Personal transfiguration and radical privatization in New Age Self-Help

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DOI: 10.1177/146954050200200102 2002; 2; 33 Journal of Consumer Culture

Guy Redden Age self-help

The New Agents: Personal transfiguration and radical privatization in New

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ARTICLE

The New AgentsPersonal transfiguration and radical privatization in New Ageself-helpGUY REDDENUniversity of Queensland

Abstract. The New Age is a broad milieu which allows participants to undertake arange of activities in pursuit of self-improvement. Often characterized as a form ofreligious consumerism in the popular media, it does not easily fit into receivedchurch-sect models of the sociology of religion. This article argues that themovement’s market-type organizational logic, in which individuals typically choosefrom a range of belief options rather than commit to a central doctrine, is consonantwith the privatist concerns of personal authority and self-care found in its discourse.However, at the same time, the New Age does not reduce to some simple acquisitiveconsumerism. It is better understood as offering solutions to the problem of personalagency in a post-traditional society which obliges individuals to assume the burden ofplotting their own destinies.

Key wordsconsumerism ● countercultures ● new social movements ● religion ● spirituality

DURING A RECENT PERUSAL OF THE FREE POSTCARD STAND at my localcinema, I was struck by the number of cards that were not straightforwardadvertisements for familiar consumer products: so many aspects of social lifeare now at least partly conveyed through the techniques of ‘promotionalculture’. One card advertised the Australian Government’s NationalReconciliation Week, another its Consumer Affairs Division. Those repre-senting charities included one for a community development organization

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and one for the World Wildlife Fund. Among the services offered, one par-ticularly caught my eye: the spiritual transfiguration of the self. The card inquestion shows a hand cupping a ball of celestial light guttering rays deepinto the cosmos. The slogan simply reads: ‘Pranic Power’. The reverse sideof the card tells who gets to hold the power: ‘Empower Yourself with PranicHealing’. Underneath this are details of workshops one can attend in orderto do just that.

The card and the context in which it appeared capture some of theconundrums faced by commentators on the New Age. The workshops onoffer are commodities, and the card itself may be classified as a tool of pro-motional discourse. And while the promise to enhance personal power (andthereby to control outcomes in various areas of individual life) makes theNew Age consonant with a wider secular culture of self-help, its variantson the empowerment theme also involve cosmological and spiritual beliefs.Ideologically speaking, we may ask whether the New Age is a religion ora branch of psychotherapy. Or perhaps it also includes alternative medicine,deep ecology and almost any other alternative practice that comes entwinedwith a language of spiritual transformation. On a sociological level, deter-mining its organizational type and social function are equally difficult.Thereare no New Age headquarters, and no traditional religious hierarchygoverns the forms and uses of New Age ideology (which consequently pro-liferates). Michael York (1995: 324–31) concludes that the movement ischaracterized by large-scale, decentralized, segmented, networked organiz-ation rather than centralized hierarchical institutions. Participants cannotreally be described as members of religious groups in the traditional sensepresupposed by post-Weberian church-sect typology. As Jon Bloch (1998)puts it:

Person A might practice Zen Buddhism, consult a Tarot cardreader, and be studying Native American wisdom. Person Bmight be an astrologer who also studies the Christian-based‘Course in Miracles’ and is planning attending a workshop onwitchcraft. (p. 1)

The term ‘New Age’ is a rubric covering a range of belief options whichrarely demand the exclusive loyalty of participants. In short, the New Ageis a striking anomaly among religious phenomena.

York (1996: 145) suggests that the New Age is structured along thelines of religious consumerism. Indeed, it is a liberal milieu of open-to-allworkshops, seminars, courses, retreats, therapy sessions, books, tapes andmedicines. Participation is largely through the exchange of goods and

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services for money. For some commentators, this commerciality is reasonenough to deny the validity of New Age ideas. Maureen O’Hara (1988:146–7), for example,uses the word ‘scam’ to differentiate New Age therapiesfrom professional psychology, suggesting that the New Age fuses epistemo-logical and financial fraud. However, there has so far been little analysis ofthe relationship between the transmission of New Ageism through themarketplace and the claims of New Age ideology. Indeed, while someskeptics all too readily conflate New Age ideology with promotional dis-course per se, seeing the movement’s only imperative as being to fleece thecredulous, sociologists of religion, on the other hand, have largely treatedthe consumerist nature of the New Age as though it were accidental toNew Age ideology. In contrast to both positions, I hope to show that themarket-based transmission of New Ageism is ideologically consonant withtwo particular tenets of New Age philosophy: first, its self-help ethic ofpersonal empowerment; and second, its critique of social institutionsregarded as inimical to the expression of personal power. This analysis, Iargue, helps to show how such a consumer-oriented religious movementfits into a general social environment in which the market purveys an ever-increasing range of personal needs, and also into the liberal politicalrationality that subtends such commodification.

