Browsing by Subject "Agency"

This study argues that Chaucer's poetry belongs to a far-reaching conversation about the forms of consolation (philosophical, theological, and poetic) that are available to human persons. Chaucer's entry point to this conversation was Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, a sixth-century dialogue that tried to show how the Stoic ideals of autonomy and self-possession are not simply normative for human beings but remain within the grasp of every individual. Drawing on biblical commentary, consolation literature, and political theory, this study contends that Chaucer's interrogation of the moral and intellectual ideals of the Consolation took the form of philosophical disconsolations: scenes of profound poetic rupture in which a character, sometimes even Chaucer himself, turns to philosophy for solace and yet fails to be consoled. Indeed, philosophy itself becomes a source of despair. In staging these disconsolations, I contend that Chaucer asks his readers to consider the moral dimensions of the aspirations internal to ancient philosophy and the assumptions about the self that must be true if its insights are to console and instruct. For Chaucer, the self must be seen as a gift that flowers through reciprocity (both human and divine) and not as an object to be disciplined and regulated.

Chapter one focuses on the Consolation of Philosophy. I argue that recent attempts to characterize Chaucer's relationship to this text as skeptical fail to engage the Consolation on its own terms. The allegory of Lady Philosophy's revelation to a disconsolate Boethius enables philosophy to become both an agent and an object of inquiry. I argue that Boethius's initial skepticism about the pretentions of philosophy is in part what Philosophy's therapies are meant to respond to. The pressures that Chaucer's poetry exerts on the ideals of autonomy and self-possession sharpen one of the major absences of the Consolation: viz., the unanswered question of whether Philosophy's therapies have actually consoled Boethius. Chapter two considers one of the Consolation's fascinating and paradoxical afterlives: Robert Holcot's Postilla super librum sapientiae (1340-43). I argue that Holcot's Stoic conception of wisdom, a conception he explicitly links with Boethius's Consolation, relies on a model of agency that is strikingly similar to the powers of self-knowledge that Philosophy argues Boethius to posses. Chapter three examines Chaucer's fullest exploration of the Boethian model of selfhood and his ultimate rejection of it in Troilus and Criseyde. The poem, which Chaucer called his "tragedy," belonged to a genre of classical writing he knew of only from Philosophy's brief mention of it in the Consolation. Chaucer appropriates the genre to explore and recover mourning as a meaningful act. In Chapter four, I turn to Dante and the House of Fame to consider Chaucer's self-reflections about his ambitions as a poet and the demands of truth-telling.

This dissertation focuses on the relationship of industrial shrimp aquaculture and shrimp diseases, with an emphasis on the agency of disease in shaping the history of shrimp production. Shrimp aquaculture is concentrated in developing tropical economies, with the significant majority of shrimp exported to consumers in the Global North. The rise of shrimp aquaculture has been accompanied by the development of new technologies and practices, designed to facilitate and govern the growth of the industry. While successful in making aquaculture the single largest production method for shrimp, these innovations also created ideal environments for the emergence and spread of shrimp diseases, which have caused significant and persistent production losses. Disease has brought volatility and risk to producer livelihoods, while also necessitating further technological modernization and development interventions to curb disease outbreaks.

This research draws on qualitative interviews and contextual economic analyses to explore the role of disease at multiple scales. Chapter 2 examines how disease has shaped industry discourses and he practice of shrimp aquaculture across contexts. The role of the concept of biosecurity is examined to highlight the territorial nature of disease prevention. Chapter 3 explores the context of shrimp aquaculture development in Aceh, Indonesia. This chapter applies the general ideas explored in Chapter 2, to a real-world case, highlighting how the pairing of shrimp and disease is managed as a single commodity. Chapter 4 explores the reach of disease globally, and across methods of production. The economic effects of disease on U.S. wild shrimping are explored, along with the role of disease as a narrative element in resisting global aquaculture.

It is argued that shrimp disease shapes commodity relationships, influencing production decisions, and development priorities at multiple scales. The unsympathetic quality of disease makes disease prevention an ideal project for enrolling broad coalitions of human and non-human actors, and negating the politics embedded in the relationship of disease prevention with commodification more broadly.

This dissertation identifies a logic of “equal agency” at the heart of a great deal of contemporary thinking about politics. Scholars and citizens alike, I claim, often use some version of this logic in trying to understand what is valuable about liberal and democratic institutions. As a way of thinking democratically at the highest level, however—as a comprehensive principle for organizing our various practical and theoretical commitments, understanding the nature and value of democracy, and orienting ourselves towards a democratic future—I believe that it is deeply flawed. This dissertation demonstrates why such an alternative is needed, and proceeds to articulate one: the dispersion of power.

