On habit and performance

A recent editorial, aimed at offering a ‘snapshot’ of the performing arts at the turn of the 2020s, focused on the ‘unfolding debate of decentring the field of theatre and performance studies’ (Zaroulia and Odom 2021: 1). This decentring impulse can be situated in the wake of major changes in perspectives and the ways we live on this planet brought about by upheavals and developments such as the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, decolonization, the climate crisis, COVID-19 as well as a heightened awareness about diversity and inclusivity related to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and different abilities. Faced by the magnitude and wide-ranging impact of such ongoing sociocultural and ecological currents, the customary and conventional bearings of generating and studying performance have been pushed offkilter, demanding calibration even as events are still in motion. Although the authors of that editorial were aware of the ‘inherent limitations’ of any single approach to provide an overview of this decentring, thus endeavouring to include as many realities as possible, the process of going about it still ‘exposed how ingrained, and often unconscious, certain assumptions around knowledge, pedagogies and disciplinary languages are’ (2, emphasis added). For example, the well-meaning invitation itself to individuals and organizations to contribute to the snapshot uncovered hierarchies of power and responsibility, however unintentional these may have been.

What the authors of that editorial called ‘assumptions’ can be re-read as embodied patterns of thought, or simply habits that are certainly ‘ingrained’ and indeed ‘often unconscious’ until perceived in the unfamiliar light of other ways of being and doing, whether necessitated by how we view and treat one another as human beings or geopolitical entities, a virus that has transformed how we conceive of presence and communicate with one another (digitally), or even the air we breathe and the temperatures we feel. As Nesreen Hussein observes: ‘gestures of inclusion are problematic when carried out without challenging engrained inequalities and epistemic privileges, and without consideration of the intersectionality of race, class, caste, gender, sexuality, ability, and global asymmetries’ (2022: 3, emphasis added). The ‘decentring’ of the field in terms of its pedagogies and languages is, pertinently, a de-habitation of past practices as much as it is a re-habitation for the future as survival. In between that past and future time lies the present of habitation, how we live today, how we perform now. In this regard, then, the process of ‘unlearning’ past and long-standing practices can only occur as a ‘relearning’ of new or different habits (of performing).

Writing about ‘theatre’s responsibility in the spectacle of climate change’, Zlatko Paković calls for ‘a change of habits [that] is necessary not only in energy sourcing but also in our daily practices and our relationship towards the fundamental values of contemporary society and culture’ (2023: 44, emphasis added). Paković’s impassioned and hard-hitting account starts with the imperative to use the appropriate terminology in order not to camouflage the problem in question. Not to do so and call something by another name is to remain in the clutches of old habits and deflect the full force of our actions. In Paković’s case, to refer to our ‘imminent ecological catastrophe’ as either ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ is to shift the blame and responsibility to ‘nature itself’, which is tantamount to ‘a semantic violence that inevitably has a detrimental impact on the way we see reality’ (45). The way we see reality is, pertinently, how we construct that reality. To make a different reality involves not so much an eradication of habits – for that is an impossibility – but a change in the way we approach and in habit the world around us. The implication is – as we argue in the present editorial and as comes across in this issue of Performance Research – that habit is not necessarily the poison we have been ‘habituated’ to believe it is, but can also be the remedy that relocates (rather than ‘re-centres’) us.

ON HABIT

This issue of Performance Research considers – and in some cases ‘reconfigures’ – the role played by habit in performance practices and studies. In addition to the exploration of the rich connections and overlaps between habits and performance as practices of repetition, enactment and embodiment, this volume seeks to contextualize and balance the predominant view that habits are obstacles in restraining innovation and freedom in behaviour and imagination. Far from arresting creativity, the power of habit can be located in its stabilizing capacity that enables generative change in processes like training, composition (including devising and adaptation), directing, writing, rehearsing, performing and indeed living. The intimate links between habits and material environment are also pertinent to site-sensitive issues of staging, design and location.

