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.
