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.
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