What do you need that for, Dude?

The question that motivates the entirety of Chapter 3: "Critique" is one that is easy to pose but almost impossible to sound the full depths of -- what is the value of truth?   When we hear Deleuze ask this question, we have to keep in mind the notion of value that he gave us at the very beginning of the book.  A value doesn't simply refer to some relatively arbitrary propositional belief about what's important that we hold or abandon depending on the day.  It would be closer to say that we actually embody our values, or that our whole mode of life already expresses what it is that we value.  Values are a product of evaluation, the byproduct of our way of approaching life.

In fact, the notion of value implies a critcal reversal. On the one hand, values appear or are given as principles: and evaluation presupposes values on the basis of which phenomena are appraised. But, on the other hand and more profoundly, it is values which presuppose evaluations, "perspectives of appraisal", from which their own value is derived. The problem of critique is that of the value of values, of the evaluation from which their value arises, thus the problem of their creation. (NP, 1)

So when we ask about the value of truth, we're asking what type of life results in the need to see truth as its supreme value.  Which mode of existing can't do without truth, and conversely, what mode of living is implied by the very existence of the concept of truth.  The question immediately links Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche back to the 'critical' philosophy of Kant.  Kant famously wanted to know how synthetic a priori knowledge was possible.  In other words, what did the world need to be like for logical, mathematical, or philosophical reasoning to function (as Kant presumed that it did)?  We might call it an inquiry into the condition of possibility of knowledge.  It's a bit like inferring a metaphysics from just the existence of an (assumed) epistemology.  This was Kant's critical project.  His Critique of Pure Reason wanted to know how a priori reasoning was possible, and on the basis of that, to assign it some limits.  Deleuze has already pointed out (pg. 52) that Nietzsche is in a sense the heir to, and critic of, Kant's project.  In this chapter he explores this connection further, and shows us how Nietzsche fulfills the promise of a radical Kantian critique, a promise which Kant himself betrayed right from the start (basically by not criticizing precisely the things I left in parentheses above -- the pre-existence of the unified reasoning subject).

Before getting into the details, it's best to answer the question in the simplest way first.  What is the value of truth?  Truth is a stopping point.  If truth is understood in our habitual manner -- as the correct mental representation of the facts of the world -- then the search for truth is the search for a feeling of identification or harmonization that allows us to stop changing our minds.  When we discover the truth, we see things, "as they really are".  Our subjective representation has come into some sort of alignment with the objective world.  We have polished the mirror to the point where we see things clearly and distinctly, and now we can quit polishing.  What type of person (or put better, what mode of living) attaches a supreme value to being able to stop?  One who is exhausted.  The concept of truth is the product of a tired and reactive mind that just wants to quit, to come to a final equilibrium that ends the quest and obviates the need for any future changes.  The 'will to truth' is actually just a disguise for the nihilistic will, that is, the negative will to power or the will to nothingness.  This is what truth is for, and what the one seeking it secretly wants -- to end the struggle, to silence the questions.  Someone who values truth is someone who lives life as a struggle, and who resents the clamoring questions. 

Your first reaction on hearing this analysis of the value of truth may be to object to the correspondence theory of truth it rests on.  You might say that truth as accurate representation is an old metaphysical concept we no longer have any use for.  Nowadays, we are all pragmatists or utilitarians who just believe that the truth is what works.  Officially, like good agnostics, we have no opinion on whether a belief accurately represents some ultimate reality or not; we simply know that acting as if this belief were accurate benefits us.  At first this sounds like a pretty important objection to the idea that the will to truth is secretly nihilistic.  Maybe what we want with the truth is just a means of benefitting ourselves, and who could object to that, right?  The plausibility of this response is probably why Deleuze immediately takes up the question of "utility" in the first subsection 3.1.  We quickly discover that defining truth as what is useful just displaces the question without changing the stakes.  The key issue remains unexplored: who or what is the truth useful for?  What type of life judges every potential action on the basis of its own benefit?

Deleuze's analysis of this question is quite revealing.  He suggests that the type of life presupposed by the question is precisely one that does not act.  The self that benefits is not the same self that acts.  

That is: to whom is an action useful or harmful? Who considers action from the standpoint of its utility or harmfulness, its motives and consequences? Not the one who acts: he does not "consider" action. It is rather the third party, the sufferer or the spectator. He is the person who considers the action that he does not perform - precisely because he does not perform it - as something to evaluate from the standpoint of the advantage which he draws or can draw from it. (NP, 74) 

"Considering" the utility of our action actually separates us from our ability to act.  We create a division within ourselves between the one who decides on the action and the one who carries it out.  While we often imagine this decider is some completely free inner will we possess, this mystical character never actually does anything.  They plan future actions and judge past ones.  And if they possess enough 'will power', they trigger or launch current actions.  But when it comes to executing a real action they are nowhere to be found.  As the Taoists might say, the doer of an action is empty -- the action does itself or occurs through inaction.  So the very idea that actions have utility, that we do them for a reason or have some end goal in mind requires the existence of a type of life that is removed from life.  Depending on how you look at it, this third party either lives continually within us, or stands outside of us and coordinates our various temporal selves.  Either way, we have a strong tendency to identify this useless interloper as the essence of our self.  Yet all this self ever actually does is fabricate and evaluate images of action in a world disconnected from real actions.

Now, in this abstract relation, whatever it is, we always end up replacing real activities (creating, speaking, loving etc.) by the third party's perspective on these activities: the essence of the activity is confused with the gains of a third party, which he claims that he ought to profit from, whose benefits he claims the right to reap (whether he is God, objective spirit, humanity, culture or even the proletariat ...). (NP, 74)

So even with a more utilitarian conception of truth, we discover that the question of whose life benefits from the truth is not trivial.  It leads us directly into the deeper question of who we think 'we' are.  We need some self-conception to even define the notion of who benefits.  And it's only the hypothesis of the fixity or continuity -- the essence -- of this self that allows the concept of utility to (appear to) answer the question of the value of truth.  Which, to go back to our initial question, means that "the truth is useful" also serves as a stopping point.  It's only because I 'obviously' know my essential self, and thus know intimately what is useful for this self, that the truth can come in handy as a means for keeping this self happy.  In fact, this 'happy self' is a pure fabrication that simply encourages us to quit asking so many questions.  The value of utilitarian truth is the way it both takes for granted and reinforces an 'essential self' or 'human nature' that we can rest everything else on. 

The Cultivation of the Eternal Return 2

Despite the promise to treat the second half of the "Active and Reactive" chapter as a unit, I completely lost my train of thought.  This post picks up the thread starting from 2.11 to 2.15.  As I said last time though, there are aspects of the whole second half of this chapter (2.8-2.15) that are not yet coming together for me, so what follows is a preliminary reading.

In section 2.11, Deleuze gives more shape to the idea we saw last time that the will to power serves simultaneously as both origin and middle.  The will to power as differential and genetic element determines the quality of forces placed into relation by chance.  But in addition to distinguishing these forces, the will to power also holds them together as related.  Any relationship is defined by the capacity of each force to be affected by others.  Forces that cannot affect one another cannot be related.  They can't come together to form even the most primitive body, a multiplicity that always has both a commanding and obeying side.  As a result, Deleuze will say that the will to power is "manifested" in the capacity of forces to affect one another.  So there's a two step process here.  In step 1, the forces are differentiated or determined by the will to power.  In step 2, a "manifestation" of the will to power is determined by the capacities those forces have for interacting with one another.  

The relationship between forces in each case is determined to the extent that each force is affected by other, inferior or superior, forces. It follows that will to power is manifested as a capacity for being affected. This capacity is not an abstract possibility, it is necessarily fulfilled and actualised at each moment by the other forces to which a given force relates. We should not be surprised by the double aspect of the will to power: from the standpoint of the genesis or production of forces it determines the relation between forces but, from the standpoint of its own manifestations, it is determined by relating forces. This is why the will to power is always determined at the same time as it determines, qualified at the same time as it qualifies. (NP, 62)

Clearly, there's a sort of circle or cycle at work here, where, loosely speaking, the will to power produces forces and forces produce the will to power.  However, for reasons I'm not clear on, the second half of this cycle doesn't seem to be a true "production" but a "manifestation" of the will to power.  Through the cycle, the will to power itself seems to move from potential to actual, from an abstract principle differentiating forces, to something more like a concrete 'force' with an expression of its own.

The passage above still isn't very clear to me.  But Deleuze continues to flesh it out further by relating the idea to Spinoza's definition of power.  Spinoza thought that the power of a body could be measured by all the things that it could be affected by.  There's something intuitively appealing in this definition.  If something has no capacity to affect us, if we can't even register it, so to speak, then our experience is limited in that respect.  A potential experience is denied us in the same way that the thrill of space travel is denied the chimpanzee.  This is in some sense a lack of power, of capability.  Normally, of course, we think of power using more active terms.  My power might more commonly be defined as all the things I control, or that I can do, or that I can affect, rather than the limits of what affects me.  But this way of defining power takes for granted that I know what I am.  A definition like this would characterize that power that I, a pre-determined entity, have, but not the power that I am.  In addition, I cannot have power over something (in the sense we usually mean this) without it first affecting me.  If I don't even register its existence and can't relate to it at all, how can I be said to have power over it?  So the idea of power we're developing here seems almost like a precursor to our usual understanding of the term.  It's more like a sensitivity or receptivity, a capacity to be related to things that lies under our power over them because it constitutes our capacity to register these things (or perhaps fabricate them and our self as things) to begin with.  Power in this sense actually comes before identity.  To know what we are, we look at what we can be related to, as if we were actually defined by the limits of what can 'touch' (affect) us.  

