Thinking about Agency and Pain

I suggested in the previous chapter that the secular is best approached indirectly. So I explored some ways in which the notion of myth was used through several centuries to shape knowledges, behaviors, and sensibilities we call secular.

The anthropological literature on the subject seems to me marked by a lack of adequate attention to the limits of the human body as a site of agency—and in particular by an inadequate sensitivity to the different ways that an agent engages with pain and suffering. "When the word “body” is used, it is more often than not a synonym for the individual whose desire and ability to act are taken as unproblematic.² This is not so for those influenced by Freud, of course.

2. A relevant collection that deserves wider critical attention is Other Inten­tions: Cultural Contexts and the Attribution of Inner States, ed. Lawrence Rosen, Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 1995.

3. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, Ox­ford: Clarendon Press, 1997, p. 292.

Thinking about Agency and Pain 69 sense of the internal dynamics of the passions (mediators between mind and body), it holds out the problematic promise that the passions can ulti­mately be mastered by reason through systematic observation and inter­pretation, thereby giving rationality primacy in the constitution of the modern, secular subject.

In the last decade an increasing amount of research has been pub­lished on the centrality of emotion in cultural life, and this is certainly welcome for our understanding of agency. However, my interest in suf­fering as a passion is a little different from most of this literature. I ask first whether pain is not simply a cause of action, but can also itself be a kind of action.

There is no agreement among contemporary researchers on what emotions are.⁴ Some insist that they are impulses occurring entirely in the part of the body called the brain, others that they are intersubjective, lo­cated in the social space individuals inhabit. Sometimes all emotion is equated with desire, at other times desire is regarded as one emotion among others. However, many theories apart from Freud’s stress the un­conscious character of emotions. And everyone, regardless of whether he or she has a theory of emotions or not, knows that some emotions (“pas­sions”) can and do disrupt or disguise intentions.⁵ And yet conscious in­tention is assumed to be central to the concept of agency in most anthro­pological work.⁶

Even in the growing field of medical anthropology, where innovative work has given us a cultural understanding of health and disease, the stan­dard meaning of agency is taken too much for granted. The sick body is of-

4. A useful discussion of various theories is contained in a recent book by the neuroscientist Joseph. LeDoux, The Emotional Brain, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.1 am gratefid to William Connolly for directing me to it.

5. Collingwood argued diat emotion is not essentially opposed to reason be­cause all reasoning—and therefore reasoned action—is itself “charged” with emo­tion. See R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938, especially the chapter on language that precedes Book III (“The Theory of Art”).

6. Sherry Ormer complains of “the denial of the intentional subject, and of ‘agency’” in contemporary social science writing (see S.

ten represented no differently from the healthy body in that for both re­sistance to power is the form that agency typically takes*⁷

I find such views troubling because they attribute individual agency to the sick body by translating all its states and movements directly into “dissent.” For when anthropologists talk of getting at the subjects experi­ence of illness, they often refer not only to a patient’s words but to his or her behavior as though it were a form of discourse. Rendering subjective reactions legible in this way seems to me unsatisfactory when we remain unclear as to how the behavioral “text” is to be decoded, when “dissent” or “resistance” is taken to be self-evident. Yet even in Freud “resistance” is a theoretically defined concept, one that has a particular place in the work of analysis. The sick body’s suffering is not always to be read as resistance to the social power of others; it is sometimes the body’s punishment of itself for desiring what it ought not to desire.

The anthropological use of the notion of “resistance” has rightly been criticized for underestimating the strength and diversity of power struc­tures.⁸ I am worried less by what has been called “the romance of resist­ance” than by the more inclusive category of “agency” presupposed by it. Of course in commonsense terms “resistance” occurs in everyday life, and it is often important to outcomes when it does so. My concern, however, is that our fascination with “resistance” itself comes from larger, support-

7. This can be illustrated by reference to a useful survey of recent work on the body by Margaret Lock who notes that “Bodily dissent has been interpreted until recently as marginal, pathological, or so much exotica, or else has been passed over, unnoticed and unrecorded.

