Habit and Affect: Revitalizing a Forgotten History

Abstract

Habit is an integral concept for body studies, a hybrid concept and one that has provided the bedrock across the humanities for considering the interrelationships between movement and stasis, being and becoming, and process and fixity. Habits are seen to provide relay points between what is taken to be inside and outside, disrupting any clear and distinct boundary between nature and culture, self and other, the psychological and social, and even mind and matter. Habit thus discloses a paradox. It takes up a unique position in affect modulation, which encompasses both regulation (in the form of discipline) and also extends the body's potential for engaging the new, change and creativity. In order to understand the basis of the ambivalent duality governing understandings of habit it is argued that a genealogical approach to this question is necessary. This will be located within the recent 'turn to affect' and histories of conation within the psychological sciences, particularly taking the writings of William McDougall as a focus.

The Entanglements of Affect and Participation

“…James, 1950). Notwithstanding this, recent studies emphasize the complexity of the connections between people, pasts, encounters, and materiality as emerging through participation in the situation at hand, and its unique situatedness in time and space (Wetherell, 2012;Blackman, 2013). Blackman and Venn (2010) foreground that a new ontology is on the rise, dismissing the strict division into different scientific and scholarly fields.…”

Transforming habit: revolution, routine and social change

“…This assumed divide between 'will' and 'habit' informed many scholarly mediations of habit at the time, including Durkheim's 'hierarchical conception of the relations between primitive and civilized races' (11; see also Blackman, 2013). Its logic also permeates contemporary state practices of governing marginalised groups, from the Australian Aborigines to the British 'underclass' (15).…”

The Multiple Lives of Affect: A Case Study of Commercial Surrogacy

“…I, for instance, could have added foundational theories as diverse as Segdwick's (2003) work on Tompkins's basic emotion approach, Walkerdine's (2010) psycho-social conceptualization, or Thrift's (2008) nonrepresentational theory. Similarly, by focussing on this triad of influential theories within Anglo-American, particularly US, scholarship, I bypass emerging work that harnesses alternative genealogies for affect studies-by thinking affect in relation to concepts such as habit (Blackman, 2013;Pedwell, 2017), the non-human (Latimer and Miele, 2013;Venn, 2010) or rhythm and vibration (Henrique, 2010;Henriques, Tiainen and Väliaho, 2014 While drawing on such theorizations might enrich and complicate future thought on the topic, I start with the work of Hardt, Ahmed and Massumi as they offer three distinct conceptualizations of affect that emerge out of different disciplinary ecologiesand as such are rarely put into the same analytical frame. They mobilize and operate within divergent conceptual frameworks and attach distinct theoretical and political hopes to the turn to affect.…”