https://paradoxof.agency The Paradox of Agency Tue, 08 Jun 2021 13:15:17 +0000 https://paradoxof.agency en https://paradoxof.agency/Intro Thu, 04 Mar 2021 09:53:47 +0000 The Paradox of Agency https://paradoxof.agency/Intro Complexity should be your excuse for inaction.Harry August https://paradoxof.agency/In-Between Thu, 04 Mar 2021 09:53:47 +0000 The Paradox of Agency https://paradoxof.agency/In-Between The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North This website is an exploration of the idea of the Paradox of Agency. Contributions will be continuously added below in alphabetical order. If you want to contribute, get in touch! Read more about this project. Receive a notification for new contributions by signing up to the newsletter. https://paradoxof.agency/Nora-Bateson Thu, 04 Mar 2021 09:53:47 +0000 The Paradox of Agency https://paradoxof.agency/Nora-Bateson Nora Bateson&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Leadership Within the Paradox of Agency In this era of multiple crises and global threats, I am increasingly uneasy with the call for leadership. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rachel Carson, and other iconic figures are held up as examples of true leaders: they offered charisma, vision and strength enough to pioneer new eras of thought. The lack of such characters now, we are told, suggests a vacuum in our capacity to generate the old-school kind of hope for the future that these courageous individuals embodied. So where are the leaders of today? This is the question plaintively asked of today’s activists, scientists, politicians, and keepers of the moral fabric.&nbsp; I would like a moment to call bullshit. This thinking about leadership is not useful. There is no such thing as an isolated individual—we are all interdependent. Period. Our evolution is only in our mutual contribution and learning. Mutual. Leadership is an evolving process and, as such, our understanding of what leadership is must evolve in accordance. In the past the world understood leadership as the great deeds of heroes; now we are in another phase of global transition that requires an understanding of leadership based on our understanding of interdependency. [more] https://paradoxof.agency/David-Byrne Thu, 04 Mar 2021 20:35:43 +0000 The Paradox of Agency https://paradoxof.agency/David-Byrne David Byrne and Gill Callaghan&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Structure and Agency – a complexity perspective in the era of the “New” materialisms To understand agency from a complexity perspective it is essential to engage with the other term with which agency is linked: structure. So a complexity take on agency necessarily is also a complexity take on structure. You can’t have one without the other as the old song used to say in more conventional days of love and marriage. The terms in social theory exist necessarily at a level of abstraction and we need to address them in that way. However, abstraction is never enough – we need instantiation – concrete examples which demonstrate how things actually are in the world in which we live. Abstraction is a tool of philosophy and philosophers in the meta-physical tradition have certainly engaged with agency, although in doing so they have forgotten Locke’s insistence that philosophers are the under-labourers of science. Their job is to tidy up around the work of the craftspeople. Much of recent philosophical engagement has been poorly, if at all, informed by social theory and social reality. So what we are going to do here is to begin with a discussion of agency and structure from a complexity perspective at a level of abstraction, and in so doing say some rather rude (but accurate) things about meta-physicians’ take on them. Then we will turn to an instantiation, one derived from our own lived experience and the lived experience of our own families in the era of the Capitalocene. In the context of an emergent possible climate catastrophe – to say possible is very important because agency is what will make a difference here – the issue of how we move beyond a world based on the human use of stored carbon energy is the fundamental issue facing humanity on the only planet we have.&nbsp; [more] https://paradoxof.agency/Nitzan-Hermon-1 Tue, 13 Apr 2021 12:22:09 +0000 The Paradox of Agency https://paradoxof.agency/Nitzan-Hermon-1 Nitzan Hermon On Generalizations When comparing different kinds, we must go to the general before linking the specifics. We can't compare a chair to an apple, or two people, without first going into our intuition and cognitive bucketing of both. In the process of comparing, we must go into a nonlinguistic, intuitive place. When we go into the general, we leave the detailed experience and go into our heads. Generalization is an embodied action; it is deploying to our intuition. The minute we leave bits and atoms, ambiguity and creativity appear. [more] https://paradoxof.agency/Robert-Laycock Tue, 08 Jun 2021 13:15:17 +0000 The Paradox of Agency https://paradoxof.agency/Robert-Laycock Robert Laycock life-work-art-agency In February 2002 the artist Robert Laycock began recording the time he spent being economically active. He has continued this practice to present day without break or pause. In 2015 he shared his reflections on this at Work and art: how artists make a living (Collaborative Research Group, Canterbury). In 2016 he led a workshop - Time on our side? (TURF @ Broadacre House, Newcastle upon Tyne) - for people interested in reflecting on their relationship with time.