Am posting a paper written a while ago, which I think raises some useful questions about agency while also exploring the limits of traditional approaches to Alcoholics Anonymous and similar mutual-help groups. If you think of A. A. as a "Christian" group or "cult," you're likely drawing conclusions based on their creedal conventions - that is, their repeated statements of belonging, or higher powers, etc. Things are, as always, not nearly so simple. This one runs a bit long, but I'm just happy to throw it out there.
I woke up. This had to be stopped. I saw I could not take so much as one drink. I was through forever. Before then, I had written lots of sweet promises, but my wife happily observed that this time I meant business. And so I did.
Shortly afterward I came home drunk.
(Alcoholics Anonymous 1976: 5)
Becoming Alcoholic
The epigraph above comes from the definitive piece of Alcoholics Anonymous (henceforth, “AA”) literature, colloquially (and aptly) called “The Big Book,” which has long served as the foundational outline of the program’s ideology and methodology. It also contains numerous “drunkalogues” (Rudy 1986: 12), formulaic and oft-repeated depictions of recovering alcoholics’ descent towards “rock bottom” and subsequent salvation. The quote above, from AA founder Bill W.’s personal account, demonstrates the apparently paradoxical situation of the alcoholic: a simultaneous overabundance and devastating failure of the will. The chronic drinker, constitutionally unable to maintain sobriety, still maintains that the solution is will-power, a delusion stemming from arrogance and the inability to accept one’s true self. As Yeung notes, “[a]lcoholics are seen here as meddling too much in their own affairs; they have fallen under their own tyranny – the affliction’s unique style of sovereign self-administration” (Yeung 2007: 68).
It follows, in this view, that recovery requires the consignment of one’s agency – as a function of an autonomous will – to a custodial “higher power,” whether God or the program itself, as stated in steps two and three of the “Twelve Steps” (Alcoholics Anonymous 1986: 25, 34). This entails a transformation of self, often likened to a religious conversion (e.g. Rudy 1986), and thought to be largely facilitated through the refashioning of one’s biography and self-perception according to the discursive conventions of the “drunkalogue” (e.g. Cain 1991; Rudy 1986; Yeung 2007). The mechanics of this deliberate embedding of the self into the broader structure of AA are singularly amenable to a particular style of interpretation by critics, in which a new self is fashioned discursively through participation in the program, resulting in a specific style of being.
Three such interpretations will be examined here: Rudy’s (1986) interactionist approach, which focuses on the imposition of the deviant label of “alcoholic” from without; Cain’s (1991) discursive approach, which examines the typology of “drunkalogues” and the ways in which they help drinkers fashion acceptable identities and explanations; and Yeung’s (2007) analysis of AA subjectivity, which draws on Foucault’s “technologies of the self” (Foucault 1988) to show the continuity of this self-fashioning with the style and demands of modern liberal citizenship. Such studies are certainly useful insofar as they examine one or another dimension of AA “conversion.” I maintain, however, that despite their constructivist commitments, all three works (more or less implicitly) rely on a simplistic model of the willing agent as changing but coherent, structured but unified – an epistemological foundation that obscures the fractured, open-ended and ironic (Lambek 2003) experience of those they hope to describe.
David R. Rudy’s Interactionism and Labeling
In his book Becoming Alcoholic, Rudy describes at length the entry into and movement through the AA program: initial encounter, commitment to the program due to behavioural, ideological and social pressures, the acceptance of one’s problems as being due to “alcoholism,” a subsequent transformation of identity, the telling of one’s story, and, finally, intensive ongoing interaction with the program (called “Twelfth Stepping”) (1986: 26-41). In his view, the acquisition of the “alcoholic” identity is not an innocent process of self-definition, but is instead a reinterpretation of one’s past to match the characterizations attached to oneself by others, which includes expectations of and prescriptions for “alcoholic behaviour” (1986: 103). These characterizations are heavily typologized and scripted:
Interaction with significant others, public stereotypes of alcoholics, media presentations of labeling material, the learning of drinking styles and practices, and social control agency definitions and assumptions regarding alcoholism feed into a process in which behaviours and definitions of behaviours are shaped into alcoholism characterizations. (1986: 105)
This imposition of expectations from without can be contested or negotiated, but often drinkers lack the social resources to counter them with their own explanations and idiosyncratic self-stylings (1986: 99-102). The acceptance of the label “alcoholic,” and all that it entails, is thus the result of interactions with others on a tilted playing field.
