Ici THK — Cyberfeminism

About the Concept

- Agency is the capacity to act in a given context, it is a fundamental and ambiguous concept in feminism thought, it has been very much debated from its acception as an individual concept or as a collective one. -

Sources

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

(Karen Barad; 2007) -

Interview_Karen_Barad.pdf

Interview with Karen Barad (2012) -

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Common Knowledge and Political Love

- - “an individual’s (or group’s) ability to make effective choices and to transform those choices into desired outcomes” - -The difficulty to qualify agency for feminists is that this essential notion happens in a patriarchal envoronment that feminist want to detach from; therefore it becomes difficult to define agency by the same time bringing in view and not refering to the patriarchal rules of of society - -Agency is a intertweened with different realities contexts and personnas characterising from there on the capacity to act upon something differenciating itself from Power and often poses itself in a relation of resistance to it. -Karen Barad stresses the non-human aspect of agency; insisting that agency is understood as 'an enactment.' "Agential intra-actions are causal enactments." (2007, p. 176) -Everyone accesses different type of agencies, while one's capacity to understand its own agency is always in transformation, agencies work well when combined in a perspective of solidarity. -Distributed and shared technologies value differential sets of agency and set grounds for a capacity to characterise different set of agency in different commuities. - "Agency is 'doing' or 'being' in its intra-activity. It is the enactment of iterative changes to particular practices – interative reconfigurings of topological manifolds of spacetimematter relations – through the dynamics of intra-activity." (p. 178). Like Braidotti, Barad's position also argues that in and through the entanglements of matter, agency also refers us to the "possibilities for worldly re-configurings" (Barad, 2012, p. 55). -

SYNONYM:

power, instrumentality, entanglement, matter, actant. -

ANTONYM:

impotence, oppression, causality. -

HYPERNYM:

ethics, politics, new materialism, assemblage, information. -

HYPONYM:

matter, object, thing, body, infrastructure, informatics. - -

- Agency being both a political and a relational concept it can be activated in political terms if all its constituent are in a moving relational scheme of discreet materials. - -

Tim Ingold argues: "things are active not because they are imbued with agency but because of ways in which they are caught up in these currents of the lifeworld. The properties of materials, then, are not fixed attributes of matter but are processual and relational. To describe these properties means telling their stories." (Ingold, 2007, p. 1) -

- Agential Memory, uses narrative procedures to help us to understand the complexity of our constructed memory and situate back into them a form of agential realism.relational nature of the matter, or things under discussion, -