&nbsp; For The Paradox of Agency, the artist is sharing a version of his presentation in the form of a PDF booklet along with workshop resources and a new self guide for anyone interested in exploring their relationship with time. [more] https://paradoxof.agency/About-1 Thu, 22 Apr 2021 19:25:18 +0000 The Paradox of Agency https://paradoxof.agency/About-1 Home About Nora Bateson writes, ‘The notion of the individual entity having agency is confused by a paradox. The confusion lies with the idea of individuation. The entity (organism, person, or organization) is bound to its unique perspective or epistemology, and in that sense is identifiable as a separate source of responsibility. But, there is no aspect of that entity that is uninfluenced, uninformed, or unbound to the larger contextual interactions. On closer examination we begin to see that agency is diffused into the larger contextual processes that are shared by the entire community. Agency is a paradoxical product of mutual learning within and between people, nature, and culture.’ In that Paradox of Agency, how do we define our private and professional roles? How do we define our identity or identities? How do we find out what to do and what are meaningful actions? Does it even make sense to give one’s life a specific purpose, to seek meaning in one’s life – and as a corollary, can we take meaningful action towards a purpose? How can we aspire to do good in the world? Can we? Is there still an instance of agency that leads to actions that I can truly attribute to me as an individual, as opposed to it being a consequence of my entanglement with multiple contexts and histories? What does that mean for the idea of will? These question and more I want to explore with a variety of people in different tones and forms on this website – essays, book chapters, poems, &nbsp;music, pieces of art, movement, film, etc. This is a creative project, an exploration without a defined purpose – I’m not expecting clear answers to these questions. Purpose might emerge along the way through relationships and interactions between context and people that will be formed throughout the project. paradoxof.agency is a pro bono project by Marcus Jenal. Marcus accompanies individuals, teams and organisations and explores together with them the space of the possible to open up new opportunities for development. His aim is not to fix problems, but to discover ways of being and acting when facing a complex and messy reality. He used to call himself a consultant but has been struggling to find a specific job title that fits the way he works. Home https://paradoxof.agency/Nora-Bateson-1 Thu, 04 Mar 2021 11:22:06 +0000 The Paradox of Agency https://paradoxof.agency/Nora-Bateson-1 Home Leadership Within the Paradox of Agency By Nora Bateson In this era of multiple crises and global threats, I am increasingly uneasy with the call for leadership. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rachel Carson, and other iconic figures are held up as examples of true leaders: they offered charisma, vision and strength enough to pioneer new eras of thought. The lack of such characters now, we are told, suggests a vacuum in our capacity to generate the old-school kind of hope for the future that these courageous individuals embodied. So where are the leaders of today? This is the question plaintively asked of today’s activists, scientists, politicians, and keepers of the moral fabric. I would like a moment to call bullshit. This thinking about leadership is not useful. There is no such thing as an isolated individual—we are all interdependent. Period. Our evolution is only in our mutual contribution and learning. Mutual. Leadership is an evolving process and, as such, our understanding of what leadership is must evolve in accordance. In the past the world understood leadership as the great deeds of heroes; now we are in another phase of global transition that requires an understanding of leadership based on our understanding of interdependency. Is there a part of any of us that we can point to and truly say, “that is me—untouched or influenced by any of my history, my culture, education, family, religion, social life…”? Unlikely. Perhaps, instead, leadership is a product of the context, combined with other influences that seem to culminate in crowning an individual with leadership duties. When we look through the lens of interdependency, it is impossible to separate individuals from their contexts of influence and experience. This blurs the ‘hero’s story.’ Leadership, then, can better be attributed to the town or village that nourished a person than to that person’s individual qualities. In ecological terms we can attribute the health and vitality of the whale to the ocean not only to the whale, and we can attribute the strength of the lion to the jungle (or savannah) not only to the lion. The environment in which the alchemy of collective need is met with a corresponding alchemical combination of possibility produces new paths to follow. In the combination of community and individual, hardship and support, isolation and belonging, past and future, vision and discipline, there can arise a perfect storm that produces what we have, in the past, called leaders. The very word ‘leadership’ has become cringe worthy. It reeks of colonialism and lopsided history-book listings of individuals successful in taking, making, and claiming. Celebrating the potency of the individual is an insatiable ghost haunting the endless array of courses and manuals for developing leaders. Our fatal flaw may be the idea that an individual or institution can single-handedly penetrate new frontiers of