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ABSTRACT
Rosa Luxemburg defended a view of spontaneism as a way of according strategic priority to popular initiatives over the directives of vanguard parties. But she never worked out a theory of spontaneism, and consequently it has typically been dismissed as lacking solid grounds. In this paper, I take an initial step toward rehabilitating spontaneism by rethinking its assumptions concerning historical agency in embodied habitual terms. After first outlining Luxemburg’s view of spontaneism itself, I consider individual embodied action and focus on the sort of spontaneity that is exhibited in various forms of skilled expertise. This spontaneity reflects an acquired habitual predispositionality that is never a matter of mindless automaticity, and which in certain cases can involve significant degrees of improvisational creativity. Bringing this to light secures a basic plausibility for spontaneism at the level of individual agency by showing how socially transformative action could possibly be engaged in spontaneously.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 To borrow an expression from Barker (ed.), Revolutionary Rehearsals, and Barker et al. (eds), Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age. The expression derives from Lenin’s retrospective description of the 1905 Russian Revolution as “the ‘dress rehearsal’” for the events of 1917 – see “Left-Wing” Communism, 27. Its potential misleadingness has to do with suggesting a stageism in which such events are regarded as extrinsic to revolution itself.
2 Fracchia, 87.
3 Pedwell, “Transforming Habit”, 95.
4 Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions.
5 Ibid., 141 (emphasis in original, translation modified).
6 Ibid., 158 (emphasis in original).
7 Ibid., 141.
8 Ibid., 158 (translation modified).
9 “The mistakes that are made by a truly revolutionary workers’ movement are, historically speaking, immeasurably more fruitful and more valuable than the infallibility of the best possible Central Committee” – see “Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy”, 265.
10 Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, 170.
11 Ibid., 140, 148, 159.
12 Ibid., 134 (emphasis in original, translation modified).
13 Ibid., 144–45 (translation modified).
14 Luxemburg, “Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy”, 265.
15 Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, 141.
16 Ibid., 159, 148.
17 Ibid., 161 (italics added).
18 Ypi, “Rosa Luxemburg.”
19 Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, 141.
20 Ibid., 176 (emphasis in original, translation modified).
21 The work of Hubert Dreyfus is an important and influential reference point in these discussions, although as we shall see, this account is ultimately flawed.
22 Merleau-Ponty, 144.
23 Ibid., 148 (translation slightly modified).
24 Ibid., 153.
25 Ibid., 143 (italics added).
26 Dreyfus, “Intelligence Without Representation,” 372.
27 Fantasia, 75–120.
28 Zemni et al., 202–7; Snow and Moss, 1133.
29 López, 231.
30 Malabou, xi.
31 Carlisle, 5.
32 Dewey, 50–51.
33 See Breivik, 93.
34 Dreyfus, “The Return of the Myth of the Mental”, 353.
35 E.g., Toner et al. (eds), Continuous Improvement.
36 Shusterman, 13.
37 Toner, “Habitual Reflexivity and Skilled Action”, 11.
38 In Work on Myth, Blumenberg distinguished between the “work of myth” and “work on myth”.
39 See Bergamin.
40 Toner et al., “Considering the Role of Cognitive Control in Expert Performance”, 1138–40.
41 Ibid., 1140.
42 Bermúdez, 912 (italics added).
43 Toner et al., “Considering the Role of Cognitive Control in Expert Performance”, 1139–40.
44 Gucciardi and Dimmock, 54–58; Mullen and Hardy, 291–95.
45 Bermúdez, 918.
46 See Bergamin, 421–22.
47 Miyahara et al., 134, 128.
48 Glăveanu, 84.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 80.
51 Ibid. (italics modified).
52 Berliner, 217.
53 Sawyer, 114; cited in Glăveanu, 86.
54 Becker, 171.
55 Benson, 142–3.
56 Pike, 89–90.
57 Ibid., 90–91.
58 Herbie Hancock reflecting on an early learning moment with Miles Davis, cited in Torrance and Schumann 254.
59 Bergamin, 417.
60 Ibid.
61 Smith, 42.
62 Pike, 91.
63 Eisenberg, 90.
64 Küpers, 117.
65 Glăveanu, 87.
66 Ibid., 84.
67 Gallagher, 200.
68 Torrance and Schumann, 265 (original italics).
69 Glăveanu, 85–86.
70 Pedwell, Revolutionary Routines, 11.
71 Pedwell, “Transforming Habit”, 107, 95 (original italics). See also Cuffari. A detailed and historically significant example of this is elaborated in Belhadj.
72 Pedwell, “Transforming Habit”, 95.
73 This is an expanded version of a paper presented at the “People on Streets: Critical Phenomenologies of Embodied Resistance” conference held at Universität Paderborn in May 2022, organized by Marieke Borren, Sara Cohen Shabot, Katja Čičigoj, and Maria Robaszkiewicz. Special thanks to Maria and Marieke for their enthusiastic and patient support in bringing it to publication, as well as to two anonymous reviewers at JBSP for helpful comments.