Carol Bacchi

Content:

This entry is prompted by a recent article by Kayi and Sakarya (2020) which states that it uses “Bacchi’s framework” (commonly known as the WPR approach) to analyse government responses to COVID-19 in 13 countries (United States, UK, Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Italy, Turkey, South Korea, Singapore, Japan and China). The article offers a survey of the arguments for and against the two main policy responses to COVID-19: suppression and mitigation.

While the paper is useful, it does not to my mind engage the level of analysis I associate with WPR. Clearly, I cannot and do not wish to “manage” how WPR is deployed. At the same time, I feel that it is worthwhile to consider the research approaches that appear in various WPR adaptations. I use the term “approach”, in line with Ozga’s (2019) account, to signal a focus on the “theoretical resources” drawn upon in forms of analysis.

On this point it is important to recognize that WPR is used in a variety of ways and in combination with other theoretical approaches (van Toorn and Dowse 2016; Van Aswegen et al. 2019). In other Research Hub entries, I have queried the possibility of some of these combinations, specifically on attempts to produce hybrids of WPR with CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis) or with critical realism (14 May 2018; 1 Feb. 2019).

Kayi and Sakarya (2020) describe their approach as interpretive, an approach they link to studies of representation and frames/framing. They refer to Browne et al. (2019: 3, 8) who offer interpretivism as a broad rubric encompassing WPR alongside other qualitative approaches that focus on “how meaning is created” in policy texts and interactions, and on how “different stakeholders represent policy problems”.

In a previous entry (4 March 2018) I emphasize one key distinguishing factor that separates WPR from other interpretive approaches: that interpretive analyses tend to focus on the rationales or perspectives advanced by policy actors or “stakeholders” whereas WPR, alongside other poststructural approaches, analyzes deep-seated presuppositions within governmental texts (see also Bacchi 2015 Bacchi The Turn to Problematization).  Importantly, “governmental” is understood broadly to encompass the many rules, agencies, professional bodies, etc. that shape conduct, while texts go beyond written documents to include all practices of signification (see for example “Buildings as Proposals”, Research Hub entry 14 Jan. 2018; Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 18). The objective is to examine critically the “grounds of the system’s possibility” (Johnson 1981: xv) and the politics involved in its making.

In their introduction to WPR, Kayi and Sakarya ask: “What is the problem represented to be in the debate between defenders of mitigation and suppression strategies?” (2020: 31). This declared intention to identify problem representations in debates between defenders of mitigation or suppression strategies indicates a distance from the WPR objective of interrogating problem representations in governmental texts (see above). As a result, the authors fail to select proposals within governmental texts as starting points for asking the WPR questions, a key step in applying the framework (see Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 16, 19). What we are offered instead is an analysis of “points of view” or “commonly articulated reason[s]” (Kayi and Sakarya 2020: 32).

It appears, then, that the research approach in this analysis – that is, the  theoretical resources drawn upon (see Ozga above) – contrasts with the WPR research project. Alvesson and Sandberg (2013: 53-56) offer a useful way to distinguish among analytic approaches, focusing specifically on the kinds of assumptions that researchers target for interrogation (or problematization). They produce five categories of assumptions: in-house, root metaphor, paradigmatic, ideological and “field assumptions”, associating the last with the work of Foucault.  Studies that question “in-house assumptions” tend to work within the frames of reference accepted in their field, whereas Foucauldian-influenced research puts these terms of reference into question. Alvesson and Sandberg offer the example of “trait theory” in research on leadership. Those who dispute (only) the criteria for characterizing leadership retain the background assumption that leadership abilities depend on certain traits and hence tacitly accept the premise of “trait theory”.

Kayi and Sakarya (2020) produce analysis at the level of “in-house” assumptions, whereas WPR works at the level of “field assumptions”. They do not query the terms of reference (the “in-house” assumptions) marshalled in the debates about responses to COVID-19. That is, their approach stays within the framework of accepted medical and epidemiological categories. The goal becomes (simply) to highlight “fallacies” or missing information in relation to those terms of reference. For example, they spend some time pointing out that efforts to achieve herd immunity are compromised by the lack of a vaccine for “high-risk” groups (Kayi and Sakarya 2020: 36). And they note that: “The challenge with the simulation models is the need for input variables which are uncertain or absent” (Kayi and Sakarya 2020: 35).

A WPR approach, by contrast, raises questions about the categories of analysis (the “field assumptions”) that feature in governmental “responses” (see Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 62-63), e.g. “risk categories” (see Lupton, 1993; Dean, 1999: Chapter 9; Rose 2000), “modelling” (see Rhodes and Lancaster 2020), “immunity” and “distancing”. Such categories are seen as “contingent historical creations, human constructions, that need to be interrogated rather than enshrined as ‘truth’” (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 5; emphasis in original).

In WPR, Question 2 probes the ontological and epistemological presuppositions that make those categories of analysis possible – for example, presuppositions about the nature of disease, “the body” and “human nature” (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 21).  Spivakovsky and Seear (2017: 458, 463) usefully refer to these presuppositions as “pervasive cultural logics” and “dominant cultural imaginaries”. They offer agency, capacity, disability and crime as examples of categories in the field of legal research that require critical interrogation at the level of deep-seated assumptions. By contrast, assumptions of this kind are, in general, rendered unremarkable in Kayi and Sakarya.

This tendency to work within accepted (“in-house”) terms of reference is clear in Kayi and Sakarya’s (2020: 40) enthusiastic promotion of evidence-based research. By contrast, the WPR framework encourages researchers to probe the ways in which conceptions of “evidence” rely on epistemological assumptions about “true knowledge” and ontological assumptions about a fixed “reality” (Bacchi 2009: 252-254).

In the article, the adaptation of Question 5 (in WPR; see Bacchi WPR CHART) also clearly illustrates the distance between Kayi and Sakarya’s research approach and WPR-related thinking – that is, how they stay within the terms of reference of mainstream policy analysis. While they pose the question “What effects are produced by the representations of the problem?” they describe their goal as assessing “outcomes” of the contrasting strategies. In their account, “effects” (“outcomes”) refers to the specific details of implementation. For example, here are the “outcomes” they observe in Sweden:

“Sweden maintains its mitigation approach: most places are open, only work hours are reduced, primary and secondary schools are open, people over 70 are particularly encouraged to stay at home, more than 50 people are prohibited from being together, and social distance rules are applied.” (Kayi and Sakarya 2020: 37)

Diagrams indicating the number of cases and deaths reported in the analysed countries also serve as “outcomes”.

By contrast, Question 5 in WPR identifies three kinds of interconnected effects (or implications): discursive effects, subjectification effects and lived effects. Discursive effects highlight the limits imposed on thinking and analysis by working within accepted terms of reference. Subjectification effects consider how specific policy “responses” affect how subjects “come to relate to themselves and others as subjects of a certain type” (Rose 1998: 25). For example, the focus on individual responsibility in social distancing rules – a policy proposal that crosses over the suppression/mitigation distinction – produces subjects who self-regulate in domains and practices that invite critical scrutiny. Finally, lived effects focus on how discursive and subjectification effects translate into everyday lives. Together, these three “kinds” of effects broaden our understanding of “outcomes” to consider how lives are shaped through governmental practices, “how social relationships are set up and [for] how subjects are positioned within policy and discourse” (Cui et al. 2019: 2). None of these issues is raised by Kayi and Sakaryi.