Clare Carlisle outlines some possible manifestations of habit in human behaviour, ranging from the individual to the collective, from active to passive habituations, from the source of certain actions to the result of others, from aptitudes or skills to tendencies and inclinations, from nervous tics to routines (2014: 7). It is through a study of such manifestations that a complex appreciation of habit emerges. In acting, dancing, playing a musical instrument and other modes of performing (including in daily life), patterns of habitual use are generally frowned upon in conditioning movement and thus limiting the exploration and range of other possibilities. Conversely, the actual practices themselves have always embraced a more integrated understanding that combines supposedly ‘bad habits’ (for example, automatic and ‘mindless’ behaviour) with ‘good practice’ (for example, mindful awareness) (cf. Marshall 2008: 97–9). This issue of Performance Research delves deeper into the nature of habits by engaging with a broader and more nuanced understanding of the processes, mechanisms and potentials involved as they relate to specific situations, contexts and practices.

The dynamics of habit are relational (in always being relative and/or comparable to other elements) and situated (in being cued by and in affecting material setting). The spatio-temporal contexts of such dynamics allude to what in fields of study like philosophy, human geography, sociology and psychology is often referred to as the ‘milieu’ of habits, which indexes the material surroundings that frame and shape human behaviour. The implications of the milieus of studios (for training, devising, composing and rehearsing), of technical and design workshops, of theatres and other spaces of performance, are many and far-reaching. Foremost among these are questions of agency as distributed across bodies and environment (including objects, technology and landscapes), which in turn point to a broader and more complex understanding of habit on a human–non-human continuum. In the context of performance, such a conceptualization of agency has further radical ramifications that involve notions of intentionality, consciousness, awareness, memory and voluntary action. It is for this reason that a reappraisal of habit in performance processes is long overdue.

Apart from some isolated writings, including our individual contributions in the context of performer training (Camilleri 2013: 46–8, 2018) and within the broader field of performance (Dewsbury 2012), not much has been written in a direct and explicit way about the complex characteristics and implications of habits in aesthetic performance. The operative and important caveat here is ‘in a direct and explicit way’ that engages with the terminology of habit rather than as something else. A fundamental problem when addressing habit that emerged with the Call for Proposals for this issue, and that also surfaced when the first drafts of the articles and artist pages were received, concerned the fact that everything-and-all seems to be or is related to habit because, as a phenomenon that is manifested in being/performing body in space and time, it deals with embodiment, behaviour, cognition and psychology as much as it does with wider socio-cultural and political movements. These and other topics (like technique, skill and memory to mention a few) are, of course, amply and sophisticatedly discussed elsewhere. And yet, in the field of performance (especially aesthetic performance), ‘habit-as-habit’ is only very rarely discussed in its own terms – it is always something else like body memory, implicit memory, reflex, automaticity, ‘bad practice’, technique, routine, custom, convention and many others. Moreover, whenever habit is mentioned, it is almost always something that needs ‘counteracting’ (Rodenburg 1992: 170), ‘undoing’ (Cull 2013: 177), ‘surpassing’ (Fraleigh 2019: 382) or ‘inhibiting and surrendering’ (Hansen 2022: 154).

Indeed, there is ‘not much’ or ‘very little’ in the literature of aesthetic performance that compares to the upsurge of concerted and focused critical interest across the social sciences and the humanities as reflected in the special issues dedicated to habit in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (42:1, 2011), Body & Society (19:2/3, 2013), Cultural Geographies (22:1, 2015) and Applied Psychology: Health and well-being (forthcoming), as well as in numerous publications in the past decade such as A History of Habit: From Aristotle to Bourdieu (Sparrow and Hutchinson 2013), On Habit (Carlisle 2014) and Habits: Pragmatist approaches from cognitive science, neuroscience, and social theory (Caruana and Testa 2020). Furthermore, this scholarly and scientific attention has been complemented by a popular interest as evidenced in international bestsellers like The Power of Habit: Why we do what we do in life and business (Duhigg 2014) and Atomic Habits: An easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones (Clear 2018). This volume of Performance Research aims to complement this body of work as well as to highlight its relevance in the context of performance by providing multiand interdisciplinary reflections on the topic. One way it attempts this is by addressing and defamiliarizing the two prevalent and often unquestioned assumptions already mentioned. First, that habit is very rarely discussed in its ‘own terms’, in the sense that it is always camouflaged as – or in the shadow of, or as a prop for – something else, be that embodiment, memory, social conventions or any established practice or subject. Second, that habit is invariably always something ‘bad’ – a block or an obstacle – that needs to be dismissed and combated, which explains why it rarely features in its own terms. These two predominant assumptions came across very tangibly in the seventy-odd proposals received for this issue of Performance Research, which, considered together, serve as a kind of informal litmus test for the state of affairs about the topic of habit. Hence the timeliness of this issue, especially in the context of the decentring of studies mentioned at the beginning of this editorial.

