A provocation that names how concrete agents and material relations exceed, escape, or even undo abstract, pre-assigned “agency,” shifting attention from agency as a property to situated agential doings in entangled worlds.
Coined as a deliberate echo of Ingold’s “materials against materiality,” “agents against agency” proposes that what acts in the world often resists being captured by “agency” conceived as a stable attribute or capacity. Rather than asking whether entities have agency, it foregrounds how agents emerge, diverge, and dissipate across relations, sometimes counter to the expectations built into theoretical grids or institutional categories of agency. The emphasis falls on agential happenings—how cups heat hands, interfaces nudge attention, rubrics delimit creativity, models autocomplete thought—where effects arise from assemblages that do not sit comfortably with a priori schemas of who or what the agent is supposed to be.
Read through Barad’s agential realism, this move is consonant with intra-action and the agential cut: relata do not preexist relations, and “agency” is not a possession but an enactment within material-discursive apparatuses that perform boundaries and causalities. It also sits alongside Bennett’s vital materialism and Latour’s actants, where distributed causation overflows intentions, and with Ahmed’s attention to how orientations and contact zones shape what is actionable in the first place. “Agents against agency” thus names a methodological skepticism toward reifying agency and an attunement to the unruly, often mundane, ways that things do in excess of our categories.
Postqualitative inquiry treats “agency” not as a variable to be measured or granted but as a situated effect of apparatus design, relational intensities, and agential cuts. “Agents against agency” functions as a reminder to track what actually composes action in a setting—frictions, affordances, interruptions, habit, latency—especially where those dynamics run counter to narrative expectations about intentional actors. It supports methodological choices that prioritize tracing assemblages, composing with more-than-human data, and remaining accountable to how analytical categories can domesticate or erase the very doings that matter.
Within AI-entangled writing instruction, this concept directs analysis to how authorship, learning, and creativity are enacted by agents that resist being neatly subsumed under “instructor” or “student” agency. Prompt templates, autosuggestions, token limits, plagiarism detectors, and LMS policies co-compose what becomes writable or thinkable; sometimes these agents work against institutionalized notions of “student agency” or “teacher autonomy,” redirecting attention, pacing, or evaluative criteria. Attending to “agents against agency” illuminates the lived experience of instructors when the feel of a platform, the rhythm of an interface, or the tenor of a campus policy unsettles pedagogical intentions; it clarifies how distributed agency in the pedagogical assemblage can reconfigure assessment, feedback timing, and the emergence of classroom artifacts, not by removing human agency but by showing how agential patterns diverge from where agency is presumed to reside.