bite of brightness

“Agency can be strange, twisted, caught up in things, passive, or exhausted. Not the way we like to think about it. Not usually a simple projection toward a future. It’s what we mean by “having a life” (as in “get a life”). But it’s caught up in things. Circuits, bodies, moves, connections. It takes unpredictable and counterintuitive forms. It’s lived through a series of dilemmas: that action is always a reaction; that the potential to act always includes the potential to be acted on, or to submit; that the move to gather a self to act is also a move to lose the self; that one choice precludes others; that actions can have unintended and disastrous consequences; and that all agency is frustrated and unstable and attracted to the potential in things. It’s not really about willpower but rather something much more complicated and much more rooted in things.”