THE TURN TO THE SELFRecent cultural-studies work on the general category of self-help hasfollowed Foucault in relating strategies of subject formation to socio-historical contexts. In his later work, Foucault (1988) outlined an approachto disciplinarity that focused on technologies of self

. . . which permit individuals to effect by their own means orwith the help of others a certain number of operations on theirown bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so asto transform themselves in order to attain a certain state ofhappiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality. (p. 18)

This focus marked a shift in his thinking away from analysis of tech-nologies of power towards consideration of the ways individuals act uponor ‘dominate’ themselves (p. 19). However, far from being a turn away fromthe politics of regulation, this approach emphasizes that technologies of self,despite their projections of self-fashioning,‘hardly ever function separately’from the technologies of productivity, sign systems and power (p. 18). Inthis Foucauldian vein, Toby Miller and Alec McHoul (1998) have taken agenealogical approach towards contemporary western self-help, aiming to

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understand the ‘conjunctural factors’ which produce the conditions forrecent ideologies of self-care (p. 129). One such factor is ‘the displacementof traditional religious civic culture by commodity and evangelic culture’(p. 130). Self-help is a movement that exists through bestselling books anddaytime television, and it encroaches upon some of the functions of guid-ance that are performed by mainstream religion (pp. 136–7). Heidi MarieRimke (2000) has shown that the particular style of guidance being offeredpresupposes ‘free’ self-determining subjects putatively able to govern them-selves. She argues that self-help models of personal responsibility ultimately‘reproduce the social subject of liberal governance’ (p. 63) as they privilegeliberal truths of choice, autonomy and freedom (p. 62). Above all, theyencourage the individual to take personal responsibility for creating a‘productive self in private concerns’ (p. 72). Miller and McHoul, and Rimkethus establish the double sense in which self-help is privatist: it disseminatesknowledge through commodity exchange, and it focuses the concerns ofthe individual upon private matters of self.

In this article, I extend this trajectory by examining the models of self-fashioning offered specifically in the New Age, which may be thought ofas a variant in a wider tradition of self-help. Miller and McHoul (1998: 137)point out that self-help has been a bestselling genre since the 1930s. Itsorigins go back to 19th-century Christian inspirational literature whichemphasized subjective experience, this-worldly self-mastery and the powerof positive thinking more than ‘surrender to the will of God’ (Schneiderand Dornbusch, 1958: 45). Yet as James Webb (1988: 54) has argued, theNew Age was shaped in the postwar counterculture through avant-gardeideologues and groups – such as Aldous Huxley, the Beatniks, TimothyLeary and the Hippies – who turned towards ‘alternative’ philosophical tra-ditions, from Zen, esotericism and romanticism to the transcendentalists, ingestures of rebellion against modern culture. Indeed, Stewart Brand,founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue – one of the first and most famousforums for the New Age market of goods and services – claims: ‘I oweeverything to [the Beats]’ (McNally, 1979: 326). In asking what may bespecific to New Age variants of self-help, two qualities stand out: first thecontemporary New Age has a metaphysical, mystical bias; and, second, itis, in a particular sense, countercultural. As Hanegraaff (1988) notes ‘allNew Age trends, without exception, are intended as alternatives to cur-rently dominant religious and cultural trends’ (p. 515, original emphasis).New Ageism doesn’t simply replicate liberal capitalist ideologies of self,but offers a libertarian politics in which the spiritual power of the indi-vidual is opposed to the putatively oppressive control of social institutions.


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Knowledge, its nature and who controls it, become key points of contesta-tion. In the remainder of this article I trace the interlocking concepts whichconstitute ‘radical’ New Age theories of personal power by analysing dis-cursive continuities in several bestselling New Age fiction and non-fictiontexts. I subsequently ask what relation these theories might have to the widercultural, social and economic trends of the milieu in which they have arisen.

LIBERATING FICTIONSHeelas (1996) defines New Ageism as a ‘lingua franca to do with the human(and planetary) condition and how it can be transformed’ (p. 2). It privi-leges the authority and agency of individuals in effecting these transform-ations on both personal and collective levels (Hanegraaff, 1998: 201;O’Hara, 1988: 157; Ross, 1992: 541). The self is sacralized, seen at once asradically connected with the cosmos and the object of a necessary redemp-tion in which the individual must restore ‘authentic’ personal capacitieswhich have supposedly been occluded or lost under the vicissitudes ofmodernity (Heelas, 1996: 16). New Age works construct the value of per-sonal power: the self, it is frequently argued, may only be developed by aself-reflexive epistemological operation. The improvement of self and one’slife are supposedly contingent upon the epistemological empowerment ofself. The self becomes an individual’s primary resource for effecting posi-tive outcomes in life.

Although New Age literature is most often associated with guidebooks,autobiography and fiction are also among its major didactic genres. Thesegenres enable optimistic narratives which illustrate personal transformationin the form of the recovery of personal agency and wellbeing (McLaugh-lin, 1996: 82). Individuals become ‘seekers’ and transformation becomesnarrativized as a ‘path’ that takes the individual from a prior unsatisfactorystate of being to a liberated one (Melton, 1988: 47). Paulo Coelho’s influ-ential bestseller The Alchemist (1988), for example, focuses on the problemof how an individual may realize his or her ‘Personal Legend’. The novelconstructs a young Spanish shepherd as a kind of Everyman figure who issearching for hidden treasure, initially in the ‘outside’ world. At the begin-ning, the hero learns from a wise man that almost all the world’s bookspropagate ‘the world’s greatest lie’ which is that ‘at a certain point in ourlives we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become con-trolled by fate’ (p. 20). Instead, the seeker should pursue his or her dreamsby following the omens provided by life experiences (p. 31), because ‘torealise one’s Personal Legend is a person’s only real obligation. All thingsare one. And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in


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helping you to achieve it’ (p. 24). Ultimately, the young Spaniard’s ‘hiddentreasure’ turns out to be his own transformative inner power and this is theonly power one needs in order to discover and control one’s unique destiny(p. 166).

