Scholarly. About habit – what it is, the role it plays in lives and worlds, and how it relates to struggles for social transformation. (Not, btw, the philosophy book I alluded to feeling resistant to reading in a post last week…I had already finished this by that point!) Draws on US pragmatist philosophers, more recent critical/radical thinkers, affect theory, bits and pieces of social movement scholarship, and more.
I think what I found most useful about this book were some of the core ideas it starts from, and not necessarily what it does with them. So, for instance, despite being very aware of being a creature of routine myself, I had never really given much thought to the social significance of habit. That’s not entirely true – the idea that repeated practices are crucial to the formation of selves is a pretty common one, but I had generally encountered it in contexts that don’t quite frame that repetition as habit. After reading this book, I think habit can be a really useful way of thinking about why and how we do what we do, and also for thinking about the relationship between the level of everyday life and broader features of social organization. For one thing, it gets at how there is an inertia to so much of how we live our lives, beyond the immediate disciplinary pressures of social regulation, but also a malleability. A lot of visions of social transformation recognize that it is inevitably accompanied by, and requires, a concomitant transformation of selves, but get a bit vague when it comes to the details of what that means and how it might work. Habit can perhaps be one useful part of thinking that through. Importantly, the book warns of the ways in which shaping habit has also always been part of colonial and capitalist rule, and is key to contemporary modes of neoliberal governance and to how online mechanisms shape and profit from us. To distinguish the role that attention to habit might play in liberatory projects, the book argues that our consideration of shaping the habits through which we produce ourselves and the world must be deliberate and collective and open.
A related idea that I also think could be quite useful is the book’s distinction between social change in a major key and social change in a minor key. The former captures more overt movement activity and the kinds of change it seeks – rallies, strikes, changed legislation, revolutions, etc. The latter is more about changes in our ways of being and doing (our habits) at the level of everyday life, within the constraints of the existing order. It argues that both are important. In particular, change in the minor key can be important because the changes in self and everyday practices that it results in can create the conditions of possibility that might determine whether our big picture interventions to change the world succeed or not, and what happens in practice after the nominal point of success. This is not explored or developed nearly as much as I would’ve liked in the book, or maybe it’s more accurate to say it isn’t explored in quite the way that I would’ve preferred, but again I think it’s a potentially useful way for thinking about things.
As I said, the specifics of how the book builds on some of these core ideas were not always of as much interest to me. For instance, one chapter talks about how revealing some injustice often does much less to actually solve it than the dominant commonsense about change assumes, whether that change is supposed to happen because new knowledge will trigger action or because of the affective impact of the truth that has been revealed. I mean, I think that is quite an important point, and I think the idea of habit (particularly, as in this chapter, when thought about in direct relation to affect) can be useful in figuring out new ways to think about how to move people to act in response to injustice. But a lot of the details of how the chapter explored this question were…not bad, just not necessarily all that interesting to me.
The final chapter of the book is more explicitly about movements, and it even makes pretty prominent use of a friend’s book at a couple points, so I should’ve really liked it. But notwithstanding that it says some interesting things, it also regularly felt a bit off to me. I can’t quite decide why. It is almost as if too much of the author’s understanding of Black Lives Matter, Occupy, and the other movements she talks about came from reading what other theorists say about them and not enough from engaging with the movements themselves. Which may be a terribly unfair thing to say, I don’t know, but…yeah, it just felt a bit off.
I also had some reservations about how the book is written. This is not really about this book itself – it is readable and clear, and while certainly not writerly in character, it is not at all bad as scholarly writing goes. But I had this feeling that I often have with scholarly books, particularly scholarly books written with movement-aligned values in mind, that it could just be so much better – meaning, probably, something very selfish, like it would suit my needs better – if it were able to throw off the ways in which disciplinary and institutional norms shaped both its knowledge production and writing, and instead tuned in a little more directly to the ways in which the issues it discusses manifest in everyday life and in the course of collective struggle. I think it is possible to do that and produce knowledge that is just as rigorous and just as thoughtful. But of course it would mean working differently than the academy demands and compels. And it would mean writing a different book than the one that has been written, which is never really a fair demand to make of an author.
Anyway, despite my complaining, I’m quite glad I read this book, and I have definitely tucked a few ideas from it away for further reflection.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.