Politics Precedes Being

Once we see the way that the question of difference versus identity is linked up with the question of affirmation versus negation, we can also see how our seemingly metaphysical starting point can quickly develop political consequences.  These start to peak through in this section when Deleuze asks why, if difference is affirmative and productive, it has such a long history of being linked to contraries (Aristotle), limits (Leibniz), and ultimately opposites (Hegel).  

Our claim is not only that difference in itself is not 'already' contradiction, but that it cannot be reduced or traced back to contradiction, since the latter is not more but less profound than difference. On what condition is difference traced or projected on to a flat space? Precisely when it has been forced Into a previously established identity, when it has been placed on the slope of the identical which makes it reflect or desire identity, and necessarily takes it where identity wants it to go - namely, into the negative. ^15

Begin with the identical and difference will always be relegated to the negative -- not the same, not changing.  Where does the concept of identity that leads to this negative spiral come from though?  The footnote (15) that appears at the end of that last quotation gives us the most straightforward answer to this question -- from a vast reduction and simplification of reality:

Louis Althusser denounces the all-powerful character of identity in Hegel's philosophy, in the form of the simplicity of its internal principle: 'The simplicity of the Hegelian contradiction is made possible only by the simplicity of the internal principle that constitutes the essence of any historical period. It is because it is possible in principle to reduce the totality, the infinite diversity of a given historical society ... to a simple internal principle, that this very simplicity thereby accrues by right to contradiction and may be reflected in it.' This is why he criticizes the Hegelian circle for having only a single centre in which all the figures are reflected and retained.

Hegel (and later Marx) are able to make opposition and negation the motor of history only because they so dramatically oversimplify it.  Whole eras are summarized by one principle, which means that the next era can be summarized by the opposite principle.  Of course, Hegel isn't alone in looking at history this way.  Our textbooks are full of the Romantics rebelling against the Enlightenment, of the Renaissance breaking through the gloom of the Dark Ages, etc ...  In reality these accounts tell us very little about the complexity and the contingency of the changes that were involved.  There's never just one thing going on under the surface of history but a complex mess of forces acting in all directions.  This is why history is so hard to predict in advance and so easy to see as inevitable from the safety of your armchair.  

These simplifications thus ultimately have a political motive.  Their goal is not just to "objectively understand" history, but to make it appear inevitable and necessary.  The intent is actually to make whatever political power prevails at the moment look either inevitable and permanent, or inevitably on the brink of collapse, poised to give way to a new utopia (or, these days, it seems, dystopia).  The whole content of their claim to be objectively representing the facts and merely illuminating a historical logic boils down to their assertion that it just couldn't be any other way.  Which of course, justifies the inevitability of their own politics, whatever that is, as the only correct one.  Necessity, Universality, and a simplifying Identity are they stick they use to try to argue us into submission.  

It is the same every time there is mediation or representation. The representant says: 'Everyone recognises that ...', but there is always an unrepresented singularity who does not recognise precisely because it is not everyone or the universal. 'Everyone' recognises the universal because it is itself the universal, but the profound sensitive conscience which is nevertheless presumed to bear the cost, the singular, does not recognise it. The misfortune in speaking is not speaking, but speaking for others or representing something. The sensitive conscience (that is, the particular, difference or ta alia) refuses.

The politics of Identity are always ultimately conservative.  Not in the sense of being on the Left as opposed to the Right -- there is just as much 'conservation' on either side of the divide -- but in the sense of having a fixed blueprint for society in mind, a stable end state that would apply to everyone for ever and ever, amen.  Sometimes this state is in the past, sometimes it is projected into the future.  In either case though, you see a politics imagined as a goal and endpoint (a State), rather than a process.  And once you have the final solution in mind, it's only a small step to seeing its perfect inevitability as demanding any sacrifice and rejecting any compromise.   

