Check out the video version of this essay on YouTube!
Understanding ourselves is one of the most difficult things we have to do, and in doing that we’re likely to grab whatever tools we can find. Political power, as its own phenomenon, is a major concern of philosophy, sociology, even economics. One of the first people in modern European philosophy to discuss this topic was Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s concept of “will to power” holds that intelligent beings are seeking, above all, to acquire, maintain, and exercise power. This is best understood in light of the “will to live”, a concept developed by Nietzsche’s predecessor Arthur Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer, intelligent beings sought self-preservation and security over everything else. Nietzsche wanted to supersede Schopenhauer and seems to have succeeded, as it was “will to power” which would be picked up by the postmodernists.
Structures of power were a preoccupation of the postmodernists and they looked to Nietzsche for a description of what power was. Nietzsche’s ideas about power began with the concept of domination. Michel Foucault redefines power to be about the ability to change one’s situation. Regardless, Foucault mainly focused on power as wielded by culturally privileged (if not hegemonic) figures. That is what continues to be the summoned image when we say power: how those in charge get what they want.
I believe that a major project of Foucault’s was to take useful notions of Nietzsche but to leave Nietzsche’s perspective behind; this is just my belief, like I said, but I bring it up for a reason. To a large extent I believe Foucault was successful in translating Nietzsche’s notions so that they could be used more widely. He wasn’t as successful in trying to denature the concept of power. He wanted to make power a feature of all interpersonal relationships, not as a measure of oppression but of capability. This idea did not quite take.
And this is where “juice” comes in.
What does it mean to have “juice”? It means you can get shit done. It means you have connections. It means you’re attractive or charismatic, or important, or dangerous. It can mean a lot of things but they all revolve around the idea of potency. If you’re not an American English speaker then the word “juice” might not have the same meaning, but there’s likely a similar idea in your culture. It’s a general intangible potential, one that people can recognize even without being able to fully describe it; for instance, can anyone say exactly how much or what sort of juice former U.S. president Barack Obama has in 2024? We know he quote “has juice” unquote but that means nothing other than that he has more than some other people.
This concept of Juice includes political power (as we normally conceive of it) but also makes the Foucauldian move and represents itself in all relationships. Juice can be understood via the term “power-as-influence” (or “power-influence”), as opposed to the typical (or Nietzschean) formulation of “power-dominance”. The introduction of a wholly new term is part of the solution to decoupling the two concepts, one of two parts which Foucault failed to achieve. The other part is that I believe Foucault’s method of argument was flawed. Foucault purported to be making a study of history but, as I think a moderate knowledge of European history will support, his application of historical evidence was (to be lenient) without rigor.
This had two major effects on Foucault’s ability to redefine power. Firstly, it limited his ability to talk about interpersonal power such as between friends, neighbors, sellers & buyers, etc. because he relies on documentary evidence which prioritizes institutions and their essentially state-like relationships. Since he bases his arguments on observation and not a logical method, he is limited to where he can credibly take his argument. (As an aside, I am not saying that Foucault did not use logic, only that his method did not let him be as free to see where a line of thinking took him if it went far beyond his subject of observation.) This leads to the second effect: because his argument rests upon his scholarship, its credibility can be questioned by attacking that scholarship. As Foucault’s scholarship has serious deficiencies, that makes it harder for his ideas on power to be taken seriously outside of academic philosophy.
Both Foucault and Nietzsche wanted to characterize their ideas as historical developments, by which I mean that they assumed that human values & thought systems would evolve over time; not that things would get quote-unquote “better”, just that they would change in a way that was based on their present state. My perspective is different. Rather than assuming that humans change as a function of time, I want to remove consideration of “human nature” by instead saying that human expression is facilitated by the available means, which we can call “technology”. We generally conceive of technology (stated as such) as a collective phenomenon which does in fact “progress” over time. In this usage, however, I’d like you to think of technology in the sense of a series of devices. Let’s use personal communication as an example. These days, quote-unquote “everybody” has a smartphone. In that sense, technology is more widespread now than it was in, say, the year 1600. That said, you can lose your phone, your laptop can break down, your alarm clock can die. In this sense technology can be lost and this change in access will change your options even if it doesn’t change your intent.