The WPR approach also emphasizes the need for researchers to practice self-problematization as a part of the research exercise (see Step 7 in Chart Bacchi WPR CHART). In the Covid-19 example, this step would involve researchers questioning their positioning in debates about, for example, containment strategies, “outcomes” and “evidence”.

As I mentioned at the outset, I have no desire to “police” how WPR is deployed. However, I would encourage researchers to pay more attention to the different levels of analysis produced in contrasting applications – if only to debate their potential usefulness. In the next two entries, I introduce several WPR applications in the field of medical practices to illustrate further what it means to query “field assumptions” and to suggest the political implications of such analyses.

I would like to thank Sue Goodwin and Anne Wilson for comments on an earlier draft of this entry.

References

Bacchi, C. 2009. Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to be? Frenchs Forest: Pearson Education.

Bacchi, C. 2015. The Turn to Problematization: Political Implications of Contrasting Interpretive and Poststructural Adaptations. Open Journal of Political Science, 5: 1-12.

Bacchi, C. and Goodwin, S. 2016. Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice. NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Browne, J., Coffey, B., Cook, K., Meiklejohn, S. and Palermo, C. 2019. A guide to policy analysis as a research method. Health Promotion International, 34: 1032-44.

Cui, J., Lancaster, K. and Newman, C. E. 2019. Making the subjects of mental health care: a cross-cultural comparison of mental health policy in Hong Kong, China and New South Wales, Australia. Sociology of Health and Illness, doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.12851

Dean, M. 1999. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage.

Johnson, B. 1981. Translator’s Introduction. In J. Derrida, Dissemination, B. Johnson, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kayi, I. and Sakarya, S. 2020. Policy Analysis of Suppression and Mitigation Strategies in the Management of an Outbreak Through the Example of COVID-19 Pandemic. Infect Dis Clin Microbiol, 2(1): 30-41.

Lupton, D. 1993. Risk as Moral Danger: The Social and Political Functions of Risk Discourse in Public Health. International Journal of Health Services, 23(3): 425-435.

Ozga, J. 2019. Problematising policy: the development of (critical) policy sociology. Critical Studies in Education, DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2019.1697718

Rhodes, T. and Lancaster, K. 2020. A model society: Maths, models and expertise in viral outbreaks. Critical Public Health,doi:10/1080/09581596.2020.1748310

Rose, N. 1997.  Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rose, N. 2000. Government and Control. British Journal of Criminology, 40(2): 321-339.

Spivakovsky, C. and Seear, K. 2017. Making the abject: problem-solving courts, addiction, mental illness and impairment. Continuum, 31(3): 458-469.

Van Aswegen, J., Hyatt, D., and Goodley, D. 2019. A critical discourse problematization framework for (disability) policy analysis: “good cop/bad cop strategy”.  Qualitative Research Journal, https://doi.org/10.1108/QRJ-12-2018-0004

Van Toorn, G. and Dowse, L. 2016. Policy claims and problem frames: a cross-case comparison of evidence-based policy in an Australian context. Evidence & Policy, 12(1): 9-24.

Preamble:  The challenges of bringing a critical theoretical perspective to current developments in local, national and international politics are immense. There is a tendency to be overwhelmed by the minutiae of daily case counts and the on-the-ground adaptations of “travel bans” and “social distancing”. To step back, to gain some perspective on developments, requires a sharing and questioning of taken-for-granted assumptions and views. And so I am grateful to Jennifer Bonham for co-authoring this current Research Hub entry. Jennifer is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography, Environment and Population, University of Adelaide. She and I have written together on Foucault’s concept “discursive practices” (Bacchi and Bonham 2014) and have collaborated on the development of PIA (Poststructural Interview Analysis) (Bacchi and Bonham 2016). Jennifer’s most recent book is entitled Cycling Futures (Bonham and Johnson 2015). It is available as a free download from the University of Adelaide Press website (https://www.adelaide.edu.au/press/).

Commentary contrasting responses to the HIV epidemic of the 1980s and the COVID-19 pandemic today is perhaps inevitable. Australia’s terrifying public advertising campaign saw the Grim Reaper knock down people of all ages, walks of life and genders like so many ten pins in a bowling alley (Padula 2006). Medical researchers understood HIV was transmitted via blood and blood products and anyone who contracted the disease would die. HIV was understood to be prevalent among gay men and drug users but the advertising campaign targeted the entire population. Every single Australian was deemed to be at risk so everyone needed to take care. While one reading of the ad was that the Grim Reaper became associated with gay men it is unclear whether this was a pervasive interpretation.

Fast forward to 2020 with many of us watching in disbelief as news footage emerged of people collapsing in Wuhan’s streets. Hospitals were overwhelmed, entire populations were locked down and confined to their apartments, temperatures were taken of people venturing into public places and “suspected” COVID-19 sufferers were hunted down, bundled into vans and taken to hastily erected “hospitals”. But Wuhan was a world away and despite the early blocking of flights from China, there was no sense of urgency in the statements from Australian authorities (politicians in all levels of government, departmental heads, or health officials) or the media reports covering the growing epidemic. Posters began appearing on protocols around coughing, washing hands, touching one’s face and greeting others (no hugging or shaking hands) but it seemed this would be enough. Information on how the virus spread focused on droplets associated with coughing and sneezing and there weren’t any real people in these advertisements – they were line drawings. The virulence of the disease, ease of surface spreading or the role of ordinary people touching ordinary objects like the door handle, keyboard or bench top did not begin appearing in the traditional media until April 2020 – several weeks after the 100 cases milestone.

Our goal is not to make a detailed analysis of responses to the HIV epidemic and COVID-19. Our purpose is to draw on Luigi Pellizzoni’s Ontological Politics in a Disposable World (2015) to recommend a line of inquiry that foregrounds an emerging mode of governing. Pellizzoni’s book critically examines the links between intellectual shifts in the biophysical sciences, the ontological turn in the social sciences and the rise of neo-liberalism. Beginning in the 1970s, each of these domains has moved away from concepts, or goals, of stasis, and increasingly constituted existence in terms of flux and flows. In this context, interventions by scientists, managers, economists and other authorities are not (or should not be) concerned with ensuring stability but they are manipulations toward producing something new. The uncertainties inherent in the flux and flow of existence together with the uncertainties of our manipulations have become opportunities to be celebrated. Pellizzoni questions the implications of hailing this uncertainty:

“Burdened with imperfect foresight, we take a chance, hoping to be excused from moral blame [let alone liability, added by Pellizzoni], if it can be demonstrated we did not have sufficient knowledge of the future consequences of actions at the time: that these could not have been ‘reasonably foreseen'”. (Owen et al 2013 cited in Pellizzoni, 2015, p. 24)

On the face of it, this new approach to intervening in the world, aligns with the Australian government’s response to COVID-19 and might be seen as an example of “governing through experimenting”.

