Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation 9780228007616

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SerieS editorS: AdriAn PArr And SAntiAgo ZAbAlA Pointed, engaging, and unafraid of controversy, books in this series articulate the intellectual stakes of pressing cultural, social, environmental, economic, and political issues that unsettle today’s world. Outspoken books are disruptive: they shake things up, change how we think, and make a difference. The Outspoken series seeks above all originality of perspective, approach, and thought. It encourages the identification of novel and unexpected topics or new and transformative approaches to inescapable questions, whether written from within established disciplines or from viewpoints beyond disciplinary boundaries. Each book brings theoretical inquiry into a reciprocally revealing encounter with material realities and lived experience. This series tackles the complex challenges faced by societies the world over, rethinking politics, justice, and social change in the twenty-first century. Revolutionary Routines The Habits of Social Transformation Carolyn Pedwell Wish I Were Here Boredom and the Interface Mark Kingwell

reVolUtionArY roUtineS tHe HAbitS oF SoCiAl trAnSForMAtion

Carolyn Pedwell

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021

ISBN 978-0-2280-0621-3 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-0622-0 (paper) ISBN 978-0-2280-0761-6 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-2280-0762-3 (ePUB) Legal deposit second quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

librArY And ArCHiVeS CAnAdA CAtAlogUing in PUbliCAtion Title: Revolutionary routines : the habits of social transformation / Carolyn Pedwell. Names: Pedwell, Carolyn, author. Series: Outspoken (McGill-Queen’s University Press) Description: Series statement: Outspoken | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200408372 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200408542 | ISBN 9780228006213 (cloth) | ISBN 9780228006220 (paper) | ISBN 9780228007616 (ePDF) | ISBN 9780228007623 (ePUB) Subjects: LCSH : Habit—Social aspects. | LCSH : Habit— Psychological aspects. | LCSH : Habit—Political aspects. | LCSH: Social change. Classification: LCC HM 831 .P 43 2021 | DDC 303.4—dc23

Set in 10/14 Radiata with Trade Gothic Std Book design & typesetting by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital

ContentS

Acknowledgments vii Preface

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Introduction: Social Change in a Minor Key 1 Affective Habits 2 Habits in Crisis

28 57

3 Governing Habits 4 Mediated Habits

83 112

5 Habits of Solidarity

135

Conclusion: Inhabiting the Pandemic Notes

175

Bibliography Index

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Throughout my work on habit, affect, and social transformation, Greg Seigworth, Lisa Blackman, Tony Bennett, Sara Ahmed, and Ben Highmore have been vital mentors and intellectual guides – I am indebted to them for their wisdom, support, and generosity, as well as for the brilliance of their scholarship. Rebecca Coleman, Angharad Closs, and Mónica Moreno Figueroa, whose writing on habit, embodiment, mediation, affect, atmosphere, feminism, and anti-racism has been so important to my own work, read nearly all the book’s chapters in various forms and provided incredibly careful and incisive feedback. I am so grateful to them for their knowledge, insight, and care, as well as their friendship, for so many years now. Thank you also to my dear friends, Jen Tarr, Dawn Lyon, Jessica Ringrose, Anna Hickey-Moody, Neelam Srivastava, Miri Song, Marina Franchi, Amy Hinterberger, Rebecca Lawrence, Deborah Finding, and Christina Scharff, who shaped and supported the book in so many ways, while also providing such wonderful inspiration through their own critical and creative projects. The ideas that inform Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation first began to percolate during an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship on the Transnational Politics of Emotion held in the School of Arts and Cultures at Newcastle University from 2013–14. My thanks go to my colleagues at Newcastle whose ideas and imagination contributed a great deal to the project, especially Mónica Moreno Figueroa, Neelam Srivastava, Diana Paton, Stacy Gillis, Kate Chedgzoy, Anne Whitehead, Cate Degnen, Meiko O’Halloran, Darren

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Kelsey, and Simon Sussen. Angharad Closs, Ben Anderson, and James Ash were not far away at Durham University and Northumberland University at the time, and our short-lived but generative affect theory reading group, alongside many other organic conversations and collaborations, were so intellectually stimulating and significant during those years and beyond. The book really began to take shape once I joined the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent in 2014. I thank my colleagues and students for providing such a rich and supportive research environment, and particularly members of the cultural studies and sociology groups, and the gender, sexuality, and culture and visual and sensory research clusters. I am especially grateful to Chris Shilling, Miri Song, and Sarah Vickerstaff for their invaluable mentorship and guidance over the years, and to Vince Miller, David Nettleingham, and Kayleigh Flaxman, who, along with Chris, have made working in the cultural studies team such an excellent academic gig. Ongoing dialogues and debates at Kent about habit, rhythm, everyday life, embodiment, materiality, sensation, affect, emotion, power, neoliberalism, governmentality, digital culture, mediation, algorithms, and social justice have been pivotal to Revolutionary Routines and I want to thank, in alphabetical order, Stella Bolaki, Beth Breeze, Adam Burgess, Caroline Chatwin, Heejung Chung, Marian Duggan, Triona Fitton, David Garbin, Eddy Hogg, Phil Hubbard, Ellie Jupp, Marjo Kolehmainen, Dawn Lyon, Vince Miller, David Nettleingham, Daniela Peluso, Sweta Rajan-Rankin, Larry Ray, Erin Sanders McDonagh, Balihar Sanghera, Chris Shilling, Miri Song, Alex Stevens, Tim Strangleman, Trude Sundberg, Julia Twigg, Sarah Vickerstaff, Iain Wilkinson, and Joy Zhang for all the conversation and camaraderie, whether in research talks, offices, hallways, or our famous Thursday night post-seminar refreshments at the Jolly Sailor, the Thomas Beckett, or Café de Vie. I have learned so much over the years from my former PhD students at Newcastle, Kent, and Goldsmiths: Anne Graefer, Marie Thompson, Constance Awinpoka Akurugu, Tiffany Page, Katja May, and Carolina Furusho. I have also been fortunate to work with brilliant cosupervisors, especially Yasmin Gunaratnum, Stella Bolaki, Stacy Gillis,

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Cate Degnen, Mónica Moreno Figueroa, and Marian Duggan, who, along with our wonderful students, always made the process so enjoyable and generative. I am, as ever, indebted to my mentors, teachers, and friends at the LSE Gender Institute, especially Clare Hemmings, Anne Phillips, Diane Perrons, Mary Evans, Sadie Wearing, Hazel Johnstone, Rosalind Gill, and Karen Throsby, who did so much to shape my critical consciousness and feminist, queer, anti-racist, and decolonial habits of thought. Thank you also to my fellow colleagues and co-editors at Feminist Theory journal, who formed such kinetic and supportive collective, of which I was honoured to be a part for over a decade. It has been a pleasure to work with McGill-Queen’s University Press on this book, particularly given that I began my university education at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, in 1997. I am especially grateful to my editor, Khadija Coxon, for her interest in the project from the beginning and for all her knowledge, expertise, and enthusiasm in developing the manuscript throughout the writing and publication process. Thank you also to Lisa Aitken, Kathleen Fraser, and Jennifer Roberts for their invaluable guidance and support during the production process and to Carolyn Yates for their astute and incisive copy editing. Revolutionary Routines’s three anonymous reviewers provided remarkably perceptive and considered feedback that helped me improve the book in innumerable ways, and I thank them for their insight, care, and dedication to making the review process so valuable and productive. I have presented material from Revolutionary Routines at conferences, seminars, and events across the United Kingdom, Europe, North America, and Australia. The questions, comments, and critiques which such forums generated have been incredibly important to the book’s development and I appreciate the contributions of everyone who organised and participated in these discussions. I particularly want to acknowledge Ben Anderson and Ruth Raynor for including me in their panels on “The Present” at the AAG annual conference in Chicago in 2015, which, as my first public discussion of this material, was pivotal in developing the book’s arguments and interpretive framework. My gratitude also goes to Tony Bennett and Nikolas Rose for inviting me to participate in “Assembling and Governing Habits” at the

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University of Sydney; Megan Boler and Elizabeth Davis for including me in “Affect, Propaganda, and Political Imagination” at the University of Toronto; Kevin DeLuca and Joshua Barnett for inviting me as a keynote to “Activism, Affect, and New Media” at the University of Utah; Greg Seigworth for including me as a spotlight speaker at “Capacious: Affect Inquiry/Making Space” at Millersville University; Libe García Zarranz for inviting me as a keynote to “Affect Theory and Praxis: Transdisciplinary Methodologies” at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology; László Munteán for including me as a keynote at the Netherlands Research School of Media Studies Summer School at Radboud University; Ágnes Györke and Imola Bulgozdi for inviting me as a keynote to “Migrant Narratives and the City in Western Modernity” at the Central European University; and Susanne Witzgall, Marietta Kesting, and Karianne Fogelberg for including me in the Politics of Emotion: Power of Affect series at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. I want to thank my oldest friends, Melanee Brathwaite and Carlie Ladner, who have been such an important part of my life since childhood. We lost Carlie suddenly and unexpectedly in August 2020 and her absence continues to be painfully felt. Carlie really was the best of us. She was exceptionally smart, talented, and beautiful, but what always mattered most to her was other people: listening, caring, and doing what she could to make life better for everyone around her, especially those who had a much harder time navigating the world than we did. Carlie’s commitment to social justice in all its forms continues to inspire me and is, in many ways, written into the pages that follow. I am also grateful to my newest friends, the members of my National Childbirth Trust group, especially Justine Guerrero, Natasha Rainsford, Diana Leth, and Sam Tenakoon, for their vital support and companionship as I was desperately trying to complete revisions on the manuscript . . . while also caring for a newborn baby . . . during a global pandemic. Thanks so much to all of you for getting me through such surreal times. My biggest thanks and debt of gratitude go, as always, to my parents, Laurie and Dave Pedwell, who have made everything possible. It is difficult to imagine parents who could have been more loving, supportive, and enabling – as well as inspirational. I am so grateful for