Relating Nietzsche's will to power to Spinoza's idea of power risks trying to explain the obscure with the obscurer.  On top of that, there are subtle differences between the two ideas that nuance the parallel.  For example, what I said above about power preceding identity already departs slightly from Spinoza.  His conatus does seem to have a certain identity, at a minimum the self-reinforcing identity of a feedback loop (Deleuze points out this issue in footnote 2.18).  So, without launching into an exhaustive analysis, what are we meant to take away from the comparison?  Though Deleuze never says it explicitly, I think we are meant to remember that for Spinoza, the actual feelings of a body -- its affects --  were related to the moment to moment increase or decrease in its power of acting.   Positive affect was created when the power of acting of a body increased, and negative affect corresponded to its decrease.  Likewise, the will to power has two qualities, affirmation and negation.  By linking the will to power to Spinoza's theory of affects, Deleuze seems to be seeing the will to power as the feeling of a change in power.  Affirmation is the feeling of an increase in power because it brings more things into our world, so to speak; it connects us to other parts of existence by affirming that they exist.  And negation is the feeling of our world shrinking, the feeling of crawling into our shell and disconnecting from things.  It's as if he was defining the will to power as the derivative of power.  We've already seen that the qualities of the will to power were introduced into the theory of force in order to account for the becoming of forces.  This addition was necessary because an instantaneous snapshot of the power of a force was not enough to characterize it as a force, but reduced it to a mere mechanism and converted the passage of time (qualitative change) into a transcendent dimension. So perhaps what Deleuze is getting at here is that our theory of force has to include both the instantaneous power of forces, but also their instantaneous rates of change.  Both of these variables are necessary to construct a 'phase space' of force.  Differences in power are like a 'spatial' variable that results in different qualities of force (active/reactive), while the rate of change of power is like a 'temporal' variable that results in different qualities of the will to power (affirmative/negative).  

While I'm still not clear yet why the will to power plays a double role (genetic and affective) let's leave this first section with a quote that uses the manner of triumph of reactive forces we discussed last time to illustrate the two step unfolding of the will to power as a feeling of power. 

The affects of force are active insofar as the force appropriates anything that resists it and compels the obedience of inferior forces. When force is affected by superior forces which it obeys its affects are made to submit, or rather, they are acted (agies). Again, obeying is a manifestation of the will to power. But an inferior force can bring about the disintegration or splitting of superior forces, the explosion of the energy which they have accumulated. Nietzsche likes to compare the phenomena of atomic disintegration, the division of protoplasm and the reproduction of organic life (VP II 45, 77, 187). And not only do disintegration, division and separation always express will to power but so do being disintegrated, being separated and being divided ...

1) active force, power of acting or commanding; 2) reactive force, power of obeying or of being acted; 3) developed reactive force, power of splitting up, dividing and separating; 4) active force become reactive, power of being separated, of turning against itself. (NP, 63)

The next subsection 2.12 takes the sequence described here as the default dynamic of forces interacting.   Now that we've discussed the qualities will to power (affects of negation or affirmation) separately from the qualities of force (action and reaction), we can see the triumph of reactive forces in a new light.  They don't triumph by increasing their power (by becoming active) but by decreasing the power of active forces.  Reactive forces separate active forces from what they can do, sever their relations, reduce their capacity, and in short make them become reactive. 

It must not be said that active force becomes reactive because reactive forces triumph; on the con- trary, they triumph because, by separating active force from what it can do, they betray it to the will of nothingness, to a becoming-reactive deeper than themselves. This is why the figures of triumph of reactive forces (ressentiment, bad conscience, and the ascetic ideal) are primarily forms of nihilism. The becoming-reactive, the becoming nihilistic, of force seem to be essential components of the relation of force with force. (NP, 64)

Here we can see the full dynamic of forces.  The will to power determines a force as the active one in a relation.  But then the developing dynamic of that relation determines that this active force manifests a negative will to power.  The active force develops a negative affect, a feeling of being blocked or stymied, so it ends up changing character.  It becomes reactive, and begins to fight against the limits set on it as if these were imposed by a superior external power.  This is a "will to nothingness" in the sense that it's a will to make something (the limits) not exist.  It's a purely destructive will.  Instead of fighting for what it can do, the formerly active force ends up fighting against what it can't do.  It's almost exactly Marathe's distinction between freedom from and freedom to -- freedom from is entirely reactive, the freedom of spoiled children.

Deleuze will go on to talk about the opposite process -- the becoming-active of force -- so why does he present this becoming-reactive as if it were the default case?  The question is related to topics we've already broached like the inevitably reactive role played by facts and laws.  Here he presents it as a question of the "shame of being human".  

But we can ask why we only feel and know a becoming-reactive. Is it not because man is essentially reactive? Because becoming-reactive is constitutive of man? (NP, 64)

I presume that we are defining "man" here as a conscious, rational animal.  We saw at the beginning of this chapter (pg. 39) that consciousness is an inherently reactive force.  In terms of real power it is the slave of the body.  In terms of our conscious explanations of reality, its supposed rationality is the triumph of a slave rebellion that attempts to make the tail wag the dog.  Hence our very "humanity" is the product of the process of becoming-reactive that we just saw described.  Consciousness separates us from the world, restricts its ability to affect us.  Rationality limits our thinking to its laws of common sense.  And beneath the visible tip of these fictions is the submerged iceberg of the unconscious, the body and its power dynamics.  You are not your consciousness, but it certainly encourages you to see it that way.  

Deleuze claims that this is the deepest reason why Nietzsche presents the eternal return as the "greatest weight", and why it at first inspires such nausea in Zarathustra.  Not only will the petty reactive forces also return, but they will even triumph again and again.  Even the active forces will inevitably become reactive.  Even as exciting an evolutionary experiment as humanity will go awry.  If we can't discover a new type of consciousness that would be active, and a new process of becoming-active of forces, the eternal return dooms us to a sort of heat death of forces where all of them eventually express nothing but the negative affects of nihilism.  This would be a much weightier condemnation of existence than simply affirming that our past suffering will also return ... alongside our present happiness.  Instead it would make even our present happiness delusional.  It would also make the Return contradict itself by defining an endpoint.  In short, if there is only a becoming-reactive, ER is the pinnacle of nihilism.

Deleuze follows this distressing vision of a universal becoming-reactive by asking in subsection 2.13 whether there could be a counterbalancing becoming-active.  As a first approach to this question he points out that despite all his criticisms, the power of reactive forces is strangely fascinating for Nietzsche.  His greatest enemies (eg. Christ and Socrates) all come off looking like evil geniuses.  They seem to all possess a secret power, a power of negation and nihilism, to be sure, but one that nevertheless keeps things ... interesting.  

Here we can recognise an ambivalence important to Nietzsche: all the forces whose reactive character he exposes are, a few lines or pages later, admitted to fascinate him, to be sublime because of the perspective they open up for us and because of the disturbing will to power to which they bear witness. They separate us from our power but at the same time they give us another power, "dangerous" and "interesting". (NP, 66)

So Nietzsche's point is not that reactive forces and a negative will to power are necessarily bad.  It even seems there's a possibility that they are strangely creative.  At first, this doesn't seem to make any sense.  Reactive forces, along with forces that have become reactive, are naysayers.  They take orders and try to impose limits based on these orders, or they rage against these limits, respectively.    How could these forces that are necessarily set in motion by others become interesting, creative?  Deleuze only hints at how this might happen in 2.13, and saves the full explanation for the final two subsections.  Basically, reactive forces as such can't be creative.  But if they go so far that they directly affirm their negativity, they can be transformed by a becoming-active.

But whatever the ambivalence of sense and values we cannot conclude that a reactive force becomes active by going to the limit of what it can do. For, to go "to the limit", "to the ultimate consequences", has two senses depending on whether one affirms or denies, whether one affirms one's own difference or denies that which differs. When a reactive force develops to its ultimate consequences it does this in relation to negation, to the will to nothingness which serves as its motive force. Becoming active, on the contrary, presupposes the affinity of action and affirmation; in order to become active it is not sufficient for a force to go to the limit of what it can do, it must make what it can do an object of affirmation. (NP, 68)

We've seen that this idea of enantiodromia is central to Nietzsche's entire philosophy.  When things are pushed to their limit, they convert into their opposite.  In a sense, we're seeing that the affirmation of a limit actually removes it, whereas trying to push it away doesn't work, because it is an entirely negative effort.   This is straight out of Buddhism.  Though of course the deeper point is not that affirmation removes the problem, but that it transforms it, making the previous limit into a phase transition.  

It's at just this point in 2.14 that Deleuze introduces the strange idea that the eternal return is a selective doctrine.  Earlier, he discussed ER as a cosmological doctrine designed to be the principle of an unlimited becoming that rejected all steady states or closed cycles.  This resulted in an interpretation of ER as an infinite splitting of time within each moment.  What returns is everything, but it comes back inside any particular thing.  The idea that this same doctrine of the Return could somehow be selective just doesn't seem to make sense at first.  Selection seems to imply some sort of change between repetitions, as well as some point of view or set of values to base the selection on.  Nevertheless, it's true that Nietzsche does present ER this way sometimes.  He makes its affirmation into an ethical imperative to rival Kant's categorical one. 