HISTORICAL AND CONCEPTUAL CONTEXTS

The overall negative evaluation of habit in aesthetic performance reflects stronger currents in Western philosophy. Habit has a long history, especially as it features in expositions on the ethical life and practices of living, dating from Plato and Aristotle, to Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, to René Descartes, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, to American pragmatism (notably William James and John Dewey), and in more recent times, to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze (Sparrow and Hutchinson 2013; Caruana and Testa 2020: 3). It is a rich and multifaceted history that accounts for a complex aspect in human existence, indeed of all life: that habit is a kind of pharmakon that is both cure and poison in strengthening some aspects of life and deadening others (Malabou 2008: xix).

Nineteenth-century French philosopher Félix Ravaisson, renowned for his seminal 1838 text De l’habitude (translated as Of Habit in 2008 [1838]), captures this complexity in what he calls the double law of habit, that is, that habit strengthens action/movement and weakens feeling/sensation at the same time, thereby generating contrasting effects on the active and passive dimensions of physical and moral action. The point to underline is that these conflicting aspects of habit are not only complementary but constitutive of each other. That is, they do not exist in isolation and as such cannot be considered in the absence of each other. However, as the predominant pejorative associations in everyday parlance show, it is usually the negative aspects of habit that are generally highlighted. Though there are various precedents of this one-dimensional formulation, it is in the twentieth century that the paradoxical and complex understanding of habit seems to have been largely reduced to poison: as mechanicity, automatism, form but no content.

Catherine Malabou identifies two fundamental outlooks in the European philosophical tradition when it comes to habit. There is the perspective that includes Descartes and Kant, where habit is conceived in terms of ‘mechanism, routine process, devitalization of sense … the disease of repetition that threatens the freshness of thought and stifles the voice’. And then there is the consideration of habit, which can be traced back to Aristotle, as ‘a primary ontological phenomenon’, a life force or ‘law of being’, open to change via the disposition that accrues with and that accompanies repetition over the slowcreep of time (Malabou 2008: vii).

The conception of habit as a life force is inseparable from milieu. Here an organism develops multiple propensities that are contingent on habitat and that accrue in the repetition of habitation. These dispositions are materially incipient in the environment and in the conditions that surround the organism (Dewsbury 2012: 76). Skill sets, habits and other ways of living emerge and are developed from these inclinations, thus sharing the same ontology. This conception gained visibility mainly through a French philosophic lineage that revolves around Ravaisson (1813–1900), who echoes earlier writings by Bichat (1771–1802) and Maine de Biran (1766–1824) on the double law of habit, and whose work was subsequently invoked by Deleuze (1925–1995) via Henri Bergson’s (1859–1941) uptake of various aspects of Ravaisson’s Of Habit.

PERFORMANCE CONTEXTS

In the context of performance, especially the performing arts, there does seem to exist a disciplinary anxiety when it comes to the doubleedged blade or, to use Malabou’s metaphor, the poison–cure pharmakon that is habit. Such anxiety is reflected in the various ways the word ‘habit’ is avoided – or camouflaged as something else, including as ‘habitus’ (see Crossley 2013) – while talking about the phenomenon. Indicative is the challenge to find chapters and sections (let alone books and articles) with the word ‘habit’ in the title – and when there is, it generally marks a negative to be countered or a kind of reflective surface to make a point about other themes like ‘presence’, ‘implicit memory’, ‘mind–body connections’, ‘training’ and ‘embodied cognition’. And yet, despite these currents, it is possible to engage in an archaeological exercise to unearth subterranean discourses about habit, especially in discussions related to contemporary dance. These nuggets of insight are not always easy to detect or locate due to the ubiquity (and thus wide applicability) of habit and of its frequent accompaniment by a whiff of moralizing due to its association with obstacles, for example: ‘Habits … introduce murkiness [and] keep me stuck’ (Fraleigh 2019: 382, emphasis in the original). This real but generally unacknowledged sense of ‘murkiness’ often transcends the physical and the gestural to reflect or infect the perception of other dimensions such as one’s ‘attitude’, ‘character’ and ‘spirit’ due to one’s inability (read ‘laziness of engagement’) to be free from the deadening effect of ‘easy’ habits. This ‘murkiness’ explains in part habit’s lack of prominent visibility in book, chapter and article titles about aesthetic performance. Index entries can also be indicative; see, for example: ‘habit (automated response, reflex), inhibiting and surrendering’ (Hansen 2022: 154), which captures the two facets highlighted above concerning the camouflage treatment and obstacle status of habits.