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everything they have done for me and for everything they have taught me. Thank you also to my brother Greg Pedwell, my sister-in-law Elsa Pedwell, and my niece and nephews Lilla, Berkley, and Ivor for their love and support. We lost (big) Berkley Harper in 2018, but the impact of his compassion, ingenuity, and free-thinking vision lives on in his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Luis Cereceda wants me to acknowledge that he has been “an absolute legend” during the process of writing this book, but also wants to request that I “please not write another book.” In all seriousness, Luis’s love, support, and humour have sustained me more than he knows. I am so grateful for all the early-morning weekend writing sessions he made possible during my maternity leave, as well as all the amazing home-cooked meals and superior domestic logistics management. I’m afraid I can’t make any promises about future books, though. Finally, thank you to our daughter, Sadie, who has taught me more about rhythms, habits, and routines than I could have ever learned from theory or philosophy . . . mainly by interrupting them. This book is dedicated to her. Some material from chapters 1, 3 and 4 appeared in earlier publications, and is reprinted with permission: Carolyn Pedwell (2017), “Transforming Habit: Revolution, Routine and Social Change,” Cul­ tural Studies 31, no. 1: 93–120; Carolyn Pedwell (2017), “Habit and the Politics of Social Change: A Comparison of Nudge Theory and Pragmatist Philosophy,” Body and Society 23, no. 4: 56–94; and Carolyn Pedwell (2017), “Mediated Habits: Images, Networked Affect and Social Change,” Subjectivity 10, no. 2: 147–69.

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Towards the end of 2008, I stopped sleeping. I had been grappling with a period of significant change in my life – the completion of my doctorate, the end of a long relationship, and a new job in a distant city about to start. As I lay awake in a state of increasing anxiety and exhaustion, I became viscerally aware of the disruption of a habit I had not previously recognised as such. Sleeping through the night is, in many contexts and cultures, a habitual capacity that babies acquire over time,1 ideally in a safe and comforting environment. Yet for those untouched by insomnia, the ability to sleep may never reveal itself as habit. As the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey writes, “the more suavely efficient a habit the more unconsciously it operates” ([1922] 2012, 71). And yet, as his predecessor William James notes, the “usually inattentive” sensations of habit will “immediately call our attention if they go wrong” ([1890] 2004, 43).2 Infuriatingly, as much as sleeping had once functioned as a “physiologically engrained” mechanism (Dewey [1922] 2012, 32) for me, not sleeping now emerged as a habit with a life of its own. The more I agonised about not sleeping, the more I failed to sleep. Indeed, what is at once most distressing about insomnia and also most likely to ensure its continuance is the fear that one might never sleep again. Although it would have brought me little comfort at the time, my dilemma offered a perfect illustration of the French philosopher and archaeologist Felix Ravaisson’s ([1838] 2008) insight that habits enable both grace and addiction: that is, the same force that produces habit as ease,

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facility, and power also produces it as machinic repetition (Malabou 2008). The bodily plasticity that had enabled me to become habituated to sleeping in the first place was now precisely what was allowing this new unwanted habit to take hold. While this particularly brutal period of sleeplessness eventually receded, insomnia continued to trouble me for nearly a decade. I became reliant on various props, routines, and pharmaceutical aides to manage it and sought relief in everything from meditation and acupuncture to cognitive behavioural therapy and psychotherapy. Nothing really worked: the harder I tried to dislodge my insomniac habit, the more powerful and resistant it became. I grew adept at delivering lectures on adrenaline alone and once even completed a half-marathon having not slept a wink the night before. Still, this was no way to live. When you are routinely and unwillingly awake in the small hours of the night, the line between sanity and whatever is on the other side becomes terrifyingly permeable. I began to vacillate between intense waves of anxiety and gnawing bouts of depression. But things were changing – things are always changing. Early on in my journey with insomnia, my brother sent me a book of guided meditations by the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Inside was a note: “I don’t want to sound cheesy, but atheists and secular Christians like us often only nourish our spirit through romance, and when romance is gone, so too is our peace of mind. Meditation will allow you to nourish your spirit and mind when you are alone.” Right . . . well, at that point I was ready to try anything. My brother warned, however, that “focusing one’s thoughts on something as simple as one’s breath can be very challenging.” He was correct: meditation was challenging. I could not be sure whether or not my wildly distracted efforts to focus on my breath were nourishing my soul, but sleep was certainly not forthcoming. Nonetheless, slowly and largely imperceptibly, a new practice was beginning to emerge. Not long after this, a therapist I had been seeing recommended a book about mindfulness. This was a few years prior to the full neoliberal capture of mindfulness as the millennial technology of the self, and the proliferation of associated literatures, courses, and digital applications. The book opened with an exercise that involved attending

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to the multisensory experience of eating a raisin. I was to hold the raisin in palm of my hand and examine “the highlights where the light shines, the darker hollows, the folds and ridges, and any asymmetries or unique features.” Moving slowly onwards, I then focused on its texture, scent, and taste, before seeing if I could “detect the intention to swallow as it comes up” (Williams et al. 2007, 55–6). Alongside the recommended mindful dishwashing, teeth-brushing, shower-taking, and stair-walking, the raisin activity sought to bring awareness to routine activities that usually operate on autopilot, enabling one to “dwell in the mode of being” (69). At the heart of mindfulness, and the diverse Eastern traditions it appropriates and repackages, is a belief that both greater mental peace and the possibility of affirmative transformation emerge through this kind of embodied dwelling in the present. This was not, I began to perceive, all that different from some of the scholarship on affect in which I had been immersing myself for a book I was writing about empathy. Some calls for empathy (or indeed other emotions) as sociopolitical panacea invest in the transformative force of an affective break or upheaval at the level of the subject or collective.3 Other writing, however, focuses on what might be generative about honing our capacity to inhabit affect as it unfolds – to, in Raymond Williams’s words, become attuned to that which hovers “at the very edge of semantic availability” (1977, 134). In Ordinary Affects, for example, the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart explores how inhabiting the varied sensations of everyday life – from the feeling of being part of the mainstream to the lived textures of racism – interrupts the automatic “jump to representational thinking and evaluative critique” (2007, 4). It might also, as the philosopher Erin Manning (2016) suggests, enable us to catch affects, gestures, and habits “in the act” and find ways to reanimate or realign them. Stimulated by these literatures, I began, without fully knowing it, to inculcate a habit of inhabiting the moment – of noticing the quality of the light filtering through the trees on my walk to work or the pleasure of reaching the last page of a good book. This emergent practice of mindfulness offered no quick fix for my sleeping problems. But it did help me reorient some of my ways of being in the world – to connect with what Sara Ahmed calls “the hap” of happiness; those moments

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that “create texture, shared impressions: a sense of lightness in possibility” (2010, 219). Moments, that is, which allow us to see that “when things go astray, other things can happen” (198). Several years passed and, at the end of 2016, I attended a sleep school in London. The instructor had completed a doctorate on cognitive behavioural therapy-based approaches to insomnia but had become convinced that such techniques, in their tendency to focus too much attention on the behaviour you sought to transform, were often not particularly effective and could, in fact, be counter-productive – a conclusion I had come to myself over the years. Instead, he offered an approach that combined mindfulness and acceptance-based tools. The gist of his message was that the only way to release yourself from the relentless cycle of insomnia was to stop trying to sleep. Our assignment was to gradually give up the various props we depended on to manage our sleeplessness and, if we were struggling, to concentrate on the sensation of being awake. By this point, I had spent a couple years acquainting myself with classical philosophies of habit and recognised how this approach resonated with philosophical pragmatism. If affirmative transformation is the goal, Dewey ([1922] 2012) suggests that compelling people to focus on what is wrong, on what they should not be doing, could be the worst possible approach because it maintains attention on “the bad result” rather than a potentially generative change in the making. Similarly, as the late queer theorist Eve Sedgwick argues in Touching Feeling (2003) – a key text for contemporary affect theories – repeated acts of exposing “the bad,” and mimetically tracing its counters, often work precisely to reproduce its force. Change at the level of habit, from these perspectives, requires reoriented modes of affective attention. It is not that I had not thought of this before – the reverse psychology of simply ceasing my efforts to sleep – I had just never really felt able to let go in this way. It took me a while, but by the beginning of July 2017 I had given up all my sleeping aids including, crucially, my drugs. I did not sleep for three full nights in a row, which given that I was in Italy teaching on a graduate summer school was . . . interesting. By the fourth night I was so exhausted that I fell into a deep sleep and continued to do so effortlessly for the next few nights until I strung

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together a whole summer of “normal” sleeping. Somehow, after nearly a decade, something had shifted: I finally believed that I could sleep again. Barring an off night here or there, the insomnia that plagued me for so many years has not since returned. I am not saying that attending the sleep school, reading pragmatist philosophy, or cultivating mindfulness “cured” my insomnia – a lot of other things in my life had changed for the better since 2008 and, moreover, life is more psychoanalytically complex than the above narrative might convey (Sedgwick 2003; Rose 2003). Nor am I suggesting that my sleeplessness will not at some point return. Indeed, what my engagement with the logics of habituation illustrates most potently is that habits are never static; they are always evolving in conjunction with changes to the physical, social, and affective environments in which they operate (Dewey [1922] 2012).4 Furthermore, and crucially, our habits are never really our own. As the geographer David Bissell suggests, habits might be “better understood as competencies that tem­ porality possess us” (2013, 127) – they will always exceed human modes of calculation and control. I begin these pages with my own story of sleeplessness not only because it is one to which I suspect other academics will relate, but also because of how it changed the ways I think about change. And change – what it is, how it works, and how we might know when it is happening – is the topic of this book. In Revolutionary Routines I explore how, in focusing on the dynamics of habit, we might arrive at a different, and potentially more generative, understanding of social change – one which moves beyond traditional narratives of collective transformation to explore the implications of “minor” processes active beneath the surface of everyday life. Yet this possibility, I suggest, also requires a transformed conception of habit itself. That is, we need to understand habits not simply as mindless forms of repetition that reproduce the status quo, but rather as moving assemblages that enable new affective, material, and political capacities and collectives to emerge. Moreover, as I discuss next, processes of habituation are never neutral or apolitical and, as such, attention to their role in social change must address how habits are (re)produced through complex relations of power.

