more on materialism and magick

Music: Judge Joe Brown

An air-conditioner repairman is busy in the bathroom attempting to stem the tide of water that continues to flood out of the ceiling. This after the previous repair company failed to fix the problem twice. Water damage bonanza, of course, sagging ceiling and all, but nothing like last summer thank Goddess. Now I have to see if the first company will repair the water damage caused by their gaffe (note the "e," I've added to gaff, dearest Eric).

[Later edit: nope, the guy who caused the water damage is denying the whole thing; it's either small claims court or insurance claim---I await the adjuster's phone call.]

Sheesh, people. I'm not so sure home-owning is for me; I have my doubts and I now understand why people buy "new" instead of charming and old.

Meanwhile, I write. After Bryan's stellar comps defense on all things Marxist (including Leninist vanguardism!), today I'm pumped to finish drafting the essay I'm writing with Dana ( introduction here and more here). Basically, we're critiquing what we call "magical voluntarism," the "old" self-transparent view of agency but with a bonus: that one can will the material world to change by wishing really, really hard. The vehicle of critique is a recent essay by Foss, Waters, and Armada on Run Lola Run, but our primary object of analysis is The Secret, a ridiculously successful DVD and book of wish-fulfillment clap-trap. Dana loaned me a copy of a recent Oprah show on "the law of attraction" and I simply couldn't believe these "experts" were taking each other seriously. I mean, its one thing to visualize success as a way of achieving it, but it's quite another to believe in magical stoves: this woman cut a picture of a stove out of a catalog one day because she'd really like that model one day. When she had her kitchen remodeled, she completely forgot about her wished-for stove and picked another model. They installed not one, but two of the other model stoves and neither would work properly. Then she remembered her dream stove and bit the bullet and had it installed: it worked perfectly! It must be "the law of attraction." I shit you not people were gasping in awe and nodding in agreement.

Could it be all my nasty home repairs are a consequence of my worrying about nasty home repairs? When will the endless cycle of repairs stop?

Anyhoo, it's hard to stay measured when writing about something as ridiculous as The Secret. And, the damn scheme only confirms my commitment to writing a self-help book under a pseudonymn. Basically, I want to plagiarize Plato's Phaedrus, dress it up in different metaphors, turn Phaedrus into a Phaedra (so the erotic mentoring angle is going), and make a million convincing people that a sexless love of the Divine Principle is the key to happiness. Then, when Oprah has me on her show, I will pull a Frey and reveal it was all a sham but, unlike Frey, my message will be positive: sometimes we are not responsible for our own conditions and sometimes structural change, not individual struggles with our inner-brats, is necessary to make the world a better place.

Anyhoot, I could ramble on but the day is wastin' and I actually should be writing over there instead of in here. I'm pasting in a little tease of yesterday's progress:

III. The Secret: Magical Volunteerism as Make-Believe

By the end of their reading of Run Lola Run, Foss, Waters, and Armada extract a theory of "agentic orientation" that emerges as both a "mechanism" for rhetorical criticism and an ideal toward which people should aspire. As a mechanism, agentic orientation can be discerned in a text/reality by attending to the conscious analysis and choices a given individual (real or fictional) makes in respect to structure, possible actions, and the outcome of the chosen action. As an ideal, however, the authors suggest the director orientation is "superior" (p. 219) and characterize the ideal in the following way: (1) a director understands that structural conditions can be manipulated such that "desires are affirmed and supported" (p. 215); (2) a director understands structural conditions as "resources" for "innovation" (p. 215); (3) a director understands structures as social constructions because "symbols create reality" (p. 216; p. 220); (4) a director exhibits "individual responsibility and independence" or "self-responsibility" such that "there is no expectation that others are responsible for meeting [his or her] needs or desires" (pp. 215-216); and (5) a director self-consciously chooses which agentic orientation to adopt (pp. 220-221). For simplicity, we can reduce these characteristics to three interrelated components: (1) wish-fulfillment through free choice and will; (2) social constructivism; and (4) radical individualism. The ideal agentic orientation, in other words, is one where an individual, mindful of the symbolic construction of reality, changes reality through conscious, willful choices made independently of others.