Deleuze, by contrast, is very much an anarchist, albeit of an extremely philosophical variety.  The beauty of anarchism is precisely its lack of a fixed State.  It doesn't have an endpoint because it is all a question of the consensual process of living with differences, rather than submitting to the one true ruler.  It is the only "ism" that you can call creative, or (philosophically) progressive, and it has none of the inevitability of other politics.  It is nothing but the process of imagining what happens when people cooperate in asking what they can do together.  Which is to say that it is a politics of affirmation, focused on the possible not on the limits.  In fact, for Deleuze, I think it's less about choosing a politics and letting that dictate whether you affirm or negate, than it is about having a "taste for affirmation", if you will, and letting that interest in seeing what we can make, be your politics.  There's no discussion of necessity here.  There's no "common sense" here about how we obviously need to have a state with borders and democracy and capitalism and even human rights.  Maybe we want those things, but there is no end to history, and hence no guarantees.  It reminds me a bit of Robert Nozick's quip regarding necessary truths in philosophy: "Lack of invention is the mother of necessity".

So we have the affirmative anarchist poet who creates difference, and the negative politician who limits us to identity:

In very general terms, we claim that there are two ways to appeal to 'necessary destructions': that of the poet, who speaks in the name of a creative power, capable of overturning all orders and representations in order to affirm Difference in the state of permanent revolution which characterizes eternal return; and that of the politician, who is above all concerned to deny that which 'differs', so as to conserve or prolong an established historical order, or to establish a historical order which already calls forth in the world the forms of its representation. The two may coincide in particularly agitated moments, but they are never the same.

Or, to connect the whole works back to Nietzsche's parody of Hegel's master-slave dialectic, we can talk about our "anarchist masters" and "slave politicians".  

... the point of view of the slave who draws from 'No' the phantom of an affirmation, and the point of view of the 'master' who draws from 'Yes' a consequence of negation and destruction; the point of view of the conservers of old values and that of the creators of new values.  Those whom Nietzsche calls masters are certainly powerful men, but not men of power, since power is in the gift of the values of the day. A slave does not cease to be a slave by taking power, and it is even the way of the world, or the law of its surface, to be led by slaves. Nor must the distinction between established values and creation be understood as implying an historical relativism, as though the established values were new in their day, while the new ones had to be established once their time had come. On the contrary, the difference is one of kind, like the difference between the conservative order of representation and a creative disorder or inspired chaos which can only ever coincide with a historical moment but never be confused with it.

In either case, the important point is that Deleuze conceives his focus on Difference instead of Identity as a political choice in the broadest sense of the term -- only difference allows us to affirm all the possibilities of the world.

The Fractal Infinite

The other image I always have in mind when reading Deleuze is the fractal.  I think he very often creates concepts that are specifically meant to be fractals, where the definition of difference is in terms of other differences, or the definition of "a" life turns out to be a whole series of lives. 

Naturally any fractal concept is going to have an inherent relationship to the infinite.  But it's an interesting variation on our more common conception of infinity.  You might call it the infinitely small, or maybe better, the "interior infinite".  It isn't created by just adding another one indefinitely, ad infinitum ... That would be the infinitely large, or the "exterior infinite".  Mathematics is completely familiar with this large concept of infinity because it starts with a well defined atomic unit and just keeps adding more.  Deleuze's fractal concepts approach the infinite from the opposite direction.  We don't begin with a well defined unit, but one defined in terms of itself, creating a sort of feedback loop where we plunge into the concept, through the floor into the infinitely small, as it were.  There's no base root of the tree which then branches off as many times as you like, but instead a rhizome whose roots get deeper and more convoluted the further you look. 

The world is neither finite nor infinite as representation would have it: it is completed and unlimited. Eternal return is the unlimited of the finished itself, the univocal being which is said of difference.

The fractal is the perfect image for this type of infinite.  What could be a better example of "completed but unlimited" than the Mandelbrot Set?