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HAbit, AFFeCt, And SoCiAl trAnSForMAtion In the midst of rising populisms of the right and left; the radical configuration of major geopolitical alliances and communities; a harrowing international refugee crisis; looming global climate catastrophe; resurgent misogynistic, homophobic, racist, xenophobic, and anti-trans ideologies; and the unfolding impact of a global pandemic, many of us are preoccupied with the urgent need for meaningful psychic and sociopolitical change. Which strategies, techniques, and practices we employ in the hope of transforming ourselves and our worlds, however, depends, in part, on how we sense, perceive, and conceptualise change itself. Different accounts of the meanings and logics of social transformation will produce very different methods of pursuing it. As Manning discusses in The Minor Gesture (2016), we often understand change in “the major” key; as emerging via significant events, turning point moments, or revolutionary upheaval. Yet, as both the visceral experience of insomnia and the various philosophies discussed so far suggest, it is often the less perceptible, more processual, and minor dynamics of habit that are vital to the possibility of transformation. For Manning, “the minor” is not simply what is seemingly insignificant or happening at a micro level, nor does it necessarily correspond with the figure of “the marginal”5 – though it might well encompass all of the above. Rather, following Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s articulation,6 the minor names those continually unfolding, yet often unrecognised, dynamics that “open up experience to its potential variation” (2016, 1). If the major is identified according to predetermined principles of value and significance, the minor is the unpredictable force which runs through it, creating possibilities for established rhythms and tendencies to materialise differently. In interpreting social change in a minor key, then, in Revolutionary Rou­ tines I aim to explore how everyday habits constitute crucial sites and technologies of transformation – though ones that may be “cast aside, overlooked, or forgotten in the interplay of major chords” (2016, 1). While in chapter 1 I outline some of the key ways in which habit and habituation have been defined, for now we might usefully understand habit, following Dewey and other pragmatist philosophers, as an acquired predisposition to particular modes of responsivity and

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action. As evolving psychic and somatic relationships between bodies and their environments, habits constitute an “organism’s subconscious predisposition to transact with its physical, social, political and natural worlds in particular ways” (Sullivan 2006, 23). Habits, however, inevitably exceed the individual organism. While we can address embodied or psychosocial habits, we must also, I posit, grapple with political, institutional, and datalogical habits – all of which involve the interplay of human and nonhuman elements. Moreover, although particular forms of habituation may be deeply ingrained and seemingly intractable, there are always, I argue, minor currents percolating within them – opportunities, that is, for “altering what a tendency can do” (Manning 2016, x). In considering the dynamics of personal and social change, relationships between habit and affect – and particularly the modes of affective (in)attention we bring to everyday gestures and routines – appear significant.7 As I discuss in later chapters, I conceptualise affect as a form of sensorial relationality productive of different kinds of interaction and becoming.8 If key literatures associated with “the turn to affect” focus on the transformative power of “affective revolutions” (Pedwell 2017a, 2017b, 2020b), in Revolutionary Routines I am more interested in the nature and implications of affective patterns and tendencies. More precisely, how might bringing together philosophies of habit and theories of affect enable us to rethink the relationship between “the revolutionary” and “the routine” at the current sociopolitical conjuncture? How might we better understand the interplay between the force of affective jolts and the ongoing dynamics of embodied, material, and political habits? In the chapters to follow, I explore key narratives, explanations, and strategies of individual and collective change, paying particular attention to how habit and habituation figure (or not) in their logics. As a growing range of self-help literature – from Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) to Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit (2012) – underscores, change at the level of habit is an affectively charged topic of personal significance to many. With the rise of wearable biosensing technologies which “gather real-time information from [our] bodies and lives,” we can now self-track everything from sleep to anxiety to fertility and seek to adjust our habitual practice

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accordingly – intervening in how our “bits, sips, steps and minutes of sleep add up to affect [our] health” (Dow Schull 2016, 3). We are perhaps often preoccupied with our own habits, patterns, and repetitions because they seem so central to who we are, who we wish we were not, or who we want to become. Indeed, Dewey goes as far as to argue that there exists no “true self” apart from habitual modes of conduct; rather, “we are the habit” ([1922] 2012, 14). In this book, however, I am also interested in how habit management and modification are processes of much wider social, political, economic, and ecological salience. Governing via habit is a primary tool of neoliberal and neocolonial states (Bennett et al. 2013; Blackman 2013), and algorithms premised on pattern recognition increasingly fuel processes of global capitalism, international securitization, and transnational knowledge-production (Amoore 2013, 2018, 2020; Clough 2018). Institutions, in turn, have their own habits: they are animated by tendencies shaped by the bodies which inhabit them; for instance, habits of whiteness (Sullivan 2006; Ahmed 2015; Yancy 2017). Moreover, in the midst of the Anthropocene, collective human habits pertaining to energy, pollution, waste, farming, and food are figured as both the cause of and solution to the global climate crisis (Shove 2010; Klein 2014). Technologies of habit also enable contemporary social movements to connect visions of social justice with the rhythms and routines of everyday life (Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Pedwell 2019), as they mobilise the algorithmic possibilities that networked media enable. Yet what can be said to constitute “human habits” is increasingly uncertain. Research within the life sciences investigates the interpenetration of human and nonhuman matter at the molecular level, whether via the microbiome (Lorimer 2016) or human-animal chimeras (Hinterberger 2017). Developments in artificial intelligence, moreover, indicate how increasingly sophisticated human gestures, tendencies, and emotional expressions can be learned and autonomously reproduced by machines, providing resources “for the inanimate to become sentient” (Sledge 2013 cited in Clough et al. 2015, 146). The logics of habit are, in other words, at the heart of a range of complex developments which are reshaping the nature of contemporary social and (im)material life. How we might best understand habit and

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its relationship to social change across diverse sites, relations, and contexts is the primary question which I explore in this book. Throughout Revolutionary Routines, I trace the narratives of transformation that might be considered dominant (or habitual) within social and cultural theory and the wider realms of philosophy, governance, media, and political activism, and consider what material and ethical possibilities thinking and feeling differently about change might open up. While it is frequently assumed that meaningful transformation requires dissolving or breaking free from problematic forms of habituation, pragmatist and continental philosophies suggest that habits never really die; rather, they must be creatively repurposed.9 Habit thus acts as pharmakon: it is, as the philosopher Catherine Malabou suggests, drawing on Jacques Derrida, “at once poison and remedy” (2008, x). Engaging more deeply with this double logic of habit, I argue, might better attune us to how particular patterns of action become ingrained, but also to how new modes of responsivity might be actualised and sustained across various embodied, ethical, and ecological realms. As the pragmatist thinker Shannon Sullivan contends, “freedom and power are found in and through the constitution of habits, not through their elimination” (2006, 24). Although my personal experience of insomnia points to some broader themes of relevance to this book – habit’s plasticity, paradoxical nature, and interaction with affect and atmosphere – I do not intend it to serve as a template for the logics of habit. Indeed, processes of habituation are always situated, particular, and immanently unfolding. Habits are formed within given physical, social, and affective environments and, as those environments shift or adjust, habits in turn evolve. As Deleuze contends in Difference and Repetition, “habit never gives rise to true repetition: sometimes the action changes and is perfected while the intention remains constant; sometimes the action remains the same in different context and with different intentions” ([1968] 2011, 5). Habits, then, are always moving and becoming. Engaging with their dynamics thus requires a speculative and responsive approach attuned to change as it is happening. Furthermore, with respect to insomnia in particular, it is clear that sleep and sleeplessness are, like other habitual capacities, produced

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and allocated differentially via complex social, political, and economic relations. As Jonathan Crary (2013) argues, sleep is increasingly under threat in the face of global capitalism’s imperative for continuous work and consumption. And yet, within our always on, 24/7 world, “the injuring of sleep” is experienced unevenly: those with adequate resources can buy sleep (even if chemically induced), whereas others remain subject to the exhausting demands of overnight shift work, zero-hours contracts, or even sweatshop labour. Sleep can also, of course, be weaponised, whether through sleep deprivation as a method of state-sanctioned torture, or through the construction of public spaces to deter rough sleeping via “the serrated design of benches or other elevated surfaces that prevent a human body from reclining on them” (2013, 26). Sleep habits, then, are bound up with complex structural forces and hierarchies – realities that position my own struggles with insomnia as comparatively privileged and benign. In this vein, it is crucial to recognise that, as embodied technologies that bring forward (the result of ) past actions into the present and future,10 habits can reanimate histories of violence, oppression, and inequality.11 Staying with the example of insomnia, research in the United States indicates disproportionate rates of sleep deficiency among racial and ethnic minorities linked to key markers of inequality including “neighborhood disadvantage, psychosocial and occupational stressors . . . and treatment access” (Kingsbury et al. 2013, 1). These and other findings highlight not only the politics of habit but also the biological and physiological impact of racism; that is, “how psyche, body and environments transact to produce human health and disease” (Sullivan 2015, 4). As Claudia Rankine notes in her powerful account of the impact of everyday encounters with white privilege, there is a “medical term – John Henryism – for people exposed to habitual stress stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death by trying to dodge the buildup of erasure” (2014, 11). Consequently, thinking through habit demands not only that we engage with questions of becoming, potentiality, and freedom, but also that we grapple with ingrained relations of privilege, power, and exclusion – which is why, I argue, it is vital to read classical and contemporary philosophies of habit through the lenses of feminist, queer, critical race, and decolonial theories.