What is striking about Foss, Waters, and Armada's ideal is its unusual similarity to the way in which "magic" has been defined and characterized in the last two centuries. The most famous and influential magus of modernity, Aleister Crowley, for example, defines magic (or Magick) as "the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will" (1999, p. 27), which overlaps precisely with the wish-fulfilling element of agentic orientation. Crowley then elaborates a number of "theorems":

1. Every intentional act is a Magical Act. . . .
2. Every successful act has conformed to the postulate [that change occurs through willful force].
3. Every failure proves that one or more requirements of the postulate have not been fulfilled. . . .
4. The first requisite for causing change is through qualitative and quantitative understanding of the conditions. . . .
5. The second requisite of causing any change is the practical ability to set in right in motion the necessary forces. . . .
6. "Every man and woman is a star." That is to say, every human being is instrinsically an independent individual with his own proper character and proper motion. (pp. 28-29)

The Great Magus continues at some length, however, we already see all three components of Foss, Waters, and Armada's ideal agentic orientation reflected in these statements about magic: the magus is an "independent individual" who changes the world in accord with her will through an understanding of the conditions, symbolic and material. Unlike Crowley who recognizes material limitation, however, Foss, Waters, and Armada are even more magical: reality is a creation of symbols and consequently can be changed by force of will alone (p. 220). Insofar as Foss, Waters, and Armada's theory of agentic orientation has striking parallels to a number of theories of magic (see Carpenter, 1996; pp. 57-58; Lurhman, 1989, p. 7), we argue for a better label: "magical volunerism." Magical volunterism refers to any theory of agency that suggests one can fulfill ones needs and desires through the independent, willful manipulation of symbols irrelevant of structural limitation or constraint.

Today magical thinking in the United States is no more conspicuous 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, The Secret purports to reveal a centuries-old teaching, dubbed "the law of attraction," that "can give you whatever you want" (Byrne, 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-in both pseudo-scientific and spiritual terms (brought together in the endorsements of two quantum physicists) that the key to wealth, health, and prosperity is making sure that the mind's thought frequencies are appropriately and positively tuned.

The book and video suggest that The Secret has been wrongly hoarded by the powerful few, making what amounts to an appeal to popular power that, ironically, dislocates popular anger and defuses politically necessary antagonism. 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. To illustrate magical volunteerism, then, we now turn to a comparative analysis of the three basic components of Foss, Waters, and Armada's theory and The Secret, careful to point out what we see as the real world outcomes in each instance. We begin, however, with the most foundational component of each theory: constructivist ontology.

Constructivism

Presumably drawing on the work of Judith Butler (1993, p. 28),[i] Foss, Waters, and Armada argue that orienting oneself as the "director" of one's life

is in tune with a tenet acknowledged by a number of diverse perspectives, ranging from social constructionism to quantum physics. Simply put, it is that symbols create reality . . . . Symbolic choices . . . can and do affect the structural world. . . . Although the reality of everyday life appears prearranged, ordered, and objective, and therefore outside of agents' sphere of influence . . . the structural world not only 'bears cultural constructions' but is itself a construction. (p. 220)

Because the structural world is itself a construction, individuals are capable of changing that world by thinking and making choices about it. Although the authors acknowledge that "agents cannot . . . lay out precisely the routes through which their desires will be fulfilled," they nevertheless believe that "desires are realized in outcomes that align with agents' choices" because of the ontological status of the structural world as a construction (p. 220). The key to understanding the ideal of agentic orientation is full consciousness : in order to change the construction of the world, one must understand what options are available and put faith in unforeseen possibilities yet to come (pp. 220-221). Such a position is entirely in keeping with the "core concept" of magic: "that mind affects matter, and that . . . the trained imagination can alter the physical world" (Luhrman, p. 7).[ii]

Not surprisingly, Rhonda Byrne also aligns "the Secret" with quantum physics (p. 156), however, constructivism appears in The Secret in the guise of "the law of attraction," which Bob Doyle, "author and law of attraction specialist," defines simply as "like attracts like" at "a level of thought." Byrne elaborates:

The law of attraction says like attracts like, and so as you think a thought, you are also attracting like thoughts to you. . . . Your life right now is a reflection of your past thoughts. That includes all the 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 . . . Until now! Now you are learning The Secret, and with this knowledge, you can change everything. (pp. 8-9)

Changing everything depends on understanding the ontological primacy of attraction, which is best grasped as a form of magnetism: "Thoughts are magnetic, and thoughts have a frequency," explains Byrne. "As you think, those thoughts are sent out into the Universe, and they magnetically attract all like things that are on the same frequency" (p. 10). Of course, in a basic seventh grade physics course students learn that magnetism is explained by the attraction of opposites, which is perhaps why The Secret is extra magical!

