Abstract
As of late, claims have been made in social and political theory that agency is neither a property of subjects nor of objects, but is instead an emergent effect of constellations or assemblages – that agency takes place ‘between’ various things. The question that follows is how to then account for what happens and what to make of the ‘betweenness’ of agency. The answer offered by this article is to trace and situate agency empirically through practices. Exploring the happening and non-happening of a particular object – shit – I show that for things to happen, a lot of work has to be done. By evoking three examples of constipated bodies, I show that while the work that has to be done is different, and that the actors involved are diverse, agency is located in practices.
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Notes
Elsewhere, Bennett evokes the power blackout that struck North America in 2003, arguing that rather than putting the blame of the blackout on specific corporations, and specific individuals within those corporations, the events of 2003 happened ‘in a world where agency is distributed’ and that in such a world ‘a hesitant attitude toward assigning blame becomes a virtue’ (Bennett, 2005, p. 464). On assemblage and distributed agency see also De Landa (2006).
In the sense of ‘an autonomous, pure and purely individual (male) subject’, as the editors of a special issue on posthumanism in this journal put it. See Schraube and Sørensen (2013).
For another version of this critique, also in the context of eating, see Berlant (2007) who convincingly shows how campaigns and policies targeting obesity in the United States tend to privilege a certain kind of ‘militaristic’ agency geared towards decision making, consciousness, intention and control of the body. And for two relevant geographical and situational contrasts, see Yates-Doerr (2012) and Vogel and Mol (2014).
See also Munk and Abrahamsson (2012) for an example of how the dictum to ‘follow the actors’ may pan out differently depending on what we take that prescription to imply for the case that is at stake.
The distinction between hot and cold situations comes not from research on constipation but from Michel Callon’s study of financial markets. In a cold situation, Callon writes, ‘Actors are identified, interests are stabilized, preferences can be expressed, responsibilities are acknowledged and accepted. The possible world states are already known or easy to identify: calculated decisions can be taken’ (1998, p. 261). Here I use the distinction to signal the shift from unconstipated (cold) to constipated (hot).
A classic example in science and technology studies and, more specifically, in Actor-Network Theory is Bruno Latour’s (1988) analysis of the agency attributed to the French chemist Louis Pasteur. Contrary to the heroic story of the scientist acting alone, Latour excavates all the other actors that acted and were made to act – scientific instruments, bacteria, journalists, publics, notebooks and so on – so as to make it possible to attribute the Pasteurization of France to the actions of a single actor.
A case in point is the practice of listening. In his ethnography of music lovers, Antoinne Hennion learned that ‘listening is a precise and highly organized activity, but its aim is to bring about a loss of control, an act of surrender. It is not a matter of doing something, but of making something happen’ (2001, p. 12).
Needless to say, the words European, Dutch and Western neither explain nor exhaust the particular enactments of constipation that are described here. They situate – make situations of – them. As such the words evoke similarities and differences with other situations. For an analysis of differences between Dutch and Ghanian toilet cultures, constipation included, see Van der Geest (1998).
My translation from the Dutch foundation ‘Maag, lever, darmstichting’ URL: http://www.mlds.nl/ziekten/39/verstopping-bij-volwassenen.
I have anonymized the name of Dr De Vries and other informants.
While it is tempting to use the word ‘toilet’ we are reminded by George (2008) and Jewitt’s (2011) detailed accounts of managing human excrement that there are many ways – most of them tedious and complex – to deal with and take care of human waste, the (water) toilet being only one among many.
In the Netherlands health care is financed through premiums paid by citizens to private insurance companies. Hypnotherapy is not covered under the obligatory health insurance, but may be covered by additional health insurance packages. Without a special insurance one session of 60 min costs approximately 80 euros.
This loosening and opening up of the integrity of the patient-body resonates with the concept of entanglement and the ways in which bodies may become entangled-enacted through technological, prosthetic, therapeutic and medical practices. See for example Benbow (2003) and Blackman (2010).
For a similar case see Wilson’s analysis of the gut in relation to eating disorders: ‘The logic of interaction, addition, or supplementarity presumes that the entities at stake are already, radically detached … . Mood is not added onto the gut, secondarily, disrupting its proper function’ (2004, p. 85).
On the friction between social science methods, theoretical interventions and case studies in Science and Technology Studies, see Zuiderent-Jerak and Bruun Jensen (2007).
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Acknowledgements
The present text was made to happen thanks to many elements: An ERC Advanced Grant (no. AdG09 no. 249397) financed the research; three anonymous reviewers helped to sharpen the arguments; Annemarie Mol, Rebeca Ibanez Martin, Emily Yates-Doerr, Else Vogel, Filippo Bertoni, Cristobal Bonelli, Tjitske Holtrop, Anna Mann and Katja de Vries provided invaluable feedback; and my informants shared experiences, details and insights from their work.
