Rebel Nietzscheanism
"Struggle! To struggle is to live, and the fiercer the struggle the more intense the life. Then you will have lived, and a few hours of such life are worth years spent vegetating. Struggle so that all may live this rich, overflowing life. And be sure that in this struggle you will find a joy greater than anything else can give!" Peter Kropotkin, "Anarchist Morality"1
We love Nietzsche so much, we anarcho-Nietzscheans. Nietzsche helps us uncover the genealogies of power and domination behind the idols -- the state, religion, moralities, the norms and values dug deep into our bodies. He shows us the virtue of solitude, and how to live philosophy for real, dangerously, radically, everything at stake. He speaks to us of the possibilities, as well as the contingencies and the challenges, for self-transformation -- a life beyond the human. For over 100 years anarchists have loved Nietzsche, found so many tools and weapons in his writing, proving that it is certainly possible to put these ideas to work in ways which Nietzsche himself would never have expected, certainly never have approved.
But, we who love Nietzsche so much, what do we do with the man's own reactionary politics? Yirmiyahu Yovel (1994) praises Nietzsche's self-overcoming of one malaise of his place and time: despite, or perhaps thanks to the stimulation of living in highly "infected territory", Nietzsche eventually came to take a stand as an anti-anti-semite. It could be that Yovel reads him too favourably even on this score, but unfortunately there's just no such question when it comes to gender or class: here Nietzsche stays firmly stuck in the perspective of his origins.
Take the Genealogy of Morals, where Nietzsche celebrates a type of human spirits that are forceful, joyful, audacious, sometimes mad and absurd, uncontrollables who take on improbable challenges, go looking for trouble, strife and frenzy. To the timid world they are "not much better than beasts of prey turned loose", "joyful monsters", enjoying "freedom from all social constraints." But amongst themselves they live by a code of "resourceful consideration, self-control, refinement, loyalty, pride, and friendship". (GM 1:11) Where might you go looking in the late nineteenth century for bands of free spirits living short dangeous lives of joyful struggle, committed to overturning established values, to creating new selves and new worlds? While wary of ancestor worship, we will avow that you'd be more likely to find active examples of such "noble" values where anarchism and other revolutionary movements bubbled up amongst migrant workers, landless peasants, lumpen dispossessed, than amongst the gouty aristocracy.
The thing is that Nietzsche, amongst many other all too human things, was a terrible snob. This snob perspective placed very effective limits on his political vision -- for one thing, it left him constitutionally unable to recognise "heroic" acts amongst the lower orders. Nietzsche's political understanding was confined to a band of "high culture" running from a mythologised ancient world to the nihilism he identified amongst the elite of his own day; non-nihilistic forces outside of this stratum were just not visible from this perspective.
But as well as the sight impediment of snobbery, Nietzsche's politics also involves a substantial anti-egalitarian critique which flows from his overall view of the world as will to power. In this essay I'll work mainly on this second seam, though we will see how the two interweave: after all, Nietzsche is the philosopher who insists that all thinking (all "thinking, feeling, willing") comes from its limiting perspective. We will grapple with two specific thoughts which Nietzsche links to the conception of will to power: the idea that life flourishes only in hierarchical organisations; and that life is essentially a violent struggle for limited energetic resources.
These ideas are the substantive underpinnings of Nietzsche's elitism; but what role do they play in Nietzsche's psychological (and/or ontological) conception as a whole? Can we still take value from Nietzsche's thinking of power and life if we challenge them? I'll suggest that challenging these ideas, if that means deepening our understanding of the agonistic dynamics of will to power, will actually lead to a stronger anarcho-Nietzscheanism.
life, power and hierarchy
Nietzsche makes some of his clearest political statements in the last book of Beyond Good and Evil, which opens: "Every elevation of the type 'man' has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society -- and so it will always be: a society which believes in a long scale of orders of rank and difference between man and man and needs slavery in some sense or other." (BGE257).
