Chainsmoking with Nietzsche and Foucault

Chainsmoking with Nietzsche and Foucault: What is Power?

By Frederick Griffith

To the tune of Mazatalan by Paul Bley (1965)

1

“This is it,” he thinks, “this is really it”. They're all taking themselves away, headlong in the music of the jam. Jazz rides them towards a blazing conflagration, lit as an act of worship to the music. Practice, after all, is always in reverence to the form. Their bodies,  their instruments, the distinction is inane. Their passion remains real where language fails. A cosmos of energy laps through them, tickled and spun by their fingers into a flickering infinitude of noises, sonorous and screaming, with no particular shape or colour. Pink elephants and visions of wild rhinos play behind their eyes. Any way is the only way, Tom Waits said, and they’re all feeling it now.

Each musician feels free to express themselves and is simultaneously tied to the beat, to the head of the tune. A lick or a riff jumps out here or there, inspiring a new direction one can pursue. Like a star being pulled apart from all directions, that fibre holding the jam together becomes thinner and looser, but they always find their way back together; their organisation is strong enough to balance the sun on a tight rope without thinking too hard.

The musician’s reality is like a mania. Like blind trapeze artists, they are confident only because they have been here before. They know how to push themselves out of themselves and return when they need to catch each other.

2

Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche share a view of power as a substrate of energy necessary for the development of relationships between things and the negotiation of truths and facts. Power as a resource is more accessible to some individuals than to others in specific contexts and exists in every word and action. Assertion, creation, recreation, and resistance are interactions mediated by power relations.

Nietzsche’s definition of power is difficult to pin down, the main point being that power is agency, will. Ciano Aydin argues that Will to Power should be treated as one word to convey that power is not something we possess but is an emergent characteristic, identifiable during every interaction and every time we exert our energies onto the world. Power is also exerted on us. Within us exist conflicting drives, instincts, thoughts, and emotions, exercising their power over each other. The stronger person or organisation can persist through this struggle, not necessarily finding balance or stability, but continuing to move forward through time. Weak organisations collapse, are pulled apart by their internal energy, and pursue life-denying activities, as the organisation's consciousness feels burdened by these challenges.

Arguably, Nietzsche's definition is so all-encompassing that it becomes redundant. He argues that power is synonymous with Geschehn (All Happening) to describe how everything that happens is “the result of an unthinkably complex interaction among an infinite number of ‘will to power’ organisations” (Aydin). I agree that this definition is not practical, and that Nietzsche reads more like literature. How are we supposed to incorporate into our lives the knowledge of “unthinkably complex interactions” when, by definition, they are unthinkable? I don’t think we have to. We can recognise that our perception of reality is similar to the jamming musicians. Its complexity and emotion defy verbal expression; our capacity to interpret each other’s signs and balance things is intuitive, not logical. Nietzsche’s philosophy serves as a lens through which we can understand life and its challenges as power relations between the external world and our internal power structures.

3

The following debates discuss the three ways that we experience reality, applying this framework to personal experiences:

Form describes the physical world. I am practical, I do not believe that the world of things in themselves exists outside of our perception of reality. Our bodies and personalities have shape, form, and depth. You push into the world and feel resistance. This is the starting point of my philosophy.

Force describes how we exert ourselves onto the world through our activities, and how the world exerts itself onto us through its resistance. Daily life is a series of overlapping interactions, pressures, and resistances. We push through obstacles towards our desires and drive our desires away by constructing barriers. We exert ourselves into the world as a habit of existence. The world and its systems push onto us, we feel its pressures as we bear the weight of existence. The exercising of Form and Force is unconscious, we cannot help but exist and exert ourselves.

Direction describes where and how our Force and requires conscious decision making.  Every moment of every day, we decide how we will exert ourselves on the world. Are we going to go to work, care for those we ought to, pursue our desires, seek our destruction? We compute an infinitely complex series of decisions constantly; it is exhausting, yes, but has potential for reward. For some people, this path is so challenging that self-destruction and removing the capacity for decision, for Direction, is more tolerable than exercising our fullest capacity for existence.

4

Quiet children like me had internal wills towards indecision. If you were scared of your own footsteps, you didn’t like to make decisions, because speaking up for yourself led to beration. We never reflected on our desires and perspectives to form a decision about anything. As a young man, even, I shuddered at the realisation that my decisions, my wants, had been acknowledged and had shaped the world and my direction. Deciding (as an activity) was the base form of expressing myself. I didn’t want to speak up, I didn’t want to decide. I would flinch at the strike of an invisible hand when I realised I had exerted myself onto the world and onto my future. I didn’t make plans, I  didn’t want to want anything, I wanted to be as small as possible. 