The main arena in which these expectations, and the identity around which they cohere, are demonstrably accepted and enacted is the “drunkalogue,” which typically begins with an account of one’s drinking, goes on to describe one’s encounter with AA, and then ends with a heartfelt explanation of how and why life is so much better in the program (1986: 12). Rudy draws on C. Wright Mills (1940) in calling these stories “vocabularies of motive,” that is, explanations of one’s behaviour that make sense in specific contexts, both to speaker and audience (Rudy 1986: 44). While this usefully signals the collaborative nature of one’s presentation of self, with the implication that this presentation effects changes in one’s own self-perception, the mechanics of this process are left untheorized. Quite simply, it is assumed that the rhetorically-formulaic enactment of a social label is evidence of the deep interiorization of the label. This is of course a problematic leap of reasoning.
Carole Cain’s Incorporation of Discourse
Cain steps into the space left open by Rudy’s model and tries to flesh it out with her attendance to the functioning of the personal story as a cognitive tool and model (1991). Similarly to Rudy, she addresses movement through the program as a change in identity and self-understanding:
[For AA practitioners,] alcoholism is not something one has, but rather, an alcoholic is what one is. This is a situation in which many of one’s basic assumptions must be changed or reorganized, in which one must learn a new understanding of one’s problem, one’s self, and what the world is like. (1991: 214)
She also sees the AA stories as the primary means through which this acquisition of a new identity is accomplished, as encodings of the group’s principles and propositions, but also as models of what alcoholics are and do (1991: 215). However, she widens her gaze to include the broader process in which these stories have a significant, but not total, role. She draws on Van Gennep (1960) by treating the transformation of self as a rite of passage: “The old identity is weakened through identity diffusion. In acquiring a new identity, individuals must understand the identity, internalize it, and become emotionally attached to it” (Cain 1991: 218).
The stories aren’t learned and mimicked in a vacuum, but are instead encouraged, corrected and reinforced through an ongoing dialogic relationship with one’s AA peers. Gradually, as one’s stories match the group’s conventions with more and more fidelity, the calibrations from outside cease, and the end result is a successful intra-individual internalization of the inter-individual skills (1991: 229). Cain collected several formal and informal stories told by AA members, using their structural similarities to the prototypical AA stories (as in “The Big Book”), verbal markers such as “I now know,” and the inclusion of more or less “AA propositions” (e.g. being powerless over alcohol, that AA is a program for living and not just not drinking, etc.) as a means of measuring the members’ acquisition of these skills of self-analysis. She notes that the stories change over time for each member, and serve as a means of organizing new experience rather than simply the past, concluding:
There seems to be a fairly strong relationship between the extent to which the AA identity has been internalized, the extent to which the drinking-experience narrative resembles the AA story structure, and the salience of the AA identity to the individual. (1991: 242-3)
“Drunkalogues” as Objectification
It is perhaps useful to call on Webb Keane’s treatment of objectification here, as it will help shine light on the problem shared by both works reviewed above. Keane (2010) discusses the objectification of one’s experience in acts of ethical justification, noting that these objectifications allow for the perception of stability in one’s life and make one’s character available for evaluation by oneself and others. The collaborative framing of one’s deeds is “crucial to the identification of acts and agents as belonging to socially recognized types… which contributes to the perception that traits are coherent and stable” (2010: 74). This bears obvious connection to AA stories, which have been described above as the presentations of individuals’ pasts in a way that demonstrates an acceptable enactment of the “alcoholic” character, from which certain expectations and prescriptions follow.
An important aspect of Keane’s treatment of objectification is its connection of public statements of the self to the creedal conventions of evangelical Protestantism. These conventions are themselves embedded in an Enlightenment model in which one’s responsibility as an agent depends on the translatability of one’s thoughts and experience into propositional form (i.e. objectification) (2010: 79-81). For inchoate experience to be harnessed to one’s ethical character, and so to be available for presentation and evaluation, it must be objectified. It is precisely these objectifications, which occur after-the-fact and necessarily efface all that is unspeakable, incoherent, or in contradiction to the narrative being presented, that are the focus of Rudy and Cain’s analyses.
