible distribution of memory into the global realisation of capitalist production through virtual labour. Educational institutes are irrevocably connected to this plane of immanence, and, unless they discover their own peculiar funding power (capital abstracted from the capitalist sign); they shall become incorporated in this aspect of the abstract machine of the virtual.

At the beginning of One Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari point out that many problems in information theory and computer science, still cling to the oldest modes of thought, in that they grant all power to a memory or central organ.This is a problem which has been widely discussed by, for example, Daniel C. Dennett, "Conscious human minds are more-or-less serial virtual machines implemented - inefficiently - on the parallel hardware that evolution has provided for us." As computer technology has evolved, the explicative power that we have at hand to understand the workings of the mind has also progressed. The mind itself is now explained through the use of virtual technology; the virtual machine doing the work of thought. Deleuze and Guattari use the work of Pierre Rosentiehl and Jean Petitot to note that accepting hierarchical structures with a central organ, gives arborescent structures privileged status. In these systems, the channels of transmission are pre-established, and pre-exist the individual who is integrated into it at a certain place. 1000 Plateaus could be seen to be an attempt to destratify the hierarchical structures in favour of geologically arranged strata, without recourse to central implementation; whether in linguistics or social studies or philosophy or education. Information theory as they saw it, misunderstands the working of biunivocalisation and binarization, (which is not just an increase in calculating skills); due to the deployment of a wall or a screen, the installation of a central computing hole, without which no message is discernible and no choice is decidable. Virtualization also works in 1000 Plateaus via the development of strata into epistrata and parastrata, and through the understanding that the abstract machine of the virtual is working as a distributed system on a plane of consistency. Rather than the distinction between the virtual and the material brain; we encounter planes of becoming that ‘cross-over’ in every direction, so that the complex understanding that we have of the brain’s functioning, are not localised or isolated ‘inside the head’, but form conglomerate and molecular movements (swarms), that enable hybrid and cross-curricular expression; this defines the productive and unpredictable edge of the digital curriculum, which is in practise productive of digitally aesthetic packs, (see the Excursus).

Deleuze invents many of his concepts which he uses in 1000 Plateaus with a glance over his shoulder at the history of philosophy. Ronald Bogue notes, for example, that the Spinozist concepts of implication and explication, envelopment and development are used to inform and explain the abstract machine. This is so that the abstract machine develops itself in respect to being absolutely deterritorialised matter, and wherever it is implicated in a process, it is the most fluid aspect of that process, and it is at the point of being the most responsive to the multiple. The problem of the abstract machine, in these terms, is not its location or invention, but its expression throughout a system so that it is not stratified or identified in propositional terms without a complex connectivity being unveiled though its usage. The abstract machine of Deleuze and Guattari therefore, develops itself on a plane of consistency, whose continua, emissions and conjunctions it constructs; it also remains enveloped in a stratum whose unity of composition and force of attraction or prehension it defines. Deleuze and Guattari also refigured the change in underlying substance of Aristotle, so that their abstract machine operates via "matter and not substance; via function and not form". The abstract machine is defined by its matter and by the configuration of its plane of consistency. Through learning in virtual reality, the plane of consistency that is developed by the users of the new technology, is coexistent with the realisation that virtual technology has an abundance of material content and expression. This is not the process of limitation of the universe into pixels, but the enhancement of many aspects of thought, and the understanding that desire for this new technology is not an elimination of previously established modes of development, but the unfolding of new dimensions, and a technologically derived interactive intellect.

The development of strata into epistrata and parastrata does not occur through simple induction. Anthony Wilden remarks that all digitalisation generates paradox or oscillation at some level in the system. Deleuze and Guattari speak of a "technological lineage", which converges and makes transductions that resonate between the molecular and the molar, independent of order and magnitude. The functional efficacy of any interior substances, which are independent of distance, are resonated by the introduction of virtualization for the benefit of proliferation and even the interlacing of forms, which is in itself independent of code. Abstract machines work wherever we find a "constellation of singularities", which prolong operations that converge and that make operations converge upon one or several assignable traits of expression. This is why the introduction of computers into the classroom may be seen to be one of the most significant steps in post-modern education. The PC is a multi-task device that expands and transforms the learning process. Pupils are increasingly able to make their own decisions as to the best method for progression, and the number of outcomes that we might expect to any project are radically expanded by the introduction of digital manipulation. The convergence of music making facilities, the digital rearrangement of image and video, the manipulation and presentation of different types of text, the resources on the internet, the expression of videoconferencing; all present a constellation of the virtual that communicate through the abstract machine of learning through virtual reality. The interface between virtualization and analogue process is not oppositional. Virtualization develops strata, which resonate analogue communication systems by increasing their complexity and certain dynamic structurations (for example videoconferencing). Propagation and diffusion mark these lines of innovation, and they are bends in the technological lineage, where digital coding has performed a markedly increased and as a result expanded the flexibility of manual forms or traits, for example, the manipulation of photographs and video images through the use of virtual technology.