As an ethical thought the eternal return is the new formulation of the practical synthesis: whatever you will, will it in such a way that you also will its eternal return. "If, in all that you will you begin by asking yourself: is it certain that I will to do it an infinite number of times? This should be your most solid centre of gravity" (NP, 68)

Interpreting ER this way turns it into an existential selection like the one Kathleen Marie Higgins discussed.   As Deleuze points out, if we were to look at our actions through this ethical lens, we would stop doing all those petty reactive things that we now permit ourselves with the thought that they're just this one time, and it's not a big deal.  The doctrine would truly give each of our actions "the greatest weight" because it would 'eternalize' them in a way analogous to how the categorical imperative 'universalizes' them.  We would have to imagine everything we do duplicated endlessly; we would have to want any action taken to this limit.  I have no doubt that this is part of what Nietzsche had in mind with the idea.  

But in other moments, he seems to present a different version of the Return.  He says that things will return anyhow, whether you believe in ER or not.  This is clearly a perspective that makes more sense given the content of the doctrine.  After all, how are we expected to make an existential selection to act in a certain way if the action has already happened innumerable times?  There's a more mysterious and paradoxical reading of ER that emphasizes a way in which the only action it asks of us is an affirmation of the "unbearable lightness" of our being.  It asks us simply to affirm that there is no selector and no selection, to affirm our powerlessness.  We've already seen this basic idea under the guise of affirming chance.  Now though, Deleuze would like to recast it as a question of a negative will to power going so far that it actually affirms its own nihilism.  At that point it would transmute into its opposite through a becoming-active, just as we earlier saw the affirmation of chance come back in the form of necessity.  

I think Deleuze would like us to think of this transformation as a type of selection.  He's not talking about a selection where someone goes through a list of possibilities and picks out one that best matches a pre-existing scheme or criteria.  That would be how the existential selection we just discussed works.  The deeper selection is something more like a cultivation, an evolutionary or 'natural' selection that works like a selective breeding.  There's no fixed image of what form is to be selected that we can identify in advance.  All the selecting happens at the level of saying "yes" or saying "no" to the results of our experiment.  We select only by deciding to continue cultivating, or deciding to stop.  

This kind of selection as cultivation is meant to be deeper than the existential version because it does away with the need to have a human selector.  The idea here is that the mechanism of the eternal return will automatically and naturally perform this selective cultivation by letting the affirmative forces continue affirming while forcing the negative forces to negate themselves.  The Return is in fact a nihilistic doctrine -- "This is the most extreme form of nihilism: the nothing (the "meaningless"), eternally!" (WP, #55).  But it takes nihilism to its limit, and then affirms even this nihilism.  Nihilism overcomes itself.   

Why is the eternal return called "the most extreme form of nihilism". ... Only the eternal return makes the nihilistic will whole and complete. (NP, 69)

The will to nothingness was the universal becoming-reactive, the becoming-reactive of forces. This is the sense in which nihilism is always incomplete on its own. Even the ascetic ideal is the opposite of what we might think, "it is an expedient of the art of conserving life". Nihilism is the principle of conservation of a weak, diminished, reactive life. (NP, 69)

What happens when the will to nothingness is related to the eternal return? This is the only place where it breaks its alliance with reactive forces. Only the eternal return can complete nihilism because it makes negation a negation of reactive forces themselves. By and in the eternal return nihilism no longer expresses itself as the conservation and victory of the weak but as their destruction, their self-destruction. (NP, 70)

The self-destruction of reactive forces completes the description of the cycle of force that Deleuze has been building up over the course of this chapter (cf. the four point summaries on pg. 63 and 67).  First there was an active-reactive split.  Then reactive forces triumphed by separating active forces from what they can do.  This made them become-reactive, turning against their original affirmative and active character.  Then finally we see that reactive forces, if they go all the way to affirming their nihilistic will to power, can actually destroy themselves in a becoming-active.  While this may sound like some sort of dialectical cycle, Deleuze has already given us the tools to understand how these two cycles are different -- their relations of difference and identity are totally reversed.  For Hegel, affirmation pertained only to identity, not difference (non-identity, otherness).  For Nietzsche, it's only difference that can be affirmed, and identity is always a concept of limit and negation.  His initial active force is constituted not by a self-affirmation but by an affirmation of its difference from, and superiority to, the reactive force.  You might call it a sort of 'self-affirmation from without'.  The active force doesn't negate the identity of the reactive force, but affirms its difference.  The initial reactive force, however, is all about negating the identity of the active force that has mastered it, separating this force from its power and grinding it down.  Then in the becoming-reactive of active force, an active force turns against itself because the original affirmation of its difference is converted into a negation of the limits to that difference (which is almost a sort of 'other-identity') imposed by the reactive force.  And finally, when reactive forces become-active, they end up negating their identity.  The dialectic is always affirming the inside by negating the outside.  Nietzsche is always affirming the outside, even if this happens to mean negating the inside.  The roles of difference and identity, outside and inside, change and stasis, are exactly inverted.

Deleuze outlines this whole process again on pgs. 69-71, starting with the quotes I included above.

Turning against oneself should not be confused with this destruction of self, this self-destruction, in the reactive process of turning against oneself active force becomes reactive. In self-destruction reactive forces are themselves denied and led to nothingness. This is why self-destruction is said to be an active operation an "active destruction" (NP, 70)

The second selection in the eternal return is thus the following: the eternal return produces becoming-active. It is sufficient to relate the will to nothingness to the eternal return in order to realise that reactive forces do not return. However far they go, however deep the becoming-reactive of forces, reactive forces will not return. The small, petty, reactive man will not return. In and through the eternal return negation as a quality of the will to power transmutes itself into affirmation, it becomes an affirmation of negation itself, it becomes a power of affirming, an affirmative power.  This is what Nietzsche presents as Zarathustra's cure and Dionysus' secret. "Nihilism vanquished by itself" thanks to the eternal return. (NP, 71)

The eternal return is a process of purification that works through repetition alone.  An analogy might be the way numbers behave when raised to the N-th power -- presuming N > 1, every starting point greater than one heads off towards infinity, while anything less than one converges towards zero.  On each pass of the cycle, more negation is negated, until we are left with nothing but affirmation, even though this affirmation has become so universal that it includes even negation, so long as this negation goes all the way to its limit and negates itself.  It's quite a circuitous route, anything but a simple circle.  So perhaps a better metaphor than simple exponentiation would be the fractal border of the Mandlebrot set (likewise constructed by the effects of repeatedly raising something to a power).  This complexity makes sense though, since the Return is in service of a universal becoming that never stops producing something new but that only does this by transforming something old.  As Deleuze and Guattarri will later elaborate, it's a music of infinite variations on the same theme -- a cosmic fugue.  

The final subsection 2.15 elaborates on the way that an unlimited becoming flows from a single becoming, from becoming-active alone.  Only the affirmative will to power, and its corresponding affect of joy, can survive the cycle of ER.  I think this is meant to show us how the cycle closes (or perhaps more accurately, opens) and the being of an active force is only produced through the affirmation of becoming.  In other words, the differential and genetic element of the will to power which began the cycle always operates through an affirmation of negation (of difference, novelty, 'mutation').  Being is only produced by the affirmation of becoming (a species of non-being) or by "making an affirmation of becoming".   So within the 'original' active/reactive split is a becoming-active that can only be traced back to the overcoming of another split, ad infinitum.  

The eternal return thus has a double aspect: it is the universal being of becoming, but the universal being of becoming ought to belong to a single becoming. Only becoming-active has a being which is the being of the whole of becoming. Returning is everything but everything is affirmed in a single moment. (NP, 72)

Unlimited becoming, the being of becoming, the time crystal, and anything as the eternal return of everything.  These are all the same idea in various guises.

The Cultivation of The Eternal Return 1

While it may court disaster, I'm going to treat the final nine subsections of chapter 2 (2.7-15) as a unit.  Part of the reason for this is that Deleuze leaves notes at several points that his analysis here is provisional and in need of completion through concepts that will presumably appear later in the book.  Which suggests that your friend and humble narrator's failure to adequately understand this section is not entirely unexpected.  In addition, these subsections hang together as a development of the problem we left off with last time -- what is the relationship between forces and the will to power?  Read what follows as a first draft of a response.

A force doesn't exist by itself, but only in a relationship with another force.  This relationship is a product of chance.  Two forces happen to collide.  However, the way this relationship is structured is due to the principle of the will to power.  The will to power is the differential and genetic element which distinguishes forces at the same time as it holds them together in a relation.  The basic distinction that the will to power creates is that between active and reactive forces.  This is the dualistic split which we saw last time was related to the splitting of time into past and future that happens within every present.  Another way to put this is to say that it is the will to power that causes forces to become active or reactive.  This choice of terminology is no accident.  Saying that the will to power involves forces in a 'becoming' is meant to nuance the idea that the will to power creates forces as such.  In a sense, the will to power is creative, generative.  But in another sense, its role is more like an agent of transformation.  It doesn't create something from nothing, but it always produces something new.  Becoming always starts in the middle, but one of Deleuze's characteristic ideas is to make this middle an origin (or to make the origin a middle).  Clearly this involves us in paradox, or at least in a confusing recursive feedback loop.  This shouldn't be a huge surprise at this point, since the idea that "the origin always already happened and now we're repeating it" sounds almost like a direct restatement of ER.

The paradox of becoming as an origin might be the main force behind Deleuze's decision to introduce a qualitative split even into the will to power.  The will to power splits forces into active and reactive, but is itself split into affirmative and negative qualities.  So the will to power can be an affirmative and creative principle, or it can be a principle of negation, destruction, and nihilism.  It's beyond good and evil.

