Transferred from Ma Mei Research
【About the Author】 Tony Bennett, Professor Emeritus of the Institute of Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, a representative figure of contemporary British cultural studies, and a well-known critic of Marxist literary and art theory.
【Translator's Profile】 Gao Qiong, Ph.D. candidate in aesthetics, College of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University. Research interests: Marxist aesthetics, Western literary and art theory.
Introduction
First, I will briefly elaborate on my title and the background to my discussion. I've been studying the subject of habit for some time, and in the process I've come across literature on habit's pathway, but it wasn't until I read Sara Ahmed's book What is Use? (What's the Use?, 2019) The discussion of different political logics of paths in this book made me realize that the concept of exploring habitual paths might provide a useful theoretical umbrella for my thinking. Different discourses about the relationship between habit and repetition shape different authorities in varied ways—theology, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, neurology—the ways in which they try to control behavior by following a particular route, process, or path. These reflections stem from the far-reaching influence of the work of Michel Foucault, who argued that power was practiced through concrete forms of knowledge (the famous set of concepts of truth/power). But before we get into that, let me give you some explanations of the path of habit.
First, the path
In An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Bruno Latour celebrates habit as "the patron saint of planned routes, paths, and footprints." Imagine a "lost hiker who has to stick to his own path", hesitating and thinking about the direction of his way at every step, and when he sees "the path extending from the footprints of others", this moment of encounter becomes "an extraordinary blessing of habit: he no longer has to choose ... He knows what to do next, he knows and doesn't need to reflect..." For Latour, habit is a mechanism by which things can be taken for granted, and the mind is thus freed from the development of new courses of action. The American pragmatist William James also believes that habits as unthinking repetitions are a blessing, and by repeating them into the grooves of the brain pathways and nervous system, habits make it possible to acquire new abilities. In these narratives, the path of habit begins a journey forward, and habit is often described as letting people detour to the original point. In his novel A Man Asleep, Georges Perec describes a "sleeping man" with "robot-like behavior":
Keep walking, tirelessly. You walk like a man carrying an invisible box, you walk like a person who follows his shadow. Walking of blind and sleepwalkers. You move forward in mechanical steps, endlessly, until you forget that you are walking.
An Inquiry into Survival Patterns, Harvard University Press, 2013
Or, the habitual path puts those who have no choice on a backward trajectory. James Phillips Kay in The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Class Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester 1832) discusses the mechanization of labor in the cotton mills of Lancashire in the early 19th century, describing a path that reduces workers to animals:
The routine, which is filled with endless heavy and boring work, the same mechanized operations that are constantly repeated in the daily routine, like the torment to which Sisyphus suffered—the hard work, it is the stone that falls back eternally again before the weary worker... Intelligence sleeps in the inertia of passing and passing; the rough part of our nature develops to the extreme. To a certain extent, to make people bear such harsh hard work is to cultivate their animal habits.
In contrast, in post-Darwinian evolutionary thought, the habitual path is thought to have a progressive force, i.e., new habits acquired by one generation and made natural can be passed on to the next generation as an accumulated "second nature". But if this is collectivizing the generation of habitual paths, it is only for some people. Edward Burnett Tylor, a British anthropologist in the late 19th century, argued that the rituals of so-called "primitive man" were "survivals" of early habit withering, which were difficult to change due to the endless repetition of the past, and as Taylor said, people continued to behave from generation to generation, like a stream that once settled on the riverbed, it would flow for many years.
In all these examples, the question of habit and repetition remains to be solved. These two concepts are inextricably intertwined with each other, yet manifest themselves in a variety of forms. In some uses, they are simply equivalent or dependent on each other in mutually reinforcing relationships. Habit is— in its most universal definition (often traced back to Aristotle's concept of consuetudo) — a form of mechanical repetition that is the result of the continuation of repetition and the reason why repetition is continued. However, in other uses (often traced back to Aristotle's concept of hexis or habitus), habit is the mechanism by which repetition is broken, which suspends repetitive activities in order to pave the way for the development of new abilities. In the former case, the habit is a limitation: a chain, resistance, or shackles. In another understanding, it is virtue, an indispensable part of the process of development. In some conceptions, habits lead to specific ends (as in the use of medieval Christian theology, habits cultivated a series of virtues for the purpose of obtaining grace), while in others, habits form part of an open process of generation and freedom (post-Deleuzeism interprets repetition as a necessary mechanism for the existence of differentiation leading to change, and thus locates habits).
