Agency Project Reflection When this project was first introduced, I was not quite sure what I wanted to do, or what the project was asking me to do. After listening to examples, my group and I decided we wanted to deter people from buying something. Originally, we wanted to go to the Apple Store and put up sticky notes explaining the working conditions of those making Apple products. We eventually decided to go to a market and put sticky notes on animal products explaining why they are bad for the environment and people's health to deter people from buying them. We decided to go to a market over Apple because Apple is very small, and people are less likely to be deterred from buying something that affects others versus something that affects …show more content…
Putting the notes on the products was difficult because I knew that it was wrong. The fact that I was being watched added to my guilt. The idea relates to Panopticism and Althusser’s idea of ISA. Because Ideology says that it is wrong for me to discourage people from buying a store’s product, I felt guilty about putting the notes up. Althusser's idea of RSA also came into play when we were kicked out. Because I did not listen to ideology, a repressive source acted on me, the manager, and this reinforced the ideology that putting sticky notes up to discourage consumption is wrong. This observation also leads to the realization that we really have no agency in society. Since ideology controls our actions, and if we go against an ideology we are controlled by a repressive source, then it is difficult for us to actually establish power. Not only is it difficult for us to express our opinion, but even once we do, we are not able to develop the agency to convince people to follow our ideas; our ideas are not yet mass culture, and until they become mass culture, people are less willing to follow. This realization is unfortunate because it means that it is hard to change people's