This focus on objectifications as presented by “converted alcoholics” is problematic specifically because of this effacement. As a result, both Rudy and Cain take for granted the co-extensiveness of demonstrations of self and the selves they are meant to demonstrate. Working solely with what is offered in AA stories precludes the possibility of either theorist’s portrayal of his or her informants being punctured or complicated by the very contradictions, self-betrayals and ambivalences that must be central to the frustrations of the problem drinker. Both authors “take them at their word,” without regard to the pragmatic ethical context and instrumentality of these words. Therefore, despite the emphasis on structure, collaboration and interaction, the model of the self implicit in these studies is still one of internal consistency and enduring self-perception (following adoption of the “alcoholic” identity). This is of course similar to the Western conception of the self relativized by Geertz, as a “more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe… organized into a distinctive whole” (1983: 59). About this conception, James Laidlaw makes a crucial observation: “This is a much more accurate description of the postulates of certain brands of social science than it is an ethnographic description… for which latter purpose it is no better empirically grounded than the philosopher’s ‘moral responsibility’” (2010: 154). It is precisely this difference between epistemological postulate and informants’ non-propositional experience that is lost by exclusive focus on the AA story.
Cheryl Yeung and AA’s Care of the Self
Yeung’s analysis of AA differs significantly from Rudy’s and Cain’s insofar as she attends to the discourses of self that structure the program without relying on objectifications as a measure of the successful conversion of participants. She looks exclusively to the group’s literature, rather than solely its “drunkalogues,” then contextualizes this discourse of the self as part of the broader construction of modern liberal political subjectivities. There is of course some overlap with the earlier studies examined above, in particular, the claim that “AA discourse crafts a distinct alcoholic subject who will never be able to drink moderately because of a stable disposition” (2007: 52; emphasis in original). There is a further similarity with Cain’s work in that participation in AA is said to give its members a new skill set, a new means of self-assessment and management, brought about through collaboration: “individuals are compelled to become their own AA experts with the help of group and sponsor” (2007: 60; emphasis in original). In this respect, both Yeung and Cain can be said to emphasize the active role AA members play in their development, as opposed to the comparatively passive role played in Rudy’s model.
Yeung’s analysis reads AA’s literature through the lens of Foucault’s “technologies of the self,” which include self-knowledge and self-care, verbal confession and penitence, and the relation of concern for self and political participation. These are similar to the features of pastoral care, which entails submission to divine agency, affirms the powerlessness of the individual, and calls on him or her to make amends and reconciliation and to spread the word of salvation (Yeung 2007: 63-4). Structured along these lines, AA’s program is continuous with the complex of discourses and tactics that Barbara Cruikshank identifies as the “technologies of citizenship” (quoted in Yeung 2007: 65). A curious feature of this reading is the apparent paradox between the goal of self-management and the simultaneous affirmation through AA that a key problem for alcoholics is “too much self” (2007: 67) – the delusion of having autonomy and self-control. This paradox is apparently resolved through submission; self-knowledge of the peculiarly AA kind leads to an awareness that resignation of one’s (false) agency to the guidelines of the program is the only route to freedom, and thus to true self-care. In this sense, a subject who is reconstituted by the technologies of self and citizenship is similar to the subject derived from Rudy and Cain’s readings of their informants’ ethical objectifications – an individual who has passed from one state of being to another, and is subsequently given an internal coherence and consistency that is maintained from without.
An advantage of Yeung’s focus on the literature rather than the spoken words of informants follows from the discussion above: by not relying on objectifications, her conclusions aren’t pre-emptively determined by her selection of data. This of course has the drawback of not dealing with the lived experience of informants at all (which, admittedly, wasn’t her research goal); and, as just suggested, the model of agency reached by this circumnavigation is ultimately similar to that derived exclusively from informants’ stories. The dilemma here appears to be either effacing that which can’t be cleanly narrated or ignoring it altogether, with the end result of both approaches being an implicit assumption of internal coherence and consistency. I’ll now turn elsewhere for an analytic of agency and responsibility that can be used to salvage what is lost above: namely, ambivalence, uncertainty and the messiness of experience.
Disarticulated Responsibility and Illness as Agent
James Laidlaw’s “Agency and Responsibility” (2010), as noted above, critiques the assumption that Western experiences of the self-as-agent are indeed as coherent and organized as suggested by Geertz. He goes on to offer an alternative conception of responsibility to the one customarily assumed – that is, a responsibility neatly assigned to the single, identifiable author of an event. To do so, he draws on Bernard Williams’ description (1993) of ancient Greek understandings of responsibility, which had four elements: cause, the assumption that someone made something happen; intention; state, the condition of one’s mind at the time something was done; and response, the assumption that someone must make amends (Laidlaw 2010: 149). Rather than suggesting that this disarticulation of responsibility is a universally applicable conceptualization, Laidlaw uses it because it is a productive breakdown whose component parts may be differently related, compounded, distributed and emphasized according to context; no particular configuration necessarily holds in any or all places (2010: 150). The vital point made by Laidlaw, however, is that these four elements needn’t necessarily be coincident within a given individual or group, but may be distributed [footnote 1]: “to see agency as something that belongs to an individual as such… must be an error. Our efficacy may be extended through the agency of things extrinsic to the body and mind but to some degree intrinsic to ‘us’” (2010: 152).
