Agentic Orientation as Magical Voluntarism

Communication Theory ISSN 1050-3293

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Agentic Orientation as Magical Voluntarism Joshua Gunn & Dana L. Cloud Department of Communication, University of Texas at Austin, One University Station, Mailcode A1105, Austin, TX 78712

In this essay we argue that the rhetoric of Foss, Waters, and Armada’s recent work on ‘‘agentic orientation,’’ as well as the rhetoric of the popular bestselling DVD and book The Secret, are typical of ‘‘magical voluntarism.’’ Magical voluntarism is an idealist understanding of human agency in which a subject can fulfill her needs and desires by simple wish-fulfillment and the manipulation of symbols, irrelevant of structural constraint or material limitation. Embracing magical voluntarism, we argue, leads to narcissistic complacency, regressive infantilism, and elitist arrogance. A more materialist and dialectical understanding of agency is better. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2009.01349.x

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). Over a decade ago anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff (1999) 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 (p. 282). From ‘‘get rich quick’’ pyramid schemes to e-mail 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 (1994) 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

Corresponding author: Joshua Gunn; e-mail: [email protected] 50

Communication Theory 20 (2010) 50–78 © 2010 International Communication Association

J. Gunn & D.L. Cloud

Agentic Orientation as Magical Voluntarism

independent of the social principle by which it is constituted. Such ideology explodes in occultism: It is Idealism come full circle’’ (p. 133). What the Comaroffs point to is not the arrival of a new form of magical thinking, then, but the intensification and proliferation of postenlightenment gullibility via globalization—ironically in what is presumably the age of cynical reason (e.g., Sloterdijk, 1987). As human beings, academics are just as susceptible to magical thinking and narcissistic fantasies of omnipotence as everyone else. Perhaps because at some level of 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 notion that human agency is better understood as the ability to control a given phenomenon through the proper manipulation of thoughts and symbols (e.g., language). Going well beyond the straightforward idea that our thoughts necessarily influence our actions in transforming the world around us, what we are calling magical voluntarism fosters a deliberate misrecognition of material recalcitrance, an inability to recognize the structural, political, economic, cultural, and psychical limits of an individual’s ability to act in her own interests. Furthermore, magical voluntarism refuses to acknowledge that there is a limit to the efficacy of symbolic action, beyond which persuasion and thought alone fail to shift existing social relations. In popular culture, magical voluntarism is typified by the bestselling book and DVD The Secret (Byrne, 2006; Heriot, 2006), which teach the reader/viewer that ‘‘[y]our 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). The ‘‘magical, neo-Protestant zeitgeist’’ typified by the raging success of The Secret (see McGee, 2007) indicates that enchantment is not limited to developing countries, but is also a crowning achievement of late capitalism in the postindustrial world. Nor is magical thinking limited to popular culture. As a recent essay in this journal by Sonja K. Foss, William J. Waters, and Bernard J. Armada (2007) demonstrates, magical thinking has some purchase in the field of communication studies (see also Geisler, 2005; Villadsen, 2008).1 According to Foss, Waters, and Armada, human agency is simply a matter of consciously choosing among differing interpretations of reality. We argue that the understanding of agency advanced by Foss, Waters, and Armada is informed by the same voluntarist ideology that has enchanted The Secret’s millions of readers. Below we advance a conception of agency as an open question in order to combat magical thinking in contemporary communication theory. Although we approach the concept of agency from different theoretical standpoints (one of us from the perspective of psychoanalysis, the other, classical Marxism), we are mutually opposed to the (bourgeois) idealism of magical voluntarism in recent work in communication and rhetorical studies on agency.2 Our primary vehicle of argument is a critique of Foss, Waters, and Armada’s essay, ‘‘Toward a Theory of Agentic Orientation: Communication Theory 20 (2010) 50–78 © 2010 International Communication Association

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Rhetoric and Agency in Run Lola Run,’’ which represents a magical-voluntaristic brand of practical reason (phronesis) that is increasingly discredited among a number rhetorical scholars. 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’’ (p. 33). The idea that one can choose an ‘‘agentic orientation’’ regardless of context and despite material limitation not only ignores two decades of research within the field of communication studies on agency and its limitations (and is thus ‘‘regressive’’ in more than one sense), but tacitly promotes a belief in wish-fulfillment through visualization and the imagination, as well as a commitment to radical individualism and autonomy. As a consequence, embracing magical voluntarism leads to narcissistic complacency, regressive infantilism, and elitist arrogance. In what follows we first briefly survey the field’s literature on agency and contextualize Foss, Waters, and Armada’s essay in respect to recent discussions among rhetorical scholars. Their 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 alternative readings of their primary exemplar, Run Lola Run. Rather than Run Lola Run, we argue that Byrne’s bestselling The Secret is a better illustration of their theory. We conclude by urging a renewed attention to an older, more durable, thoroughly disenchanted approach to the question of agency: dialectics. I. Agency in Rhetorical Studies

[Let] me say that reports of the death of the author are greatly exaggerated. . . . [R]hetors/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) Rhetoric’s ‘‘Agency Crisis’’

