Transforming habit: revolution, routine and social change

ABSTRACT

Compelling recent scholarly work has explored the crucial role affect, emotion and feeling might play in activating radical social and political change. I argue, however, that some narratives of ‘affective revolution’ may actually do more to obscure than to enrich our understanding of the material relations and routines though which ‘progressive’ change might occur and endure in a given context – while side-stepping the challenge of how to evaluate progress itself in the current socio-political and economic landscape. Drawing on the work of Eve Sedgwick, John Dewey, Felix Ravaisson and others, this article asks whether critical work on habit can provide different, and potentially generative, analytical tools for understanding the contemporary ethical and material complexities of social transformation. I suggest that it habit’s double nature – its enabling of both compulsive repetition and creative becoming – that makes it a rich concept for addressing the propensity of harmful socio-political patterns to persist in the face of efforts to generate greater awareness of their damaging effects, as well as the material forms of automation and coordination on which meaningful societal transformation may depend. I also explore how bringing affect and habit together might productively refigure our understandings of ‘the present’ and ‘social progress’, as well as the available modes of sensing, instigating and responding to change. In turning to habit, then, the primary aim of this article is to examine how social and cultural theory might critically re-approach social change and progressive politics today.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• empathy
• habit
• social change
• John Dewey
• Eve Sedgwick

Acknowledgements

Would like to express my gratitude to Rebecca Coleman and Angharad Closs Stephens for their insightful comments on the article, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their very useful feedback and suggestions for improvement. Thanks also to Ben Anderson and Ruth Raynor for the invitation to present this research for the first time as part of the panels on ‘the Present’ at the AAG 2015 in Chicago. This work was also presented at ‘Understanding Global Politics Affectively’ at the Gender Institute, LSE in 2015 and the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick in 2016, and my thanks go to the organizers and participants of all three events for their incisive questions and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Carolyn Pedwell is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Cultural Sociology in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent, UK. She is the author of Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave: 2014) and Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison (Routledge: 2010).

Notes

1. See Sedgwick (1996, 2003, 2011), Latour (2002), Felski (2015).

2. See Sullivan (2006), Malabou (2008), Shilling (2008), Weiss (2008), Bennett et al. (2013), Grosz (2013).

3. See also Stacey (2014), Wiegman (2014), Pedwell (2014b), Felski (2015).

4. See Pedwell (2012, 2013, 2014a).

5. See Bennett et al. (2013), Sparrow and Hutchinson (2013), Carlisle (2014), Dewsbury and Bissell (2015).

6. See also Bennett (2013, 2015).

7. See Thaler and Sunstein (2008).

8. Although, as Dow Schüll, notes, the ‘nudge’ approach does not quite fit the standard neoliberal model of individual responsibilization: it ‘assumes a choosing subject, but one who is constitutionally ill equipped to make rational, healthy choices’. As such, nudge ‘both presupposed and pushes against freedom’ and ‘falls somewhere between enterprise and submission, responsibility and discipline’ (2016, p. 12).

9. For Deleuze, in Difference and repetition ([1968] 2011) – a key text for the renewed interest in habit in critical theory and continental philosophy – the fundamental intertwinement of repetition with singularity and the production of difference means that ‘habit never gives rise to true repetition: sometimes the action changes and is perfected while the intention remains constant; sometimes the action remains the same in different contexts and with different intentions’ (p. 5).

10. Ravaisson was writing at a time when late nineteenth century physical psychology and neuropsychology began to interpret habits ‘as a purely physio-anatomical set of instinctual reflexes’ in ways that ‘trespassed on questions of the will, consciousness and freedom that had earlier been the exclusive terrains of theology and philosophy’. In this context, he offered a reading of habit that enabled earlier theological and philosophical notions to align with, without fully capitulating to, the emerging physical sciences (Bennett 2015, p. 6).

11. As Carlisle argues, this interpretation of habit ‘accommodates the idea that human beings can possess a divine gift when it is given to them, and are even able to cultivate it through their own actions’. However, understanding habit in this way also ‘avoids the implication that it is entirely up to individuals to actualize the divinely infused habitus, since this has its own momentum. This means that someone who receives grace can consider it her own, while remaining aware that it is God’s power that moves through her when she is inclined to do good’ (2014, pp. 120–121).

12. See also (Shilling 2008, Weiss 2008, Coleman 2014).

13. As theorized by Spinoza and Deleuze, in particular, affect is inextricably linked to movement. Yet, as Carlisle discusses, this point was actually partially addressed in much earlier philosophical discussions of habit. Writing before Ravaisson, in his 1736 book, The Analogy of Religion, Joseph Butler was the first to note that ‘repetition has contrasting effects on actions and movements on the one hand, and sensations and feeling on the other’. Yet, he acknowledges that ‘since actions are often prompted or motivated by feelings and sensations the active and the passive aspects of habit combine to produce a more complicated effect’ (Carlisle 2014, p. 27). Moreover, in particular circumstances, feeling or sensing can be ‘turned into an activity’, which can ‘engender a heightening of experience rather than a diminution of feeling’ (p. 82). As such, the ‘law of habit’ is more complex than it appears at first glance.

14. See also Grosz (2013), Carlisle (2014).

15. See also Shilling (2008), Grosz (2013), Coleman (2014).

16. In these ways, Dewey’s framework resonates with other prominent strands of contemporary social and cultural theory, such as Judith Butler’s analysis of gender and sexuality, that conceptualize embodiment and subjectivity as performatively constituted, as well as those that understand social relations and phenomena as working through pulsating networks or assemblages, from Henri Lefevre’s analysis of everyday life and the social production of the city, to Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory, to various ‘new’ materialisms.

17. Dewey’s approach here again overlaps with theories of affect influenced by Spinoza and Deleuze.

18. See Pedwell (2014b).

19. See Bennett (2013, 2015), Bennett et al. (2013), Blackman (2013).

20. See Sullivan (2006, 2015), Weiss (2008).

21. See, for example, Connolly (2002, 2013), Sullivan (2006, 2015), Shilling (2008), Bennett (2013), Bennett et al. (2013), Noble (2013), Fraser et al. (2014).

22. See Young (1990), Kelley (2002), Freeman (2010), Duhigg (2012).

23. See Noble (2013).