About the Concept
Agency is the capacity to act in a given context, it is a fundamental and ambiguous concept in feminism thought, it has been very much debated from its acception as an individual concept or as a collective one.
Sources
- Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press. (Karen Barad, 2007)
- Interview with Karen Barad (2011)
- Materials against materiality. Tim Ingold, in Archaeological Dialogues, 14: 1-16.(2007)
- http://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/a/agency.html a comprehensive article by Felicity J Colman
Common Knowledge and Political Love
Agency is intertwined with different realities, contexts, and personas characterising from there on the capacity to act upon something. Agency differentiates itself from power and often poses itself in a relation of resistance to it. Karen Barad stresses the non-human aspect of agency; insisting that agency is understood as ‘an enactment.’ “Agential intra-actions are causal enactments.” (2007, p. 176)
Agency associates the possibility of a transformation to the contextual materiality of any process of action. Agency understood as a collective process situates a capacity in the context of a collective organisation, system of support that relates to other societal.
The difficulty to qualify agency for feminists is that this essential notion happens in a patriarchal environment that feminists want to detach from; therefore it becomes difficult to define agency by the same time bringing in view and not refering to the patriarchal rules of of society.
Everyone accesses different type of agencies, while one’s capacity to understand its own agency is always in transformation, agencies work well when combined in a perspective of solidarity. Distributed and shared technologies ground a capacity to characterise different set of agency in different communities.
“Agency is ‘doing’ or ‘being’ in its intra-activity. It is the enactment of iterative changes to particular practices – interative reconfigurings of topological manifolds of spacetimematter relations - through the dynamics of intra-activity.” (p. 178). Barad’s position also argues that in and through the entanglements of matter, agency also refers us to the “possibilities for worldly re-configurings” (Barad, 2012, p. 55).
Agency being both a political and a relational concept it can be activated in political terms if all its constituent are in a moving relational scheme of discreet materials.
In this perspective historicisation, is essential to agency as it only exists in relation hence the transformation of perception brought by retelling histories is part of the agential process. Ingold argues: “things are active not because they are imbued with agency but because of ways in which they are caught up in these currents of the lifeworld. The properties of materials, then, are not fixed attributes of matter but are processual and relational. To describe these properties means telling their stories.” (Ingold, 2007, p. 1)
Karen Barad speaks about “Agential Memory”, that uses narrative procedures to help us understand the complexity of our constructed memory and situate back into them a form of agential realism.
Tree of Significance
- SYNONYM
- power, instrumentality, entanglement, matter, actant
- ANTONYM
- impotence, oppression, causality
- HYPERNYM
- ethics, politics, new materialism, assemblage, information
- HYPONYM
- matter, object, thing, body, infrastructure, informatics