Instead of seeking to historicize the idea of Juice, then, I am going to present a model which I hope will be logically consistent. I will be using visual aids and metaphorical constructs but I want to emphasize that I am building a philosophical model, not a chemical, acoustic, electrical, or any other kind. I’m aware that what I am going to say will mix metaphors and may be confusing. If it’s any consolation, this is definitely the most esoteric that this current series of videos will get. The reason that this video is first is that I need to fully treat with the concept of “will to power”.
The appeal of finding a central drive is the same as the appeal of any grand unified theory: gaining the ability to explain anything in the field. Though such theories may not hold water, the search for them (as well as efforts to disprove them) can provide their own discoveries. Modern Western philosophy’s first proposition for a unified theory of human nature was Arthur Schopenhauer’s “will to live” (as discussed). Other concepts followed it, with Nietzsche’s “will to power” being the most enduring. I don’t want to get sidetracked with my thoughts on why as I will return to it another day. To be brief, I think “will to power” is a better candidate for the grand unified theory, but we have to replace Nietzschean power with the concept of Juice. To do this, I need to present a fleshed-out idea of what Juice is. With that more solidified, my later points will make more sense.
The concept of Juice is meant to help model how all interpersonal interactions work on an individual level: how does one person persuade another, for instance. Traditional philosophy doesn’t seem to deal with interactions at this particular level; it deals in ideals and generalities. For this reason, traditional philosophy did not give me the tools to talk about these interactions. The goal of magic, however, is often precisely for one person to act upon another “from a distance”, as it were. Though it is currently not a widespread academic field, the study of magic has a history and has developed its own technologies. There is evolving, serious thought in this endeavor. As I begin to bring in esoteric concepts in order to fully define Juice, I ask you to take these ideas in the same way you should take concepts from theology or from traditional philosophy itself: the lack of an empirical core does not mean that the study isn’t useful.
To explain what Juice is, I need to put it into context. That context is what I am calling the Relational Field. I was introduced to the concept of “the Field” through the work of occultist Aidan Wachter, but it appears to date (in essence) back to the 9th century Arab polymath [Abū Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ] al-Kindī and his stellar ray theory of magical causation. While these provided inspiration, I want to be clear that the following theory is my own; I’m not simply explaining the theories of Wachter, al-Kindi, or anyone else.
In the Relational Field, every distinct thing is represented as its own point, called a Being (or simply Point) sitting in a “void”. We can call this empty space Abstraction (or Indistinction). Beings include not only people but other creatures, objects, and even ideas. Every Being is connected to every other Being; each connection is called a Relation. Ultimately, Juice is exerted along these Relations, in a manner I’ll talk about in a bit. To understand Juice better, it’s crucial to know first what makes a Being up.
Every Being is composed of at least two parts: its Locus and its Aura. For Beings such as ideas, the Locus is empty, simply a “space” which the Aura is situated around. The Aura is made up of innumerable Facets, and each Facet is related to one other Being. Therefore we can define the Aura as the totality of Relations that the Field has with the Being. So if we were to answer “what is a chair?” from the perspective of ultimate meaning, we might say “a chair is whatever we decide to accept as a chair.”
A Living Being has four parts: the Body, the Quickfire, the Ego, and the Aura. The Body is the Being’s physical form, something that conceptual Beings lack. Quickfire is what you might call “life spark”: a stand-in term for whatever it is that makes a physical object alive. I like the image of fire because, like our lives, fires burn until they go out and once they do they will not come back again as the same fire. The Aura is the same for the Living Being, while Being’s Locus is here replaced by the Ego.
The Ego differs from a Locus in that an Ego can act in the Field. We should not say that the Ego is the seat of personality or willpower or even identity. The Ego is the unknown process by which changes get made. Whereas a Locus is empty, the Ego in fact contributes to its own Aura, such that it’s difficult to say exactly where qualities like personality, willpower, and identity reside. If we have to place them we’ll just take both paths and ascribe these qualities to the Ego-Aura, which we can call the Spirit: in other words, the Living Being as represented in the Relational Field.