You don't keep zooming out to see the full figure; it can't be created by adding together individual units.  Rather, you zoom in, and in, and in ... with each smaller level revealing a variation on the larger theme.  I don't know what the word is in French, but if the translations I've read are consistent, "plunge" is one of Deleuze's favorite verbs.

I see even one more twist to this idea, but the thread is tenuous.  I think one of the big unstated problems behind Deleuze's philosophy is the question: "what is a thought?"  How can we create metaphysical concepts that treat thoughts as real things, and make them part of the same world as everything else?  Notice the way this immediately creates another fractal structure, because obviously whatever metaphysical concepts you create are themselves going to be thoughts, which are things you're theorizing about, which, etc ...  One "image of thought", if you will, that seems like it would satisfy the requirements is to conceive of thought as a sort of simulation of the possibilities of the world.  Some piece of the world that simulates what happens to another piece of the world.  And packed inside the first simulation can be a simulation of that simulation, etc ... Thought is a model of the world, an abstraction and extrapolation of it, that is nevertheless running on the "hardware" of the world.  Note that his is not the same thing as a representational reflection of the world.  A simulation is a slice of the world taken for a specific purpose; it's not right or wrong, it's useful or not useful, stable or unstable, picking up signal or just modeling noise.  I'm influenced here by Andy Clark's suggestion that this is how the brain works. 

What sort of image would illustrate this idea?  Maybe something like this?

Images

I have a few different recurrent images that I associate with Deleuze's ideas, and I think this is as good a time as any to add some pictures to the mix.  This is a vector field.

That is, one example of the differential fields I mentioned last time.  Each little arrow is "a" difference.  Forgive the long-windedness if you're already familiar with the concept, but for other folks ... you see these vector fields in a variety of circumstances in physics, but probably the simplest interpretation would be as a description of a gravitational field.  In that context, each vector tells you the magnitude (arrow length) and direction of the gravitational force acting on something.  So together they are basically describing a sloping landscape, filled with hills and valleys, though what you're actually seeing is the derivative or differential (the slope) of the hill at any given point.  We're just looking at a map of the changes.

Obviously, by calling it a "field", you are acknowledging that there are always a multitude of little arrows all over the place.  There's actually a technical mathematical definition of the term field, as in "field of rational numbers", but so far I haven't seen anything in D&R that makes me think he's referencing that concept.  Maybe later.  At any rate, if we want an image of the transcendental field, or the multiplicity of difference, or univocal being, I think this picture points the intuition in the correct direction.  This is a world of tiny little arrows completely without pre-established form.

Of course, we often see some patterns in the arrows, especially if we blur the line between one and the next to create a trajectory (for example, that an imaginary ball would be following as it rolls over a landscape under the influence of gravity, or that of a smoke particle caught in a turbulent current)

These field patterns can be neatly summarized as units, or things, or monads, by the singularities in the differential field.  Look carefully at the vortices in that picture and you will discover that each "one" that pops out to your eye is structured by some point in the field that all the local arrows point to but where there's no arrow at that point.  In other words, where the vector field is zero.  Or infinity, as in the case of a black hole:

In either case, the pattern is summarized by a singular point in the vector field.  Each singularity looks like the "center" of something.  But the quotes around "center" and "one" are to remind you that all we've really been given is a bunch of arrows, and that there's no hard and fast division between one singularity and another.  As we move through the field, we go seamlessly from being influenced by the first to being in the vicinity of of the second, though of course there may be some sort of transitional boundary where our motion changes direction more abruptly.  Singularities are thus not forms or individuals or identities.  They are "pre-individual" as Deleuze repeatedly says.  They are really composed entirely of difference. 

