From Inquiry to Academic Writing, p.42-46

TEACHING NOTE: 

“THEORIES OF AGENCY” & RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

Textbook: Stuart Greene and April Lidinsky’s From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Text and Reader, second edition, 2012, p. 42-46.

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4 elements of rhetorical analysis: situation, purpose, claims, audience

p. 42: In the field of sociology, “scholars recognize that the values, beliefs, and linguistic practices of a community can exert pressures on and even limit the ways individuals make decisions and take action—that is, the ways they assert a sense of agency.”

Agency = the ability to take action or to choose what action to take (Cambridge Dictionary)

Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s “Agency”

p. 43, para 1:

• Human beings as agents of or actors in their own lives.

  • Actor = a person who plays the part of a character in a movie or play (Cambridge Dictionary)

• The issue of how subjects claim, exercise, and narrate agency is far more complicated.

p. 43, para. 2:

• Discursive systems emergent in social structures shape the operations of memory, experience, identity, and embodiment.

• People tell stories of their lives through the cultural scripts available to them, and they are governed by cultural strictures about self-presentation in public.

Theories of Agency

p. 43, para. 3: Louis Althusser

• Social services, educational institutions, the family, literary and artistic institutions—all these “hail” subjects who enter them.

  • Hail = the process through which subjects become interpellated (概念などを生じさせる),　become what institutional discourses and practices make of them.

    • Discourse =「言説」：言語・文化・社会を論じる際の専門用語として、「書かれたこと」や「言われたこと」といった、言語で表現された内容の総体を意味する概念）

• Individuals understand themselves to be “naturally” self-produced because the power of ideology/system to hail the subject is hidden, obscured/covered by the very practices of the institution.

  • Ideology = 概念の体系。観念形態、思想形態とも呼ばれる。

• In this way, people are invested in and mystified by their own production as subjects, by their own “subjection.”

• = they have “false consciousness”: they collude in their own lack of agency by believing that they have it.

• = false “free will” (a concept developed in a discourse about the Enlightenment individual, whereby subjects understand themselves as intellectually mature and free to make their own choices)

p. 43-44, para. 4: Elizabeth Wingrove

• “Agent change, and change their world, by virtue of the systemic operation of multiple ideologies.”

• Multiplicity of ideologies “expose both the subject and the system to perpetual reconfiguration.”

  • Perpetual = continuous

  • Reconfiguration = re-arrangement

p. 44, para 6: Judith Butler

• The “performativity” of subjectivity: identity is enacted daily through socially enforced norms that surround us.

  • Enact = put into practice

• The impose of masculinity and femininity leads to the formation of idea within oneself as “a heterosexual man” or “a woman.”

• But this enforcement of norms cannot be totally effective since individuals fail to conform/obey/follow/fit fully to them because of the multiplicity of norms we are called to reenact in our everyday lives.

• The failure to conform results in reconfigurations or changes of identities.

Para. 8: Teresa de Lauretis

•  The unconscious as a potential source of agency.

•  Unconscious = a repository of all the experiences and desires that have to be repressed in order for the subject to conform to socially enforced norms.

•  Unconscious = a source of resistance to socially enforced calls to fixed identities.

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p. 46: A Practice Sequence: Writing a Rhetorical Analysis of a Paragraph

Review your annotations and write a paragraph in which you describe Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s rhetorical situation, their purpose, their main claim, and their audience.

Situation:

• To notify the reader to recognize that the issue of how subjects claim, exercise, and narrate agency is far more complicated.

Purpose:

• To encourage the reader to think deeper into the concept of subjectivity and the relationship between oneself and society by introducing the various theories regarding agency.

Claim:

• Many theories are useful to think about how one’s identity is sculptured, formed, and reformed. For instance, Louis Althusser claims that people are made to believe that they have “free will” but in reality, they do not have it. The truth is that people are trained into thinking/acting/reacting in specific ways under the government of institutions such as schools, churches, families, art, social media, and so on. Elizabeth Wingrove proposes that while we are affected/shaped by the systems embedded in the society, the system itself is also reformed or changed, or affected by this process. Judith Butler in Gender Trouble suggests that identity is formed through the repetition of performances or acts hailed by the systems/ways of thinking enforced by the institutions surrounding us. Because identity is formed through the repetition of specific performances, it can be changed through the repetition of other performances as well. Finally, Teresa de Lauretis sees the unconscious as a potential source of agency, emphasizing its role as resistance to socially enforced calls to fixed identities.

Audience:

•  Readers in the field of sociology, philosophy, literary studies