As a teenager, I rebelled. The pendulum swung, and I took every opportunity to take and affirm what I wanted, ignoring the feelings and thoughts trying to put me down. I took advantage of people, and when told to stop, I mutinied further, feeling their resistance as the invisible voice of beration I had always heard as a child. I exercised the force of my power in reckless directions, exerting myself into the world irresponsibly.

Now, as a man, the will towards indecision persists.

My sweet tooth is unruly. Sometimes I shake for lack of sugar; I cannot think straight, and I’ll binge. This habit reflects my self-destructive will towards indecision as a means of eliminating the guilt I feel for doing things I shouldn’t. I rationalise: If I eat all these cookies, there will be no more cookies; I won’t have to spend any energy not eating the cookies, saving myself from the possibility of regret and guilt. By binging, I no longer have to wrestle with myself to not eat. It doesn’t make sense, but that is normal for me.

My inability to make decisions and my recklessness with the world have been challenges I’ve had to overcome, and having these experiences has allowed me insight into understanding my relationship with decision-making. Now, rather than deliberating and agonising over what direction to take, waiting on the weather to change, I take life as it is. If it’s raining, don’t wait for it to stop; decide what to do now that you’re staying inside. This mindset requires self-confidence, or a trust in your ability to judge your perceptions and make informed decisions with the information you’ve collected. It is liberating, at any moment you can change your decision, our old convictions, after all, were only steps toward our convictions now. It’s not bad to be rash or quick to judgment if you’re not hurting anyone, but indecision is bad if it hurts you. You can believe something entirely and later realise that belief was only a small, transient part of your journey to a more refined perspective.

5

God is no longer watching, Nietzsche argued.

The source of meaning and direction is no longer centralised within the doctrine of a single entity or formula. Society has become hyper individualistic, reflected by our consumption and politics; the policies of the conservatives have focused the responsibility for one’s health and finances onto oneself, rewarding those who are more self-interested. We have been socially engineered to think for ourselves as if this were natural. We once were followers, but are now encouraged to think for ourselves. To inform our unique worldviews, we draw upon our own resources of experience, education, and ideology. These resources are shaped by the same self-interested institutions, Foucault contended, writing during the expansion of the political and ideological processes of individualization.

Nietzsche penned Beyond Good and Evil as a polemic for freethinkers, during the cultural disintegration of Christian natural law. He exposed and railed against the deep-rooted influences of Christianity and nationalism on the European psyche, revealing the challenge of thinking for yourself. Nietzsche concludes the book by arguing that the concepts Good and Evil are tools of ideology. Not only are they culturally variable, but they are systems of power and prescription that provide consensus-based guidance on morality. Because humans are ego-centric animals, we believe that our success comes by virtue of our goodness; our success is evidence that our virtuous ought to be predominant. We are cynical of others but not of ourselves, and we ignore that our success and survival depend primarily on chance.

The man who eats broccoli every day and who lives to 103 will tell you he lived so long because he ate broccoli every day. Replace the success of old age with the unification of a country, and whatever subjective Good the rulers hold becomes espoused as a divine or transcendent good. The same goes for evil.

As for the evil acts, what does evil even mean?  Some acts harm other people; it is counterintuitive to harm others if we believe in the goodness of our own existence, as it means others will do harm onto us. Is harm, then, evil? Is harming others without them knowing evil? Why does the word evil hold so much more semantic weight than this explanation?

As Nietzsche disputes, Good and Evil are fairy tales used to simplify our thinking. Instead, we should bear the weight of the world and discover our own values in our own reality.  While evil may be a useful label to communicate our feelings, evil does not pacify killers and rapists, and good does not stop the Godly from doing the same. The usefulness of these descriptors when speaking about politics and morality is thus minimal.

6

Chain-smoking is self-destruction; it destroys your capacity for direction and decision-making. If I smoke all the cigarettes in the world, I won’t have the opportunity to feel the guilt of a bad decision, and when I die, I won’t have to make any more decisions. Smokers extinguish the conflict of their internal drives and race towards death, killing themselves before they have a chance to think twice. 

Kristen Kain and Lori Nelson suggest that young people may react to death anxiety by engaging in more risks, especially pleasurable ones. This drive of Reckless Hedonism  (Kain and Nelson) is suggested to be a means for coping with life’s finitude, enjoying oneself as the most obvious way of reconciling one’s fate with death and making one’s increasingly brief time alive more tolerable; it’s getting even in a sense.

