Identity claims need not yield agency, which is a blank word

Evidence

Now it seems to me that agency relates to accountable reason. The idea of agency comes from the principle of accountable reason, that one acts with responsibility, that one has to assume the possibility of intention, one has to assume even the freedom of subjectivity in order to be responsible. That’s where agency is located. … When one posits an agency from the miraculating ground of identity, the question that should come up is, “What kind of agency?” Agency is a blank word. So the shift from “identity” to “agency” in itself does not assure that the agency is good or bad, it simply entails seeing that the idea that calling everything a social construction is anti-essentialist entails a notion of the social as an essence. If one carries the notion of the social as an essence, that can very quickly lead to an unexamined assumption of capitalist sociality as a kind of essence, as the social. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2328

Categorization

• DEFINE: Agency is located in accountable reason, not in identity claims — and anti-essentialism that treats ‘the social’ as an essence smuggles capitalism back in.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s strategic-essentialism thread: Spivak here insists anti-essentialism must not reify the social, echoing her retraction of her own 1984 phrase. — connects to: Agency should not be equated with history-making or self-empowerment — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 327

Broader Connections

• Agency should not be equated with history-making or self-empowerment #expands (0.88) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 327