New Age narratives involve the restoration of the natural ability of theindividual to know and manifest ‘what is right’ for him or herself ratherthan live by societal norms. The novels, The Celestine Prophecy by JamesRedfield (1993), Mutant Message Down Under by Marlo Morgan (1994) andThe Return of Merlin by Deepak Chopra (1995), are all concerned with nar-rativizing such reconstruction of individual agency. They offer allegoricaladventures which depict the supersession of modern knowledges by heroeswho, through exposure to ‘non-modern’ knowledges, discover new trans-forming powers within themselves. In the preface to The Return of Merlin,Chopra argues that ‘What society thinks of as reality is the hypnosis of socialconditioning, an induced fiction in which we are all collectively partici-pating’. There is, however, ‘a sacred place inside us. . . . If we could justrealise it, the keys to the miracle of life lie in our own consciousness.’ TheReturn of Merlin is about waking up ‘the wizard that sleeps in all of us’. Notbeing in a subjectively enfranchised condition is seen as a form of sicknessto be overcome. The key is supposedly to turn away from reliance onoutside props and norms in favour of ‘inner’ resources. Redfield (1993)argues that there is an ‘inner direction, an intuitive guidance of some sort’(p. 141), Morgan (1994) that ‘Each person’s healer is within’ (p. 90).

In these novels, paths of self-revelation are underwritten by a cosmicpurpose which takes the existential arbitrariness out of life – personaldestiny is a universal human potential, but one that may only manifest itselfin the particularities of a life under the control of the individual. After aquest for wisdom that takes him in search of ancient manuscripts in Peru,Redfield’s narrator learns that ‘We all have a spiritual purpose, a mission,that we have been pursuing without being fully aware of it, and once webring it completely into consciousness, our lives can take off ’ (1993: 146).

The New Age hermeneutics of self presented in these novels portrayevents as steps of destiny rather than isolated, random happenings. Themessage is that things do have purpose and people can experience the liber-ation of realizing their destinies if they master the knowledge that enablesthem to understand the significance of events. The heroes do not followthe injunctions of doctrine. They are shown as rebels in the cause ofbecoming subjects and objects of their own revelations, achieving a trulyproprietary relation to self. This facet of discovery within the ambit of the‘true’ self is integrally linked to a critique of modern powers – norms,


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institutions and knowledges – which supposedly suppress the hidden poten-tial of the individual. The control over processes of becoming no longerlies in the institution or the word, but is internalized in a degree of per-sonal epistemic authority which renders external guidance in knowledge aservice at the disposal of sovereign individuals.

THE NATURE OF GUIDANCEThe representation of empowerment being channeled towards the privateends of ‘personal destiny’ appears in the form of direct promise on thecovers of New Age non-fiction self-help books. Deepak Chopra’s Uncon-ditional Life (1989) is ‘an inspiring new vision of our unlimited potential formastering the forces that shape personal reality’. In Infinite Self (1996), StuartWilde ‘shows you how to consolidate your inherent power and transcendall limitations by releasing yourself from the constraints of the ego’.Deborah Benstead and Storm Constantine’s The Inward Revolution (1998),‘demonstrates how we can create positive changes in all aspects of our livesby awakening our dormant life force’.

The structure of Chopra’s Unconditional Life (1989) exemplifies a similarideological architecture to that found in the novels. The authentic self ispitted against the false socialized self (pp. 15, 158) and is instead alignedwith natural, vital and cosmic forces (p. 233). These forces are tapped intuit-ively (p. 44) while the ‘false’ self is aligned with the technocracy of moderninstitutions (p. 6) and an associated epistemological mode of impersonalrationality (pp. 23, 53). This results in the inscription of personal realizationas a progressive countercultural act of taking (back) control of personaldestiny from oppressive social powers. In a similar vein, in The Path ofTransformation (1993), Shakti Gawain avers that ‘old forms and institutionsand systems simply aren’t working any more’ (p. 166). Stuart Wilde elaboratesfurther in Infinite Self: 33 Steps to Reclaiming Your Inner Power (1996) whenhe valorizes ‘fringe dwellers’ as

. . . people who know there’s something else to life other thanego, tick-tock, control and the institutions. . . . They’re peoplewho know and believe in a different reality – an alternative idea.Believing and acting differently, they extricate themselves fromcommon tribal emotions and make a dash for freedom. (p. 10)

In New Age thinking, then, the flipside of rejecting mediation by theexternal forces of modern institutions and knowledge is the appeal to theinner self as the central locus of knowledge and power. Heelas (1996) deemsNew Agers ‘epistemological individualists’ for their demands that ‘voices of


