In this book, I have asked the question: How to think of agency in oppressive ... precariousness, risk, injury, coercion, oppression and differential power ... carry out their development functions- nor does it mean that speech practices can be ... somehow overcome the oppressiveness of their lives and thereby triumph as.
Conclusion
In this book, I have asked the question: How to think of agency in oppressive contexts? My aim in formulating
such a question has to been twofold: to include questions of
precariousness, risk, injury, coercion, oppression and differential power relations in conceptual descriptions of agency and to examine the conceptual modifications that their inclusion brings to the mechanics of agency itself. Through presenting and analysing the empirical context of the sathins, I have argued the following: given that most lives are constrained in all manner of ways, agency thinking cannot continue to regard conditions of negative freedom as ‘standard’, a necessary given and to insist that persons display their agentic selves through their ability to commit free acts. Furthermore, that in order to think about agency of persons in largely oppressive contexts, we must associations with and reliance on displacement of the principal site
not only loosen its
negative freedom and free action but also seek a of recognition and analysis of agency: from actions to
speech practices. Through examining the ethical engagements of the sathins with the idea and language of individual rights- a language that they come in contact with through encounter with developmentalism – I shift my focus from their actions or lack of thereof, by examining instead, their dynamic ethical reflection on rights, their various discursive strategies for decoding and making sense of developmentalism and their self-[re]fashionings in the face of new discursive order of developmentalism, all of these, I argue renders them
agentic
subjects. It is crucial to note here, that this displacement of the chief site of agency from free acts to speech practices and ethical reflection neither precludes the importance of committing actions- in fact, the sathins perform actions both as individuals and as a collective in order to carry out their development functions- nor does it mean that speech practices can be performed more freely and that these are somehow immune from oppressive conditions and
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practices. But quite simply, this shift – from free acts to speech practices- is to signify that under social contexts marked by a lack of negative freedom, it becomes imperative to think about alternative theorisations of agency.
This alternate theorising of agency has as its empirical background the concrete lived experience of subordination and forms of coercion and through such an exercise, I wish to insist that that bringing different contexts into our theoretical conversations must not simply a technical exercise but a productive one; that theoretical work must display an theoretical openness in the face of empirical specificities, allowing possibilities for theoretical reconfigurations when confronted by empirical evidence. In foregrounding ‘oppressive contexts’, while I realise, only too acutely, that I’m placing myself in the way of some intellectual and political vulnerability1, however, I also believe, that to speak of it, is not to speak without intellectual and political caution. The chief aim for including oppression and coercion in any analysis of agency – as this book shows- is not to examine/measure the distance that persons travel away from it, and in doing so exhibit agency, but to view how persons wrought a sense of themselves and accord meaning to their lives while inhabiting and being subject to it.
A recognition of oppression and agency as twinned concepts then leads us away from thinking in terms of instances of either ascendance or prevailing of one upon the other but 1
By speaking of ‘agency’ within oppressive contexts, I might be misread in the following ways: that I’m
speaking for the those whose lives I am representing here in this book as oppressive or even that I am attempting to somehow ‘recover’ the agency of the oppressed by allowing them space to speak for themselves, so that they may somehow claim a ‘subject’ status for themselves. Or that furthermore, in speaking of oppression, I am not only identifying and describing a particular context as oppressive but also that I am harbouring a hidden expectation that the sathins would somehow overcome the oppressiveness of their lives and thereby triumph as liberal humanist agents. I hope that this book refuted all of these.
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instead to an analysis of how these are intertwined and implicated in each other. And furthermore, a conceptual twinning of agency and oppression, as I have shown in this book, also directs us to foreground the nature and forms of social context against which persons develop and exercise their agency, with a view to highlight not only that persons exercise their agency in the backdrop of specific social contexts but that this agency; its mode, site and practice are influenced by this specificity.