Affirming and denying, appreciating and depreciating, express the will to power just as acting and reacting express force. (And just as reactive forces are still forces, the will to deny, nihilism, is still will to power: " ... a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will! GM III 28 p. 163) (NP, 54)

Force can have two qualities and, independently of that, the will to power can have two qualities (WtP doesn't seem to be associated with any quantity).  This gives us a sort of matrix where, beyond the obvious alliances between active forces and affirmation and reactive forces and negation, a force could be active, but express a negative will to power, and, conversely, a reactive force might somehow express an affirmative will.  These are like secondary effects (splits within splits) that can transform the quality of being of a force, making it become something new.  In other words, things are more complicated than we thought at first.  

As far as I can tell, the point of introducing this complexity is to keep things interesting, in both a theoretical and an ontological sense.  Like we said last time, the will to power is an ontological concept designed to answer the question of how there can always be something new, how becoming can be unlimited.  If forces created by the will to power could be forever and permanently labeled as active or reactive, we would not have accomplished this goal.  In this case the forces would be static and the will to power would sit completely outside the universe, determining the forces at work within it the same way we imagine God's divine plan or natural laws to determine the course of earthly events.  Instead, we have to see the will to power, this seemingly most crucial determining factor, as a sort of nothing-in-itself (in D&R this becomes difference-in-itself, which is related tot eh later concept of the body without organs).  Deleuze never quite says it this way, so maybe I'm missing something, but the real secret of the will to power seems to be that it doesn't do anything.  Despite its power as a principle, it doesn't really act on its own.  It requires forces to act on its behalf and express it, while it alone simply affirms or negates, says "yes" or says "no".  It is pure belief, distinct from desire.  This fits with the idea that the will to power as origin is also a middle.  It's like a pure potentiality, not a pre-existing plan or origin point that comes before every force, but a sort of inexhaustible reserve of possibility that comes between any two configurations of force.  

... affirmation and negation extend beyond action and reaction because they are the immediate qualities of becoming itself. Affirmation is not action but the power of becoming active, becoming active personified. Negation is not simple reaction but a becoming reactive. It is as if affirmation and negation were both immanent and transcendent in relation to action and reaction; out of the web of forces they make up the chain of becoming. (NP, 54)

Adding a second layer of qualities also keeps things interesting from a theoretical perspective, because it allows us to address some obvious questions that come up with the theory of power we've been constructing.  For example, what happens if the slaves win?  What if the reactive forces, though individually less powerful, somehow team up and overcome an active force?  If the only distinction available to us was the active/reactive split defined by a difference in quantity at the level of force, then we would have to say that whatever force in fact triumphs at any moment is the dominant, and therefore active, one.  Adding a second distinction at the level of the will to power allows Deleuze to say that reactive forces don't triumph by virtue of somehow increasing their own power and thereby becoming active, but by decreasing the power of active forces, by separating these forces from what they can do and making them become reactive.  

... even by getting together reactive forces do not form a greater force, one that would be active. They proceed in an entirely different way - they decompose; they separate active force from what it can do; they take away a part or almost all of its power. In this way reactive forces do not become active but, on the contrary, they make active forces join them and become reactive in a new sense. (NP, 57)

If the interpretation of forces depended on nothing but an instantaneous quantitative comparison of power and a corresponding instantaneous quality, it would be a pretty dull affair.  We could simply read the quality of forces at work directly from the current state of the world.  Who is winning now?  Well, then, that's the active one, now.   This way of measuring the power of a force would actually serve to effectively do away with its quality, and ultimately even with its distinction as a force.  As we observed before, this type of temporal atomism is the high point of the mechanistic view of the world, and it surreptitiously serves to deconstruct the notion of force entirely.  It posits one state of affairs with one configurations of 'forces' and then another state of affairs with a different configuration, but there's not really an immanent way to get from the first point to the second.  Why would we even say that the same 'forces' are at work if all we get are two unrelated snapshots?  If we rely on natural law to join the points into a trajectory, we are appealing to something outside the world of instantaneous forces, precisely something that 'forces' them to obey laws.  But this is antithetical to the entire concept of a force as positive 'power of doing' that can only be limited by another (really existing) force.  We might say that since nothing can resist the laws of nature, then they don't even need to push; pushing and resistance to pushing are the essence of force.  Mechanism as a type of 'instantaneous interpretation' actually so dissolves the identity of forces that we lose the concept entirely.    

While a force doesn't have an identity, it does have a becoming.  Forces too must have a becoming, or we will not be able to understand the passage of time.  We need the whole history (the genealogy) of a force in order to interpret it, and in order to value it.  An instantaneous interpretation interpretation oversimplifies the temporal depth of the world of forces.  Genealogy restores to forces a trajectory, a becoming, but an immanent one, where the future is folded inside the present instead of added to the outside.  This is why Deleuze continually insists on the subtlety and delicacy of the art of interpretation.  We have to see the whole unfolding or becoming of a force as somehow contained within the genetic element of the will to power (though this interior will be constructed through recursion).  

Concretely speaking, the point here is that the universe can't be contained in an infinitely thin snapshot and that history of forces matter to an interpretation of their quality.  Thus, even though reactive forces may triumph over active forces in fact, if they express a negative will to power, one that only seeks to separate active forces from their power, then they remain qualitatively reactive even in victory.  

We have said that active forces are the superior, dominant and strongest forces. But inferior forces can prevail without ceasing to be inferior in quantity and reactive in quality, without ceasing to be slaves in this sense. (NP, 58)

At first blush the theory of force may appear to be a species of "might makes right" theory.  Whoever is winning now is the good guy, the active force.  And calling the principle of this theory the "will to power" only seems to reinforce this interpretation.  Everybody wants to win, right?  Now we can see that this is all classic Nietzschean masking and misdirection.   Nietzsche always shouts the opposite of what he means; he only whispers his real message.  In reality, the whole theory of interpreting force and evaluating the will to power behind it shows us that we cannot conclude anything important from the bare fact of the current state of the world.  "There are no facts, only interpretations".  We cannot leave time out of our theory, nor can we add it from the outside.  

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What's more, the very attempt to see the world as a set of inert facts or separated instants is itself a product of reactive forces.  In passage after passage Deleuze points to a deep complementarity between the view that atomizes existence into a set of snapshot facts, the notion that forces must be 'ruled' by laws that limit what they can do, and the triumph of those reactive forces that rob the world of its possibilities.  So, far from the factual might of the law making right, Nietzsche's theory of force suggests that most of the 'powers that be' will, in fact, be the 'wrong' kind of power.   They will only reflect forces of reaction and powers of negation and limit.  But everywhere we look, these slaves appear to be masters.  This is a tricky but crucial point, so I want to spend some time examining in detail the ways Deleuze approaches it.

Deleuze first discusses slaves' peculiar habit of triumphing when he talks about the "inverted image" of the origin in subsection 2.8.  By "origin" he means the point where the will to power differentiates between active and reactive forces on the basis of their difference in quantity of power.  This, though, is only a description of the origin seen "right side up", that is, from the perspective of active forces that affirm themselves through their difference.  The reactive forces have a different interpretation of what happened.

Reactive force, even when it obeys, limits active force, imposes limitations and partial restrictions on it and is already controlled by the spirit of the negative (GM II11). This is why the origin itself, in one sense, includes an inverted self-image; seen from the side of reactive forces the differential and genealogical element appears upside down, difference has become negation, affirmation has become contradiction. An inverted image of the origin accompanies the origin; "yes" from the point of view of active forces becomes "no" from the point of view of reactive forces and affirmation of the self becomes negation of the other. (NP, 56)

Basically, reactive forces see the origin of any new power as a threat that must be eliminated.  For them, difference is always a problem, a departure from equilibrium or a violation of the law.  In other words, these forces see difference as something that should be prevented from having an effect, at best negated, and at worst adapted to in order to preserve the status quo.  Reactive forces are always fighting off the origin of anything new.  Deleuze's example of this inverted image is quite telling:  

Its image then appears as that of an "evolution". 

 

Whether it is English or German, evolutionism, is the reactive image of genealogy. Thus it is characteristic of reactive forces to deny, from the start, the difference which constitutes them at the start, to invert the differential element from which they derive and to give a deformed image of it. (NP, 56)

How does Darwinism see difference, novelty?  As nothing but dangerous mutation!  But it's precisely these mutations that have collected over the eons to define the organism.  A replicator is really nothing but a long history of mutations.  The idea of "mutation" only changes valence when it can be assimilated to the existing organism as an "adaptation".  This is the whole world seen upside down though, as if each organism were the center of the universe, a fixed entity in itself rather than a tiny eddy in a great stream of evolutionary becoming.  In this sense, the survival of the fittest becomes the survival of the most boring replicator; these successfully negate the power any new variation as a threat to their incessant and utterly predictable copying.