possibility. This is an obsolete but undead dream of heroes and rescuers pioneering innovations. Lightning bolts of imagination and strength, these so-called leaders are presented as utterly independent of their histories; as though they had fallen from the sky. The haunting seeps into what we call ambition, fueled by our wanting to be important and successful. There are scissors somewhere that slice the ambitious from their comprehension of the mutuality we all inevitably live within. The mutuality is where the imagination is brewing, where the strength is made, where the integrity of the context lies. Can we extract a stand-out entity from that mutuality and call it a break-away? Isn’t the break-away a product of the mutuality? How can ‘leaders’ exist without all the relationships that have culminated and fermented to make them? Should we not point to those mutualities as heroic? So I don’t want a leader. I am sick of heroes. I look back at how we got where we are now and I wonder what kind of systemic imbalances have been created by the thinking that longs to canonize leaders. What is a leader in a complex system anyway? What is the ecology of leadership? I think there isn’t one. When we look to nature for models, we find that there is not an ecology that would accommodate the existing model of leadership. Think of trees in a forest. How did the ‘leaders’ get so tall? Were they extra courageous or charismatic? The ecological response would observe that the other organisms mutually contributed to that growth. The ‘king of the jungle’ is a human nonsense that understands nothing of the lion’s relationships in the ever-changing natural order of the many species that extend into the pride of lions. The alpha dog is seen as the ‘leader of the pack,’ presuming that the pack ends with the grouping of dogs, which it does not. The human construct of leadership is projected onto the pack by us who are in the habit of identifying that pattern. Dogs have no such framing. Pack members are in communication and mutual learning with each other and the wider surroundings, responding to information that is funneled through the ‘alpha’ but generated through the pack. This makes the ‘relationship of dominance’ perceived, contextual, and not fixed. What we see as deference is a collaborative, communicational relationship that can be disrupted if the ‘leader’ or the ‘followers’ reorganize the communication. In fact, I think our notions of leadership are toxic to the ecology of communication and collaboration in a social system. How can there be real communication when there is deference to a leader? This imbalance creates a hold-back of contribution and interaction. Look now at the fascination with celebrity that has infected the globe. The imbalance in the possibility for communication when one individual is placed above others in this way effectively destroys the possibility of true cooperation and mutual learning. Mutual learning is only possible when all participants are willing to be wrong… willing to learn, to explore new ideas, to go off the map, out of the known, and together grope in the shadowy corners of new ideas, new plans, new territories. That cannot happen if one person is the know-it-all. Even if that person has perfect ‘leadership skills’—they still disrupt the ecology with individualism. ‘Leadership’ often creates competition, ambition, greed and, on the flip side, fosters deference, hopelessness, apathy, and blame. Being part of a system requires knowing that whatever happens is an expression of the patterns that entire system is involved in—that means, there is no fault, and everyone is responsible. No blame. Everyone must contribute to the shift. The health and the toxicity of the system ecologically manifests in keeping with the trends of the system. Someone with a diet of sugar, alcohol, pesticides and other harmful substances may develop pimples, rashes, tumors, or other illnesses. The manifestations of the system’s toxicity are intrinsic responses—indicators of challenges to the system. In the same way the toxicity of our institutional infrastructure is an indicator of the challenges in our cultural zeitgeist. The tumor or pimple is formed from within the body as a whole, in the same way that the healing of a wound, or embryonic development of a baby is also formed from within the system as a whole, including the father. These forms are not stand-alone. This means big oil is not to blame, big banks are not to blame, big pharma is not to blame. Big weapons, and bad guys—not to blame. We are all included in a pattern in which those systems are interlocked into our survival and destruction. Whether we like it or not. As uncomfortable as it is, the lens of contextualizing leadership reveals that the responsibility we would like to hold our institutions to, does not in fact lie inside the institutions, but between them. The linkings between institutions, where no governing body lies, is the zone where integrity or corruption actually rests. But there is nothing there; no board of directors, no policy, no by- laws; it is a nowhereland where there is neither authority nor jurisdiction. The injustices that occur are not stand-alone either, they are the tumors, the pimples, and the deadly contextual toxicity in our culture. One example is the interlocked institutional bond that forms the spectrum of troubles around depression and anxiety. It is all too easy to get bogged down in the current cultural quest for success and to feel unable to measure up. The anxiety and depression of this feeling of failing is often treated with pharmaceuticals