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Importantly, the point I wish to make in these opening pages is not that personal or individual habits are analogous to collective or social habits. Indeed, for pragmatist thinkers, habits are neither individual nor collective; rather, they are ongoing transactions between bodies and “the environment, natural and social” (Dewey [1922] 2012, 9).12 Habit might thus be understood as an (im)material hinge which connects “the individual” and “the structural,” “the organism” and “the milieu,” and “the human” and “the nonhuman” – while also functioning to dispel any fantasy that such categories are ontologically separable. Approaching change at the level of habit thus requires attention to shifting “habit assemblages” that imbricate organisms, objects, infrastructures, and atmospheres (Bennett et al. 2013; Pedwell 2017c, 2020b). Yet how exactly this kind of ecological work can be undertaken is neither obvious nor uncomplicated – and remains one of the guiding questions of this book. As I explore in Revolutionary Routines, habits are always more-thanhuman and the processes they enable – whether of potentiality or regulation – often work at scales and speeds that are not our own. Thinking affectively, materially, and ecologically about these dynamics therefore requires that we move beyond the subject, the human, and normative ideas about will and agency as central touchstones, even as we appreciate that habit is precisely what connects us constitutively to nonhuman processes, infrastructures, and entities which are always already part of ourselves. As I examine in the chapters to follow, habits are diverse and multiple and social transformation involves “a continuous modifications of habits by one another” (Dewey [1922] 2012, 19). Moreover, and crucially, there is always more than habit going on. Processes of habituation are inevitably entangled with other embodied, material, and immaterial dynamics – linked, for instance, to action, responsivity, affect, data, and matter – and it is the nature and implications of such articulations that interest me.

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introdUCtion SoCiAl CHAnge in A Minor KeY

In the aftermath of recent pivotal political events, questions concerning the nature of social change and the possibilities of progressive politics are ever more pressing. The momentous rise of far right-wing populisms underlying Donald Trump’s election to the US presidency as well as the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote to leave the European Union left many in a state of shock. What happened? How did we get here? What do we do now? In Revolutionary Routines I aim to rethink the meanings and logics of social change in this evolving sociopolitical environment. I also consider what has become of “progress” and “progressive politics” in a context in which beliefs, behaviours, and battles that many assumed were of a different era can reawaken with visceral force and the hard-won achievements of anti-racist, feminist, and LGBTQ + activism can be so swiftly overturned. As outlined in the preface, I explore these questions through the concept of habit. While the workings of habit were of significant, if not widespread, interest to nineteenth-century philosophers and sociologists,1 critical attention to habit and habituation declined in the twentieth century.2 Today, as Catherine Malabou (2008) argues, we tend to associate habit with “bad habits” – with damaging addictions or mindless forms of repetition that work to maintain the sociopolitical status quo. As such, we have turned away from the vital role of habit in processes of becoming, transformation, and change.3 In this book, I argue that habit remains a rich and generative concept for

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grappling with sociopolitical change because of its double nature: it attunes us simultaneously to both the powerful automated processes and mechanisms underlying the tendency for patterns of inequality to persist and also the necessary, yet counterintuitive, role of habituation in enabling meaningful transformation. At the intersection of shifting political landscapes, changing forms of neoliberalism, emergent digital technologies, and new social activisms, I unpack the critical relevance of habit to prominent narratives, projects, and processes of social change. Key examples include: the affective habits of critical theory (chapter 1); nudge theory and policy and behaviour change in North America and the United Kingdom (chapter 2); the “reawakening” of crude forms of racism and xenophobia in the wake of Trumpism and Brexit (chapter 3); the role of iconic images and habituated affect in international responses towards refugees (chapter 4); and the prefigurative habits of networked social movements like Black Lives Matter and Occupy (chapter 5). Throughout, I examine how, although habit can compel us to repeat previous modes of action again and again, it is nonetheless only through habituation that new tendencies may be created which are deeply rooted and robust enough to endure. In doing so, I aim to contribute to the emergent critical return to habit which is gaining momentum across a range of interdisciplinary fields. Scholars are now engaging the work of continental philosophy, pragmatism, classical sociological theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, information theory, and neuroscience, among other literatures, to rethink the contemporary workings of social and material life, from the habits of white domination (Sullivan 2006, 2012, 2015; Yancy 2017), to the patterned dynamics of biopolitical governance (Bennett 2013, 2015; Blackman 2013, 2019), to the digital routines and possibilities of algorithmic life (Chung 2016; Pedwell 2019, 2020b, 2021).4 In mapping the evolving links among sensation, duration, repetition, iteration, automation, and change, I seek to develop a renewed pragmatist theory and politics of habit informed by interdisciplinary critical theories. Such an approach is particularly salient at the present moment, I contend, when, on the one hand, the political, technological, and ecological contours of our social world are changing in unprecedented ways and, on the other hand, the pernicious patterns

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of the past are resurgent and the concept of progress may appear beyond resuscitation. My primary theoretical companions on this journey are the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophers of habit Felix Ravaisson, William James, and John Dewey. In different ways, these continental and pragmatist thinkers understood habit as essential to processes of social, biological, and environmental reproduction and transformation. For James and Dewey pragmatism develops as an approach to engaging with the changing nature of physical and social life as it unfolds with a focus on the productive role of habituation, whereas for Ravaisson habit offers a philosophical and theological lens for interpreting the dynamism of the whole of the natural world. In Revolutionary Routines, I offer original readings of these thinkers’ work, and bring it into conversation with the legacies of W.E.B. Du Bois, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze via contemporary critical scholars such as Eve Sedgwick, Erin Manning, Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, Shannon Sullivan, Claudia Rankine, George Yancy, David Theo Goldberg, Tony Bennett, Lisa Blackman, Elizabeth Grosz, Catherine Malabou, and Nicholas Mirzoeff. In doing so, I seek to develop an interpretive framework that weaves together insights concerning habit, consciousness, agency, and transformation from social and cultural theory, philosophy, affect theory, critical race studies, and feminist theory. I also draw on key literatures on media and digital culture, governance and public policy, and social movements and activisms – all fields concerned with the logics and workings of social change. The literatures, relations, and cases which I foreground in Revolu­ tionary Routines enable me to rethink the relationship between habit and change with a focus on emergent processes that are becoming central to contemporary social and political life – from the resurgence of fascism and the malleability of white supremacy, to the crafting of post-neoliberal technologies of governance, to the operation of adaptive algorithmic architectures. My key method throughout is to follow pertinent discourses, practices, and materialisations of habit across different sites and networks, in order to unpack their relevance to the contemporary logics, limits, and possibilities of sociopolitical transformation. I examine persistent traces of “old” forms of habituation

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alongside emerging habit assemblages which call into question powerful truths about human nature, sociality, and political action. Through speculative engagement with habit, then, in this book I offer a new understanding of social change, progress, and progressive politics – an ontology of transformation in which the revolutionary and the routine are perpetually intertwined and minor gestures and tendencies may be just as significant as major events. In doing so, in the following chapters I refigure the logics of thought, affect, and agency in collective change and consider the diverse modes of (non)consciousness and (in)attention through which political action and solidarities might arise. Rather than positioning social progress at a point far on the horizon, in Revolutionary Routines I locate it in the immanent potential for habits to become otherwise and see social transformation as unfolding through experimental processes of re-inhabitation in everyday life. HAbit, PoWer, And SPeCUlAtiVe PrAgMAtiSM Intellectually, we are seeing the emergence of renewed forms of pragmatist thought, ones aligned not with political liberalism but rather with a critical empiricism concerned with possibilities of meaningful intervention in the midst of changing formations of social life, (im) materiality, temporality, and agency.5 In providing novel interpretations of classical philosophers of habit and applying their insights to current social, political, and economic concerns, in Revolutionary Routines I aim to speak to this nascent return to pragmatism. More specifically, I examine the critical possibilities of a “speculative pragmatism”6 of habit infused with social and cultural theory and insights from affect studies. As Brian Massumi writes, to think “pragmatically” is to ask, “how does this work” and to think “speculatively” is to ask, “what does how it works tell us philosophically about the way in which the present-day ecology of power obliges us to rethink fundamental categories” (2015, viii). In a world that is itself becoming increasingly speculative – whether via the production of “affective facts” within the political-media “resonance machine” (Connolly 2005; Anderson 2016), the role of derivatives trading in financial markets (Clough et al. 2015; Clough 2018), or the intuitive modes of pre-emption employed