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). Their attention to Lucaites’ call for a multiplicity of standpoint-oriented analyses, however, fails to acknowledge the overriding concerns of 41 scholars who also participated in the discussions on agency at the 2003 meeting of rhetoricians in Evanston, Illinois, under the aegis of the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies (ARS). This inattention to the broader conversation in the discipline about agency (see 52




also Biesecker 1992b, Cloud, 2006a) 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 postmodern 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 that discussions of agency at the ARS meeting were in response to the posthumanist turn in the theoretical humanities and not ‘‘postmodernism’’ (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 polarized class positions, exploitative economic relations, and their ideological justifications cause us to invest—of necessity and of desire—in our own exploitation and unhappiness. Such contemporary theorists as Judith Butler and Fredric Jameson have illuminated the material and ideological limits to any conception of entirely willful, individual agency (Butler, 1990; Butler, 1993, Jameson, 1991). The critique of humanism calls into question any easy assumption of individual conscious agency. Thus, in a field founded on the possibility of strategic political intervention into existing social relations, the critique of humanism constitutes a crisis that is particularly poignant to us. Responses to this crisis have been diverse. The Posthumanist Turn

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 selftransparent, autonomous subject that is sometimes said to begin with Heidegger’s critique of humanism (Davis, 2000, pp. 21–68; 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 Communication Theory 20 (2010) 50–78 © 2010 International Communication Association

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theories; what they all share, however, is a decentering of the all-powerful, choicedriven, radically free subject and an attention to larger structural, material, or discursive objects that limit and/or constitute the subject. The work of Michel Foucault (1990) is paradigmatic in this regard, detailing the ways in which the production of the subject who believes s/he is a willful agent is the primary operation of power: Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective. If in fact they are intelligible, this is not because they are the effect of another instance that ‘explains’ them, but rather because they are imbued, through and through, with calculation: There is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject. . .There is no single locus of great Refusal. . . . Instead there is a plurality of resistances . . . by definition they can only exist in the strategic field of power relations. (pp. 94–96) Foucault’s posthumanism, following that of structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser, focused attention in critical communication studies on the production of ‘‘subjectivity’’ and/or ‘‘ideology’’ (see Cloud, 2006a; Gunn & Treat, 2006). This emphasis helps to resituate agency as a capacity—and not only a human capacity—for action that is both constrained and enabled by structures, contexts, and so on (e.g., Lacan, 2006, pp. 6–48). In rhetorical studies, Barbara Biesecker’s work has been instrumental in promoting posthumanist stances toward agency. 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’’ (1992b, p. 361; see also Gaonkar, 1997). 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, Biesecker argues, the figure of the autonomous agent is fundamentally phallogocentric and essentialist (Biesecker, 1992a; Biesecker, 1993; also see Campbell, 1993; contra Campbell, 2005). 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: Christian 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’’ 54




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 subjectification, and so on (Phillips, 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 (Turnbull, 2004, p. 221). 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; Davis, 2000; Wander, 1984; Wander, 1995). Dialectical Agency

The posthumanist turn in the humanities more broadly and in Communication Studies more specifically has been challenged by theorists and critics with explicit political projects. In an influential and widely anthologized essay, feminist scholar Linda Alcoff (1988) has noted the ‘‘identity crisis’’ posed by posthumanism to feminist theory: ‘‘The self-contained, authentic subject conceived by humanism to be discoverable below a veneer of cultural and ideological overlay is in reality a construct of that very humanist discourse’’ (p. 415). Along with Alcoff, we recognize the crucial import of having troubled na¨ıve humanism, a theoretical turn that makes critique of the constitution of subjectivity possible. Even so, we share Alcoff’s worry that taken too far, posthumanist theory ‘‘[denies] not only the efficacy but . . . even the existence of intentionality’’ (p. 416). Alcoff suggests that we must understand ‘‘individual intentions as constructed within a social reality,’’ while also recognizing ‘‘the subject’s ability to reflect on social discourse and challenge its determinations’’ (p. 417). This perspective characterizes the second general approach to the crisis of agency, the dialectical. Dialectics 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 (2005) 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. (p. 2) Notably, Campbell’s statement on the status of agency does not attempt to reverse the posthumanist turn, but rather, sets out to reconcile the theoretical perspectives Communication Theory 20 (2010) 50–78 © 2010 International Communication Association

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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 power, 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 caseby-case basis, leading to a multiplicity of conceptions of agency (Lucaites, 2003, paras. 1–2). Carolyn R. Miller’s (2007) 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. 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 1998; 2004; 2007), Cloud, Macek, & Aune (2006) argue that social groups, especially class-based groups, harbor a capacity for political action grounded in their material circumstances: 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) Cloud, Macek, & Aune (2006) argue not only that ordinary people must mobilize collectively in order to pressure or overthrow employers and institutions, but also that it is the intersection of consciousness and experience that is generative of agency. In other words, as Cloud (2005) explains, working class agency is a product of both the experience of embodied labor and explicit political intervention and collective organizing. Agency in this view is not primarily characteristic of individuals; rather, the working class is a particular kind of collective agent that can manifest a real challenge to the capitalist system. In contrast, 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). Retreat to Humanism

Finally, the third way that scholars have responded to the crisis of agency is by simply avoiding it. Avoidance is typically pursued by recourse to pragmatic or rehabilitative humanism, both of which amplify classical notions of voluntarism in the name of ‘‘tradition.’’ Recourse to pedagogical ends is a frequent pragmatic argument that is made to side-step the challenge of posthumanism (e.g. Geisler, 2005). For example, responding to Lundberg and Gunn’s argument for a negative theology of the subject, Lisa Strom Villadsen complains that their conception is pedagogically inaccessible (2008, p. 29). 56




The more troubling 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 voluntarism. 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 voluntarism is purely nostalgic for an agent who never was. Yet this is the position that Foss, Waters, and Armada curiously advocate, and to which we now turn. II. Run Lola Run: The Power of Positive Thinking?