Dying young is romantic. Dying and never having lost your innocence is almost like never having died at all, never having lived. Dying young makes you infamous, keeps you attractive, prevents you from having to reconcile and compromise convictions with the pressures and reality of life. It keeps you cool. 

When they pulled you from the wreck, you still had on your shades (Waits, 1977).

Quitting, in this reading, is reclaiming your orientation towards death, reconciling, and allowing yourself the energy for more healthy distractions that are life-affirming. Life can be filled with reasons for celebration, rather than being defined by a trajectory towards immortal rest.

7

Free jazz is the expression of life’s energy. Each musician is continually being challenged and creating a new form and direction for their expression.

Free jazz is the acceleration of life. Within the music are the infinitely complex feelings and wills to power of life. Every colour, every form, every direction, and every degree of force can be realised in the hands of an accomplished musician. What the musician can’t do is quit; they never give up the jam. 

You’ve got it! If you don’t want to play, tell a joke or dance, but in any case, you got it! (Monk, 1960).

Don’t give up because it’s too hard to try. There is always something positive worth expressing. True feeling sits inside somewhere, capable of being exerted into the world; the challenge is deciding what and how, but overcoming challenge is the definition of life. Good or evil is secondary to expression; harmony and discord are nothing without music. We can comprehend that change and growth, rot and decay are the antithesis of life.

ADDENDUM 1 – WHAT IS POWER AFTER ALL?

It is very challenging to answer what power is. Working towards a definition is like trying to flatten out a bubble on a pond's surface. To highlight this complexity, consider how sometimes we have power over our emotions, and sometimes they have power over us.  Power cannot be described as something we possess.

Power is better defined as an emergent characteristic. Identifiable at the moment of analysis, but impossible to describe outside of a relationship or interaction, we can explore where power sits for more insight…

…Power exists in the same moment energy and movement happen, but is not the product or cause. It has more in common with what cannot be explained than what can. 

Power is like life itself. We understand the biological and chemical prerequisites for life,  but what births a breathing, spasming amoeba from an ocean of heat and chemical properties cannot be defined with certainty, nor replicated. Power is life as the force that drags itself by its own hair out of the primordial soup.

Power is the beauty in the machine that is more than mechanics; the vitality in the veins of a muscle that flexes and stretches; the hum and the song of the throat that yawns. Power is the motor that is running; its pistons spark divinity. Power is the divine machine that does not sit still in equations.

ADDENDUM 2 – THE DIVINE MACHINE

Life is a divine machine because it is powered by beauty. Whether life was an accident or a trajectory, it has led to this… to us, here, now. It has led us to institutions and systems, to depressions.

Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse views humans as imperfect beings who see beauty and attempt to replicate it, yet falter at the most critical moment of that replication. They seem almost cursed by their aspirations and failures, but are fueled by the beauty of the world and its impact on their emotions.

Reflecting on this, we can acknowledge that we lack the capacity to replicate power,  destined to be a part of the play, but never see the script.

We are the reflexive unaversive, having given sight to itself so it may see its own beauty and hear its own music. But through our own self-consciousness and ego, we have convinced ourselves that both the material and the spiritual belong to us. We believe that we might share in the act of creation when we do not have that power.

The complexity of existence should impel us not to simplify our thinking, but to reduce our expectations, embrace the gift of cognition alongside our physical limits.

We have the power to accept and understand beauty for what it is, as a fuel. Accept that we cannot make love, but recognise it and cherish it more greatly. Focusing on the fact that when we wake up tomorrow, there are so many beautiful things to see. 

Beauty is a machine that’s working (Blood, 2019).

References

Aydin, C (2007) – Nietzsche on Reality as Will to Power: Toward an “Organisation Struggle” Model In Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 33. Penn State University Press,  University Park, PA 

Bley, P (1965) – Mazatalan From Touching. Copenhagen Studio, Copenhagen Blood, W (2019) – Wild Time From Titanic Rising. Sub Pop, Seattle, WA 

Kain, K and Nelson, NJ (2001) – Cigarette Smoking and Fear of Death: Explaining  Conflicting Results in Death Anxiety Research In OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying 43(1). SAGE, London 

Monk, T (1960) – Thelonius Monk’s 25 Tips for Musicians (1960). Open Culture [Web  Archive] Thelonious Monk's 25 Tips for Musicians (1960) | Open Culture 

Nietzsche, F (1886) – Beyond Good and Evil. Germany 

Waits, T (1976) – Invitation to the Blues From Small Change. Wally Heider’s Studio 3,  Hollywood, CA 

Waits, T (1977) – Burma-Shave From Foreign Affairs. Wally Heider’s Studio 3, Hollywood, CA