that have side-effects, including addiction, further depression, or conditions that need additional medication. The pain of this common story leaks into marriages, family life, professional productivity, bleeding into how the affected family interacts with the education system, and even the legal system. Where is the responsibility? Pointing a finger anywhere in particular is only a small peek of inquiry into the situation. Should big pharma not sell those drugs? Should society not be so competitive? Should government take better care of citizens? An institution is made of people, each with their own biographies, and it exists within community, culture and, ultimately, the natural world. Margaret Mead noted the African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Indeed, the responsibility for the world the child grows to understand lies in the collective impressions that the village provides. In the same way, the behavior of institutions lies in the contextual expectations and valuations of each organization’s relationships within the larger community, as well as at the level of each employee. This is a tricky set of boundaries to draw, influenced at meta levels by lurking habits of thinking that tend to individuate. The responsibility is in the village, and the way the village interacts with its institutions. In the same way, the institutions interact with each other to form the linking zone where the blending of culture, economy and education happens. In our dissatisfaction with the behavior of our institutional or corporate organizations, we, the village, with our wish for ‘change,’ may feel impotent. Politics, business, law, education, medicine, and media are all substantiating each other. Politics needs business to thrive, education is the link to employment and scientific importance, medicine and law try to support both the political and personal codes of health and justice in respect to business and governmental policy. We cannot after all vote on the board or rewrite corporate policy from the sidelines. We cannot impose transformation on the institutions. But we can change our relationship to them. In doing so we alter relationships between institutions. Collectively, growing systemic transformation is always relational; the ecology is what changes, not the individual bits. We may learn more about leadership if we study it as an entrustment of context, and not as a twinkle bestowed upon a few select individuals from the heavens above. To trust the context requires a second order shift in purposing our agendas. Instead of being activists for this or that cause, we need to tend to the contextual capacity for those changes we would like to see. For example, making laws that limit the production and distribution of dangerous drugs does not stop the drugs from being made and sold. Those who see gain in supplying them find a way, either legally or illegally. But if there is a shift in shared tastes and values within the community—a general trend that does not include those drugs—the suppliers will seek other opportunities. So the question is not how to stop the dealers, though this clearly must be addressed to some extent. The more effective inquiry is around how to assist the community overall in valuing its own well-being. The context, be it a society or family or ecology of any sort, will adjust in the ways in which its given circumstances accommodate. The illusion of the leader’s capacity to innovate is created by the success of the one who chimes the bells that were in a sense ready to ring anyway. We might inquire more broadly (while at the same time trying to change policy)—what kind of civilization we want to live in. What kind of family is this? What sort of person am I? Am I the sort that is numb to the suffering of others? That question is not about which street beggars I may or may not give a coin to, it is about what my children see me do, all day every day and how they make sense of the world they are growing up in. The millions of people who are forced now for economic, ecological, and political reasons to start new lives in new lands, are dangerous not because they will deplete the social services of the ‘developed’ countries they enter, but because in the act of refusal by the developed countries the integrity of ‘civilization’ is being condemned. What kind of civilization allows millions of people to die at its doorstep? The damage this does to the contextual fabric of Europe and North America is likely to reveal itself in a horrifying loss of decency, empathy, and integrity. The notion of the individual entity having agency is confused by a paradox. The confusion lies with the idea of individuation. The entity (organism, person, or organization) is bound to its unique perspective or epistemology, and in that sense is identifiable as a separate source of responsibility. But, there is no aspect of that entity that is uninfluenced, uninformed, or unbound to the larger contextual interactions. On closer examination we begin to see that agency is diffused into the larger contextual processes that are shared by the entire community. Agency is a paradoxical product of mutual learning within and between people, nature, and culture. Leadership does not reside in a person but in an arena that can be occupied by offerings of specific wisdom to the needs of the community. So leadership is produced collectively in the community, not the individual. The individual’s responsibility is to be ready and willing to show up, serve, and then, most importantly, stand back. Leadership for this era is not a role or a set of