Literature studies
Carrie Noland, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine
As I write the word agency, I wonder to what extent the choice of this word is my own. Has my past—my childhood, my training and background—conditioned me to choose this word, not just as part of the title of a book I published in 2009 (Agency and Embodiment) but as a guiding concept for my thinking in general? Is it possible that every act I accomplish, every decision I make, every theme I believe I choose of my own volition, is actually overdetermined by forces I cannot identify? Am I called (“interpellated”) into being, only to serve as a vessel for the will of an institution, a biological imperative, a power beyond myself?
How did I come to write about agency?
I began my professional career as a scholar of poetry but soon began to fold into my work questions having to do with performance. It struck me—as I moved from written to spoken word—that every time an inscription is interpreted bodily—or “embodied”—that inscription is somewhat transformed. I was curious about the forces that govern that transformation.
For instance… When Patti Smith intones lines from Rimbaud’s Season in Hell on an album, the poem sounds quite different from the version rendered by my college French teacher. Similarly, Nijinsky’s performance in the 1912 version of Afternoon of a Faun is only partially reproduced in Rudolf Nureyev’s of 1983. The factors responsible for the differences between these two performances, these two iterations, are more than anatomical or physiological. Also affecting the transformation of the dance are: the performer’s training, his cultural habitus, the styles and fashions of his time, as well as his personal tendencies and meditated aesthetic choices. We could thus speak in this case of distributed agency: many influences combine to compel Nureyev to move in a particular way that differs from Nijinsky’s. More generally, we could affirm that in any case of reiterated behavior multiple sources of power combine to determine an individual’s idiosyncratic performance of it. What I set out to do in Agency & Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture, then, was to inventory these multiple sources, to understand better the composition of agency and, if possible, to tease out what could be considered its inexplicable subjective element. I wanted to know whether alterations in performance—or, more broadly, behavior—are aleatory (purely random actualizations of measureless potential); overdetermined by social conditioning (disciplinary training, internalized coercion); or instances of the display of an individual free will.
Many theories of agency in philosophy and political science focus on the notion of freedom, the power exerted by the individual to evaluate, analyze, judge, decide, and act. In my own work, however, I have been more interested in the role of the body in individual decision-making and conduct (the body understood here as integral to, rather than separate from, the mind). I began by asking why it is that people innovate, even though they have been disciplined to behave in particular ways from the time of their birth. As theorists from Gabriel Tardes to Judith Butler have argued, the source of innovation may in fact be linked to the capacity to repeat, or to mime, both of which rely on the plasticity of human beings when faced with the ever-evolving circumstances of life. The imbrication of innovation in repetition is particularly evident in movement practices. For instance, when a choreographer produces inventive sequences or new steps she is drawing on an acquired repertory of other ways to move, or other “I can”s, as Edmund Husserl (then Maurice Merleau-Ponty) put it. But what compels someone to change what they have learned, to alter the “I can”?
I return to my initial query: Why have I ended up focusing some of my work on the question of agency? A psychologist might say that my father was a scholar of Nietzsche, and thus he planted in my adolescent brain the notion that I have the power to stamp my life with my own design. “Make your life more than an accident,” Nietzsche wrote. Alternatively, a historian might place emphasis on the fact that I grew up during the era of Women’s Liberation and the struggle for racial de-segregation and civil rights. Both of these movements asserted, implicitly or explicitly, the need and the ability to take control of one’s own destiny, as well as to effect social change. Thus, I was pre-programmed, so to speak, to find agency, especially subjective agency, a compelling notion.
Imagine, then, what my reaction might have been when I was introduced during graduate school first to structuralism, then to constructivism. How could I accept Michel Foucault’s notion of an amorphous, ubiquitous “puissance,” and how could I believe that it was a verbal “statement” that lent me a subjectivity, a place in the signifying chain? To be sure, my family and cultural background, even the date of my birth, played a large role in orienting me toward theories of individual agency. But what really coaxed me in that direction, I believe, is the practice of Iyengar yoga, an introspective method I have followed for over thirty-five years. Created by B. K. S. Iyengar, this form of yoga asks us to explore the “black holes” of bodily consciousness and to fill them in with sensation. Through the practice of Iyengar yoga I have sought to cultivate what Thomas Csordas calls “somatic modes of attention,” attempting thereby to enlarge my capacity to feel what parts of my body are doing and to change my habitual ways of moving. It could be argued that what I believe to be sensations (experiences of my body) are merely discursive constructions. Iyengar, the argument would go, provides suggestive images that make me think I’ve located muscles, but really it is the agency of language (not my own subjective agency) that is constructing that experience. But I adhere instead to John Lucy’s claim that specific images (or languages in general) “volunteer” categories of experience; they provide access to (and inflect) but do not construct a sensation; they mediate, they help us to articulate but do not construct an experience. By learning new languages for conveying experience, by cultivating more modes of attention through practice, I am actively enlarging my capacity to make a difference.
This is to say, in conclusion, that agency is a multi-facetted, many-limbed entity. It is a force that comes from many sources, that flows through us. As it traverses (and awakens) our body, “agency” engenders our contribution, it becomes something we too can exert, opening us up to a world that influences us and that we influence in turn. Agency, often considered the very index of individual subjectivity, may ultimately be the proof of our intersubjectivity. Something external to me, to my body, has volunteered the means by which my body can perform a self.
More from this author:
Carrie Noland, Agency & Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producting Culture, Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2009
Cite this item: Carrie Noland, “Agency”, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177585