"The strong always have to be defended against the weak" (VP I 395). We cannot use the state of a system of forces as it in fact is, or the result of the struggle between forces, in order to decide which are active and which are reactive.  Nietzsche remarks, against Darwin and evolutionism, "Supposing, however, that this struggle exists - and it does indeed occur - its outcome is the reverse of that desired by the school of Darwin, of that which one ought perhaps to desire with them: namely, the defeat of the stronger, the more privileged, the fortunate exceptions" (NP, 58)

The same idea that the power of difference has to be restrained or neutralized appears again in the next subsection 2.9 when Deleuze discusses Plato's Gorgias.  Socrates' final sparring partner in that dialogue is a young man called Callicles who indeed sounds remarkably like Nietzsche (for an example, read the quote in that post).  Callicles argues that power is just power and has nothing to do with our societal concept of justice.  Anyone who argues otherwise is just trying to corrupt the noble youth of Athens and create a herd of slaves trained to disavow their own natural power.  Yeah, I'm looking at you Socrates.  From Callicles' perspective, laws are entirely unnatural.  They serve to limit the power of the strong by separating them from their own capability.  In a stroke of reactive genius, they even try to convince the strongest that they're better off ... submitting to those weaker than them and themselves becoming weak.  

Everything that separates a force from what it can do he [Callicles] calls law. Law, in this sense, expresses the triumph of the weak over the strong. Nietzsche adds: the triumph of reaction over action. Indeed, everything which separates a force is reactive as is the state of a force separated from what it can do. Every force which goes to the limit of its power is, on the contrary, active. It is not a law that every force goes to the limit, it is even the opposite of law.  (NP, 58)

In this context, we can clearly see how Nietzshce's theory of force puts a subtle but significant twist on Callicles' argument that, of course it's better to be powerful than just.  Contrary to what Socrates thinks, justice under the law is just the form of power of the weakest.  Force has its own immanent 'law', its own will to power, which is to try and go to the limit of its power, to do everything it can do.  What's 'natural' is an affirmative will to power that repels any limits to our power.  Reactive forces and their negative will to power can nevertheless triumph by separating an active force from what it can do, by limiting its possibilities.  In fact, everywhere we find an appeal to natural or political law, we're witnessing the triumph of reactive forces.  In practice, the 'law' (perhaps more like the habit) of the world is that the weak typically win and the strong must be defended against this propensity.  In place of a simple measure of "power", Nietzsche substitutes a measure of how actively and affirmatively a forces goes to "the limit of its power".  This completely changes the theory of "might makes right" and prevents us from discovering who is truly powerful just by looking at who currently has the upper hand in terms of numbers.  It becomes a question of what you want to cultivate in your garden.

Finally, Deleuze approaches the same question of how, despite their weakness, the slaves usually win by discussing Nietzsche's critique of positivists and "free thinkers".  We've all met the type of thinker he's talking about here.  This is the modern market fundamentalist or conservative apologist.  These folks pride themselves on their liberalism (in the classic sense) and humanism (in the existential sense).  They always appeal to the open and empirical values of science.  But somehow, mysteriously, their values and conclusions always seem to exactly echo the status quo of the society they find themselves in.  These are the people who argue that the rich are obviously better because they have triumphed in our "free market" economy.  Just as Hegel's absolute spirit reached its culmination as he penned the final line of The Phenomenology of Spirit, the free thinker's scientific history always makes the facts of the moment looks inevitable.  

These are the free thinkers. They say: "What are you complaining about? How could the weak have triumphed if they did not form superior force?" "Let us bow down before accomplished fact" (GM I 9). This is modern positivism. They claim to carry out the critique of values, they claim to refuse all appeals to transcendent values, they declare them unfashionable, but only in order to rediscover them as the forces which run the world of today. (NP. 59)

Free thinkers use facts like a police truncheon to clear Quine's "slum of possibles" and to restore an order threatened by ... well, by all that free thinking.  They are always compelling us with these facts (sound of one hand emphatically pounding table) and what they prove about how the world must be.  For Nietzsche the way this view dresses up its interpretation as an absence of interpretation, as just the facts, makes it the epitome of a weak and reactive force powered by a will to deny itself.  

The measure of forces and their qualification does not depend on absolute quantity but rather on relative accomplishment. Strength or weakness cannot be judged by taking the result and success of struggle as a criterion. For, once again, it is a fact that the weak triumph: it is even the essence of fact. (NP, 60)

Next time we'll explore just how far this will to negate itself can go.

Unlimited Becoming

It turns out that the next 2 sub-sections (2.5-6) are contiguous with the first four that we covered last time.  Taken together they deliver on the promise of seeing the duality of active and reactive as expressions of a single underlying principle that Nietzsche calls "will to power".  Before we elucidate this principle though, we should follow one of Deleuze's best suggestions and ask what problem the concept of the will to power is designed to solve.  Though it's in a different context, the opening pages of Steven Shaviro's Without Criteria,  express this problem with admirable brevity.

 

Where does one start in philosophy? Heidegger asks the question of Being: "Why is there something, rather than nothing?" But Whitehead is splendidly indifferent to this question. He asks, instead: "How is it that there is always something new?" Whitehead doesn't see any point in returning to our ultimate beginnings. He is interested in creation rather than rectification, Becoming rather than Being, the New rather than the immemorially old. (WC, Preface)

Like Whitehead, Nietzsche is interesting in Becoming rather than Being.  And I think one of the best characterizations of the ultimate goal of his philosophy would be to see it as an attempt to construct a concept of unlimited Becoming.  How can we imagine a world that keeps on going, that never stops producing qualitatively new phenomena?  Without this, we don't even know what a universe can do.

We've already seen how any vision of the universe that involves some final state, or even some exactly repeated state, limits the possibilities of becoming.  In fact, for becoming to have any finite identity at all would put some limits on it and demarcate something outside of it, some not-becoming.  So one simple way to reconceive the question of an unlimited becoming is to assert that becoming has no opposite.  This is the same thing we were getting at earlier in making an affirmation of becoming and affirming even the being of becoming.  Pure affirmation is always 'of' something that has no fixed identity and no opposite, and hence has no limits.  In a sense, you never actually know what you're affirming.  This idea that becoming isn't an object helped me make sense of the this difficult passage.

But why would equilibrium, the terminal state, have to have been attained if it were possible? By virtue of what Nietzsche calls the infinity of past time. The infinity of past time means that becoming cannot have started to become, that it is not something that has become. But, not being something that has become it cannot be a becoming something. Not having become, it would already be what it is becoming - if it were becoming something. That is to say, past time being infinite, becoming would have attained its final state if it had one. And, indeed, saying that becoming would have attained its final state if it had one is the same as saying that it would not have left its initial state if it had one. If becoming becomes something why has it not finished becoming long ago? If it is something which has become then how could it have started to become? (NP, 47)

We could read this as beginning with the premise that past time is infinite and ending with the conclusion that the world can have no equilibrium state.  Or would could see the infinity of past time here as derived from the idea that, since becoming has no fixed identity as a thing, it cannot be said to have started or stopped.  Where there are no limits, there are no distinct things, and so no arising and passing of those things either.  Becoming is "eternal" not because it is something embedded in time that happens to have a very long, even infinite, duration, but because there is nothing outside becoming.  It is not embedded in time; it is time.  

An infinite and unlimited becoming obviously cannot terminate in a fixed state.  What's more, it cannot even be made to pass through the set of discreet individual states we call the present.  Contrary to what Plato and our common sense imagine, becoming can never be frozen at a particular point, and in this way contained in a series of separated snapshots.  In other words, becoming can't be one moment in time because it must be all of time.

Plato said that if everything that becomes can never avoid the present then, as soon as it is there, it ceases to become and is then what it was in the process of becoming. (NP, 47)

Seeing That Frees cautioned against interpreting the familiar notion of "living in the now" by hypostatizing even the present moment as something with inherent independent existence.  Time too, Burbea claims, is empty, nothing but a fabrication, a synthesis.  Our idea that only the present truly is, that it is precisely what the universe arrives at, even if momentarily, after all that becoming, only begs the question of exactly what's going on in this present moment.  This question may sound puzzling to common sense, but deeper introspection can start to show us that the present is so complicated that it's 'identity' doesn't seem to end. 

That the present moment is not a moment of being or of present "in the strict sense", that it is the passing moment, forces us to think of becoming, but to think of it precisely as what could not have started, and cannot finish, becoming. (NP, 48)

To better communicate his point, Deleuze decides to present this same idea using a simpler terminology that he will carry all the way through his Cinema books.  How does the present pass?  If the present is the only thing that truly is, and the past and the future, by contrast, are not, then what exists which could push the present out of the way, so to speak, in order to turn it into the past of a new present?   Where could this new present have come from?  And what happens to the being of the old present, which we assumed was the entirety of being.  If the present truly had a fixed and limited identity, we would never be able to leave it.  There would have to be some sort of unbridgeable nothingness all around it that separated it from every other present.  If there were something like a "present state of the universe" that fully defined it, then it would make the passage of time a complete mystery, a force that could only be added to the universe from without and arbitrarily.  Instead, Deleuze suggests that we can only understand the passage of time as necessary if we see the present as synthetic -- as a synthesis of past and future.

How can the present pass? The passing moment could never pass if it were not already past and yet to come - at the same time as being present. If the present did not pass of its own accord, if it had to wait for a new present in order to become past, the past in general would never be constituted in time, and this particular present would not pass. We cannot wait, the moment must be simultaneously present and past, present and yet to come, in order for it to pass (and to pass for the sake of other moments). The present must coexist with itself as past and yet to come. The synthetic relation of the moment to itself as present, past and future grounds it relation to other moments. (NP, 48)

We've encountered this idea of the emptiness of the present many times before.  It's the time crystal.   It's the Infinitely splitting present we discovered that Heidegger was unable to see in Zarathustra.  Here the passage of time isn't a motion from one moment to another completely distinct one.  It's not a flip book of drawings that miraculously produce the cinematic illusion.  Instead, the passage of time becomes a re-presentation, a transformation, of a never completed whole.  Every moment which passes is in fact every-moment seem from a new angle.  Every moment is all of time, an eternity of infinite recursive depth, the re-represents itself at every moment.  This makes it exactly the opposite of the infinitely thin slice model we habitually use to turn the present into an object and time into something external.   