Differential Fields

I still don't really understand Leibniz.  But I can see he's lurking in the background of this section at least as much as Hegel.  In fact, Deleuze seems to see Leibniz as having only just missed the mark:

In this sense, too, Leibniz goes further or deeper than Hegel when he distributes the distinctive points and the differential elements of a multiplicity throughout the ground, and when he discovers a play in the creation of the world. It seems, therefore, as though the first dimension, that of the limit, despite all its imperfection, remains closest to the original depth. Leibniz's only error was to have linked difference to the negative of limitation, because he maintained the dominance of the old principle, because he linked the series to a principle of convergence, without seeing that divergence itself was an object of affirmation, or that the incompossibles belonged to the same world and were affirmed as the greatest crime and the greatest virtue of the one and only world, that of the eternal return. (my emphasis)

How does this distribution of distinctive points and differential elements work though?  All I really know about Leibniz is the thumbnail sketch that he thought of the world as composed of monads, which I've always imagined along the lines of spiritual rather than physical atoms.  In other words, I would have called Leibniz an "ideal atomist", for lack of a better term.  Which is actually a kinda interesting combination, now that I think about it.  I'd long ago given up on the naive version of Materialism that dominates our current scientized popular worldview.  So Idealism as a concept doesn't seem that shocking to me.  It's hard to make headway with it though, when ideas are usually presented as being subjective entities that only exist in the skulls of hairless chimps.  What cosmic arrogance!  However, if ideas are like tiny minds distributed all over the place, and even come in atomic form, then the theory starts to become a lot more interesting.  That doesn't get us over the hurdle that Deleuze is raising in this chapter, namely that monads as ideal atoms are still conceived on a model of identity, and have no internal structure one can investigate.  But it's still a thought provoking change of context.  

Or at least that's what I would have said about Leibniz, until I reviewed the video tape.  It turns out monads do have a sort of internal principle, so aren't quite atoms after all.  This is all from The Monadology:

9. It is also necessary that each monad be different from each other. For there are never two beings in nature that are perfectly alike, two beings in which it is not possible to discover an internal difference, that is, one founded on an intrinsic denomination.

 

10. I also take for granted that every created being, and consequently the created monad as well, is subject to change, and even that this change is continual in each thing.

 

11. It follows from what we have just said that the monad's natural changes come from an internal principle, since no external cause can influence it internally (sec. 396, 400).

 

12. But, besides the principle of change, there must be diversity [un détail] in that which changes, which produces, so to speak, the specification and variety of simple substances.

 

13. This diversity must involve a multitude in the unity or in the simple. For, since all natural change is produced by degrees, something changes and something remains. As a result, there must be a plurality of properties [affections] and relations in the simple substance, although it has no parts.

 

14. The passing state which involves and represents a multitude in the unity or in the simple substance is nothing other than what one calls perception, which should be distinguished from apperception, or consciousness, as will be evident in what follows. This is where the Cartesians have failed badly, since they took no account of the perceptions that we do not apperceive. This is also what made them believe that minds alone are monads and that there are no animal souls or other entelechies. 

 Hoocoodanode!?  Somehow monads contain or represent or are composed by a diverse multitude that in a passing moment of "perception" are unified into a simple substance with no parts.  Isn't this exactly the type of structure we're looking for with a concept of difference in itself producing identity?  Leibniz kinda cruises right past this point; The Monadology goes on to talk about how the soul is connected to the body, how God is the reason for everything, how this is the best of all possible worlds, etc ... He only really comes back to make any use of his passing observation that monads express a multiplicity when he concludes that each monad actually expresses the entire world from a certain perspective.  Each monad is a mirror of all infinity, though it expresses some part of its relationship to that infinite clearly (namely the part that represents its body) and some part obscurely (everything else). It seems like the infinite in question here is basically all the other monads, though this gets a bit confusing because later on he says that monads grow and develop somewhat like multiplying cells, producing higher level monads which are the souls of animals and people.  Which suggests that not only are there an infinite number of monads, but they are sort of infinitely nested or folded into one another as well.  I don't want to get totally lost in the details of his philosophy now, especially the way this relates to God and compossibility and the notorious "best of all possible worlds".

