Rethinking Agency

Rebecca Chung

University of Chicago
rmc2@quads.uchicago.edu

 

Mann, Patricia. Micropolitics: Agency in a Postfeminist Era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

 

Micropolitics argues that shifting gender roles help produce postmodern anxiety. According to author Patricia Mann, scholars have overlooked the importance of shifting gender roles to help explain the postmodern condition: “I formulated this theory of individual agency in response to gendered social transformations that I believe provide the basic foundation for all other social transformations today, and I call it a ‘gendered micropolitics'” (1). Mann claims that modernist paradigms miss t he influence of micropolitics on the public sphere: “I am a postmodern philosopher in a quite literal sense. I believe that the social and political frameworks of modernism are exhausted and incapable of making sense of the most important contemporary pr oblems” (1). Moreover, these paradigms cannot account for facts of contemporary life: social “unmooring,” female and male emotional neediness, the dependency of public success on private servicing, and the profound social transitions involved when women decide forever that homemaking is a choice, not an inevitability. A postmodern, postfeminist era has begun. While liberal discourses remain dominant, they are conflict-ridden and unstable as a consequence of the social enfranchisement of women, and the unmooring of women, men, and children from patriarchal kinship relationshps. The identification of humanity and masculinity is no longer normatively or structurally secured by the ailing institutions of late liberalism. And so, the actions of women and men, as well, have a peculiarly radical/constructive potential. Yet it will remain difficult to appreciate or to act upon that potential so long as we continue to assume modernist visions of change and political agency. (25)

 

By ignoring new historical realities, scholars risk ignoring the material conditions foundational to emerging postmodern social practice. In fact, they altogether miss an opportunity to observe an emerging relationship between material and social practic e. Driven moreover by outdated theories about social behavior, scholars make incomprehensible what could be comprehensible–if the scholars would take seriously new theories, particularly theories inclusive of female experience. Mann makes her position quite clear: “Changing gender relations are the most significant social phenomenon of our time” (2).

 

Micropolitics effectively forestalls accusations of non-philosophical meandering by pointing out the limits of conventional philosophical practice: “Perhaps we are [becoming] unphilosophical, but only insofar as we are placing demands upon ou r philosophical resources to which they are not yet capable of responding” (33). Here, and throughout Micropolitics , Mann is at her best when articulating the limits of conventional thinking vis-a-vis “philosophically interesting changes in the human condition” such as universal female enfranchisement, job protections, reproductive choice, non-patriarchal family structure, and presumptive female equality generally. Using the canon of philosophy, Micropolitics demonstrates the uniqueness of current gender roles in Anglo-European history.

 

In these ways Micropolitics purports to be about agency. Unfortunately the social analyses run away from the concept. Individual chapters omit any sustained engagement with the question of agency as they explore the consequences of female s ocial enfranchisment in contemporary American society.

 

Mann’s analysis follows a pattern: she begins each chapter with a theoretical discussion of agency, then drops the topic in order to conduct an analysis of some current issue or event: the double duty workday, abortion, pornography, the history of libera list individualism, women in the military, Anita Hill, sexual harassment, William Kennedy Smith, Mike Tyson, date rape, Thelma and Louise. The problem is that none of these specific analyses, grounded as they are in cultural criticism common places, really requires a new thinking of gendered micro-political agency in the first place. Readers informed about these events, but wondering how they might be reconsidered in light of the ongoing theoretical debates over postfeminist agency, will fin d themselves repeatedly provoked and then disappointed.

 

This digressive, or at any rate anti-climactic, structuring of the chapters reflects a general problem in the organizational logic of the book. One is grateful for the new terms and concepts Mann introduces–but her capacity to produce these new concepts seem to outrun her capacity to arrange and order them. Her sentences often contain more than one idea, her paragraphs more than one topic, her arguments more than one thesis. The frequent signposts and other attempts to manage information flow (“First, I will,” “I define. . .”) generally make the prose even more, rather than less, inefficient. In themselves these are often minor blemishes–and indeed they are closely allied with the book’s strengths, with the richness and fertility of the author’s tho ught. But one can’t help feeling thatMicropolitics would have profited substantially from more careful editorial attention.

 

More troubling are some of the book’s underlying assumptions about gender and society. Micropolitics reproduces a presumptive white bourgeois heterosexuality by focusing almost exclusively on social issues significant to women intimate with (white) men: the double duty syndrome, abortion, pornography. Micropolitics does not question the assumption that these are the issues women care most deeply about. It leaves out of its analysis all those women for whom intimacy with men is a non-concern, or at least a marginal one. There are women who have scarcely any contact with men except in public, institutional settings. There are minority women who are even further removed from the kinds of white heterosexual relations the book ex amines. Feminism has begun to recognize that the private practices of white patriarchy impose themselves with different force on different women, but Mann’s study seems untouched by this recognition. My point is not that the cultural matters Mann takes up–heterosexual pornography, abortion law, Freudian psychology, American political history, the inheritance of liberalism, and so forth–are necessarily the wrong ones. It is that feminist practice today has to mean, among other things, a willingness at least to consider how limited may be the relevance of such matters to the lived experiences of non-white, non-heterosexual women.