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authority emanating from experts, charismatic leaders and established tra-ditions’ be ‘mediated by inner experience’ (p. 21). The overturning of aninherited dualistic epistemology which places authority outside the indi-vidual, in the objective realm, in other persons or social mores, is central tothe promise of the new and better that is inscribed in the term ‘New Age’(Hanegraaff, 1998: 515). Wilde (1996) employs the familiar trope that youhave to ‘understand that when you have a problem, the solution is internal,and the healing is internal’ (p. 150). Chopra (1989) believes ‘it is just a matterof reorienting one’s perspective, seeing the self as primary and outwardthings as secondary’ (p. 49). And in a chapter entitled ‘Finding Your InnerTeacher’, Gawain (1993) describes how the inner guide is supposedlyoccluded by socialization:

And, if we had all been raised in an enlightened way, we wouldhave learned to follow this inner guidance throughout our lives.Instead, most of us did not receive much support orencouragement in trusting our own deepest feelings. In fact,many of us were actively taught not to trust ourselves butinstead to follow an external authority, often in the form of rulesor dogma. Or we were encouraged to be rational – to theexclusion of our intuitive faculties. (p. 59)

Rationality is a key aspect of this problem of external authority. In NewAge philosophies it is an impersonal epistemological mode that deserves tobe superseded by the inuitive powers of the inner self. Chopra’s (1989)theory of magical thinking (‘magical’ because it leads to the manifestationof our desires) privileges ‘self-referral’ over ‘object-referral’ ways of think-ing, wherein ‘Self-referral means that I gauge reality not by externals but byinternals, by my own feelings and intuitions’ (p. 47). Intuition does not referdecision-making to the arbitration of public standards or an objective realityand thereby transfers epistemological authority to the self.

What all this implies is that if final ideological authority is ceded toindividuals, then they are essentially at liberty to endorse or exclude know-ledge depending upon its value for them. Indeed, this principle of New Ageideology maps onto the actual syncretism of the movement. Wilde (1996)suggests we extract knowledge from various sources to make up our per-sonal philosophy, but that no single system is sacrosanct. One should‘Develop a philosophy that works, and any time a system doesn’t work, takea long hard look at what you believe. Bag it if it doesn’t work’ (p. 202).Gawain (1993) similarly points out that ‘a spiritual practice need not bereligious in the normal sense. . . . Whatever works for you is great’


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(pp. 78–9). In other words, the criteria for deciding both which means ofself-development to choose and which ones ‘work’, are private, just as arethe ends of ‘personal destiny’ towards which New Age knowledge is instru-mentalized. The ‘guidance’ of Gawain and Wilde accordingly tailors itselfto the model of self that it valorizes. It disclaims its own authority, prefer-ring a provisional status in which it is of potential service to subjects whomust try it out ‘for themselves’. Gawain (1993) warns that it is not neces-sary to ‘give power away’ to teachers (p. 61). Basically, they ‘are in our livesto help us strengthen and deepen our relationship with our own innerteacher’ (p. 63). For Wilde (1996),‘even though something or someone caninspire you or teach you, in the end the only way you will sustain a higherenergy is to create it for yourself ’ (p. 21), and this involves having ‘your ownindividual destiny, beliefs and methodology’ (p. 69). So this New Age guid-ance rhetorically effaces its own externality to the subject by inviting theuser to make what he or she will of proffered knowledge. This places it ina position of theoretical subordination to the private desires of the know-ledge consumer.

Another way of saying this is that in New Age ideology truth is pro-visional – not open to public verification by recourse to a shared reality, butcontingent upon an inner guide that may choose what version of reality isrelevant. There is a crucial nexus between the epistemological, the onto-logical and the cosmological here. It is the source of a unique metaphysicsin which the given individual is ceded a great deal of freedom to epistemi-cally construct a ‘personal reality’ which is a valid aspect of a diverse – onecould even say liberal – cosmos, which supports the great variety of meansand ends that are‘right’ for different people.What is ‘right’ is continuous withwhat is ‘true’ and ‘real’ in terms of a person’s unique path. It is only left, insuch an open-ended cosmos, for the individual to experiment with a viewto realizing their destiny for, in the words of Wilde (1996),‘If an idea is right,it will be empowered by your Infinite Self projecting energy outwards, andthings will flow’ (p. 47). Gawain (1993) explains the philosophical rationaleof this pervasive New Age idea of ‘making your own reality’. Apparently

. . . we are each constantly creating our subjective experiences ofreality. Our own deepest beliefs and expectations aboutourselves, about others, and about life, determine how weperceive external reality, what kinds of people, events andsituations we draw to us, and are drawn to. (p. 18)

It is claimed that people’s lives change after realizing that they have theability to control their lives through establishing a working hermeneutics


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of self: ‘they become aware of a whole new range of possibilities theycouldn’t have seen before’ (p. 19).