traits; it’s a zone of interrelational process. Step in, step out. The illusion of the prevailing way of thinking is that there is someone to blame—or to praise—as a leader, hero, villain, tyrant, saint or Satan. And that thinking—that is how we got where we are today. Am I writing this book? Or is it the swirling contexts of my culture and family history, my digesting breakfast, my friends, and colleagues that are collectively responsible for this purple prose? I cannot rule out contextual input or the particular sensitivities of my epistemology. Both are relevant. But are they mine? But are they me? In the ecology of the interdependence of our world, that individualistic idea is wildly out of sync. With blame, as with praise, the causation becomes singular and linear… The problems we face now are neither singular nor linear. So the solutions won’t be either. The danger of the world’s fascination with celebrity is that it distracts from our ability to perceive larger interactions in context. In a world in which individualism is a viable illusion, collaborative discovery is unseen. What part of a jungle is the most important? Water? Soil? Insects? Plants? Animals? Geography? Rivers? Air? The jungle in fact is only alive in the living, growing relationships between the processes… What part of the body is the most important part? Heart? Lungs? Blood? Muscles? Emotions? Dreams? Intellect? Maybe there was a time when these notions of leadership were useful – but not any more. This global whirl of interrelations and interlocked histories and futures is not waiting for leaders… it’s waiting for the courage to trust each other and to step carefully into the ‘intentional community’ of the 7 billion people we share the commune of life with. This is our tribe. Just the 7 billion of us… and the animals, plants and micro- organisms. Those who came before, and those who will follow. That’s all. So, am I saying that there is no room for teachers? That there is no room for the expert? No. But a good teacher, and a real expert, knows that they are in a process of learning themselves. They are not leaders. They are not making the seeds grow… They are fertilizer, tending to the soil.By definition, leadership is needed when something has to be done that has never been done before. Meeting unknown circumstances requires rapid and spontaneous learning. In the case of today’s leadership needs, that learning is mutual. Excerpt from Nora Bateson’s book Small Arcs of Larger Circles,&nbsp;Triarchy Press, UK. 2016. Copyright Nora Bateson. Reproduced with permission of the author. <img src="https://norabateson.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/front-cover-hi_2_orig.jpg?w=299&amp;h=461" width="299" height="461" style="width: 299px; height: 461px;"> Home https://paradoxof.agency/Byrne-and-Callaghan Tue, 13 Apr 2021 12:11:56 +0000 The Paradox of Agency https://paradoxof.agency/Byrne-and-Callaghan Home Structure and Agency – a complexity perspective in the era of the “New” materialisms&nbsp; Prof. David S. Byrne and Gill Callaghan To understand agency from a complexity perspective it is essential to engage with the other term with which agency is linked: structure. So a complexity take on agency necessarily is also a complexity take on structure. You can’t have one without the other as the old song used to say in more conventional days of love and marriage. The terms in social theory exist necessarily at a level of abstraction and we need to address them in that way. However, abstraction is never enough – we need instantiation – concrete examples which demonstrate how things actually are in the world in which we live. Abstraction is a tool of philosophy and philosophers in the meta-physical tradition have certainly engaged with agency, although in doing so they have forgotten Locke’s insistence that philosophers are the under-labourers of science. Their job is to tidy up around the work of the craftspeople. Much of recent philosophical engagement has been poorly, if at all, informed by social theory and social reality. So what we are going to do here is to begin with a discussion of agency and structure from a complexity perspective at a level of abstraction, and in so doing say some rather rude (but accurate) things about meta-physicians’ take on them. Then we will turn to an instantiation, one derived from our own lived experience and the lived experience of our own families in the era of the Capitalocene. In the context of an emergent possible climate catastrophe – to say possible is very important because agency is what will make a difference here – the issue of how we move beyond a world based on the human use of stored carbon energy is the fundamental issue facing humanity on the only planet we have. Dawe (1970) in a much cited paper argued that Sociology (and we might say related disciplines with Social in their name: Anthropology, History, Geography) could be divided into two schools of thought. There were those who interpret the word in terms of structures which create regularities and those who saw the social world as created by actions of people, whether as individuals or in some form of collectivity. The major social theorists have always taken the issue of the relationship between structure and agency as fundamental for understanding the social world and in a Chapter of our Book Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences: the state of the art (2014) we examined in detail the contributions of Bourdieu and Archer and the commentary on them by Elder-Vass to this debate and drew attention to the degree to which they are