Discourse and Human Agency
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Discourse and Human Agency Roland Bleiker1 School of Political Science, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QID 4072, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]
The conceptualization of human agency is one of the oldest and most debated challenges in political theory. This essay defends the continuous relevance of this endeavour against a proliferating theoretical pessimism. Instead of engaging the much rehearsed structure–agency debate, the author conceptualizes agency in relation to discourses. However, such an approach inevitably elicits suspicion. Is discourse not merely a faddish term, destined to wax and wane with fleeting intellectual trends of the postmodern and poststructural kind? Does the concept of discourse, as many fear, suck us into a nihilistic vortex and deprive us of the stable foundations that are necessary to ground our thoughts and actions? Not so, argues this essay, and defends an anti-essentialist stance as the most viable chance for retaining an adequate understanding of how people situate themselves as agents and influence their socio-political environment. The ensuing analysis, which focuses on everyday forms of resistance, demonstrates how the very acceptance of ambiguity, often misrepresented as relativism, is a crucial precondition not only for the conceptualization of human agency, but also for its actual application in practice. Contemporary Political Theory (2003) 2, 25–47. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300073 Keywords: discourse; human agency; Foucault; everyday resistance; foundations; anti-essentialism
The concept of human agency has occupied a central position in the history of political and social thought. From Aristotle onwards, countless leading minds have philosophized how people may or may not be able to influence their environment. Do our actions, intentional or not, bear upon our destiny? Or are we simply creatures of habit, blind followers of cultural and linguistic orders too large and too powerful to be swayed? Today these questions remain as important as ever. Who or what shapes the course of social dynamics in the late modern world, an epoque of rapid change and blurring boundaries between nations, cultures, knowledges, realities? Can shifting social designs and their designers be discerned at all? Questions of agency, this essay argues, can best be understood if approached through the concept of discourse. However, embarking on such a journey breaks theoretical taboos and evokes various forms of anxieties.
Roland Bleiker Discourse and Human Agency
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There are possible objections from those who employ the concept of discourse in their work, poststrucutalists and postmodernists in particular. Very few of the respective authors, from Heidegger to Foucault to their contemporary interpreters, have dealt with questions of agency in an explicit and systematic way. White (2000, 76) speaks of a ‘tendency to keep ontological affirmations austerely thin or minimal.’ This minimalism has often been equated with an image of the world in which human beings are engulfed by discur
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