Nietzsche is a philosopher of values and valuing, but just what is it that Nietzsche himself values? One positive theme throughout his writing is an affirmation of life, where life is usually associated with growth, strength, health, newness, creation, activity, ascending motion; and contrasted with weakness, decadence, exhaustion, submission, reaction, descending motion, etc. "Elevation of the type 'man'" is in this conceptual line, and in the above passage Nietzsche expands the phrase with: "the formation of ever higher, rarer, more remote, tenser, more comprehensive states ... the continual 'self-overcoming of man'".
Overcoming, and particularly self-overcoming, provide important keys here; but first we need to understand something of the basic structure of Nietzsche's thinking of the will to power. In this "power ontology", we can see the world as made up of forces (drives, wills, quanta of force) constantly striving for power. Perhaps the first and easiest place to understand the will to power at work is on the level of psychology, where the forces are largely unconscious drives, desiring energies, struggling to direct the activity of our bodies: it is this picture that became so influential on Freud.
Nietzsche sees intentional explanation as a human, all too human, fiction in which we erroneously separate the flow of becoming into a "deed" and "doer"; and so it is inexact to think of these drives or forces as mini-agents or homunculi with their own hidden goals (although Nietzsche himself sometimes uses intentional language as, perhaps -- to be charitable, a kind of shorthand). The more accurate, less error-prone, description of Nietzschean forces is as processes, or patterns of activity. When Nietzsche says that a drive strives for mastery of a body, this means: that force, if it becomes the strongest force in a body, will shape the activity of the body as a whole, re-directing other activities towards its characteristic pattern. For example, for an athlete in training, hunger, sleep, sex, must become co-ordinated and disciplined sub-functions of the drive to compete.
Thus one way in which Nietzsche understand human individuals is in terms of the way forces are arranged or structured in our bodies. An individual in whom many forces of more or less equal strength compete for dominance is a weak individual, oscillating between different activities without any direction. In The Gay Science Nietzsche outlines a "stylistic" project for individual self-mastery: "One thing is needful. -- To 'give style' to one's character -- a great and rare art!"(GS290) Through long practice and daily labour the self-artist works on herself like a sculptor assessing, molding, pruning, reinterpreting. But the key to success is to achieve a hierarchical organisation of the individual -- one drive must rule: "In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!"
Nietzsche comes to apply the same conception of will to power not only to human psychology but to all life, and even to non-organic "material" activity.2 In the most general terms (here following Deleuze) a body means any relation, meeting, of forces, whether a brief encounter or a complex persisting organism. We can see another application of this principle in Nietzsche's (unpublished) notes on biology: there an organism is an assemblage of forces in "collaboration and mutual opposition" (WP707), but the essential structure is that of "slavery and division of labour" (WP660). Nietzsche theorises "the body as a political structure", where the particular form this polis takes is that of an aristocracy: lower forces are subjugated organs or "functions" in service of the higher forces directing the body. (See also WP647).
Nietzsche repeatedly distinguishes his thinking from any theory (such as Spinoza's or, as he sees it, Darwin's) of preservation of bodies, species, or societies. "It can be shown most clearly that every living thing does everything it can not to preserve itself but to become more --" (WP689). Will to power is incessant energetic movement in which forces always seek to increase, grow, spread their activity further. Expansion by a strong force always involves conquest, domination, "incorporation", of outside forces: until, perhaps, a force overreaches itself and appropriates more than "the ruling cells are [capable] of organising" (WP660)3. If a force becomes weak, it will itself succumb to attack and assimilation. As there is always either an outside opposing force, or the possibility of a "rebellion" from a subordinated internal force, staying still is not an option, stasis turns swiftly into decay.
So, first of all, only organised as a hierarchy can a body, social or otherwise, resist attack from outside, disintegration from within, and advance to overcome and conquer outside rivals. Noting here that attack and defence, domination and resistance are the two aspects of the same motion called will to power, only depending on whether in a given moment the force or body under consideration is stronger or weaker than its rival. This is the insight that Foucault will take up: "resistance is present even in obedience: individual power is by no means surrendered. ... 'Obedience' and 'commanding' are forms of struggle." (WP642).)
