Agency, at least in
Foucault’s terms, is the ability to make individual decisions for one’s self. Some might call it being able to act on a
thought or the ability to dictate to make one’s decisions. Agency within
everyone’s lives can be measured through the choices they make. Though, if this
is through Foucault’s lens, then the panoptic mechanism plays a major role with
the amount of agency one may have. With
the idea of Panopticism now in mind, with the factors of control, power,
isolation, and submission; do we have agency? Do we have the power of choice that
we are made to believe?
I
would simply answer, no; we do not have this agency, at least in its pure form.
With submission of power of an individual, the individual must give up some of
his agency with that power. An example
being laws; an individual is protected by laws, but has to give up agency
because the individual has to follow the same law, or else feel the hammer that
is the legal system. The cost of control
is to give up agency to ensure that other’s agency does not hinder
another’s. Although some agencies are
stronger than others, there is no pure substance of this. Society created laws to
help create order out of chaos. To ask
for pure agency, is to forget order within society. With pure agency, there would be no
repercussions for actions other than natural order within the cosmos. No corrections to behavior, no prohibition of
actions, and no prevention of unwanted consequences.
To
counter laws, civil liberties and unalienable rights have increased an
individual’s agency just based on existence and the morality that the current
society upholds. Though these rights and liberties don’t necessarily give an
individual the power of choice, it does give it a sense of resistance to laws
that do not apply or are considered detrimental to a human being. The amount of
agency is directly correlated with the amount of civil liberties and rights an
individual has. The more rights it has,
the more agency.
We
can also look at this in a different view.
Is there agency within an individual on a mental level and capacity? An
example would be conscious and subconscious decisions throughout one’s
life. In Susan Bordo’s book The Male Body she discusses the workings
of the male advertising business and the effect on people who view them. Example being, if a subject looks at
advertising (male underwear model, just for the sake of Bordo), the subject can
simply walk past it and consciously take nothing out of it; but in the
subject’s subconscious the individual has the image of beauty correlated by the
advertisement and will recall it when making purchases (clothing, for example). “In this post-modern age, it’s more of a
free-for-all, and images are often more reactive to each other than to social
change. It’s the viewers’ jaded eye, not
their social prejudges, that is the prime consideration of every ad campaign,
and advertisers are quick to tap into taboos, to defy expectations, simply in
order to produce new and interesting images” (Bordo 208). Even though subjects
think they have control over purchases and decisions, they don’t. The
subconscious tricks the subject into thinking that it came up with the idea of
a purchase, but really the subject saw it or read it in a past time. In short, we have lost agency within
ourselves on decision making and rationality because of the outside environment
due to conditioning.
This brings up an important element in factoring in the
amount of agency a subject may have.
Conditioning one’s mind into a belief of something, or the rights and
wrongs of society, happened every single day.
The more conditioning one puts on itself or is exposed to, the more
agency that individual gives up. One can
lose sight of decisions that it is capable of making because of this. Conditioning affectively takes an individual
and slowly pushing them to one side of a spectrum. Make decisions more controlled
or specific and generally one sided.
Conditioning can come from a variety of elements. Parenting, schooling, law enforcement,
reading, praying, etc. are all examples on how an individual can subject itself
to conditioning. Though most of these
can be considered voluntary, is it truly voluntary in most cases when it was
learned by a sort of systematic process.
There is a saying that children are the product of their parents. On a biological level, this is fact. On a
psychological level, there are definite factors that can lead to the thought
process and ideology that that child grew up with. Take for example a child that was raised in a
Republican household, that child, according to statistics, will more likely be
Republican then Democrat (Bunge 2008). This is a systematic way of learning
values and life lessons. It is not necessarily
taking away the option of becoming the opposite party, but the value and
ideology has made a shift in the spectrum. This successfully takes away agency
because an individual does not have a clear open mind. There is always going to
be preferences, whether they are rational or irrational, and these preferences
from conditioning hinder agency.