8. See, for example, the article by Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Re­sistance,” American Ethnologist, vol. 17, no. 1,1990.

ing ideas. The tendency to romanticize resistance comes from a metaphys­ical question to which this notion of “agency” is a response: Given the es­sential freedom, or the natural sovereignty, of the human subject, and given, too, its own desires and interests,⁹ what should human beings do to realize their freedom, empower themselves, and choose pleasure? The as­sumption here is that power—and so too pain—is external to and repres­sive of the agent, that it “subjects” him or her, and that nevertheless the agent as “active subject” has both the desire to oppose power and the re­sponsibility to become more powerful so that disempowerment—suffer­ing—can be overcome.¹⁰1 shall argue against this assumption. But to the extent that the task of confronting power is taken to be more than an in­dividual one, it also defines a historical project whose aim is the increasing triumph of individual autonomy.

9. The concept of “interest” (including “self-interest”), which agency theo­rists often invoke, is another psychological term that has a singular history and that presents itself to moderns as universal, natural, essential (see Albert Hirsch­man, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Tri­umph, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). The complicated genealogies by which we have acquired our vocabularies for talking about agency and subjec­tivity, and the changing psychological theories they bring with them, should alert us to the dangers of applying them without careful thought and qualification to any or all social situations.

10. Although Foucault is often invoked by theorists of resistance, his use of that notion is quite distinctive. For example: “there is indeed always something in the social body, in classes, groups and individuals themselves which in some sense escapes relations of power, something which is by no means a docile or reactive primal matter, but rather a centrifugal movement, an inverse energy, a discharge. There is certainly no such thing as ‘the’ plebs; rather there is, as it were, a certain plebeian quality or aspect (‘de la’plèbe). There is plebs in bodies, in souls, in indi­viduals, in the proletariat, in the bourgeoisie, but everywhere in a diversity of forms and extensions, of energies and irreducibilities. This measure of plebs is not so much what stands outside relations of power as their limit, their underside, their counter-stroke, that which responds to every advance of power by a move­ment of disengagement” (Power/Knowledge, Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 1980, p. 138). This notion of resistance as the “limit” of power has some resemblance to the Clausewitzian notion of ““friction” (see Carl von Clausewitz, On War [1832], New York: Penguin Books, 1982, pp. 164-65).

struggling against an occupying power, and so on) points to one way in which a particular, kind of deep motivation may become attributed to an essentialized subject-agent., ■

Theorists of culture sometimes find themselves at once asserting and denying the existence of such an essence. Thus the editors of a popular reader in contemporary social theory write in their Introduction: "From a theoretical point of view we need a subject who is at once culturally and historically constructed, yet from a political perspective, we would wish this subject to be capable of acting in some sense autonomously,’ not sim­ply in conformity to dominant cultural norms and rules, or within the pat­terns that power inscribes, But this autonomous actor may not be defined as acting from some hidden well of innate will’ or consciousness that has somehow escaped cultural shaping and ordering. In fact, such an actor is not only possible but ‘normal,’ for the simple reason that neither culture’ itself nor the regimes of power that are imbricated in cultural logics and ex­periences can ever be wholly consistent or totally determining.”¹¹ Because they are progressive-minded (read: “constructivists”), these social theorists disapprove of any talk of “innateness.” They also want to present struggle (resistance) and dissent (deviation) as normal to human behavior. But “normal” is a notoriously ambiguous notion, including both a descriptive statistical sense in which a distribution is normal and a prescriptive one in which being normal is being healthy, the opposite of pathological.^{[55] [56] Slid­ing between these two senses, the editors can assert that there is nothing in the agent “that has somehow escaped cultural shaping and ordering,” and yet insist that “culture” can never be “totally determining.”}

Of course anthropologists have written interestingly about the body, its emotions, and its engagement with the world through the senses. My concern is that because the human body has a changing life largely inac­cessible to itself, because behavior depends on unconscious routine and habit, because emotions render the ownership of actions a matter of con­flicting descriptions, because body and mind decay with age and chronic illness, we should not assume that every act is the act of a competent agent with a clear intention. Nor should we assume that a proper* understanding of agency requires us to place it within the framework of a secular history

Thinking about Agency and Pain 73 of freedom from all coercive control, a history in which everything can be made, and pleasure always innocently enjoyed—a framework that al­legedly enables us to see ordinary life as distorted or incomplete.