An example of the insights that aesthetic performance can provide involves Vida L. Midgelow’s reflections on body memory and habit in the context of her main discussion on ‘dramaturgical consciousness within improvised dance performance’ (2015: 106). She writes that, at first glance, the dramaturgical and the improvisational appear as ‘binary opposites’, with the former focused on memory and the carefully constructed, and the latter oriented towards the new in resisting ‘controlling mechanisms’ (107, 112):

In body memory the emphasis is less upon an act of recollection from the present back to the past and more upon an ongoing re-enactment of the past within the course of the body’s performance. As such, the body holds within it an accumulation of skills and experiences from our lived past, as habits in the body. And, while habitual memories have been described as part of an inattentive recognition, resulting in a shift away from an object of perception towards habitual physical actions, implicit memories do not merely operate through bodily reflexes. (Midgelow 2015: 113, emphasis added)

Midgelow’s nuanced assessment of the role that habit dynamics play goes against the grain when she concludes that ‘the dancer can only generate the equally important complexity of response [in improvisation] when aided by the essential functions of procedural memory’, which she aligns with ‘the habitual’ that is often ‘denigrated’ and viewed as ‘a hindrance that needs to be overcome in order to arrive at new movement’ (114). In this scenario, then, habit can be something to be cultivated, adapted and applied rather than dismissed outright.

Another example involves Sondra Fraleigh’s (2019) referencing of habits in the context of subjectivity and intentionality in Butoh and dance more generally. Although her appraisal of habit and the habitual is not exactly as ‘poison’, Fraleigh tends to use it in the modern conventional sense as restricting freedom and innovation, for example, in her call to ‘give up your habitual way of dancing’ (386). Although she allows the rhetorical possibility for something else to occur with or alongside habit, she does not explicitly articulate what this may be: ‘Habits interrupt an easy flow and introduce murkiness. I want to move freely – with trust and ease according to my intentions – but habits keep me stuck. Or do they?’ (382, emphasis in original). Fraleigh’s concession to habit, which she associates with and re-reads through (in camouflage style) Edmund Husserl’s ‘individual habitus’ and ‘habitus of the subject’, involves the cordials of conscious attention, awareness and intentionality, in the process laundering habit through the filter of the dancer’s subjectivity (382–3).

The ‘training of attention’ and awareness, along with the ‘defamiliarization of routine’, also accompany ‘the undoing of habit’ in Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca’s exposition on ‘theatres of immanence’ with special reference to Allan Kaprow and Lygia Clark (Cull 2013). Although Cull Ó Maoilearca deploys the term ‘habit’ in the book mostly in the conventional sense that it needs resisting and ‘breaking with’ (72) and ‘to think our way out of or beyond the socially habituated body’ (166), the section on ‘[i]mmanent theatre in the context of the postdramatic’ (195–8) includes a more nuanced line of argumentation via John Protevi’s reading of Deleuze’s ‘ontological status of habit’. In this context, in functioning ‘on the level of the metabolic or organic, as well as at the level of the perceptual and imaginative’, habits are ‘absolutely necessary to our survival as organisms. The lungs have to repeat their habitual synthesis of oxygen, for instance, in order for the human body to continue to live’ (196). As such, we are literally (organically and culturally) our habits, and to resist or contain or transform a habit involves a work upon oneself through attention and defamiliarization. These insights lead Cull Ó Maoilearca to conclude that ‘rather than reject habit outright, we will go on [to] question whether there might be habits and expectations that we can do without’ (196). In the context of her discussion on the ‘theatres of immanence’ of Goat Island and Robert Wilson, the regular and predictable time that the metabolic habit of breathing exemplifies is essential for postdramatic theatre’s ‘distortion’ of time, thus drawing attention to and defamiliarizing it.

The above considerations in the work of Midgelow, Fraleigh and Cull Ó Maoilearca are emblematic of the kind of discussions about habit that feature – at times marginally or almost by accident – in the literature of aesthetic performance. This issue of Performance Research pushes such valuable insights deeper and further, precisely by spotlighting the dynamics and mechanisms of habit with as little camouflage as possible.