. . . the subject as a self-identical entity is no more. —Judith Butler (1993, p. 230) So far we have considered 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. By failing to engage posthumanism3 —indeed any work that challenges their theory—Foss, Waters, and Armada advance an under-researched theory of agency that some readers of the journal Communication Theory may mistake as representative of rhetorical studies. Although we subscribe to different positions on agency ourselves (one of us is skeptical of posthumanism, while the other is more critical of humanism), it is nevertheless our intent to put an end to the na¨ıve 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. Foss, Waters, and Armada presumably advance their theory in response to Lucaites’ 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’’ (p. 223). After a 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 practical option for understanding agency. Our aim in this essay is to explicate Communication Theory 20 (2010) 50–78 © 2010 International Communication Association

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the nature and function of agentic orientation and the options available to agents through its application. (p. 206) Foss, Waters, and Armada have taken—and distorted—the term ‘‘agentic orientation’’ from a groundbreaking essay in the field of sociology by Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische (1998). In ‘‘What is Agency?’’ Emirbayer and Mische ‘‘begin to reconceptualize human agency as a temporally embedded process of social engagement’’ (p. 963) in which ‘‘the formation of projects is always an interactive, culturally embedded process by which social actors negotiate their paths toward the future’’ (p. 984). This conception, Emirbayer and Mische insist, is ‘‘neither radically voluntarist nor narrowly instrumentalist’’ (p. 984) in a reality that is ‘‘resistant to [the] immediate and effortless realization’’ of one’s projects (p. 998). Ignoring the complexity of the concept they have appropriated, Foss, Waters, and Armada 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. Tom Tykwer’s (1999) 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 deutschmarks 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 win 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 those of ‘‘victim,’’ ‘‘supplicant,’’ and ‘‘director.’’ In the first run, they argue, Lola adopts the persona of victim because she understands her structural situation as controlling (looking to her autocratic father, a banker, for help); her response is self-inflicted punishment (in the film she dies; pp. 209–212). Foss, Waters, and Armada characterize the second run as a Foucauldian accession to the demands of her situation; Lola thus resorts to ‘‘petitioning’’ the hegemonic structure for help (a peculiar reading given that she robs the bank), 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’’ (bypassing the bank, having missed her father, in favor of the casino). 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 58




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. (pp. 218–219) Never mind that Lola’s encounter with the casino results from pure chance. And, 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’’ (p. 220). Foss, Waters, and Armada’s reading of the film certainly stands in distinction from other critical readings in a way that severely undermines Run Lola Run as an illustration of their theory of agency. There is a significant literature on Run Lola Run, Tykwer’s work more generally, and its relationships to postfascist, postcommunist German culture and politics (see Burns, 1995; Clarke, 2006; Kapczynski, 2008). Understanding the agentic orientation of the film (not only the orientation of the fictional character Lola) requires historical contextualization, which Foss, Waters, and Armada do not undertake. Their rhetorical analysis of an admittedly fantastical film, in which characters exhibit magical ability, treats the film’s characters as if they were or could possibly be real people in actual situations, concluding that the film’s internal lessons make up its import. In contrast, most critics and film historians (with the exception of Evans, 2004) are careful to situate the rhetoric of the film as an intervention into sociopolitical space. As such, the film constantly cues the viewer to read it as fantasy, not reality (see Wood, 2006). For example, O’Sickey (2002) interprets the film as a digitalized and hypermediated game that upsets the notion of realism (p. 123). In fact, the film begins as a game refereed by the character of the security guard who calls ‘‘ball up!’’ to signal the beginning of the film’s action. O’Sickey argues that the Game provides the illusion that ‘‘we, too, if we work at it, can become the player rather than the played’’ (p. 124). Acknowledging that the film’s central question is the possibility of agency, O’Sickey argues that the ‘‘bricolage of realities’’ and the combination of live action and animation make cause and effect indeterminate, since Lola’s ‘‘supernatural’’ abilities are enabled only in a fantasy universe. Mixed media, intercut time sequences, shifts in point of view, and the techno soundtrack ‘‘all work to position viewers to accept her as an extraordinary being who is able to stop a truck hurtling at high speed toward her, who can win 100,000 Marks at the roulette table by arresting the wheel on the number 20 by simply screaming, whose piercing look can bring on cardiac arrest, and who is able to save that same man’s life by simply holding his hand’’ (p. 126).4 Young audiences in the postgaming environment understand that visual culture does not represent options available in reality. In the end, O’Sickey argues, Communication Theory 20 (2010) 50–78 © 2010 International Communication Association