The paradox inadequately appreciated here is that the self to be lib- ? erated from external control must be subjected to the control of a liberat­ing self already and always free, aware, and in control of its own desires. Susan Wolf identifies this metaphysical conundrum and the failure of re­cent philosophers to solve it. In place of the obsessive attempts to define the freedom of the subject as its ability to create its self, Wolf offers an.al­ternative by drawing on the commonsense notion of being sane: “The de­sire to be sane,” she writes, “is thus not a desire for another form of con­trol; it is rather a desire that one’s self be connected to the world in a certain way—we could even say it is a desire that one’s self be controlled by the world in certain ways and not in others.”^[57] This notion of sanity pre­supposes knowing the world practically and being known practically by it, a world of accumulating probabilities rather than constant certainties. It al­lows us to think of moral agency in terms of people’s habitual engagement with the world in which they live, so that one kind of moral insanity oc­curs precisely when the pain they know in this world is suddenly no longer an object of practical knowledge.

Thinking about agency

Assuming that agency need not be conceptualized in terms of indi­vidual self-empowerment and resistance, or of utopian history, how should it be understood? One might begin by looking at usages of the term (or what are taken to be its equivalents) in different historical contexts. This would indicate not merely that agency is not a natural category, but that the successive uses of this concept (their different grammars) have opened up or closed very different possibilities for acting and being. The secular, with its focus on empowerment and history-making, is merely one of those possibilities. I am unable to attempt a history of the concept of agency here, but I begin with some brief comments on contemporary usage.

Agency today serves primarily to define a completed personal action

from within an indefinite network of causality by attributing to an actor responsibility to power. Paradigmatically, this means forcing a person to be accountable, to answer to a judge in a court of law why things were done or left, undone. In that sense agency is built on the idea of blame and pain. A world of apparent accidents is rendered into a world of essences by at­tributing to a person moral/legal responsibility on whose basis guilt and in­nocence (and therefore punishment or exoneration) are determined. How did such a model of agency become paradigmatic? After all, human beings do, think, and feel all sorts of disparate things—what is it that brings all of them together? Ar least as far back as John Locke, “person” was theorized as a forensic term that, called for the integration of a single subject with a continuous consciousness in a single body.^[58] The development of property law in a nascent capitalism was important to this conception. But equally important was the way attributing an essence to him helped the human subject to become an object of social discipline.

Moderns tend to think of responsibility for something as being founded on a relation between an act and the law that defines the penalty attaching to its performance dr nonperformance. Intention (in the sense of being a subjective cause) may have nothing to do with the matter, as when someone sustains an injury on another’s property because of an accident. Agents need not necessarily coincide with individual biological bodies and the consciousness that is said to go with them. Corporations are both liable under the law and have the power to carry out particular tasks. But the projects of a corporation are distinguished from the intentions of the indi­viduals who work for it and act in its name. Because “corporations never die,”^[59] they can be described as agents but not as having subjectivity.

Agency also has the meaning of representation. In this sense the ac­tions of an agent are taken to be the actions of the principal whom the agent represents. The concept of representation, central to this meaning of agency, has been the subject of longstanding debate in Western political theory. Are elected representatives finally responsible to themselves (agents in their own right) or to their constituents (as their agents)? Whose wishes should they enact in the representative assembly? There does not seem to be a decisive answer. The idea of representation underlying agency is rooted in a paradox: that who or what is represented is both absent and present at the same time (re-presented).¹⁶ Theatrical representation, where the actor’s body makes present someone who is absent, exemplifies in a dif­ferent way the same paradox.

Even when it refers to leaving undone what ought to have been done, the responsibility of individuals refers to an action in opposition to a pas­sion. That is the reasoning behind the legal doctrine that “crimes of pas­sion” are less culpable than calculated crimes since in them the agent’s ca­pacity for reason (and therefore, in the Kantian sense, for moral judgment) is diminished by the intrusion of an “external force.” Like the act of an in­sane person, a crime of passion is not considered to be the consequence of an agent’s own intention. Now that emotions are generally thought of as part of the internal economy of the self, the notion is reinforced that agency means the self-ownership of the individual to whom external power always signifies a potential threat.