HABITS AND IMAGES OF THOUGHT: PHILOSOPHICALLY FRAMING THE 'ON HABIT 'CONTRIBUTIONS

To discuss habit in its own terms involves focused and subtle examinations that draw on the long and rich history of the subject across various disciplines, rather than, it must be said, rely on the often facile and reductive representations of contemporary usage. To this end, it is important to resist a dualist framework that considers the phenomenon simplistically as a counterfeit condition, a copy of a movement, thought pattern or process that lacks intentionality, attention and awareness. The fact that it can be problematic to identify a habit in isolation or to distinguish between a habit and something else without the relevant context (for example, a practice or ritual or a custom or a nervous tic), suggests a more complex occurrence.

Instead of a binary, Ravaisson proposes viewing the process of habit formation as a ‘dividing line, or the middle term, between will and nature; but it is a moving middle term, a dividing line that is always moving, and which advances by an imperceptible progress from one extremity to the other’ (Ravaisson 2008 [1838]: 59, emphasis added). The conception of a shifting middle term, one that is particular to bodies and sensitive to circumstances and milieu, partly explains the shape-shifting manifestations of habit. It can also be a strategy that, in resisting the fixity and determination of a focal centre for established practices, contributes to the decentring impulse in the fields of theatre, dance, music and performance studies.

Conceived in this manner, habit can be interpreted as providing a fuller and more dynamic picture of the complex entanglements and overlaps with other areas of human activity and knowledge, especially with pedagogical processes like training and transformational practices like performance, but even more broadly to include the socio-cultural, geopolitical and ecological upheavals with which this editorial opened. The picture that emerges from a more nuanced reading is thus one where habit mediates and/or contrasts nature and culture (life), inside and outside (space), freedom and necessity (dynamics), perception and memory (experience), past and future (time), and, crucially in the context of performer and behaviour processes, psycho and physical, body and world.

This issue of Performance Research situates habit within a broad spectrum that ranges from performing bodies in theatre, dance, music and other genres like boxing, magic and photography, to performing milieus in different geographical and historical contexts and in a variety of technological scenarios that involve artificial intelligence, immersion, mobile apps, robots and algorithms. It also cuts across disciplines such as human geography, philosophy, ethics and law, as well as across viewpoints of training, performers and spectators.

In light of the many intersections between habit and performance, the articles of this issue are organized according to five main strands that will be briefly detailed at the end of the editorial. First, however, one way of reading the articles here is in keeping in mind two thematic strands of thought that create associations and connections across the articles and artist pages in ways that help pose significant questions for thinking better the relationship between habit and performance. The first strand dives deeper into the architecture of habit formation and aims to think aesthetic performance in terms of contraction and repetition. The second pulls back out to see habit staged by performance as a means for presenting the question of the human in new ways, especially against the backdrop of ever more technological interferences within everyday life.

THE FORCE OF CONTRACTION AND REPETITION

One key aspect of the interest in bringing habit, both as a concept and a phenomenon, into conversation with performance of one form or another is the clarity with which it enables us to think through and tease apart the relationship between thought and action, and significantly in ways that do not prioritize one term over the other. Instructing thought, the thinking behind performance choices if you like, are many familiar factors depending on the specific mode of performance being considered: these include the text, score, movement or choreography being performed; the previous histories of performance of these texts, moves, scores or choreographies; the cultural representations and contexts underwriting the text or event or rules of performance; a shared grammar of association when addressing common themes of concern (political rallies, ecological crises, social traumas) or emotion (anger, grief, love); and so on. It is then very easy to find arguments here floundering upon where thought ends and action begins. It is at such points of questioning origins and agency that habit is perhaps at its most interesting in that it pivots upon the idea that there is no punctual space to place neither thought nor action as discrete enough to distinguish one from the other. This is why, for Deleuze, habit is about contraction (1994): thought and action get contracted until they become one and the same; and the logic of habit is then one that unpacks how that distinction between action and thought gets ironed out. And in performance, the force of repetition is about the contractile power of visceral presence within performing bodies.