But the "elevation of the type 'man'" which Nietzsche associates with aristocracy involves not just overcoming (domination/resistance) of outside forces but internal "self-overcoming". A strong, active, force strives not just to dominate other forces but to transform itself: its own activity pattern will change, become something new, something more. (In fact the two points can be related -- as, for example, the idea of evolution as an arms race of invention in which predators and prey must constantly develop new adaptations or lose their advantages/defences and face extinction.) This is one of the main themes of Thus Spoke Zarathustra -- humanity, if it is to be active, life-affirming, must become something else, grow beyond the bounds of its own nature and so voluntarily perish, as humanity, to evolve into a new form of life, the "overman". In general, the active body is always pressing forwards, beyond itself, in a process of becoming, change, evolution.
Hierarchy is also essential for this process. Lower forces or "organs" in the body perform essential preservative functions, but only the higher, leading, forces do the work of "elevating" the "type". These are the creative forces, inventors of new goals, new values, new ways of living -- the "shaping, form-creating" forces (WP647) -- the organism's "highest functionaries, in whom the life-will is active and manifests itself" (GM2:12). In human societies creativity, for Nietzsche, is always the work of a rare elite, a few "higher men", geniuses, whether lucky strokes or (potentially) products of breeding, who propel the self-transformation of the species.
culture critique
It could be interesting to trace the threads of hierarchy and struggle through Nietzsche's work, perhaps involving his unpublished notes and letters, and his personal political involvements. One approach might be to start with his early writing on the Greeks, where he is interested in ancient state forms and in the idea of contest (agon) within an aesthetic view of the world, and follow how these ideas develop into the doctrine of will to power. Unfortunately all I'm able to do here is just point out a few basic features of these ideas as we find them in Nietzsche's later work.
To start with the idea of hierarchy, we might roughly separate out three lines. First, an old chestnut: that a society needs leadership, hierarchical ordering, in order to survive in the face of both internal conflict and external aggression. The more specifically anti-liberal extra which Nietzsche adds here is the idea that social stasis is untenable: the only real means of defence is to constantly attack.
Yet this more strictly "political" thought never carries the main load in Nietzsche's social thinking. We can ask: why should Nietzsche (or anyone) be interested in the "flourishing" of any particular group, society, people? One answer might bring out a chauvinism that is generally implicit in much political thinking: we are interested in our own bodies, or in groups with which we feel in some way identified. (Richard Rorty is the contemporary philosopher who most explores this way of being "honest" about political perspective.) This element is certainly there in Nietzsche: while early on he disavows German nationalism, he considers himself to the end "a good European"; there is a "European" people whose fate, history, future, he feels intimately concerned with.
But most of all Nietzsche is interested in a certain kind of flourishing which could be summed up in Georges Bataille's words: "In Nietzsche's mind, everything is subordinated to culture." Keith Ansell-Pearson puts it: politics "is viewed not as an end in itself, but merely as a means to the production of culture." Military historians might measure the success or "life" of a nation by a tally of victories; economists are obsessed with GDP growth rates; for Nietzsche, for whom "existence and the world are justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon", history and politics are all about aesthetic creation.
Just what it is that culture stands for in Nietzsche's philosophy is not something we can sum up in a few lines. Yes we are talking about art, and art as understood in a tradition of European "high culture". But also, more generally, art means an expression of the will to power in its highest, most active form as creative self-overcoming. In this sense there are arts of living (self-creation, "style" in the sense of GS290), and arts of doing. Nietzsche's great men are military commanders as well as poets and philosophers, but Napoleon is valued here not as an effective technician of victories but as an artist of deeds -- and above all, as a creator of values.
