Transforming Habit: Revolution, Routine and Social Change

Compelling recent scholarly work has explored the crucial role affect, emotion and feeling might play in activating radical social and political change. I argue, however, that some narratives of ‘affective revolution’ may actually do more to obscure than to enrich our understanding of the material relations and routines though which ‘progressive’ change might occur and endure in a given context – while side-stepping the challenge of how to evaluate progress itself in the current socio-political and economic landscape. Drawing on the work of Eve Sedgwick, John Dewey, Felix Ravaisson and others, this article asks whether critical work on habit can provide different, and potentially generative, analytical tools for understanding the contemporary ethical and material complexities of social transformation. I suggest that it habit’s double nature – its enabling of both compulsive repetition and creative becoming – that makes it a rich concept for addressing the propensity of harmful socio-political patterns to persist in the face of efforts to generate greater awareness of their damaging effects, as well as the material forms of automation and coordination on which meaningful societal transformation may depend. I also explore how bringing affect and habit together might productively refigure our understandings of ‘the present’ and ‘social progress’, as well as the available modes of sensing, instigating and responding to change. In turning to habit, then, the primary aim of this article is to examine how social and cultural theory might critically re-approach social change and progressive politics today

Gender, embodiment and cultural practice: towards a relational feminist approach

Establishing similarities between embodied practices typically posed as fundamentally distinct (such as 'African' female genital cutting and 'Western' cosmetic surgery) has become increasingly common within feminist literatures. Cross-cultural comparisons can reveal the instability of essentialist binaries constructed to distinguish various groups as culturally, ethnically and morally 'different'. These strategies, however, are also problematic. In their emphasis on cross-cultural commonalities between practices, they often efface historical, social and embodied particularities, while reifying problematic notions of 'culture'. When employed by privileged 'Western' feminist theorists, such strategies can involve appropriations which affirm, rather than challenge, dominant discursive hierarchies. Consequently, the crucial links between violent histories of embodied differentiation and contemporary relations of power are not effectively interrogated and problematic binaries remain intact. This thesis thus seeks to develop a more historically-grounded, relational and politically accountable feminist approach to addressing essentialist constructions of embodied 'cultural practice'. Mapping feminist and other critical literatures, I identify three main approaches to linking embodied practices: the 'continuum', 'analogue' and 'subset' models. Through three case study chapters, I conduct a comprehensive analysis of these models,,and their potential discursive-material effects. Each case study focuses on a different set of practices which have been linked: 'African' female genital cutting and.-`Western' body modifications; Muslim veiling and anorexia; and 'passing' practices associated with the categories of race, gender and sexuality. I argue that rather than illustrating how particular practices or their imagined subjects are fundamentally similar, we should examine how they are constructed relationally in and through one another. This is possible through genealogically tracing how their historical trajectories of production intersect and inform one another. As an alternative to commonality-based comparative approaches, I advocate a 'relational web model' which traces multiple constitutive connections within a network of differently situated embodied practices or figures

Affect Theory's Alternative Genealogies - Review Symposium on Leys's The Ascent of Affect

Despite what its title, blurb and editorial endorsements might suggest, Ruth Leys’ The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique is not a genealogy of the ‘turn to affect’ or a critical account of the emergence of affect theory across the humanities, social sciences and life sciences. It is, rather, a post-war history of the ‘science of emotion’ focusing on mainstream, American, largely male, psychologists and philosophers investigating the relationship between feelings and facial expressions in human and non-human animals. In its pursuit of the latter, it is rigorous, incisive and illuminating. In its claim to the former, it is partial, dismissive and, at times, misguided - though not without critical food for thought for interdisciplinary affect and emotion studies. In what follows, I summarise Leys’ important arguments and insights before offering a more detailed consideration of her critique of affect theory

Affective Habits: Sensation, Duration, Automation

This chapter begins with a critical hypothesis: in order to better understand the logics, challenges and potentialities of social change at the current conjuncture, we might need to attend more carefully to the relationship between affect and habit. That is, in the midst of the turn to affect, renewed interest in habit, the rise of various ‘new’ materialisms and ecological approaches and the growing salience of algorithmic life, both apprehending and pursuing socio-political transformation may require closer engagement with the emergent links among sensation, duration, repetition, iteration, automation and atmosphere

Access Africa: Transforming the Lives of Women Through Economic Empowerment

In June 2008, CARE launched its ACCESS AFRICA Village Savings and Loans Program- an ambitious ten year investment that will show dramatic returns in the fight against poverty. The program is expanding to 39 countries, providing 30 million people - 70 percent of them women - with access to a suite of basic financial services that can enable them to break the vicious cycle of poverty, transforming it into a virtuous cycle of rising income, improved health, better education and greater participation in their communities and nations

Transforming the Human: Algorithms, Intuition and Networked Activism

Abstract: Please refer to full text to view abstrac

Re-mediating the Human: Habits in the Age of Computational Media

This chapter considers the extent to which we can apply the insights of pragmatist and continental philosophers of habit to understand the dynamics of networked and computational media and how they may be re-mediating ‘the human’. If habit is key to processes of social transformation, how, this chapter asks, does it figure in algorithmic dynamics that are altering the very meaning of ‘the social’ – and at what point might the logics of habit meet the limit of their analytical purchase? It argues that attention to habit assemblages remains salient to understanding the unfolding constitution of human nature within emergent media ecologies, but only if we reassess what constitutes ‘habit’ in a social field increasingly organised by media analytics and machine learning – and, in turn, what implications arise for understanding more-than-human sensibility, cognition, agency and experience

Intuition as a “trained thing” : sensing, thinking, and speculating in computational cultures

What happens when intuition becomes algorithmic? This article explores how approaching intuition as recursively trained sheds light on what is at stake affectively, politically, and ethically in the entanglements of sensorial, cognitive, computational and corporate processes and (infra)structures that characterise algorithmic life. Bringing affect theory and speculative philosophies to bear on computational histories and cultures, I tease out the continuing implications of post-war efforts to make intuition a measurable and indexable mode of anticipatory knowledge. If digital computing pioneers tended to elide the more ambivalent implications of quantifying intuition, this article asks what computational myths are at play in current accounts of machine learning-enabled sensing, thinking, and speculating and what complexities or chaos are disavowed. I argue that an understanding of more-than-human intuition which grapples meaningfully with the indeterminacy central to digitally mediated social life must recognise that visceral response is recursively trained in multiple ways with diverse, and often contradictory, effects

Mediated Habits: Images, Networked Affect and Social Change

While many people remain hopeful that particular images of injustice will have the power to catalyse progressive transformation, there is also widespread belief in the inevitability of ‘compassion fatigue’. Bringing philosophers of habit into conversation with contemporary scholars of affect, visual culture and digital media, this article argues for a more nuanced understanding of the links between images and change – one in which political feeling and political action are complexly intertwined and repeated sensation does not necessarily lead to disaffection. When affect acts as a ‘binding technique’ compelling us to inhabit our sensorial responses to images, I suggest, we may become better attuned to everyday patterns of seeing, feeling, thinking and interacting – and hence to the possibility of change at the level of habit. This article thus contends that thinking affect and habit together as imbricated may enable us to better understand the dynamics of both individual and socio-political change today