drafted!

Music: Aphex Twin: Ambient Works Volume Two (1994)

Yesterday I finally finished drafting the "magical voluntarism" essay, and just in time for RSA when I'll be presenting it. Today I'll be working on that presentation (at least I hope to) so that I don't have to worry about it next week and can focus, instead, on prepping for summer school. This summer I'm teaching a survey of film theory that I've not taught in four years. I reckon I should brush-up a bit, update some readings, and figure out what movies are possible to show in class.

Meanwhile, this weekend there are multiple commencements, and a number of chums are in town to "walk." I'm looking forward to sitting for the Ph.D. hooding ceremony on Saturday, dressed in my clown-suit, where I'll get to hug and cheer or a number of our goodly folks (all of whom are dutifully employed! w00t!).

In any event, continuing the conversation about The Secret and Foss, Waters, and Armada: we close the essay by calling for a return or re-engagement with dialectics. Dana wrote much of the stuff here, since it's more her bag, but I do side with the dialecticians myself re the critical theory battles (I go with the Frankfurt School, not the "immanence" people). Many of the criticisms of dialectics tend to be leveled at those folks who discuss it as the inner-dynamic of History and social change. I'm particularly taken with Ollman's work, who argues dialectic is a method of analysis and a style of thought, not to be confused with, say, an ontology. In this scheme, class antagonism is a chosen focus, for example. Now, there's some tension here between Dana's views on class and my tendency to see more common cause in Laclau's version of hegemony politics, but hopefully we won't need to highlight that tension. We'll see. Nevertheless, if we can make this conclusion plausible, then perhaps the magical self-transparent subject will be dead once and for all in rhetorical studies?

I mean, the subject has been dead for sometime, which is reason for our "zombie trouble." The dead subject just keeps on coming back, like her cousin, the dead horse. The tentative and drafty conclusion below:

IV. Concluding Remarks: Whither Dialectics?

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
---Karl Marx

In this essay we have advanced an extensive critique of Foss, Waters, and Armada's theory of agentic orientation, arguing that The Secret book and DVD are much better suited as an illustration of their theory. We have argued that the rhetoric of Foss, Waters, and Armada's theory and that of The Secret are typical of "magical voluntarism," an idealist understanding of human agency in which a subject can achieve her needs and desires by simple wish-fulfillment and the manipulation of symbols, irrelevant of structural constraint or material limitation. More specifically, we argued that magical voluntarism features three components: a reliance on constructivism; a belief in wish fulfillment through visualization and the imagination; and a commitment to radical individualism and autonomy. In light of these components, it is important to underscore magical voluntarism is not simply a rehabilitation of the rational, self-transparent and autonomous subject of the Enlightenment; it amplifies the powers of imagination in a manner that is said to transcend material conditions, including the laws of nature. Such a view is consistent with the beliefs and practices of magicians and witches in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Finally, we have argued that an embrace of magical voluntarism leads to narcissistic complacency, regressive infantilism, and elitist arrogance.

Although our primary task in this essay was to advance a critique of the ways in which capitalism enchants and mystifies, we do wish to close our essay with an alternative understanding of agency that takes into account the rhetorical research of the past two decades. If our critique of Foss, Waters, and Armada achieves anything, we trust it is the realization that scholars cannot simply wish-away the problems posed by the project of the posts (posthumanism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and so on) any more than we can wish-away the systematic inequities and structural barriers that prevent millions of people from being the "director" of their own lives. Rather, as scholars and social actors, we must continuously work-thorough the problematic of agency in respect to our "structural" plight.

So how might we continue to work-through the question of agency? Insofar as the antithesis of our position is magical voluntarism, we are left with two directions that are not necessarily mutually exclusive: we can continue to think-through agency in terms of posthuman problemmatics; and we can continue working-through the question of agency dialectically. Dialectical thinking is, in fact, one of the ways in which posthumanist theory and the "middle way" favored by rhetoricians might come together---and is one of the ways in which each author of this essay finds a middle ground of agreement. In closing, we briefly rehearse the basics of dialectics to sound the final death knell of agentic orientation: when we understand how dialectical thinking works, it occurs that we already have the tools at our disposal to continue working through the question of agency without any magic whatsoever.