The second line on hierarchy I'll identify here is also old and familiar. Back in his 1871 essay The Greek State Nietzsche argues that with the surplus created by slave labour "the privileged class is to be relieved from the struggle for existence, in order to create and to satisfy a new world of want." In Beyond Good and Evil this elite is then the whole "meaning and supreme justification" of a social system: "society should not exist for the sake of society but only as a foundation and scaffolding upon which a select species of being is able to raise itself to its higher task and in general to a higher existence ..." (BGE258).
The third, more peculiarly Nietzschean, line comes in with the concept of the "pathos of distance". Nietzsche believes that the existence of hierarchy is not just economically necessary (to create a surplus for the use of the creative elite), but that the very structure of distance between classes is somehow a necessary stimulant for creative activity. BGE 257 continues: "Without the pathos of distance such as develops from the incarnate difference of classes, from the ruling caste's constant looking out and looking down on subjects and instruments and from its equally constant exercise of obedience and command, its holding down and holding at a distance, that other, more mysterious pathos could not have developed either, that longing for an ever-increasing widening of distance within the soul itself ..."
This draws on the association -- even, identity -- Nietzsche makes between dominating and creating. Creativity is active force; active force is strength; strength is always expressed in the struggle to overpower other forces. There is, however, a jagged edge in Nietzsche's account of the pathos of distance: Nietzsche so often insists that creativity is a force that comes from within. Active creation, as opposed to what Nietzsche calls reactivity, is not supposed to be a response to the action of any external force or body, but an unprovoked self-expression. But if the elite artist is simply expressing something found within, why should she care at all about the position of the slave? Why should she need anything more from the inferior than economic energy to parasitise and spend?
It is certainly not that she needs some Hegelian "recognition" from the slave. Rather, Nietzsche's idea seems something like the one found in the old English public school system, where budding members of the elite were supposed to be trained to command through their experience of the school hierarchy. Only here the school is the social world as a whole, and what the soul learns is not just to command but to perceive and experience distance, to take the view from above and afar. This experience of social distance is introjected back into the elite creator's inner life, where it can be put to work in the process of self-creation, of making oneself an artist by differentiating and "elevating" ones own higher forces. Social hierarchy is where elitists learn style.
cyclical Nietzsche
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra experiences a terrible vision (Z3: The Convalescent): if we are to embrace a tragic pessimism and say yes to life, even to the point of willing the eternal recurrence -- that our actions recur eternally, forever and ever again -- then this means affirming everything, that everything will recur, not just moments of growth and strength, but moments of weakness and sickness, the "small man" as well as the great.
As we saw above, life for Nietzsche is most often a positive evaluative pole associated with "flourishing", strength, growth, newness; contrasted with a negative pole of weakness and decay. But there is also another sense of life as "everything there is", all strong and all weak moments too. There are places in Nietzsche where this all-inclusive sense comes to the fore, where decaying is just as necessary as flourishing (another sense of pathos of distance: there cannot be any high without a low) -- and not only is decay necessary, but it is also to be affirmed.
The all-affirming strand in Nietzsche appears in the Genealogy of Morals where, for all the condemnation of priestly morality and the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche has to admit that it was priests, after all, who made man an "interesting animal" (GM1:7). Deleuze puts it exactly: "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 ... They separate us from our power but at the same time they give us another power, 'dangerous' and 'interesting'". (2006: 62).
This line gets still stronger in Nietzsche's last works and late unpublished notes. After a career spent decrying the "levelling" of European culture in the modern age, by 1887 Nietzsche starts to imagine that the "mechanisation" of humanity could actually be a good thing -- a precursor condition for the overman. One note (WP866) outlines a science fiction plot in some ways reminiscent of HG Wells' The Time Machine. The "consumption of man and mankind becomes more and more economical and the 'machinery' of interests and services is integrated ever more intricately". Not only will future capitalism create a greater than ever "luxury surplus", but also an ever more levelled, "dwarfish" (WP890), herd class; and thus potentially a greater than ever creative pathos of distance if only a new aristocracy is able to escape the overall levelling of culture.
