Agency
Coopers argues
that neither conscious intention nor free will—at least as we commonly think of them—is involved in acting or bringing
about change: though the world changes in response to individual action, agents are very often not aware of their
intentions, they do not directly cause changes, and the choices they make are not free from influence from their
inheritance, past experiences, or their surround. I argue that agency is an emergent property of embodied individuals. (421)
Additionally, “awareness and consciousness do not ‘cause’ action but rather follow and explain, justify, modify, and orient our understanding of our actions” (436). “Circular causation is a matter of ongoing perturbation and response, not of cause and effect” (437).”What happened is not the effect of a single action, but is a pattern that develops from the interanimating actions of a multitude of agents. Rhetors—and audiences—are agents in their actions, and they are responsible for those actions, but they are not the sole cause of what happens” (438-9).
Rhetorical Responsibility
Cooper’s finishes her article by asserting,
Recognition of an other as someone capable of agency, someone capable of making a difference, is important in
persuasion, but rather than creating agency, it is how a rhetor becomes responsible, how a rhetor enables real persuasion. Agency is inescapable: rhetors are agents by virtue of their addressing an audience. They become responsible rhetors by
recognizing the audience not only as agents, but as concrete others who have opinions and beliefs grounded in the
experiences and perceptions and meanings constructed in their brains… Responsible agency instead requires one to be
aware that everyone acts out of their own space of meaning and that to affirm one’s own meanings as absolute truth is to
negate the other person (442)
Key Terms
- Agency: “the process through which organisms create meanings through acting into the world and changing their structure in response to the perceived consequences of their actions” (420). “Agency ‘refers to doing’ (10); it ‘concerns events of which an individual is the perpetrator, in the sense that the individual could at any phase in a given sequence of conduct, have acted differently’ (9). Agency is a matter of action; it involves doing things intentionally and voluntarily, but it is not a matter of causing whatever happened” (439)
- Responsible rhetorical agency: “being open to and responsive to the meanings of concrete others, and thus seeing persuasion as an invitation to listeners as also always agents in persuasion” (420)
Though Syverson is in the works cited, Cooper does not discuss Syverson. She does discuss complex systems, though, so she may get here language of embodiment, enaction, and emergence from complex systems theory.