more on magickal agency

Music: Burial: HDBC0001 (2006)

I've decided to focus on my work with other people for a while. I enjoy coauthoring things . The essay with Tom on Fight Club is finished, so for the last few days I've been focusing on my essay with Dana. Then, I'll turn to my work with Shaun on 28 Days Later and with Chris on "The Six Myths of Psychoanalysis." Finally, I may try to write that thing about Tom Cruise. Then I'll get busy with my book.

I made pretty good progress today on the essay I'm writing with Dana, "Phronesis Trouble in Run Lola Run and The Secret, or, Agential Orientation as Magical Voluntarism." Some time ago I posted the introduction. Today I finished up the second part (which Dana will then go through and re-write and stuff, but this is just a blog and a nice place to work-it-out). The tone is a lot more, er, a lot more alarmist and aggressive than is my tendency. I just don't like to get frugly with anyone. However, insofar as the criticisms we make below are the very same ones I made to the authors as one of the original blind reviewers---criticisms that they ignored---I reckon the tone is more than justified. Anyhoo, without further ado:

I. Agency in Rhetorical Studies

. . . let me say that reports of the death of the author are greatly exaggerated. . . . rhetors/authors, because they are linked to cultures and collectivities, must negotiate among institutional powers and are best described as "points of articulation" rather than originators.

--Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (2005, p. 5)

Foss, Waters, and Armada frame their essay on "agentic orientation" as an answer to John Lucaites' call for identifying "the wide range of options by which agency . . . is constituted in particular rhetorical performances," which they interpret as a cartographic project that can lead to a better understanding of the choices available to people "in the rhetorical process" (2007, p. 3). Insofar as human agency and its limits have always been a concern for rhetoricians (see Leff, 2003), what is immediately unclear in this justification is the exigency for such a call and answer. Some readers of The Present Journal may be unaware that Lucaites' call for a typology of agency was made in the context of a 2003 meeting of rhetoricians in Evanston, Illinois, under the authority of the Alliance of Rhetorical Societies (ARS). A broader contextualization of Lucaites' call within the problemmatics introduced at the ARS conference helps to frame Foss, Waters, and Armada's essay in terms of (1) a reaction to posthumanism in the theoretical humanities and (2) the work that has been done by rhetorical scholars on the question of agency that Foss, Waters, and Armada willfully ignore.

The formation of ARS was initiated by Fred Antczak, Gerard Hauser, Robert Gaines, Michael Leff, and others affiliated with the Rhetoric Society of America. The alliance was forged to overcome disciplinary and institutional divisions and to encourage collaboration among scholars of rhetoric currently housed in Communication, English, and composition and writing programs. To date ARS has had only one meeting, yet another is in the works. The well-attended conference in 2003 featured four keynote speakers selected to inspire discussions in break-out sessions around four key themes: rhetorical agency; understanding the rhetorical tradition; institutional and social goals for rhetorical scholars; and rhetorical pedagogy. Prior to the conference participants were asked to submit short position papers on one of the key themes, which were subsequently distributed and shared with small, ten-to-twelve member discussion groups.

Foss, Waters, and Armada's attention to Lucaites' call for a multiplicity of standpoint-oriented analyses fails to note the positions of forty-one scholars who also participated in the discussions on agency. This inattention leads them to elide the crucial exigency for the contemporary critical and theoretical investments underpinning current scholarship on (rhetorical) agency. "Since agency has traditionally been understood as property of an agent, the decentering of the subject-the death of the author/agent-signals a crisis for agency," suggests Carolyn R. Miller (2007, p. 143). And as Cheryl Geisler notes, a strong preoccupation with postmodern and poststructural theory among ARS participants was in reaction to this perceived crisis:

Most scholars at the ARS acknowledged, explicitly or implicitly, that recent concern with the question of rhetorical agency arises from the post-modern critique of the autonomous agent. As articulated by Gaonkar more than a decade ago, this critique faults traditional rhetoric for an "ideology of agency," viewing "the speaker as origin rather than articulation, strategy as intentional, discourse as constitutive of character and community, ends that bind in common purpose." (2005, p. 10; also see Gaonkar, 1997 [1993])