According to traditional Marxist theory, ordinary people exist in "circumstances transmitted from the past" that shape their consciousness and constrain their action, yet collectively and-in spite of ideological and coercive forces arrayed against them-come to consciousness of their situation, assess the world around them, and plan and enact change in their own interests (need source for quote). Materialist dialectics is a critical and political method that describes actual historical change and affords scholars and activists grounds for political and critical judgment.[1] On this analysis, class position and the experience of exploitation combine to form an epistemological potential in the dialectical contradiction between the lived experience of exploitation and the mystifications of ideology.

In philosophy, dialectics is most often understood as a form of reasoning toward understanding of the whole on the basis of the discovery of contradictions. This sense of the concept of dialectics has its origin in philosophical idealism, such as that of Plato, whose dialogues enact clash in the rarified realm of ideas, aspiring to what he regarded as ever-higher truths; and that of Hegel, whose observation that the self-estrangement produced in relations of unequal power is crucial, but whose solution to estrangement once again involved transcendence of the sensuous, material, political world.[2] Although Marx clearly rejected "thought against thought" as a viable resistance strategy, he and Engels were drawn to Hegel's dialectics as an alternative to either static views of society or theories of automatic linear progress. Materialist dialectics describes the ways in which history unfolds, not as a series of great ideas or scientific reforms, but rather as a product of contending classes, possessing divergent structural interests. Materialist dialectics insists that dynamism is neither metaphysical nor directed from above according to invisible laws or principles. Rather, change unfolds out of contradictions in the existing world.

Although many forms of dialectical thinking have blossomed from Marx's original project (e.g., the "negative dialectics" of Adorno), it is important to underscore it is a style of thinking and not a "science." Because dialectics is associated with Marxism, it is often misunderstood or hastily dismissed. As Bertell Ollman explains,

The dialectic, as such, explains nothing, proves nothing, predicts nothing, and causes nothing to happen. Rather, dialectics is a way of thinking that brings into focus the full range of changes and interactions that occur in the world. As part of this, it includes how to organize a reality viewed in this manner for the purposes of study and how to present the results of what one finds to others, most of whom do not think dialectically. . . . Dialectics restructures our thinking about reality by replacing the common-sense notion of "thing" (as something that has a history and has external connections to other things) with notions of "process" (which contains its history and possible futures) and "relation" (which contains as part of what it is its ties with other relations). (2003, pp. 12-13).

The implications of this view for agency should thus be obvious: individuals do not exist in isolation, but bear the traces of other individuals in such a way that to speak of "agency" as something any one person possess ignores the interactive dynamic of material and social realty. This is not to say an individual does not make choices that affect his or her life. Rather, a dialectical way of thinking about agency sees an individual only in relation to other individuals. Consequently, the individual takes a back seat to interactivity, dialogue, and collectivity.

Insofar as the totality is dynamic and constantly changing---insofar as the material world, inclusive of our relations to each other, is not inert---perhaps we should not settle on any definitive understanding of what agency is, who has or does not have it, and so on? Perhaps-and in much more in keeping with Lucaites' call-agency is only definitively sensible in retrospect and with situational specificity? We are taken with Caroline Williams' suggestion that we should leave the matter of the power and limits of the individual actor as an open question, which seems to us to be compatible with dialectical thought. Speaking of the concept of the subject in Western philosophy, Williams says:

A significant paradox has been noted to pervade the philosophical study of the concept of the subject. Not only do our references to the subject seem to assume the existence of the subject in some form or other, but the repetition of the very question of the subject appears to confirm its structure, a structure which announces itself in the form of the question: "what is the subject?" The circle of referentiality is quite unavoidable. (2001, pp. 191-192)

That we have similarly studied agency in rhetorical and communication theory in the last twenty years suggests a similar question. "What is agency?" presupposes that agency exists, but it does not necessarily isolate it in a discrete human being. How we contend with agency depends on the particular circumstances and material specificity of a given event; to say that agency resides in unbridled free choice is nothing short of magic.

Notes

[1] "Materialist dialectics" as we are using the term is not aligned with Stalin's distorted articulation of "dialectical materialism" or "dia-mat," which in 1938 interpreted Marx and Engels in such a way as to remove the human agent from the process of revolutionary change (see Stalin, 1938).

[2] See any of Plato's dialogues with the Sophists, including Gorgias and Phaedrus (Plato, 1997).