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Lola actually becomes a ‘‘deflated heroine’’ as Manni (whose very name signals the feminist politics of the film) reasserts his control (p. 131). Of course, there are plausible optimistic feminist readings of the film as well. In the diegesis, the barriers Lola faces are posed by boys and men: the menacing youth and dog on the stairway who trip up Lola on her second run, the autocratic father whose mistress and work life have displaced concern for Lola, and the dependent and inconsiderate boyfriend who, blissfully unaware of Lola’s panicked sacrifices, greets her after the third run with surprise and nonchalance. It is no wonder at this point that Lola, having leapt over the dog, completely missed the encounter with her father, and won her own money, gains a sense of her own capacity to control her environment. In the end, she holds a bag of honest money and faces a horizon more open than she had available before (for a resonant reading, see Schubart & Gjelsvik, 2004). A more pessimistic, existentialist interpretation of the film, however, is even more plausible and common among critics: The film cultivates awareness that at any given moment, a random encounter or nonencounter could alter one’s life forever, with potentially tragic as well as emancipatory outcomes. In the film’s narrative, secondary characters’ futures also hinge on randomly meeting or not meeting Lola. Doris, a mother in an abusive relationship, loses custody of her son in one run’s aftermath but wins the lottery in the next. Mrs. Jäger, a bank employee, is occasioned to meet her fantasy lover (a teller at the bank) when Lola robs the bank at gunpoint; but when Lola skips the bank in favor of the casino, Mrs. Jäger has a serious car accident and commits suicide rather than live forever as an invalid. A bicyclist likewise ends up happily married after one run but dead by overdose in a public restroom in another (Lauer, 2003). Significantly, the fate of Lola’s father is in question at the end of her third run; he never returns to the screen. It could be that by bypassing the bank on the third run, Lola inadvertently caused her father’s death in the car accident. Thus, Lola’s agency sometimes comes at the expense of that of others, revealing another risk of magical voluntarism: It is blind to the suffering of anyone besides the chosen agent. From a dialectical perspective, perhaps the most compelling understanding of this film comes from Schlipphacke (2006), who argues that Run Lola Run is, like other Tykwer films, ‘‘a fantasy of escape’’ (p. 109) situated in an aesthetics of global postmodernity. ‘‘The Holocaust has, as it were, partly thrust Germany out of the First World, so that in the almost 60 years since the fall of Nazism, the country has experienced an abrupt re-entry into modernity that occurred synchronically with German postmodern ruptures’’ (p. 113). In this context, Tykwer’s films attempt to escape the imaginary wholeness of melodrama, located ‘‘somewhere between the repetition compulsion of historical critique endemic to the New German Cinema and the ahistorical apathy and traditional aesthetic of the most popular postwar German film comedies’’ (p. 115). For Schlipphacke, the films offer an ‘‘escape tableau’’: ‘‘The dialectic of entrapment and escape from family, gender, and history structures each of Tykwer’s five films’’ (p. 129). 60




In sum, Run Lola Run is much more complex and ambiguous than Foss, Waters, and Armada’s reading permits one to see. That there is a way to recognize both structure and agency—and that Run Lola Run might be an excellent vehicle for understanding a more complex agentic orientation—seem to be lost on Foss, Waters, and Armada. Instead, they offer Lola’s magical agency as the solution to the myriad structural crises that Lola faces. Just as they have ignored the extant literature on agency in rhetorical studies, so too have they ignored both crucial details from the film as well as critical readings about it that would complicate and compromise their reading. Consequently, we propose to reread Foss, Waters, and Armada’s theory of agency with reference to an object that is better suited as an illustration. III. The Secret and Magical Voluntarism, or, the Arrogance of Wishful Thinking

[M]oral purpose [choice] does not apply to impossibilities; anyone who said he had a purpose of achieving the impossible would be thought a fool. But there is such a thing as wishing for the impossible, as, for example, immortality. Again, we may wish for things which could not possibly be won by our own efforts, as for the victory of a certain athlete. But we cannot purpose [choose] such things; we only purpose what we think we can bring to pass by our won act. . . . For in general our moral purpose seems limited to things that lie within our own power. —Aristotle (1943, pp. 118–119) 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 (3) radical individualism. The ideal agentic orientation, in other words, is one in which an individual, mindful of the symbolic construction of reality, changes reality through conscious, willful choices made independently of others. Communication Theory 20 (2010) 50–78 © 2010 International Communication Association

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The Magic of Free Will

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. For example, the most famous and influential magus of modernity, Aleister Crowley, defines magic (or Magick) as ‘‘the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will’’ (1999, p. 27), which overlaps 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 intrinsically an independent individual with his own proper character and proper motion. (pp. 28–29) 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’’ (a ‘‘star’’ or ‘‘director’’) who changes the world in accord with her will. Unlike Crowley, who recognizes material limitation, however, Foss, Waters, and Armada go so far as to argue that 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; Luhrmann, 1989, p. 7), we argue for a better label: ‘‘magical voluntarism.’’ Magical voluntarism refers to any theory of agency that suggests one can fulfill one’s 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 (1952/1996). Both a bestselling 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 pseudoscientific and spiritual terms (brought together in the endorsements of two quantum physicists) that the key 62