State experiments are nothing new but, as Bulkeley and Broto (2012) and Jones and Whitehead (2018) argue, they are becoming more widely used. Not-withstanding their critiques of such experimentation, the examples they provide describe controlled and limited experiments. In contrast to these authors, we are using the phrase “governing through experimenting” to refer to authorities trialling novel interventions and, crucially, embracing the uncertainty of their outcomes. Regardless of those outcomes, the experiment provides an opportunity for the production of new knowledge (Pellizzoni, 2015, p. 29).

Like politicians and health officials across most of the world, the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, and the Chief Medical Officer, Brendan Murphy, appear on the nightly news to talk about “flattening the curve”. We couldn’t “let the virus rip”, although this idea was endorsed in some quarters (e.g. the UK), but we could “flatten the curve”. In fact, ALL we could do was try to flatten the curve. As an exercise in “problem-solving”, “flattening the curve” was not a matter of politics but a matter of technical expertise (Bacchi Problem Solving ojps_2019123016255521). This strategy aimed at dampening the daily count of people contracting the disease in order to reduce the demands on the health care systems and minimise the death toll. As the Prime Minister stated a number of times “there will be deaths” and the acceptability of these deaths was supported with the analogy of war. Indeed, the certainty of deaths was the only thing we could count on in a moment of uncertainty where “there are no guarantees” and the “virus writes its own rules” (Melbourne Age, Saturday 4 April 2020, p. 6).  We had to understand it wasn’t possible to eradicate the virus – until New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, offered New Zealanders an alternative. Her Government’s goal was precisely that, to eradicate the disease. Most recently (7.30 Report, ABC, 16 April 2020) Morrison speculated that Australia might yet achieve “eradication” as a “by-product” of its current approach to suppression. Experimenting, it seems, is a useful intervention.

The significance of this motif of governing is clear in the parallel development in the world of finance and management. In Radical Uncertainty: Decision-making for an unknowable future (2020) John Kay and Mervyn King celebrate the human instinct to adapt to an environment that people understand only imperfectly. As Pat O’Malley (2004: 3-5 in Pellizzoni 2015:63) identifies, this outlook reflects “an extensive and immensely influential managerial literature appearing since the 1980s” that “celebrates uncertainty as the technique of entrepreneurial creativity … the fluid art of the possible”.

In this task environment, “proper calculations of risk are seen as the exception, while reasoned bets on unpredictable futures are regarded as the rule” (Pellizzoni 2015: 63) – with “betting on the future” a hallmark of decision-making by the Morrison government at the moment.

In this motif of governing, flux and flows are productive of innovation. The more unstable and unpredictable the world, the more manageable (Pellizzoni 2011), “as long as the market, as a blind mechanism of co-ordination, ensures ex-post the overall soundness of choices” (Pellizzoni 2015: 66-67). Here we would emphasize the insistence by Morrison that “lives and livelihoods” are inextricably linked.

In this motif of governing, “scenarios and expectations play a growing role in policy-making” (Pellizzoni 2015: 63). And so, the focus in Australian planning for COVID-19 is on modelling and curves. The wonders of mathematics and science are hauled out to give sense to an “unprecedented” “crisis”, all the while heralding that there are “no guarantees”. People become ciphers in a scientific experiment. As one childcare worker noted when reflecting on the Morrison decision to provide childcare free – commonly perceived to be a progressive intervention – “they are treating my childcare centre like a petri dish”.

We are not suggesting here that a version of the Grim Reaper would have been preferable to the regime of measurement and “guesstimates” currently shaping Australian lives. Rather, we are suggesting the need to step back from the kinds of questions COVID-19 commonly provokes – for example, do authoritarian or democratic governments “handle” the crisis better? Or how are we to explain the turn to the “left” of Australian conservatives (the Liberal Party)? Instead, we suggest that a broader shift in governance styles needs to be traced, a shift towards a mode of “governing through disorder” (Pellizzoni 2011) and an “entrepreneurial desire for uncertainty as an engine of enterprise” (Ericson 2005: 659).

REFERENCES

Bacchi, C. & Bonham, J. 2014. Reclaiming discursive practices as an analytic focus: Political implications. Foucault Studies, 17 (March): 173-192.

Bacchi, C. & Bonham, J. 2016. Poststructural Interview Analysis: Politicizing “personhood”. In C. Bacchi and S. Goodwin (eds) Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice. NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bacchi, C. 2020. Problem-Solving as a Governing Knowledge: “Skills”-Testing in PISA and PIAAC. Open Journal of Political Science, 10: 82-105.

Bonham, J. and Johnson, M. (eds) 2015. Cycling Futures. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press.

Bulkeley, H. and Broto, V. C. 2012. Government by experiment? Global cities and the governing of climate change. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

Ericson, R. 2005. Governing Through risk and uncertainty. Economy and Society, 34(4): 659-672.

Jones, R. and Whitehead, M. 2018. “Politics done like science”: Critical perspectives on psychological governance and the experimental state. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36(2): 313-330.

Kay, J. and King, M. 2020. Radical Uncertainty: Decision-making for an unknowable future. NY: W. W. Norton and co.

Padula, M. 2006. “The AIDS Grim Reaper Campaign”. The Australia and New Zealand School of Government, 2006-90.1. Case Program. https://www.anzsog.edu.au/preview-documents/case-study-level-1/192-aids-grim-reaper-campaign-the-a-2006-90-1/file

O’Malley, P. 2004. Risk, Uncertainty and Governance. London: Glasshouse.

Owen, R., Stilgoe, J., Macnaghten, P., Gorman, M., Fisher, E. and Guston, D. 2013. A framework for responsible innovation, in Responsible Innovation: Managing the Responsible Emergence of Science and Innovation in Society, edited by R. Owen, J. Bessant and M. Heintz. Chichester: Wiley, 27-50.

Pellizzoni, L. 2011. Governing through disorder: Neoliberal environmental governance and social theory. Global Environmental Change, 21(3): 795-803.

Pellizzoni, L. 2015. Ontological Politics in a Disposable World: The New Mastery of Nature.Surrey: Ashgate.

Content:

I mentioned “affect” briefly in the last entry. Given its prevalence in contemporary social theory, I felt it worthwhile to introduce the concept more fully.

Leys (2011) identifies a two-fold foundation: first, the “dominant paradigm in the field of emotions”, associated with Silvan Tomkins, in which “the affective processes occur independently of intention or meaning”; and second, Spinozist-Deleuzean ideas about affect. To these, I would add the uptake of “affect” by some governmentality scholars, discussed later.

The Tomkins’ perspective (2008), described as a “Basic Emotions paradigm” (Leys 2011: 439), conflates “emotion” and “affect”, a trend identified as problematic in the last entry. Some in the Spinozist-Deleuzean tradition, most importantly Massumi (2002), insist that “emotions” and “affect” are separate phenomena. Massumi claims a distance from “received psychological categories such as emotions”, describing “affect” as “irreducibly bodily and autonomic” (Massumi 2002: 28; see Shouse 2005). “Affect” is a prepersonal “intensity”, “the human power or capacity to affect and be affected” (Kristensen 2016: 17). In this account, “affects” bypass reason and criticality and seize “the body at the level of neural circuits, the nervous system, the endocrine system or other systems assumed to work independently of cognition” (Blackman 2012: xi).