Nevertheless, as with Foss, Waters, and Armada, Byrne and her army of specialists insist on the constructedness of reality and the mutability of structure. "Time," for example,

is just an illusion. Einstein told us that. If this is the first time you have heard it, you may find it a hard concept to get your head around. . . . What quantum physicists and Einstein tell us is that everything is happening simultaneously. . . . It takes no time for the Universe to manifest what you want. Any time delay you experience is due to your delay in getting to the place of believing, knowing, and feeling that you already have it. (p. 63)

The concept of temporality is used here to teach readers a certain version of constructivism, the version Foss, Waters, and Armada advance in their reading of Run Lola Run: all three runs in the film happen at the same time, but reflect different levels of believing, knowing, and feeling. Once Lola understood the mutability of reality and the power of her manipulation of symbols, she could magically bend the laws of the Universe for money. Similarly, Byrne writes "[i]t's as easy to manifest one dollar as it is to manifest one million dollars" if you simply have the right mindset (p. 68).

Although we do not dismiss certain forms of constructivist thought, it is important to detail the consequence or "outcome" of choosing magical volunterism. Both The Secret and Foss, Waters, and Armada invoke physics to argue that structural change is possible for anything you desire through conscious thought and choice. Hence, magical volunteerism denies that some material and social conditions are not changeable:

Agentic orientations . . . are achieved within, rather than simply given by, the conditions of individuals' lives. Thus, individuals may be in a dominant position as defined by economic and other structural conditions or in a subordinate position as defined by a lack of access to such resources, but they may choose any agentic orientation and produce any outcome they desire. We acknowledge that such a view may be difficult to accept in extreme cases such as imprisonment or genocide; even in these situations, however, agents have choices about how to perceive their conditions and their agency. Even in these situations, adoption of the agentic orientation of director opens up opportunities for innovating in ways unavailable to those who construct themselves as victims. (p. 223, emphasis added)

In other words, the starving prisoner in a concentration camp should choose the director orientation and create the possibility of her liberation or escape.

Aside from the obvious offensiveness of such a perspective on imprisonment and genocide, what is the outcome of adopting this ontological view about "structural" conditions? The Secret is quite clear on the answer: narcissistic complacency. "Anything we focus on we do create," explains Hale Dwoskin, "so if we're really angry, for instance, at a war that's going on, or strife or suffering, we're adding our energy to it" (pp. 141-142). So although the rhetoric of magic exemplified by The Secret acknowledges structural injustice, it gets explained away in mystical terms that urge the reader to turn a back to the world and seek within. The video and book openly discourage social protest, invoking Carl Jung's phrase, "what you resist persists" (p. 142). "Don't give energy to what you don't want," intones one of the video's "teachers." For example, the DVD segment on wealth begins with black-and-white footage of sweatshop laborers in dreary factories, but sweatshops are a mere blip on the screen. Immediately, the text explains that today one can be free from such exploitation and drudgery simply by wishing for money (strangely, one of the "philosophers" invoked in the video to support the idea that the Secret can end exploitation is Henry Ford!). The real-world outcome of the constructivism that supports magical volunteerism is ultimately selfish inaction and complacency. "You cannot help the world by focusing on the negative things," says Byrne. "When I discovered The Secret I made a decision that I would not watch the news or read newspapers anymore, because it did not make me feel good" (pp. 144-145). Perhaps Foss, Waters, and Armada would have Byrne go to the movies instead?

Notes

[i] We object to the use of Butler's work in support of Foss, Waters, and Armada's project. The full citation that the authors marshal in support of their version of social construction is as follows: ". . . this presumption of the material irreducibility of sex has seemed to ground and authorize feminist epistemologies and ethics . . . . In an effort to displace the terms of this debate, I want to ask how and why 'materiality' has become a sign of irreducibility, that is, how it is that the materiality of sex is understood as that which only bears cultural constructions and, therefore, cannot be a cultural construction?" (1993, p. 28). Here Butler is concerned with those who argue that sex is not a social construction, and more specifically, why the materiality of sex is understood as "irreducible." Foss, Waters, and Armada, however, suggest Butler equates the materiality of the body with the structural world and, further, that she would support the argument that "choice is the basic mechanism by which the world is manifest," a statement Butler would rigorously reject as "linguistic relativism."

[ii] Luhrmann is careful to note, however, that change is possible only in "special circumstances, like ritual," a limitation that neither Foss, Waters, and Armada nor Byrne and her specialists acknowledge.