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within the post-9/11 international security apparatus (Amoore 2013, 2020; Massumi 2015) – critical theory and praxis must also, Massumi argues, become speculative.7 In this context, habit offers a rich theoretical concept and lens through which to explore the immanent nature of politics and social change with “the prudence of the experimenter” (Manning 2016, 7) – in ways that attend to the imbrication of immateriality, flux, and emergence with materiality, duration, and continuity. Favouring speculation over prediction, the approach I develop also moves away from what Eve Sedgwick (1996, 2003) famously calls “paranoid reading” – a dominant mode of critique that always knows what it will find before it finds it. As I discuss in chapter 1, Sedgwick figures paranoia as the habitual form of interpretation within critical theory which assumes that we can know in advance which epistemic practices are likely to promote social justice and which are likely to impede it. Consequently, “paranoia requires that bad news be already known” (2003, 130), and this often stops us from sensing change as it unfolds. By contrast, my engagement with habit focuses on process, possibility, and prefiguration and is guided by a reparative injunction to inhabit the present in all its complexity, ambivalence, and fluidity. At the same time, reading philosophies of habit through feminist, queer, anti-racist, and decolonial theory enables me to pay crucial attention (often missing from both classical and contemporary discussions of habit) to the power relations inherent in processes of habit formation and modification. Dewey, James, and Ravaisson tend to understand habituation as a neutral mechanism which can support a range of social and biological functions and possibilities. Other critical scholars, however, explore how embodied habits are (re)produced through dominant modes of social intelligibility which often work in exclusionary and violent ways. Alongside more recent work in trans studies and radical Black thought, Judith Butler, for example, influentially underscores how attending to the generativity of habituation must confront the simultaneous production of uninhabitability; that is, the constitution of “a domain of unthinkable, abject and unlivable bodies” (1993, 3).8 While Dewey’s liberal vision of participatory democracy – outlined most extensively in The Public and Its Prob­ lems ([1927] 2016) – is one in which all might ideally enter on equal

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footing on the basis of being human, Butler powerfully illustrates that to pose the human as an unmarked category is to elide how expectations of legible gendered embodiment (which are always produced in and through race and other vectors of social differentiation) structure entry to the realm of humanity itself.9 Juxtaposing Butler’s writing with that of pragmatist and continental thinkers thus highlights the classical philosophers’ limitations in addressing embodied particularities and modalities of discipline, regulation, and exclusion, which require careful attention when mobilising their work for contemporary critical theory and politics. In interrogating the links among habit, power, and control, we might also consider the everyday prohibitions on Black movement, gesture, habit, and routine – on Black life – alongside the immanent possibility of Black death, which constitute what Claudia Rankine calls “the quotidian operations of antiblackness” (2015). As I address in chapter 5, there exists a long history in the United States and other settler colonies marked by the founding tenets of white supremacy of controlling the everyday movement of Black people (Hartman 1997; Sharpe 2016). Today, Black people and people of colour remain disproportionally subject to surveillance via traffic stops and stop-and-frisk policies. Algorithmic technologies offer law enforcement new modes of tracking and controlling Black movement and habits through realtime facial recognition software (Garvie, Bedoya, and Frankle 2016). Although some law enforcement officials claim that such algorithmic programs “[do] not see race” (ibid.), it is clear that human habits, values, and choices play into these automated decision-making systems in ways that “reinforce oppressive social relationships and enact new modes of racial profiling” (Noble 2018, 1). From this perspective, reading pragmatist and continental philosophies in conjunction with both critical race theories and also emergent work on digital technologies is necessary to understand current manifestations of habit’s double logic – including what Safia Umoja Noble (2018) calls “algorithmic oppression.” In this context, one the most significant challenges which I address in Revolutionary Routines is how to develop a speculative account of the relationship between habit and transformation that pays meaningful attention to social relations of power. As pragmatist philosophy underscores, to work speculatively is to approach the world as

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composed of unfolding events conceived of as “moving, as fraught with possibilities, as not ended, final” (Dewey [1922] 2012, 122). It is, as Martin Savransky, Alex Wilkie, and Marsha Rosengarten argue in Speculative Research, to develop practices that, “by engaging inventively with the (im)possibilities latent in the present, can disclose, make available and experiment with possible prospects for becoming of alternative futures” (2017, 10). There is a risk, however, that in “making everything an event’” (Manning 2016, 3) and overemphasising the novel and unexpected, speculative thinking will fail to address the durability of habitual mechanisms and processes, including those linked to racism, sexism, xenophobia, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism. Indeed, various approaches associated with the ontological turn – from speculative realism, to object-oriented ontology, to particular strands of affect theory – have, in their focus on immanence, unpredictability, and nonhuman agencies, tended drop social and embodied particularities out of the picture, as if bodies and their capacities are not still produced and affected differently via cultural, sociopolitical, and economic power relations. More generally, theory and activism that addresses the persistence of racism or (hetero)sexism are now frequently dismissed as outmoded forms of “identity politics” as if all politics were not, in a certain sense, identity politics (Ahmed 2017). My wager in this book is that the double logic of habit provides a pertinent lens through which to draw together analysis of power with speculative attention to process, emergence, and change as it unfolds. On one hand, thinking through habit enables us to address the mechanisms via which old discourses and practices can return in the present with renewed vigour. For example, as I discuss in chapter 2, white domination has, in different guises, been a constant and structuring feature of American social and political life. Yet people of varying social locations expressed shock at the public reintensification of crude racist and xenophobic language and behaviour in the context of Trump gaining the US presidency. Making sense of the punctual “reawakening” of explicit and violent forms of white supremacy in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, I suggest, requires addressing how persistent habits of white privilege act as an incubator for their public resurgence in particular socio-political circumstances. On the other hand, attention to how processes of habituation evolve

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in conjunction with varied infrastructures and environments (Dewey [1922] 2012) underscores how race and racism regularly assume new guises and dimensions across time and space. For instance, biopolitical modes of governing which involve emerging surveillance techniques tend to translate and dissipate race into multiple molecular instances that can make the practices of racism involved difficult to identify or trace (Amoore 2013, 2020; Browne 2015; Noble 2018). Contemporary processes of racialisation may thus involve formations “that are not necessarily or only tied to what has been historically theorized as ‘race’” (Puar 2008, xii). We therefore require pragmatic and speculative modes of praxis to sense how shifting social and technological dynamics necessitate novel modes of apprehension and intervention – without underestimating the resilience and plasticity of existing forms of habituation, both human and nonhuman. The form of speculative pragmatism which I seek to unfold in Revo­ lutionary Routines has important implications for how we understand the nature of social change. Following Dewey, James, and other pragmatist philosophers, I appreciate the significance of unanticipated events and aim to avoid analysis that depends on preset formulas and “old moral truths” (Dewey [1922] 2012, 94). Nonetheless, like these thinkers, and like continental philosophers such as Ravaisson and Bergson, my focus on habit means that I am most interested in the interplay of continuity and change – in what Manning refers to as “the becoming of continuity: process punctuated” (2016, 3). Various forms of social transformation, in this view, arise not primarily from unpredictable forces that disrupt or wash away existing patterns,10 but rather from reworking ongoing forms of habituation from within – from experimentally inhabiting the potential for current tendencies to become otherwise. This is never, however, a process subject to human mastery; singular interventions can have unintended effects throughout wider relations and ecologies, and the prediction of human-environmental interactions therefore offers no guarantees. Minor PolitiCS And ontologieS oF trAnSForMAtion Through my attention to habit, in this book I aim to rethink not only how change works at an (im)material level but also what counts as

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change. More specifically, the stories we tell about sociopolitical transformation tend to focus on turning points that enact radical modifications to the status quo. In the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election and the rise of the “alt right,”11 renewed calls for the necessity of leftist revolutionary action abounded. As I suggested in the preface, however, thinking through habit offers a different perspective on social change – one in which the revolutionary and the routine are fundamentally imbricated and minor tendencies, gestures, and interactions may be just as important as major events (Manning 2016). In this view, transformation is immanent and ongoing, continually pulsating through emergent relations and networks, and progress is alive in the present. As such, I suggest that we might generatively approach progressive politics though efforts to engender an “increase in present meaning” (Dewey [1922] 2012, 110), while remaining open to the unexpected. Social progress, from this perspective, entails not a dramatic rupture with the past, but rather emergent dynamics wherein the latent possibilities of the past are rearticulated in the present through remaking shared habits and expanding material and ethical capacities. Dominant narratives of social change often privilege the pivotal role of exposure and revelation in processes of transformation. This is evident, for example, in the power we invest in revelatory images to catalyse radical transformation; that is, in our expectations of what will happen when people become viscerally aware of horrifying or tragic situations of which they may have previously been ignorant.12 The haunting image of Alan Kurdi which circulated online at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015 provides an affecting case in point (chapter 4). Yet, as I discuss in chapter 1, in presupposing that greater cognitive or affective knowledge is enough to implement progressive transformation, we often elide the psychical, physiological, and environmental processes that perpetuate existing patterns of conduct (Dewey [1922] 2012). Moreover, it is precisely because our most efficient habitual behaviours tend to be less-than-conscious that techniques of transformation dependent on reason and reflexivity are often ineffective – as witnessed by the apparent impotency of fact-checking and other appeals to accuracy in the “post-truth” atmospheres of Trumpism and Brexit (chapter 2). What is required, I argue, are speculative approaches that address thought and embodied

