Everyday Agency in Precarious Times

Abstract

I live in a region of northwest Oregon that, over the past half decade, has experienced an accelerated accumulation of climate-related disasters. From September 2020 to July 2021, fire, ice, and heat killed people, plants, birds, and animals in and around the Willamette Valley. Other climate events are more routine: severe drought is widespread, while summer wildfire smoke regularly smothers the atmosphere. These events overlapped with a global pandemic that continues to ravage everything. Distressed over our overwhelming and overwhelmed planet, I often wonder what can I—can we—do?Four years ago, I gained a backyard and started gardening; now, my husband and I grow food year-round. It’s a challenging, messy, fulfilling pastime that unfailingly reveals the limits of my intentions. When I’m working with the earth, I reflect on theories of agency that shaped my dissertation. In “Toward a Posthuman Perspective,” Sarah Hallenbeck invites scholars to examine how everyday rhetorics of “seemingly nondeliberate and arhetorical embodied activities” (12) shape cultural notions of gender. Her vocabulary of “nondeliberate” and “arhetorical” led me to Marilyn Cooper’s “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted,” then Stephanie Kerschbaum’s “On Rhetorical Agency and Disclosing Disability in Academic Writing.” Cooper identifies rhetorical agency as a property that manifests during dynamic “dance[s] of perturbation and response” (421) among agents. Moving beyond causal logics, Cooper untethers agents from consciously creating change and advances rhetorical agency as acting in the world while remaining open to the potential for (unpromised) difference. Kerschbaum sees agency as “a kind of kinetic energy” (63) that inhabits the interplay within rhetorical encounters. That interplay is meaningful independent of results, which broadens notions of rhetorical success.These texts animate key associations within rhetorical studies: individuals and systems, intentions and outcomes, evidence and assessment. They help me recognize an agency that arises as I interact with the environment and attempt to create something new. Valuing the commonplace activities that texture my days—seeding, watering, inspecting—means that agency emerges as I try. Difficult weather and pests may disrupt plants and plans, yet the authors expanded my sense of what agency can be when released from assumptions about human control. Indeed, learning to separate intentions from results and to locate meaning in efforts has enriched my outlook beyond my backyard. Hallenbeck reminds me that posthuman agency doesn’t disregard human action but “redeems [the] agent as a participant” (19) in networks and a contributor to larger, unknowable transformations. I feel this acutely, for my individual actions situate me in a broader collective whose members work toward food, environmental, and racial justices from where we can. Climate change has arrived, and I will continue to garden at home and at community gardens with others as we learn about and revise enactments of resilience in these precarious times. Hallenbeck, Cooper, and Kerschbaum have offered more than a critical orientation—they’ve revealed a sustainable ethic for living in this world.