To this end, he cites an interesting example, the case (Regina vs. Charlson) of an adult man brutally murdering his ten-year-old son without any identifiable motive [footnote 2]. The perpetrator was successful in his defence, arguing that this attack, which was apparently entirely “out of character” (words I use here quite specifically), was the result of a brain tumour (Laidlaw 2010: 153). In this case, the cause was considered to be external to the agency of the man (though obviously still internal to his body), with the man acting unwillingly as the means of execution. Yet this particular construction of agency (or non-agency) is specific to the juridical framework. One can only imagine the type of social suffering the perpetrator endured outside of it, as the normative social constructions of agency – as a unitary phenomenon that inheres within a bounded individual – were brought to bear on him by his family, friends and peers. Similarly, his self-assessments and guilt, despite his successful defense, were likely never finally put aside. Laidlaw’s disarticulation of agency is useful precisely because it allows for the identification of just such numerous, differing configurations of agency from framework to framework, ethical assessment to ethical assessment, whether they are brought to bear from without or from within the same individual. These configurations are always contingent, unstable and shifting, and so too must be the experience of responsibility and agency in such complicated situations.
This bears considerable connection to a particular facet of AA members’ understanding of responsibility, and one that sits uneasily with the conception of agency that is evinced by their stories: the notion of alcoholism as a disease. Rudy notes two competing explanations used by AA members and sanctioned by the program’s discursive structure. The first, the moral explanation, is that which is given shape in the “drunkalogue.” Rudy notes that it depicts a descent over several years in different settings, stresses character defects, and describes alcohol as an escape or a means of becoming a different person (1986:48-52). (He wrongly, in light of Cain’s work, describes this explanation as reflecting more the individual’s interpretation than the organizational ideology, though this doesn’t detract from his overall schematic opposition.) It is precisely this type of explanation that was the focus of the work assessed above. But opposed to it is the disease explanation, which is explicitly put forward by AA: alcoholism is described as a function of an allergy to alcohol, and not the result of one’s character flaws, thus releasing individuals from the sort of personal responsibility constructed via their formal objectifications of experience (Rudy 1986:45-7). This is an explanation that lurks in the background of the AA stories and discourses described above, motivating the need for participants to found their agency on the bedrock of the “higher power” (the central moment of transition in the “drunkalogue”) but never integrated to the point of absolving them of moral responsibility for their earlier shortcomings of character.
It is precisely this opposition, with one explanation privileged and the other lurking within but never displacing the first, that Laidlaw’s disarticulation of responsibility can help untangle. While one explanation requires the other due to the unique discursive arrangement of AA – the overabundance of self is morally problematic precisely because it prevents recognition and appropriate reaction to the disease – they represent distinct configurations of responsibility and, with it, agency. The moral explanation that dominates AA stories is founded on the assumption of the alignment or unity of all four elements of “responsibility” within the person. The individual’s character is the cause of his failure to get well, his intentions and state of mind support this character (the intent: to remain autonomous; the state of mind: delusional and amnesic towards the individual’s drinking history), and the response is to change this character and, with it, the problematic behaviour. The disease explanation isolates the cause (the allergy to alcohol) from the individual’s character, in a manner reminiscent of the tumour described above. Intent becomes irrelevant, and state of mind is important only insofar as it either aids or blocks the expected response, which is a change of lifestyle to mitigate the effects of the incurable disease.
These different configurations of agency and responsibility make uneasy bedfellows in the discursive arena of AA, and slippage from one to the other is inevitable, with one serving as foundation of the required narrations of self and the other offering respite from moral condemnation. Yet the latter is often obscured in studies of AA, along with the tension it creates with the type of agency presented through objectification. And so this central ambivalence, which must figure heavily in the experience and personal evaluations of the participants, is excluded in favour of the internally-consistent “recovered alcoholic” presented to, and accepted by, the observers discussed above. I by no means wish to suggest that this tension is necessarily found in all participants, nor that it is the only or central source of ambivalence participants may experience. I do, however, find it useful as a concrete example of what sorts of things get left out in analyses like those above, and so what may need to be salvaged through future study.