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action, the conscious and the less-than-conscious, and individual and environmental conditions at once – that is, change at the level of habit. While some interventions I discuss in this book consider how becoming affectively aware of automated habits might enable the development of new forms of practice, others involve alterations to environments and atmospheres which may reorient tendencies below active consciousness. Across all these habit-oriented modalities of transformation, however, agency is not equated with conscious or rational thought – an important point for a minor ontology of social change which I address further in the next section. Relatedly, scholars and activists increasingly focus on how affect, emotion, and feeling might act as vehicles for meaningful individual and collective change. A key assumption across many of these accounts is that, although we may commit ourselves to opposing social injustice in the abstract, a transformation at the affective level is required to make us actually feel, embody, and activate such political and ethical responsibilities.13 My concern, however, is that such narratives usually do not focus on what happens after the event of being moved. While affect may act as a trigger which drives forward embodied change, or which signals when existing habits have become disrupted, it cannot participate in enduring processes of transformation without some degree of habituation or automation. Yet the risk is that when affective responses become routine, they can lose their force and may actually prevent meaningful action and change – a point which Ravaisson articulates incisively in Of Habit ([1838] 2008). What is needed, I suggest, are collective modes of intervention that address the ongoing interaction of affect and habit within processes of transformation. As I argue in chapter 4, attending to the complexity of affect-habit relations suggests that repeated or sustained affect need not necessarily lead to desensitisation or disaffection. Rather, what I call “affective inhabitation” can generate forms of attentiveness, connection, and care that transform sensing “into an activity” (Carlisle 2014, 82) which has a range of political and ethical implications. In this view, it is, in part, the mode of affective attention that we bring to habitual states that might prove personally and politically transformative. Any endeavour to explore habit’s transformative potential, however, must confront its legacies as a colonialist, imperialist, and capital-

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ist technology.14 Indeed, the history of empire is, in many ways, also a history of habit. As Sara Ahmed argues in The Promise of Happiness, the colonial project was imagined “as a form of moral training or habituation” (2010, 129). In the context of the British empire, teaching natives “civilised habits” required that they unlearn “what is custom or customary” (128). Through such processes, the habitual and the affective were intertwined: developing “good habits” required, as the sociologist Norbert Elias puts it, “the civilisation of the affects” ([1939] 1969, 166 cited in Ahmed 2010, 35). Illuminating these affect-habit interactions through the concept of “impressibility,” Kyla Schuller contends in The Biopolitics of Feeling that nineteenth-century American discourses of sentimentalism functioned to distinguish between “civilised” and “uncivilised” bodies.15 Within this biopolitical framework, civilised bodies were “receptive to their milieu and able to discipline their sensory susceptibility,” whereas uncivilised bodies were “impulsive and insensate, incapable of evolutionary change” (2018, 4). In other words, to be judged as civilised was to possess the reflexive capacities necessary to transform sensory impressions into cultivated habits and capacities. By contrast, to be assigned the characteristic of “unimpressibility” was to be incapable of “both progress and pain” – assumptions, as Schuller notes, that buttressed settler capital accumulation and its “multiple forms of unfree and free labor, forced reproduction, and/or coerced experimentation” (2018, 14). As these analyses underscore, habit and affect have ambivalent genealogies and the productive capacities that might be crafted via their interaction always have an underside: debility (Puar 2017).16 Within a speculative politics of habit attuned to complex relations of power, capacity and incapacity must thus be understood as deeply entangled. Today, habit modification is a primary (post-)neoliberal17 tactic of managing populations. This can be witnessed, for instance, by the embracing of “nudge theory” by both the Obama administration and the United Kingdom’s Conservative-led coalition government (2010–15) as way to nudge citizens into developing healthier and more prudent habits with respect to diet, smoking, exercise, and financial saving (Thaler and Sunstein 2008; Halpern 2015).18 More recently, Boris Johnson’s Conservative administration in the United Kingdom enlisted nudge techniques in an attempt to promote social distancing habits

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in the midst of the global COVID -19 pandemic. On the surface, nudge theory and pragmatist philosophy have much in common: both favour less direct, and sometimes less-than-conscious, strategies that address “the environments that ‘feed’ habits” (Sullivan 2006, 9). However, as I discuss in chapter 3, belying their indebtedness to both behaviourism and classical economic theory, many nudge-style policies draw heavily on corporate techniques and market-based principles (Jones et al. 2012, 47). In comparison, pragmatist philosophies of habit tend not to employ the figure of homo oeconomicus as a benchmark for human rationality.19 It is important, as such, to distinguish between political pragmatisms which are informed by a predictive, top-down model of expediency, and a philosophical pragmatism which seeks to enable collective sensing of speculative possibilities for individual-collective change as a means to support more participatory forms of democracy (Dewey [1922] 2012, [1927] 2016). Whereas nudge advocates claim that complex social problems can be addressed via expert knowledge of patterned psychological and economic behaviour, pragmatist philosophers highlight the dangers of assuming that we can know in advance the nature of ethical or progressive conduct. In this context, in Revolutionary Routines I argue that genuinely democratic and inclusive forms of transformation are not likely to be cultivated through overly predictive, instrumentalist, or individualist techniques of habit management and modification. A more speculative and affirmative politics of habit is possible, I suggest, but it must engage with the pernicious histories of governing through habit which persist in the present and find ways to make thinking, sensing, and experimenting with habit a collaborative endeavour. Although wary of overinvesting in the promise of sweeping revolutionary change, the interdisciplinary approach I unfold does not dismiss the importance of radical praxis or elements of what Sedgwick call “paranoid” critique.20 Rather, I explore how transformation via habit can itself be revolutionary and how a minor ontology of change21 might open up possibilities that exceed, but do not disavow, the dominant tropes of evidence, exposure, and affective revolution. As I have suggested so far, to interpret social change in a minor key is to understand it as immanently unfolding through the evolution of embodied, political, and technological habits in ways that may

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not be intelligible according to normative expectations of collective transformation. It is also, as I explore next, to understand bodies and their milieus as constitutively entangled and habits as always morethan-human. HAbit ASSeMblAgeS, bodieS, And enVironMentS As signalled in the preface, understanding and pursuing social change via the logics of habit requires engagement with habit assemblages. In exploring how habits are formed and reformed through the interaction of bodies, objects, infrastructures, and environments, Dewey, James, and Ravaisson each point to the need for an ontology of change premised on more relational, processual, and ecological technologies of transformation.22 As I discuss, habit assemblages are diverse and can be conceptualised at various levels of (im)material interaction across multiple sites and scales. For example, as Tony Bennett and colleagues note, beyond the specific modalities of nudge theory, a view of “habits as part of mind-body-environmental assemblages” is evident in current conversations about climate emergency and waste management in which “questions of dis- and re-habituation are no longer posed as matters of ‘changing the subject’ but as ones of modifying the arrangement of such assemblage” (2013, 12). Relatedly, in Transit Life (2019), David Bissell explores how urban commuting problems cannot be solved via investment in transport infrastructure alone; rather, global cities require a multidimensional approach that addresses the interplay of materials, ideas, advocates, and organisations within transit assemblages, including “commuting dispositions” and the embodied competencies which commuters develop over time. Approaches which focus on adjusting habit assemblages are also advocated to address habitual forms of racism in ways that disrupt the stimulation of psychic defence mechanisms linked to white fears of lost privilege and control (Sullivan 2006). As I explore in chapter 2, such environmentally oriented techniques might involve the design of architectures and infrastructures to encourage ethical cohabitation and multicultural “conviviality” (Gilroy 2004; Amin 2010; Noble 2013), or choreographed disruptions to the smooth running of habits designed to produce a “shock to thought” (Massumi 2002b) concerning

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the quotidian dynamics of white domination. We could, in turn, consider work on “media ecologies” (Fuller 2005; Durham Peters 2015) and “media habitus” (Papacharissi and Easton 2013) which figures affective and habitual capacities as mediated via unfolding transactions among digital infrastructures, platforms, applications, algorithms, data, and users. As I discuss in chapter 4, embodied capacities and media technologies are, from this perspective, ontologically intertwined such that alterations to one element of the assemblage can reverberate throughout the entire network, producing a range of implications for human and nonhuman habits and tendencies. Informing these various examples is an understanding of habits as always exceeding the boundaries of human subjectivity, and transformation as arising through processes that refigure the transactions among emergent components of wider sets of ecological relations. Following Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987), an assemblage is a contingent ensemble of things, practices, and relations which, although appearing as a functioning whole, is not reducible to a single logic. With respect to temporality, assemblages are always in process, and involve “forms that are shifting, in formation, or at stake” (Collier and Ong 2005, 13). Assemblages also dissolve any discrete divide between human bodies and other forms of matter (Dixon-Román 2016). In my reading, the logic of assemblage thus suggests that effective change at the level of habit is not likely to materialise from transforming either organisms or “the environment” in isolation (indeed, they are always already co-constituted). Instead, we need to target the interfaces and circuits of transmission which connect bodies with their multilayered milieus, while recognising that such interventions are always subject to unintended consequences (Dewey [1922] 2012). Given that habit assemblages are constantly evolving, we also require speculative modes of praxis that can inhabit these relationalities as they unfold across time and space. In exploring the transactions between bodies and environments that constitute habit assemblages, it is important to recognise that forms of state and corporate governance, surveillance, and extraction that work via habit often do not address individual subjects or organisms holistically. Rather, they seek capture and/or adjust gestures, movements, and sensations below the level of “the individual” or the