Agency also has a theatrical context. Here the professional actor tries to set her self aside and inhabit the somatic world of her character—her gestures, passions, and desires. The actor’s agency consists not in the ac­tions of the role she performs but in her ability to disempower one self for the sake of another.¹⁷ Her action is not solely her own. It is at the same

16. Hanna Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

17. The actor Alla Nazimova puts this as follows: “The actor himself should be a creature of clay, putty, capable of being molded into another form, another shape. An actor must never see himself in [a] character. I study the woman. I look at her under a magnifying glass and say to myself. ‘Is she right? Is she logical? Is she true to herself? Can Zact that woman? Can I make myself over into her? I am nothing. I am nobody. I have to reconstruct my whole self into this woman I am to portray—speak with her voice, laugh with her laughter—move with her mo­tion. But if you can see the person as a living creature, quite removed from your­self, you can work objectively "to adapt yourself to the part.” (“The Actor as an In­strument,” in Toby Cole and Helen K. Chinoy, eds., Actors on Acting, New York: time that of the dramatist who has written the script and of the director who mediates between script and performance. It also belongs to the tra­dition of acting in which she has been schooled.’In an important sense the actor is a part subject; her actions are not fully her own. That she is not the author of the story doesn’t mean that she is therefore its passive object.

Writing about acting traditions, Edward Burns has made the in­teresting point that whereas the Elizabethan player sought to become an instrument of the text, to fuse himself directly with it by presenting a dramatic persona in an explicit, open-ended manner, the (modern) Stanislavskian actor by contrast constructs his own text—that of a being whose “character” he tries to represent through the script. Burns suggests that there is a tension between the actor’s self and that of the substantive character he projects, a tension that creates the effect among the audience of realism (“human” subject positions available for imaginative occupation) as well as of profundity (hidden “human” meanings to be endlessly un­covered).^{[60] [61] These are two very different ways in which actors’ ability to dis­avow or empty themselves articulates their agency in relation to a particu­lar acting tradition. Of these two traditions the second is not “truer” or “more developed”' than the first; it is just that in a subjectivising literary culture people take to it more easily and regard it as “more natural.”}

A recent critic of modern styles of acting (identified as Strasbergian rather than Stanislavskian) makes the interesting claim that its strongly in­dividualist bias leads to a devaluation of plot: “seeing a play as a collection of individualized character portraits,” he maintains, “means that plot, themes, images, rhetorical figures, metrical forms, poetic motifs, and intel­lectual content of any kind become unimportant; they are... externals. As dozens of actors and directors have earnestly told me over the past three decades, 'You can’t play an idea.’ You can only play real, live, independent persons, so the theory goes, not literary constructs.”^[62] The assumption that

Thinking about Agency and Pain 77 real, live persons are independent of plots has interesting consequences. (I return to this point in the final section.)

It may be objected that professional actors disempower themselves voluntarily and temporarily, in the context of framed performances—that in “real life” we can and do represent ourselves. But one answer to this is that many, if not all, activities in social life are framed. The professional ac­tor’s concern to perfect a role on the stage is of a piece with the teaching and learning of rhetorical skills (speech, gesture, attitude, behavior)²⁰ by agents in other domains where their actions are not absolutely “their own.” In modern, secular society these sites include law courts and political are­nas, domains in which the self must be disavowed (whether sincerely or not) in the act of representing a client or “the law,” a constituency or “an interest group”—domains in which state laws disempower zs well as enable the active citizen. (Incidentally, critics drawing on psychoanalytic ideas have proposed that ^ctiwgin modern society can offer relief to the painful effort of having to live up continuously to one’s idealized self-image pre­cisely by disempowering^ne. self.²¹) In all such situations the partial owner-