Time as recursive splitting is precisely the eternal return.  In a sense, at the limit, there's only one moment, but that moment only exists as an infinite series (or perhaps more accurately as an infinite series of infinite series of ... as Yamada Koun observed, ultimately there's not even one thing).  This differs from our understanding of time as an infinite series of static presents because it reverse the relations between finite and infinite, one and many.  In place of an infinite series of finite moments that pass us by as we count a succession of integer units, ER understands time as a single finite moment, "complete yet unlimited", that is itself already an infinite series.  This reversal of perspective is exactly what makes fractal geometry interesting.  The finite 'unit' is already an infinite sum of terms that are themselves infinite sums.  The image we should have of the Return is as an endless recursive web that reappears within each term that constitutes it.  Keeping this image in mind goes a long way in interpreting some of Deleuze's more difficult passages.

In other words, identity in the eternal return does not describe the nature of that which returns but, on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs. This is why the eternal return must be thought of as a synthesis; a synthesis of time and its dimensions, a synthesis of diversity and its reproduction, a synthesis of becoming and the being which is affirmed in becoming, a synthesis of double affirmation. (NP, 48)

What's reproduced in every moment is the diversity of the series that compose it.  It's exactly this continual reappearance of diversity within the moment that the mechanistic view cannot account for.  As we've pointed out, if we atomize time into unrelated instants (perhaps represented as points in the phase space of the universe) we'll never understand how time can pass without invoking the thumb of some external God who flips the pages of our cine de dedo.  And if time doesn't pass on its own, so to speak, we will be stuck in and limited to an eternal present, even if we conceive of this present as an endless circle (closed trajectory in phase space).  The problem is that the self-identical atomic moment can contain no internal structure or diversity.  A time atom is antithetical to the very notion of the passage of time.  

This final state is held to be identical to the initial state and, to this extent, it is concluded that the mechanical process passes through the same set of differences again. The cyclical hypothesis, so heavily criticised by Nietzsche (VP II 325 and 334), arises in this way. Because we cannot understand how this process can possibly leave the initial state, reemerge from the final state, or pass through the same set of differences again and yet not even have the power to pass once through whatever differences there are [now, in the present]. The cyclical hypothesis is incapable of accounting for two things - the diversity of co-existing cycles and, above all, the existence of diversity within the cycle. (NP, 49)

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By this point, you can probably imagine where it goes from here.  The infinite fractal splitting of time into two asymmetrical sides (ie. the eternal return) is the same process as the differentiation of force into two asymmetrical components: active and reactive.  The motor of this process is the will to power.  Which is to say that the will to power is the principle behind the unlimited becoming of the eternal return.  Subsection 2.6 is devoted to elaborating this idea that the will to power is the differential element within force that gives rise to and reproduces the qualitative diversity of active and reactive.  

The basic concept here is relatively simple.  The will to power produces the quantitative difference in power between forces that can never be equalized or canceled.  As a result it thereby produces a qualitative difference between types of forces. 

We must remember that every force has an essential relation to other forces, that the essence of force is its quantitative difference from other forces and that this difference is expressed as the force's quality. Now, difference in quantity, understood in this way, necessarily reflects a differential element of related forces - which is also the genetic element of the qualities of these forces. This is what the will to power is; the genealogical element of force, both differential and genetic. The will to power is the element from which derive both the quantitative difference of related forces and the quality that devolves into each force in this relation. The will to power here reveals its nature as the principle of the synthesis of forces. (NP, 49)

There is a subtlety lurking here though, when we come the question of the exact relation between the will to power and the forces involved in this differentiation.  We can ask: who wills in the will to power?  The answer can't be that forces 'possess' a will to power.  Remember, individual forces have no existence, and hence no will, of their own, but only exist as such once chance brings them together in a relation.  So the will to power does not correspond to a force's innate desire for power.  

The will to power is thus ascribed to force, but in a very special way: it is both a complement of force and something internal to it. It is not ascribed to it as a predicate. Indeed, if we pose the question "which one", we cannot say that force is the one that wills. The will to power alone is the one that wills, it does not let itself be delegated or alienated to another subject, even to force (VP I 204, II 54; "Who therefore wills power? An absurd question, if being is by itself will to power ...") (NP, 49)

Instead, the will to power seems to have an autonomous 'force' of its own, one that allows other forces to express themselves through their difference.  It's a "genetic" principle in the sense that it generates forces as such, and assigns to each what it can do in a given configuration.  Unfortunately, calling the will to power a "principle" that operates beneath or before forces gives us the impression that the will to power by itself has some sort of ultimate metaphysical reality.  Deleuze explicitly cautions against this reading of the term.  

The will to power is, indeed, never separable from particular determined forces, from their quantities, qualities and directions. It is never superior to the ways that it determines a relation between forces, it is always plastic and changing. (NP, 50)

This seems to leave us at a bit of an impasse.  Forces don't have a will to power, a will to domination as some sort of end goal.  But neither is the will to power something that fabricates forces on its own.  In fact, it's quite tricky to understand the reality of the will to power.  It's an element with a huge determining effect on forces, but one without any reality of its own.  It's genetic, as in it generates new stuff, but at the same time merely differential, in the sense that it differentiates already existing stuff that has been placed in relation.  So does the will to power come before or after force?  Deleuze's explanation doesn't really help clear up the mystery either, since it's at precisely this juncture that he introduces the notation Leibniz invented for the "differential element" in calculus -- dx.  

... it [WtP] is added to force as the internal principle of the determination of its quality in a relation (x+dx) and as the internal principle of the quantitative determination of this relation itself (dy/dx). The will to power must be described as the genealogical element of force and of forces. Thus it is always through the will to power that one force prevails over others and dominates or commands them. Moreover it is also the will to power (dy) which makes a force obey within a relation; it is through will to power that it obeys. (NP, 51)

This appears to be the root of the very difficult ideas we find in the second half of D&R.  The differential is a non-element, a non-thing in itself, an infinitesimal nothing, that nevertheless ends up determining the relations of (maybe even producing) real things (in this case forces).  I don't understand this idea yet.  Perhaps this problem is why Deleuze concludes this subsection with an obscure passage about Kant (pg. 51-2).  He feels that a full explanation of the connection between WtP and ER depends on understanding Nietzsche's relationship to Kant, which is the subject of the next chapter: "Critique".  I don't understand yet why we need Kant here.  Perhaps it will end up being related to a seemingly obvious question raised by my comparing time to a power hierarchy --  the synthesis of time in the eternal return involves an infinite fractal splitting, whereas the synthesis of forces involved in the will to power only appears to go one level deep.  That is, it's not clear how the will to power would necessarily involve a reproduction of the split between active and passive.  Or perhaps another way to put this would be to wonder how the will to power can be both genetic and differential at the same time.  These seem as if they could only be two successive steps in a process, and yet Deleuze insists we see them as a single principle.  The only model I can think of that combines these two notions in a single concept is embryogenesis. 

 

Difference in Quantity Becomes Quality

Deleuze begins his chapter on "Action and Reaction" with one of his favorite quotes from Spinoza: "We do not even know what a body can do".  Here's the full quote from the Elwes translation.

"I have just pointed out that the objectors cannot fix the limits of the body's power, or say what can be concluded from a consideration of its sole nature, whereas they have experience of many things being accomplished solely by the laws of nature, which they would never have believed possible except under the direction of mind" (Spinoza's Ethics, Part 3, Proposition 2, Note)

While this may at first suggest a reduction of mind to body that anticipates modern neuroscience by 300 years, that's not how Spinoza saw the situation.  For Spinoza, mind and body are strictly parallel.  Anything that we think the mind is capable of, the body is likewise capable of in its own terms.  What he's objecting to is our habit of inserting a mysterious and a-causal mental interiority into the natural world to account for any part of it we don't understand.  We already saw that this was precisely what Nietzsche objected to in the Christian ideas of divine grace and free will -- our inability to see a meaning within existence leads us to posit a transcendental meaning outside of it.  

Spinoza's parallelism between mind and body has always struck me as a somewhat odd doctrine because of its obvious redundancy.  Nevertheless, this redundancy does at least serve to dethrone the mind from the privileged position it has occupied since the inception of philosophy.  For Spinoza, the mind is at least no more important than the body.  Nietzsche and Deleuze, however, take this same logic a step further and assert that the (conscious) mind is in fact the distinctly less powerful and less important of the two.  Once the parallelism has been broken this way, we do find that there is a sort of reductionism involved in asking what the body can do.  But the reductionism at work here is not based on our typical idea of reducing an immaterial mind to a merely material body.  Instead, by pursuing Spinoza's question, Deleuze will end up dethroning the entire duality between spirit and matter, and reducing both of them to asymmetric expressions of a third term -- the will to power.  

To eventually understand this subtle reductionism, we need to first examine how Deleuze defines the body and uncover what role the conscious mind plays in this definition.  A body is defined as simply any relation of forces.  We saw from the outset of the book that 'force' makes a peculiar fundamental metaphysical unit because it never exists by itself, but only in relation to other forces.  