This raises a question about Material Beings — not the idea of a chair but the exact chair I’m sitting in now — and if they have a Body. I conclude “no”, for this reason: the Body is (ideally) the way that Living Beings control and navigate themselves in the physical world, while the material makeup of non-Living Beings don’t give those beings the ability for self-expression. I’ll come back to considering matter after we’ve developed more of this model. First we need to consider interactions.
I’ve said that Egos, unlike empty Loci, can act in the Field. In a broad sense, this means Ego-Auras are capable of knowing things, of communicating, exploring, enduring, upsetting, and so on. In terms of this Field model, there are two kinds of actions that Beings take: Perception and Manipulation. The latter especially happens in different modes, which I will discuss briefly, but each mode shares the essential “mechanism”. Perception involves acquiring information via the Relation between perceiver and perceived. Seeing, hearing, reading something, all these are Perception. Manipulation involves an actor affecting some change in the target. Think about persuading someone of something, or maybe intimidating them. The actor’s capacity to cause such a change is their Juice.
When I replace the idea of “will to power” with “will to Juice”, what I mean is that people are seeking this capacity to effect personal change.
Now I have defined the term which I introduced this model to explain, but the model itself is incomplete, so I will complete my sketch. I regard what I’m laying out now to be a starting point requiring more refinement with more work. For now, I want to simply make this model functional, and for that I need to bring in more scaffolding.
As I’ve laid out, every Being is connected to every other Being by a Relation, each Relation ending on a Facet on each Being. So if we say that Beings A & B are connected, we could more accurately say that A’s “view” of B is related to B’s “view” of A. Each Being’s Aura is therefore the aggregate of their Facets. Though every Being is connected to every other, Living Beings prioritize certain Relations over others, with the vast majority of Beings in existence appearing almost invisible to any one observer. With this in mind, we can see that certain Facets are likely to be more determinative of a Being’s overall Aura than others. This is reflected in what we can call a Facet’s Prominence, where a high Prominence means that the Facet’s attributes are well-represented in other Facets.
When I say “aggregate”, what I mean is “a collection of separate elements”, as opposed to a “conglomerate” which implies a totalizing or mashing together. By this I mean that measures such as an Aura’s “average” qualities are not important. What does it mean, for instance, to get the “average opinion” of LeBron James’s basketball ability? Is that something we can add up and then divide? No, what is more useful in this instance is the most common opinion. Of course, in usual usage, people will say “average opinion” when they mean “common opinion” and that’s fine, but I split them apart to show that this common opinion can’t really be considered a derived quality that’s intrinsic to the totality of opinion. Instead, this common opinion is best represented as its own Being. I call this common opinion an Aspect.
As you may have already come to, virtually any idea, impression, or whim can be thought of as a Being. Aspects are best considered as separate Non-Material Beings (with empty Loci) because they alter an observer’s view of a target rather than being seen as purely part of the observer’s Perception of the target itself. To continue the James example, while an observer might personally have a low opinion of James’s ability, it would be difficult to ignore the general opinion that he is one of the greatest of all time and, knowing that opinion, even more difficult for that general opinion not to influence one’s own in some way. Perhaps it makes the observer say “I understand that James is good but he’s not for me” or maybe it makes them say “the fact that everyone loves James makes me hate him even more”; regardless of the specific response, the Aspect is an influence but one that is perceived separately from one’s perception of the Being themselves.
This idea of “passive alteration” (or influence) is important for how Juice operates. As every Being is connected to every other in the Field, it follows that every action is made with connection to all other Beings, and just as such connections change Beings they also alter actions: one’s opinion of a song depends on their knowledge of the genre, songs heard in the past, and so on, and an insult’s impact depends on the reactions of bystanders as well as the target, for two examples. An action is quote-unquote “in light of” other Beings if those Beings exert a significant influence upon the action (or any reactions). Certain influences can “strengthen” an action while others can “weaken” it. Beings can of course be natural influences, like the idea of a metal genre is for a metal song, or they can be specifically called in, like a non-metal musician saying in an interview that their new song is inspired by metal. Neither way is naturally better than the other, what is important is the Beings themselves.