It is then the act of repetition, so central to habit, that irons out the gaps in the flow of action that thinking (too much) might bring; this does not remove thinking, rather it makes of thinking something more effortless, graceful and fast. And all those factors that shape and even hinder performance come from this idea of habit as contraction, that we, as living organisms, are ‘triply contractile: actively (representation), passively (perception), and viscerally (organically)’ (Posteraro 2016: 97). Taking the example of watching a play by Shakespeare, we actively appreciate the poetry of expression (because we are taught to have this appreciation through the representation of the words we have learned to give set meanings to), we passively see the movement of objects as known things with expected capacities (in Macbeth, for example, the object of the dagger associates with the capacity to kill) and we viscerally feel our heart beat faster and our breathing tighten (as a howl or a cadence drop in the diction of a line of text pulls on our heart strings). These are all contractions, all habits, such that we are synthetic beings contracting all these past associations that have put that play or performance in place, and created the particular affective capacities of our body over that time.

Another way of looking at this is to start the other way around and say that there is action in thought, micro-perceptive synapses of electricity firing as a form of physicality in thinking separate to any other more discernible physical action being manifested. These sparks of life that seemingly run under the surface create many different avenues for potential and subtly alter interpretations, harmonies and moves as they occur. In effect there are ever changing subterranean narratives creating different ‘leading ons’ from one thing to the next, many of which of course do not get actualized into, or acted out in, the light of day.

Having this fold of action and thought foremost in our minds brings to attention this force of repetition. Conceptually, what is at stake in this repetition is the aspiration for smoothing out the distinction of thought and action to require less effort, be more graceful or become more natural precisely through repeated actions of one form or another. Physically we are made to understand more pertinently the micro-perceptive impacts repetitive acts wire into bodies for future action. Performance is then an ideal art form within which to site and discuss the logics of habit because the visceral presence of the performing body is central; although, arguably as you will see in some of the articles, this visceral centrality is waning with AI deciding lighting cues and robots appearing on cast lists.

If there is no discernible distinction between thought and action, no starting point and origin of agency, it is no wonder that habit is a difficult concept to address because it is a difficult phenomenon to capture. This is why, much like writing of performances, and in many of the contributions to this issue, as soon as habit comes into view it almost simultaneously slips from the author’s and reader’s grasp. This is not a failure but rather speaks to the fact that habit is about the way living beings accommodate activities, performances, routines and skills in transforming to a greater or lesser extent what they are becoming. In other words, habit is not about immediately tangible things nor straightforward representational information that can function as generalized, and thus immediately understood, instruction. Habit is also like a contraction of a virus, an infection, in that you rarely notice exactly when you picked one up.

In relation to this difficulty of capturing and articulating habit, Deleuze’s conceptualization of habit as the first passive synthesis of time and as a contraction (1991) has valuable currency, especially when finding ways to see how habit plays such a vital role in performance. The contraction of habit, for Deleuze, is not undertaken actively by the mind but passively by the body, and delves into the chemistry, electricity and fluidity of the organic, plugging us into the different rhythms of the body, namely the cardiac, digestive, molecular and nervous. To receive information, best understood as sensations in this now more visceral appreciation of habit, depends on these passive syntheses and rhythms of the body, with every organism itself being a synthesis of water, nitrogen, carbon, chlorites, sulphites and so on (see Williams 2011: 38). As Daniel Smith puts this, helping us expand our understanding of what is taking place here, these ‘organic syntheses are contracted habits’ where ‘each contraction constitutes a living present of the body in which the future appears as need and the past as genetic heredity’ (2013).

In a more immediate timescale than the genetic, skilled performance is acquired through oscillations of the retention of past experiences, rehearsals and trained moves, that accrete and come together over time (and repetition) to create an internal choreography within the body of potential future acts that in effect construct a more limited palette of ranged expectations. This oscillation of retention and expectation is anticipation wired into the body through experience. The art of working upon these oscillations is precisely one that is found in many appreciations of the training for artistic performance. Take, for example, Konstantin Stanislavsky’s comments on the art of the stage:

The necessity of teaching the actor to search in himself for the right understanding of the value of words, teaching him to develop his attention and to concentrate introspectively on the organic qualities of his part and on the nature of human emotions and not to judge from outside the effectiveness of one kind of action or another in the belief that it is possible to learn how to act one kind of feeling or another. (Stanislavsky 1967: 98)

In summary of this first strand of thought, habit is then a reservoir of anticipations filled up by past experiences that help create a more expansive repertoire for future acts in performance. As Grosz puts it: ‘Habits provide the ability to change one’s tendencies, to reorient one’s actions to address the new, and to be able to experience the unexpected’ (2013: 221). Thinking performance through habit is not just about fine-tuning bodies to do again what has been done before well; it is as much about understanding better the ability to improvise along with the unexpected.

