What is habit?

"One may say that no real movement becomes aware of its global character all at once, but only gradually through experience—in other words, when it learns from the facts that nothing which exists is natural (in the non-habitual sense of the word), but rather exists because of the existence of certain conditions, whose disappearance cannot remain without consequences."

Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks  (1971: pg. 158).

It is not easy to separate nature and habit, if "nature" refers to a set of preconditions, rather than predeterminations, of human action, and moreover, if habit is more than a thoughtless internalization ("routinization") of social norms. Why did we ever assume that habitual experience is simply a copy of something transmitted to an agent from an "outside" structure? It is a problem that even makes Bourdieu's use of the concept of "habitus" seem closed and functionalist at times. Habit is unfortunately associated by Gramsci in the above quote (as well as by others in the classical marxist and neo-marxist traditions, which Gramsci straddles) with technique or instrumentalization, which, as artificial or cultural is, by binary opposition, conditioned and unnatural. Within neo-Marxism, there is a tendency, traceable to Adorno and the Frankfurt School, to view nature itself as a deterministic mechanism related to unconscious domination. In his writings, Adorno consistently associates habit with routine, with "the administered life" of dull banality, as well as instrumental reason and technique; technique is necessarily unconscious, and therefore serves to enslave conscious reason (1975 [1951]). Because of their reliance on Freud's psychoanalysis, they view actors as primarily the product of 'drives' - i.e., dangerously irrational instincts unleashed by "industrial society's" under excessive technological development - and as a desiring subject, rather than analyzing social needs. Only later did the Frankfurt School come to see natural dispositions - world-forming eros - as potentially productive and compatible with social emancipation (Marcuse 1955). That the Frankfurt School fail to distinguish between the unchanging and sovereign "power-over" of domination and the articulated and changeable "power-to" characterizing oppression is another point. However, the argument I am making, drawn from Bourdieusian notions of "habitus" and practice, is that there are two forms of skill or ability: one based in technique and conscious rationality, to which closed-systems theorizing applies, and the other based in habit and unconscious affect, to which open-systems thinking applies. The latter allows nature to once again become the "realm of freedom," rather than blind compulsion or domination, as it is in the modern philosophical conception.

The problem of the 'misrecognition' of habit is rooted in classical Marxism. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx separates, yet fails in his effort to dissolve, the difference between theory and practice, associating the imaginative act of thinking too closely with thought, abstract ideas, and theory, a move which subsumes imagination to Reason, despite Marx's pointed criticism of German Idealism. At other times, Marx confuses imagination with bourgeois 'sentiment,' feeling, fantasy, and fetishization (whose effect, paradigmatically, is the visual camera obscura), and later presents the dichotomy of "conception" (ends) and "execution" (means) in Capital Vol. 1. For Marx, when experience becomes consciousness through reflection (as opposed to false consciousness, non-consciousness, or unconsciousness), the distorting effect of ideology will supposedly be broken, and class-in-itself will become class-for-itself. At this point workers will no longer 'consent' to domination, and will communicate the falseness of ideology through education mechanisms. Even the outline of communism takes the form of "a common and rational plan," for Marx.

But habits are not so easily manipulable or subordinate to conscious recognition. If we agree with the Marxist view that thinking arises from experiences, and that experience can encompass practices/acts, gestures, affects, and imagination, as well as reflection, then habit cannot be reified or idealized separately from its specific form in the world - the way dispositions and capacities accumulate around certain experiences. Routinized habits can only be 'constructed' from above when mental conceptions dominate practice, as Barbara Ehrenreich relates in the surprises she experience in the habitus of low-wage workers: "Educated middle-class professionals never go careening half-cocked into the future, vulnerable to any surprise that might leap out at them. We always have a plan or at least a to-do list; we like to know that everything has been anticipated, that our lives are, in a sense, pre-lived" (2008 [2001]: pg. 54). While she could assume the formal role of service workers, her imitation could never capture their experience, and given her own physiological comportment, she supposed that many of the "grunt" jobs that drained her energy must have been just as "skilled" as more high-paying jobs, even though they were more degrading. Because of its creative dimension, habitus is more of an art than a science: while involving technique and formal rules, its outcomes are ultimately dependent on the ongoing construction of refrains, and the ability of an actor to achieve a precarious balance. Moreover, a purpose or end result can neither ground nor orient habitus definitively: it cannot be stabilized and hence regulated 'externally.' Clearly, habit is rooted in experience, but this experience cannot be reduced to a means to an end, or become routinized by an abstract logic such as scientific management.