Nietzsche's futurology is not dialectical but contingent, and he offers at least two possible scenarios: either an "overall diminution", European culture as a whole down the drain; or the appearance of a new "higher form of aristocracy" to justify the 20th century. "Morally speaking, this overall machinery, this solidarity of all gears, represents a maximum in the exploitation of man; but it presupposes those on whose account this exploitation has meaning." The question is: how can such a "stronger species" "raise itself" out of the degenerated, pampered form of the 19th century European intellectual? "A dominating race can grow up only out of terrible and violent beginnings. Problem: where are the barbarians of the twentieth century? Obviously, they will come into view and consolidate themselves only after tremendous socialist crises ..." (WP868).
There we have perhaps Nietzsche's most positive comment on socialism: at least social upheaval has a role to play in the great cycles of history that bring us to the possibility of the creative moment. In one other note from the same period: "The revolution made Napoleon possible: that is its justification. For the sake of a similar prize one would have to desire the anarchical collapse of our entire civilisation." (WP877).
From these notes, and some late published passages, it is possible to trace a kind of cyclical theory of social change. The general idea is developed in BGE262: moment (1) "a type becomes fixed and strong, through protracted struggle against essentially unfavourable conditions" which force on it narrow severity and durability; (2) once a triumphant people arrives at an "easier state of affairs" it loses its "ancient discipline", but instead acquires the "splendour and abundance" of variation, whether as deviation (into the higher, rarer, more refined) or as degeneration and monstrosity"; however, (3) this "glorious, manifold, jungle-like growth and up-stirring" inevitably brings the society to the "dangerous and uncanny point" that tips into decay -- inner order (hierarchy) has broken down, disrespectful individualism reigns, universal nihilism; (4) only one "species of man" manages to flourish in these conditions -- the mediocre (bourgeois liberalism), may manage to preserve its levelled version of culture against the raging mob.
Mediocrity is as far as Nietzsche takes the process in Beyond Good and Evil, but in later unpublished notes he sketches possible further developments which close the cycle: (5) mediocrity itself breaks down into a stage of "socialistic revolts"; which then bring us back to (6) -- or (1') -- these harsh conditions clear the ground for a new "aristocracy of the future".
Nietzsche recognises that all these moments are necessary (xxx) to cyclical life. The very nobility of the active moment is its squandering and brevity: "History shows: the strong races decimate one another: through war, thirst for power, adventurousness; the strong affects; wastefulness ...; their existence is costly; in brief -- they ruin one another; periods of profound exhaustion and torpor supervene; all great ages are paid for ..." (WP864). And he even finds, as we saw, ways to affirm the declining moments: not only does the priest makes humanity "interesting", but there are even passages (xxx) where Nietzsche finds value in the mediocre.
However, necessity and value remain distinct. Nietzsche does (perhaps contra Deleuze) affirm the reactive declining forces, but certainly not as often, and not as openhandedly and openheartedly, as he affirms the highest moments. It is as if, whatever may be necessary, one can still show some reserve, some discretion, about what one affirms, for: "One must have a standard: I distinguish the grand style: I distinguish activity and reactivity; I distinguish the excessive, the squandering from the suffering who are passionate." (WP881/fn).
herd dogs
What is especially relevant for us anarcho-Nietzscheans to observe here is that one "moment" in the grand cycle never gets affirmed by Nietzsche: revolution always remains at best an unpleasant necessity. And the revolutionary, the rebel -- anarchist, socialist -- is never affirmed. In fact, more than this: the master, the priest, the mediocre are characteristic human "types" that emerge in their given moments; but, even as a pure negative, Nietzsche never makes the rebel into a distinct "type" for study. (The closest we get is the type of the "criminal".) More often, though, the rebel remains hidden in the great herd, undistinguished from the general type of slave.
