Agency

Terminological Confusion

The notion of an agent and the capacity of agency are often confused or conflated with closely related, but nevertheless distinct, concepts. Chief among them are the subject, a philosophical concept that refers to a typical, or paradigm, self-conscious human being, and subjectivity, a concept that refers to the conscious awareness of oneself as a subject. Originally, being a subject meant that one was ruled by, or under the legal control of, a king or prince, but gradually the term came to denote one's status as a citizen beholden to the laws of a given government or nation-state (e.g., “Josh is a subject of the United States”).

In philosophical circles, the subject has come to denote a perceiving human being who is conscious of himself or herself as a human being. In this philosophical sense, the subject is discussed in relation to the object, which refers to that which is perceived by the subject or that which the subject knows he or she is not. The philosophical distinction between the subject and object as categories, however, is not stable, and the meaning can change from one context to the next. In psychoanalysis, for example, the subject denotes a self-conscious person, but the object denotes another person whom the subject loves, hates, is ambivalent about, and so on (e.g., the infant subject loves the maternal object, mother).

A subject who self-consciously acts or causes change is said to possess agency. Hence, a subject with agency is an agent. An agent does not necessarily need to be a subject, however, nor does a subject necessarily possess agency. To complicate matters, agency is often confused with the term subjectivity as well. Whereas the subject denotes a self-conscious person, subjectivity refers to consciousness of one's perceptions as an individual or discrete subject. Consciousness of oneself as a discrete individual (subjectivity) does not mean that one has agency or is an agent. Only an awareness of one's ability or capacity to act (subjectivity) imbues the subject with agency.

In sum, agency is the capacity to act; the agent is the source or location of agency; the subject is a self-conscious human being; and subjectivity is consciousness as a subject. All these concepts are implicated in the idea of communication.

Agency and Modern Philosophy

Contemporary understandings of agency can be linked to 18th-century Western thought, often termed the Enlightenment. Although Enlightenment thought is not easily summarized, key among its goals was the use of reason to improve society and understand the natural world. In Enlightenment thought, we find agency and the subject tied together in complex ways. For example, just prior to the Enlightenment, the philosopher René Descartes reasoned that absent any knowledge or sensory perception whatsoever, an individual could know one thing: It thinks, therefore it exists (this argument is known as the cogito). Insofar as thinking is a type of action, this “it” that thinks is an agent, but it is not necessarily a subject. The it or [Page 28]agent that thinks is not a subject until it is conscious of itself as an agent who thinks (subjectivity). The Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant extended Descartes' argument about this most basic kernel of knowledge—something exists that is thinking or acting, and therefore agency and an agent exist. Yet self-conscious knowledge, he suggested, depends on exposure to the world outside our minds, or the empirical world. In other words, to be subjects, we have to have sensory experience. Subjectivity, consequently, is wholly “in our heads” but requires a confrontation with the external world. The resulting concept of the transcendental subject advanced by Kant consisted in both the necessity of a thinking thing independent of the outside world and the necessity of that outside world to make the thinking thing conscious of itself (subjectivity). For Kant, all knowledge subsequent to fact of self-existence is impossible without sensory experience. The meaning of the external world, however, is entirely dependent on the way in which the human mind works. This view implies that the paradigm self-conscious human being, or subject, is destined to become an agent and thus harbors an incipient agency at birth.

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