Agency seems, at first, to belong to individuals.
An animal moves. A bird builds a nest. A person makes a decision.
But some of the most striking forms of organised action occur when no individual appears to control the whole process.
Ants construct nests.
Bees regulate a hive.
Birds move in coordinated flocks.
Human beings build institutions that continue to act long after the individuals who created them have gone.
Something happens when organisms begin to coordinate their possibilities.
The action of one organism can become part of the conditions governing another.
A bee's movement can alter another bee's behaviour. An ant's trail can alter the probability that other ants will follow it. One person's utterance can change what another person does.
Agency begins to circulate through relations.
This does not mean that individuals cease to be agents.
It means that the possibilities available to one organism can become partly dependent upon the activity of others.
The social environment becomes an extension of the organism's field of action.
Consider an ant colony.
No individual ant needs to possess a representation of the colony's architecture for a complex nest to emerge. Local interactions accumulate into a structure that no single ant designed.
The colony therefore exhibits a form of organised agency that cannot be reduced simply to the intention of any particular ant.
The same principle appears at greater complexity in human societies.
A language enables people to do things that no individual could do without it.
A legal system creates possibilities for coordinated action that depend upon shared recognition.
A market, an institution or a scientific community can maintain patterns of action across generations.
These structures are not agents in exactly the same sense as individual organisms.
But they can become conditions under which agency is exercised.
This gives social agency a peculiar character.
We do not merely act together.
We can construct systems that subsequently alter what each of us can do.
A road changes where people can travel.
A language changes what they can communicate.
A law changes which actions are permitted or prohibited.
A scientific practice changes which questions can be asked and which observations count as evidence.
The social world therefore becomes a field of second-order affordances.
It does not merely offer physical possibilities.
It offers possibilities created by the previous activity of other agents.
This greatly expands the temporal depth of agency.
An individual inherits a world partly constructed by predecessors.
They act within it.
Their actions modify it.
Those modifications become part of the world inherited by others.
Agency has become historical.
Culture is perhaps the most extraordinary example.
A human being is born into a world of words, practices, technologies, institutions, stories and expectations that existed before them.
None of these is simply natural in the sense of being independent of human activity.
Yet none is simply the product of the individual now encountering it.
The social world is sedimented agency.
Past actions have become present possibilities.
And present possibilities can become the conditions for future actions.
This creates a loop extending far beyond the lifetime of any organism:
organisms act → social structures emerge → social structures alter possibilities → organisms act differently.
Agency has become distributed across time as well as space.
There is also an important consequence for the idea of individuality.
An organism's capacities are partly constituted by its relations with other organisms.
A young human does not acquire language alone.
A bee does not acquire the organisation of a hive independently of other bees.
A developing organism is shaped by a social environment that is itself produced by other organisms.
The individual is therefore not the opposite of the social.
Individual and collective agency can be mutually constituting.
This does not require us to decide whether a colony, institution or society is “really” an agent.
The more interesting question is what new possibilities become available when agency is organised across multiple organisms.
The answer is: enormous ones.
A colony can construct structures no individual could build.
A human community can preserve knowledge no individual could retain.
A scientific tradition can extend inquiry across generations.
A language can allow one organism to alter the possibilities available to another organism separated by time and space.
Agency has escaped the lifetime and location of the individual.
And this may be what the social invention of agency really means.
Not that society created agency from nothing.
Rather:
life discovered that the possibilities of one agent can become part of the agency of another.
Once that happens, organisms no longer act only upon environments.
They begin to act upon each other's fields of possibility.
And that creates a new question.
What happens when an organism can respond not merely to what another organism does, but to what that organism might do next?
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