This view of “affects” as “irreducibly bodily” appears in the work of the geographer, Nigel Thrift, and the policy researcher, Paul Hoggett. According to Thrift (2004: 59), “It has become increasingly evident that the biological constitution of being … has to be taken into account if performative force is ever to be understood, and in particular, the dynamics of birth (and creativity) rather than death.” Along similar lines, Hoggett (2000: 144; see also Thompson and Hoggett 2012), argues that “the body is the original site of the affects and emotions, and that these saturate consciousness”. Emotions, in his view, exist “on the boundary between the psyche and the soma”. For researchers, says Hoggett (2000: 144), it follows that, “With affect, quantitative considerations are dominant, whereas with emotion the qualitative dimension is much more important”.

This (re)turn to the body can be explained as, in part, a reaction against both “rationalist models of the human subject” and post-structuralist and Foucauldian perspectives. The latter, argues Hoggett (2000: 142), provides “us with no adequate way of theorizing agency”. “Agency” here aligns with the intentional, autonomous subject, put in question in a previous Research Hub entry (31 Jan. 2020). Along similar lines, Schaefer (2016; see also Shaefer 2015) argues that “affect theory helps us evade the ‘linguistic fallacy’”, while Sedgwick and Frank (1995 in Wetherell 2013: 352) see it as a counter to “routine anti-biologism and anti-essentialism”.

Its broader appeal can be linked to an attempt to “take a more encompassing view of social action … redirecting attention to the ‘somatically sensed’ body” (Wetherell 2013: 352). It reflects an effort “to offer a dynamic alternative to scientific thinking that highlights stasis” (Kristensen 2016: 12). We can see links here to what is described as the “new materialism” (Fox 2015). Wetherell (Beer 2014) also identifies connections to feminism “which made the ‘personal’ and the process of ‘being affected’ a core social topic”.

A number of theorists query what they perceive to be a presumption of a biological substrate operating in Massumi-associated understandings of “affect”. Leys (2011), for example, sees strong links between Massumi and a Basic Emotions paradigm. Wetherell (Beer 2014) considers “versions of ‘affect theory’ that posit affect as a pre-personal extra-discursive force hitting and shaping bodies prior to sense making” to be “simply unsustainable”. Clarke et al. (2015: 58) are equally wary of Massumi’s (2002) idea of affect as somehow “pre-social”, describing it as “psychologistic or biologistic essentialism”.

Some of these critics have produced adaptations that attempt to avoid “affective determinism” (Kristensen 2016: 11). Notably Wetherell (2013) describes “affect” as a “practice” and develops an affective/discursive variation. Here there are links to discursive versions of “emotions”, seen in the last entry. On this development, note that a decision to characterize “affect” as “practice” leads necessarily to the complex task of theorizing practices (see Research Hub entries 30 Nov. 2019; 31 Dec. 2019).

Clarke et al. (2015: 59) offer what they describe as a “somewhat promiscuous approach to thinking analytically” that can “weave the attention to affect/feeling into our repertoire, rather than succumbing to them”. In this approach they refer to the “danger” of borrowing “the languages of emotions and affect without them making any difference to how actors, processes and relationships are conceived”, leading to interesting questions about their conceptions of “the subject”.

Ahmed (2004: 119) develops the notion of “affective economies”. Her primary target is “emotions”. However, in her account, emotions are not “psychological dispositions”; they do not “reside in a given subject or object”. She describes emotions as “economic” because they circulate “between signifiers in relationships of difference and displacement” (Ahmed 2004: 119).

Ahmed focuses on narratives of fear in the creation of notions of crisis. She gives as an example the fear of the “bogus asylum seeker” and how “words generate effects: they create impressions of others as those who have invaded the space of the nation, threatening its existence” (Ahmed 2004: 122-123). Fear, in this instance, “does not involve the defense of borders that already exist”; rather “anxiety and fear create the very effect of borders” (Ahmed 2004: 128, 132).

Ahmed’s argument leads us directly into, and allows a contrast with, the ways in which “emotions” and “affects” have been linked to studies of governmentality. Bigo (2010), introduced in the previous entry, shares Ahmed’s interest in borders. However, in Bigo’s account, fear does not create borders; rather, borders create fear and “unease”. The key point of differentiation from Ahmed is the emphasis on how governmental technologies (here “borders”) produce “subjects” as particular kinds of subject, described as “subjectification”. There is no “fearful” “subject” prior to the governmental practice of “bordering” (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 100).

A significant group of theorists include consideration of “affect” in their reflections on subjectification.  Fannin (2013: 278) focuses on “transformations of governmental power in the realm of reproduction” to “incorporate the affective and psychological dimensions of birth”. Fortier (2010) targets “community cohesion” as a form of “governing through affect”, aimed at “designing people’s behaviours and attitudes in the public domain”. Carol Johnson (2010: 495) argues for the importance of a concept of “affective citizenship” which explores “(a) which intimate emotional relationships between citizens are endorsed and recognised by governments in personal life and (b) how citizens are also encouraged to feel about others and themselves in broader, more public domains.”

Other theorists argue that governing practices do more than produce particular “subjects”; governing involves “affects”. Clough (2007a), and Parisi and Terranova (2000), draw upon Deleuze and Foucault to examine the shift from discipline to control as a mode of governing. Says Clough, “Control is a biopolitics that works at the molecular level of bodies, at the informational substrate of matter”:

“The target of control is not the production of subjects whose behaviors express internalized social norms; rather, control aims at a never-ending modulation of moods, capacities, affects, and potentialities, assembled in genetic codes, identification numbers, ratings profiles, and preference listings, that is to say, in bodies of data and information (including the human body as information and data).” (Clough 2007: 27) – dramatised perhaps in the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

Clough et al. (2007: 62, 74) identify a “rationality of affectivity” that governs through “pre-individual capacities to affect and be affected”.

While recognizing the appeal of this argument, I remain uncomfortable with references to “capacities” and “moods” as if these exist outside of signification. For similar reasons, I am “unhappy” (so to speak) with “affect”.

I mentioned in the previous entry (29 Feb. 2020) that neither Foucault nor Deleuze engaged with “emotions”. “Affect” is clearly associated with Deleuze but not with Foucault.

“Affect” in Deleuze is directly connected to his concept of “desire” (see Gilliam 2018: 192). Foucault explicitly distanced himself from the term “desire” because it seemed to “evoke a psychoanalytic idealism of lack and repression (contra his reversal of the repression hypothesis in the first volume of The History of Sexuality)” (Gilliam 2018: 192). The point in Foucault was not to “liberate” “desire” but to create “pleasures”, a term Deleuze criticized.

