AGENCY

STEVEN ACCARDI

The term agency is embedded in many discussions in writing studies, and, depending upon how it is used, reveals particular theoretical orientations. As a commonplace, agency signifies the ability or capacity to act, such as in the sentence, "The president has the agency to veto the bill." In Genre and the Invention of the Writer, Anis Bawarshi argues that in writing studies, the subject is often conceived as having agency, or being the sole possessor of agency, and thereby having the responsibility, in some cases, to take action (Bawarshi 2003, 53–5).

This conceptualization, for example, is seen in Agency in the Age of Peer-Production. Quentin Vieregge et al. (2012) study the transformative effect of digital peer-production tools on communication, collaboration, and the agency of teachers. Their use of agency connotes a force or power that can be owned or managed. They write, "[Teachers] want to play along without being pushed along. They want to assert their own agency without completely delegitimizing the agency of their programs, departments and colleges" (Vieregge et al. 2012, 4). Here individuals as well as collectives own agency.

Agency is similarly seen in discussions about writing program administration. While discussing the role of WPAs in the distribution process of composition textbooks, Libby Miles states, "Regardless, the voice of the consultant is the loudest and strongest in the textbook production process, and those of us who can should make more of that position of agency for the benefit of all" (Miles 2000, 37). Agency here inflects a power attributed to WPAs. Kelly Ritter, in her article, "Extra-Institutional Agency and the Public Value of the WPA," builds upon this notion of power: "[W]hat follows is rooted in a story about my own developing agency as an administrator, resulting from my negotiations with our state offices over common system rubrics for basic writers and basic writing placement" (Ritter 2006, 47). The term agency here resembles authority as well as power. This dual definition is rearticulated toward the end of her piece: "Rather than resist our power to influence these discussions and shape public perception, I submit that we do seize it and use it to help system offices help us to define and thus provide institutional agency for basic writers in the FYC curriculum" (Ritter 2006, 57).

In second language writing, notions of power and possession follow suit, as A. Suresh Canagarajah argues: "The value of the debate between LI [linguistic imperialism] and LH [linguistic hybridity] schools is that it expands our awareness of the complexities in the negotiation of power, developing the possibilities for teachers to exert their agency for simple but significant changes" (Canagarajah 1999, 213). Sandra McKay and Sau-Ling Wong employ the term similarly: "As subjects with agency and a need to exercise it, the [second language] learners, while positioned in power relations and subject to the influence of discourses, also resist positioning, attempt repositioning, and deploy discourses and counterdiscourses" (McKay and Wong 1996, 603).

In each of these cases, agency reflects an ability, power, or authority that can be possessed by a subject or subjects. This usage links with a humanist — modernist theoretical orientation, one that suggests a writer is a rational individual, capable of inventing ideas autonomously and pursuing an intention to engage or provoke an audience. In short, humanism implies that agency is something a writer can possess and use — as when Marilyn Cooper states that "agency is an emergent property of embodied individuals" (Cooper 2011, 421) — or something that can be taken away: "[T]hey realize that they are seen as native informants and that their agency is wrested from them" (Partnoy 2006, 1667). Sometimes scholars reveal this orientation by mentioning that agency is something "personal" or deriving from "personal experience," something coming from the self. Gail Hawisher et al. (2006, 633) state that the "theme of personal agency also played itself out in terms of gender expectations and computer use," while Alan France notes, "Composition studies ... is skewed toward agency, toward the personal experience of the world, including the experience of any structure that might determine or even constrain that experience" (France 2000, 148). France states further, "And the purpose of rhetorical education has been since antiquity, after all, learning the practices of personal agency in their relevant social context" (149).

A posthumanist or poststructuralist orientation, on the other hand, does not locate agency with the subject. According to this lens, agency is found circulating in discourse and dispersed into an ever-shifting field of power relations (Herndl and Licona 2007, 141). In other words, agency cannot be possessed. Christian Lundberg and Joshua Gunn explain that this posthumanist orientation reverses possession, from a subject possessing agency to agency possessing the subject. The reversal

refocuses our attention on the ways that the subject is an effect of structures, forces, and modes of enjoyment that might precede or produce it. This reversal of agent's relation to agency directs attention to quintessentially rhetorical concerns: to the constitutive function of trope, to modes of address, to the dialectics of identification and difference, and even to the power of concealing exercises of techne under the veil of the natural. (Lundberg and Gunn 2005, 97)

Helen Ewald and David Wallace inflect a posthumanist orientation when they state, "Although taking such a look might imply that agency is an attribute of classrooms rather than individuals and, as such, might seem a counterintuitive move, it is also a move consistent with the postmodern sense that the agent or subject is situationally constructed rather than autonomously present"...