What Marx ignores in both his early and later writings is the auto-poietic experience of practice noticed by phenomenologists like Martin Heidegger (whose notion of dwelling is important for the concept of habit/habitus), and Heideggerian Marxists such as Kostas Axelos. This practice of inhabitation is not static; in fact, it is ek-static: necessarily outside of itself, projective, anticipatory; in a word, 'homeless.' It is world and meaning-embedded forms of imagination, rather than the rational subject, which project actors 'outward' into the future, improvising from experiences 'thrown' into through the formation of 'new' patterns of common action. New temporalities of practice continually emerge from the 'games' actors play with the habits and dispositions their "field" seeks to reproduce them by; but they are always specific to and in reference to their singular origins (biography, generation, learning styles, etc.). They are not necessarily conditional or 'random,' though they may appear to be spontaneous.

In comparison to repetitive techniques, habits are relatively open, changing and re-arranging/re-assembling over time in relation to social practices. Rethinking the notion of "creation," French post-Marxist philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy conceives creation "ex nihilo" (i.e., from nothing) as originally shared, adapting Heidegger's phenomenology in Being and Time to a vision of "literary communism" (1991 [1986]: pg. 40): all being-there (Dasein) - presence - is always already being-with (Mitsein)(2000) - an "absent" presence generating shared habits and dispositions. In other words, there cannot be a being-in-itself (objective form) which is not already being-with-others (inter-subjective community, Heidegger's being-in-the-world), though this takes the alienated form of being-for-others (association, formal recognition "in society") under capitalism. For example, workers under the technical division of labour are alienated and atomized in individual workplaces ("bargaining units" if unionized), and hence, class-formation (becoming class-in-itself) can only be a project, rather than an assumption grounding class struggle. In the Hegelian conception of Community, however, being-for-others is the primary basis of mutual recognition or identity: one has to be made conscious of oneself through an external mirroring process in order to act ethically, learning how to imitate and model oneself based on the Other's gaze. Pure objective being ("naked life" in Agamben's conception) is the effect of domination, and recognition seeks to rescue identities through self-consciousness. No distinction is made between actors' ethical conduct and systematic morality. However, in the Heideggerian, post-Marxist perspective, our being-with-others implies community, and all communities are communities of practice. This implies an active power-to-do (in a sense never complete), rather than passive membership: the power-relations involved could potentially transform, rather than merely repeat, past structures of domination/oppression. Moreover, rather than being based on discourse or recognition/consensus, such as a hypothetical social contract or educational degree and discipline, communities and practices are inscribed politically, with reference to an imaginary, shared experience (called "the social flow of doing" by Holloway, and the "collective unconscious" by Jung and Jameson). There is nothing necessary or predictable/guaranteed about shared practices so long as imagination and creativity generate new non-technical or non-repetitive habits and dispositions to counter such reification. This is the infinite background against which the world reveals itself, providing definite yet changing potentials for social action. The generation of habit is therefore fundamentally social, but social relations cannot be too closely associated with social structures. Habitual social relations bring together "parts" that are too intricately interwoven to be simply re-arranged at will; change must come from their interrelation. This is very much like the argument of Axelos (2005), Nancy (2007 [2002]), and other post-Marxists that for the contemporary capitalist system, there is an absolute difference between world ("mondialisation") and globe ("globalization"), or between possibilities and totalities. Thus, when Bourdieu states that "the schemes applied to the world are the product of the world to which they are applied" (2000 [1997]: pg. 147), this world is always greater than a social structure, and also less: while going beyond the parts, it does not subsume them in an aggregated or bounded system. This means that Burawoy's (2012: pg. 191) Marxist critique of habitus in flawed: habitus is not simply the logic of its reproduction. Rather, if "the social" is not a closed system "society," then habitus does not refer to an ultimate structural logic, and therefore involves "temporal slippage" within and outside the "field" it is structured by (Beasley-Murray 2010 [2003]: pg. 177-8). The social unconscious or imaginary generates singular combinations of possible forms of meaning and action, giving rise to actors' habits and dispositions (possible "games"), rather than pre-determined causality.

The mistaken notion of habit as deterministic, unnatural, leads to a politics which - fearing domination by nature - seeks to dominate it in turn by converting practice into instrumental rationality and consensus to guarantee control over action. Habit is the core of practice, but habit is much closer to poiesis, i.e., "creativity" or play, or techne, i.e., "craft," than to the modern interpretation of skill as instrumental technique (which must be willed by an agent). This reconceptualization allows for the possibility of affective action, and a "step back" from the paradigm of effective agency: affects become the the link between potentialities and possibilites, and effects are reassigned to the level of closed or reified systems. By refusing to separate the imaginary from the real or objective, without seeing it as a product of subjective rationality or agency, actors continually have the potential to emerge and transform their worlds with others.

Bibliography

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