There totalizing view of power doesn’t address the complexity of politics and cedes agency

(Laura, Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech, 12/30/13, Center for the Study of Developing Societies, “Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World”)

In summary, in non-substantialist frameworks, agency is conceptualized as modest and multifar- ious agonic interactions, localized tactics, hybridized engagement and redescriptions, a series of uncertain and situated responses to ambiguous discourses and practices of power aimed at the con- struction of new openings, possibilities and different distributive processes, the outcomes of which are always to an extent unpredictable. Political agency here is not imagined as a quest for individual authenticity in opposition to a unitary nefarious oppressive Leviathan aimed at the creation of a ‘‘better totality’’ where subjects can float freed of ‘‘oppression,’’ or a multitude made into a unified ‘‘subject’’ will reverse the might of Empire and bring about a condition of immanent social justice. By not reifying power as a script and subject as monads endowed with freedom non-substantialist positions open the way for conceptualizing political agency as an engagement imbricated in praxis. The ethical virtue that is called for is ‘‘pragmatist humility,’’ that is the patience of playing with the cards that are dealt to us, enacting redescriptions and devising tactics for tinkering82 with what exists in specific contexts. Conclusion In this article, I have argued that, notwithstanding their critical stance, scholars who use governmen- tality as a descriptive tool remain rooted in substantialist ontologies that see power and subjects as standing in a relation of externality. They also downplay processes of coconstitution and the impor- tance of indeterminacy and ambiguity as the very space where political agency can thrive. In this way, they drastically limit the possibility for imagining political agency outside the liberal straight- jacket. They represent international liberal biopolitical and governmental power as a homogenous and totalizing formation whose scripts effectively oppress ‘‘subjects,’’ that are in turn imagined as free ‘‘by nature.’’ Transformations of power modalities through multifarious tactics of hybridiza- tion and redescriptions are not considered as options. The complexity of politics is reduced to homo- genizing and/or romanticizing narratives and political engagements are reduced to total heroic rejections or to revolutionary moments.