Every force is related to others and it either obeys or commands. What defines a body is this relation between dominant and dominated forces. Every relationship of forces constitutes a body - whether it is chemical, biological, social or political. Any two forces, being unequal, constitute a body as soon as they enter into a relationship. (NP, 40)

A body, then, is what holds forces in relation, or perhaps more accurately, it simply is a relationship of forces.  Since forces have no inherent or a priori relation, the body is a product of the chance collision of various forces.  This makes the fact that it forms at all "astonishing" (in Nietzsche's words).  In other words, the identity of a body can never taken for granted but is always constructed by forces that have come into contact.  While for the sake of simplicity we will often speak of a body as composed of just two forces -- active and reactive, dominant and subservient -- it's clear that any actual body is composed of the many forces and their various relationships that give the body a hierarchy.  Finally, it's important to note that this definition of a body has nothing to do with its materiality.  As Deleuze says explicitly, a body may be physical, chemical, biological, social or political depending on the forces involved.  It's not clear to me whether this means that the forces themselves belong to these domains, or, more likely, that forces have no inherent domain but that the hierarchy of their relations defines various domains.  So here we can already see a break with the material-immaterial dualism I mentioned before.  A body is neither of these two sides, or both simultaneously.  

What happens when two different forces come into relation?  One of them is stronger, more active, more powerful than the other.  Each force has a quantity of power, and, for reasons we'll see in a minute, these quantities are never equal.  As a result, one force overpowers another and dominates it, while the second submits to it as an emissary  submits to its master or a tool to the designs of its user.  In the case of humans, the more powerful force constitutes the body, while the less powerful force is what we think of as 'us' -- our consciousness.  Our consciousness is actually a tool of the body, its 'subject', emissary, or slave.  

To remind consciousness of its necessary modesty is to take it for what it is: a symptom; nothing but the symptom of a deeper transformation and of the activities of entirely non-spiritual forces. (NP, 39)

The body is thus higher than consciousness in the hierarchy of forces that constitute our organism.  The body commands and consciousness obeys.  The body is active, and consciousness reactive.  

[Attentive readers may notice that we seem to be using the term body ambiguously to refer to both the stronger term in a relation of forces, as well as to the relation as a whole (which necessarily comprises both a stronger and weaker term).  This turns out to be a strategic ambiguity on the part of Deleuze.  The higher term in a relation of forces is always unconscious.  As a result, we aren't able to identify it as easily as we can the lower, conscious, level of a relation, and end up inferring it by seeing this lower level as a symptom.  Since we aren't directly conscious of the stronger term (the body), our access to it is only through seeing the weaker term (consciousness) as a weaker term.  Thus, in practice, we discover the unconscious body only as a relation that must include consciousness as one of its parts] 

The notion that our consciousness is a slave to the body is a total inversion of our normal way of seeing things.  Nevertheless, there are a few ways to make this idea more approachable.  Consider that on an evolutionary time scale, consciousness seems to be an extremely rare and late-breaking phenomenon.  How could it not be a tool of the body, something that would adaptively serves the ends of the body, under those circumstances?  Consider as well that we actually already conceive of our consciousness as determined or dominated by a larger force, though we don't often think of the relationship in quite those terms.  We usually call this force 'reality', or the 'external world'.  And we call the relation of consciousness to this superior force 'representation'.  In fact, we call a consciousness not dominated by reality in this way 'deranged', even though such a consciousness would at first glance appear to have more freedom of action.  If a properly functioning mind is merely the mirror of nature, it must also be the servant of nature.  This is what Deleuze is alluding to in comparing the Freudian to the Nietzschean conception of consciousness.

Like Freud, Nietzsche thinks that consciousness is the region of the ego affected by the external world (VP II 253/WP 524, GS 357). However, consciousness is defined less in relation to exteriority (in terms of the real) than in relation to superiority (in terms of values). This distinction is essential to a general conception of consciousness and the unconscious. In Nietzsche consciousness is always the consciousness of an inferior in relation to a superior to which he is subordinated or into which he is "incorporated". (NP, 39)

So while it may seem counterintuitive to think of consciousness as inferior, Nietzsche is, in a sense, merely being more explicit about the fact that our consciousness is only a small part of a larger whole.  Instead of taking the reality of the exterior world for granted, Nietzsche begins with the more fundamental relations of power that are implicit in our conception of this world.  At its core, reality is what commands us, what we can't change, what we're forced to accept.  We rightly ascribe this power of command to something external to our ego, but we err in hypostatizing this larger force.  We don't really know what's out there because it is, by definition, outside of and more powerful than our consciousness.  

In Nietzsche consciousness is always the consciousness of an inferior in relation to a superior to which he is subordinated or into which he is "incorporated". Consciousness is never self-consciousness, but the consciousness of an ego in relation to a self which is not itself conscious. It is not the master's consciousness but the slave's consciousness in relation to a master who is not himself conscious. (NP, 39)

If we want to replace the concept of reality with the concept of the body, we need to be careful not to slip into thinking of the the body as my body.  My body belongs to my conscious ego.  The body is the superior force that constructs precisely this ego as its tool or servant.  Consciousness is not the possessor of the body, but on the contrary is possessed by it.  This means that there's a certain deliberate vagueness in the way Deleuze is using the term body.  He doesn't mean to deny that consciousness is to some extent a tool of the biological body of an individual organism.  But he also doesn't want to limit the concept in this way and foreclose on other, more abstract bodies that also dominate consciousness.  

"Consciousness usually only appears when a whole wants to subordinate itself to a superior whole . . . Conscious- ness is born in relation to a being of which we could be a function" (VP II227). This is the servility of consciousness; it merely testifies to the "formation of a superior body". (NP, 39)

If we ask ourself what "superior body" "incorporates" our human consciousness, I think the most obvious answer is not our individual biological bodies, or even our personal energy bodies, but the social body.  I wouldn't care to argue that this is the only superior body our consciousness is but a part of, but it seems clear to me that a significant fraction of our ego's reactions are programmed by fairly general societal forces.  Of course these forces are as diverse as they are contradictory, so maybe it would make more sense to say that our conscious ego is the inferior term constructed at the nexus of many bodies.  So while the point of this first subsection (2.1) is to put consciousness in its place as an inferior and reactive force, the superior and active force to which it corresponds is largely left open.

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The point of seeing consciousness as the inferior force in a relation is not to somehow deny the reality of consciousness and condemn it as an illusion.  The existence of the master does not negate the slave.  The point is not to say that inferior forces have no power.   Rather, the point is to see these as forces.  Inferior or reactive forces are a type of force.  They possess the type of force that belongs to a tool or agent which is made to serve a master.  But we can only understand the forces of this type if we see that they do not exist on their own, but always as the inferior terms in a relation.  

Inferior forces do not, by obeying, cease to be forces distinct from those which command. Obeying is a quality of force as such and relates to power just as much as commanding does: "individual power is by no means surrendered. In the same way, there is in commanding an admission that the absolute power of the opponent has not been vanquished, incorporated, disintegrated. 'Obedience' and 'commanding' are forms of struggle." (VP II 91/WP 642) Inferior forces are defined as reactive; they lose nothing of their force, of their quantity of force, they exercise it by securing mechanical means and final ends, by fulfilling the conditions of life and the functions and tasks of conversation, adaptation and utility. (NP, 40)

We've seen that consciousness is one of these reactive forces.  But it is only one example of a general class.  It turns out that much of our modern scientific worldview is unwittingly constructed from reactive forces that have been divorced from the body to which they belong.  Consider the basic concept (though perhaps not the actual practice) of science.  Science only deals with things that follow laws.  The whole point is to find out what is fully determined to happen, what must happen, according to the laws of nature.  The domain that it investigates, and the manner in which it pursues the investigation are specifically designed to strip the subject matter of any activity of its own.  In physics, matter is inert.  It merely obeys laws which are not themselves material.  Even in biology, we interpret organisms as nothing more than machines for duplicating themselves, and lionize the evolutionary law that relegates the forces that create and modify these organisms to chance.  In other words, we always conceive the subject matter of science as entirely reactive, and pack all the true activity of nature into a separate world of general laws.   These laws project the dominant and determining forces into another world, a world which, conveniently, our reactive consciousness is uniquely equipped to understand.

It is inevitable that consciousness sees the organism from its own point of view and understands it in its own way; that is to say, reactively. What happens is that science follows the paths of consciousness, relying entirely on other reactive forces; the organism is always seen from the petty side, from the side of its reactions. The problem of the organism, according to Nietzsche, is not an issue between mechanism and vitalism. What is the value of vitalism as long as it claims to discover the specificity of life in the same reactive forces that mechanism interprets in another way? The real problem is the discovery of active forces without which the reactions themselves would not be forces. (NP, 41)

Part of the goal in discussing reactive forces is to restore these to their rightful place as forces.  They have a power of obeying or executing which properly belongs to them, even if this power is always steered by and in service of an active force.  But of course, part of the goal is also to bring the active forces back into this world and reverse the mysterious separation of the two sides of force.  Active forces are harder to characterize because they always escape consciousness.  These unconscious forces don't operate according to the principle of identity and following the rules of law that consciousness understands.  Instead, these are the forces that give rise to identity, that create forms and that represent an immanent law unto themselves.  Seeing the world through the lens and categories of consciousness makes active forces nearly invisible, which is why science ends up describing a cold and mechanistic world.  Restoring activity to the natural world means putting the creative and self-organizing force back into matter in exactly the manner popularized by Manuel de Landa.