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 one 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. According to McGee (2007), ‘‘Byrne’s rate of sales is nearly unrivaled in the annals of self-help snake oil.’’ As of May, 2007, The Secret had spent months on bestseller lists worldwide and sold nearly 4 million copies, thanks in part to Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of the book as the explanation for her success (as opposed to the feminist or civil rights movements). To illustrate magical voluntarism, 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. Although it is certainly the case that Foss, Waters, and Armada’s theory of agency is not identical to that of The Secret, we argue that both are informed by the same ideology of voluntarism. The Secret is simply a more extreme expression of that ideology, and as an extreme, it provides us with a helpful lens with which to see it operating in Foss, Waters, and Armada’s work. We begin, then, with the most foundational component of each theory: constructivist ontology. Constructivism and the Malleable World

Presumably drawing on the work of Judith Butler (1993, p. 28),5 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 Communication Theory 20 (2010) 50–78 © 2010 International Communication Association

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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).6 Not surprisingly, Rhonda Byrne also aligns ‘‘The Secret’’ with quantum physics (p. 156); however, constructivism appears in The Secret most conspicuously 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 (even though magnetism is, in physics, the attraction of opposites): ‘‘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). 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, which is similar to 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 voluntarism. Both 64




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 voluntarism 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 dream-up the possibility of her liberation or escape.7 Aside from the 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 her 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.8 The real world outcome of the constructivism that supports magical voluntarism is ultimately selfish inaction. ‘‘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). Although professional scholars in the United States may be buffered from some of the vagaries of economic crisis and barriers to achievement, there are, in fact—as opposed to the fantasy of a filmic game or magnetizing your desires into reality—millions of people around the world who cannot wish away the ‘‘conditions, people, or events external to them’’ (p. 209). Nongovernmental organizations, grassroots banks and crafts projects, and other forms of localized ‘‘self-help’’ can do little to curtail the broader abuses of capitalist globalization. But Foss, Waters, and Armada chastise critical postcolonial scholars Radha Hegde and Raka Shome, as if Communication Theory 20 (2010) 50–78 © 2010 International Communication Association

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the (magical) options available to a fictional Lola actually apply to sweatshop workers in India (p. 223). Similarly, The Secret encourages readers to turn on to the law of attraction and stop resisting injustice: ‘‘The antiwar movement creates more war,’’ explains Jack Canfield (quoted in Byrne, p. 142). Shockingly, however, Foss, Waters, and Armada carry their magical voluntarism beyond the fuzzy magnetism of The Secret to a most extreme conclusion: Symbolic choices, Run Lola Run argues, can and do affect the structural world. We acknowledge that a belief in this tenet is disputable in the presence of certain kinds of conditions, but we ask our readers to consider seriously for a moment . . . the possibility that it might be true under all conditions. (p. 220) Even in the contexts of famine and genocide, Foss, Waters, and Armada believe that changing one’s interpretation of events is the correct strategy, especially because ‘‘what you resist, persists.’’ While demonstrably different, both their article and The Secret counsel passivity—implicitly and explicitly respectively—in the face of the most brutal exploitation and oppression, letting the purveyors of inequality off the hook for their actions, urging millions to think positively in the face of their immiseration.9 Wish Fulfillment and Visualization

Foss, Waters, and Armada are arguing that a fictional film, Run Lola Run, advances a tutorial in agency applicable to everyday life. On their account, one’s desires ‘‘are realized in outcomes that align with agents’ choices, although their manifestations may occur in ways not imagined by agents’’ (p. 220). In a way that strongly reflects the theory of radical free will advanced by Jean-Paul Sartre in his existentialist philosophy (Sartre, 1993, pp. 31–62), Foss, Waters, and Armada relentlessly intone the importance of conscious choice-making rooted in an agency that is purely internal to the subject’s imagination: ‘‘An exigence of agentic orientation, in contrast, is something that can be chosen and is under the control of the individual. No one can interfere with that choice because its location is internal and it can be maintained and reinforced with every decision the individual makes’’ (p. 221). To make their case the authors read the actions of Lola and other characters in Run Lola Run as if they were real and their situations were transferable into real people’s circumstances, a mode of interpretation consistent with the valorization of the imagination by practicing magicians (see Luhrmann, 1989, pp. 328–331). Not surprisingly, The Secret also stresses the import of choices made in an imaginary space: The reason visualization is so powerful is because as you create pictures in your mind of seeing yourself with what it is you want, you are generating thoughts and feelings of having it now. Visualization is simply powerfully focused thought in pictures . . . . When you are visualizing, you are emitting that powerful frequency out into the Universe. The law of attraction will take hold of that powerful signal and return those pictures back to you, just as you saw them in your mind. (p. 81) 66