However, I do want to pick up on this thread of a "diversity involving a multiplicity in the unity".  It seems that for the co-inventor of the calculus this wasn't just a philosophical, but also a mathematical concept, or at least that's the way Deleuze interprets it.  In other words, diversity = the differential element (dx or dy).  There are various formulations of calculus, but the one that both Leibniz and Newton used is the one I was still taught in high school -- the differential is an infinitely small difference, and two infinitesimals form a clear relationship that defines the slope of the curve (dy/dx) at the limit of the difference becoming infinitely small.  Once you know the derivative -- formed by these differential relations at each point -- you can integrate them to find the curve.  One of the first steps in imagining that integral is to figure out where the underlying curve is vertical and where it is flat by finding the distinctive points where the derivative is either zero (flat) or infinite (vertical).  Either of these can be referred to as singularities of the derivative, though I feel like you hear that a lot more in the case of the derivative going infinite.  I take this to be the thrust of the comments Deleuze made about Leibniz in the previous section:

In reality, the expression 'infinitely small difference' does indeed indicate that the difference vanishes so far as intuition is concerned. Once it finds its concept, however, it is rather intuition itself which disappears in favour of the differential relation,
as is shown by saying that dx is minimal in relation to x, as dy is in relation to y, but that dy/dx is the internal qualitative relation, expressing the universal of a function independently of its particular numerical values. However, if this relation has no numerical determinations, it does have degrees of variation corresponding to diverse forms and equations. These degrees are themselves like the relations of the universal, and the differential relations, in this sense, are caught up in a process of reciprocal determination which translates the interdependence of the variable coefficients.  But once again, reciprocal determination expresses only the first aspect of a veritable principle of reason; the second aspect is complete determination. For each degree or relation, regarded as the universal of a given function, determines the existence and distribution of distinctive points on the corresponding curve. We must take great care here not to confuse 'complete' with 'completed'. The difference is that, for the equation of a curve, for example, the differential relation refers only to straight lines determined by the nature of the curve. It is already a complete determination of the object, yet it expresses only a part of the entire object, namely the part regarded as 'derived' (the other part, which is expressed by the so-called primitive function, can be found only by integration, which is not simply the inverse of differentiation. Similarly, it is integration which defines the nature of the previously determined distinctive points). That is why an object can be completely determined - ens omni modo determinatum - without, for all that, possessing the integrity which alone constitutes its actual existence. Under the double aspect of reciprocal determination and complete determination, however it appears already as if the limit coincides with the power itself. The limit is defined by convergence. The numerical values of a function find their limit in the differential relation; the differential relations find their limit in the degrees of variation; and at each degree the distinctive points are the limits of series which are analytically continued one into the other.

So by now you can probably see what I'm driving at.  I think Deleuze is borrowing this blurring of philosophy and mathematics that occurs with Leibniz to give us an image of what the world of pure difference is like.  It's a differential field along with the singularities that this field defines.  This is most fun to visualize in two dimensions as a vector field.  I am not the first guy to interpret Deleuze this way.  In fact, most of Manuel DeLanda's reading of him is an elaboration of this basic image.  I don't remember whether DeLanda talks about this or not, but it seems Deleuze himself is borrowing the basic idea from Leibniz.  Basically, each monad is a singularity in a differential field created by the relations of all the other monads.  And a principle of limit and convergence and continuity reigns at every level.  You can define the derivative, even though it is only a relationship of infinitesimals, because of the properties of limits on a continuous number line.  You can integrate all of these differentials into a singular monad because God assures you that all the monads play nice together, and converge on one compossible world -- the best of all possible worlds.  Deleuze is borrowing the image, and removing the converge part.