The book discusses agency and autonomy conceptualisations in the background of devleopmentalism and individual rights. The frame of developmentalism, as I point out in chapters 1 and 2 and describe in detail in chapters 3, 4 and 5 helps us focus on the interplay between agency and coercion. As development workers, the sathins are expected to transform not only themselves but also the other village women- but in blurring the divide between the sathin as a development worker, with certain priveleges that come with being closely associated with the state, and the sathins who inhabit precarious social positionings to begin with, not least, because they are often very poor women belonging to lower castes, this demand for transformation is both oppressive and steeped in risks and injuries but it is , as we have seen , also productive. It helps produce a particular public persona for the sathin and opens up spaces for a certain kind of agency to emerge- and as we discussed in chapter 3, this public persona results in no small part from the perceived close identification of the sathin with the state- an identification having both positive and negative outcomes, and generating as it does new forms of conflict, , risk, injury,.
In terms of agentival activity, what is most remarkable, and forms the central empirical focus of the book, is the self fashioning exercises of the sathins. As I have shown in chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5, the sathins engage in self making practices which are influenced and required of them
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by developmentalism. In chapters 3, 4 and 5, I argued that developmentalism was far from a technical project and had as one of its primary aim to produce in the subjectivities of persons under development. The normative repertoire of developmentalism, I pointed out in these chapters, consists of a reliance on the ideas of agency, autonomy, individual rights and empowerment which it utilises most effectively. . it is important to note that in accompanying these new subjectivities and ways of relating to the self are also new forms of subjection, as a result of which these exercises in self-making are not only self policed but also intensely regulatory and disciplinary; invoking violence, injury and social ostracism in the event of either failing to meet the standards of self transformation demanded of them by the state , or for transgressing prevailing social norms by adopting new codes of personal behaviour and modes of comportment. Through tracking the dynamic ethical encounter of the sathins with rights and the moral distance they travel as a result of this contact and engagement with rights, I argue that it is this moral creativity and liveliness that renders them as agentival subjects and not their capacities to put in place free actions. I provide more illustrations in support of this conceptual intervention by focusing on the three self-representations that the sathins advance and identify with, and which I suggest come into being as a result of their encounter with political rights.
Before closing this summary, I should also like to suggest that in addition to agency and oppression and rights, this book is also concerned with, the question of
intellectual
responsibility. As I reflect upon the troubled nature of rights- their embeddedness in fields of power, their appropriation by multiple actors and groups not all progressive, their paradoxical functionings, operations and their socially regulative roles - and at the dissatisfactions and despair they generate - dissatisfactions at the unfulfilled promise of
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juridical rights, and despair at their refusal, obstruction and contravention, I’m also mindful of the fact that rights remain the ‘only way for the disenfranchised to mobilize’ (Cheah 2006:172).We can, therefore, neither afford to give up on rights nor be less heedful of their implicated nature. In chapters 4 and 5, in particular, while focusing on the sathin engagement with rights, I have tried to highlight how the language of rights make accessible- and for many sathins, for the first time ever- a discursive terrain whereby they find themselves becoming ‘available’ to themselves and to others through a shared political subjectivity- that of a citizen. The language of political rights then opens up the arena of citizenship or at least its possibility, albeit however, fragile, and one to which the sathins aspire. But while, it is certainly the case that the sathins employ the language of constitutionally guaranteed rights , this use is never unqualified or unaccompanied by disappointment, frustration and despair at the elusive and near unrealisablility of rights. And therefore, the paradox of liberal rights- the formal promise of equal rights and citizenship for the free standing, abstract and unencumbered individual hollowed out and rendered unrealisable for the concrete and socially located one- -found a clear articulation in the speech practices of the sathins.
I have tried to raise the question of intellectual responsibility in and through the WDP with a view to think about the vexed question of how should feminist activists, scholars and practitioners strategise and respond when invited to collaborate on projects aimed at countering ‘oppression’. Development interventions mobilising citizen participation, I have argued, need to display awareness of and sensitivity towards the risks and injuries that accrue to individuals and groups as a result of their political participation and to the formation of gendered subjectivities under severely subordinate contexts (Naples 2002; Mouffe, 1993; Madhok 2003a, b, 2007; Rai 2008). Mobilising, exercising or framing agency, must be informed by a mapping of power relations and the identities formed as a result of or in
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response to multiple subject positionings – of class, caste, religion gender, space, sexuality. A nuanced reading of power relations within which persons formulate, perform and articulate their agential capacities is important, as it alerts us to the constraints imposed upon them by social relations together with the possible spaces for challenging these and also to the levels of risk involved in exercising agency on a political landscape where political power is manifest as well as hidden, disciplining as well as disruptive.
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