Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities
Agency has been central to modern conceptions of politics but it is a complicated and contested idea that seems to have fallen into both theoretical and historical crisis. I explore the underlying ideas that have grounded it, as well as some recent historical and theoretical challenges. I respond by...
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Published in | Political studies Vol. 53; no. 1; pp. 124 - 142 |
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Main Author | |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Oxford, UK
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
01.03.2005
SAGE Publications Political Studies Association Sage Publications Ltd |
Series | Political Studies |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Agency has been central to modern conceptions of politics but it is a complicated and contested idea that seems to have fallen into both theoretical and historical crisis. I explore the underlying ideas that have grounded it, as well as some recent historical and theoretical challenges. I respond by advocating an ontological agnosticism regarding who or what exercises agency and suggest a spectrum of agentic capacities instead. Commending a phenomenological approach, I then suggest that agentic capacities emerge and interact across this spectrum. At one pole I envisage pre-personal, corporeal processes and at the other, a transpersonal, intersubjective interworld that requires a novel social ontology. I locate individual or collective agents in the middle of the spectrum where they emerge as contingent singularities. My aim here is to retain agency as a necessary ingredient of politics while eliminating the Cartesian presuppositions that have, for example, rendered the agency-structure debate irresolvable and supported a subjectivist account of agents that is no longer tenable. I show how all three dimensions of the spectrum have political significance and discuss examples to illustrate this. |
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Bibliography: | ArticleID:POST520 istex:C2DED809F85B486CD852640040F6829BD9A67EC4 ark:/67375/WNG-SG81JQVX-V ObjectType-Article-2 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-1 content type line 23 ObjectType-Article-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 |
ISSN: | 0032-3217 1467-9248 |
DOI: | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2005.00520.x |