Embodied Agency and Habitual Selves

Jennifer Hansen’s article exhibits exactly the sort of commentary that feminist scholarship aims for. It is insightful yet trenchantly critical, and advances dialogue on the vexing questions of self and agency in the face of mood changes. Although her comments are specific to mood swings that accompany bipolar disorder, her way of framing these issues contributes more generally to questions of what it means to be an agent and to exercise agency.

Hansen sets out the three criteria that I take as the conventional idea of a coherent narrative self. Although she agrees with the importance I place on self-trust and alleviation from self-alienation, she challenges my account on the grounds that I do not give enough credit to the bipolar patient’s agency. She offers an account of the habitual, embodied self that addresses a problem in my account of alienation and agency. Hansen draws on feminist scholarship to support her argument, which my article did not do; but the absence of a feminist analysis in my writing suggests a mistake on my part. Therefore, this article—at Hansen’s implicit prodding—is a corrective to that error.

The contribution of the habitual self is very helpful in theorizing just what is difficult and distressing about living with bipolar disorder and what it might take to become more empowered with respect to a healthy and realistic confidence in one’s agency and self. The habitual self, according to Hansen, is an embodied way of being in the world that is “consistent, coordinated, unified, and goal-directed . . . without narration or conceptualization of this pragmatic unity” (Hansen 2013, 72). Habitual bodies, she says, have recognizable skills that cohere even when we are not conscious and deliberate about the exercise of them. This point is important to understanding the significance of being an embodied self—that is, a phenomenology of the self as embodied emphasizes both the role of bodily experiences and habituation, and the way that agency is necessarily exhibited and expressed via material existence.

Hansen argues that “a [narrative self] is devastating and shaming to a patient; not because they cannot see themselves as agents, but rather as consistent agents” and that she disagrees that “conventional narratives deny agency to bipolar patients” (2013, 75). She claims, as in her example of purchasing a sports car, that we can be accountable for past actions even when we would no longer be the sort of person who would do those things. I am ambivalent about Hansen’s claim that the issue is not about experiencing a lack of agency, but a lack of consistent agency. But first, it has become clear, from the dialogical exchange in this issue of PPP, that a definition of agency will be helpful. I discuss five intertwined features of agency that current literature employs. I aim to show that those of us who theorize about agency and mental disorder, or any other challenge that confronts people living in hegemonic societies such as the United States, face a daunting task. (‘Hegemony’ is a way of talking about power relations that emphasizes the process by which a dominant group maintains its power, for example, through education, media, economics, social roles, and other methods of structuring and establishing norms and material existence. As I am using the term, ‘hegemony’ assumes that the maintenance of domination is a struggle—and, thus, that the position of dominance is not a foregone conclusion—and is compatible with—indeed, constitutive of—true democratic practices. The United States is a hegemonic society in the sense that the ruling class primarily consists of White, heterosexual, upper class males who maintain power through their control over institutions such as education, marriage, and medicine, while simultaneously are jostled and challenged by the voices of other, less privileged groups such as women of all colors, racialized people, gay people, working class people, and immigrants.) The difficulty in understanding agency, I suggest, lies in the ways that societal norms, engenderings, and racializations intersect with people’s lived experiences as marginalized.

Agency

The philosophical concept...