Logic And Politics #7: Gimme Some More
Jeff Rubard
If someone were to say "The beauty of women makes adultery a serious
and painful duty", then we'd be talking.
Donald Barthelme, on moralism in literature
The philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche are, at present,
the most popular inhabitants of that particular literary menagerie;
and Nietzsche has exerted a powerful influence on the educated mind
ever since his work was taken up by German poets and artists at
the turn of the century. Has this been, on the whole, a good
influence? I have always felt the answer is "no", but that the
question may smuggle a great deal more into the question of
Nietzsche interpretation than is appropriate; perhaps he was a
smaller, but more careful mind than we have been lead to believe
by gushing accounts of his philosophical revolution.
Although many viable intellectual traditions exist which speak
against certain of Nietzsche's teachings, and among these is
quite definitely the tradition of large-scale social critique
initiated by Marx and continued by communist intellectuals
in the 20th century, an easy way to remove Nietzsche's work
from such attacks is to partially "bracket" it as a literary
conceit in a style we have long since become accustomed to.
Nietzsche was by profession a philologist, not a "philosopher"
such as had recently come into existence in the German
academy, and much as there is absolutely no reason to think
that Nietzsche does not frequently call out tunes from classical
literature and drama, there is little reason to think that
Nietzsche's work is not *stylistically* of a piece with the
"Symbolist" movement in French literature initiated by
Verlaine and Rimbaud.
Now, Nietzsche's concerns were different from those of Verlaine
and Rimbaud, and although the "suggestiveness" of this title will
be paid for through other means I would like to suggest that the
way of recent "queer" appropriation of Nietzsche has been entirely
too short, and perhaps seriously distorting. As Nietzsche is in
part emulating the great moralists of early modernity, for whom
the passions of sexual love and concomitant behavior formed a
great deal of their subject-matter, "theoreticizing" Nietzsche's
texts is not right -- but at the same time the Foucaultian
appropriation of Nietzsche as a sign of the subsumption of
cognition under the affects is tendentious in a bad way, from
a critical perspective. In my opinion, the "psychologistic"
readings of Jaspers and Loewith (i.e., the understanding of
Nietzsche possessed by well-educated Germans prior to the
Nazi era) are far more faithful to the "spirit" of Nietzsche's
intellectually serious texts, and I would like to spend this
essay defending their views in the light of later
20th-century theory.
Nietzsche's Context: Imperial Germany Today
Of all of Nietzsche's concepts, in the Anglophone world little
use is made of his first significant theoretical innovation and
his most "mainstream" account of the functions of text, that
known to Germans as "Wirkungsgeschichte" or "effective history".
The term is a generic one commonly used in nonphilosophical
written German, but the core of the contemporary notion traces
back to the second of the *Untimely Meditations*, "On The Use
And Abuse Of History For Life". The essay concerns itself
with a style of historiography defined by the teachings of Leopold
von Ranke, a figure of immense importance in German intellectual
life. Ranke was the first modern to pose the question of history
as a proper science, and his exemplar of the scientific history
was roughly Thucydides' *Peloponnesian War*. Scientificity for
Ranke was a question of scrupulousness and thoroughness with respect
to sources, rather than the overall structuring of a historical
drama; he laid down an injunction for historians to write
*wie es eigentlich war* ("how it really was").
In terms of large-scale dynamics such as the historian espies
in said drama, Ranke was an idealist; he believed in the power
of ideas to motivate men to action, including the actions of
world history, and consequently was more interested in people
who shaped opinion than the "ordinary" executors of their
programs. In this conjuncture, Nietzsche is (for once, and
then later once again) anti-elitist; his criticism of "monumental"
history in favor of a "critical history" is a call to turn
a way from post hoc decisions about the quiddity of historical
events to consider how they were lived, and through this to
consider how said messages effected action (rather than assuming
what a contemporary analytic philosopher would call a
'rationalizing' action).
