Consciousness as claiming: Practice and habit in an enigmatic world

Abstract

There has been increasing interest in recent years on the non-cognitive nature of human existence. Self-conscious thought and reflective action are no longer seen to be the defining feature of the human condition nor an anchor for social life. On the contrary, material practice and habitual engagements are the abiding mechanisms by which everyday life is sutured. One of the consequences of this perspective is its abbreviated conception of human consciousness. In the literature on habit and practical engagement, consciousness is conceptualised primarily in terms of self-perception and awareness. The aim of this article is to put forth the thesis that human consciousness is not just an awareness of the self – it is also a ‘claim’. Drawing upon the psycho-analytic work of Jean Laplanche, the paper argues that consciousness emerges as subjects reckon with existential problems that are as imminent to everyday life as the concrete problems and practical tasks. In this framing, consciousness emerges as a desire to claim oneself as a self in the face of problems that exceed our practical capacities. Consciousness is a claim in the sense that it marks a desire to be a self-standing, self-possessed subject, within a precarious and enigmatic world.

The lived experience of COVID-19: housing and household resilience

“…4.3 Changes in social ties: handling physical distance, negotiating closeness 4.3.1 Self-perception COVID-19 affected how participants saw themselves in various ways, affecting their willingness or ability to communicate or relate to others around them. Self-perception has recently been defined as contingent on material practices and habits, rather than as a pre-given of the human and social condition (Rose 2018). This understanding of self-awareness as 'simply another capacity, an awareness born of problems and the ability to reflect on them' (Rose 2018: 1124) was illustrated by participants' remarks on their own social positions under the COVID-19 restrictions.…”

The question of culture in cultural geography: Latent legacies and potential futures

“…This question is different because it is concerned with human life specifically and the forms of identity and belonging therein. There is, in other words, a question about selfpossession here (Rose, 2018). While subjects obviously do not care for all their habits, the phenomenon of identity is one where subjects make choices about which habits are conceptualised as their habits, the habits they care about, invest in and represent in material forms such as landscapes.…”

“…11. Elsewhere I have discussed the phenomenon of investing in one's own world (as my world) as 'claiming' (Rose, 2012(Rose, , 2018. While I have yet to develop this argument in relation to the concept of culture, this paper lays the groundwork for just such a position.…”

Cultural geography III: The concept of ‘culture’

“…Uses of the term experience vary (on which see Jay, 2005), but what work shares is a concern for how and with what consequences relations and events become palpable and are felt. Accompanying this orientation to experience as it happens has, therefore, been a (re)conceptualisation of a cluster of terms that were at the heart of humanist and humanistic approaches to cultural geography, including sensation, perception and bodily life (Colls, 2012; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2010; Straughan, 2018), affect, feeling and emotion (Davidson, 2016; Anderson, 2014), subjectivity (Dawney, 2013; Simpson, 2017) and consciousness (Rose, 2018). As one example of how this version of culture has become hegemonic in Anglophone cultural geography, consider how an important recent special issue of Cultural Geographies on ‘cultural geographies of precarity’ articulates what today constitutes a ‘cultural geographies approach’.…”