I Am Dynamite

An Alternative Anthropology of Power

Nigel Rapport

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415258623
• eBook ISBN: 9781134575718
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Free Will & Determinism in Philosophy

Power is conventionally regarded as being held by social institutions. We are taught to believe that it is these social structures that determine the environment and circumstances of individual lives. In I Am Dynamite, the anthropologist Nigel Rappaport argues for a different view. Focusing on the lives and works of the writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, refugee and engineer Ben Glaser, Israeli ceramicist and immigrant Rachel Siblerstein, artist Stanley Spencer, and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he shows how we can have the capacity and inclination to formulate 'life projects'. It is in the pursuit of these life projects, that is, making our life our work, that we can avoid the structures of ideology and institution.

Part I

PROPOSITIONS

1

PRELIMINARY STATEMENTS

The book's questions

• This is a book about power, but not power as conventionally understood and represented in social science. Rather than an appreciation of the structural power of what is institutional, collective, impersonal and not-individual to create and/or curb what is individual, this is a book about the existential power of individuals to create personally meaningful and viable environments and to traverse these in the pursuit of their own life-projects.

• Individuality has been the main focus of my work to date (e.g. Rapport 1987; 1993; 1997a). I have emphasized the diversity multiplicity and creativity of individual consciousness; also the way that, due to the ambiguity of social-symbolic forms of exchange, this individuality need not be expressed or communicated on the surface of social life. Society and community, I have concluded, are represented and constituted by a public commonality and a private diversity The chief criticism levelled against this work has been that the real-politik of power relations in which individual lives are lived escapes the attention. Social structures, it is averred, are more than mere forms for free individual expression; they are mouldings and constraints – if not the very origins of expression. Moreover, individual consciousness (even where it can be said to exist in a socio-cultural milieu) is a far remove from individual control; far from a manifestation of uniqueness, a means of transcendence, consciousness may be understood to be an emanation of certain systems of structural-institutional control.

• The relationship between consciousness and self control is the issue which this book set outs specifically to examine: between consciousness of an idea of self-in-the-world, and control over one's life in the world. Inasmuch as individuals are conscious of their environments (consciously create meaningful environments in which they live) and plot certain courses through those environments which they then endeavour to put into effect, can they be seen to be in control of their lives? To what extent does self-consciousness equate with self control, with freedom from the conditions of external circumstance beyond the self? Inasmuch as individuals lead their lives in terms of objectives and criteria of evaluation which are largely of their own making and choosing – so that their lives are actualizations of their ‘life-projects’ – can they be said to escape the sway of exterior forces – social structures and insti-tutions, ideologies, discourses, systems of signification?

• I explore these questions through a biographical examination of the lives of four individuals in particular. Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher, constructed an original philosophical edifice both perspicacious and idiosyncratic; Ben Glaser, refugee engineer-cum-amateur astrophysicist, led a life of intellectual recreation of great complexity, and productiveness, in a new land; Rachel Silberstein (a pseudonym), an immigrant ceramicist-cum-political activist, construed a road to personal ‘completion’ that committed her to a life of brave and continual transition; and Stanley Spencer, the painter, engendered a visionary pictorial and also scriptural oeuvre, both engaging and eccentric. Each of these individuals, I argue, led lives of self-intensity and single-mindedness – singularly focused on a certain life-work of their own, directing their energies towards the accomplishment of a project or end or design which belongs within them – and thereby achieved a remarkable order in, and control over, their conscious lives. Each succeeded in placing themselves in the middle of an abundantly meaningful life-narrative, in the centre of a significantly unfolding world of relations. It is not that Nietzsche, Glaser, Silberstein and Spencer subordinated their lives to their ‘art’, to an abstraction, but that their lives became works of art: they lived their lives as their ‘art’, as extensions and manifestations of their creative visions. Nor is it that Nietzsche, Glaser, Silberstein and Spencer lived lives of isolation, of ostracism or solipsism beyond the relational; rather that their relations were construed in their own image, guided by a logic and a negotiation which reflected their confidence or Machtgefuhl (feeling of power) in their own life-courses and projects.

