Agency: iteration (habit), projectivity (imagination) and practical evaluation (judgement)

More on Agency (from Susanne Eichner, Agency and Media Reception: Experiencing Video Games, Film, and Television)

Iteration (habit), projectivity (imagination) and practical evaluation (judgement) are constitutive elements of human agency. Iteration refers to the learning effect and historical embededness of agency. “Past experiences condition present actions” as Emirbayer and Mische (1998: 975) put it. The recurrence of knowledge – either in forms of mental concepts, embodied practices or social or- ganizations – as Sewell (1992) suggested, is fundamentally necessary for any occur- rence of agency. However, agency is not merely employing the same schema over and over again. Projectivity refers to the “creative character” of agency (Joas 1996: 15), entailing “the capacity to transpose and extend schemas to new contexts” (Sewell 1992: 19), making agents “inventors of new possibilities” (Mische/Emir- bayer 1998: 984) through various creative tactics, such as anticipatory identification or experimental enactment (cf. ibid: 989ff.). Practical evaluation, finally, refers to the real life circumstances with which an agent contextualizes social experiences, which might be ambiguous and even contradictory. Practical evaluation requires an agent to recognize a given situation adequately in order to decide on appropriate actions, and to execute those actions accordingly. The cognitive dimension of agency clarifies an agent’s general ability to perform with agency, and is therefore not to be understood simply in terms of possessing agentive abilities, but as the ability to acquire them; cognitive agency refers to the process of “achieving agency” (Biesta/Tedder 2006: 18). Rather than an attribute possessed, agency is something which evolves in “transaction with a particular situation” (ibid: 19). With regard to media reception, this signifies that certain specific textual characteristics might allow for more agency than others.