NEW AGE COUNTERCULTUREIt is not within the scope of this article to think through the many conse-quences of such an ideology of self. However, by recognizing the materialand social contexts within which the discourse is transmitted, it may bepossible to identify cultural conditions which facilitate the technologies ofself on offer. At least it is clear that New Age ideology is generally inimi-cal to centralized institutional authority: choices about what is right for theindividual are contingent upon a ‘personal reality’ that only the individualcan truly know. This leads to the question of how such pervasive ideologi-cal continuities as those concerning the ‘New Agent’ become establishedin the absence of institutional doctrinal compulsion. This question involvesasking in turn to whom these qualities of empowerment are meant toappeal and how such acts of identification take place in terms of theorganizational logic of the New Age movement.

I have claimed that work in the sociology of religion has recognizedbut not followed through on the idea that the New Age movement trans-mits ideology through commodity exchange. It is, however, true that suchresearch has revealed certain libertarian presuppositions to be integral to themovement. Jon Bloch’s (1998) study of the beliefs of 21 New Agers focuseson the conceptual problem of ‘the strain between self-autonomy and com-munity’ that is apparent in detailed interview responses (p. 41). All the inter-viewees expressed disenchantment with organized religions; all expressedbeliefs in the self as authority and self-autonomy as a spiritual ideology; andall but one proffered unsolicited beliefs in self-autonomy in opening state-ments (p. 44). Bloch concludes that the evidence suggests a new form ofsocial movement that accommodates self-autonomy and challenges sup-posed threats to it: ‘In such movements, emphasis is placed not on strongorganisational ties or explicit political agendas, but on advancing new com-munication codes that challenge existing social controls and dogma’ (p.115). This idea that the New Age is reticulated by communication codeswhich are not tied to central institutional sites of production affirms Heelas’sidea that at the most basic level the New Age is like a lingua franca – thatis, a ‘link’ language rather than a proprietary one.

However, once New Ageism is described as a countercultural discoursecommunity, the problem of specifying its own institutional sites of pro-duction follows. Identifying the New Age solely in terms of its lack of over-arching organizational structure (as though it were reticulated in an


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institutional vacuum) lacks explanatory power. It is precisely its decentral-ized institutional character, the business enterprises that convey servicesthrough it and consumer appropriation of commodities, which give shapeto the diverse, amorphous New Age milieu. Providers of New Age prod-ucts – the authors, publishing houses, seminar convenors, the healers, theeditors and journalists – design products to appeal to a market of consumers.Demographic research profiling the types of customer likely to buy ‘NewAge’ is on sale to those responsible for marketing products (Ray, 1997);publishing trade magazines discuss and influence trends in New Age bookand tape sales (Mantell, 1998); and business magazines analyse the market-ing of the New Age in various sectors (Stodder, 1996). The fact that thereis no central non-market authority controlling the forms and uses of NewAge ideology on the ‘supply’ side is continuous with its diversity. NewAgeism comprises a grand melange of belief systems and practices – fromZen to Shamanism and Reiki to Rebirthing. New Age motifs may beemployed in selling a range of products from mind/body therapies toretreats or a Zen alarm clock that ‘awakens’ you gradually with therapeuticsounds every morning. Magazines available in the key New Age social spaceof the bookshop network goods, events and ideas. Seminars and exhibitionsbring together speakers, businesses, products, practices and philosophiesoffering various ways of enhancing personal wellbeing.

The existence of the New Age market supports a contention thatThomas Luckmann made in 1967:

The social form of religion emerging in modern industrialsocieties is characterized by the direct accessibility of anassortment of religious representations to potential consumers.The sacred cosmos is mediated neither through a specialiseddomain of religious institutions nor through other primarypublic institutions. It is the direct accessibility of the sacredcosmos, more precisely, through an assortment of religiousthemes, which makes religion today essentially a phenomenon ofthe ‘private sphere’. (p. 103)

In the New Age, the ‘direct accessibility’ of which Luckmann speaks isexpressed in the strong belief in the individual’s liberty to choose andfashion a personal destiny, which, as we have seen, appears in the pages ofNew Age works as a sacred principle. It supplants the ideological appeal forthe believer to commit to a single doctrine, the appeal that is the basis oftraditional notions of church, sect and cult membership. Instead, the NewAge consumer is in a literal position of having to select ‘what is right for


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them’ from a range of marketed options that make up the assortment ofmeans of enhancing personal wellbeing which are presented in New Agecontexts. The first stall banner I saw at a recent Mind, Body, Spirit Festivalat Brisbane Convention Centre read, ‘Destiny is not a matter of chance. Itis a matter of choice.’ The slogan of an advertisement for a book calledColloidal Silver:The Hidden Truths, promises that ‘the truth will set you free’(Insight, 2000: 9). Appeals to self-realization appear repeatedly in advertise-ments in the same magazine. The Awaken and Discover telephonecounselling service advertisement invites one to ‘Awaken and Discover yourTrue Potential’ (p. 69). Trinity Academy of Science and Philosophy aversthat ‘YOU can change your Career Life and Destiny’ (p. 66, originalcapitalizations), while Mind Motivations Hypnotherapy Consultants assertthat ‘All Change Begins in Your Mind’ (p. 67).