Before moving on, one thing should be made clear. Juice is something that each Being has, but Juice is not a total or average for the whole Being; instead, each Facet of a Being’s Aura has its own Juice. Also, as we are still working on aggregate logic, any “common” opinion about a Being’s Juice should be considered a related Aspect of the Being rather than as a trait held as part of the Being.
To complete the sketch of this model, I want to lay out a kind of dispute between two Living Beings, and through that elaborate the idea of Resonance and the two conceptual components of Juice. Let’s call this kind of dispute a Simple Determination. In this scenario, an Observer tries to change a Subject’s opinion (or “view”) of a Concept. As I’ve talked about before, if we were building a fully accurate model, we would need to represent the innumerable influences working upon this situation. For this simple depiction, I’ll use only the Observer, Subject, and Concept, as well as their Relations.
We can of course imagine Relations between all three of these Beings. Remember that Beings are made up of Locus and Aura, and also that Beings only interact with the corresponding Facet on another Being. We can imagine each Being then as a circle with a center, with the Locus as the center and the Aura as the circle. Along the Aura perimeter are placed the Facets, and it’s Facets that are connected. For example, a relation between Subject and Concept would actually be drawn between the Subject’s Concept Facet and the Concept’s Subject Facet. Each Relation between Beings is, properly, a Relation between opposing Facets of those Beings, so we can do the same for the Observer-Concept and Observer-Subject Relations.
In an actual dispute, there are many different ways that one person can persuade another. In the case of the Simple Determination, we restrict that. Here, the Observer is trying to persuade the Subject, through an ideally-realized argument, that the Observer’s perception of a Concept is better than the Subject’s. The Subject makes this Determination by comparing two Relations: the Relation between the Subject’s Concept Facet and the Concept’s Subject Facet (which we’ll call the Primary Relation) and the Relation between the Subject’s Concept Facet and the Concept’s Observer Facet (the Competing Relation). This represents the Subject considering two different understandings of the same Concept. Should the Competing Relation be stronger, the Subject attempts to alter the Primary Relation — by Manipulating itself or the Concept’s Subject Facet — to make it [Primary] as close as possible to the Competing Relation. In other words, if an Observer’s understanding of a Concept is more convincing to the Subject than the Subject’s own existing understanding, the Subject changes either their own outlook or their understanding of the Concept so that it matches (as much as possible) the Observer’s understanding.
What makes one Relation stronger than another? Well, we are comparing the Juice of each Relation. The scale of Juice is reckoned in Magnitude. Simply defined, a Relation’s Magnitude is determined by the interaction between the two Beings involved. To get a better idea of this interaction, we need to talk about Resonance and the vibration model of Juice.
When vibrations (such as sound waves) are modeled, they are shown as a line that curves up and down in a wave-like pattern; this pattern allows us to find two basic attributes: the vibration’s amplitude (which is the height of a wave peak measured from the baseline) and the vibration’s frequency (number of times a wave peak passes a point in a time frame; in sound, frequency is strongly related to the tone of a sound). When looking at Juice we can use the same diagram, but instead of amplitude we have Magnitude and for tone we have Flavor. Juice is compared based on Magnitude, with higher Magnitude meaning stronger Juice. Flavor can affect Magnitude through the phenomenon of Resonance.
When two Beings interact, the Relation which is their medium becomes a product of the appropriate Juice from each. If the two composing Flavors are in Resonance (or, more accurately, in positive Resonance), the Magnitude of their Relation’s Juice will be higher than the natural result. We could consider Resonance as being the real number scale from positive 1 to negative 1, with a Resonance of 1 being an infinite increase in Magnitude, Resonance 0 meaning a Magnitude equal to the midpoint between the composing Magnitudes, and Resonance negative 1 meaning a Magnitude of 0. Especially in the case of a Simple Determination, then, the question of Resonance is crucial for the final result.