It could be said that there has been a general tendency in post-modern theorising, demonstrated by texts such as Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism by Jean-François Lyotard, or Simulations by Jean Baudrillard, to theorise the flattening of hierarchy in expression and the placement of networked discourse in singular units of cellular and imagistic simulation. This in parallel, and as a response to the way in which virtualization is allowing the inter-disciplinary alignment of the artifice of cultural production. These books, therefore, cannot be read as solely academic or scholastic approaches to phenomena, even though they are well researched and thorough; but show the effect of the abstract machine of the virtual in the systematic planarisation of the metaphysical and the material. They are testament to the way in which culture has absorbed the new technology to such an extent that expression of its production is impossible without the style and direction of the virtual. Deleuze and Guattari qualify this movement with the introduction of machinic assemblage and the machinic phylum. For them, the immanence of the process does not only exist on the plane of consistency, but it is already present, or is encased in the strata in general, in which it may simultaneously organise a form of expression and a form of content. The abstract machines are only present by dint of the fact that they have the power or potentiality to extract and accelerate destratified particle-signs. All these states and modes of the abstract machine coexist in the machinic assemblage.

The plane of consistency, beneath contents and expressions, emits and combines particle-signs, that set the most asignifying of signs to functioning in the most deterritorialized of particles. The plane transforms indexes into absolute values. That is to say, the abolition of metaphor is importantly located on the plane; everything that it consists of is real. For example, "Eros never grew a beard", (Hakim Bey). All differences exist only by means and in relation to the strata. In terms of education, the curriculum is irrevocably altered by the reality of the abstract machine that works through it in the use of the virtual. The cultural, historical, scientific, poetic, philosophical, religious or linguistic objects that are studied in the name of the curriculum are placed closer together; making it more difficult to extract singular skills from their usage, but also indicating that their study is more open to emulsified and combinatory intellect. For example, palaeontology may be studied in virtual reality as a dynamic and exciting way in which the reality of dinosaurs and knowledge about their actual environment may be presented to the learners. Knowledge about dinosaurs would be communicated, and interest in the particulars of the dinosaurs galvanised, as the learners would be more likely to ask penetrating questions about lifestyle and habit from the interactive experience that they would gain from the learning procedure. However, the learning in virtual reality might also make the learner keen to know how the effects in virtual reality have been created, leading to an interest in film or video production. The abstract machine of the virtual learner produces desire for knowledge and questioning, but may lack the specificity or focus of pragmatics in that this knowledge may be less likely to be directly related to individual skill acquisition (i.e. the desire to follow a single career path).

A further example, which intersects the worlds of philosophy, literature and religion; is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, which could be said to be one of the leading myths and allegorical tales at the zenith of modernity. This demonstrates its function as a complex abstract machine even before it is subjected to the abstract machine of the virtual learner. Abstract machines are inseparably linked because they are "political, economic, scientific, artistic, ecological, perceptive, affective, active, thinking, physical and semiotic". Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is published in a book, referenced through the internet, discussed on late night TV, inspires music and soldiers, is disregarded then rediscovered. Abstract machines also operate by convergence, which is called the mechanosphere. In terms of virtualization, the binary abstract machine of the computer accelerates convergence, proliferates through cyberpunk, console gaming and techno-music; and erupts globally in all areas, this is called the technosphere. One of the most important recent developments of the technosphere is the internet. As such it shall be analysed in depth in the next chapter. Learning in the digital curriculum is increasingly a process of research and analysis based on network efficiency. The way in which the learners interact with and use the internet represents an aspect of the abstract machine of the virtual, and its immanent, connective impetus.

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