Although it would be better to say discussions of agency at the ARS meeting were in response to the posthumanist turn in the theoretical humanities and not "post-modernism" (Gunn, 2006; Lundberg and Gunn, 2005), the interest in understanding agency today directly descends from the challenges posed to the self-transparent, fully conscious agent by numerous philosophers and theorists in the last two centuries (e.g., Adorno, Althusser, Baudrillard; Butler; Derrida; Foucault, Freud; Heidegger; Lacan; Marx; Nietzsche; and so on). For example, Sigmund Freud and numerous psychoanalytic thinkers have been telling us for more than a century that our choices are never fully conscious and often motivated by unconscious desires. Karl Marx and numerous materialist thinkers have also been telling us for more than a century that economic ideology and the material arrangement of basic resources causes us to invest in our own unhappiness. More contemporary theorists, such as Judith Butler and Fredric Jameson, have also clarified the constraints on human agency and political action posed by material limitation and ideological interpellation (Butler, 1990; Butler, 1993, Jameson, 1991). We might, then, frame the discussions at the ARS conference as attempts to answer a very basic but important question: how does the rejection of the self-transparent and conscious agent in the theoretical humanities impact how we think about rhetorical agency? How should we respond to the resulting crisis? Although space limits any thorough discussion of the answers rhetorical scholars have developed, a brief typology is helpful.

One way scholars have addressed the crisis of rhetorical agency is by embracing the posthumanist turn. "Posthumanism" is simply shorthand for the critique of the self-transparent, autonomous subject that is sometimes said to begin with Heidegger's critique of humanism (Gunn, 2006). Posthumanism is often erroneously equated with "postmodernism" and "poststructuralism," although the latter share an investment in the former. There are many different posthumanist theories, however, what they all share is a decentering of the all-powerful, choice-driven, radically free subject and an attention to larger structural, material, or discursive objects that limit and/or constitute the subject. In Communication Studies, much of the work in posthumanism has been conducted under the aegis of "subjectivity" and/or "ideology," which helps to resituate agency as a capacity--not necessarily a human one--for action that is both constrained and enabled by structures, contexts, and so on (e.g., see Cooren, 2007). Although many scholars would first locate the posthumanist turn in the work of Dilip Gaonkar (Geisler, 2004, p. 10; see Gaonkar 1997 [1993]), perhaps no scholar has been more influential in promoting posthumanist stances toward agency than Barbara Biesecker. In her widely-read essay on the work of Foucault, the crisis of agency is recast in terms of the question of resistance: "critical rhetoricians and their discourses do not set practices of resistance into motion but, rather, are themselves set into motion by those practices" (1992, p. 361).

The posthumanist reversal of the locus of agency from the individual to the exterior (e.g., discourse, technique, and so on) is also reflected in Bisecker's critique of the work of Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and others, whose focus on the rhetoric of discrete, individual women, argues Biesecker, unwittingly rehabilitates the figure of the autonomous agent. Ironically, the figure of the autonomous agent is fundamentally phallogocentric and essentialist (Biesecker, 1992). In a similar vein, arguing that the crisis of agency is wrongly saddled with the normative goal of political effectivity, Ronald Walter Greene has argued for recasting rhetorical agency as "a form of living labor" that frees theorists from the task of specifying its precise ontological locus in an individual person (2004, p. 2). Related posthumanist conceptions of rhetorical agency abound: Christopher Lundberg and Joshua Gunn have critiqued discussions of agency that formulate the concept as a power or substance which can be owned or possessed. Instead, they advance a "negative theology of the subject" that would resist any final statement on what agency is or how it is manifest-an ethical and dispositional orientation instead of an epistemic or ontological one (2004, p. 102). Kendall R. Phillips' recent work develops the notion of a "rhetorical maneuver" to help specify a mode of agency that can contend with the complexities of a subject of multiplicity in relation to the "constraining nature of the subject position," material limitation, ideological subjectiviation, and so on (2006). Drawing on the work of Michel Meyer, who "reformulates the foundational and the human in terms of questioning," Nick Turnbull has argued for a "rhetorical anthropology" that locates a capacity for action in the cognitive act of questioning as such (p. 221, 2004). Our gloss of these theorists' work, of course, does not exhaust the posthumanist work being done on rhetorical agency, but it is suggestive, nevertheless, of a strong, decades-long investment in theorizing a posthumanist understanding of rhetorical agency (also see Crowley, 1992; Charland, 1987; McGee 1978; McGee 1995; McKerrow, 1983; Wander, 1984; Wander, 1995).