Of course, in talking about Juice we are mostly talking about Facets and Aura, but does the Being’s Locus have any role? Yes: as the thing which the Aura accretes around, the Locus is the ground for any understanding of the Being. This is obvious for Living Beings — one’s perception of a person is certainly based in some way on what that person actually does, even if heavily mediated/interpreted/etc. For Non-Material Beings, I think the contemporary reader will easily accept that such a Locus is empty; it is a “location” in the sense of being coordinates but if there was no real place there, like a web address whose owners can change the website at will. Nothing affects one’s perceptions of an idea except the perceptions that other people have about it. In the case of Material Beings, though — that is, not “chair” (which is a concept) but “this specific chair” — the Locus is not empty, it is made of matter. We can call this material Locus a Referent.
Does the Referent create meaning? No, it does not. It is a Locus and these never create their own “meaning” or Aura, not even the active Locus called the Ego; meaning only comes through perception. To explain the Referent, let’s return to “this specific chair.” Let’s say that “this specific chair” is a high-backed wooden chair with four legs. Now let’s say I’m talking with an alien called Bootsy about this chair. Now Bootsy, who comes from another dimension, has no reason to agree with me on any of the attributes I laid out. Maybe his people are 9 feet tall on average, so this chair has quite a low back to him, or maybe he considers the chair’s four legs to make up a single unit called the “flange structure”. The point is that statements we make about this Being must reflect the Referent if they are to resonate. Believing a chair’s four legs are actually a single flange structure would strike us as an odd view, but if Bootsy then said “and it ends in 20 flange-lets” he would simply be uncredible. It must end in 4 flange-lets, otherwise there is no way I would be convinced.
I don’t consider myself to be a materialist but I do recognize that this typology which I’ve laid out privileges material reality: rather than just being a voice among many, matter creates Referents which must be obeyed. I do think that this system is generalizable to more than just the material world, though the material is always useful. Firstly, I’d ask you to consider the basic Locus-Aura form of Being to be the standard, with the Referent-Aura and Ego-Aura variations being used to simplify processes that require more work to isolate. Ideally, I would see this model as being reducible entirely to Locus-Aura and Relations. Secondly, rather than seeing this typology as binding for all reality, see it as working within the system of material reality. Even if matter is not the whole stuff of existence, we must admit that we cannot escape material restrictions while we inhabit this reality, one of which being that matter is undeniable. If I say there is a chair in your path, you can fail to hear me, ignore what I said, disagree that you are moving, not know what chairs are, disbelieve in gravity, think that you are incorporeal, and so on, but if you move into the thing which I will call a chair you will impact it. This nature of material reality also has implications for our construction of meaning. It means that matter can be credibly perceived in different ways but cannot be credibly denied. The Referent does not create meaning but it does direct Perception and meaning-making based on its material qualities.
Many gaps and unexplored roads remain in this model, I’m aware of that. This is a sketch which requires definition. There is, however, one final bit of speculation which I feel I’m obligated to present: how does one get Juice? Resonance affects a Relation, it does not alter the Magnitude of a Facet’s Juice. Restricting this conversation to the Facet level, Juice of Facet A relative to Facet B is actually granted by Facet B, and vice versa. This granting is a mode of Manipulation and it works on the logic of undiminished giving or emanation. Facet B’s Juice may fluctuate but isn’t a finite resource such that B must lose for A to gain. It is the emotion or event of regard that one has for another. No one loses when showing respect.
With this I’ve laid out the first version of the Juice-as-Power model and I hope that I’ve made my points clearly. Juice is the potential for influencing the Relational Field. My goal with this definition was to make it as demonstrably neutral as possible so that it can be applied to a variety of social & political situations rather than being restricted to studying quote-unquote “power relations”. This is the first part in a planned series of five critiquing the thought of Nietzsche, and though this is the least traditional piece, its place as a point of difference between myself and Nietzsche will become more relevant as the series continues.