Agency in the University

With the reading, I had trouble understanding the idea that agency is mostly unconscious. Though with Cooper’s explanation of feedback and feedforward loops, I got the image of a hive mind like a literal bee hive with all the agents working together to create a colony.

I found it even easier to think of agency in terms of a University. Clemson's welcome video for newly accepted students challenges newcomers to change the world. At first, I thought it was a pretty big challenge, especially for grad students. How are you going to change the world in two years, but I believe what is meant here is to change the world through agency.

An individual student can shape the University without any intention of doing so. It's easier for me to look at this in terms of my undergraduate education that graduate. But through interactions with friends and sharing interests, I grew in passion for a student org and decided to run for an officer position. This org had a large presence in the University, and my actions as an officer shaped that presence, which in turn shaped the University. I never had any intentions of shaping the University as a whole. My conscious actions consisted of interacting with friends and desiring to shape the student org. But the feedforward and feedback loops had a greater effect than I had intended. Furthermore, the students who were simply members of the org also helped shape the University by their interactions with their friends that helped shape the org.

This helped me to understand the act of agency and how it is an unconscious act. However, I still have questions as to the implications that has with the ethics of rhetorics. Cooper addresses this but does not go into any great detail. If agency can only be seen from the whole and not from an individual, how does one apply ethics to the agent? One can, and Cooper does, argue that an agent acting ethically breeds ethical agency, such as Obama asking the country to combat racism.

It makes sense on some level that is our efforts always and inevitably effect the whole in some unconscious way, then we would want to act ethically in order to benefit the whole. But I would have liked Cooper to have gone into more detail.