Second, the habits and transformations in the field of discourse
This concludes a brief description of the many forms of habitual pathways. We will now discuss the forms of power that arise from and put into practice these habitual pathways. I'll start with Foucault, who, in The Punitive Society, distinguishes between the discursive coordinates used by habits of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 18th century, he noted that the first to consider this was the English philosopher David Hume, whose habits had in the past provided the basis for criticism of notions of political order based on traditional obligations. In rewriting traditional obligations as effects derived purely from habits and questioning their close connection to the theology of the source of transcendent authority, these discourses clear the way for the idea that individuals are free and independent— in the sense of ownership — to conform to a social order based on contractual relations. In contrast, in the discourse of the 19th century, Foucault pointed out that habits became things that people had to obey; or rather, what certain people had to obey were reinterpreted as habits as characteristics needed by those proletarians, habits that bound them to "machines that they do not possess... Bound by the order of things, the order of time, and the political order." The trick is the normalisation approach used in closed environments (prisons or psychiatric hospitals). Thus Foucault points out that habits are inscribed in the sequence of modern productive societies: "The formation of labour-power— the custodial mechanism—the permanent operation of normativity." ”
The Society of Punishment, Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2015
The relationship between normativity, habit, and discipline gave rise to new forms of political discourse in which the symbolism of supreme ruling power succumbed to what Foucault called "a norm of hidden, everyday, habitual forms," where power is exercised through the "discourse of the dominantr"—"the dominant can supervise, regulate, distinguish between normal and abnormal, evaluate, adjudicate, and decide." For example, the words of teachers in schools, the words of judges, the words of doctors, the words of psychiatrists. This in turn mirrors where habits are inscribed in the new realm of personality, and the development of psychology provides a new understanding of the determinants of behavior—instincts, impulses, fetishes, willingness, and unconscious behavior—which provide new ways to manage behavior, replacing the significance of the earlier passions. This transformation—part of a more general paradigm shift, where abnormality, which used to be associated with various forms of strange absurdity, is now understood as a form of the most basic and everyday behavior—constitutes a new game of knowledge and power, and psychoanalysis is no longer what the sick think, but an analysis of unconscious behaviors involving instinct, impulse, drive, etc.: this transformation is not only about how people who are perceived as deranged are ruled. It also affects those who suffer from unconscious addiction (e.g., alcoholism).
Of course, I can say more, but the general point of the debate lies in a shift in the political history of habits—that is, with regard to how habits function as an end or strategy when behavioral reigns—and its reconceptualization is associated with the emergence of a series of new personality components that, as unconscious habits, restore the influence of the series of newly defined behaviors (drunkenness, drug use). Habits have proven to be a highly volatile concept, and as the historical evolution of "human architecture" continues to be reconstructed. I proposed the term "architecture of man" in order to participate in the debate over the different understandings of what constitutes the main component of man and its relations. This involves will, memory, instinct, desire, reaction, mental processes: they are not consistent with the outcome of the following questions, including how habits are defined, how they are perceived to function, how their relationship to repetition is understood, and how and for what purposes it is judged according to the needs of domination, which have always been extremely variable. The same is true of the relationship between habits and multiple repetitive forms, such as the concept of habits and customs. They are often equated, just as they are often distinguished. Medieval Christian thought held that customs were repetitive forms acquired through daily training, while habits were understood as mechanisms for acquiring virtue. David Hume, by contrast, combined the two into a positive assessment, the "great guide to life." In later British social and political thought, the two were again distinguished, and custom was interpreted as a force that inhibited the potential positive dynamics of habits: as in John Stuart Mill's "tyranny of customs." I'll get back to that later. But let me first relate the question posed by Foucault to the habitual path.
