Once more on agency

I have written about this topic before, but I have some more thoughts I’d like to work out and share here, especially because the appeal to “agency” has now become the primary propaganda term deployed by Western media and political class hacks, even more than “whataboutism” (for a takedown of that one see this thread).

What does it really mean when you say someone has agency? On the individual level you’re ascribing some kind of autonomy to them, the ability to independently make choices free from direct coercion. Now there are two kinds of coercion that could be at play here: external and internal. The external is obvious, like having a gun pointed at you, or, a more common experience, having the threat of being fired hanging over your head. The degree of coercion can vary based on the individual’s nature, particularly the amount of various forms of capital or power they embody and possess. So a person who is a millionaire is much less likely to be affected by the threat of unemployment than someone who has no money in the bank and has a family to take care of. Someone who has gone to a prestigious university and has a PhD in mathematics is generally less likely to be coerced on the job market than someone who has no degree (cultural capital), because they have more options.

What about internal coercion? This is a bit more tricky. Here we’re talking about the passions and emotions overtaking one’s ability to rationally come to a particular decision about an action to take, and then pursuing it. We can imagine that someone who is severely depressed has less agency than someone who isn’t because of this: their depression negatively affects their ability to make choices and follow them through. But it doesn’t have to be negative. When you’re in love you can make choices that outside of that context would have seemed totally irrational to you, but you happily do it. In that case talking about your agency being impeded is kind of odd, as you’re doing it willingly. So agency is not necessarily directly tied to a abstract, cold, calculating conception of rationality. Rather, it’s part of a holistic life-project that you autonomously design for yourself, always under the influence of both external and internal constraints (after all, we all live in a society), but still it’s something that you’ve created out of your own volition. Sartre talks about this in interesting ways.

So we see how the seemingly simple statement: “that person has agency” doesn’t really say much, if anything, without all this additional background information. That is why it makes for such a useful propaganda term. We can imagine a capitalist being criticized for terrible working conditions in their workplace saying: “well, my workers have agency!” In fact, many of them do, as it is one of the basic justifications for capitalism. If you don’t like your place of work, just leave. The market, as defined in a perfectly ideal form, gives everyone at any level the equal opportunity to move from job to job. Of course reality has a tendency to not conform to this ideal model, but that doesn’t matter, as the propaganda has done its job in convincing people that actually yeah, we do have agency, so if we’re poor or stuck at a terrible job, it’s ultimately our autonomous free choice.

This is why the talk of “agency” is so sinister. It implies freedom, but in fact is an ideal tool to justify and normalize unfreedom, coercion, constraints by erasing from view the conditions required for true agency, the very same ones I detailed above.

Let’s zoom out from the individual level to the level of nation-states. What does it mean to say that a state has agency? Again, similar to the individual, you are ascribing some kind of autonomy to them, the ability to make choices or policies relatively free from external and/or internal constraints. It should again be obvious what the sources of external constraints are on the level of states: other, more powerful states, and institutions like the IMF and World Bank. They have the ability to coerce a weaker state in all sorts of ways, from direct military attack (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya), to covert actions (Syria, Chile, Cuba, Iran, the list is long), to economic terror campaigns, to diplomatic pressure through the UN or NATO.

Before we can say that a state has agency, then, we need to know what its relation is to other, more powerful states and institutions, to see whether there is a coercive element there which is undermining said agency. For example, if a state is near-completely dependent on another state for its basic source of income through taxation, can we really ascribe much agency to them? It would be kind of absurd to say that this is a truly free state, capable of making choices out of their own volition, without any coercion. This is of course the situation the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is in. That is why many Palestinians are incredibly frustrated with it, and do not believe it is expressing their will properly. But they can’t do anything about it because there is no democratic process to get rid of the current leadership. That is why when Israel appeals to the Palestinian Authority’s “moderation” as an expression of the agency of Palestinians as a whole, they’re doing propaganda.

This takes us to internal constraints for states. So what do we have here? First of all, an important distinction: when we’re talking about the agency of a state, it is not synonymous with the agency of the people living within it. Even in the most perfect democratic society, there will always be dissent from state policy, typically comprised of a significant number, and we cannot just include them in the broader category of “people” and then equate it with “state”.

