Power and agency

I originally created this space to explore the ideas of power, agency and discourse around the digital. Power, in my mind, is crucial to understanding popular discourse, consumerism, indeed to culture itself. It is ubiquitous and omniscient. As I’ve explained to people what it is I’m trying to get at through this space and what it gives me, the terms “power” and “agency” keep coming up. Every now and then, someone will actually ask me what I mean by power and I end up articulating it to them, only to find that their idea of power and mine are quite different.

Social sciences are dominated by the ideal concept of power explained by Michel Foucault, which is that power is a force at work in social constructs (institutions, social order, etc.) and as such, isn’t something one “has” or “hasn’t”. It isn’t something one uses over someone.

Yet, while this may be the ideal concept, in reality, the research and popular discourse of power still clings to the polarized duality of power as being something owned by one person at the expense of the other. Perhaps this is why the notion of agency gets so troublesome, then, for social scientists. They are supposed to be trained in the Foucauldian sense of power, but their own culture structures power as the result of an interaction, rather than a force at work on all parties in the interaction.

Before I explain my own conception of the concepts of power and agency, I should point out that I have not yet read Foucault in the original – I have only read other people’s interpretations or truth claims about Foucault’s work. Nor have I read much yet on other people’s interpretations of agency. Thus, I refuse to claim that my ideas and conceptualizations are necessary novel or unique or even nuanced per se. One of my personal projects, then, for the next few months will be to work my way through the essays in Power/Knowledge, in order to try to get a sense for myself of what Foucault himself says about power.

So what is power for me? What is agency? Power is a force that is at work in the social. It is a result of past interactions, generalized out to the effects that is then concretized down again into new interactions. Power is initiator and result. It is the ability to accomplish action, whether that action is goal-directed or purely creative in Joas’ sense of the term. Here, then, the social concept of power meets up with the individual concept of agency.

Agency is the sense of empowerment internalized by an individual that allows them to act in life. Action, then, in this sense, is the creation and synthesis of choice. The act of choosing is an action in and of itself. Agency is that creative taking-in of power, merging it with idea, ideals and will and through that recipe, the creation of an act. The act can be a thought crystallized into knowing. It can be a desire acted upon. It can be a goal to which one strived. At work within all action, then, is the idea of agency, the pure ability to act. Agency gives the ability for an individual the ability to work within the world. Agency, then, is power integrated or operationalized within the individual.

In this sense, then, neither power nor agency are binary forces and should not be talked about as such. The nuances and subtleties of power and agency working within and above interaction, structure and social order are crucial to understanding humananity and the world and should, therefore, never be trivialized down to the level of a dichotomy.