The question of militarism in German culture is frequently posed,
and why not, but there is a hidden term to the normativity of
military ideals which is rarely spoken of; namely, that many
German military figures were accomplished writers and their
prose extremely popular with the reading public, including
academics. Of these two in particular deserve to be mentioned:
Bismarck, whose *Gedanken und Erinnerungen* was along with
*Dichtung und Wahrheit* one of the canonical biographies of
the 19th century, and then Frederick the Great, whose *Anti-
Machiavel* was a very influential work outside the immediate
context of diplomacy. Recently Nietzsche's work has come
under scrutiny for links to fascism, such as were elided
during the period of the French "New Nietzsche", and this
is an interesting if carefully posed question; however, the
consideration of some of Nietzsche's conceits (frenzied letter-
writing, obiter dicta, etc.) as a parody of this genre
has been hampered by the solemn and serious consideration
of Nietzschean texts, though this is itself a reflection
of the solid prejudice against taking parody as excusing
an assertion from moralistic consideration; and in the next
section, I will argue that Nietzsche's conception of the *Wille
zur Macht* turns on exactly this.
Nietzsche's Elisions: The "Will To Power" as anti-genealogical
There are many inventions in the Nietzschean corpus; not only
concepts, but in also the *Nachlass* the book precis that rather
plainly stands in for a text which will go unwritten . Of
Nietzsche's inversions of traditional philosophical analyses of
morality, two have been taken to be particularly important:
the analysis of *ressentiment* as the source of moral oppobrium
and the "genealogical" analysis of this as originating in a
"slave revolt" against morality culminating in, but predating,
Christianity (which Nietzsche viewed as a popularization of
Platonism). In particular, much has been written on "genealogy"
as a new method for divining historical connections; together
with the critique of *presence-a-soi*, it has formed one of the
staples of "postmodern philosophy".
Without going into these topics in greater detail, I would like
to say that the historical fact that the *Genealogie zur Moral*
predated the *Nachlass* notes which were collected in *Wille
zur Macht* seems to me to have prejudiced the consideration of
the two books, either in favor of the concept of "will to power"
developing out of retrospective analyses of social formations or
Heidegger's route, to divorce the *Wille zur Macht* from
Nietzsche's cultural criticism and consider him as philosopher
entire. The matter is complicated for us, the English-speaking
readers, by the fact that *Macht* is a word which has no
precise analogue in English; it refers not to physical power or
ability, but political power such as is possessed by a leader
of men. "Juice" is close, but not close enough because *Macht*
derives from a ubiquitous Germanic noun (we have one ourselves).
In fact, Nietzsche's analysis of the phenomenon is very "dynamic"
in spirit; and this not in the sense of pragmatism, but in the
sense of recent developments in formal semantics, because one
of the stock uses in German of the verb *machen* is to form the
sentence *Machts nichts* ("it's nothing"), which has through
the US Army presence in Germany entered American English in a
slightly altered form ("mox-nix juice" is an example from
Veronica Geng). And I will make a perhaps obvious suggestion
that Nietzsche's description of the "will to power" as the
ability is begins with an impressionistic sociolinguistic
analysis of this phrase and takes it as emblematic of excluding
the "normativistic" elements of assertion, including cognitive
and not moral ones, from consideration *in a spirit of charity*.
Pointing to Bataille as a counterexample would be a bad thing
to do here, as he had read Marcel Mauss as well as Nietzsche
and the *Accursed Share* turns as much on the ethnological
work of the former as on the latter. (That remark
is not directly an example of the will to power.)
Furthermore, for partisans of the genealogical method I would
argue that what Nietzsche is clearly enjoining the better sort
of person to do is eschew precisely that kind of analysis, and
quite thoroughly.
How can this be? Well, the point about "dynamic" semantic
interpretations is not that parts of a sentence can be assigned
different interpretations - that can honestly be done in any form
of formal semantics - but that "compositional" elements of meaning
(such as the meaning of a sentence depending on the meaning of its
words, but also the meaning of a word quite thoroughly depending on
its use in sentences) can be modulated upwards: there can be dynamic
assignments for higher-level semantic categories as well, (and I
will not say it, but I mean it). The reason for this is that in
truth *ressentiment* is something like "demanding forgiveness",
expecting that distasteful behavior will be accepted rather
than tolerated; but the reason why many generations of leisure-class
artistes have utilized this concept for fun and profit requires
going outside the ambit of philosophy, and I will address it
at the end of this essay.