Gilliam (2018: 194) argues that the dispute between Foucault and Deleuze over “desire” versus “pleasures” was a matter of semantics. That may indeed be the case. Foucault admitted that “desire” in Deleuze was not used with its conventional meaning. Still he continued to avoid the term. He explained why:

“Deleuze and Guattari obviously use the notion in a completely different way. But the problem I have is that I’m not sure if, through this very word, despite its different meaning, we don’t run the risk, despite Deleuze and Guattari’s intention, of allowing some of the medico-psychological presuppositions [prises] that were built into desire, in its traditional sense, to be reintroduced.” (Foucault 2011: 389)

I have similar qualms about “affect” and on grounds Gilliam (2018: 209) clearly explains:

“Language exists in a discursive network after all, particularly conceptual language. Thus, despite any internal conceptual subversions, the use of a word entails a subtle network of power-relations capable of invoking and/or inviting un/intended misuse.”

Choosing to adopt a specific theoretical language is a fraught exercise, as numerous earlier Research Hub entries illustrate. My aversion to “problem/s” and to “agency” rests precisely on long-standing traditional uses of these terms, uses entrenched in power-relations that concern me. On the same grounds the commonplace view of “affects” as pre-existent bodily capacities leads to my decision to avoid the term.

REFERENCES

Ahmed, S. 2004. Affective Economies. Social Text, 22(2): 117-139.

Bacchi, C. and Goodwin, S. 2016. Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice. NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Beer, D. 2014. The future of affect theory: An interview with Margaret Wetherell. Theory, Culture and Society, Available at: https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/the-future-of-affect-theory-an-interview-with-margaret-wetherall/Accessed 28 October 2019.

Bigo, D. 2010. Freedom and Speed in Enlarged Borderzones. In V. Squire (Ed.) The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity. NY: Routledge.

Blackman, L. 2012. Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation. London: Sage.

Clarke, J., Bainton, D. Lendvai, N. and Stubbs, P. 2015. Making Policy Move: Towards a Politics of Translation and Assemblage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Clough, P. T. 2007a. Introduction. In P.T. Clough and J. Halley (Eds) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Clough, P. T., Goldberg, G., Schiff, R., Weeks, A. and Wilse, C. 2007b. Notes Towards a Theory of Affect-itself. Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, 7, 60-77.

Fannin, M. 2013. The burden of choosing wisely: biopolitics at the beginning of life. Gender, Place & Culture, 20(3): 273-289.

Fortier, A-M. 2010. Proximity by design? Affective citizenship and the management of unease. Citizenship Studies, 14(1): 17-30.

Foucault, M., Morar, N. and Smith, D. W. The Gay Science. Critical Inquiry, 37(3): 395-403.

Fox, N. 2015. Emotions, affects and the production of social life. The British Journal of Sociology, 66(2): 301-318.

Gilliam, C. 2018. Vrais Amis: Reconsidering the Philosophical Relationship between Foucault and Deleuze. Foucault Studies, 25: 191-212.

Hoggett, P. 2000. Social Policy and the Emotions. In G. Lewis, S. Gewitz and J. Clarke (Eds) Rethinking Social Policy. London: Sage.

Johnson, C. 2010. The politics of affective citizenship: from Blair to Obama. Citizenship Studies, 14(5): 495-509.

Kristensen, K. 2016. What Can an Affect Do? Notes on the Spinozist-Deleuzean Account. LIR.journal, no. 7.

Leys, R. 2011. The Turn to Affect: A Critique. Critical Inquiry, 37: 434-472.

Massumi, B. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Parisi, L. and Terranova, T. 2000. Heat-Death, Emergence and Control In Genetic Engineering And Artificial Life. CTheory, http://www.ctheory.com/article/a84.html, 5.

Sedgwick, E. K. and Frank, A. 1995. Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins. Critical Inquiry, 21(2).

Shaefer, D. O.2015. Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution and Power. Duke University Press.

Shaefer, D. O. 2016. What is Affect Theory? Available at: http://donovanschaefer.com/what-is-affect-theory/Accessed on 28 October 2019.

Shouse, E. 2005. “Feeling, Emotion, Affect”, M/C Journal, 8(6).

Thompson, S. and Hoggett, P. 2012. Politics and the Emotions: The Affective Turn in Contemporary Political Studies. Continuum Books.

Thrift, N. 2004. Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect. Geografiska Annaler, 86B(1): 57078.

Tomkins, S. S. 2008 (1962-63). Affect, Imagery, Consciousness: The Complete Edition. 2 Vols. NY: Springer.

Wetherell, M. 2013. Affect and discourse – What’s the problem? From affect as excess to affective/discursive practice. Subjectivity, 6(4): 349-368.

Content:

This entry is prompted by a 2019 article by Stephanie Paterson entitled: “Emotional Labour: Exploring emotional policy discourses of pregnancy and childbirth in Ontario, Canada”. The article offers an overview of shifting discourses around pregnancy and birth over time, from a “discourse of fear” to a “discourse of joy” and a more recent merging of these discourses in a “discourse of risk”. Paterson uses her study to suggest some modifications to the WPR approach. In her view,

“While the WPR reveals how policy discourse affects what we can think and say, little attention has been given to how it affects what we can feel” (Paterson 2019: 5).

To amend this tendency, she lists a number of supplementary WPR questions to target “emotional landscapes” and “emotional discourses” (see Paterson 2019: 6-7).

There is a good deal to reflect upon in this article, including the meaning of “subjectification” and consideration of the place of “feelings” in governmentality studies. I will return to these topics at the close of this entry.

The article also provides an opportunity to examine briefly some themes regarding WPR that have arisen in previous entries. I have chosen three:

• First, is there a place for “emotions” in WPR given its grounding in Foucauldian anti-humanism (see Research Hub entries on “Conceptions of ‘the subject’”, 30 Sept. 2019, 31 Oct. 2019)?
• Relatedly, is it possible, in a WPR analysis, to build an analysis that relies upon perspectives reflecting opposing epistemological and ontological premises – e.g., Orsini and Wiebe (2014) and Nicol (2011)?
• Third, how are researchers to decide which WPR questions are relevant to their analysis? Paterson focuses on questions 1, 3 and 5, bypassing question 2 (see Bacchi WPR CHART). This omission is surprising given the focus in question 2 on discourses and given that Paterson offers a form of discourse analysis.

Turning to the first question, in a previous entry on “Conceptions of the subject” (31 Oct. 2019), I quote Foucault (1977: 87) concerning his commitment to place “within a process of development everything considered immortal to man (sic)”, including “feelings”, “instincts” and “the body”. As Tamboukou (2003) explains, neither Foucault nor Deleuze “have dealt directly with emotions … since they refuse any universal or primordial notion of the human essence as such – both being persistent anti-humanist thinkers”.

Recall that Foucault (1990: 23; Research Hub entry 30 Sept. 2019) insisted that “the subject” has a history, thereby challenging universalist conceptions of human nature. It follows that, instead of studying emotions, a Foucauldian analysis would pursue the reasons for the current upsurge of interest in “emotions” across a broad range of fields (Leys 2011: 434) and the corresponding production of “the emotional subject”. As Hacking (2002: 3) explains, conducting an “historical ontology of ourselves” means “shedding light on the ‘historical a-priori’ of a time and place; on the conditions of possibility of what we can say about ourselves and the world” (in Pellizzoni 2015: 48).

