There are things we have control over and things we don’t. There are ways we push the world and the way the world pushes us. This fundamental insight drives bits of folk wisdom like the serenity prayer. This fundamental insight is about agency.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
To know the difference is to understand agency. To know the difference is to see that agency coheres the expansion of our universe. It manifests in the firing of the synapses in your brain, in the gravity keeping you in your chair, in the dance of valence electrons between molecules. It is the causality that opens and closes the doors of possibilities in the ever-expanding collective project (a pro-ject, if you will) – as in the thrust of meaning into the future – of the universe. Or, as Hawking would tell us, agency gives direction to the arrow of time.
In December of 2019 lightning decided to strike the Australian bush. By the end of January 2020 the country smoldered. 14.3 million hectares had burned as fauna from field mice to kangaroos scampered for safety. Frantic firemen fought to contain the blaze as fire consumed nearly 10,000 buildings, killing 34 people and millions of animals. Plants were left charred, landscapes devastated while smoke invaded the homes and lungs of everyday citizens claiming 445 additional lives.
This past summer, Hurricane Ian tore through the Caribbean then it ripped across Florida before regrouping in the Atlantic and heading for the Carolinas. While some intrepid souls braced themselves to fight the storm with sandbags and American flags others fled, trying to outwit the storm as it wove a path of destruction from Cuba to South Carolina.
Many threads of mainstream discourse, including those which most prolifically mediatize meteorological phenomena, anthropomorphize nature and frame it as willful – destructive storms and fires, gentle breezes and sea spray. These discourses are entangled with a prolific, almost platonic, intuition that ‘things’ ‘want’ to be a certain way. By ‘be a certain way’, I mean move and become and change; and by ‘want’ I mean driven, or more accurately, impelled by motives of being that arise from ways the universe relates to itself. This is true for the smallest Higgs boson and the largest blue whale. It has been true since the big bang banged agency into the universe and will be true until heat death eventually mutes those reverberations. We know this because there is no ultimate discontinuity of existence. that would involve a kind of void in spacetimemattering that all the empirical evidence we have tells us can’t be, because genuine voids don’t exist. Therefore, we know that there is no meaning in regarding the big bang as in any way confined to any single part of reality; the only viable way to look at it is as an ongoing, iterative happening, becoming, continuously manifesting through all of existence. This motivation or motivity of space-time-matter is the manifestation of agency. We ought to say that lightning determined to strike the Australian bush. Or more precisely, the manifestation of agency was such that there was a resolution of a local dtermination that lightning struck the Australian bush.
I’m sure, dear reader, that at this point you know me too well to not see a classification system coming. Well… you’re right, to an extent. Here I am going to draw on the work of physicist and philosopher Karen Barad. They stipulate that, in layman’s terms, entanglement is a thing and it takes place on a larger scale than typically conceived – that is to say beyond the microscale. Any coherent phenomenon is agential. Things can said to be agential when their phenomenal coherence is a manifestation of agency, they measure and are measured by and against other phenomena, they seek stability, they react to observation and so on. Parts of space-time-matter become motivated to achieve mutual intelligibility. The conditions enabling this mutual intelligibility can be generatively conceived of within a framing drawn from disability or crip theory as a kind of condition of capacitating stability that allows us to be in and move through the world. However, Barad puts forth that the drawing of the line at a small scale of space-time-mattering is arbitrary – because all spacetimemattering relationships are relative.
The question then is how to distinguish between types of agency. We must be careful here not to fall into the trap of thinking that agency is something the one possesses, something that resides in you that you have dominion over. Agency is not something you spew out like John Coffee in the Green Mile waiting for the universe to accept, deny, negate, or reduce it.
Agency is not a property possessed, it isn’t some liquid that resides within things, Just as you would never say a guitar contains music, we shouldn’t think of people, places, and things containing agency. Rather, Agency is the term for the arrangement, structure, constancy, imminent, transcendental, and fundamental entanglement of all reality, which capacitates the possibility for different parts of the universe or phenomena to make sense of one another as distinguishable, substantive themes, even within their ultimate objective entangled unity; which is a complex and rather breathless way to say that agency is the term for the music of the universe being played on the instrument of matter.
If the universe was an orchestra, then every phenomenon in the universe would be an instrument in that orchestra entangled in concert, distinguishable, but part of an inseparable whole. If sound, then, was existence, and reality was a particular type of existence called music, played by that orchestra of all the distinguishable but inseparable phenomena in the universe, then agency would be melody. Without melody, the sound an orchestra played could not make consistent sense. Rather, it would end up sounding mostly like white noise. Just as without agency, all of existence would be practically indeterminant and undiscernible. Nothing could come to matter neither in existence (as opposed to possibility) nor in consequence on the unfolding of the universe.
Agency is therefore aniterative causality that is constituent in all things – an enactment that comes to determine the becoming of the universe. Different kinds of agency come to constitute different kinds of agential flow in different ways. Agential flow channels through different horizons of possibility, which, at least in broad strokes, can be coherently categorized to trace entanglements, analyze the effects of possibilities becoming realized, and judge whether the actualization of those possibilities serves or harms the pursuit of justice. This creates layers of complexity in agential flow which allows agency to be classified. That is to say that the way to classify agency is by measuring the number of possibilities that might be actualized in a particular flow.
If this sounds a bit complicated that’s because it is. Agency is complicated, a series of complex, contingent relationships; entanglements that are nigh impossible to untangle. When Hans Zimmer scores a film is the story creating the music or vice-versa? Neither. The creative process is cyclical and iterative. Entrenched habits of composition are shifted by the images on screen and adjust to the instantiation of the score in the hands of musicians. Awash in a flood of melancholy minor keys the images on screen take on new character or spring to new heights, responding to a zippy staccato beat. That is to say, the pathos of film and score swell together amping up the viewer’s perception of the film’s sentiment. The causality isn’t linear, it couldn’t be.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote of the Tralfamadorian sense of time, the events of all of our lives, and all of humanity laid out in a line like the Rocky Mountains. At points we are alive and in fine form and further down the line we’re dead. So it goes. While this is a lovely way to contemplate love, loss, and our place in the vastness of space, it fundamentally misunderstands agency. Agency is iterative; it can’t be unwound frame by frame like the closing scene of the Theory of Everything, the entanglements aren’t neat. While it may be easier to view life through that Aristotelian lens of a prime mover giving order to the universe, to do so is to blind yourself to the beauty of the entanglements of time, space, and capacity – the stuff of agency.
Agency is an iteratively unfolding enactment of sensemaking throughout existence that allows matter to matter. You can’t increase or decrease the amount of agency in a person any more than you can decrease the amount of sound in a guitar. That doesn’t mean you can’t play louder or softer, in a resonant concert hall or a sound-dead closet nor does it mean the guitar can’t break. These things simply change the timbre or expression not the amount of music itself. When conductors call for a pianissimo section we don’t say there’s less music in the orchestra, we don’t even say that if there are more rests or fewer instruments. When agency is interfered with we are stuck in indeterminacy, in musical terms kind of incoherence that would result if a moth flew into Placido Domigo’s mouth mid-performance, but we aren’t left with less agency. The particular agential flow of these ideas shall remain indeterminate until next month, stay tuned dear reader.