Byrne argues that one is putting ‘‘trust and faith in the Universe’’ by visualizing in a way that reflects Foss, Waters, and Armada’s ideal agentic orientation: ‘‘With a director orientation, the agent trusts that the orientation will open up possibilities . . . (p. 220). By visualizing the desired outcome, structural limitation is overcome by choosing an imagined future. ‘‘Exigence thus becomes not a constraining force within which agents must work,’’ explain Foss, Waters, and Armada, ‘‘but an opening that enables them to transcend what they previously conceptualized as constraints and limitations’’ (p. 221). Visualization or imagination thus operates as the key mechanism by which one understands The Secret and adopts the ideal agentic orientation. Magical voluntarism is a conspicuous form of wish fulfillment: I imagine myself wealthy, and before I know it, I am wealthy! Notably, Byrne and her associates, as well as Foss, Waters, and Armada, acknowledge that their theories of wish-fulfillment concern magical dispositions. When attempting to distinguish those who know, understand, and practice The Secret from the rest of us, Marci Shimoff explains: The only difference between people who live in this way, who live in the magic of life, and those who don’t is that the people who live in the magic of life have habituated ways of being. They’ve made a habit of using the law of attraction, and magic happens with them wherever they go. Because they remember to use it. They use it all the time, not just as a one-time event. (Byrne, p. 87) Insofar as Foss, Waters, and Armada describe agentic orientation as a predisposition akin to Bourdieu’s conception of the habitus (p. 206), we are not surprised to find Lola described as one of the ‘‘people who live in the magic of life’’: 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 innovative rhetorical options. (219) The ideal agentic orientation, in other words, is a habituated tendency to ‘‘produce a virtually infinite array of options that are constrained only by the desires and imaginations of the agents themselves’’ (Foss, Waters, and Armada, p. 222). Byrne argues the ‘‘only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts’’ (p. 99). Presumably, to get the money we want or need, we must visualize beyond structural limitations like Lola does in her third run and hope that our luck does not run out at the casino. Of course, the visualization of success is important to most endeavors and, as many readers of this journal will recognize, remains a key lesson in the basic public speaking course. Imagination and creativity are very important to developing and discerning options and solutions to life’s many problems. Nevertheless, the idea that one can become wealthy by thinking about money is patently absurd. This fact leads us to a discussion of the outcome of visualization-magic: a commitment to childish nonsense. Communication Theory 20 (2010) 50–78 © 2010 International Communication Association

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McGee (2007) attributes the success of Byrne’s enterprise not to the gullibility of the public but rather to the appeal of the work to people struggling in their daily lives. ‘‘Simple desperation renders people susceptible to all manner of false promises,’’ she writes, adding: The real secret is that Americans earn less per week than they did in 1972. . . Americans are feeling the pinch, and the magical thinking that one can simply ‘‘ask-believe-receive’’ has a powerful appeal. While subscribing to The Secret’s fantasy of effortless wealth and omnipotence requires that one buy into its darker victim-blaming corollaries that seems to be a price millions are willing to pay rather than concede that their lives are subject to forces beyond their control. Dire circumstances call for magical solutions. (emphasis added) From another critical perspective, Adorno would explain the appeal of both The Secret and Foss, Waters, and Armada’s essay as a ‘‘regression of thought,’’ meaning that belief in the ‘‘magnetic mind’’ or the visualization of an ‘‘infinite array of options’’ in the face of certain death is a classically infantile way of thinking. Usually most conspicuous in children, magical 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 (Burgy, 2001, p. 70). Fantasies of telepathy and telekinesis, for example, are rooted in this way of thinking. Freud would suggest that such beliefs are caused by 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.10 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. Foss, Waters, and Armada’s essay is simply an example of how infantile regression is perpetuated in academic scholarship. Radical Individualism

Finally, both The Secret and Foss, Waters, and Armada’s versions of magical voluntarism repeatedly stress a radical individualism in two ways: (a) by insisting the individual alone has the power to transcend limitation without the help of others; and (b) by insisting that individuals must take full responsibility for their material, social, and cultural existence. ‘‘You are the master of your life,’’ intones Byrne, ‘‘and the Universe is answering your every command’’ (p. 146). Such juvenile omnipotence is reflected in the opening remarks of the most recent program on The Secret and the law of attraction by Oprah Winfrey (2008): ‘‘I am grateful that . . . millions of people, for so many millions of people, the door was at least opened to the idea that we are each responsible for the quality of our lives . . . so that people can begin to understand that our thoughts . . . are literally creating our experiences.’’ Throughout the hour-long program various individuals testify to the transformative power of the law of attraction (for example, ‘‘34-year-old Meadow’’ was ‘‘fat, broke,’’ and ‘‘crying 68