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dynamics of organic equilibrium. As the political geographer Louise Amoore notes, at the intersection of the security state and the market economy, modes of risk management led by a speculative focus on possibility (rather than traditional calculations of probability) “act on and work through what Gilles Deleuze termed the ‘dividual,’ a fractionated subject whose risk elements divide her even within herself” (2013, 8). In this vein, Ben Anderson points to “a contemporary condition in which power now operates at the sub or just conscious level of bodily affects” (2014, 26). Through digital and molecular technologies linked to neuroscientific paradigms, “states, institutions and corporations now know, target, and work through affective life rendered actionable” as pre- or nonconscious processes (2014, 26).23 Within these various information-led biotechnical practices, it is extracted organic functions which are deemed significant: facial expressions, eye movements, blood pressure, and heart-rate fluctuations, for instance. Moreover, the increasing use of computational technologies by public and corporate bodies to shape social and consumer behaviour does not target internet users as individuals, but rather compiles algorithmic profiles through continuous aggregation of online data: site visits, posts, clicks, likes, shares, uploads, searches, check-ins, geotags, and so forth (Manovich 2013; Eubanks 2017; Amoore 2020). As such, when I refer to body-environment interactions in this book, I invoke not bounded embodied subjects or discrete and stable environments, but rather permeable bodily processes and heterogeneous and changing milieus which are entangled within emergent ecologies. Nonetheless, in approaching the workings of habit, it is vital, I argue, that we retain the category of “the subject” and close psychosocial and affective attention to embodied subjectivity. This is necessary both to understand how particular modes of governing and capitalising at the level of habit are experienced and also to interrogate which bodies and populations are repeatedly subject to associated technologies and modes of discipline and control – whether via the use of biometric data in border policing, algorithmic facial-recognition technologies in law enforcement, or state and corporate nudge techniques which identify certain populations as most in need of behavioural intervention (Jones et al. 2012). What is also important to underscore, however, is how foregrounding habit reconfigures the

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subject itself, and offers a view of subjectivity as distributed across a multiplicity of gestures and tendencies and “social categories such as race, gender and class [as] situated in events, acts, and situations rather than characteristic of human subjects” (Dixon-Romàn 2016, 485). Moreover, as I discuss in the chapters to follow, habits imbricate biological, physiological, psychic, social, and cultural processes all the way down and their logics disrupt any recourse to mind/body, nature/ culture, or human/nonhuman dualisms. Thinking through habit assemblages has particular implications for conceptualising both “human nature” and the nature of human and more-than-human agency. As Dewey observes, habits have often been understood as antithetical to will – indeed as “the unwilled” or that which robs us of agency, intentionality, and control. This is particularly notable, he suggests, in the case of “bad habits” such as “foolish idling, gambling, addiction to liquor and drugs,” which we tend to describe as exerting a foreign “command over us” ([1922] 2012, 13).24 More generally, the Enlightenment ideal of reason was assumed to require extraction from both the passions and habitual action and, as such, habit was framed as antithetical to rational thought and civilisational progress.25 It is such genealogies, most evident in the philosophical legacies of Descartes and Kant, which shape contemporary associations of habit with unwilled repetition (Malabou 2008). Consequently, we often assume that meaningful change requires reasoned thought which breaks free from the deadening cycle of habit to inform deliberate and transformative sociopolitical action. Dewey’s work, however, radically disrupts the possibility of any discrete divide between embodied habit and rational thought. For him, there is no thought, feeling, or action untouched by processes of habituation. This is not to suggest that all human behaviour follows a rigid logic of patterned repetition – Dewey does not in fact equate habit with mechanical repetition – but rather that “the formation of our ideas as well as their execution depends upon habit” ([1922] 2012, 16). If all that we think, feel, and do emerges “through the refracting medium of bodily and moral habits” (16), then thought is always embodied, feeling continually depends on past experience, and action requires the physiological and cognitive scaffolding of habit.26 In this way, pragmatist philosophies resonate with the social theorist Gabriel

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Tarde’s conception of human activity as operating without any discrete divide between “the voluntary and the involuntary” ([1903] 2013, xi), as well as the philosopher Henri Bergson’s account of habit as providing the stability and bodily preparedness necessary for the elaboration of creativity and freedom (chapter 1). For each of these thinkers, there can be no legitimate recourse to rational thought outside of the embodied habits which make human life and conduct possible. Or as Dewey puts it, “reason pure of all influence from prior habit is a fiction” ([1922] 2012, 16). In the absence of a mind/body split which attributes intentionality to rational thought against the mindless automaticity of habituation, habits can no longer be conceived as antithetical to will. Indeed, for Dewey, once we understand that “all habits are demands for certain kinds of activity,” we can appreciate how, “in any intelligible sense of the word will, habits are will” ([1922] 2012, 14). In this view, habits exercise an embodied intelligence that works below the level of critical consciousness. Prefiguring these ideas in Of Habit ([1838] 2008), Ravaisson understands habits as enabling “an intelligence” that, in exceeding cognitive processes, operates throughout the human body as well as the natural world.27 In turning “voluntary movements into involuntary or instinctive movements,” he suggests that habits “incline toward a goal” – a process which illustrates that “the whole range of human functions, right down to the depths of unconsciousness, is characterized by a spontaneous or unreflective intelligence” ([1838] 2008, 14). Central to these overlapping philosophies, then, is an account of distributed agency via habit – a range of capacities for intelligent action made possible not by a disembodied capacity of rational thought but rather by the evolving interactions of mind, body, and environment.28 Significantly, none of these philosophers dismiss the importance of more conscious or critical modes of reflection in processes of personal or social change. Yet, in addressing embodied subjects who are neither bounded nor volitional in a traditional sense, they open up the category of thought itself to more expansive understandings. In doing so, these thinkers allow us to consider how embodied habits may enable what Elizabeth Grosz calls “a new kind of consciousness, one not aware of itself but prone to act, that is activated by the possibility of its acting” (2013, 223). We might say, then, that the agencies which

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habits entail often involve “decisional” rather than “volitional” action: emergent forms of thought-movement that, in Manning’s words, can never be “fully directed by the subject” but are nonetheless “capable of altering the course of the event in the event” (2016, 19).29 Focusing on habit assemblages therefore opens up a wider spectrum of (non) consciousness and (in)attention through which sociopolitical transformation might emerge. Of course, the ethics and politics of projects of social change that work below the level of active consciousness are not unproblematic or without ambivalence. As Lisa Blackman and others highlight, subconscious technologies of habit manipulation have long been tied to fascist aims (2013, 202) (see chapter 3).30 Yet concerns regarding the ethicality of techniques that subconsciously prompt people into particular modes of action are also pertinent within contemporary liberal democracies. As I discuss in chapter 3, the fact that many nudge-style techniques operate without us knowing it means that they do not generally invite the kind of reflexivity that enables subjects to hone capacities that resonate with their own experiences, skills, and desires. Nonetheless, there are, I suggest, important differences between paternalistic technologies of behaviour modification that augment the authority of political and corporate leaders, and more collective forms of habit-oriented praxis that work at varying levels of attention to expand possibilities for “liveable lives” (Butler and Athanasiou 2013). While the former equates social transformation with the effects of social marketing on citizen or consumer behaviour, the latter appreciates that meaningful transformation inevitably exceeds the aims of political or corporate governance, emerging via the routines, habits, experiments, and solidarities of everyday life. Fundamentally, in Revolutionary Routines I argue that if we want to pursue affirmative forms of social change that might actually work, we require an effective understanding of how human action operates within more-than-human ecologies. This requires us to relinquish any lingering belief that what happens within social, political, economic, and cultural life is determined by intentional, volitional subjects. As Manning suggests, mobilising Bergson’s philosophy, “how we act is based on a continuous interplay of conscious and nonconscious movement with nonconscious movement playing a vital part,

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especially as regards movement’s creative potential.” Moreover, no one act is ever identical to a previous act: “it is always altered by the ecologies that create this singular field of relation, and that influence how it will unfold this time” (2016, 18–19). From this perspective, a minor ontology of habit oriented towards liberation, solidarity, and social justice needs to conceptualise human activity and responsivity as working through varying thresholds of attention and awareness, within assemblages in which nonhuman entities exhibit their “own” forms of agency (Bennett 2010; Clough 2018) – a challenge that requires an interdisciplinary, speculative, and ecologically oriented approach. netWorKed HAbitS, AFFeCt, And PreFigUrAtiVe PolitiCS Although engaging with habit assemblages introduces significant challenges to progressive projects of social change, it also opens up salient opportunities for political collaboration and solidarity, as is evident in the habits of transnational social movements. For Dewey ([1922] 2012), revolutionary social movements are “successful” when shared habits of feeling, thought, and movement which have been cultivated “insensibly” over time encounter physical conditions that enable their activation. In order to be effective, political activism, he suggests, must orchestrate transactions between bodies, atmospheres, and environments which facilitate the development of embodied capacities ready to spring into action when required. Such collective dynamics are explored incisively by the sociologist Deborah Gould in Moving Politics (2009), which focuses on the emergence of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP ) in New York City during the 1980s. Drawing on Bourdieu’s scholarship, Gould considers how both the epidemic itself and the state and media responses to it “called into question lesbians’ and gay men’s everyday routines and practices,” and so generated significant self-doubt and anxiety (2009, 61). Activists sought to channel these feelings into a more generative “emotional habitus” that could support direct action and advocacy within the fraught environment of the crisis. In Gould’s account, affect can be “a key force in social change”; however, in order to actualise this potential, movements must translate “inchoately felt affective states”

