Thinking about agency is that opportunity wherein that which is agentive is allowed to show itself as agent for those who also seek to participate in agency.

Agency is a process. Thinking about agency is a process. We begin with the word *capacity*. Aristotle once remarked that rhetoric was the capacity to see the available means of persuasion in a given situation.

This ability is not shared by all.

Those with the ability or capacity to influence others might be called agents.

Rhetorical agency is the capacity to influence the form and shape of a rhetorical culture. Rhetorical culture can be shaped both in a material sense and in a sociological sense. Material influence has to do with products and technologies. This specifies the means available for bringing about change. If someone had a network-communication node implanted in his brain that would be a change in the rhetorical culture in the material sense. Cell phones are already a change in the material rhetorical culture. The typewriter was a change in the rhetorical culture in the material sense of that term. And so on.

Influence with respect to sociological norms is also easy to articulate. Recently a writer for the L.A. Times announced that along with his weekly print columns(there were two), he would now be blogging daily. He then invited others to read his blog. Now this is a sociological shift in that the one who is the agent (i.e., the columnist) is now virtually accessible whereas earlier, within the parameters of print culture, he was relatively less accessible. You'd have had to write him a letter.

Our definition of rhetorical agency is now becoming clearer. First, we return to the Organon of Aristotle and the two categories of agent/patient. We are always acting and being acted on in various and complex ways. When it comes to rhetorical culture, we are both shaped and shapers. Our shaping capacity is enhanced by the skills that are both social and technical. The important point here is that we have little choice: either shape the community's rhetorical culture or be shaped by it. The national, regional, local, and family orders are all permeated by the sense of norms. Now let's connect these thoughts to the concept of practice.

A practice is a way of doing something. Rhetorical culture is a practice in the sense that it is the product and the process of written, oral, electronic, and visual acts. We write, we speak, we transmit, and we perceive through visual images; we want others to do the same.

This converges on what Bourdieu called the habitus of the community.

Now we are ready for the complete definition: rhetorical agency is possible only within the communication practices of a given community of discourse.

(For more, please see the ARS Conference papers, 2003,esp. K.H. Wilson, "The Practice of Agency")

MGGreer