every day’’ until she picked up and read Oprah magazine and saw The Secret DVD). The ‘‘experts’’ on Oprah continuously underscore the centrality of the individual and necessity for forgiveness and personal responsibility even to the point of ‘‘disappearing’’ those who have harmed you through acts of forgiveness. The Secret always comes back to this refrain: ‘‘To love yourself fully, you must focus on a new dimension of You. You must focus on the presence inside you’’ (p. 173). In a manner that resembles Ayn Rand’s (1964) defense of the ‘‘virtue of selfishness,’’ Byrne argues that focusing on others is the problem: ‘‘It is not people who are giving you the things you desire. If you hold that false belief, you will experience lack, because you are looking at the outside world and people as the supply’’ (p. 163). Only by forsaking the world and centering in oneself can true, positive change begin. Again, while not as extreme, Foss, Waters, and Armada similarly advocate individualism and personal responsibility when they stress the ‘‘internal’’ locus of choice. As with The Secret and Oprah’s experts, the problem with achieving the ideal is a basic misunderstanding about how the Universe truly works: That everyone has the same capacity for agency, regardless of access to resources, is not to be confused with the notion that everyone chooses well. With their agency, all individuals may choose situations that make them suffer and reduce their control over structural conditions. Those who make agentic choices that appear less desirable gain at least some rewards from such choices—possibly a greater capacity to attract others to a cause, the generation of positive responses in the form of sympathy or avoidance of responsibility. (p. 224) Herein we confront the outcome of choosing a radical individualism: elitist arrogance. The elitism of The Secret and Foss, Waters, and Armada’s agentic orientation is pronounced in their claim that oppression is a matter of perception. For example, Foss, Waters and Armada argue that ‘‘Lola sees herself as helpless and disempowered’’ in the first filmic run (p. 209), but when an individual in the real world confronts a real, deadly situation, she might really be helpless and disempowered (e.g., the stories of child abuse, rape, American slavery, Indian Removal, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the Holocaust, come to mind). According to Foss, Waters, and Armada, Lola dies in the first run, not because her father is a misogynist, but because of her ‘‘adoption of the victim orientation’’ (p. 209). ‘‘Because Lola views structural conditions as controlling, she sees them as limiting’’ (p. 210). Never mind that space, time, and social relations are actually constraints on human action (and more so for some than for others). Indeed, in both The Secret and the theory of agentic orientation, every act is ‘‘an interpretation of a set of conditions’’ (Foss, Waters, and Armada, p. 207). Oppression is a matter of perception and liberation is an outcome of wishful thinking. ‘‘Lola also cedes power to structural conditions by refusing to take responsibility for what happens to Manni and her. She places the blame for events in their lives on conditions, people, or events external to them’’ (p. 209). For practitioners of The Secret, Oprah and her experts, as well as Foss, Waters and Armada, Lola is wholly responsible for her existential condition.11 Communication Theory 20 (2010) 50–78 © 2010 International Communication Association

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McGee (2007) calls attention to the conservative consequences of this way of thinking: ‘‘What about the unfortunate corollary that would necessarily apply to those who are ill, impoverished, dispossessed, or worse? What about The Secret’s more egregious claims . . . that the children of Darfur attracted the starvation their families are facing with their wrong thinking.’’ Strangely, this judgment—that women and oppressed others are wrong to blame ‘‘conditions, people, or events external to them’’ for the hardships of their lives—resembles the rhetoric of conservative real world policies and agencies, suggesting a common ideological underpinning (see Cloud, 1998). Neoliberal structural adjustment programs, in which the World Bank or International Monetary Fund ‘‘help’’ suffering populations only if those populations interpret their problems as something other than a structured result of global capitalism, are good examples (see Soederberg, 2006). Some of these programs compel the desperately hungry to grow luxury crops for export, asking debtor nations to sacrifice infrastructure—plumbing, waste management, transportation, employment, and social services—to the servicing of their debt (see Bond, 2001; Geier, 2000).12 Likewise, now that the U.S. war in Iraq has destroyed (for the second time) that country’s infrastructure and stripped the nation’s resources, creating a crisis that opened the door to al Qaeda and other insurrectionary groups, the rationale for continuing the occupation is that the Iraqis are not taking enough responsibility for solving their problems. For example, in January, 2007, Senator and Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (2007) complained during Congressional hearings on the Iraq troop ‘‘surge’’ strategy that the hardship faced by the US in Iraq ‘‘has everything to do with the years of lost opportunities and the failures of the Iraqis to step up and take responsibility for their own future.’’ Like the starving in less-developed countries, perhaps the beleaguered Iraqis have failed to adopt the proper agentic orientation? When we consider a theory of agency derived from structural antagonisms and global realities, instead of from mystical claptrap or Hollywood films, magical voluntarism appears like child’s play. 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 (1852/2009) In this essay we have advanced an extensive critique of Foss, Waters, and Armada’s use of Run Lola Run to justify a theory of agentic orientation. We have argued that the book and DVD The Secret are much better suited as an illustration of their theory because they help us to see more clearly the voluntaristic ideology informing it. To a compelling degree, the rhetoric of Foss, Waters, and Armada’s theory and that of The Secret are both typical of ‘‘magical voluntarism’’: an idealist understanding of human agency in which a subject can achieve her needs and desires by simple wish 70




fulfillment and the manipulation of symbols, regardless 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 that 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. 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 mass culture and scholarship alike have embraced capitalism’s enchantments, we 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. 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 problematics; and/or we can continue working through the question of agency dialectically. Dialectical thinking is, in fact, a third and eminently rhetorical way between happy-go-lucky voluntarism and structural/economic determinism, and is the meeting place of the present essay’s authors. Although space prevents a detailed account, we think it is important nevertheless to conclude with what we see as the most positive and productive approach to agency in communication studies. According to traditional Marxist theory, ordinary people exist in ‘‘circumstances transmitted from the past’’ (Marx, 1852/2009) 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 on their own. Materialist dialectics offers therefore a critical and political method that describes actual historical change and affords scholars and activists grounds for political and critical judgment.13 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 (see Cloud, 2006b). In philosophy, dialectics is most often understood as a form of reasoning toward an 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 Communication Theory 20 (2010) 50–78 © 2010 International Communication Association