TECHNOLOGY AND THE QUESTION OF THE HUMAN

If we contract habits and come to repeat actions with less thought, the question becomes where, in this fold of thought and action, does agency lie? What cues the action or what drives the thought? Are we externally cued by the infrastructures and people around us? Or, do our visceral drives censor already our selection and range of choices about what we are going to do? The capacity the human has to affect something and to be affected by something, to show emotions for example, comes from the way we develop habits to deal with certain experiences. Do not habits effect these capacities, altering the efficacy of such affections to be more or less powerful in their impacts upon us? This is about the question of the human, and part of art’s power is in presenting this question to us when we experience it. Staging habit as central to aesthetic performance is to equally see how performance is a perfect site to discuss the logics of habit, and thus to continue performance’s history of being the ideal site to question what it means to be human. As Deleuze puts it: ‘Isn’t this the answer to the question “what are we?” We are habits, nothing but habits – the habit of saying “I”. Perhaps, there is no more striking answer to the problem of the Self’ (1991: x).

If there is one note from the way habit recasts the relation between thought and action through contraction and repetition, and that focuses this address of the question of the human at play in this issue, it is in the implied rejection of stable and substantial identities. This is because the dynamics of those oscillations between retention and expectation are shaping habits, and, as per Deleuze, shaping us. The point is that, in thinking this way, are there not many more possibilities for you to be other than who you think you are; or who you get identified as; or for what the human might be becoming? This latter question is more pertinent than ever given our increasing immersion in the reach of ever more expanding technological infrastructures of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and human– machine interfaces and co-dependency. This is equally the rejection of difference understood by way of a dialectical opposition or an ordering. This means that synthesizing difference is not the only outcome to aim for as there is, with habit understood in the ways presented within this issue of Performance Research, the chaotic, the new and the questioning, all now being allowed to remain as more open endgame states for performance to drop the curtain upon.

A significant lodestar here is Gilbert Simondon (2011 and 2022) and the way in which his work helps us to think through sequentially perception, imagination and invention. Many of this issue’s articles and artist pages stage different modes of perception, different arts of imagination and then the resulting different appreciations of invention, including showcasing the conceptual manner of thinking performance training, action and improvisation through these terms. One implication is the way in which we can now see how actions change invention even when equally different inventions present the same actions. So much of performance is scripted behaviours or skilfully learned routines, so how do we capture the new and singular as opposed to the similar and general? Habit dances upon the line between these oppositions; there of course needs to be some form of consistency for self-reference (that this performance is a discernible interpretation of this or that dance or play) but there equally needs to be disruption to traditions that would otherwise trap us within the ever same.

A significant part of the debates held within this issue of Performance Research comes from the time of its publication in the third decade of the twenty-first century where it is becoming clearer that instead of asking what is essential of the human, or animal or AI, we are starting to ask what is the relation between habit and intelligence, instinct, and imagination across all entities? This is a theme in many of the articles, and will offer a way of interpreting, placing or orienting future debate with the many problematics the papers address. We are thinking here especially of the more or less immersive, instructive and disruptive presence of different forms of contemporary technologization (of the social and of life). Is not the question of whether machines think as much a question of whether or not machines have habits? Is it possible to argue that the learning in machine learning is just ever more sophisticated habits of association? We are also acutely aware of new technological tools, and technically tooled ideas, for thinking differently of the modes of contagion in performance. These necessarily include new affective states between bodies, machines, performers and audience (all as a practice of technology), and are equally necessarily compositional as well as decompositional or disruptive. The ultimate point being, at least for this editorial on habit and performance, that habit is both the means that enables us to attach to these new compositions as well as the means by which we shield ourselves from the destructive forces they present.

For Simondon, the new compositions of humans and technology result in the production of new behaviours and milieu, and are broadly understood as inventions – inventions that are then equally transformative of the human. This is, of course, a recursive loop reshaping what the human is becoming in much the same way as we see in the logic of habit. A couple of key problems emerge from this increase in the complexity of our understanding of the role technology now plays in our lives, and that comes through in between the different arguments of the articles in this issue that address technologies explicitly. The first relates to how these transformations of the human are to be understood and evaluated. Crucial to any discussion here is for there to be a wariness, at least initially, of any new understandings to fall back upon normative and technocratic judgements; these would necessarily continue to centre such evaluations on traditional and static appreciations of the human and thus underplay the potential impacts of the changes taking place, particularly upon the more subtle implications technology – and its pervasive and invasive infrastructures – has upon human behaviour.