Third, the path of habit and different repetitive logics
Perhaps the most profound explanation for the path of habit comes from the 17th-century British philosopher John Locke, who, in His Essay Concerning Human Understanding, said that the habit of thinking "can continue in its usual way as soon as it is initiated." These pathways are easier and more natural to move in because they have been flattened for a long time." But Locke's failure to share in the positive dynamics of habits in all categories—children, idiots, barbarians, and completely ignorant people—is another point I'll return to. But first I would like to draw on Sarah Ahmed's discussion of the relationship between the concept of path and the concept of "use", which she clarifies the approach taken by the path metaphor in the history of the life sciences, reconciles the differences between Locke and his later interpreters, and draws on the work of the French naturalist Jean-Baptist Lamarck, which links habits to evolutionary mechanisms through which the intergenerational transmission of learned abilities can continue. Develops into an accumulative "second nature". But this transformation of habit and convention, turning past efforts into a cumulative inheritance, is a double-edged sword. Amed vividly illustrates this by tracing the political course of the "path," using the example of the blacksmith's arm, which was very popular in the 19th century. The strength gained by the blacksmith in the customary exercises of his arms was passed on to his son as a legacy. The "blacksmith's arm" thus became a symbol, referring both to the power of repetition and to the transmission of the results of such use. However, Ahmed stressed that what the "blacksmith's arm" conveys is "not how the workload is reduced, but how the workload is obtained". Frequent use—the long-running trails—has become a trap, far from a heartwarming freedom and ability. For the blacksmith's son, the result of inheriting "use" is "to inherit a workload." It is also a social status of inheritance. Such as blacksmiths, workers, students, clerks, musicians: the path flattened by habits shapes their ability to adapt to their profession perfectly, but for the same reason they also constitute restrictions on their profession. William James also sees this as another side of the potential for the development of habitual paths. After the age of 30, brain plasticity will gradually become rigid, and he believes that people who have not changed their habitual paths to escape the limitations of their inheritance by this age will henceforth be locked in their destiny — career and social status — where they have been since birth.
The Theory of Human Understanding, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999
But for Amed, the relationship between habits, frequent use and path means more than just limiting the distribution of people across occupations and social statuses. Habits also play a role as a core mechanism in managing the efficiency and form of workforce development. The idea that use in prescribed tasks can improve capacity is yet another long-standing path that justifies increasing workloads – making the grooves of the muscles and nervous system carved into the repetitive ones deeper and deeper. For Karl Marx, the power lost by the worker in the irrational demands of factory discipline was ultimately acquired by capital. The factory needed to train the workers, and ultimately "to harmonize them with the consistent regularity of the great automaton," to which Marx agreed with Friedrich Engels' comment: the factory enslaved the worker through the "authoritarian bell" that "summoned him from his sleep and from breakfast and lunch."
Revisiting the 1960s debate about the important ideas made by the British Marxist historian E.P. Thompson, I continue to follow this thread. Thompson argues that the repetitive forms of labor imposed by the clock time of the factory system replaced the task-oriented, pre-capitalist forms of labor, and at the same time, this new form of labor was also applied to the slave labor of the plantation system. Eugene D. Genovese, in his Roll Jordan Roll, doesn't think so. In his view, no matter how much the plantations resembled "factories in the fields", because their working environment was still rural and the pace of work was still changing with the seasons, it was nature that provided the slave laborers with time references, not clock time. Influenced by project 1619 (which argues that the impetus for American capitalism stemmed from the introduction of slaves in 1619), the plantation economy was not less disciplined and labor-managed than the factory system, but rather promoted the Taylor system that was widely adopted in industrial production in the 20th century. Caitlin Rosenthal, for example, argues that the plantation system itself is a manual system for managing labor, and that it differs from factory labor not only by the illiberality of workers, but also by the way they operate. For slave owners, slaves were both a source of labor and an asset. These aspects of the plantation economy were also reflected in a unique accounting system in which the time-possessed slaves formed the necessary gears for the machinery of the plantation system; slaves were commodities used to measure the output of the plantations, whose output was calibrated in the final accounts, which recorded the total output as if each slave had so much (this was not characteristic of the factory accounting system that employed free labor).