Of course, in these examples from advertisements, as with the postcardat my local cinema, the function of promotion is quite obvious. Yet theseare the same imperatives to achieve self-enhancement through tapping innerpotential as found in the elaborated discourses of New Age books analysedhere. As Andrew Wernick (1991: 181) argues, the communicative functionof promotion may be expressed through a range of signifying materials,rather than merely the genre of advertising. Not the least important of theseis the product itself – promotional discourse is not simply external to, butis often designed into, the commodities it promotes and, in the case of NewAge knowledge commodities, this means that it is imbricated with the ideassold. The insistent appeal to a sovereign knowledge-chooser looking forways to enhance self is central to the discourse even in its less explicitly pro-motional moments. The suggestion of New Age self-help is that the poten-tial powers of the individual may be realized through application of the kindof knowledge on offer. This is consonant with the imperatives of com-modity promotion, which require that the agency of the individual beactivated in the form of buying self-enhancing products. Hence, the NewAge transfer of the rights to deem truth and determine value away fromthe traditional authoritative regulators of religious discourse towards theknowledge-user seems inextricably bound up with the exigencies of per-suading people through a liberal marketplace which offers belief optionsrather than obligations. A typical New Age magazine is awash with suchoptions, comprising articles and advertisements which promote a widerange of ideas and activities, but including little or no editorial attempt tosort out true from false belief. It is up to the reader to designate value, andit is contrary to the overall economic interests of New Age producers tonarrow the scope of the market in ideological products. The fact that the


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products being sold to the consumer involve models of liberated sovereignsubjectivity may be more than coincidence. As Bourdieu (1984) puts it indiscussing bourgeois utopian projects of personal development: ‘It may evenbe wondered if the ethic of liberation is not in the process of supplying theeconomy with the perfect consumer whom economic theory has alwaysdreamed of ’ (p. 371). In a sense, then, the sale of ego-ideals directly throughcommodified philosophy of self (rather than through metonymic associationwith other products) seems like the logical upshot of a consumer culturewhich insistently trades on the symbolic value of personal enhancement.

MARKET CURESHowever, if there are definite parities between New Ageism and con-sumerism, it is wise to avoid collapsing all distinctions between them. HereI wish to propose that there is a culture-specific political consonancebetween the contemporary ideologies which surround the dominant modeof knowledge exchange in New Ageism (commodification) and the move-ment’s privatist ideologies of self. The fact that New Agers are addressed,and act, as consumers should not be confused with the idea that they areconcerned with consuming as an end in itself, or indeed, the idea thatmaking money is the principal motive of New Age business people. A studyof 908 British New Agers revealed that a high number of them had lowincomes despite being middle class by profession and education. Many ofthese were people who themselves worked in the alternative health andspirituality area (Rose, 1998: 19). Nonetheless, some commentators regardNew Age appeals to self as functioning purely to catalyse consumption asthough no cultural values beyond the economic are involved in New Ageideology. For example, in an incisive critique of New Age consumerism,Jay Rosen (1988) shows how it reproduces the broader consumerist messageof ‘Buy this product and change your life’ (p. 270). But he then proposesthat the New Age is basically ‘a business, a way of moving merchandise’ (p.270). Yet, the instrumental aspect of New Age market relations does notmean that profit and consumption are the only interests that drive NewAge exchange. The movement addresses major dilemmas related to con-temporary life and identity.

The projected use-value of New Age products is tied up with culturalvalues regarding modernity, solutions to problems of meaning and purpose,and the competency of individuals in various areas of social and personallife. In the words of Jane Mulcock (2001): ‘Like any other group, partici-pants in the alternative health and spirituality movement are using the


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resources at hand to create narratives of meaning that help them to under-stand the world and their place in it’ (p. 181). While it tackles existentialthemes of perennial human interest, the New Age appeals to the reflexivesearch for identity and wellbeing of people living in a ‘post-traditional’ socialmilieu. Giddens (1991) and Beck (1992) have described how contempor-ary modernity obliges individuals to plan reflexive biographies as ways ofnavigating a social environment marked by a plurality of options and risks.Both writers link the dominance of expert rationality in social adminis-tration with the dilemmas of lay people as to valid sources of knowledgeupon which personal decisions may be based. Beck (1992) argues that theincomprehensibility of expert knowledge constantly appears as a problemin everyday decision-making. For example, when faced with the problemof whether or not to buy food containing synthetic chemicals, an individualmay experience that the grounds for making such a judgement ‘are funda-mentally dependent on external knowledge’. In such a ‘risk’ society, ‘affectedparties are becoming incompetent in matters of their own affliction. Theylose an essential part of their cognitive sovereignty’ (p. 53, original empha-sis). Where traditional sources of guidance have withered, New Age self-help promises the restoration of the personal ability to know and act. Aswe have seen, it promotes personal inner knowing as a solution to the per-ceived disenfranchising effects of institutional rationality. In so doing, itdeproblematizes choice by emphasizing the cognitive powers of individualsto judge what is right for themselves and consequently to determine per-sonal destiny.