The second is in heightening the importance of the question about the agency behind action, which we have already covered in part within this editorial. Increasingly, aesthetic performance is putting on show the powerful effects of matter in steering courses of action and informing interpretations of the events unfolding, interpretations that are both affective and intellectual (felt and thought, if you like). The matters being spoken of in this issue are several but include, as well as the molecular biological matter of bodies and what material they ingest, the spacing between bodies, the material objects defining territory and association and the physics of light, scent and sound. In Simondon, this agency of matter can be, for clarity’s sake, understood as potential where potentials in matter can cross thresholds instigating the foundation of new relations of association that are autonomous from the human subject as directing agent (see Massumi 2012: 24–6). What is so important here is that it scrambles the timing of the effects of these transformations. Thus, in a further twist of that recursive loop, better understood in this context as a recursive causality, ‘invention is the bringing into present operation of future functions that potentialize the present for an energetic leap into the new’ (ibid). In other words, the components of the new relation are in the present but only tangible in, or to be understood from, their future emergence.

The radical empiricism of William James helps bring us back to focus upon appreciating this recursive causality in relation to the psychology of the human emerging from these inventive twists of technology, matter and new behavioural habits and environments. Interpretations and ideas emanating from these new inventions of the human are no longer defined ‘as a representation or modification of the mind but as a process by which mind is made’ and consciousness is no longer ‘defined as substantial reality, nor even as a reflexive act’ but becomes rather the ‘movement of what is being made conscious’ (Lapoujade 2020: 3). Thus, think upon the technological snapshots held within some of the articles in this issue, the images presented or the artistic witness statements made, as captures of the new movements of human consciousness, and thus habits of association, that are emerging in these interfaces of the twenty-first century.

EXPECTATIONS: THE PAPERS TO COME

The human we are beginning to see staged is then becoming less and less determined and we are seeing sighted more and more a sense of the ontogenetic laboratory spaces of the human in its ongoing evolution. We would expect nothing less of aesthetic performance in the twenty-first century and habit is a concept for making the most of these expectations:

A created object is not a materialized image, nor is it placed arbitrarily in the world like an object among other objects in order to overload nature with an artificial supplement; it is (through its origin) and remains (through its function) a linkage system between the living and its milieu, a double point in which the subjective world and the objective world communicate. (Simondon 2022: 186)

The first section, which includes four articles by Dick McCaw, Ilinca Todorut, Filippo Romanello and Phoebe Robinson, with one artist page by Elizabeth Stich, focuses upon performance itself from acting to dance, drawing in questions of belonging, creativity, mimesis, repetition and training. The second section, a short one on sound and sonic performance comprising of an essay led by Sam Curkpatrick and an artist page by Angus Tarnawsky, brings new perspectives upon the art of listening that unpacks the juxtaposing yet complementary roles of a lightness of touch in improvisation with the depth of history in Indigenous cultures. The third section spatializes and historicizes the debates in between habit and performance through three vignette-style articles by Olly Crick, Maheshwar Kumar, Amarjeet Nayak and Pranaya Kumar Swain, and Eddie Hanchen Feng, taking us to performances that are archived through time, foundational of diasporic cultures and instructive of national characteristics and characters. The penultimate section places us firmly within the here and now of the twenty first century, housing four articles by Andrew Lapworth and Tom Roberts, John Matthews, Sarah Levinsky, and Irene Alcubilla Troughton, and includes two artist pages by Katherine Rees and Francesco Bentivegna, all of which address the question of the in-between of the human and technology where their respective habits of awareness, intelligence and autonomy blur. The final section is comprised of three articles by Sarah Kate Crews, Aileen K. Robinson, and Sean Mulcahy and Kate Seear, with one artist page by Tom Rodgers, and brings the issue home and back to the upper cut and surprise of the present by focusing upon habits themselves through their performative aspects in arenas as diverse as boxing rings, magic shows, court rooms and personal after-images – thus ending with the reminder for us to never forget the role that habit plays in the everyday, preparing us for what is about to come next.