divertissement
Music: Marilyn Manson: Eat Me, Drink Me (2007)
Gorgias of Leontini: "I have by means of speech removed disgrace from a woman; . . . I wished to write a speech which would be a praise of Helen and a diversion to myself."
Dr. Juice of Austin:
or,
Agentic Orientation as Magical Thinking
Joshua Gunn and Dana L. Cloud
University of Texas at Austin
Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.
---Aleister Crowley (1991, p. 27)
By its regression to magic under late capitalism, thought is assimilated to late capitalist forms.
---Theodor Adorno (1994, p. 129).
Almost a decade ago anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff advanced the provocative thesis that globalization in late capitalism has led to "a dramatic intensification . . . of appeals to enchantment," often most discernable in industrializing countries such as South Africa (1999, p. 282). From "get rich quick" pyramid-schemes to email promises from millionaire widows in Nigeria, "capitalism has an effervescent new spirit—a magical, neo-Protestant zeitgeist—welling up close to its core" (p. 281). Of course, over a half-century ago Theodor Adorno inveighed against astrology and soothsaying as indices of economic magic, underscoring the ability of capitalism to promote the "doctrine of the existence of spirit" so central to bourgeois consciousness. "In the concept of mind-in-itself," argued Adorno, "consciousness has ontologically justified and perpetuated privilege by making it independent of the social principle by which it is constituted. Such ideology explodes in occultism: it is Idealism come full circle" (1994, p. 133). What the Comaroffs point to is not the arrival of a new forms of magical thinking, then, but the intensification and proliferation of post-enlightenment gullibility via globalization—ironically in what is presumably the age of cynical reason (e.g., Sloterdijk, 1987).
In the United States magical thinking has indeed intensified, and perhaps no more obviously than with Rhonda Byrne's repackaging of the wisdom of Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). Both a best-selling DVD and a book, Byrne's The Secret purports to reveal a centuries old teaching, dubbed "the law of attraction," that "can give you whatever you want" (2006, p. xi). The law of attraction is simply this: "Everything that's coming into your life you are attracting into your life. And it's attracted to you by virtue of the images you're holding in your mind. It's what you're thinking" (p. 4). In the hour-and-a-half DVD and the 200 page book, various experts and "teachers of The Secret" explain that the key to wealth and prosperity is making sure that the mind's thought frequencies are appropriately and positively tuned. For example, in the DVD a scene is shown of a number of businessmen in a darkened room smoking cigars; in a voice-over the "philosopher" Bob Proctor explains:
Why do you think that 1 percent of the population earns around 96 percent of all the money that's being earned? Do you think that's an accident? It's designed that way. They understand something. They understand The Secret . . . . (p. 6)
They understand, Proctor continues, that the secret to their success is visualization, that imaging one is wealthy leads one, magically, to wealth. Undoubtedly, The Secret is the most blatant and profitable exemplar of enchantment and magical thinking in our time.
The idea that one can become wealthy by thinking about money, of course, is patently absurd, and yet The Secret has sold millions of copies and, at the time of this writing, has remained on the New York Times Bestseller List for over twenty weeks. Adorno would explain the appeal of The Secret 's as a "regression of thought," meaning that belief in the "magnetic mind" is a classically infantile way of thinking. Usually most conspicuous in children, "magic thinking," explains Martin Burgy, "is characterized just by the nonexistence of a clear dividing line between the ego and the object," the belief that one's mental will alone can manifest profound material changes (2001, p. 70). Freud would suggest that such beliefs are bone of infantile fantasies of omnipotence, and thus an adult who entertains the possibility that her brainwaves can alter the social and economic conditions of her immediate environment is—however unconsciously—"regressing" to a childhood world of make-believe. The Secret is thus not only a perfect representative of the contemporary enchantment of capitalism, but an index of popular infantalization in the United States.
A presumption behind such negative judgments of magical thinking, of course, is that as academics—as Freud was fond of writing—we "have been taught better" (1998, p. 132). Yet insofar as the academy is not absented from the social totality, a materialist viewpoint urges us to abandon such a conceit; as human beings academics are just as susceptible to magical thinking and narcissistic fantasies of omnipotence as everyone else. Perhaps because at some level communication scholars tend to entertain a sense of the magical in the idea of communication (see Peters, 1999), we have been particularly prone to a philosophical belief in what we term "magical voluntarism," the idea that human agency is best understood as the ability to control a given phenomenon through the proper manipulation of symbols (e.g., language; see Cloud, 2005). Magical voluntarism is a type of magical thinking typified by The Secret : "Your life right now is a reflection of your thoughts. That includes all great things, and all the things you consider not so great. Since you attract to you what you think about most, it is easy to see what your dominant thoughts have been on every subject of your life, because that is what you experienced" (Byrne, 2006, p. 9). Unfortunately, as a recent essay in this journal by Sonja K. Foss, William J. Waters, and Bernard J. Armada (2007) demonstrates, we are witnessing both a regression of thought and a dramatic intensification of magical thinking in communication studies under the aegis of "theories of agency."
In this essay we advance a conception of agency as a question in order to combat magical thinking in communication theory. Although we approach the idea of agency from different theoretical standpoints (one of us from the perspective of psychoanalysis, the other, orthodox Marxism), we are mutually opposed to the (bourgeois) idealism of magical voluntarism in recent work in communication and rhetorical studies on agency. Our primary vehicle of argument is a critique of Foss, Waters, and Armada's essay, "Toward a Theory of Agentic Orientation: Rhetoric and Agency in Run Lola Run," which represents a magical voluntaristic brand of practical reason (phronesis) common among a number rhetorical scholars (pop in some peeps here). We are particularly alarmed by the suggestion that even in "situations" such as "imprisonment or genocide . . . agents have choices about how to perceive their conditions and their agency . . . [which] opens up opportunities for innovating . . . in ways unavailable to those who construct themselves as victims" (Foss, Waters, and Armada, p. 33). The idea that one can choose an "agentic orientation" despite material limitation not only ignores two decades of research within communication studies on agency and its limitations (and is thus "regressive"), but tacitly promotes an occultic individualism and infantilism at the expense of collective action and dialectical thought.
To this end we first briefly survey the field's literature on agency and contextualize Foss, Waters, and Armada's essay in respect to recent discussions of agency among rhetorical scholars. Magical voluntarism, we suggest, is better understood as a facile response to the challenge posed to communication scholars by the posthumanist turn in the theoretical humanities. Then, after briefly summarizing Foss, Waters, and Armada's argument, we advance an alternative reading of their primary exemplar, Run Lola Run, as a homologous antecedent to Byrne's bestselling The Secret . We conclude by urging a renewed attention to an older, more durable, thoroughly disenchanted approach to the question of agency: dialectics.