• I do not say that their life-projects necessarily afforded these individuals happiness (never mind bringing happiness to their contemporaries or consociates). In the concluding discussions (Chapters 7 and 8) I do come to argue that consciously leading one's life in terms of a life-project can afford that life a certain dignity and can give onto an equitability and tolerance towards others’, but happiness as such is not my focus (I am reminded, however, of an argument made by George Kateb, to the effect that ‘democratic individuality’ makes for a life of ‘ecstasies’ more than of ‘happiness’ and of ‘pleasures’ rather than ‘herd contentments’ [1991b: 206]). To reiterate my question: however happy or unhappy these individuals were – however ‘unhappily’ (nihilistically chaotically, unpredictably, pessimistically deterministically whatever) they might be said to have construed the worlds in which they saw themselves as acting – did the very nature of their self-conscious and directed construals afford them a control over the parameters of their lives and relationships, and a determination over their fate?

• In specifying the approach to power taken in this book, ‘control’ appears to be a key term (cf. Hendry 1996: 155). I want to elucidate an existential power that individuals possess over and against an impersonal, social-structural or institutional power that I feel schools of social science have had a tendency almost exclusively to focus upon. This leads me to consider who or what determines the lives individuals lead: both the courses of action they adopt and the meanings they accord to those actions. Where, ultimately do individuals’ actions and interpretations come from? The hypothesis offered in this book is that individuals who see their lives in terms of the pursuit of a certain life-project, who see the meaning of their lives significantly in terms of the achievement of a particular goal or goals, can succeed in giving their actions a certain robustness, power and independence such that they escape the influence of external forces and of other individuals who might have wished to have directed them in other ways.
‘Control’, I understand, then, as extending both to the ‘objectivity’ of actions and the ‘subjectivity’ of meanings or interpretations. Ultimately, I would understand both of these as pertaining to the subjective realm, since the meaning or effect of action is a subjective interpretation; but then the social-scientific apprehension of another's subjectivity is an objective act – at least, that of an exterior subjectivity – and the testing of my hypothesis will rest upon my biographical and autobiographical accounts of others’ autobiographies.

• The complexities of ‘control’ within individuals’ lives thus ramify. Richard Fardon suggests that there is an inevitability and an interminability to the question of control because it is in the very nature of power to play host to a ‘fundamental equivocation’ (Marilyn Strathern): never directly visible, only metaphorically (Fardon 1987: 7–8). Suffice it to say that I am exploring ‘existential power’ by way of an examination of the extent to which individuals can be said to be responsible for determining the interpretations they make and the actions they take. These might include succeeding in feeling out of control, or in putting oneself in positions of helplessness; one might be in control of one's beliefs that one is under the control of others, and as social-scientific observer and analyst I reserve the right for myself to distinguish between a personal rhetoric of powerlessness and a powerlessness determined by others.
Of course the latter distinction does not give rise to necessarily watertight compartments. Insisting on one's powerlessness, putting oneself in positions of helplessness, might reach a point when one is unable to change tack, whatever one's present determination. Hence the existential or developmental dimension of the hypothesis; perhaps construing oneself to be in control of one's life itself figures as a source of one's being able to continue considering oneself in control – itself figures as a source of one's actions being self-determined; ‘[c]onsciousness of our powers augments them’, as the Marquis de Vauvenargues once put it (1997). Hence the thesis: The very possession of a life-project, the conception, intention and practice of seeing one's life in terms of a certain directionality, velocity and destination, serves as a source of self-control, the possession being instrumental in one's continuing capability to be responsible for interpretations made, relations entered into and actions taken.