The second way scholars have addressed the crisis of agency is characteristically dialectical, which represents an attempt to reckon with the challenges of posthumanism while not abandoning, entirely, various components of the humanist tradition: agency is to be situated somewhere between subject and structure, a meeting place of interiors and exteriors. This understanding of rhetorical agency is perhaps the most popular and satisfying one among rhetorical scholars. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's widely read and award-winning keynote address at the ARS conference, "Agency: Promiscuous and Protean," summarizes the dialectical position well:

In a nutshell, I propose that agency (1) is communal and participatory, hence, both constituted and constrained by externals that are material and symbolic; (2) is "invented" by authors who are points of articulation; (3) emerges in artistry and craft; (4) is effected through form; and (5) is perverse, that is, inherently protean, ambiguous, open to reversal. (2005, p. 2)

Notably, Campbell's statement on the state of agency does not attempt to reverse the posthumanist turn, but rather, sets-out to reconcile the theoretical perspectives of Judith Butler and Michelle Balif with close textual reading practices that, until the crisis of agency, were assumed to have singular, self-transparent authors. Similarly, John Lucaites' call to jettison agency as a concept and locate it, instead, in historically particular rhetorical performances "in relationship to a set of perceived or constituted tensions . . . between cultural, institutional, and technological norms and structures" is a theoretical compromise: agency is best understood on a case-by-case basis, leading to multiplicity of conceptions of agency (2003, paras. 1-2). Carolyn R. Miller's recharacterization of agency as an attribution that makes certain kinds of symbolic action possible also figures a subject's actions between the constraints of an exterior and the motives of an interior (2007).

The most widely known, explicitly dialectical positions on agency in rhetorical studies, however, are those of James Arnt Aune, Dana Cloud, and other Marxist critics. For example, critical of certain posthumanist theories of agency (namely, those of Greene), Cloud, Macek, and Aune argue that social groups, especially class-based groups, harbor a real capacity for political action: Either workers and their allies claim the real agency of that they possess and take the chance of making a world in which they are free in body as well as mind; or they resign themselves to generation after generation of grinding exploitation, settling for the meaningful but insufficient consolations of sporadic, creative, ungrounded, and symbolic resistance. (2006, p. 81) Agency is featured as something to be possessed, however, that possession is only sufficiently political in groups. To believe that one can individually effect political change, or worse, to believe that one is powerless to effect political change, is to succumb to oppressive structures, economic and otherwise. Again, agency is located in the tensions between a larger structure and the (collective) subject (also see Jameson 1977).

Finally, the third and increasingly unpopular way that scholars have addressed the question of agency is by simply avoiding it. Avoidance is usually achieved by recourse to pragmatic or rehabilitative humanism, both of which amplify classical notions of volunteerism in the name of "tradition." Recourse to pedagological ends is a frequent pragmatic argument that is made to side-step the challenge of posthumanism. For example, responding to Lundberg and Gunn's negative theology of the subject, Lisa Strom Villadsen writes that even if one concedes that

the general discussion of rhetorical agency has its share of jargon, that does not force us to accept the authors' radically "hospitable" conceptualization of rhetorical agency as something that "possesses" an agent. Where they see an unproductive element of "ontotheology" in rhetorical theory and criticism, I suggest a focus on the need, especially in pedagogical contexts, for more accessible discussions of rhetorical agency in rhetorical criticism. Moreover, even if some of the theoretical discussion about rhetorical agency repeats traditional thoughts on rhetoric in a new vocabulary, this does not necessarily undercut its significance. Rather, it may promote the accessibility of new ideas to students and researchers alike by virtue of moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar. Thus, I maintain that by studying rhetorical agency as it is played out in fairly familiar rhetorical forms . . . and from a perspective of classically based theory . . . we stand to enhance our understanding of a concept as it is applied in specific acts of rhetorical criticism. (2008, p. 29)

We cite Villadsen at some length to underscore the labor required to avoid the posthumanist critique. Dismissing an argument because it is deemed inaccessible for the classroom seems strange, yet it is a pragmatic-humanist move that is sometimes made (e.g., Geisler, 2005).

The counterpart to the pragmatic retreat, however, is the kind of rehabilitative humanism that asserts agency involves a self-conscious, self-transparent subject who is condemned to make choices, and in so doing, directs the course of her life entirely by will alone: magical volunterism. In light of the posthumanist critique, as well as the negotiation with the project of the posts represented in the dialectical position, a return to any radical form of volunteerism seems not only nostalgic, but righteously wrong-headed. Yet this is the position that Foss, Waters, and Armada curiously advocate, and to which we now turn.