It is unnecessary to impute ‘capitalistic’ motives to New Agers in orderto analyse the role that the market plays as a site that transmits and influ-ences their countercultural ideology of self-empowerment. However, inorder to account for the conditions that allow for New Age models of selfit is necessary to understand the shifting politics of the private and the socialin the liberal capitalist culture in which libertarian models of self have theirhistory. The concept of personality as the expression of the unique innerself (as opposed to previous notions of the individual embodiment ofgeneral human characteristics), developed in the 19th century (Sennett,1986: 265; Lasch, 1978: 92). According to Campbell (1987), related dis-courses which pit the unique individual against the weight of an oppres-sive social structure may be traced back at least as far as the ‘theodicy ofcreativity’ of romantic Bohemianism, which ‘cast the individual of truevirtue into the role of the opponent to “society”, whose conventions hemust deny if only to secure proof of his genius and passion’ (p. 205). TheNew Age is part of a countercultural expressive humanist tradition which


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valorizes the powers of the ‘unique’ individual against those of institutionsand conformity to norms. This ideational tradition is arguably continuouswith the loss of belief in the public in favour of a private reality of ‘inti-mate’ feeling in which the ‘real self ’ becomes redefined as a set of personalmotivations and impulses (Sennett, 1986: 326, 331). The flipside of thisvalorization of individual agency, however, is that pursuit and expression ofpersonal autonomy is ideologically consonant with the ‘voluntaristic’ practiceof consumption (p. 11).

This returns us to the double sense in which New Age self-help is pri-vatist: it encourages people to concentrate on personal concerns, and itspreads its ideology of self-concern in the milieu where private agencyreigns supreme: the market. New Age technologies of self which proposethat self-fashioning is achievable through an inward turn in which thesubject realizes the epistemological potential to control his or her uniquepersonal destiny are indicative of the longstanding liberal subjectivism(needs and wants are private affairs) which has depicted harmonious com-munal life in market society as an aggregate of the private activities of indi-viduals (Slater, 1997: 32–61). However, if, as in the works examined here,realization of the authentic self and its epistemological powers is insepar-able from rejection of supposed social norms such as rationality and thepowers of social institutions – for example, allopathic medicine, education,the State and the Church – it is necessary to consider New Age self-helpnot so much as reinforcing ‘general’ liberal capitalist ideology but rather asinvolved in historical liberal disputes over power and self-determination.While many sociologists (e.g. Rose, 1999) recognize that ‘the free, rational,conscious, choosing, autonomous self is a creation of western capitalistdemocracies’ (p. xxx), the New Age opposition of sacralized sovereign indi-viduality to impersonal rationality and operations of social institutions isassociated with a more historically specific critique of the interventionistforms of governmentality associated with social market capitalism. Its liber-tarian solution of self-transfiguration makes sense in terms of a broader his-torical shift towards privatism in political rationality, one that according toRose ‘began to occur in the late 1950s and 1960s’ (p. 228). In this model,‘the same forces that de-legitimate “public” interference in “private” lifeopen the details of wishes, desires and pleasures to a plethora of new regu-latory forms [. . .]’ which promote ways of life ‘generated by the techniquesof choice and consumption’ (p. 229). A crucial part of this contemporaryceding of forces of regulation from other social institutions to the marketare ideologies of subjectivity which hail the citizen as a free voluntarychooser pursuing private definitions of the good. Chief neo-liberal


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ideologists, Milton and Rose Friedman (1990), for example, believe thatthere is a basic difference between ‘the market and a political agency’ –namely that ‘You are free to choose’ (pp. 222–3). The ‘free’ market is, inother words, the institution which apparently supports the empowermentof the individual. It is the logical home of New Age self-help.

The crucial point about this advanced liberal milieu, however, is notthat late capitalism simply innovates new products and ‘creates needs’ fromthin air (though it arguably can), but that forces of commodification enteralready existing cultural practices which have historically been regulated indifferent ways. As Randy Martin (1999) puts it, ‘For markets to emerge,cultural practices must be dispossessed from their source and attributed witha generality of freedom of exchange’(p. 36).The commodification of spiritualknowledge may not seem consonant with received cultural distinctionsbetween the sacred and the secular or with church-sect typology, but it isfar from an anomaly in the context of a post-scarcity consumer capitalisteconomy. In analysing the history of the commodity form and resistancesto its encroachment upon various domains, John Frow (1997) finds nothingwhich seems to ‘undermine the narrative of a continual, if uneven, exten-sion of commodification’ (p. 135).

This then may help us to understand the historical logic which allowsthe New Age to appear as a ‘radical’ cultural option while being politicallyconsonant with the exigencies of recent ideologies of liberal capitalismwhich depict the privatization of social power as liberating. New Age spir-ituality took shape in a 1960s counterculture unified more by a critique ofestablished powers than by the alternatives that it offered. In the 1960s,elements of capitalism turned against the mainstream conformism of 1950sconsumerism to selling products through ideological appeals to authenticity,individuality, difference and rebellion (Frank, 1997: 9). An inherited politi-cal impulse then became the basis of a new ethos of commodification inwhich the rebel became the consumer, one who wanted to devour the newvalues created by the product innovations of ‘flexible’ capitalism (p. 119).The central conceit was to sell individuation and personal empowerment,creating a politics of ‘individual liberation through product choice’ (p. 172).Frank argues that elements of the business sector were involved in the 1960srebellion against ‘technocratic totalitarianism’ in such a way as to makeuntenable a distinction between ‘the radical’ (as a pre-economic category),and its co-optation by capitalism (p. 14). Campbell (1987) similarly arguesthat there is a close historical correspondence between ‘outbursts ofBohemianism and periods of creative consumer boom’ (p. 206), giving the1890s, 1920s and 1960s as examples. The New Age may be seen as the


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contemporary zenith of this emancipatory, countercultural strain of pro-motional culture.