The introduction lays out the scope and methods before giving a chapter outline and a summary of the dissertation’s contributions. Chapter one gives an account of the logic of equal agency, demonstrating its pervasiveness in political theory and its reliance on an ideal of individual subjectivity. Chapter two employs contemporary biology and cognitive science to support Foucault’s critique of subjectivity, and chapter three demonstrates that this should lead us to abandon the logic of equal agency more generally. Chapter four articulates conceptions of agency and power that are compatible with Foucault’s critique, and chapter five demonstrates how we might “think democratically” using these concepts within a logic of dispersing power. Chapter six links a crisis in contemporary democratic theory to the logic of equal agency and suggests that the dispersion of power can help to resolve it; a promise that is followed up in chapter seven. Chapter eight concludes by employing the logic of dispersing power to advocate for a universal basic income.

This study examines the representation of "conscience" in English literature, theology, and political theory from the late fourteenth century to the late seventeenth. In doing so it links up some prominent conceptual history of the term, from Aquinas to Hobbes, with its imaginative life in English narrative. In particular, beginning with William Langland's Piers Plowman and moving through texts in the "Piers Plowman tradition" and on to John Bunyan's allegories and polemics, I explore what I call the "satiric" dimensions of conscience in an allegorical tradition that spans a long and varied period of reform in England, medieval and early modern. As I argue, conscience in this tradition is linked up with the jolts of irony as with the solidarities of mutual recognition. Indeed, the ironies of conscience depend precisely on settled dispositions, shared practices, common moral sources and intellectual traditions, and relationships across time. As such, far from simply being a form of individualist self-assurance, conscience presupposes and advocates a social body, a vision of communal life. Accordingly, this study tracks continuities and transformations in the imagined communities in which the judgment that is conscience is articulated, and so too in the capacities of prominent medieval literary forms to go on speaking for others in the face of dramatic cultural upheaval.

After an introductory essay that examines the relationship between conscience, irony, and literary form, I set out in chapter one with a study of Langland's Piers Plowman (ca. 1388 in its final version), an ambitious, highly dialectical poem that gives a figure called Conscience a central role in its account of church and society in late medieval England. While Langland draws deeply on scholastic accounts of conscientia--an act of practical reason, as Aquinas says, that is binding as your best judgment and yet vexing in its capacity for error and need for formation in the virtues--he dramatizes error in terms of imagined practice, pressing the limits of theory. A long, recursive meditation on how one's socially embodied life constitutes distinctive forms of both blindness and vision, Langland's poem searches out the forms of recognition and mutuality that he takes a truth-seeking irony of conscience to require in his contemporary moment. My reading sets the figure of Conscience in Piers Plowman alongside the figure of Holy Church to explore some of these themes, and so also to address why the beginning of Langland's poem matters for its ending. In chapter two I turn to an anonymous early fifteenth-century poem of political complaint called Mum and the Sothsegger (ca. 1409) that was written in response to new legislation introducing capital punishment for heresy in England. In Mum I show how an early "Piers Plowman tradition" gets taken up into a rhetoric of royal counsel and so subtly, but decisively, revises aspects of Langland's political and ecclesial vision. In a final chapter moving across several of John Bunyan's works from the 1670s and 1680s, I show how Bunyan conceptualizes coercion in terms of the state and the market, and so defends a "liberty" of conscience that resists both Hobbesian assimilations of moral judgment to the legal structures of territorial sovereignty and an emergent market nominalism, in which exchange value trumps all moral reflection. In part two of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan draws surprisingly on medieval sources to display the forms of mutuality that he thinks are required to resist "consent" to such unjust forms of coercion.

This dissertation begins a conversation between "apocalyptic" interpretations of the Apostle Paul and the contemporary revival in "virtue ethics." It argues that the human actor's place in Pauline theology has long been captive to theological concerns foreign to Paul and that we can discern in Paul a classical account of human action that Alasdair MacIntyre's work helps to recover. Such an account of agency helps ground an apocalyptic reading of Paul by recovering the centrality of the church and its day-to-day Christic practices, specifically, but not exclusively, the Eucharist. To demonstrate this we first offer a critique of some contemporary accounts of agency in Paul in light of MacIntyre's work. Three exegetical chapters then establish a "MacIntyrian" re-reading of central parts of the letter to the Romans. A concluding chapter offers theological syntheses and prospects for future research.

