The main aim of this essay is to bring out some important distinctions between the work of Deleuze and Guattari and what has come to be known as ‘cybertheory’ or ‘cyberculture’. After looking briefly at some of the themes that characterise the imaginary of cyberspace, the essay will assess the significance of the cybernetic inheritance of much contemporary cybertheory, since, as several commentators have claimed, cybertheory is founded upon the informational and communicational paradigm that emerges out of cybernetics in the post-war era. The essay will then move on to look at the way in which Deleuze's concept of the ‘virtual’ can be distinguished from Pierre Lévy's attempt – taking Deleuze's concept as a starting point – to conceptualise a general dynamic of virtualisation which is at work in contemporary societies. The closing section of the essay will focus on Deleuze's resistance to the informational/communicational paradigm.

It is in many respects not surprising that Deleuze and Guattari's work has been identified with aspects of cyberculture. For one thing, they seek to undermine the molar organisation of the organism, with its clearly defined and delineated body, in favour of a molecular plane of disorganisation. In an apparently analogous way, cybertheory often talks in terms of disrupting or even transcending the limits of the body. Also, the dissemination of the work of Deleuze and Guattari has coincided with the growth of the Internet as a ubiquitous, global social practice.