The market presents agency at an utterly impersonal scale.

Evidence

This is, however, not quite the end of the story; that the adventures of agency, of consciousness and intention, are not really concluded here becomes clearer when we recall the matter of the market, whose status as something like agency on an utterly impersonal scale is scarcely addressed in the skirmish with Freud. In fact, the political unconscious of Michaels’s book has not stopped thinking about the problem in another, more consequent way; and it has something rather different to tell us: not a theory, exactly, not a “solution,” but an evolution and a restructuration of the problematic itself that is even more significant an acknowledgment of the deeper issues than the settling of accounts between intention and psychoanalysis. The “market,” after all, first sent us back to individual subjects — Dreiser, Gilman, Hawthorne, Norris, et al. and their characters — who, caught in its logic of consumption, acted out and demonstrated the impossibility of getting out of that into something else. Getting out of that simply meant dying (when not the romance fantasy of immortal property rights, as in Hawthorne). But what if this particular search could be prolonged in an unexpected and more consequent way? What if, in the failure to theorize the “system,” the impossibility of thinking some nonindividual, meaningful, collective yet impersonal agency (what Marxism calls the “mode of production”), another possibility opened up to grasp a different kind of agency — still somehow a “subject,” like the individual consciousness, yet now immortal, impersonal in another way, collective beyond the dreams of populism, and embodied, institutionalized in so rigorous a fashion as to give it social and historical objectivity beyond all fantasy? — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 479

Categorization

• DEFINE: Jameson/Michaels introduce the problem of nonindividual, collective yet impersonal agency — the Marxist ‘mode of production’ as a subject of history.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s stated goal of mapping their own position in the world system — the market as impersonal agent is the structural background of that map.