The habit path is also linked to another metaphor for habit, related to the plantation economy and the development of basic transportation facilities connecting plantations and markets. It is the "chain of habits", just like the path of habits, and it also has a different history. St. Augustine, one of the most important Christian theologians of the late Roman Empire, was the first to propose that the "chain of habits" was forged by past actions, the power of memory, and the shackles were not put on you by the other, but by self-imposed restrictions, restrictions on the will to freely choose behavior. However, according to the work of Susan Ziegler, chains, habits, and paths are brought into a different, violent relationship formed by the prisoners of chains and the development of the American way. Whether in the plantation economy or in the repair of damaged roads in the United States after the Civil War, black labor was chained and forced to participate in work, and this work deployment constituted an early form of automation that promoted the discipline effect of production assembly lines. Differences in individual rhythm and ability are removed in the operation of forced precise labor, and when "unplanned and unrelated activities" are eliminated, the chain prisoner "conveys a desire for collective human automation." As an instrument of capital circulation and accumulation, roads consumed slave laborers, whose bodies were depleted by the daily hard work of the collective form. In Critique of Black Reason, Achille Mbembe argues that the slave economy makes the slave's body a "working substance" whose value derives only through endless repetition, which is imposed on slaves, bound to a particular habitual path.
Fourth, the survival of useless things
The following example of a habitual path is constructed in a different way. Most of the paths we've mentioned earlier come in the form of roads, but habitual paths sometimes apply to channels, streams, rivers, or straits— water-related metaphors were widely used by the late 19th-century English novelist George Eliot in his novel The Mill on the Floss. The basis for these metaphors stems from contemporaneous reinterpretations of Locke's related ideas (the relationship between habitual pathways and conceptual associations). The research of Eliot's partner, George Henry Lewes, had a significant impact in this regard. He subscribed to the post-Darwinian notion that habits played an important role in the production of "second nature" in a cumulative, intergenerational collection of instincts. But while using path metaphors, Lewis also added a neurophysiological dimension, which he interpreted as channels in which repeated forces are engraved in the body's sensations and neural structures. However, he stressed that if the automatic relaxation brought about by the unconscious repetition of habits is not countered by another force, these passages are also in danger of reaching a dead end. Without this power, the path of habit will only carve deeper and deeper passages in the body, rather than liberating people to new, free, creative behavior. The latter requires the intervention of the brain's ability to "mental differentiation," which produces new abilities and is passed on from generation to generation through genetic mechanisms that link habit pathways to evolutionary explanations of sociocultural development.
The Mill on the Flos River, Broadview, 2007
In the context of the late Victorian era, the fusion of Darwin's theory of natural selection and Lamarck's acquired genetic characteristics was popular in Britain, and Locke's conception of the habitual path led to many reinterpretations, and Lewis was only one of them. What I'm going to explore is an anomaly in conceptual understanding, where the metaphor of the habitual path is interpreted not as the survival and development of the fittest, but as the survival of the unfittest in relation to the late 19th-century anthropologist doctrine of "remnants." Originally proposed by the British anthropologist Edward Burnett Taylor, this doctrine offers an explanation of "social and cultural flattening" that contributes to the development of biopolitical forms of Indigenous governance, particularly in Australia. As a withered form derived from earlier practice, it relies on the interpretation of rituals of so-called primitive things, which anthropologists believe have lasted for a long time and are remnants of the past that have survived to the present. Taylor points out the persistence of such practices, which, once established, are difficult to disturb but will be passed down from generation to generation, just as a stream, once precipitated on the riverbed, would flow for a long time. He argues that these remnants constitute "a series of stupid things" that have persisted from the past to the present, and that they must be removed in order to integrate "barbarism" into the cultures of higher races.
The survival of rituals does not mean that habits are too strong for "primitive people". Cultural backwardness is not so much because they fail to follow the dynamics of the habitual path to achieve the appropriate results, but rather that they translate the comfort and familiarity of reuse into the basis of new practice. This failure stemmed from many different factors, but the most influential was the "customary tyranny" proposed by the Australian anthropologist Mill, who used this concept to discuss the reasons for the backwardness of the Australian Aborigines. However, museum collector Henry Pitt Rivers clearly analyzes the underlying ideas in terms of the habitual path under Locke's logic. Pete Rivers argues that if a distinction is assumed between "intellectual minds capable of inferring strange events" and "automatic minds capable of intuitively handling certain kinds of things without the action of will or consciousness," then they must be bound by an evolutionary dynamic that prompted the achievement of the intellectual mind in the early historical stages to be passed on to future generations as a legacy of automatic reason. The core mechanism by which this dynamic is formed is habit, which normalizes the conscious acquisition of the intellectual mind through repetition. Thus the lessons learned by one generation can be passed on to the next generation through habits, as a natural talent, and the logic of accumulation of habit paths promotes the development of new talents.
