Waymaking by Holding Paradox

Agency is not Hierarchy, it's Haecceity

rethinking what it means to be 'high agency' and finding this-ness in Ozu

Apr 08, 2026

I write unscripted every other Wednesday about something related to the navigational approach to mind. This one (written after a long day) explores how way-making moves beyond hierarchies like ‘high agency vs low agency’ towards constellatory ecologies. Doing so means holding tension and learning to be friction-friendly; the inevitable portal towards exquisite micro-ecstasy. If you’re in NYC this weekend, come to the Quad April 11th and you’ll get a chance to engage in this sort of practice directly through the work of Sophie Fiennes. And we can meet!

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Do we really want to be high agency?

Does high agency still mean what we once thought?

As you have probably heard, ‘high agency’ has been a trendy phrase for a time in tech, where people are supposed to ‘act act act’. And act they have. And they’ve been successful…right? So, does that mean you want to have high agency?

Not too long ago, it might have seemed attractive, might have seemed like the answer was yes. These days, many say no. Many people from all walks of life wonder whether any of it is worth it. Sometimes it’s even hard to remember why it was so attractive. What does it all matter if we lose meaning and purpose and our ability to be sensual and feel the life in our bodies and days? What does it all matter if we became a monster to get it?

Maybe we are reaching a time where we want to have agency beyond all this ‘high/low’ stuff, a time where we make it easier to be good to one another again.

Or would you rather keep that dichotomy of high/low?

If so, we are likely to keep living in a world that builds hierarchies. Maybe that is what we want. But maybe not. Look closely. Is that what we want, or is it the meaning, sensuality, excitement, and connection we think ‘doing whatever it takes’ will bring? Because all those can come in ways far better than becoming an action zombie and breaking things.

Maybe what we want is not a world where we have to ‘climb the ladder’ but rather one where we can explore trails that take us over vistas and put our heart in our mouth, that wake our sleepy molecules but still care for us, too. Still care for us even when we can’t win the gold medal again, and even when (especially when) we’re older.

Maybe what we want is a world that gives us the delicious permission to feel into the raw, wild power of ourselves, but that will also protect us and let us protect it, even as we test and push it.

That’s not high agency.

That’s the agency of attention well-directed even as it cannot contain itself.

High agency may have once meant something positive, maybe even something like that above (and maybe one day it will again), but today, it is starting to look more like it means ‘being a bully’ and ‘getting what you want by doing what you have to do’ and making it to the top ‘no matter what’. Unfortunately, there is no top; the top is just a big show, and so all this just combusts.

When we define ourselves only by how high we climb, we will always route right back to insecurity and ‘needing more’ because no high can be sustained, as there is always something higher; there is no absolute, just different directions from different positions, and they’re not moving linearly. The ladder literally is not real.

What if the real fight is actually with something much harder than all those low agency folks? What if it is a fight that is not ‘won’ no matter how high you get? What if you could simply let go of that delusion and still test your limits and tone your body and push hard because it makes you feel more alive? Would you do it?

Anyone who stakes their purpose and meaning on ‘getting to the top no matter what’ will ultimately feel like an imposter or create a tower of their own power, trapping themselves in it.

Whether we are Olympic athletes, presidents, students, or the person making smoothies at the gym, if we build those towers (the kind where you make others think you have it all figured out,so then you have to always act as if you do), the unbearableness of it gets worse the more people think you’re high agency. Beware building that tower round yourself.

Ask: What would it look like to feel raw wild power beyond the high/low hierarchy?

It might feel more like an ecological-mycelial-tendril-spreading-of-power through your very body and all the bodies which which you relate. You might suddenly find that you and those around you can lift cars and build mountains and clean up the sea and still be rich and wear nice fabrics and sleep in beds with sheets of a high threadcount, but also help others who have had everything destroyed by this high agency.

Agency is not the problem, and all that excitement and rush attached to it (which is what people really want) is possible and can be felt without the alienating tower of self that comes from believing and building heirarchies.

There’s still plenty of difference and plenty of ways to compete and excel when you’re living in a dynamic constellatory fractal web.
What IS different? You are safely held, elastic as trusted relation, with all your crazy energy and tension and competition rooted in (and seen by others as) care.

Some will tell you that’s impossible. Indeed, the whole past decade that we now see exploding all around us was built on the Silicon Valley version of ‘high agency’ whereby one is supposed to push through no matter the cost, bend the world to one’s will, never wait for permission, move fast and break things… all that.

But now we are somewhere else.
What is emerging and is exciting these days may be best described as haecceitas.
Haecceitas is a fancy medieval philosophical term for ‘this-ness’ or that irreducible overall sensory signature that is the ongoingness of bodies in vulnerable relation.

Being a jerk and climbing ladders and knocking everybody out of your way to get to the top is not powerful and it is not in your genes. And even if it were in your genes, the very fact that you can reflect on that and question and change it also means there is a more exciting path.

Why? Because there is no ‘high as compared to low’ in the multi-dimensional world of ongoing life so long as it has a heart; there are only shifts of the constellatory kaleidoscope whereby vulnerability is a spiritual duty that comes with attention to life, and from life itself (i.e. from us).