20. Burns reminds us that in early modern Europe “Acting and rhetoric are never seen as distinct entities; the theory of acting is unnecessary, as are systematic manuals of its techniques, since the first is already present in the theory of rheto­ric, and the second can be seen in one aspect as an aggregate of unclassifiable so­cial and entertainment skills, and in another, in the special effects of master rhetori­cians like Alleyn and Burbage, as a development from within a long-established rhetorical tradition. The dramatic traditions of the universities, the Inns of Court and the choir schools had long explored acting and rhetoric as, essentially, the same. We must not make the mistake of taking rhetoric in its modern colloquial sense as something strained, unreal, nearly ridiculous. To talk of acting in terms of rhetoric is to consider it as abranch of the study of human communication, of the development of the skills of ‘moving’, ‘delighting’, persuading’ and ‘teaching’ other human subjects, as classical, mediaeval and renaissance culture conceived of it” (Burns, p. 10), Burns could have added that medieval and early modern rhetor­ical traditions had strong roots in Christian preaching and the performance of sacramental rites as well as passion plays.

21. “In a safe, socially approved situation (at a party, on a holiday, or in a play) you are allowed to drop, temporarily, the pain of living up to your idealized self-image. You can even be a despised figure—an idiot, a villain, a coward—and not only not be abused or ridiculed for it, but even receive laughter and ap­plause.... The character weeps, but the actor feels ecstatic (from the Greek ex his- tanai, which means, literally, out of one’s place) because he is liberated from his usual cabined, cribbed, confined everyday personality” (Hornby, pp. 17-18 [italics in original]).

ship of the agent’s acts, and their continuously re-defined nature, become evident. As opposed to a dramatic plot, acts unfold and are subject to re- description in ways that are often unanticipated.

Ritual drama, such as the Passion of Christ or the Martyrdom of Hussain, has an added dimension. Participants here enact, identify with, undergo, the predetermined agony of figures in Christian and Islamic nar­ratives. In subjecting themselves to suffering (in some cases to self-inflicted wounds) they seek in part to extend themselves as. subjects.²²

Religious history is a discursive domain in which the notion of agency is richly played out. Thus in eighteenth-century England, a combi­nation of secular ideas about human perfectability with Christian ideas about Christs suffering issued among evangelicals in a self that was at once active and passive. “The theology of the Atonement,” writes Phyllis Mack, “taught women and men to be little children, passively resting in the arms (or wounds) of Christ, but the theology of universal perfectability pushed them toward a firmer sense of personal autonomy or self-mastery, which in turn made it more difficult to perceive themselves as dependent on God. The Methodists’ attainment of self-control—the habits of diet, discipline, and reflection that helped them to manage suffering—thus had the poten­tial to threaten the very core of their faith and confidence: the power of the Atonement to wash away sin and conquer death. Agency both increased the desire for self-transcendence and made self-transcendence more diffi­cult to attain. For women as well as men, the problem was not in finding the authority to speak and act; it was in remembering that the authority didn’t belong to them.”²³ Because the tension was unstable, Mack believes that the unequivocal triumph of reformist activism over passivity—and therefore of a more secular, this-worldly outlook—was inevitable. But this causal drift did not render the possibility of “surrender to Christ” incon­ceivable, as the life of many Christians demonstrates.

Thus “agency” is a complex term whose senses emerge within se­mantic and institutional networks that define and make possible particular ways of relating to people, things, and oneself. Yet “intention,” which is variously glossed as “plan,” “awareness,” “willfulness,” “directedness,” or

22. See the interesting article by David Pinault, “Shia Lamentation Rituals arid Reinterpretations of the Doctrine of Intercession: Two Cases from Modern India,” History of Religions, vol. 38, no. 3,1999.

23. Phyllis Mack, “Religious Dissenters in Enlightenment England,” History Workshop Journal, issue 49,2000, pp. 16-17.

“desire” (terms whose linguistic opposites don’t function grammatically in the same way: to be without desire is not to be without a plan nor to be in a state of unawareness) is often made to be central to the attribution of agency. "Empowerment,” a legal term referring both to the act of giving power to someone and to someone’s power to act, becomes a metaphysical quality defining secular human agency, its objective as well as precondi­tion. Although the various usages of agency have very different implica­tions that do not all hang together, cultural theory tends to reduce them to the metaphysical idea of a conscious agent-subject having both the capac­ity and the desire to move in a singular historical direction: that of increas­ing self-empowerment and decreasing pain.