The biopolitical implications of this view come from Pete Rivers' further argument that the tendency of automatic behavior under the influence of specific ideas is proportional to the time it took an individual's ancestors to implement those ideas. This view is in line with that of the Australian Aborigines, who attributed their "persistent conservation" to the failure of the mechanism of habitual development, which was not sufficiently energetic to build an ever-accumulating reservoir of so-called modified instincts, but only as a result of thousands of years of endless repetition of their culture and behavior. This example illustrates how the dynamic potential of habits is suppressed by "customary tyranny." In the early 19th century, John Locke's interpretation of land ownership premised on land use drove the interpretation of Terra Nullius, which played a key role in the (illegal) appropriation of indigenous lands by colonial powers. At the end of the 19th century, Locke was once again called to the front lines of colonial debate, where indigenous people claimed to be unaware of the potential of habitual pathways for self-improvement, invoking vital life rights, in which racial elimination strategies continued to replace cultural upliftment programs.
conclusion
How do we conclude here? Maybe I'd better talk about an issue that hasn't been mentioned yet. There is a question that is very concerned in the large literature on habits, namely: What is the power of habits? I will further replace the question with: How does the force attributed to habit change according to the different ways in which it is understood to be associated with other aspects of personality, and how does it correspondingly represent different kinds of authority at work in various strategies for the domination of behavior? I also paid general attention to forms of authority that are applied to negative understandings of the path of relational habits, linked to disciplinary and biopolitical forms of power. I do this to provide a differentiated perspective. There is a far-reaching tradition in Western philosophy, where positive paths of habits are explained as if they provide an autonomous way for individuals to develop new abilities. From the work of Maine de Biran in the late 18th century, to Felix Ravaisson's Of Habit in the mid-19th century, to the work of Henri Bergson in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to the influential Difference and Repetition by Gilles Deleuze Repetition), the French philosophical tradition, shows the multiple ways in which contemporary philosophy leads to habit. This tradition provides a positive explanation for the so-called dual law of habits. It transforms the negativity of habitual repetition into the positive ability to develop cumulative second nature. This ability beckons more and more freedom and talent, or, as is often said, it means obtaining grace—a term that repeats the early Christian concept of habits, when habits were monastic virtues chosen by society. This tradition has had an extremely powerful and far-reaching impact on contemporary thinking about habits. However, I think it has three limitations. First, the principal representatives of this tradition all seek to maintain the status of philosophy as the principal authority, and philosophy has the right to debate on behalf of habit. When it comes to the interpretation of habits by positivist disciplines, philosophy takes a dual stance: taking into account them while limiting their expression of ideas in order to leave room for the continued operation of philosophical or spiritual forms of authority. Second, this view exists in the sense of an uncertain moment, when the external forces (anatomical, social, psychological) that have a decisive influence on behavior are temporarily suspended, so that the mind is free to construct accumulated capacities and thus develop new abilities. Locke assigned meaning to moments when the mind, through "standing still," subordinated itself to its reflection and thus freely broke with the specific "mental pleasures" that came with its earlier desires and habits. But if stillness is "the key to opening up the freedom of intellectual existence," then it is clearly selective in social distribution, rejecting children, idiots, barbarians, and the most ignorant. The metaphor of selective distribution frees people from the repetition of habits and towards the comfort and grace they receive in accumulation, a metaphor that has been repeated in the literature on habits. But I think this is just a metaphor, and it is far from ensuring a realm of freedom free from the guidance of authority, but an example of a liberal mechanism of government. In Foucault's view, these mechanisms are far from being rivals of the government, in which freedom is something that must be produced and organized, and it realizes the guidance of the government through its own free technology. Similarly, its distribution is always selective, at the expense of rejecting others in order to defend some. I therefore question all contemporary discourses which attribute the forces of liberation to habit, in which habit seems to have no demand for philosophical authority, and the knot between the positive and negative paths of habit (in terms of the social expression of the relationship between the two) seems to be deftly unraveled at any time.