And the Debate Goes On: Lundberg and Gunn's Response to Geisler

Lundberg, Christian, and Joshua Gunn. “‘Ouija Board, Are There Any Communications?’: Agency, Ontotheology, and the Death of the Humanistic Subject, or, Continuing the ARS Conversation.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35.4 (2005): 83-105. Print.

In Lundberg and Gunn’s response to Cheryl Geisler’s piece on the ARS convention (see my previous post), they raise the concern that Geisler’s “report” had less to do with accurately reporting on the metting than arguing against the postmodern (or posthumanist, to use their term) views of agency. They argue that Geisler’s attempt to locate agency in the agent is a problematic attempt to maintain a view of the agent as autonomous and a mistaken conflation of the agent with agency. Such a view, they claim, is narrow in its conception of agency. They also characterize as narrow Geisler’s representation of posthumanist theories.

They begin their discussions likening the agent/agency relationship to the playing of an Ouija board, establishing an indeterminate view of agency. (After all, any one player or some other worldly spirit may be moving the planchette.) This indeterminate view represents for them the more postmodern view of rhetorical agency. Rather than trying to locate agency within the subject or the rhetor, they argue that agency can and does exist in a number of potential agents. The subject, too, is influenced by a number of external influences and is thus “produced” (86), making it harder to claim that the subject can always have agency.

But rather than this “problematized” sense of agency leading to agential paralysis or precluding the possibility of the agent having any rhetorical effects, they claim that the posthumanist view examines the agent/agency relationship as only one trope that allows us to investigate and interrogate these ideas (98). This is part of their desire for a “restless and relentless thinking” (98) about subjects like agency to add multiple, complicating, and ultimately illuminating layers to that idea.

In many respects, I find their discussions thought-provoking. I, too, agree that a continual examination of the relationship of the agent and agency and of the possibility of locating agency within entities and forces beyond the sbuject will give us a deeper understanding of them. However, I tend to agree with Geisler, who in her response to this piece, claimed that this theorizing does not really get at her pedagogical concerns about rhetorical agency (109). Indeed, theory takes a dominant place in Lunberg and Gunn’s article, and I too wondered where the rhetorical rubber is to meet the pedagogical road. Certainly, theorizing agency will ultimately serve many benefits in developing how we view and analyze agency, but we should not theorize exclusively or at the expense of pedagogy either.

Work Cited

Geisler, Cheryl. “Teaching the Post-Modern Rhetor: Continuing the Conversation on Rhetorical Agency.” Rhetorical Society Quarterly 35.4 (2005): 107-12. Print.