Perhaps the easiest place to notice the conspicuous absence of actives forces in our habitual view is in the case of biology.  Just where we would expect to find some creative action, some life, we are told there is only a tendency to establish and reestablish the identity of the organism.  Our actions as living organisms are all purported to serve the self-evident goal of maintaining us within a viable equilibrium that itself serves only as a means for producing an identical copy of this equilibrium tending machine.  But where are the forces that create this identity and equilibrium to begin with?  What forces within life produce this machine for reproducing a reproduction (of equilibrium state), and what forces allow it to adapt when a new equilibrium is called for?  This is why Deleuze mentions the failure of vitalism.  If we understand vitalism as the principle that there is some inner life force or will to survive leading an organism to preserve and duplicate itself, then vitalism merely describes the same equilibrium seeking behavior as mechanism.  In either case, where is the force that would explain why just this equilibrium, or why there's any equilibrium at all?  Within Darwinism, the answer is clear -- chance is the only force that can initially give rise to an organism and chance is the only force that can modify it.  Yet chance is explicitly outside the theory of natural selection and outside the domain of life as such.  Which leads us back to a question that our esteemed colleague over at the Capitalist Axiomatic posed more than a decade ago: What is evolution a theory of?  Do we think that nature is only capable of following laws and reproducing forms and never creates new ones?  This question lies under Nietzsche's critique of Darwinian evolution. 

"What is active? - reaching out for power" (VP II 43/WP 657). Appropriating, possessing, subjugating, dominating - these are the characteristics of active force. To appropriate means to impose forms, to create forms by exploiting circumstances (BGE 259 and VP II 63/WP 647). Nietzsche criticizes Darwin for interpreting evolution and chance within evolution in an entirely reactive way. He admires Lamarck because Lamarck foretold the existence of a truly active plastic force, primary in relation to adaptations: a force of metamorphosis. (NP, 42)

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Section 2.3 begins to address a tricky question left hanging by our definition of a body as a relation of active and reactive forces.  If what makes a force active is simply its greater quantity of power relative to its reactive partner, then why are we introducing a qualitative difference between the two types of forces?  Why can't we just reduce the strength of a force to a single number?  The answer is basically that there is no single, global scale for quantifying force that would apply to all forces at once.  The fact that there is no single real force capable of dominating 'existence as a whole' means that no absolute scale can be imposed on force.  It's like a good friend once told me in defense of his decision to drink Budweiser: "there ain't no king of wines".  Instead, all we can find in the absence of a global coordinate system are local relations of power.  Power is a manifold.  As a result, we discover that while a force is characterized by a quantity of power, differences in this quantity cannot be reduced to a simple quantity of difference, but actually give rise to different qualities.  

... differences in quantity cannot be reduced to equality. Quality is distinct from quantity but only because it is that aspect of quantity that cannot be equalised, that cannot be equalised out in the difference between quantities. Difference in quantity is therefore, in one sense, the irreducible element of quantity and in another sense the element which is irreducible to quantity itself. Quality is nothing but difference in quantity and corresponds to it each time forces enter into relation. (NP, 43)

The subtext here is that Nietzsche's previous critique of the tendency of science to see matter (and the body) as homogenous, inert, stuff, is not made in the name of a romantic appeal to some irreducible spiritual quality.  On the contrary, there is nothing but quantity.  It's just that quantity is more complex than we usually give it credit for.  Echoing Spinoza, we might say that we don't even know what quantity can do.

This same line of thinking casts a new light on the idea of affirming chance.  When we sought to affirm all of chance at once, in a single throw of the dice, we stumbled over the fact that no existing force was capable of appropriating all the others.  There is no largest force.  So the affirmation of chance had to proceed from affirming the Return of a single moment, a single fragment of chance.  When completely affirmed though, it turned out that this fragment was ultimately connected to and dispersed in a larger totality that had the power to bring it back again (and launch it out again, endlessly).  We do not affirm chance globally and as a totality, but locally and piece by piece.  This appears to conflict with the idea of affirming chance all at once, but that is the paradox of ER.  When we affirm the power of a force -- whether it is active or reactive -- we find it connected to other forces, which are in turn connected to yet other forces, in a series of local patchworks that extend indefinitely.  Since everything is connected to everything, but not in any order, Deleuze can introduce a contrast between chance and a continuum.  Like power, chance is a manifold, a holey-space that cannot be defined in its entirety from a single perspective.

By affirming chance we affirm the relation of all forces. And, of course, we affirm all of chance all at once in the thought of the eternal return. But all forces do not enter into relations all at once on their own account. Their respective power is, in fact, fulfilled by relating to a small number of forces. Chance is the opposite of a continuum (on the continuum cf. VP II 356). The encounters of forces of various quantities are therefore the concrete parts of chance, the affirmative parts of chance and, as such, alien to every law; the limbs of Dionysus. (NP, 44)

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Section 2.4 continues the theme of Nietzsche's relation to science and culminates in a comparison between two types of scientific cosmology and the cosmology of Eternal Return.  The basic idea is the same one we've already seen.  Science proceeds by equalizing difference.  Whether it's particles that obey the laws of physics or organisms that obey the laws of evolution, the 'subjects' of a science are all equivalent when it comes to these laws.  The goal is to see the world as an inert and undifferentiated material; it's all the same stuff, just with different numbers attached to it.  We've seen that Nietzsche is opposed to this type of reductionism.   

Rightly or wrongly Nietzsche believes that science, in the way it handles quantities always tends to equalize them, to make up for inequalities. Nietzsche, as critic of science, never invokes the rights of quality against quantity; he invokes the rights of difference in quantity against equality, of inequality against equalization of quantities. (NP, 45)

[ Note that the first words of this quote allude to a question Deleuze chooses to skip over.  Is Nietzsche right about science, or is he critiquing a straw man?  After a long discussion of this we would inevitably conclude that the answer is yes.  Surely Nietzsche's hypostatization of 'Science' results in something of a caricature.  At the same time, I think we can recognize a large majority of scientist's worldviews and a huge chunk of scientific activity in this caricature.  It's simply not all that science could be.]

The essence of quality does not lie in some supplementary spiritual dimension.  It escapes our conscious scientific concepts to become the hard problem of qualia not because it is mysteriously added to the material world, but because it is the irreducible element of differentiation within the world.  It stems from the fact that two interacting forces cannot be made perfectly equal and interchangeable.  

This is why his whole critique operates on three levels; against logical identity, against mathematical equality and against physical equilibrium. Against the three forms of the undifferentiated. (NP, 45)

The fact that the world cannot exist in an undifferentiated state is really a corollary of the metaphysics of force we have been describing.  It's another way of saying that existence is necessarily linked to diversity and multiplicity.  Or that it is empty of intrinsic nature and always dependent on a way of seeing that simultaneously fabricates an active and a reactive force.   

While it's not immediately obvious, the Eternal Return encapsulates this idea of the always differentiated.  It affirms the world as an unlimited becoming that can never be grasped as a total identity, never fall into a cycle which repeats the same state as equal, and never come to rest in an equilibrium.  In other words, it is designed to reject all three forms of the undifferentiated.  

It's probably obvious from the name how ER rejects the idea of a single straight line of existence that begins with the The Word and ends with Eschaton.  The universe has no transcendent goal or meaning and is not ruled by a divine plan.  Existence is not a single identity that can be totalized in this way.  Nor, however, is it the meaningless increase in entropy that inevitably ends in the equilibrium of heat death.  Nietzsche argues that if it were possible to reach an equilibrium, the universe would already have done so (we'll investigate this idea more in the next section).  The difference between forces can never be canceled out in equilibrium.  Nietzsche opposes the Return to both of these interpretations of existence.  It produces neither identity nor equilibrium, but an endless circulation where everything comes back again and again.  

Probably less obvious is the way the Return also rejects the repetition of the same.  The touchstone is always: what returns is not the same thing but everything.  This distinguishes the return from a cyclical cosmology, where the universe (perhaps due to ergodicity?) eventually returns to the same state where it 'started'.  Once a state is duplicated at the 'end' though, the laws of physics insist that the system as a whole will endlessly repeat the exact same cycle.  Here again, we see science associated with a form of the undifferentiated.  Start and end must be exactly equal states, with no difference between them.  In addition, this point on the circle we've labeled start/end is entirely arbitrary, and not fundamentally different from any of the other states, all of which are endlessly duplicated.  The irreducible difference in quantity (quality) becomes mere quantity of difference through the trajectory of the cycle, and is finally zeroed completely as the circle closes.  Just like it rejected an endpoint for existence, ER rejects the limit on becoming that this cosmology necessitates.  What returns is not the same state.  After all, how could exactly the same state ever repeat?  It wouldn't be a return if it was identical to the first time.  How would we ever know it was the second go-round?  Either we need some force outside existence to count the number of repetitions of this state, or, if we make this counting force part of existence, then there was no repetition after all.  Nietzsche's Return is not the repetition of the identical but the synthesis of the difference between the first and second (and Nth) times.  

According to Nietzsche the eternal return is in no sense a thought of the identical but rather a thought of synthesis, a thought of the absolutely different which calls for a new principle outside science. This principle is that of the reproduction of diversity as such, of the repetition of difference; the opposite of "adiaphoria". (NP, 46)

It is not the 'same' or the 'one' which comes back in the eternal return but return is itself the one which ought to belong to diversity and to that which differs (NP, 46)

The eternal return affirms the unequalizability of any two moments, but it does so precisely by putting them into a relation.  I assume Deleuze will later explore how this is related to the definition of force.