• Clifford Geertz has called social and cultural anthropologists ‘the miniaturists of the social sciences’ (1971: 4); in attempting to answer ‘grand questions’, anthropologists paint ‘delicate strokes on lilliputian canvases’. They are ‘always inclined to turn towards…the microscopic’ in order to ascertain the truth about ‘humanity’ (1971: 4). In my estimation this is so because it is in the individual – in individual energy, creativity will – that the force of the social and cultural lies. Scale does not give onto a supra-individual reality, and the same mechanisms of individual consciousness – of our human being-in-the-world courtesy of interpretive mechanisms which give onto a distinct sense of self and other – operate within large-scale, institutional or grand-historical situations of interaction as in more personal or private ones.
Another way of putting this is that no subject is intrinsically small-scale or large-scale; it depends rather on how they are approached. For, every subject is ultimately the same subject: the construction and interaction of individual world-views; individual interpretations of social situations and cultural practices (cf. Rapport 1997a: 12–29; also Samuel 1975: xix). In this book, four individual lives are put under a microscope as a route to elucidating the nature of human social life and the potentialities of Everyperson. ‘Thick description’, as William Blake might have counselled, is to ‘see a World in a Grain of Sand’ (1975: 585).

A metaphor of individuality

Genius, according to Nietzsche (1994: 162–3), resides in the single-minded-ness with which individuals approach an activity, and the continuity and complexity of the concentration they impart to their practices. To consider genius is to imagine individuals

whose thinking is active in one particular direction; who use everything to that end; who always observe eagerly their inner life and that of other people; who see models, stimulation everywhere; who do not tire of rearranging their material.

(1994: 162)

Moreover, genius is a craft rather than an innate gift or talent, Nietzsche insists. One ‘becomes’ a genius and one acquires its greatness not by virtue of something miraculous but via a certain seriousness and industry, energy and endurance which is potentially within the grasp of every one.

In identifying the project of this book, to myself and others, I settled upon a metaphor which had the benefit of providing a visual framework, while hopefully not too simplistic a one. (I am reminded of Robin Horton's [1967] description of the analogical relationship between theoretical and non-theoretical knowledge; an immediate sense of the theory of atoms, say, may be gained by analogy with the movement of balls on a pool-table so long as one remembers the only partial connectability of the two: that atoms, for instance, are not variously coloured). In approaching the theory of this book, then, I offer an avowedly impressionistic, but immediate, image.

Consider a self-propelled projectile careering through space. Its energy and momentum carry it along a certain trajectory, and it is deflected from this path only to the extent that it comes under the gravitational sway of another body, or is actually hit by another body. Even if this were to happen, the displacement caused to its original trajectory would depend upon its own force relative to that of the other body: its mass and its speed in a certain direction. If it is forceful enough it carries on its way.

Now think of that projectile as an individual human being ‘thrown’ into life (as the Existentialists put it), and the career which his or her life-course represents. And think of the other bodies met in space as other individuals, or as the so-called social systems, institutional structures and cultural discourses which are often seen as constituting the environments in which individual lives are led. Would not the extent to which an individual's path through life is affected, even controlled, by these outside bodies and forces be dependent upon the forcefulness with which that life was prosecuted? In other words, should not the control which a social-cum-institutional-cum-cultural gravity can be expected to exert upon an individual life, and the displacement caused, depend upon the intrinsic single-mindedness, the self-intensity, with which that person attends to the effecting his or her own life-course?

Returning to Nietzsche's commentary on genius once more, so many and varied are the impulses that living creatures are home to, so distinct are their constitutions and senses of consciousness, Nietzsche feels (1968: 46), that he would advise against any simple conceptual use of the term ‘will’. Notwithstanding, there is a sense in which ‘strong will’ and ‘weak will’ resonate with experience; ‘weak will’, he suggests, translates as those occasions in which a ‘lack of gravity’ causes an oscillation and absence of systematic ordering between a multitude of ‘disgregated’ impulses; while ‘strong will’ translates as those occasions when the multitude of impulses are given precise and clear direction, coordinated, perhaps, under a single impulse which predominates. To be strong, then, is to acquire ‘the orientation of a straight line’ as against ‘wavelike vacillation’ (1994: 270). In Nietzsche's sense, the individual-as-projectile has the strong will to harness his or her impulses in one direction, producing a force which protects them against lesser wills.