Literary Recidivism
So what use could there be for this, besides cheerful games of
emotional Russian roulette with the Moral Sciences Club? Well,
Nietzsche was a lover of literature and the fundamental end
of the concept within Nietzsche is *style*: Nietzsche is something
like the anti-Kraus. The work of art critic Dave Hickey provides
what may be a somewhat more inviting example, namely the comparison
of playing "air guitar" -- a rather frequent pastime among American
men of a certain age -- to the visual arts. Air guitar looks very
foolish indeed, almost to the point of being anti-social; but air
guitar is something that rock musicians do for some time, and
musicians do something like it most of the time (unless they are
Ornette Coleman, which they never are).
The air guitar player is behaving in a mildly improper way, and
we would not be amiss in assessing them a normative demerit
for their behavior (I have studied such people, and it is in
fact often the case); but that is not there all there is to
said behavior, since there is a conative-affectual component.
What happens? The person gets "charged up", acquires a certain
quantity of energy which cannot be expended on a normative
extension of the game of rationalizing action (since this has
been quelled by a social taboo), and what goes on is a
surreptitious application of that energy to subtly modify the
individual's comportment in action. In other words, the
will to power is the font of style in a sense which is
not class-specific, and the "payoff" (if such terminology were
appropriate) is with activities that do not directly involve
routinized normative activities; in art, literature, and
scientific research.
The Uses of Literature and the Functions of Text:
Nietzsche after Durkheim
All this is unobjectionable enough, and what Nietzsche does is
draw the world through the specular eye of the plastic artist;
if the end result of a pattern of activity is not a thing of
beauty, in what sense is it praiseworthy or blameworthy? Well,
in a sense Nietzsche missed because the vision of the social
world inculcated by thinking of things in terms of "effective
history" is "internalist" in the sense this carries in the
philosophy of language, and this in the extreme; since there
are no termini for social action besides individual affects,
we are forced to draw the conclusion that at every station
along the way to our consciousness it has been exactly the same.
This is not quite so, and it is in fact necessary to detour
through sociology to understand why. The figure we must begin
with is Emile Durkheim, the founder of modern sociology and a
much-abused figure: Durkheim is viewed as a fusty Edwardian of
the Dreyfusard period, even though theoretical approaches of
his have become part and parcel of the common intellectual
culture -- chiefly the concept of a reconciliation between a
structural view of the social totality and the individual
consciousness, effected without loss of acuity due to "false
consciousness"; and the scientific study of culture is how
this is done. Durkheim wrote many fine studies along such
lines, but as a reappraisal of his work would require much
backing and filling I will simply move on to an appropriation
of this idea in Talcott Parsons' four-function "AGIL" schema.
According to the later work of Parsons, social systems serve
four functions with respect to the regulation of interaction:
adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency.
To give a quick sketch: adaptation allows interaction to
continue as a matter of course, goal attainment provides a
framework within which individual interests can be ,
and integration sanctions deviant interactions. The function
of latency is to align the importance of any particular
interaction with the overall importance such interactions,
or in plain English to make an event not matter *too much* for
all concerned; and in this it serves a role similar to
Nietzsche's will to power, but (although not to put too fine
a point on it) Parsons is the anti-Nietzsche, because
individual interactions are woven into the structure of
society at large rather than portending exciting new
developments; and this captures the boundedness of demurral
by social situations, crucial to close examination of
happenings, better than views which deny such situations exist.
Furthermore, Parsons explains the functioning of the social system
devoted to culture (a prerequisite for individual artistic activity)
rather better than the concept of the overman, because it
explains the functioning of artists of quality; although they
innovate, they are well-versed in artistic movements and techniques
of the past (this is how new artistic statements get to "stand the
test of time" rather than being assimilated as mere dross and
promptly forgotten). But ultimately, to put a fine point on
it the enduring interest of Nietzsche pertains to intimate affairs
rather than the sordid business of making stuff; and although
there is something to be said for the work of Nietzsche in this
context (a play of affects requiring a certain amount of lightness),
the assimilation of Nietzsche's work to critiques of gender has
been massively overplayed. So to end on a moralistic note:
he is from the old school, read him and stay away from him.
Jeff Rubard
rather suggestive quotation from the early *Nachlass* (posthumous writings):
Furcht (negativ) und Wille zur Macht (positiv) erklären unsere starke
Rücksicht auf die Meinungen der Menschen.
Fear (negative) and will to power (positive) elucidate our strong
"concern" concerning the intentions of others.