But we do then have at least one source of agency for a state, namely the people who support/voted for the government and its policies. But let’s not go too quickly here. Support for a government is also not synonymous with having voted for it in an election, as people vote for governments for all sorts of reasons (pragmatism, lesser evilism, belief in policy platform/statements of politicians, etc.), and this can and often does erode over time. Rousseau’s famous critique of representative democracy captures this best, when he noted that only at the very moment of an election do you have the ability to express your will, your agency, but right after its done you relinquish it, and the government that comes out of that moment becomes immediately democratically illegitimate as a result (a quite extreme claim you can read more about here).

People who voted for Obama because they thought they would enact policies that he did not end up enacting stopped supporting him at some point. The same goes for Trump, Biden, any other politician. Approval ratings approximates how many people in a country support a particular political leader, but even then we’re dealing with a bundle of reasons for what constitutes their support, and there is no clarification as to how strong of a degree that support is and when it might change.

This becomes even further removed from an actual expression of will and agency on the part of people who support a particular politician when we consider the countless billions spent on propaganda and indoctrination through mass media. Then add corruption, lobbying, interest groups all involved in election campaigns with dark money and super PACs. In short, the manufacturing of consent.

Think back on what we discussed earlier regarding external and internal constraints on the individual level: are these not exactly that? When you’re made to believe something that is not true because it is told to you by media institutions you have been told your entire life are authoritative and the paragons of truth, like Fox News or the New York Times, and this affects your decision-making, are you not under a level of coercion, both external and internal? The former can easily bleeds into the latter, as for example with the fearmongering about a crime wave, which leads people to believe there’s a much higher risk of being a victim of crime than there is in reality. If you’re making decisions about which politician to support based on fear, that’s coercive. It’s limiting your range of choices. It is constraining your agency.

So here we have the first internal constraint of agency, or a constitutive element of it, on the level of the state: the degree of support from people for a particular political leader, which is highly ambiguous, diffuse, malleable, changeable, to such a great extent that it becomes absurd to even ascribe agency to any state as if it means the same thing as on the individual level.

This is the core part of the propaganda usage of the term agency: ascribing its use on the individual level, which itself requires a lot more background knowledge to properly assess, to the level of the state. That is, pretending like they’re referring to the same simple, uncomplicated truth, that agency merely means a state expressing its will, made synonymous with the will of its people. No such thing exists, nor can it exist.

Whenever you see someone say “why are you denying the agency of X nation-state/people”, think about the vast number of things that are being hidden from view in the assertive claim embedded in that sentence: namely that there is such a thing as the agency of X nation-state/people, and, moreover, that they have ownership over it, that they know what it is, they understand it and they are now speaking for said nation-state/people. When you step back and look at it after all we’ve just gone through, you realize just how narcissistic and indicative of megalomania it is to make such a bold claim, that you are now speaking for an entire people, all because you threw the magic word “agency” into the mix.

Does this mean, then, that we can never speak of agency at all, either on the level of the individual or the state? Well on the individual level we just saw what is required to talk about it coherently and substantively, namely when you’re including an analysis of the required conditions for agency to exist, and also the constraints (both internal and internal) that impede it. We need an additional concept like that of a life-project to do so, but it’s possible and necessary as a way to reframe and counter the propagandistic use of the term which erases all this from view.

What about on the level of the state? I believe here too we have to think in terms of conditions of possibility for agency to exist, the constraints impeding it, and additional concepts that allows us to stabilize it somewhat, like sovereignty, the division of powers, public funding for elections, limitations on corporate/lobbying influence (if not outright banning them altogether). We can then say that a state approximates having full agency once there is a fully functioning democracy in place, both politically and economically, and that there is a robust system of international law based on justice and fairness with other such states.

But since we are dealing with the world as it is rather than as it could be, saying that a state possesses “agency” is a totally meaningless, empty statement. It does not refer to anything, it merely has the appearance of doing so, a sleight of hand that allows it to function as a powerful propaganda tool. Throw “agency” into your claim, and you’re appealing to these lofty sentiments like freedom, independence, having the ability to make your own choices—and who can possibly disagree with that, either on the individual or state level? But this is merely a rhetorical house of cards, one that collapses under the slightest scrutiny as we have just seen.

Alright, I think I’ll let this be my final word on agency and its use as a propaganda tool. It’s just incredibly annoying to see international relations professors and journalists at the New York Times throwing this term around like it’s some magical spell that automatically resolves every difficulty and makes them right and the person on the other side wrong. It’s post-grad academic bullshit that has migrated into the mainstream discourse, and now everyone from 12 year old youtube debatebro fanboys to NYT journalists are gleefully using it.

But there is nothing there.