Irony and the Limits of Agency
Both illness and the cultivation of moral discipline provide sites at which agency and its limits are addressed by human subjects and hence become explicit for anthropologists.
(Lambek 2003:13)
This paper has reviewed analyses of the AA program that range from approaches focused on self-presentation to a discursive, broadly contextualizing one. In all, an assumption of internal coherence and consistency was made of the program’s participants, as “conversion” through the program was thought to result in a totalizing transformation of self. But the obscured yet persistent presence of a competing explanation for drinking behaviour (one opposed to the overwhelmingly moral accounts repeatedly presented in “drunkalogues”) signals the possibility of doubt, slippage, and ambivalence in the participants’ experience and self-assessments. This experiential messiness is lost due to an epistemological presumption of the unity and totality of the agent, which allows for transformations of self but takes the enduring internal consistency of that same self for granted, a là the “Western conception” described by Geertz. It is my hope that I’ve pointed toward what may be lost through such an approach.
Michael Lambek usefully points to irony as a persistent element of human experience, defined as a “fundamental undecidability of agency and intention” rather than by opposition to seriousness or sincerity (2003:3). He writes: “Irony here is the recognition that some of the potentially participatory voices or meanings are silent, missing, unheard, or not fully articulate, and that voices or utterances appearing to speak for totality or truth offer only single perspectives” (2003:6). I believe this is an excellent characterization of the issue at hand. Stories in AA are self-conscious narrations of experience according to the conventions of the program and the expectations of others. They can’t help but give the impression of totality and a final acceptance of the “alcoholic identity” because they are intended to do specifically that, and to exclude anything that may contradict it. Taking these stories and the discourses of AA at face value, without equal attendance to the lived experience of those who speak and inhabit them, critics lose sight of the tensions and ambivalences of the participants. As a result, the pervasive irony of self-making is replaced with a false certainty, and the play of différance that betrays this certainty is stilled. These need to be recuperated if proper place is to be given to the features of experience that perhaps most often characterize problem drinking: despair, frustration and lack of control.[1] Even to inanimate objects, as in his example of a person’s vase crashing from a sill and injuring someone below, causing a feeling of responsibility and guilt in the owner (2010: 151). This extension of agency to the inanimate is in keeping with his attempt to partially recuperate actor-network theory (ANT), without following it in unwisely ignoring the fact that agency (that which plays an active role in a chain of cause-and-effect) is attributable only by virtue of a particular observer’s reading of a sequence of events as leading to, or frustrating, a specific goal. His inclusion of the inanimate takes for granted that agency is largely attributed after-the-fact, thus highlighting the contingent and subjective nature of attributions of responsibility.
[2] He goes on to do a subtle re-reading of Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer and Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande to demonstrate the ways in which “institutions and practices can work so as to proliferate the kind of connections that sustain attributions of responsibility [as with the Azande] or they can tend to constrain them [as with the Nuer]” (2010:159). Similarly, he examines the use of statistics as a means of extending attributions of responsibility, as when a particular hiring decision gets linked to racial imbalances in the workforce. While fascinating, these examples are less directly applicable here.
Works Cited
Alcoholics Anonymous
1976 Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism. New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc.
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1986 Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc.
Cain, Carole
1991 Personal Stories: Identity Acquisition and Self-Understanding in Alcoholics Anonymous. Ethos 19(2):210-53.
Foucault, Michel
1988 Technologies of the Self. In Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. L. Martin, H. Gutman, and P. Hutton, eds. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Geertz, Clifford
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2010 Minds, Surfaces, and Reasons in the Anthropology of Ethics. In Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. M. Lambek, ed. Pp. 64-83. New York: Fordham University Press.
Laidlaw, James
2010 Agency and Responsibility: Perhaps You Can Have Too Much of a Good Thing. In Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. M. Lambek, ed. Pp. 143-64. New York: Fordham University Press.
Lambek, Michael
2003 Introduction: Irony and Illness - Recognition and Refusal. In Illness and Irony: On the Ambiguity of Suffering in Culture. M. Lambek and P. Antze, eds. Pp. 1-19. New York: Berghahn Books.
Mills, C. W.
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Rudy, David R.
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Van Gennep, Arnold
1960 The Rites of Passage. M.B. Vizedom and G.L. Caffee, transl. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Williams, Bernard
1993 Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Yeung, Shirley
2007 Working the Program: Technologies of Self and Citizenship in Alcoholics Anonymous. Nexus 20:48-75.
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