 

Micropolitics is bound to some other dubious assumptions as well. In respect to pre-modern forms of community and their relation to contemporary conditions, Mann offers this observation:

 

As serfs left the estates of feudal landowners, material forms of human neediness were unmoored from stable agricultural communities, and today as women leave the home to enter the workplace, psychic relational forms of human neediness are coming unmoored from patriarchal kinship relationships. (124)

 

Mann offers no evidence for this generalization about fedual times, nor does she cite any sources that suggest medieval affective life was fundamentally the same as late-twentieth century heterosexual bourgeois affective life.

 

Admittedly, information on the emotional economy of serfs is scarce. But the relative experience of stability or upheaval in particular times and places can be indicated by reference to rates of enclosure or unemployment, the frequency of outbreaks of di sease, the incidence of war or famine, and so forth. Claims about non-elite pre-modern life need to be grounded in the historical records left by particular regions and communities. Micropolitics demonstrates no knowledge of the methodologi cal complexity involved in this kind of historical reconstruction. Mann’s claims are not based in primary sources, concrete examples, but in Marx’s notoriously unreliable generalizations. As a result, potentially valuable concepts–such as that of “unmo oring” in this instance–are drained of any specific historical meaning and end up dubiously signifying transhistorical features of the human condition.

 

Finally, on the level of philosophical categories, the basic argument of Micropolitics seems at times confused. Mann declares herself a critic of modernism and of the modernist conceptualization of the subject. Yet the real object of her cr itique would seem to be the social constructivism of many postmodern thinkers. I believe that insofar as social identities are presently unstable we should stop focusing so intently upon these fragile notions of selfhood. Instead, I suggest that we thin k more about the quality of our actions, or in the terminology of social thoery, upon our agency. In seeking to better understand our actions we will be confronting the moral and political issues of everyday life in the best way possible during a time of social confusion. We should think of ourselves as conflicted actors rather than as fragmented selves. (4)

 

Here, as elsewhere, Mann neglects to discuss how exactly agency was conceived in modernist thinking, what the problems or limitations of that thinking were, and how the concept might be rethought and resurrected for contemporary theory. Far from offering a critique of modernism, she begins by lamenting the radical suspicion of agency within postmodernist paradigms, and proceeds to invoke, by way of a solution to this ostensible problem, what often appears to be a naive return to modernist assumptions.

 

This is not to say that Micropolitics has no critique of modernism to offer–only that its critique is not always very clearly delineated. Mann’s characterizations of early modern philosophers are sometimes admirably precise and astute. Hob bes, she observes, was “the first great theorist/storyteller of modern forms of material agency, articulating the power of material desires and their anarchic implications within a society in which market-based economic structures had not yet developed” ( 132). Here, both Mann’s historical sense and her philosophical penetration are brought nicely to bear as she conducts a reading of Leviathan. Her critique of the philosophical assumptions about free will and individual choice to which defen ses of patriarchy frequently have recourse are also right on the mark: “If women freely choose to devote themselve to the happiness of their husbands and children, this, like any other freely undertaken course of action, must be understood as simply a ma tter of personal preference. But if we ask a doctor to diagnose our difficulties in sleeping and he responds that we apparently prefer not to sleep regularly, we will question his medical abilities” (50). On this relatively familiar territory, Mic ropolitics is lively and convincing.

 

The book’s title, then, is somewhat misleading. Micropolitics: Agency in a Postfeminist Era, announces itself as a book about (individual) agency in a (culturally or socially) postfeminist situation. In short, it claims to examine the relat ionship between individuals and their larger circumstances. Micropolitics purports to resituate individual agency: a welcome intervention, given contemporary academic debates driven by constructivist analyses. Yet the book does not firmly s ituate itself vis a vis modern and contemporary theories of agency, nor does it manage very well to articulate its theoretical concerns with the mass-media events it examines: the Hill-Thomas hearings, the Tyson-Washington trial, and so forth. Tho ugh still of interest, these events do not in and of themselves help to bring the problem of agency into better focus, nor does Mann’s use of them suggest what might be gained by engaging that problem philosophically. Hoping to appropriate, for the purpo ses of feminist theory, these seductive episodes of mass culture, Mann was perhaps too much seduced by them herself, and in the end denies her readership the full benefit of her scholarly–her philosophical–expertise.

 

Despite these weaknesses, Micropolitics is a welcome contribution to the postmodernist conversation. “What particularly excites me about the present historical moment,” remarks Mann, “is the conceptual strangeness of various social situation s and relationships, and the sense that they can only be adequately comprehended through reworking our systems of signification to better articulate basic concepts” (206). Yes–this is the excitement proper to postmodern studies. And by fostering that e xcitement in her readers, Mann is helping to produce the kind of dispersed and various micro-interventions out of which a better set of social arrangements might emerge.