The metaphor of a projectile might just be taken one step further. Besides rockets and missiles careering through space are also to be found bodies in more fixed trajectories, fields of influence or orbits: molecules and meteors, moons and planets, stars, solar systems and galaxies. All, however, are composed of the same physical matter (there is only one kind); indeed, the matter that comprises their individual identities at any one time will be broken down and recombined into other identities at other times. Finally, all the bodies are subject to the same physical laws, of momentum, velocity, mass and gravity. Their trajectories derive from the constellation of relations which comprise their own force relative to others’ in the one physical universe.

Again, think of the individual human being on his or her life-course. For some this involves more habitual or fixed behaviours than others. Likewise, there may be more or less alignment with the lives and routines of others; the individual human being is not an isolate, and for some, life might consist of remaining within the ambit of particular others or ‘orbiting’ jointly with them. That is, besides the force to continue on one's own path, there is also the force to remain within others’ domain or to organize joint trajectories. These latter can amount to aggregations, communities, societies of individuals, all of whose lives are to an extent aligned. The extent varies, the longevity and impersonality and institutionality of the arrangement vary, and the size of the aggregation varies. But the principle is the same. Individual trajectories through life come to be aligned one with another so that instead of their momentum taking them apart, it keeps them together, moving, for a while, more or less in tandem. Finally, however, the aggregations, the societies of individuals, are not greater than their sum; there is nothing beyond the matter that (temporarily) constitutes the identity of the individual, and nothing beyond the force which that individual life gives onto and, in collaboration with others, adds up to. In combination, in institutionalization, individuals may be more forceful than apart (to the extent that they can orchestrate their individual momentums in harmony), but the institution and the society has no life or life-force of its own.

The analogy has been taken far enough – without, I hope, seeming forced. Listen, now, to how Stanley Spencer is introduced by his first biographer, Maurice Collis (1962: 15, my italics):

He stands a giant (though physically he was a very small man) who was never deflected from his main concern, which was to express himself. His story is bound up with three women in particular, and also a fourth. He was influenced by them for a time, but remained unchanged in essentials. They people his art from 1927 till his death and are the recurring subject of his writings. But he was a recluse at heart, a paradox of which [his posthumous] papers leave no doubt.

A second biographer attributed Spencer's behaviour to the ‘self-intense nature of his genius’ (Pople 1991: 209). What I mean to posit is this: do not individuals have the power to decide whether and how to align the energy and momentum of their lives with those of others? To the extent that individuals conduct their lives in the actualization of projects which they themselves author and to which they continually attend – single-mindedly, with self-intensity – are they not in a position to eschew or deflect the gravitational pull, the power and influence, of others, and to exert control over the trajectories of their lives?

A Nietzschean ethos

A Nietzschean commentary can be seen to underlie not only ideas on the ‘genius of single-mindedness’, but the book as a whole. In ethos it might be described as a Nietzschean ‘fiction’:

I am not a man I am dynamite. – And with all that there is nothing in me of a founder of a religion – religions are affairs of the rabble, I have need of washing my hands after contact with religious people…I do not want ‘believers’…I do not want to be a saint, rather even a buffoon…Perhaps I am a buffoon…– But my truth is dreadful: for hitherto the lie has been called truth. – Revaluation of all values: this is my formula for an act of supreme coming-to-oneself on the part of mankind which in me has become flesh and genius.…I was the first to discover the truth, in that I was the first to sense – smell – the lie as lie.…My genius is in my nostrils…I contradict as has never been contradicted and am nonetheless the opposite of a negative spirit. I am a bringer of good tidings such as there never has been.

(1979b: 126)

Superlatives often accompany Nietzschean commentary (not least in his own writings), and seldom without hyperbole. Friedrich Nietzsche, we variously read, was, during his lifet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• Foreword by Michael Jackson
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Propositions
• PART II Illustrations
• PART III Discussions
• Bibliography
• Index