CONCLUSIONSNew Age self-help needs to be understood not as a straight instantiation ofconsumerism per se, nor as a purely religious discourse which is transmittedby commodification yet is somehow untouched by cultural ideologieswhich legitimate and promote commodity exchange.

New Age thought depicts personal destiny as a private affair. Its func-tion of providing existential answers and beliefs that people can live by isan enduring one present in many cultures, but at the same time it appearsin a particular socio-cultural form where religious ideology takes the formof belief options to be navigated by a knowledge-chooser in a marketmilieu. Individuals are encouraged to recover responsibility for their ownlives by realizing their inner cognitive potential. This optimistic message isimbricated with the ideologies of self-enhancement and appeals to sover-eign consumer choice which characterize contemporary promotional dis-course. It is also a countercultural message which promises the end of thesubject’s dependence upon external knowledge, social norms and insti-tutional resources. In this way, it is consonant both with neo-liberalideologies which identify provision with private agency, and with a recentstage of capitalism that has associated qualities of subjective authenticity,rebellion and liberation with the consumption of commodities.

The question of whether New Ageism actually provides adequatesolutions to the alienation of personal power that it identifies is of coursea moot point. This article has not been concerned with New Age practicesand makes no judgements about their therapeutic efficacy. It is quitepossible, as Bloch’s study suggests, that the majority of New Agers doexperience significant personal transformation. Furthermore, as Hethering-ton (2000) has shown, some New Agers ally spiritual transformation withsocial and environmental activism. However, on the other hand it is crucialto recognize and interrogate the particular ideological affinity betweenNew Age thought and its institutional ground of possibility: the market-place. If we agree with Rose (1999) that the dominant logic of advancedliberal capitalism ‘obliges’ us to be free to choose, New Age self-help startsto denote less the liberation of the individual agent from mediation by‘outside’ powers, as is imagined in the discourse, than a historical shift inthe external shaping powers and the way they mediate. The New Agemarket in personal values seems to obviate the very kind of sovereignsubject it celebrates.


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There is a big difference between purchasing a promise that one maycontrol one’s destiny and actually controlling it. New Age works propose abetter life through the transfiguration of personal agency. Yet there is anobvious disparity between the means of transformation offered, which tendto be idealistic, and the ends, which include improvements in all aspects ofdaily life. ‘Creating your reality’ is seen largely as a function of one’s stateof mind. Among the other insights afforded by her new-found philosophyof personal responsibility is the realization by the narrator of Marlo’s MutantMessage (Morgan, 1994) that street people in the USA are ‘allowing them-selves to remain victims’ (p. 130). Chopra’s Unconditional Life: Mastering theForces that Shape Personal Reality (1989) only really deals with one force –the power of the individual mind – and depicts it as a panacea for all ills.Such extreme positions seem to repeat the mystification that Adorno (1973)identified in the existentialist bid for personal authenticity, i.e. that thegesture of autonomy stands in for the content of autonomy as something forthe alienated to aspire to (p. 18). According to Adorno, such philosophyignores real material and social states of affairs in order to affirm the highlyformal sense of belonging to oneself, whereby ‘The individual, who himself(sic) can no longer rely on any firm possession, holds onto himself in hisextreme abstractness as the last, the supposedly unlosable possession’ (p. 115).

The New Age ideology of the individual’s sovereignty over his or herown affairs and the value-relativism indissociable from it obviate more trulyradical discourses which pursue substantive communal political ends indialectical relationships with private ends. Such discourses, which charac-terize feminist, green and alternative globalization social movements,revolve around the problem of how ‘we’ are to live and the unequal powerindividuals have to pursue the political as the personal. The popularity ofthe New Age movement is testament to a sincere search for better ways,and New Agers are right that an upsurge of personal agency is required toeffect significant change. However, from a political point of view, channel-ing such an upsurge into affirming an illusion of absolute self-control over‘personal reality’ can also seem like a recipe for a new order of quietism.

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Guy Redden is completing a PhD about the cultural politics of self in the New Age movementat the Media and Cultural Studies Centre of the University of Queensland. His broader interestsinclude countercultures, social change and theoretical issues relating to agency. He haspublished articles about the New Age, activism, colonialism and the internet, the most recentof which is ‘Networking Dissent: The Internet and the Anti-globalisation Movement’, in MotsPluriels 18 (2001), available online [http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP1801gr.html].He is also an editor with M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture [www.media-culture.org.au].Address: School of English, Media Studies and Art History, The University of Queensland, StLucia, Qld 4072, Australia. [email: [email protected]]


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Personal transfiguration and radical privatization in New Age Self-Help

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