That's just the stress talking, man

I actually think that this next section (pg. 50-58, post Hegel and Leibniz up to where he starts talking about Plato) might be the key to the whole first chapter. It is all about the affective tone, if you will, of difference and identity, and as a result goes some distance towards explaining a question we have really taken somewhat for granted so far: why would you want to start a metaphysics from the concept of Difference rather than Identity?  Why is that any better?  The basic answer is that difference, properly conceived, is positive and productive, whereas identity is always negative and limiting.  Difference is a door-opener and Identity is a door-closer.  

Let me quote the the beginning at length just because I really like this passage:

There is a crucial experience of difference and a corresponding experiment: every time we find ourselves confronted or bound by a limitation or an opposition, we should ask what such a situation presupposes. It presupposes a swarm of differences, a pluralism of free, wild or untamed differences; a properly differential and original space and time; all of which persist alongside the simplifications of limitation and opposition. A more profound real element must be defined in order for oppositions of forces or limitations of forms to be drawn, one which is determined as an abstract and potential multiplicity. Oppositions are roughly cut from a delicate milieu of overlapping perspectives, of communicating distances, divergences and disparities, of heterogeneous potentials and intensities.  Nor is it primarily a question of dissolving tensions in the identical, but rather of distributing the disparities in a multiplicity. Limitations correspond to a simple first-order power - in a space with a single dimension and a single direction, where, as in Leibniz's example of boats borne on a current, there may be collisions, but these collisions necessarily serve to limit and to equalise, but not to neutralise or to oppose. As for opposition, it represents in turn the second- order power, where it is as though things were spread out upon a flat surface, polarised in a single plane, and the synthesis itself took place only in a false depth - that is, in a fictitious third dimension added to the others which does no more than double the plane. In any case, what is missing is the original, intensive depth which is the matrix of the entire space and the first affirmation of difference: here, that which only afterwards appears as linear limitation and flat opposition lives and simmers in the form of free differences. Everywhere, couples and polarities presuppose bundles and networks, organised oppositions presuppose radiations in all directions.

This is the first mention we hear of the concept of a multiplicity, which is destined to be perhaps the signature concept of Deleuze's philosophy and will appear in all his writings.  Difference is explicitly linked to multiplicity.  In fact, you might say that there's not really "a" difference or "the" difference, but there are always differenceS.  Swarms of tiny, even infinitesimal, differences.  If you don't start with a principle of identity, you also don't start with a principle of unity.  You start with the many, and have to manufacture the one.  All the identities and unities have to be constructed or produced by difference.  And difference itself only hides more difference -- you can think of this tiny swarm of differences as the atoms composing everything only on the condition that you understand the atoms themselves to also be composed of differences, and so on ad infinitum ...  As always with Deleuze, the infinite regress isn't a bug but a feature, the sign of a productive feedback loop that means there's always more out there.  

Okay, you might think, fine, let's say we replace unity and identity with multiplicity and difference.  Why is that somehow better?  Aren't we just playing an abstract shell game with these concepts?  Does it make any practical difference which way we start our philosophy?  While that can at first sound like the objection of a churlish simpleton, I actually think we should take questions like this completely seriously.  In fact, I'd consider Deleuze a Pragmatist of sorts, entirely interested in the practical value or the effects of his philosophy, broadly construed.  The answer is that the two starting points have very different outcomes and methods.  

If you start with unitary identity you make a two-fold choice right off the bat.  First, you choose to see whatever identity you start with as having fallen from the sky, and to stop investigating how it's built and what might be underneath it.  You choose to take the identity in the sense of a root or ground or axiom.  Obviously, someone else might look under the hood of what you took for granted, but then they will accept something else as their root identity, and etc ... This is our normal arborescent structure of thought that is horrified by the idea of an infinite regress and clamors for us to stop somewhere, to have some limits, some fixed endpoints.  Second, since you assume the identity has no internal structure, you can only recognize it by a principle of negation.  It is not anything else, not any other identity.  Its difference or distinction from everything else is purely negative.  We've seen this perhaps counter intuitive feature of identity creep into the descriptions of both Aristotle's and Hegel's theory of difference.  Difference is contrariness, opposition, contradiction.  Identity is contradiction overcome, the monster subdued, the differences integrated into a whole.  The point is that both these choices are based on negativity, dude.  They urge you to stop, to accept the limits, to draw a line in the sand and say, across this line ... Fundamentally, they're about stasis and opposed to change.  