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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.14 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 the idea that it is a style of thinking and not a ‘‘science.’’ Because dialectics is associated with commonplace straw persons of 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). (Ollman, 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, institutions, collective social relations, and histories 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, social relations, and histories. Consequently, the individual will cannot exist indendent of interactivity, dialogue, and collectivity. Insofar as the totality is dynamic and constantly changing—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. Indeed, understood as a theory of contingent, situated intervention, a dialectical position resonates even with traditional rhetorical theory’s understanding of agency as occurring in a simultaneously enabling and constraining situation (see Aristotle, 1991; Bitzer, 1968). 72




Foss, Waters, and Armada actually advance a theory that is a- or antirhetorical because it lacks a sense of contingency or constraint. Alternatively, we are taken with Caroline Williams’ (2001) 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 20 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. When we regard the processes of invention and transformation of our circumstances as dialectical rather than voluntarist, it occurs that we already have the tools at our disposal to continue working through the question of agency without any magic whatsoever. Notes 1

2

3

4

And we should add the humanities as a whole. In our neighboring Department of Advertising, one professor assigns and teaches The Secret not as an exemplar of good advertising, but as true philosophy that inspires creativity. As Cloud (2005) has noted, discourse determinism is commonplace across rhetorical, cultural, and critical organization studies. For example, following Paolo Virno, Deleuze and Guattari, and Hardt and Negri, Bratich (2008) has argued that the ‘‘immaterial labor’’ of communication scholars is the agency of social change in a capitalism rendered as primarily constituted in communication (p. 31). By ‘‘communicating otherwise’’ (p. 32) in ‘‘counterresearch,’’ communication scholars now have a central role in communicating a new social order into existence. In organizational communication studies, Conrad (2004) has called attention to the perils of discursivist voluntarism there. We should disclose that one of us was an original, blind reviewer for Foss, Waters, and Armada’s essay, and that these criticisms were made in the blind review to the authors. Instead of choosing to address the problem that posthumanism posed for their theory, they simply cut out any discussion of the crisis of agency altogether. The soundtrack to Run Lola Run is a song called ‘‘Believe,’’ in which Lola expresses a contradictory desire for belief in magical agency, wavering from resignation to chance to belief in fantasy: ‘‘I don’t believe in trouble/I don’t believe in pain/I don’t believe there’s nothing left/but running here again/I don’t believe in promise/I don’t believe in


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chance/I don’t believe you can resist/the things that make no sense . . ./I don’t believe reality would be/the way it should/But I believe in fantasy/the future’s understood/I don’t believe in history/I don’t believe in truth/I don’t believe that’s destiny/or someone to accuse/I believe, I believe!!!’’ The music during her third run expresses Lola’s wish (not reality) to be the all-powerful hunter, an almighty ruler, and a writer who could determine her own ending. For us, this mantra-like soundtrack is ironic, as her fate depends almost exclusively on chance and ‘‘things that make no sense.’’ Even though her third run is successful, she still has not become the writer of her own destiny. 5 We also 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: The ‘‘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, with 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 to which Butler would vigorously object. 6 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 (p. 7). 7 To her credit, Oprah has advised cancer patients not to forgo treatment in favor of positive thinking (McGee, 2007). 8 Strangely, one of the ‘‘philosophers’’ invoked in the video to support the idea that The Secret can end exploitation is Henry Ford! 9 Bob Herbert (2008), writing in The New York Times, recently observed that millions of people’s agency is curtailed by the present war in Iraq. He notes, ‘‘for a fraction of the cost of this war we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more’’; and ‘‘The money spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants.’’ The needy student cannot wish tuition into existence. The disabled retiree cannot interpret her poverty another way to solve her inability to pay for medication. The more than a million dead in Iraq certainly did not have the privilege of ignoring ‘‘conditions, people, or events external to them.’’ It is nothing short of irresponsible and infuriating to adopt magical voluntarism as a serious theory of agency in these contexts. 10 In this respect, the video game logic of Run Lola Run makes sense as a regressive fantasy: What if we were given three lives to change the course of events? ‘‘Do-overs,’’ of course, are the province of childhood—and to our knowledge, there are no do-overs after death. Ironically, a more realistic depiction of juvenile fantasy is Guillermo del Torro’s magically realist Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), in which a young girl, Ophelia, invents a complex fantasy world to cope with the brutality of fascism. Here we point out simply that coping with, and agentive control over, circumstances are quite different things. 74




11 Tellingly, Oprah gushes on her episode on The Secret about having discovered a sterling bubble blower in her office (a previously unnoticed gift) after telling a guest on the show how much she would like to blow bubbles. Incredibly, she takes this coincidence as evidence that The Secret works. In a new book on the Oprah phenomenon, Janice Peck (2008) argues that the show’s psycho-spiritual offerings are both an extension of the strategy of the therapeutic in capitalist society and part and parcel of a hegemonic neoliberal worldview. 12 Economist Joel Geier (2000) explains the role of the IMF: ‘‘IMF loans were granted on ‘conditionality.’ That is, the IMF imposed a series of conditions to which the borrowing country must adhere in order to receive its funds. . . . IMF loans were only granted to countries that agreed to accept ‘structural adjustment programs.’ Through these programs, the IMF demanded privatization of state-run enterprises. . . . ordered social welfare spending reduced . . . [and] demanded that currency be devalued to cut real wages’’ (para. 19). 13 ‘‘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). 14 See any of Plato’s dialogues with the Sophists, including Gorgias and Phaedrus (Plato, 1997).

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