Habits, style and how to wear them lightly

Abstract

Contributing to cultural geography's emerging interest in the work of Felix Ravaisson, this article explores the relationship between the impersonal force of habit and the personalised production of subjectivity. More precisely, our concern is with the relationship between habit and the stylisation of self that can be witnessed in the production of the intellectual subject. Paying particular attention to the relationship he traces between habit, consciousness and the effort that defines subjectivity, we explore the implications of Ravaisson's understanding of habit for the work of style, understood as an integration of habits and dispositions into a manner of being. By exploring the question of intellectual style in the work of Alain Badiou, Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche, we consider what the implications might be of performing that task of integration lightly, without the lofty weightiness that often attends intellectual life.

Habit, experience and environment: A pragmatist perspective

“…This is part of Dewey's argument on habits in relation to social change and social division, giving his approach a greater radical edge, according to Schwanen et al (discussed later). They see the main distinction between Ravaisson and Dewey in Ravaisson's idea of habit as a way of understanding the unity and continuity of nature whereas Dewey is not prepared to "admit to the improvised spontaneity of all life" because this "would be to lose sight of the dialectical formation of the social that is so crucial to pragmatism" (Hynes andSharpe 2015, 69, referring to Schoenbach 2004). I will take up the question of these divisions between 'life' and mechanisms in the rest of the paper, suffice to say that, assuming the unity and continuity of nature and the autonomous force of life takes us into treatments of habit in geography that see it as a contraction of wider worldly, immanent forces, certain stabilisations of which, individuate or entrain subjectivities (Dewsbury 2015).…”

“…Thus Bissell (2015) sees as habit as a ‘virtual infrastructure’ comprising propensities and dispositions (Bissell, 2015). The virtual infrastructure of habit can be realised in practical competences in coping with new milieu, but with changing intensities (tracked in the example of long-haul air travel) that in turn affects the capacities of bodies to act (see also Hynes and Sharpe, 2015).…”

“…(2012). They see the main distinction between Ravaisson and Dewey in Ravaisson’s idea of habit as a way of understanding the unity and continuity of nature whereas Dewey is not prepared to ‘admit to the improvised spontaneity of all life’ because this ‘would be to lose sight of the dialectical formation of the social that is so crucial to pragmatism’ (Hynes and Sharpe, 2015: 69, referring to Schoenbach, 2004).…”

The Aesthetics of Urban Movement: Habits, Mobility, and Resistance

“…In doing so, I am exploiting the emerging interest in geography in the work of Felix Ravaisson (see Bissell, ; Dewsbury and Bissell, ; Hynes and Sharpe, ). As Bissell () argues, Ravaisson enables an appreciation of the vitality, but also the vulnerability, of the habit‐body.…”

Tendencies and trajectories: The production of subjectivity in an event of drug consumption

“…This question grows out of broader attempts across human geography to account for processes of subjectivation by way of emergent and relational ontologies (Anderson and Harrison, 2010; Bissell, 2011; Dewsbury, 2012; Hynes and Sharpe, 2015; Lapworth, 2015; Roberts, 2012; Wylie, 2010). Human geographers have long been interested in rethinking subjectivity, sociality, structure and context by working with and developing nonrepresentational (Thrift, 2007), posthuman (Castree and Nash, 2006) and new materialist (Whatmore, 2006) approaches.…”