As one of the meetings we organize with Intimate Legal Interactions research group, we read chapter 6 of Sherry Ortner’s book “Power and Projects: Reflections on Agency”.
After reading the chapter, we came to understand agency as ‘one’s capacity to have the
capacity to act’. Ortner’s distinction between routine practices and agentive acts seems to
suggest that agency is some kind of intervention. Routine practices are unexamined and
unreflected, and this is an example of how a structure makes us perform (in Giddens’ sense).
Giddens’ theory of structuration helps us to understand how, even when our agency is embedded
and to some extend conditioned by structures, we have the power to change the structure by
exercising agency. Agency is not opposed but constituent of structure.
For instance, going to school at 8:30 just because it is the rule, what the teachers tell you to do, or
what all the other students are doing. Agentic acts can be seen in (1) not going to school at 8:30
as an act of ‘resistance’, but also in (2) going to school at 8:30 because you do not want to face
consequences of disobeying, but still looking for alternative ways to subvert the structures and
acting upon in (e.g., form a group of students to protest against the rule). So, the essence of
agency is reflexivity.
Do we reflect when we act? Do we reflect on whether it is the right thing to do? For example,
crossing roads with a green light or red light. Do we cross the road with a green light because we
reflect that it is the right thing to do (for safety, or for being a good example for other people)? If
reflection and intentionality are the essence for agency, what about unconscious intent? We might
not reflect every time we cross the road with a green light that it is the right thing to do, but our
behaviour might be guided by the principles that we have. In this sense, reproducing the statusquo can also be an agentic act too.
Ortner examines the critiques that are made by some scholars about the overemphasis on
‘intention’ attached to agency (e.g., Comaroffs). Ortner calls their take on agency the ‘soft
definition’ of agency: this definition does not place intention as a central element of agency, and
emphasizes the social embeddedness of agency and unintended consequences of one’s action
(the gap between intention and outcome). The British sociologist, Giddens, for instance, argues
that intentionality is a process: not that actors have goals consciously held in mind during their
activities. By examining these critiques, Ortner herself, seems to place ‘intentionality’ (i.e.,
motives, dreams, and desires) central to her concept of agency.
Reading this chapter and following Ortner’s exploration of the question of ‘does agency inherently
involve intentions?’, allows us to understand the position of other scholars, for instance the
famous French philosopher Latour, who argue that objects can have agency. If intention is not
central to the concept of agency, their argument makes sense.
Hoko Horii 