Which one is powerful?

At first I was tempted to title this post: "What is power?".  Just because that would be one way to express the message of section 3.4 "Against his Predecessors".  Usually we think we know what we mean by power.  It's the ability to make other people do what you want, to boss them around.  And it would surprise no one if we observed that everybody wants to have power, and no one (not even whiny billionaires) ever seems to have enough of it.  So on the surface of it, a theory that says we all possess a will to power hardly  seems new or revolutionary.  This, however, is not what Nietzsche means by the will to power.  The power that figures in his theory cannot be an object that everyone wants to possess because the whole theory aims to take a critical step back from objects and ask why we want them, and how we construct them as something we want, to begin with.  What do we really get out of being able to boss people around?  Is this concept of power really such an obvious end in itself?  Is this even the only concept of power we can construct?  Just what is power?  Or better yet, what is power for?

Of course, since Deleuze has just called our attention to the fact that the question "what is ..." always presupposes a dualistic metaphysics, I changed the title to reflect our new approach.  In fact, in this next section, Deleuze doesn't try to tell us what power is, but only what it is not.  He lays out three problems with our usual concept of power that undergird any interpretation of the will to power as the will wanting the object power or seeking power as a goal.  The point is not to provide a better definition of what power "really" is, but to begin to ask which one is powerful?  The boss? Our Consciousness?  Or perhaps those subconscious workers who actually produce everything that our ego later usurps as its divine right?  Which type is powerful?  Or perhaps more accurately, we can ask which type of power -- potestas or potencia -- belongs to which type of entity.  It turns out that our habitual image of power only pictures the type that belongs to slaves.

The first mistake we make when we decide that the will wants power is to make power into a representational object (and, we might add, to turn the will into a subject).  Instead of conceiving power as simply the existence of our positive capacity to do stuff, we think of it as something that only exists when others recognize we have it and reflect it back to us.  Consider something like political or social power in light of this assertion.  When we say we want these types of power, do we really mean that we want to be able to violently force other citizens to do what we say or to compel our friends (or enemies) to think what we want them to?  Is this sort of aggression our real goal?  Of course not.  What we want in these cases is for people to voluntarily defer to us.  We want them to submit.  We want them to recognize our superiority, and ultimately to recognize the legitimacy of our rule over them.  No one actually wants the brute capacity to club another over the head as the final and ultimate thing their will desires.  Or if this is their ultimate end, they don't want it, they just do it.  But even the schoolyard bully wants less to be standing over a bloody victim per se than to be recognized and hence represented as the dominant one.  But is this the power of the master, or the slave?

The mania for representing, for being represented, for getting oneself represented; for having representatives and representeds: this is the mania that is common to all slaves, the only relation between themselves they can conceive of, the relation that they impose with their triumph. The notion of representation poisons philosophy: it is the direct product of the slave and of the relations between slaves, it constitutes the worst, most mediocre and most base interpretation of power (VP III 254). (NP, 81)

If what we really want is not power itself but merely the representation or acknowledgement of power (which sort of magically performs the functions of power) then this definition of power as object means that it only exists in the mind of another.  They must recognize that we possess some object called power, and to do this, they must already have in mind some pre-established criteria for what defines power.  In this sense everybody always already knows what power is.  It's money or beauty or muscles or twitter followers.  It's all the established values that seem so obviously valuable to us that we take them for granted.  Which means that a will to this sort of power is incredibly boring.  It would be more accurate to call it a will to status, a close cousin to the will to stasis.  Such a will just wants to have whatever values are current in its society attributed to it by others.  It can't possibly want the power to create anything new. 

... the whole conception of the will to power, from Hobbes to Hegel, presupposes the existence of establish values that wills seek only to have attributed to themselves.  What seems symptomatic in this philosophy of the will is conformism, absolute misrecognition of the will to power as creation of new values. (NP, 81)

Finally, if our notion of power is of a pre-established object represented and recognized, then there will always be a struggle for power.  It will always be a zero-sum status game of who owns the power.  My recognizing your power will always come at the expense of my own.  We will always be in direct competition for power because we have defined it as a scarce resource.  Notice, though, that this struggle for power and prestige never produces anything.  It merely distributes the recognition of an already established definition of power.  The presumption of our customary theory of the will to power is that we all already know what power is and that we all want the same power.  With that sort of setup, we naturally condemn ourselves to an eternal power struggle.  Deleuze's surprising conclusion that Nietzsche had no place for struggle in his theory of the will to power makes a lot more sense in this light.

One cannot over emphasise the extent to which the notions of struggle, war, rivalry or even comparison are foreign to Nietzsche and to his conception of the will to power. It is not that he denies the existence of struggle: but he does not see it as in any way creative of values. At least, the only values that it creates are those of the triumphant slave. Struggle is not the principle or the motor of hierarchy but the means by which the slave reverses hierarchy. (NP, 82)

This is not to say that Nietzsche's will to power is all about harmony and love and kumbaya.  There's plenty of room for real violence and the 'natural aggression' of force.  But these are symptoms of an active and creative power that simply does what it can do, without trying to attain power as an objective goal and without the need for another to recognize it as powerful.  Aggression derives from an asymmetric power, one that includes (creates?) the object it dominates as part of itself.  Struggle is a symmetric concept that assumes everyone is competing for the same prize.  

The preceding analysis might make sense for most of the human-all-too-human values that we encounter on a daily basis.  In those cases it's fairly obvious that the power we want is really a representation of status on the eyes of another.  But what about values that seem more like innate goods, like the power of being alive, or even of existing?  Just before the passage quoted above, Deleuze specifically mentions the "struggle for life" as an example of one of the zero-sum struggles that are set up by defining power as the object the will wants.  And afterwards, he elaborates this point by invoking Nietzsche's critique of Darwin.

Struggle, on the contrary, is the means by which the weak prevail over the strong, because they are the greatest number. This is why Nietzsche is opposed to Darwin: Darwin confused struggle and selection. He failed to see that the result of struggle was the opposite of what he thought; that it does select, but it selects only the weak and assures their triumph (VP I 395, TI). (NP, 82)

But hasn't Deleuze gone too far now?  Doesn't every living thing want to be alive?  Isn't being alive a value and a power in itself, and not merely a power that others recognize?  These may seem like rhetorical questions, but of course rhetorical questions are merely meant to stop you from asking the real ones.   If we look at them through the form of question that Deleuze proposes, we can immediately see the real issue at stake -- which one wants to live?  What type of life sets merely being alive over itself as the supreme goal?  Obviously the lowest and weakest type of life, the type of life that cannot do anything more than just hang around.  The fact that most life is of this type doesn't argue against it being the weakest form, the most common, but on the contrary tends to confirm the hypothesis.  This is exactly the problem we've seen before with Darwinism.  It shows us a mechanism that can do nothing more than repeat itself.  That's a neat trick and all, but one that the crystal mastered a long time ago.  Is this purely mechanical ability to replicate really what distinguishes 'life'?  Don't we want life to be something more creative and responsive?  All the life of Darwin's theory is stowed away in the chance variations.  If the goal of life is just making more copies of oneself, then sure, there will be a zero-sum struggle for the scarce raw materials and energy necessary to create more copies.  And the simplest, weakest, most boring form of life will come to numerically dominate.  But this is a level of life we might more appropriately ascribe to a chemical reaction.  Necessary perhaps, but just a base level.  We should ask ourselves: "which one is alive?" -- the replicators, or the variations that propagate through this system of coupled replicators?