Starting with multiplicity and difference reverses this scheme and focuses entirely on affirmation.  In fact, you're never "starting" at all.  You're always picking up in the middle, acknowledging that there are differences below you and unexpected novelty to come, content that you will never reach the ultimate ground or the end of history, affirming an endless and un-limited journey in both directions.  At the same time, if you start with differences you can immediately and naturally begin to investigate how identities are produced.  You never need to assume that they just fall out of the sky ready made.  It's the vortices in that swarm of differences that actually provide the presuppositions for all the identities we see.  These differences are entirely affirmative in the sense that they positively produce things, telling you what is actually happening and what might also happen, rather than trying to limit your notion of what can happen.  

I've strayed pretty far from the quote now, and actually covered the main point of the whole section.  So I'll wait till next time to go back over the more concrete reading of that passage that connects the swarm of differences to the idea of a differential or transcendental field via a brief detour into Leibniz.

Meanwhile, there's one more slightly out there connection that comes to mind here.  Deleuze always loves all things "between".  He is constantly encouraging us to look at the lines of connection instead of the points that we usually take to define those secondarily.  Points are mere moments on a line, a wave of being on an ocean of becoming (to add a dimension).  The Plane of Consistency or the Body without Organs are best thought of as a means of connection amongst disparate entities.  Even the Abstract Machines and the Virtual don't exist in some Plantonic heaven, but as he constantly points out, are always enmeshed in a milieu, literally a "mid-place".  I submit that this between is actually Deleuze's gloss on what Spinoza and Whitehead call God.  God is not at the beginning of things like a creator or principle, or at the end like a judge or goal.  God is the fabric that holds everything together, the stuff between any two things, a lure for feeling.

Will Power

How do we imagine the power of our will?  Typically as some sort of transcendent force that stands above or outside our thoughts and actions and guides them (or doesn't, as the case may be).  We also go the extra step of taking ownership of this force, or identifying our self with it.  It is, after all, "our" willpower.  For example, if I am sitting and meditating I might think of myself as using "my" will's "power" to "control" the focus of my attention. 

Naturally, the obnoxious quotes in that last sentence are meant to suggest that perhaps none of those concepts really apply.  Maybe it is not my will.  Maybe there is will, but I am not the owner of it.  And maybe it doesn't have some magical power to control anything the way a driver steers a car or a maker imparts a form, but maybe there is still power associated with this will.  

What if we thought of a "will" as a real thing, with real power, but a thing which is sort of free floating (relative to the individual) and a power which consists solely in engendering it's own repetition.  One way to think about this would be to say that each moment of intention -- say, the intention to focus on my breathing -- is a kind of atom of will.  This is the type of temporal atomism I was earlier attributing to Whitehead.  This instance of will would not be "mine".  It would be more accurate to observe that "there is some willing going on".  And the effect of this instance of will would not be to control or dictate any sort of future in which I am, in fact, focusing on my breathing.  Its real power is in being able to bring about a new state of willing that is "the same" as the first.  Here the quotes are to indicate that it's clearly not the same will, since we're treating each moment as a separate entity.  In other words, the real power of the will is in the ability to repeat itself, and thus string together a type of identity over time, just the way a seed has the power to shape the environment into a a tree which (hopefully) produces another seed.  Another way to put this would be to say that the will acts like a sort of "lure" that leads the world in a certain direction, though when the world catches up to the lure, it has created a new lure that continues the direction, and so on ...  A bit like a fella leading a horse on by sitting in the saddle and dangling a carrot in front of it.  Which is what a meditation often feels like.