II. The Perils of Positive Thinking: Agentic Orientation as Make-Believe

. . . there is no hypothetical moment in which agency actually gets 'free' of structure; it is not, in other words, some pure Kantian transcendental will.

--Mustafa Emirbayer & Ann Mische (1998, p. 1004)

So far we have rehearsed three basic positions in relation to the crisis of agency among rhetorical scholars: the posthumanist embrace, the dialectical negotiation, and avoidance via the pragmatic or rehabilitative humanist retreat. We have reviewed these many stances on agency to properly contextualize Foss, Waters, and Armada's essay as one that summarily ignores decades of research on agency-especially those studies that would challenge their understanding. Moreover, we find their deliberate avoidance of the posthumanist challenge to rhetorical theory troubling.2 By failing to engage posthumanism and to properly contextualize their intervention in rhetorical studies, Foss, Waters, and Armada advance an under-researched theory of agency that many readers of the Journal of Communication-especially those who are not steeped in the rhetorical literature-may mistake as legitimate or reflective of a common stance taken among rhetorical scholars. Quite to the contrary: Foss, Waters, and Armada's theory of agentic orientation is actually a regression to an understanding of the subject few rhetorical scholars still hold, as most have adopted either the posthumanist or dialectical stance. Although we subscribe to different positions on agency ourselves (one of us embraces posthumanism, the other, dialectical agency), it is nevertheless our intent to put an end to the naïve and politically harmful embrace of magical voluntarism in Communication Studies. Too much labor and thought has been invested in pushing theory forward toward more complex, nuanced, and critical understandings of subjectivity and agency to allow Foss, Waters, and Armada's theory to stand uncontested.

They Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: Lola's "Almost Magical Power"

Foss, Waters, and Armada presumably advance their theory in response to Lucaite's call for a standpoint-dialectical approach to agency, yet what they end up advancing is a "rhetorical mechanism" that privileges an individual agent who "may choose any agentic orientation and produce any outcome they desire" (33). After a simplistic, paragraph-long review of extant literature, they define their project in the following way:

We want to take the conversation about rhetoric and agency in a somewhat different direction [than reviewed approaches], which is to theorize a rhetorical mechanism-agentic orientation-that provides various options for the enactment of agency. Agentic orientation is a pattern of interaction that predisposes an individual to a particular enactment of agency. Thus, it is not unlike Bordieu's (1990) "habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures" (p. 10). Although a construct that others have referenced (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 964), agentic orientation has not been sufficiently developed to constitute a practice option for understanding agency. Our aim in this essay is to explicate the nature and function of agentic orientation and the options available to agents through its application. (206)

They then turn to the German film Run Lola Run and extract a tripartite scheme for analyzing agentic orientation in terms of "structure," or the ways in which a subject interprets his or her situation; "act," or the selection of a response to the situation; and "outcome," which refers to the result of a subject's interpretation and choice of action.

As many readers are likely aware, Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run is a fast-paced action film about a young woman, Lola (played by Franka Potente) and her partner, Manni (played by Moritz Bleitreu). The basic plot is simple: after mistakenly losing the money of a gangster boss, Lola and Manni are forced to come up with 100,000 deutsche marks or Manni will likely be killed. The film unfolds in three parts, each part representing different choices and different results, much like a video-game in which one has three "lives" to with the game. After defining agency as "action that influences or exerts some degree of control" (p. 7), Foss, Waters, and Armada characterize the three "runs" of the film as "victim," as "supplicant," and as "director." In the first run they argue Lola adopts the persona of victim because she understands her structural situation as controlling; her response is self-inflicted punishment (in the film she dies; pp. 209-212). The authors characterize the second run as a Foucauldian accession to the demands of her situation; Lola thus results to "petitioning" the hegemonic structure for help, and again is unsuccessful (Manni dies; pp. 212-215). Finally, analyzing the third run, Foss, Waters, and Armada argue that Lola interprets her structural conditions as possible resources and responds by "innovating." Manni and Lola "use rhetoric to act and direct themselves," they argue, and in ways that often appear extraordinary:

The power that results when individuals engage their worlds as directors is demonstrated in the third run. . . . Lola has come at last to awareness and adoption of the powerful agency of the director. Lola's apparent ability to control the roulette wheel in the casino through the unusual act of a scream also suggests such power. As she leaves the casino, the bystanders who gather to watch her go are awestruck by her power . . . . they recognize that Lola has freed herself from the game of chance. Lola's healing of the security guard in the ambulance is another example of her almost magical power. . . . Because the source of her power is her own interpretation, which is free from the influence, control, or determination of structure, she has unlimited access to innovate rhetorical options. (p. 218-219)

