Action, Agency, Coercion: Reformatting Agency for Oppressive Contexts

Abstract

I begin with a question and three clarifications. How to think of agency in oppressive contexts? By oppressive contexts, I mean the following: the absence of background conditions of negative freedom and contexts where the negative consequence of socially transgressive behaviour is uncommonly high. In aligning agency and oppression, I concernmyself with the processes of subjectivation – of the discourse and practices through which individuals are turned into subjects, of how ‘agency is implicated in subordination’;¹ with the banality of oppressive practices, including violence, intimidation, and injury, which render these subjectivating processes fragile, precarious, and conflictual; and finally, with how persons might undertake agentival activity in a manifestly oppressive context. Consequently, this chapter is concerned with two interrelated threads of discussion: the first sets out certain modifications in our conceptual thinking on agency and argues that this is essential if we are to seriously think about agentival practices under conditions of severe oppression, and the second focuses on a specific empirical context in order to provide illustrations in support of the suggested modifications. This empirical context – that of developmentalism in North West India – is explicitly engaged in producing a particular ‘development subject’ and in facilitating the emergence of certain forms of subjectivities amenable to ‘development’.