We still are able to make decisions though, but there is
a weighing factor that takes place; this could be argued by the role of
conditioning that was brought up in the previous paragraph. In Robert E. Miller’s essay, “The Dark Night
of the Soul,” he invokes the idea of writing and reading within our
society. The massive impact that it may
have in the lives of many and argues that we need to keep this literate art
alive. Within the essay, Miller brought
up the story of a French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes. Descartes was on a spiritual journey through
meditation to be able to separate the mind from the body, the pure from the
corrupt. “To rid himself of all the false opinions that he had been fed in his
youth, Descartes tells us that he waited until he had both the maturity and the
free time necessary to devote to the harrowing task of self-purification
(Miller, 433).” After days of meditation, Descartes deemed himself clean of all
past experiences and prejudges. If this was true, then Descartes essentially
freed himself from the confines of society and has reached a truer form of
agency, one could even say an almost pure form. Unfortunately, this is not the
case. Assuming that the isolation from
society in the period of time did increase his agency, Descartes made an
assumption that wiping the slate clean, tabula rasa, was possible. This is the
self-submission to an idea and conditioning is too deeply weaved into the
fabric of our personality to simply get rid of.
Though some conditioning foundations could be altered, there is a need
to fill with an alternative measure. An
example would be a sense of morality or core values.
The sense of morality is also something to take into
consideration when it comes to an individual and the amount of agency one
has. Though this can be viewed as a law
of the mental capacity or law of one’s life to live by, it is easy to say that
an individual’s life can be mandated by its own morality. For many people, the sense of morality is
based on religion. Fundamental laws are
laid down in most religions with the promise of eternal life after death, if
followed correctly. This is enough for
followers to follow these commandments; there is also the other factor of
religion, a higher being. In most cases,
there is always a God figure watching over and judging individual’s actions
throughout one’s life. Agency is lost if
an individual subscribes to this dogma.
The fact that someone is always watching a subject at all times of the
day and can read the minds of that subject is giving up agency of choice. A subject will not deviate from the
commandments set in place because there is a place for people who go against
these set laws, Hell. The power of
choice through the self-submission of one’s belief has voluntarily given up its
own agency. Though the individual can grant itself agency at any time, there
are repercussions to this belief system. This in turn, effectively controls a
population even today.
To be fair, there are some that do not submit to a faith
or religion. Does that mean that
Atheists and Agnostics do not have morals? No, but it does give them more
agency than the religious counterparts.
Atheists do have morals and a perfect example could be explained by Sam
Harris’s book The Moral Landscape. In
this book it talks about how morality can be based on scientific evidence and
should be based on human well-being. “I
am arguing that everyone also has an intuitive “morality,” but much of our intuitive
morality is clearly wrong (with respect to the goal of maximizing personal and
collective well-being). And only genuine
moral experts would have a deep understanding of the causes and conditions of
human and animal well-being” (Harris 36). In this case everyone has morality,
but the religious figures have corrupted the view of proper morality. If an Atheist follows this type of morality
based on human well-being, then there is still agency to be given up. This view of helping one another and to better
further the existence of a species, individuals must give up agency on choices
that may harm this outcome, which brings up the existence of laws. There are no higher powers that Atheists have
to answer to and the thoughts of an afterlife, good or bad, is
nonexistent. Above all, the power of
choice for Atheist is not defined by rules forever set in stone, instead these
moral experiences may change as a society changes.
In sum, we as individuals have agency, but the amount of
agency is determined by factors of many different elements throughout one’s
life. It is easy to say that law,
religion, the subconscious, self-submitting conscience, and conditioning has
successfully hindered an individual’s agency.
The only real factor that can increase agency is to step away or
dissociate from one or more of these elements.
Since most of these are impractical, gaining agency is much harder than
losing agency, making it a slippery slope if not looked at carefully.
Work
cited
Bunge,
Kayla. "Party-training: Parents' Influence on Children's Political
Attitudes Is Powerful." GazetteXtra. Web. 17 Nov. 2011. <http://gazettextra.com/news/2008/oct/24/party-training-parents-influence-childrens-politic/>.
Bordo,
Susan. "Beauty (Re)Discovers The Male Body." Ways of Reading. 9th ed.
Boston: John E. Sullivan, 2011. 187-233. Print.
Miller,
Richard E. "The Dark Night of The Soul." Ways of Reading. 9th ed.
Boston: John E. Sullivan, 2011. 420-50. Print.
Harris,
Sam. The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. New York:
Free Press, 2010. Print.
