Agents acting..

I keep encountering the politics of agency in the articles I have read for class. So, about agency -

First, how do people come to know themselves as agents; literally who is the subject at the center of agency? How can we tell where we are? What do the things we center our identities on say about what we expect from ourselves interacting with the world? So, if I think that my life goals for employment constitute something about my identity, that may say that I treat my current life with a sense of managerial distance, seeing the steps I’m taking in college now as the foreground to a more real or significant future for myself. If I think that the books I read constitute my identity, I may believe in myself as a subject of other people – stuck in a web of meaning created before me, able to receive the things I read but not necessarily write and give. The objects that we associate with identity become so as a result of a specific political history, and those objects imply something about ourselves and the role we see ourselves occupying in the world.

Codes about property create models of agency, in terms of the relationship between objects in ourselves (THAT is (different from in a relationship of ownership) (MY)MINE). Also, property defines the limits of agency – what we can or should have control over. In many ways, it is possible to see ourselves in objects or places – blackberry/cell phone fetishes create us in ways we may not know, we still talk about being in a different place in common parlance – the relations of property intervene to delimit where we find ourselves and how.

The ability to describe something as taking an action creates that subject as unified, and in a traditional sense, a subject-agent. This seems fairly straight forward, but in many ways the ascription of verb action onto otherwise disparate groups plays an important role in arguments about danger, risk and the future. The action, as a unity or discrete occurrence implies a coherence about a (then classified and amalgamated) agent. Qualities of power and authority then develop around the supposed agent based on the quality (effectiveness, impact) of the action taken. The slipperiness between the total subject defined and the complexities of the action described makes the use of verb/noun relationships powerful. The ability to identify a particular agent with a class of people lies at the basis of representation as a practice of state/sovereign politics. In reality, how much does George Bush, or the bureaucratic machine ‘represent’ the US, as opposed to the narrow interests of an institution, and a class of people who participate in that institution. There is substantial evidence to suggest that the regularized process of established bureaucracies identify more with the interests of institutions than they do the interests of people served by the machine. The same slipperiness shows up in the idea of ‘public property’ which, apparently the public does not own, in that they have no actual control over its maintenance or the ability to destroy it (port protests – try to vandalize a park, it’s public property, as soon as you put paint to pavement you de-publicize). Language about agency has the power to elide the gaps between practice and description.

Fears about ‘other’ populations emerge to the degree that those populations can be described as agents other than I, and the degree to which they can be seen as unruly. IN some senses, ascribing agency to an object or identity constructs a maverick sensibility that requires a high-violence focused response. It creates a morality that externalizes responsibility by locating power in the body of another, drawing in traditional discourses of morality with it. Morality is about choices, but very rarely about creating them, only making them once presented. In many ways, the focus on agency created in the constitution of subjects makes a moral claim about the signified body possible, a potentially violent judgment when that body potentially threatens a previously centered ‘secured’ body.

Duncan