This despite the fact that anarchists make quite a few appearances in Nietzsche. The position we occupy is always the same, militant wing of the great levelling movement called "democracy". Democracy, socialism, and anarchism are sub-movements within the same modern phenomenon of the herd asserting its mass power (agglomeration of weak forces) against hierarchy and rank order. For all his praise of upper class aggression, Nietzsche's particular disdain for "anarchist dogs" seems to come from an aversion to mob violence. One of his clearest statements on anarchism is in BGE 202:
"... the ever more frantic baying, the ever more undisguised fang-baring of the anarchist dogs which now rove the streets of European culture: apparently the reverse of the placidly industrious democrats and revolutionary ideologists, and even more so of the stupid philosophers and brotherhood fanatics who call themselves socialists and want a 'free society', they are in fact one with them all in their total and instinctive hostility towards every form of society other than that of the autonomous herd ..."
All these levelling movements, placid or aggressive, share the same essential fault. In attacking hierarchy they want to destroy the conditions for creative culture. Another level of Nietzsche's critique addresses the way herd movements present egalitarianism as a particular kind of truth, a "law of nature". This is largely an inheritance from Christianity, whose moral law Nietzsche sees as the antecedent for the socialistic-scientific conception of nature as neutral, equal, without distinction of rank. As Saul Newman points out, this kind of naturalistic essentialism certainly was a popular theme in 19th century anarchist rhetoric -- a classic example is Bakunin's avowal (xxx) that we should be bound by a "natural law" rather than artificial laws of men and states.
But before, with Newman, we plead guilty to essentialism and side with Nietzsche against "classical anarchism", we should note a couple of points: (1) an essentialist philosophy of nature never formed any kind of core doctrine of anarchist thought, even in Bakunin's day; anarchism is not an axiomatic system but a lived tradition of ideas and practices. And: (2), Nietzsche's own thinking is also vulnerable to being read as an account of nature or essence. As Nietzsche himself explains in BGE22, what he is offering against egalitarianism, with the doctrine of will to power, is simply a very different interpretation.
Indeed levelling doctrine is for Nietzsche not just dangerous, harmful to life and culture, but actually false: it denies the reality of the world (in his interpretation) as domination. Often this false doctrine is a deceit. While the drive to dominate may only express itself openly in the strong, it is equally present in the weak, only in a disguised form -- again, resistance is just domination on the back foot. Thus in a note on the "'Machiavellianism' of Power" (WP8xx), Nietzsche alleges that cries for 'freedom' among the oppressed, and calls for 'justice" from a class that is ascending but still not yet able to take power, are both expressions of the same will to power.
energy struggle
Nietzsche gives us will to power as production, expenditure and abundance. A strong force, in dominating another force, seeks not to preserve itself but to discharge its energy in expressing its characteristic activity pattern (WP650). And yet at the heart of this theory of life as energetics is a fundamental scarcity, and it is this lack which leads to the theory of essential domination.
Put simply, in order to expend energy a force first has to accumulate energy. The division of labour in hierarchical bodies splits the twofold motion of accumulating and discharging: ruling forces rob (exploit) energy from dominated forces; then expend it in creative activity.
Nietzsche sees the world as a closed and finite system: the total of energy available overall is limited. However, we need to distinguish between two conceptions of energy: "Regarded mechanistically, the energy of the totality of becoming remains constant; regarded economically, it rises to a high point and sinks down again in an eternal circle. This 'will to power' expresses itself in the interpretation, in the manner in which force is used up; transformation of energy into life, and 'life at its highest potency', thus appears as the goal." (WP639).
The idea here is that certain distributions of force -- equivalently, certain organisations of bodies -- make greater or lesser use of the available (mechanical) energy. This stems from what we have seen about hierarchy: a levelled, flat, distribution of energy is fruitless, "economically" inefficient, because without hierarchical organisations and the pathos of distance no higher forces are able to arise and transform energy into "life", i.e., new creation. Only when the world's energy is distributed hierarchically is energy converted into "'life at its highest potency'". As we saw, hierarchical and levelled forms flow cyclically into each other and thus life potency, energy conceived "economically", rises and falls with this movement.