Clearly, how “emotions” are conceptualized is critical to this discussion, and it is impossible to broach this topic without briefly mentioning the (sometimes associated) category of “affect” (this concept receives more discussion in the next Research Hub entry). Many researchers talk about “emotion” and “affect” alongside one another, while others mark a sharp distinction between the two concepts. Most commonly, “affect” is used to refer to autonomic bodily responses, such as reflexes (more detail to come next time).

Robinson and Kutner (2019: 111-112) object to the tendency to conflate “affect” and “emotion”. They argue that what is at stake in such conflation is “the very notion of subjectivity”:

“After all, the term emotion implies the existence of a singular human subject who experiences feelings that can be located, isolated, reflected on, and measured. This emotion-experiencing subject is the Cartesian cogito—the I, the rational, essential self.”

They go on to explain that the Spinozan conception of affect subsumes emotions (Robinson and Kutner 2019: 112).

Many theorists have challenged the individualistic version of “emotions” just described. I can mention only a few. The critical psychologist, Margaret Wetherell (2014), insists that “human affect and emotion are distinctive because of their immediate entanglement with very particular human capacities for making meaning” (see also Wetherell 2012). Pribram and Harding (2002) offer a “cultural studies” approach to “emotions” that draws upon Foucault’s “technologies of self” and Raymond Williams’ (1975, 1979) “structure of feeling”. Delori (2018) makes a plea for a “discursive conception of emotions”, using Foucault. I leave it to you to judge the success of these various attempts to counter the everyday usage of “emotions” as personal “feelings”.

Paterson argues that she offers a discursive understanding of emotions. She (2019: 3) quotes Janet Newman (2012: 466) to the effect that discursive approaches offer a more “fine grained analysis of how emotional regimes of governance are enacted” (see also Newman 2017).  However, Paterson builds her analysis on concepts borrowed from authors who come from very different theoretical perspectives.  From Orsini and Wiebe (2014), she adopts the notion of “emotional landscapes”, which refers to “an environment that includes affect and emotions, sensory experiences, the conscious and the unconscious” (Orsini 2017: 7 in Paterson 2019: 5). Such a stance inscribes a kind of subject – one with “senses” and an “unconscious” – that sits uncomfortably alongside a Foucauldian perspective. This tension is not resolved by Paterson’s decision to substitute the term “subjects” for “actors” in Orsini and Wiebe’s account (Paterson 2019: 17 fn 6).

Paterson (2019: 6) also argues that Nicol’s three categories of affective, agential, and symbolic attunement can be added to Question 5 of WPR (see Bacchi WPR CHART) alongside discursive, subjectification and lived effects. However, “emotions” in Nicol (2001: 3, 6) sound very like common-sense understandings of the term. She describes them as “felt perceptions and embodied knowledge” and as “normative forces in their own right”. While claiming to move beyond the opposition between emotions as either biological and natural on the one hand, or social and constructed on the other, she is particularly critical of what she labels “discursive essentialism”. This positioning makes her a rather odd theoretical bedfellow given Paterson’s focus on discourses and a discursive view of “emotions”.

These tensions between competing paradigms in the Paterson article lead to questions about the kind of discourse analysis that is being deployed. I have already mentioned that Paterson (2019: 16) omits Question 2 of the WPR approach from her analysis, although she quotes it later in the paper (Paterson 2019: 16). Question 2 is pivotal to WPR. It is the place where we consider how a particular problematization or problem representation was possible. To this end we identify the meanings (presuppositions, assumptions, “unexamined ways of thinking”, knowledges/discourses) that needed to be in place for a particular problem representation to make sense or to be intelligible. These problem representations are located within specific governmental [broadly understood] texts and technologies, linking this analysis to modes of governing.

In Paterson, by contrast, the major discourses she identifies come from either the medical profession (“the discourse of fear”) or from contesting social movements (“the discourse of joy”). It would be worthwhile to compare and contrast these quite distinct approaches to discourse analysis.

Despite some qualms about aspects of Paterson’s analysis, I believe she has drawn attention to an issue that needs more reflection – how to describe subjectification effects (Question 5 in Bacchi WPR CHART). In the first Research Hub entry on “Conceptions of the subject” (30 Sept. 2019) I considered how, in Foucault, “governmental mechanisms of power” attempt to produce “subjects” who conduct themselves in ways deemed desirable for governing purposes. The objective is to “build subjects who are voluntarily subjugated” (Lorenzine 2016: 17; emphasis in original). The category “subjectification effects” encourages consideration of this dynamic.

However, when it comes time to describe subjectification effects, there is (perhaps inevitably) slippage into language that promotes the kind of pre-existent subject opposed in a Foucauldian analysis, a subject with an “interior” existence and one who displays “emotions”. I want to offer two examples.

In their analysis of how something called “public opinion” comes into existence, according to Osborne and Rose (1999: 392; emphasis added), one key aspect of the role of social science in creating phenomena pertains to “the subjective attributes of persons themselves: the kinds of persons they take themselves to be and the forms of life which they inhabit and construct”. The task becomes tracking how “the phenomena created by the knowledge practice [social science] are, so to speak, actually internalized within persons”. My comment in an earlier article noting this point reads: “We encounter here, in the term ‘internalized’, some of the limits imposed by available language. ‘Internalized” sounds very like the kind of psychological analysis Osborne and Rose would be intent on challenging. See Rose 1989” (Bacchi 2012: 145 fn 3). I put Osborne and Rose’s phrase “so to speak” in italics to indicate how they have tried to handle the difficult task of conveying the production or constitution of “subjects” without lapsing into “common-sense” ways of speaking about subjects and their “behaviours”.

My second example is Bigo’s (2010) study of the subjectification effects of “smart borders” (e-visas, etc.). A “governmentality of unease”, says Bigo (2010: 18), works “through everyday life and the dynamic of enlargement of life possibilities transforming reassurance into unease, angst, and even fear by evoking chaos, global insecurity, terror.”

Subjectification as a political dynamic concerns “who we are when we are governed in this way” (Bigo 2010: 19). Bigo argues that “we, the ‘normalised’ often agree that regulated mobility is the optimum of the regime of mobility controls”:

“Not only do large groups of those travelling accept new technologies of surveillance and strong intrusive techniques concerning their privacy, but so also are such groups happy, considering themselves more safe and more free now that they can move with ease and safety (my emphases).”

I would like to suggest that the terms “happy” and “fear” in Bigo’s account move us into a domain of “emotions” that sits uncomfortably alongside the kind of analysis Bigo offers. As with Osborne and Rose, I couldn’t help wanting to insert the words “so to speak” in front of them.

I am grateful to Paterson for drawing attention to the need to rethink how we talk about “who we are” when we are governed in certain ways. In the end, I remain wary of the concept of “emotions” due to the ease with which it is possible to lapse into treating them as assumed states of being. In the next entry, I will consider if I would be any “happier” (so to speak) to include attention to “affect” in WPR.

REFERENCES

Bacchi, C. 2012. Strategic interventions and ontological politics: Research as political practice. In A. Bletsas and C. Beasley (Eds) Engaging with Carol Bacchi: Strategic Interventions and Exchanges. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press. pp. 141-156.

Bigo, D. 2010. Freedom and Speed in Enlarged Borderzones. In V. Squire (Ed.) The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity. NY: Routledge.

