The Agency Dilemma: From Revisionist Accommodations to a Theory of Agency

Anna Krylova interrogates the limits of what Gabrielle Spiegel called ‘revisionist accommodations’—the manifold revisionist scholarship of the last two decades that has tried to counteract the apparent depletion of the agency category of its analytical and ethical meaning by rediscovering agency in everyday uses and misuses of culture and subversive and transgressive behavior of historical subjects. Krylova argues that this focus on ‘culture in use’ and the subversive subject has not allowed scholars to address the most categorical poststructuralist propositions that render the notion of ‘individual consciousness’ meaningless, that unequivocally refuse historical subjects a possibility of ‘stepping outside of discourse’ and, by definition, of developing a critical distance from a discursive regime that claims them as subjects. Historians, in other words, have failed to grant to their historical subjects what they routinely grant themselves—what one might call ‘aggrandized agency’ to grasp the logic of dominant discursive formations, to uncover their operations, and, to critically position oneself in relation to hegemonic claims. To begin to address this double standard, the paper proposes to change the way we, historians, talk about ‘agency’, that is, as an a priori property that one can either grant or deny. By focusing on the prewar Soviet Union with its proliferation of openly contradictory gender regimes, the paper examines under what historical conditions a historical subject becomes an agent and concludes by theorizing ‘agency’ not as an a priori—present or missing—faculty but as a ‘historical condition.’