In this dissertation, I examine how actors historically marginalized in international relations – theory and practice -- may find or create agentic spaces in global politics. I use the case of Latin American countries in the history and politics of whaling and whale conservation to advance our understanding of marginalized agency. Willing participants in whaling and whale conservation politics since their independence in the 1800s, these countries’ perspectives have largely been marginalized in International Relations (IR) theory and practice. Their organization and emergence as the Grupo Buenos Aires (GBA) in 2005 can be read as an act of marginalized agency within the International Whaling Commission (IWC), and provides an excellent case to consider more general treatment of agency in IR. It provides an excellent case for analyzing not just the condition and enablers of marginality but also the conditions of emergence, insofar as after almost 200 years of marginalization in whaling politics, a group of so-called less powerful actors were able to mobilize and, to some extent, have their voices heard at the IWC. I draw from Postcolonial IR and other critical theories within the discipline, to engage with the larger Global IR project, which has emerged since 2014 as a unifying umbrella for those concerned with pluralizing and decolonizing IR. Specifically, I ask, 1) When, why, and how are marginalized actors able to find or create agentic spaces in global politics? What enables or constrains the agency of marginalized actors in global politics? 2) What is the role, if any, of geopolitical identities in constraining or empowering marginalized agents? I.e., what kinds of agency, subjectivity, and power relations do different geopolitical binaries enable or constrain? 3) How do dynamics of agency recognition, misrecognition, and nonrecognition impact actors’ abilities to influence conservation policy and practice at the international, regional, and domestic levels? What role do academic practices play in these dynamics?

To answer these questions, I apply discourse as theory and method, and I propose a new definition that de-essentializes and decouples agency from identity, power, and interests; it provides for a fully relational understanding of agency that also takes into account the role of scholarly research in reproducing representational practices that may hinder marginalized actors from emerging as fully-fledged actors of global politics. The first empirical chapters (4-6) draw from Postcolonial IR and Discourse Theory, to ‘change the subjects’ of IR (Sabaratnam 2011); the analyses shift the standpoint and take Latin American actors’ perspectives seriously, which lays the groundwork for understanding their actions and behaviors. The first line of argument, grounded in my discourse approach, is that for agency to ‘exist and matter,’ it has first to exist discursively. I show how, whether in the broader IR literature, in the English language news coverage of IWC meetings, or in policy disputes on the IWC floor, a small group of actors has held the power to define what reality is and which ‘actors matter’ in global politics. By shifting the standpoint of analysis and dissociating agency from power, I show how Latin American actors have always had a voice, and have always ‘mattered,’ even when they did not ‘achieve what they wanted.’ Importantly, shifting the standpoint of analysis shows how these dynamics of agency nonrecognition and misrecognition are more than academic blindspots; they have mattered for policy and for conservation practice. Understanding these dynamics is key to understanding and explaining State behavior, including GBA’s emergence in 2005.Apply discourse theory to an analysis of GBA’s emergence is key to answering the research questions. In the last empirical chapters (7-9), I show how analyzing identity as a dynamic process of identification brings to the fore the role of agency in identity-making and the co-constitution of interests and identity. I argue that my proposed conceptualization of agency better allows for an understanding of when, why, and how Latin America became a relevant actor at the IWC, what kinds of processes have enabled or constrained their agency, and what lessons, if any, are there for the GBA, other marginalized actors, and IR scholars. A key contribution of this analysis is that the notion of ‘recruitment’ in discourse theory is one that privileges agency over coercion or instrumental rationality. The history of the IWC is full of ‘recruitment strategies,’ yet no country has ever accepted those images, or subject positions, as representative of their experience; rather, they take offense to them. I show how the GBA grew from four countries to 11 in a short period of time because it articulated positions, goals, and ideals that actors related to; it reflected their experience. Finally, discourse theory also provided a framework for analyzing how these dynamics of agency nonrecognition and misrecognition have evolved. By grounding these dynamics in specific policy contexts, through IWC disputes over the creation of a South Atlantic Whale Sanctuary, and over the allocation of Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling quotas, I show the relevance of a theoretical framework that can account for the role of human subjectivity in shaping State positioning, and for marginality as a spectrum, not a binary. As actors emerge from absolute marginality, a Globalized IR needs to be ready to account for those new power relations in a way that does not suppress more marginalized voices but also does not suppress newly found ones.

ABSTRACT

This study is concerned with the process of the making of a postcolonial poet persona where the poet is addressing multiple audiences and is trying to speak for, and speak to, multiple constituencies through poetry. The poets examined here, Rabindranath Tagore, Derek Walcott, and Mahmoud Darwish--arguably among the best-known poets of the modern world--sought to be heard by various sensibilities and succeeded in reaching them. Outside the fold of the Western Metropolitan world, they as a trio have much to teach us about how poets living under three different phases of colonial hegemony (colonial India, postcolonial West Indies, and neocolonial Palestine/Israel) manage to speak. Their presence in their poetry, or the pressure their life stories and their poet personae, becomes an essential part of reading their work. Desiring to speak themselves, the poets chosen here have necessarily had to speak for their regions, peoples and cultures, alternately celebrating and resisting the burden of representation, imposed on them by both their own people and by the outsiders who receive them. How does a postcolonial poet address changing contingencies--personal, social and political-- while continuing to hold the attention of a global readership? How have their formal and esthetic approaches shifted as they responded to contingencies and as they attempted intervene in local and global conversations regarding the fate and future of their societies? An examination of the genre of poetry and postcolonial agency, this study addresses these and other related questions as it looks at the emergence and evolution of Tagore, Walcott, and Darwish as postcolonial world poets.