But at the "mechanical" level -- the level of "input" into the creative production process -- energy remains constant, strictly limited. And because all forces are constantly seeking growth, what we have is the classic picture of a conflict over scarce resources, a zero sum game, never enough to go around. The only way forces can keep growing is by parasitising, incorporating, exploiting other forces. Or, to restate in the underlying language of processes: a force can only expand the scope of its characteristic activity by co-opting other activities, incorporating them into its pattern.
struggle and affinity
Again, a detailed scholarly account might trace why and how Nietzsche comes to hold this doctrine of scarcity, perhaps placing him in the context of the science of the time. Does Nietzsche observe domination as a supposed constant of nature and then work back to an energetic theory; or is there some such underlying force theory even in his early work, perhaps in the notion of the Dionysian? But here we are just going to skip over these questions. Instead we will ask: what happens if we can free the will to power from the scarcity constraint, and paraphrase Bakunin to say: The power of others, far from limiting or negating my power, is on the contrary its necessary condition and confirmation.4
From the interpretation of Nietzsche developed above, we can identify the following essentials of his "power ontology":
(i) forces are patterns of activity;
(ii) bodies are relations of forces;
(iii) forces seek to increase their power -- that is, to expand (and transform) their characteristic activity patterns;
(iv) forces increase their power by dominating other forces -- that is, assimilating them to their characteristic activity patterns.
Where we saw above that (iv) is rooted in the assumption of scarcity, limited energy. But, as anarcho-Nietzscheans, we will try and substitute for (iv) an alternative, more general, principle:
(iv') forces increase their power by forming alliances with other forces -- that is, combining (in some way) their characteristic activity patterns.
There will still be struggles, relations of domination and resistance. An alliance may be unequal, hierarchical, and then a combination of activities is still a Nietzschean assimilation or incorporation. But this kind of relation is not the only one available: forces can also ally in relations of co-operation, mutual aid. One way to see this might be by looking at the relative directions of the activities of forces: if forces are working in similar directions, have similar "goals" and practices -- we could say, if they are in affinity -- then it will be possible for them to co-ordinate or combine their activities in ways that empower both. Indeed, such combinations might amount to joinings or "mergers", in which the new body formed by two forces becomes a unified force. Such a joining on equal terms is not a Nietzschean incorporation but the formation of a new joint body.
This anarcho-Nietzschean picture moves us towards a Spinozist ontology. In Spinoza, two bodies may "agree" in their natures, and join together to form a new, greater body. (This principle underlies the politics Spinoza works out in the Tractatus Politicus: "If two men unite and join forces, then together they have more power, and consequently more right against other things in nature, than either alone ..." (TP II/B) -- although here we don't move beyond the idea that humans must at least be dominators of "nature") At the same time, it remains fully within the non-substantialist thinking of power as activity and becoming; it is "Nietzschean" on every point except the specific characterisation of force-relations as always dominating.
Is there any reason to think that dropping that one premise, which is certainly one Nietzsche sees as central to his thought, will bring the rest of the power ontology crumbling down? Actually, on the contrary, there is a good reason not to worry: Nietzsche himself is not consistent on insisting that all relations involve domination. In fact he regularly admits the existence of relations of mutual respect and at least cagey collaboration between members of the elite. (cf. GM1:11, ...) This collaboration is presented as the exception to the incessant strife that goes on elsewhere; but the important thing is that it does happen. Domination/resistance is then not the general form of interaction between forces but only a specific, contingent, (even if "dominant") version. From there we may agree or disagree with Nietzsche's own view about how prevalent domination happens to be in different realms.