Care, slowness, receptivity. These are the words of this-ness. They take attention to orient, and one thing that can help a lot with this practice and with getting back into this pace is watching beautiful flims. There are many possibilities, but let’s finish this with Yasujirō Ozu. Try the practice. Simply go and watch an Ozu film (links below). If it’s hard to sit there and watch, do it anyway; keep trying till you can.

Try Tokyo Story.

Or Late Spring.

Any of them. Or just start here for an overview.

Yasujirō Ozu pretty much made the same sort of film for thirty years and never ran out of things to say. His camera sits nearly at the level of the tatami. It almost never moves. Characters arrive, speak, leave and then (high drama!), someone pours tea. You may see a train passes in the distance. But if you let yourself notice, worlds of fractal sensual potential are opening for you. Soon, you will be having ephiphanies like ‘oh my god that’s why Wes Anderson made that scene like that!’

Watch some of these and the pattern langauge will emerge in surprising ways. You will begin to sense that meaning lives in pattern, not in intervention and bullying. His films are full of what the architect Christopher Alexander called a pattern language: the repeated forms through which people actually inhabit their lives. Thresholds between inside and outside, meals that marks a transition. The child who has become, quietly and irreversibly, an adult, and the father and daughter relation that is always reversing that irreversibility. All this is the reward high-agency culture trains you to skip past. Let’s stop skipping it.

Because ecologies do not have rungs. They have niches, dependencies, edge effects, nests of messiness, and lots of care, which means lots of rubbing up against different cares, with lots of tensions and lots of generation.

This is how we get a sense of the irreducible particularity of this ongoing movement all around us, that is us, that we co-create. How? Through what we notice and what we care about and care for and care towards. There is no high or low instance of any of those, except from a position which has already passed.

haecceitas

And now a poem that is Wikipedia:

“Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology, used the term “haecceity”, to emphasize the unavoidable and irremediable indexical character of any expression, behavior, or situation. For Garfinkel, indexicality was not a problem. He treated the haecceities and contingencies of social practices as a resource for making sense together. In contrast to theoretical generalizations, Garfinkel introduced “haecceities” in “Parson’s Plenum” (1988) to indicate the importance of the infinite contingencies in both situations and practices for the local accomplishment of social order.[7] According to Garfinkel, members display and produce the social order they refer to within the setting they contribute to. The study of practical action and situations in their “haecceities”—aimed at disclosing the ordinary, ongoing social order constructed by the members’ practices[8]—is the work of ethnomethodology. Garfinkel called ethnomethodological studies investigations of “haecceities”, i.e.,

just thisness: just here, just now, with just what is at hand, with just who is here, in just the time that just this local gang of us have, in and with just what the local gang of us can make of just the time we need, and therein, in, about, as, and over the course of the in vivo work, achieving and exhibiting everything that those great achievements of comparability, universality, transcendentality of results, indifference of methods to local parties who are using them, for what they consisted of, looked like, the “missing what” of formal analytic studies of practical action.
— Harold Garfinkel, Lawrence D. Wieder, Two Incommensurable, Asymmetrically Alternate Technologies of Social Analysis, 1992, p. 203”

Gilles Deleuze uses the term in a different way to denote entities that exist on the plane of immanence. The usage was likely chosen in line with his esoteric concept of difference and individuation and his critique of object-centered metaphysics.

Michael Lynch (1991) described the ontological production of objects in the natural sciences as “assemblages of haecceities”, thereby offering an alternate reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980) discussion of “memories of haecceity” in the light of Garfinkel’s treatment of “haecceity”.[9]

Gerard Manley Hopkins drew on Scotus, whom he called “of reality the rarest-veined unraveller”,[10] to construct his poetic theory of inscape.

James Joyce made similar use of the concept of haecceitas to develop his idea of the secular epiphany.[11]

James Wood refers extensively to haecceitas (as “thisness”) in developing an argument about conspicuous detail in aesthetic literary criticism.[12]

Thank you for being here ❣️

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Discussion about this post

Martin West

Martin's Substack 9 Apr

Again riffing on a Thursday morning 9 miles west of Cambridge UK and from an architecturally philosophical lens I feel the cool air of John Dun Scouts breathing down my spine. Scotism is hieciety. That thisness in all things. Deluez is a big fan. And I feel it's geographical as well as it's historical contingency. A northern mindset at a time of deep contemplation. Being a northern myself and a craftsman architecture I think this double agency, this second level, or duetero agency vibrates between any binary conditioning. It's not in knowing as such is contemplation in relation as such. It's not not knowing it's nous. In the north you are lacking if you have no nous. It's what Gregory Bateson offered in learning to learn and what Donald Schon discovered in Reflective Practice. The dichotomy that Nous has been appropriate by the tech brothers and sisters in the valley of silicone is paradoxical. But that valley is a basin of attraction. On the opposite side of the hill is a far higher plain. One the Don Scotus found through deep contemplation and one the Don PotUS I pray will find but I won't be betting on it.

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4 replies by Andrea Hiott and others

Cari Taylor

Life's Sacred Living System 9 Apr

love how i feel this resonance - today i scribbled this - Let your doing come from your being

If we rush into doing we act from the space that brought us here

If we rush into doing we do acts that are of our action nature. We fix. We fix from a place that band aids and doesn’t consider

If we move first to being. Our truth. Our real nature we find a new space to live from. To do and act from that space changes every action.

Be first - then do from there

and whilst this may not seem about perhaps agency as hierarchy - it feels that in your words to me