Delori, M. 2018. A Plea for a Discursive Approach to Emotions: The Example of the French Airmen’s Relation to Violence. In M. Clement and E. Sangar (Eds) Research Emotion in International Relations: Methodological Perspectives on the Emotional Turn. NY: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 129-149.

Foucault, M. 1977. Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In D.F. Bouchard, (Ed.), Language, counter-memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews.Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Foucault, M. 1990. Critical theory/intellectual history. In L. Kritzman (Ed.), Michel Foucault: Politics, philosophy, culture: Interviews & other writings 1977–1984, 1st edition 1988, Sheridan, A. (trans.). London: Routledge.

Hacking, I. 2002. Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Leys, R. 2011. The Turn to Affect: A Critique. Critical Inquiry, 37: 434-472.

Lorenzini, D. 2016. From Counter-Conduct to Critical Attitude: Michel Foucault and the Art of Not Being Governed Quite so Much. Foucault Studies, 21: 7-21.

Newman, J. 2012. Beyond the deliberative subject? Problems of theory, method and critique in the turn to emotion and affect. Critical Policy Studies, 6: 465–479.

Newman, J. 2017. Rationality, responsibility and rage: The contested politics of emotion governance. In E. Jupp, J. Pykett and F. M. Smith (Eds) Emotional States: Sites and spaces of affective governance, Kindle edition. UK: Taylor and Francis, pp. 21–35.

Nicol, V. 2011. Social Economies of Fear and Desire: Emotional Regulation, Emotion Management, and Embodied Autonomy. Berlin: Springer.

Osborne, T. and Rose, N. 1999. Do the Social Sciences Create Phenomena? The example of public opinion research. British Journal of Sociology, 50(3): 367-396.

Orsini M (2017) On emotional entanglements: Narrating the affective politics of fatness and obesity in Canada. Paper presented at the annual conference of the Canadian political science association, Toronto, 27 May – 3 June 2017.

Orsini, M. and Wiebe, S. 2014. Between hope and fear: Comparing the emotional landscapes of the autism movement in Canada and the United States. In L. Turgeon, M. Papillon, S. White et al. (Eds) Comparing Canada: Methods and Perspectives on Canadian Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 147–167.

Paterson, S. 2019. Emotional labour: Exploring emotional policy discourses of pregnancy and childbirth in Ontario, Canada. Public Policy and Administration, 1-21.

Pellizzoni, L. 2015. Ontological Politics in a Disposable World: The New Mastery of Nature. Surrey, England: Ashgate.

Pribram, E. D. and Harding, J. 2002. The power of feeling: Locating emotions in culture. Faculty Works: Communications. 8.
https://digitalcommons.molloy.edu/com_fac/8

Robinson, B. and Kutner, M. 2019. Spinoza and the Affective Turn: A Return to the Philosophical Origins of Affect. Qualitative Inquiry, 25(2): 111-117.

Rose, N. 1989. Governing the Soul: The shaping of the private self. NY: Routledge.

Tamboukou, M. 2003. Interrogating the “emotional turn”: Making connections with Foucault and Deleuze.’ Eur. J. of Psychotherapy, Counselling & Health, 6(3): 209-223.

Wetherell, M. 2012. Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. London: Sage.

Wetherell, M. and Beer, D. 2014. The future of affect theory: An interview with Margaret Wetherell. Theory, Culture & Society, October 15.

Williams, R. 1975. The Long Revolution. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Williams, R. 1979. Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. London: NLB.

Content:  In the Research Hub entry on “Conceptions of ‘the subject’: Part 2” (31 October 2019) I concluded that “discoursing subjects” can still act – they can refuse to be governed in specific ways. Does this mean that they have “agency”? Using quotation marks around the term signals that I consider “agency” to be a contested and somewhat troublesome concept (see Dean 2015). My concerns are linked to the common Western cultural associations between “agency” and free will (think of “a free agent”), self-determination and autonomy, and to the way in which “agency” is set against “structure” in much sociological theory (see Howarth 2013: Chapter 4). According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Schlosser 2015), in the “standard theory”, “agency” is usually taken to refer to the exercise of the capacity of individuals to perform intentional actions. Hence, conventionally, the concept includes a “mental element” and is thus linked to the interior consciousness put in question within Foucault (see Research Hub entry 30 September 2019). The same Encyclopedia entry notes that the term attracts intense debate and that there is “good reason to distinguish between different kinds of agency”, including “mental agency, shared agency, collective agency, relational agency, and artificial agency”. Clearly, we have entered a conceptual minefield!

In several Research Hub entries I have introduced Tanesini’s (1994: 207) argument that concepts have no fixed meaning but are “proposals about how we ought to proceed from here” (see Research Hub entries 17 Dec. 2018; 31 May 2019). Applied to “agency” this should mean that it is possible to reshape its meaning away from the Western cultural association of self-determination. However, I continue to puzzle over just what the term is meant to convey and how “the subject” is theorized in relation to “agency”. For those with poststructural sympathies or critical sympathies more generally, there appear to be two possible paths to follow in relation to “agency” – either to re-theorize it in ways that question the sovereign, transcendental “subject” with which it is commonly associated, OR to avoid using it altogether. I shall mention briefly some of the attempts at re-theorization for readers who would like to explore this theoretical option further. I shall then explain why I have chosen the second path – to avoid using “agency” in my writing. [I should note that I first expressed my disquiet about the concept in a 2005 piece on meanings of discourse (Bacchi 2005: 208 fn 1) and that, in Analysing Policy (Bacchi 2009: 42) I place the term in quotation marks. I have since decided that, for political reasons, I prefer to avoid using the concept altogether.]

Unsurprisingly, given the long-standing debates among feminist theorists about the implications of poststructural theorizing for “women’s” capacity to act (see Research Hub entry 30 September 2019), important feminist theorists have explicitly reworked or redescribed “agency”. For example, Pearse and Connell (2016: 48) argue for the need to “think of agency as existing at a collective level, not just an individual level” in order to challenge “a simple opposition between gender norms and women’s agency”:

“As the studies of women’s activism cited earlier show, the collective agency that in the symbolic realm contests norms and establishes new identities, rests on the practices that constitute women as a group and specifically as a subordinated or oppressed group.”

This shift in focus to groups of activists usefully challenges the view in the “standard theory” (see above) that “agency” refers to some form of capacity held by individuals.

Sawicki draws on Butler to offer a “critical and transformative agency” that moves “beyond the dichotomy of free will versus determinism” (Sawicki 2003: 300). She quotes Butler (1990: 147) to the effect that “Construction is not opposed to agency: it is the necessary scene of agency”. The constituted “subject” in this account engages in a “performative agency” (Butler 2010) of “parodic repetition”. The possibility that such a perspective reinstalls a pre-existent “subject” who (then) “performs” certain actions/behaviours leads Annemarie Mol (2002: 41) to recommend using the language of “enactment” as an alternative to “performativity”.

Karen Barad proposes an ontological and epistemological framework that she terms “agential realism”. In this framework, “agency is not held, it is not a property of persons or things; rather, agency is an enactment, a matter of possibilities for reconfiguring entanglements” (Barad 2012; see also Barad 2007: 178).

