Cabinet Books at Cabinet Magazine:
The Virtual Sentence is an exercise book for the era of ChatGPT. Its title is indebted to Gilles Deleuze, who uses “virtual” to name a reality that is neither actual (already here), nor potential (not yet here). Said of the sentence, the term points to the articulate alternatives that surround what gets spoken out loud or committed to ink and pixel. This is neither the total space of linguistic possibility, nor the particulars of what you might have said, considered afterward in a spirit of regret, or relief. In other words, the virtual sentence is not concerned with the before or with the after. Rather, it is what you might be saying, even as you say what you actually say, and what you might be hearing, even as you hear what you actually hear—a “might” that is in fact simultaneous with sentence making, surrounding it and making it meaningful. The virtual sentence inhabits a space defined by a kind of immanent syntactic and lexical alterity. What might be otherwise is already there.
more here.
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