congruent with the complex realist frame of reference. &nbsp;Complex Realism is the synthesis proposed by Reed and Harvey (1992) between the philosophical ontology of Bhaskar and the scientific ontology of complexity theory. Bhaskar’s ontological programme asserts that reality is knowable but not in the direct form asserted by crude positivism – knowable in relation to the deep generative mechanisms of the real itself, the manifestations of the consequences of those mechanisms in contingent context at the level of the actual, and our scientific accounts of them at the level of the empirical. Note all these levels are real in the sense of possessing causal power, including our scientific descriptions at the level of the empirical because those descriptions themselves become real in their consequences and have a constitutive role in reality – now, we must recognize in the era of the Anthropo / Capitalocene, not only for social reality but for nature itself. The ontological programme of complexity theory is that reality is composed in very large part of complex open far from equilibrium systems and the relations among those systems. For the reality of structure is evident, even if the metaphorical use of the word ‘structure’ presents an image of stasis when structures themselves are dynamic entities, albeit ones with a degree of relative permanence in terms of their causal powers for the determination of social action. &nbsp;At the same time so is the power of human agency at whatever level from the individual to collectivities with varying degrees of formal organization. We would emphasize that agency is always something that happens, in the way Thompson (1963) (endorsed explicitly by Bourdieu) identified class as a happening and as one of us (Byrne 2019) has asserted class is lived through a life course. We emphasized the word determined because we want to attach a specific meaning to it. We do not mean determine in the sense of exact specification – if A then always B. Rather, following Williams’ (1980) analysis of the Marxist expression “Base determines superstructure” we agree that the second English meaning of determine is appropriate – that is the setting of limits specifically in relation to the bounding of possibility. &nbsp;In complexity terms we can consider structures, whether at the level of the generative real as say with the nature over some nearly 300 years of capitalism, or more immediately as with the character of a legal system whose structure constrains the scope of action of organized labour, as setting the possibility space within which action can occur. So we follow Thompson (1978) in rejecting explicitly the strong structuralism of say Althusser where action is always determined pretty much absolutely. Likewise we reject post-modernist versions of post-structuralism in which agency is everything although noting that almost invariable that rejection occurs purely at the epistemological level of the construction of knowledge and has virtually nothing to say about the construction by human agents of reality itself. In this piece we want to engage with discussions of agency which go beyond the conventional view that it is a capacity of human agents – in line with the Abrahamic religions emphasis on Timshel – thou mayest – as the basis of the unique free will of human beings – the central theme of Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1952). &nbsp;These are generally described as the “New” (because we want to say ‘really, new?’) materialisms in various forms from Actor Network Theory (ANT) &nbsp;through Object Oriented Ontology (OOO - &nbsp;Harman who coined this term asserts that this is not a materialism but we disagree). They assert the agentic power of all entities in reality, for ANT in relation to the construction of scientific knowledge and for OOO as Harman (2018) asserts as a ‘New Theory of Everything’.&nbsp;&nbsp; Coole and Frost (2010) identify the new materialism as a response to and rejection of the dominance of dominant radically constructivist discourses which have predominated in the post-structuralist period of cultural studies and the chaos turn in science. For them chaos is about inherent indeterminacy and stands as description of the character of complex, open, far from equilibrium systems. Here they are reproducing the all too common misunderstanding of the nature of chaos and confusing chaos and complexity. Chaos is an issue of measurement. Systems are not inherently indeterminant. They are deterministic if we can measure precisely enough. It is the inability to do this which generates chaos in our models of them and chaos is about dynamism in the possibility space which derives from this lack of specification. &nbsp;Complex systems are not chaotic systems. Rather they are relatively stable over long periods and we can certainly retroductively – looking back through their history – explore causality in them. This provides us with some guidance for action towards shaping their futures when we are dealing with the social and its interface with the natural. This is THE MOST IMPORTANT methodological assertion in a context of impending climate crisis. Coole and Frost specify three themes of the new materialism (2010 6-7): First there is an ontological turn which resonates with current developments in the natural sciences in relation to Chaos theory post-classical physics. The key element in this ontology is that :’ … it conceives of matter itself as lively or as exhibiting agency.’ (2010 7)Second, there is an engagement with a set of biopolitical and bioethical issues which we might consider as about assigning a different status to all non-human nature.There is a turn back to an engagement with the realities of political economy which bluntly was almost entirely lacking in radical constructivism. It is the first turn which matters most for us. We will come back to engagement with the realities of political economy, noting firmly that in many domains of social science and general scientific practice it never went away, not least in relation to inequality on all scales. We might say, and do say, so what else is new? Historical materialism in particular which had an interesting inter-relationship with the phenomenological materialism of Sartre, De Beauvoir, and we might argue Merleau-Ponty and even Camus, certainly never went away but US philosophers have not read this kind of stuff although historians have. What does it mean to say that everything has agency? Actor Network Theory asserts the agentic character of instruments – actants – in the creation of forms of scientific knowledge with varying statuses attached to that knowledge. So for Law (2004) we can do no more than treat it in terms of the kind of extreme conventionalism which characterized sophisticated positivism. Desrosières (1998), working in an ANT tradition does something different in his treatment of the status of the statistics produced by states as part of their operations. He seems to accord them the same relativist conventional status as Law in terms of their isomorphism with reality as it is but asserts (quite correctly) that they are real in their consequences and play a far from trivial part in the construction of social reality going forward. Others take this further and although Harman denies that what he calls Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) is actually materialist at all and asserts that the agentic power of objects is in some ways not the most important thing about them, his work can be read as assigning agentic power to all objects in the real. Do non-human actors act to create the world? At one far from trivial level if we define action as something which has consequences for the nature of reality, then of course they do. Stars which explode as supernova change reality. Asteroids which collide with the Earth can and have changed reality. The explosions of the Deccan shield volcanoes changed reality, just as the possible explosion of Yellowstone might in the hopefully not near future. Another Storegga slide with consequent huge Tsunami would change reality and there is a real threat of this from the Canary Islands. At our present levels of technology there is very little human agents could do in relation to any of these events as processes. Our technologies impose limits on our possibility space of action. At the same time our technologies, particularly the use of mineralized stored carbon in the form of coal, oil and gas, has had profound consequences for us as a species. Let us take the case of coal, as authors who come from one of the oldest worked coalfields in the world which was a pioneer zone of industrial capitalism and whose family members have worked in the production, marine transport and distribution of coal across four generations. Does coal have agentic power? Mining and using it was the technological basis of steam power in engines and in electricity generation. Coal had agency by making steam power possible both for direct production and for transport – the Great Northern Coalfield of NE England was the birthplace of the railway. &nbsp;But it required an interaction with human agency involving all of the owners of mineral rights, capitalist entrepreneurs (these two roles were often conflated), technological innovators, coal miners, railway workers, seamen, coal merchants, coalmen to get coal to surface and get it available for use. A whole social and cultural system, which was very much a complex emergent system, was made possible by the interweaving of coal and human agency. Without the human agency the coal would have stayed in the ground, the industrial revolution would not have happened, and the socio-cultural-economic-political system shaped industrial social orders would not have existed. Without human agency there would be no dramatic increase in global carbon dioxide and no threat of potential system transforming climate catastrophe. Can there be agency without will? Volcanoes, asteroids, stars, rockslides do not have will. &nbsp;This is not an arcane question for University philosophers in the revived meta-physics of 21st Century thinking. Agency for us is not something that happens anyhow. It is property of humans who act within the interface of the social and natural world in relation now to both. That said we have to note that not all human actions are the product of conscious and purposeful will. Bourdieu’s crucial concept of habitus is framed on the basis that much of what people do is not informed by conscious will but rather is the product of internalized and routinized acceptance of patterns of action, up to and including acceptance of the character of social orders themselves, as what is without reflection on them. At the same time Bourdieu did note that when there is a radical shift in the underlying basis of a social order what has operated on the basis of habitus is challenged and conceptions of the world are shaken and disrupted. The way deindustrialization, to a considerable degree a product of political decisions in the aftermath of the failed great 1984 strike by UK coal miners, has transformed the economic base and social relations across the Great Northern Coalfield where it