Elizabeth St Pierre calls for the theorizing of a “different kind of agency” since “the discursive subject clearly is not free to do whatever it will”. Still, she insists that “agency does not disappear”. She describes how feminists use the concept of positioning “to explain how the subject positions available to women not only limit their agency but also enable certain kinds of knowledge and action not possible from other positions” (St Pierre 2000: 502). St Pierre describes this position as poststructuralism’s “double move in the construction of subjectivity”:

“a subject that exhibits agency as it constructs itself by taking up available discourses and cultural practices and a subject that, at the same time, is subjected, forced into subjectivity by those same discourses and practices. (St Pierre 2000: 502)”

Actor Network Theory (ANT) mounts a significant challenge to conventional notions of agency. Basically, it extends agency beyond humans to encompass non-humans, who are collectively described as “actants”. Latour (1996) defines an actant simply as “something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general”. Clearly, then, the “mental element” of the “standard theory” of “agency” (see above) has been removed.

This retheorizing of agency fits the ANT focus on heterogeneous elements acting in networks of relations, or “assemblages”. The goal or objective is to pluralize participants and to deconstruct “the antimony of nature and society” (James and Cloke 2008: 80). As Rhodes et al. (2019: 4; emphasis added) describe, ANT “emphasises objects as lively, drawing attention to social and material effects as matters of becoming that are co-enacted through human and nonhuman entanglement”. In their view, this approach “offers a more distributed account of agency in which the human subject is not alone”.

Clarke et al. (2015: 57-58) draw on performativity theory and ANT to frame “the possibilities of agency found within the slippage of particular enactments”. They emphasize that their approach to agency marks “a radical, and irrecoverable, break with sociological notions of agency as a generic property of human beings, which is often in play during debates about structure versus agency”.  They stress the “‘unreliability’ of agency” and suggest “treating the agent as a point of condensation of multiple, heterogenous and possibly contradictory forces”. In tune with Foucault’s emphasis on micro-practices (see Research Hub entry 30 November 2019) they note that “we can no longer operate with a notion of ‘agency in general’”. Rather, “agents are always empowered to do something in particular” [My initial search indicates that Foucault seldom used the term “agency”.].

From these selected interventions it becomes clear that to use the term “agency” without specifying the theoretical tradition within which you locate yourself is a fraught exercise. It is almost as if the term “agency” in its various incarnations has become a shorthand for making specific theoretical claims. I find this trend disappointing and wonder why complex theoretical debates get reduced to how we define or explain this contentious term.

I want to suggest the possibility that the centrality of “agency” as a concept in social theory, evidenced in this entry, may well have something to do with its ubiquity within psychology, psychiatry and popular culture, and this may well be a reason to avoid using it rather than attempting to refashion it. An article on “agency” in World Psychiatry endorsed the importance of recapturing “agency” as part of recovery (from “mental illness”). Such a process of recapture entails “regaining a larger experience of ownership and authorship of one’s thoughts, feelings and actions” (Lysaker and Leonhardt 2012). Despite references to “agency” as intersubjective, the goal is to assist in the production of “a narrator who has become able to speak with a coherent authenticity”. If there appear to be connections between this view and the humanist/Enlightenment “subject” discussed at the start of this series of entries (Research Hub entry 30 September 2019), I suspect it is no coincidence. I was pleased to see Peter Goldsworthy (2019: 283) in his recent novel, Minotaur, describe “agency” as one of the “pet terms” embraced by the lead character’s  psychiatrist.

My qualms about the term “agency” incline me to probe just what it means to attribute “agency” to non-human objects, as suggested in ANT (see above). Here I consider an article by James and Cloke (2008) that ascribes “agency” to trees, illustrated in their possession of “a bewildering range of skills” (James and Cloke 2008: 86).

My concern is that the “capacities” (here “skills”) that are transposed onto inanimate objects (here trees) are “capacities” assumed to exist in “human agents”. However, the notion of “skills” is not innocent. In labor market and industrial relations policy, for example, the concept “skill” relies upon a vision of humans as skill-acquiring animals, and this ontological presupposition affects how work is evaluated and workers categorized (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 36). A danger then in “distributing” “agency” to non-human “actants”, I suggest, is the tendency to accept and apply, rather than to interrogate, conventional characterizations of human behaviours.

Rather than trying to give “agency” a meaning to suit a particular theoretical stance, therefore, the task, as I see it, involves analysing how “agency” operates in popular and scientific materials with discursive, subjectification and lived effects – a task undertaken in WPR (see questions 2 and 5 in Bacchi WPR CHART. The suggestion is that political analysis could well be enhanced through troubling the term “agency” rather than through redefining it.

REFERENCES

Bacchi, C. 2005. Discourse, Discourse Everywhere: Subject “Agency” in Feminist Discourse Methodology. NORA: Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies, 13(3): 198-209.

Bacchi, C. 2009. Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to be? Frenchs Forest: Pearson Education.

Bacchi, C. and Goodwin, S. 2016. Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice. NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Barad, K. 2012. “Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers”: Interview with Karen Barad. In R. Dolphijn and I. van der Tuin (Eds) New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Open Humanities Press. An imprint of Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library.

Butler, J. 1990. Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. NY: Routledge.

Butler, J. 2010. Performative agency. Journal of Cultural Economy, 3(2).

Clarke, J., Bainton, D., Lendvai, N. and Stubbs, P. 2015. Making policy move: Towards a politics of translation and assemblage. Bristol University Press.

Dean, M. 2015. Afterword: The Art of Not Being Governed so Much. In S. Hansson, S. Hellberg and M. Stern (Eds) Studying the Agency of Being Governed: Methodological Reflections. Abington: Routledge.

Goldsworthy, P. 2019. Minotaur. Viking Press.

Howarth, D. 2013. Poststructuralism and After: Structure, Subjectivity and Power. NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

James, O. and Cloke, P. 2008. Non-Human Agencies: Trees in Place and Time. In C. Knappett and L. Malafouris (Eds) Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. NY: Springer.

Latour, B. 1996. On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications. Soziale Welt, 47(4): 369-381.

Lysaker, P. H. and Leonhardt, B. L. 2012. Agency: its nature and role in recovery from severe mental illness. World Psychiatry, 11(3): 165-166.

Mol, A. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in medical practice. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Pearce, R. and Connell, R. 2016. Gender Norms and the Economy: Insights from Social Research. Feminist Economics, 22(1): 30-53.

Rhodes, T., Azbel, L., Lancaster, K. and Meyer, J. 2019. The becoming-methadone-body: on the onto-politics of health intervention translations. Sociology of Health and Illness. pp. 1–19 doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.12978

Sawicki, J. 2003. Chapter 11: Foucault, feminism and questions of identity. In G. Gutting (Ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

St Pierre, E. A. 2000. Poststructural feminism in education: An overview. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 13(5): 477-515.

Schlosser, M. 2015. “Agency”, Stanford Encyclopedia, 10 August. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/agency/

Tanesini, A. 1994. Whose language? In K. Lennon and M. Whitford (eds) Knowing the Difference: Feminist perspectives in epistemology. NY: Routledge.