Of course, bending the laws of physics and biology is magic, but instead of acknowledging this fact, Foss, Waters, and Armada move to characterize and advocate the perspective advanced by Run Lola Run as one that "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" (220). Such a view, of course, is certainly the opposite of posthumanist perspectives on agency that acknowledge constructionism but reverses the direction of agency to the exterior. Such a view is also a very far cry from any dialectical approach, which would acknowledge and identify the limits and possibilities for action in respect to oppressive structures. Rather, this magical perspective has more in common with that of Rhonda Byrne, who also aligns "the secret" with quantum physics in terms of the law of attraction: "through this most powerful law, your things become the things in your life. Your thoughts become things" (p. 9)! Of course, in real physics opposites attract and thoughts do not metamorphose into material objects. In magic, however, all things are possible!

Magical Agency! Run Lola Run as The Secret

Before we advance our alternative reading of a "text," it is important to underscore that Foss, Waters, and Armada have taken the term "agentic orientation" from a ground-breaking essay in the field of sociology by Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische (1998), "What is Agency?" Although Emirbayer and Mische's essay is frequently cited and spans some 61 pages in length, Foss, Waters, and Armada argue that "agentic orientation has not been sufficiently developed to constitute a theoretical and practical option for understanding agency" (206). Attention to Emirbayer and Mische's theory reveals, however, that the kind of sufficient development Foss, Waters, and Armada had in mind was simply to ignore it:

Theoretically, our central contribution is to begin to reconceptualize human agency as a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its habitual aspect), but also oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects . . . ). The agentic dimension of social action can only be captured in its full complexity, we argue, if it is analytically situated within the flow of time. (963)

Emirbayer and Mische continue by arguing the situation is more complicated when we also situate "structural contexts" for agency as "temporal as well as relational fields" (964). For them, agentic orientation is not simply an interpretation of possible responses to structure, but a temporal orientation. Paradoxically, even though Run Lola Run is fundamentally about "do-overs"-going back in time and imagining possible futures-Foss, Waters, and Armada choose to focus on atemporal personae; they neglect to note that the "orientation" of the original conception of "agentic orientation" refers to temporal structures. Moreover, Emirbayer and Mische insist that "there is no hypothetical moment in which agency actually gets 'free' of structure; it is not, in other words, some pure Kantian transcendental will" (p. 1004). And yet Foss, Waters, and Armada argue that independent of "economic and other structural conditions," individuals may choose any agentic orientation and produce any outcome they desire" (p. 223). In short, Foss, Waters, and Armada have grossly mischaracterized and misapplied Emirbayer and Mische's dialectical understanding of "agentic orientation," transforming it into something quite different-quite, well, monolithic.

Rather that attempt to advance the "correct" application of agentic orientation to Run Lola Run, we think it would be more respectful to Emirbayer and Mische's work at this juncture to simply replace the concept with a term that better describes Foss, Waters, and Armada's position: magical volunteerism. As we previously noted, magical volunterism refers to the deliberate misrecognition of structural limitation and the ways in which an individual's ability to act is constrained or repressed by economic logics, oppressive ideologies, and material arrangements.3 A comparison of Foss, Waters, and Armada's theory of magical volunterism to Rhonda Byrne's The Secret helps us to better identify its mystical, quasi-religious idealism.

Notes

[1] As we explain below, "recognition" is something of a problem: how does one discern the limits of individual agency? How does one know something oppressive is at hand? The answer is dialogical: one requires others for recognition. Radical individualism is, in this sense, synonymous with magical voluntarism.

[2] We should disclose that one of us was an original, blind reviewer for Foss, Waters, and Armada's essay, and that these claims were made in the blind review to the authors. Instead of choosing to address the problem posthumanism posed for their theory, they simply cut out any discussion of the crisis of agency altogether. In short, our critique came after the authors passed up an opportunity to address the issue.

[3] As we explain below, "recognition" is something of a problem: how does one discern the limits of individual agency? How does one know something oppressive is at hand? The answer is dialogical: one requires others for recognition. Radical individualism is, in this sense, synonymous with magical voluntarism.

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That's all for now! I got to get ready to meet a friend in anticipation of the Clinton and Obama debate!