Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities

• Published in: Political studies Vol. 53; no. 1; pp. 124 - 142
• Main Author: Coole, Diana
• 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: Agency; Agnosticism; Causality; Descartes, Rene; Government agencies; Methodology; Ontology; Phenomenology; Political Philosophy; Political science; Political Science Theories; Politics; Subjectivity
• ISSN: 0032-3217; 1467-9248
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2005.00520.x

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.