On Active and Reactive Forces

You can look at the world as composed of objects, or states of affairs, but it’s more fruitful to conceive of it as made up of forces. It’s not static. Everyone knows this. The current state is only the state of forces at apparent rest. Read your Whitehead. Read your Deleuze. Process ontology FTW.

It’s in Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche that he lays out a pretty neat distinction between active and reactive forces, and I’ll admit that when I first read this some 20 years ago I was caught up in the metaphysical weeds, trying to work out how to think about Nietzsche’s perspectivism against those who wanted to reduce it to some facile subjectivism, or something like that.

Neither here nor there!

The distinction between active and reactive forces is one that’s stuck with me, banging about in my mind as I’ve gotten older to where I feel like it’s not anything abstruse. It’s kind of obvious, if you look at the world.

Active forces are all of those that increase your capacity to act. They increase your power---what you can do.

Reactive forces, on the other hand, separate you from what you can do---they reduce your power to act.

Those are the definitions, and they’re pretty simple, but how do we apply them? We need examples and one of the faults of so many thinkers lies in not giving us those examples because it would make the work too long, or something like that.

I guess that’s what they’re thinking. (Immanuel Kant straight up said it---give us the Critique with examples, Manny! But I digress.)

If you want an example of active forces, think of any moment of inspiration, whether it’s artistic or otherwise. Think of some moment in a game or sport where you’re feeding off of someone else, or a loving relationship that increases your power to be in the world. Just don’t be too static about it and I’m sure you’ve had the relevant experience.

Active forces form what Deleuze calls the ideal game, which is a game that makes its own rules, as opposed to operating by pre-established rules. The ideal game is not fucking Monopoly; it’s maybe better embodied in the exquisite corpse or something like Telephone-Pictionary. It’s musicians having a jam session. It’s good sex.

Reactive forces, on the contrary, want to impose pre-set rules as strictures or norms upon play. Certain things are out of bounds, you degenerate! But, let’s not take this as the definition of the reactive, per se. It’s completely possible to have fun playing a game with pre-established rules and so on, and this is not the point. We can play chess. It’s fun. And it’s no longer chess if you’re ignoring the rules.

Of course, no one said that being reactive can’t be fun, and I actually haven’t even said it’s bad, other than this thought about separating you from what you can do. Surely, in principle, what reduces my power to act is bad, at least in a vague sense.

This is why Spinoza’s most significant work is called Ethics, something that confuses a lot of scholars. He starts out attempting to prove that God exists like he’s doing geometry even as he deflates God to nature, but then in the latter chapters there is a whole bunch of stuff about affect (or emotion).

The point is that for Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze, and whoever else, emotion isn’t some “subjective” thing, as though the subject stands apart from the objective world. No, affect is ontologically real---it’s about how one body is being affected by another. I feel sad, for example, because you’ve decreased my power to act.

They need our sadness to make us slaves, but it’s not as though you can just decide to not be depressed. It’s more complicated than that. It’s a matter of being bombarded by reactive forces, where, at some level, it makes sense to be depressed (and I’m just focusing on that as an example).

Reactive forces separate you from what you can do. They deny life in its manifold expressions. They say that certain ways of being are normal, natural, good and upright, while others are defective. All binaries are on the side of the reactive: good/evil, man/woman, us/them, and so on. The reactive behaves as though these are primary categories, or boxes that you have to fit into. And if you don’t fit… you might as well play one of those buzzer sounds from a game show.

The thing is, though… this is simply false, like metaphysically. It makes no sense to treat some set of binary identities as given in light of the existence of any instances that fall outside of that binary. Rather, you have to go the other way around: there is polymorphous difference that expresses itself in metastable states, and if you try to pin those states down---if you try to quell the leakage---you’re engaged in a project of trying to limit what one can do.

I hope I haven’t gotten too abstruse. Apologies. The point is that what’s primordial is the queer, the self-differing, the Body without Organs, if you like… I hope I’m making sense.

The problem is that in the interplay of active and reactive forces, the reactive forces always win. That’s not doomerism, but rather because to react to the reactive is to become reactive oneself.

You can think of any number of things here, but I’m prone to offer an example from social media. You post your joy and then some troll comes along to muck it up. Engage and you’re done for. You’ve told the world how much you love a song that this rando says sucks, and there is no winning that argument. It’s better not to play the game.

And that’s the lesson that I’m still thinking about how to draw in a general way, in practical terms. It’s easy enough to say that you shouldn’t engage with internet trolls, and maybe even easy enough to keep yourself from doing so, but those same forces are writ large all over the social reality we live in. Is there a way to say No to them without falling into some kind of problematic quietism?

To keep it structural, the point would be this: If you react to the reactionary, you become one. So, the question is how to resist, or fight, reactive forces, without becoming reactive oneself.

The only answer I have might feel too abstract. We have to play our own game and refuse to play theirs. They can play our game if they agree to play by the rules, but there are no pre-set rules so they won’t want to play---because the point of the ideal game is not to win. The point is to increase what we can do.

And these sick fucks only want to win---they want to exert their power over others to give themselves some simulacrum of inspiration or joy.

How do we tell them they can’t play?