In fact, as anarcho-Nietzscheans, we may largely accept Nietzsche's agonistic view of history in which any thing, name, institution, is "continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it" in an unfolding of "overpowering, dominating ... re-interpretation, adjustment ..." (GM2:12). Anarcho-Nietzscheans can certainly accept history as largely a struggle of interpretive forces (in conditions of evolutionary contingency not dialectical necessity). Though we may also want to point out the role of alliances and affinities, and of those counter-tendencies of mutual aid which can flash up even in the thick of battle, which Kropotkin in particular liked to discover even in the densest capitalist spaces. And certainly we will be interested in the dynamics of constructive affinity: in the possibility that we can actively transform at least some of the relations of domination in which we find ourselves into relations of co-operation.
the rebel -- a missing type
We saw that Nietzsche praises aggression and daring so long as these are traits of an elite, yet when members of the lower orders become restive they are impatient, merely destructive, "anarchist dogs". Revolutionary or insurrectional violence is associated by Nietzsche with vengefulness and ressentiment; and the anarchist, in so far as she emerges as a separate figure, is the reactive force of the herd turned rabid. I want to finish up here with an anarcho-Nietzschean sketch of a missing type.
It's true that rebels, anarchists, start from the position of slaves, and initially act in response to violence from "above" -- we rebel against the masters, and hating the masters and the domination they exert over us. Thus the beginning of rebellion is a reactive seed -- a reaction against the oppressor. However, if we do something Nietzsche was never able to do, and look at the lived experience of anarchist rebellion, which we can find expressed in a rich heritage of letters, memoirs, biographies, testaments, fictions, (and, for those of us ourselves active in this tradition, at our own personal experience and that of our comrades), another note comes across very strong: the idea of rebellion not as vengeance but as self-transforming joy.
Just to give a few tasters, this is how Peter Kropotkin expresses it in very Nietzschean terms: "Struggle! To struggle is to live, and the fiercer the struggle the more intense the life ... And be sure that in this struggle you will find a joy greater than anything else can give!" Or Nicola Sacco in his famous last letter to his son Dante: "In this struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved." 5 Or Severino di Giovanni:"Life needs to be toasted with the exquisite elevation of rebellion in mind and arm."6
This anarchist ethic of joy is an active ethic in Nietzsche's sense: it locates the source of its values in its own condition. What's good is just to be this: to be what I have become, a rebel, fighting joyfully, whether alone or amongst comrades. In standing up as rebels we find joy in the struggle, in our own strength, and now the motivating force and source of value is no longer a reaction against the oppressor, but the experience and affirmation of the new life we have entered into.
We can thus characterise the rebel as a body actively engaged in self-overcoming: or, as Deleuze would put it, as "a becoming-active of reactive forces" (61). Deleuze says: "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." But this is precisely what occurs with the rebel force. In Nietzsche's own story of active ethics (GM1:2), the caste of masters first created (or named) their values when they stopped to look at themselves and, like the God of Genesis, "saw and judged themselves and their actions as good." Similarly, the rebel force makes the switch to activity when it discovers what it can do (that, despite what it had believed as a slave, it has the power to act), and judges it as good. The rebellious transition from reactive to active is a moment of self-recognition, experienced as joy, which becomes the affirmation of a newly discovered power.
Of course, there is the danger that the rebel will disappear as a type almost as soon as she appears: once she has become strong, she may turn, like so many ex-rebels, into the familiar type of the master, forming a "new class", same as the old boss, more little Napoleons. This is the possibility suggested by Nietzsche's analysis of "Machiavellian" will. But that pattern is inevitable only so long as we accept Nietzsche's characterisation of will to power as essentially dominating; in our anarcho-Nietzschean thinking, the possibility is open that the rebel will instead, whilst transforming herself into active, also work to transform the social relations in which she finds herself from relations of domination into relations of affinity.
1http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/AM/anarchist_moralityIX.html
2Walter Kaufmann argues that Nietzsche first develops the theory of will to power as a psychological conception, before extending it to all activity. ...
3This is Nietzsche's view of procreation -- "the crumbling that supervenes when the ruling cells are incapable of organising that which has been appropriated".
4The original has "freedom" for "power".
5Letter of Niccola Sacco to his son Dante, 18 August 1927 -- http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/SaccoV/sacltrchar.html
6Severino Di Giovanni, Culmine, August 1928, quoted in Felipe Pigna, Los Mitos de la historia argentina, Planeta, 2006, p114 http://www.elortiba.org/severino.html -- (my translation)
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