is now appropriate to say: “Coal WAS our life” provides an apposite example of precisely this. A long running stable system is now in all respects in a state of flux illustrated inter alia by the way these historically socialist areas voted in the Brexit referendum and have swung away from the Labour Party which dominated political culture for the best part of a hundred years. The point is not that all human action is informed by will but that it has the potential to be informed by reflection and will and that in times of crisis, literally a state of system which cannot endure as is and must change, then will predominates. One of us has just written a book on Inequality in a context of climate crisis after COVID (forthcoming 2021) which deals exactly with the intersection of the social problem of inequality – identified by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) as the major threat to the political legitimacy of contemporary capitalism and the forthcoming likelihood of a climate catastrophe, drawing on the impact of systems of governance across High and High Middle Income countries globally in response to the COVID pandemic. COVID is a highly infectious, not particularly deadly, viral infection which has had an impact on societies which have undergone the health transformation – the main period of death is old age and the main causes are degenerative diseases rather than infections – in which governments have acquired a far greater political responsibility for preventing people dying than was the case before the late 20thCentury. Has the virus agency? It has an impact on human bodies in interaction with the immune response capacity of those bodies but to assign agency to it seems to us to go too far. Sure it has causal powers but it has not will. What is agentic is the way governance has had to respond to the impact of the disease. The key issues facing human societies today are precisely increasing relative inequality and potential climate catastrophe. What will happen to systems which under the impact of both of these will have to undergo transformative/qualitative/phase shift change will be a matter of human agency enacted through politics and governance. We can only hope for the best! References Byrne, D.S. and Callaghan, G. (2014) Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences: the state of the art London: Routledge Byrne, D.S. (2019) Class After Industry London: Palgrave Macmillan Coole, D. and Frost, S.(2010) New Materialisms Durham NC: Duke University Press Dawe, A. (1970) ‘The Two Sociologies’ British Journal of Sociology 21 207-18 Desrosières, A.(1998) The Politics of Large Numbers Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press Harman, G.(2018) Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything London: Penguin Random House Law, J. (2004) After Method London: Routledge Morin, E. (2008) On Complexity Cresskill NJ: Hampton Press Reed, M. and Harvey, D.L. (1992) 'The New Science and the Old: Complexity and Realism in the Social Sciences' Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 22 :356-79 Steinbeck, J. (1952) East of Eden New York: Viking Thompson, E.P.(1963) The Making of the English Working Class London: Gollancz Thompson, E.P. (1978) The Poverty of Theory London: Merlin Williams, R. (1980) “Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory.” In Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, pp. 31–49. London: Verso and NLB Home https://paradoxof.agency/Nitzan-Hermon Tue, 13 Apr 2021 12:21:52 +0000 The Paradox of Agency https://paradoxof.agency/Nitzan-Hermon Home On GeneralizationsBy Nitzan Hermon <img width="800" height="494" width_o="800" height_o="494" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9052b8811e11a139eb4ce853d28a06e0bb0dac03a3c90cc60a322e64865e6ca6/nitzan-hands.jpeg" data-mid="105103759" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/9052b8811e11a139eb4ce853d28a06e0bb0dac03a3c90cc60a322e64865e6ca6/nitzan-hands.jpeg" /> Image from page 554 of "Annual report of the Bureau of ethnology to the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution .."(1881) When comparing different kinds, we must go to the general before linking the specifics. We can't compare a chair to an apple, or two people, without first going into our intuition and cognitive bucketing of both. In the process of comparing, we must go into a nonlinguistic, intuitive place. When we go into the general, we leave the detailed experience and go into our heads. Generalization is an embodied action; it is deploying to our intuition. The minute we leave bits and atoms, ambiguity and creativity appear. Our body knows its limitation, which is why the brain processes so many redundant signals (9 to 1). "Agency manifests itself in the urge to master: communion in non-contractual co-operation." —The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist The paradox is that intuition, the actual agency in an open-ended world, exists in abstract nonlinguistic space. Once generalizations make it into the specific and into words, they lose their richness and mastery. Once we put anything into language, it loses its integrity. The same way that picking vegetables from soil starts its decay.Agency is the act of embodied conviction and gentle leadership. Agency is navigating all of the places we have no control. It is the white space between the inked lines. It isn't what's not said by a particular person at a specific place, but the context connects all of those things. Weaving known, unknowns, the possible, and fantastical is creativity, and creativity is the only agency. Home