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into more durable emotional habits and capacities (2009, 29). Yet, as Dewey’s work suggests, the outcomes of such efforts depend, in part, on unfolding interactions within the wider ecologies in which political mobilisation takes place. Building on these and other vital contributions, in Revolutionary Routines I examine how contemporary movements for social justice pursue transformation via habit within and through emergent digital networks and technologies. As I discuss in chapter 5, through repeated interventions in public spaces, networked activisms such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter have worked at the level of habit assemblages to refigure oppressive relationships between bodies and environments in the context of neoliberalism and racial capitalism.31 For example, as Nicholas Mirzoeff discusses, the mass die-ins staged weekly by Black Lives Matter at Grand Central Station in New York City from 2014 to 2015 made visible “the spatial component of the policed society” while also disrupting “the circulation of commodities” – and thus highlighted the imbrication of quotidian racisms and capitalist consumer culture (2017, 106–7). Through reinhabiting everyday environments in powerful ways, this reiterative series of events (which echoed ACT UP tactics) enabled those routinely subject to racialised technologies of control to cultivate new habits, capacities, and possibilities for social life. Like other networked activisms, Occupy and Black Lives Matter have been associated with “clicktivism” or “slacktivism” that habitually take the place of concrete political action, while providing data to fuel “communicative capitalism” (Dean 2015). I argue, however, that both movements have engaged in vital forms of “algorithmic politics.” While the aggregative capacities of digital media enable Black Lives Matter to track the quotidian denigration of Black lives, they also offer potent opportunities to rematerialise Black life beyond the status quo. In this vein, Barnor Hesse suggests that, in thinking “against and in excess of the centrality of the state,” Black Lives Matter has mobilised networked media to develop psychic, social, political, technological, and ecological relations with the potential to prefigure new forms of life-living (2017, 448–9). In turn, the injunction to #Occupy and the reiterative anti-capitalist slogan “we are the 99 per cent” provided the basis for expansive modes of political collaboration that actualise social relations otherwise to the dominant imperative

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of profit-maximisation. As such, I suggest that both movements have engaged in prefigurative politics – a speculative politics of habit led by an imperative to “manifest and build, to the greatest extent possible, the egalitarian and deeply democratic world we would like to see through our means of fighting in this one” (Dixon 2014, 7). While various forms of prefigurative political praxis have been portrayed as producing “much motion and few results” (Freeman 1970), such critiques rely on a particular understanding of what social change is and how it works. That is, I argue, they align with what Manning calls “the major”: “the structural tendency that organises itself according to predetermined definitions of value” (2016, 1). By contrast, when Black Lives Matter, Occupy, and other prefigurative movements are interpreted in a minor key, their weaknesses may be viewed as precisely where their strengths and potentialities lie. Indeed, if these networked activisms have not been led by clearly defined policies, targets, or end points, this is, in part, because they understand the political risks of simply “substituting one rigidity for another” (Dewey [1922] 2012, 52). Of course, we know that the algorithmic dynamics of networked media tend in certain directions and thus the forms of becoming they might support are by no means unlimited – a reality that makes contesting algorithmic oppression and the wider links between networked media and capitalism vital (Eubanks 2017; Noble 2018; Benjamin 2019a). Yet, for movements such as Black Lives Matter and Occupy, staying “in the midst” (Manning 2016) of unfolding sociopolitical relations also means recognising that there is no politically pure position from which to operate outside the dynamics of neoliberalism or racial capitalism. Rather, what are required are means of working speculatively within existing (infra)structures and relations of power to reorient the tendencies that comprise them – a point of wider significance to my minor account of the links between habit and social transformation. In unpacking the relationships between habit assemblages and prefigurative politics, in Revolutionary Routines I seek not only to sketch an alternative ontology of social change, but also to rethink dominant accounts of solidarity. While influential understandings of political solidarity define it as a “form of collective responsibility” premised on positive “moral obligations” (Scholz 2009, 13), this view elides the more complex and diffuse ways in which political resonance and

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relationality might operate within contemporary sociopolitical and media ecologies. Conceptualising solidarities as operating across a wider spectrum of (non)consciousness and (in)attention might not only expand the kinds of bodies, actions, and modes of responsivity included in their dynamics, but also lighten the load of the concept’s normative expectations. Instead of requiring “a unity of individuals” (Scholz 2009, 12), solidarity might take shape as a moving assemblage of affects, gestures, and habits – which could open up previously untenable forms of cooperation across social and political differences. It might, of course, be argued that such an account of solidarity dilutes its meaning and elides the significant labour it requires – important points which I address in chapter 5. My aim, however, both here and throughout this book, is to unfold “a more complex compositional field” for prefigurative political praxis – one in which “there is still room for mutation, for difference, for an opening toward the as-yetunseen, the as-yet-unthought, the as-yet-unfelt” (Manning 2016, 23). Through conceptualising social change in a minor key, then, in Revolutionary Routines I seek to rethink both normative accounts of collective transformation and also dominant understandings of habit. I figure affective, psychic, physiological, institutional, and technological habits as vital mechanisms in processes of transformation, yet see habits as much more than automated reflexes that reproduce sameness. Indeed, as I have discussed, habit is a more-than-human technology which generates both continuity and change; both being and becoming. Approaching collective change via the logics of habit is thus about more than addressing habituation’s powerful role in reproducing existing patterns and injustices; it is also about exploring how new (or renewed) tendencies are crucial to transformation that actually makes a difference. Composing social change in the minor key, then, is concerned with how we can imaginatively reinhabit existing cultural, socioeconomic, and political relations to generate novel forms of relationality, solidarity, and life-living. tHe oUtline oF tHiS booK In chapter 1, “Affective Habits,” I bring John Dewey, William James, and Felix Ravaisson into conversation with contemporary thinkers such

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as Eve Sedgwick to explore how thinking affect and habit together might refigure our understandings of social progress and the available modes of sensing, instigating, and responding to change. After mapping some of the dominant affective and epistemological habits within social and cultural theory and their implications for how we understand transformation, I consider how more sustained engagement with philosophies of habit might open up different ways of approaching social change. I also, however, address the risks of a politics of habit and argue for inclusive and speculative forms of praxis attuned to the imbrication of habituation with pernicious forms of governance, regulation, and value extraction. Unfolding an interpretive framework for the chapters to follow, I suggest that to make sense of social change today requires that we think mind and body, affect and habit, and the revolutionary and the routine together within the nonlinear temporalities of social life. It also entails that we inhabit the present in ways that might enable existing tendencies to be reanimated and reoriented. For many, the political events of 2016 brought into sharp relief a crisis that manifested itself most disturbingly in the reintensification within the public sphere of crude and violent forms of racism and xenophobia. Bringing together philosophies of habit with traditions in critical race theory and radical Black thought from W.E.B. Du Bois onwards, in chapter 2, “Habits in Crisis,” I ask how attending to the workings of habit might offer explanatory purchase on the rise of Trump and Brexit and the fantasy of historical progress they exploded. In particular, I draw on the work of David Theo Goldberg, Shannon Sullivan, George Yancy, Sara Ahmed, and Claudia Rankine to explore how thinking through habit can illuminate the processes by which explicit racisms seem to continually hibernate and reawaken in the context of neoliberal and so-called post-race societies. Analysing the psychic repression and resistance which are often involved in habits of white privilege, I suggest, also indicates why progressive strategies premised on correcting ignorance are often ineffective – as witnessed, for example, by fact-checking’s apparent impotency in the post-truth contexts of Trump and Brexit. I thus consider how environmentally oriented approaches to habit transformation might offer a vital contribution to contemporary anti-racist praxis.

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In chapter 3, “Governing Habits,” I explore how pragmatist philosophies of habit might be differentiated from current (post-)neoliberal modes of governing through habit. To do so, I compare the work of Dewey, James, and Sullivan with contemporary “nudge” theory and policy in the United States and United Kingdom, associated most prominently with the American behavioural economist Richard Thaler and the legal scholar Cass Sunstein. In addressing the links between habituation and individual-collective change, both nudge theory and pragmatist philosophy favour indirect, environmentally oriented interventions that work below the level of active consciousness. Yet while nudge advocates focus on how policymakers and corporate leaders can intervene in the “choice architectures” which surround us to outsmart or bypass problematic human tendencies, pragmatist philosophers appreciate the necessity of collective efforts to develop new and flexible forms of habituation in order to engender more enduring and democratic forms of social change. If nudge offers a predictive paradigm for colonising the future, philosophers of habit unfold a speculative pragmatism which is focused on inhabiting change as it unfolds. Opening with the highly circulated photograph of Alan Kurdi as an example of our persistent investment in the power of distressing images to catalyse social transformation, in chapter 4, “Mediated Habits,” I explore how rethinking the relationship between affect and habit might enable us to better understand the workings of social change. While some remain hopeful that images of injustice can instigate progressive transformation, there is also widespread belief in the inevitability of “compassion fatigue.” This belief invokes Ravaisson’s ([1838] 2008) “double law of habit”: the tendency for repeated action to gain strength and precision over time and for repeated feeling, by contrast, to wither and become passive. Bringing philosophers of habit into conversation with scholars of affect, visual culture, and digital media, I argue for a more nuanced account of the links between images and transformation – one in which political feeling and political action are complexly intertwined and repeated sensation does not necessarily lead to disaffection. Within the relationalities of networked affect, I suggest that meaningful forms of social change may emerge less through major turning points and more through the

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accumulation and reverberation of minor affective responses, encounters, gestures, and habits. In the context of racial capitalism, digital and computational technologies are enabling ever-more refined and pernicious ways to track, discipline, and shape habitual conduct. However, as I explore in chapter 5, “Habits of Solidarity,” digitally mediated affects, gestures, and habits are also important sites for anti-racist and anti-capitalist mobilisation. Focusing on Black Lives Matter and making links to Occupy, I consider how these networked activisms use algorithmic media to monitor, contest, and reorient the workings of neoliberalism and racial capitalism, while generating moving solidarities that prefigure new modes of life-living. In doing so, I argue that these movements practice “prefigurative politics”: they combine a tendency to oppose exploitation and oppression with a digitally enabled capacity to sense change as it is happening, and thus they remain radically open to alternative futures. Via their inhabitation of contemporary digital ecologies, Black Lives Matter and Occupy have generated – and in the case of the former, continue to generate – transnational forms of affinity and cooperation that emerge via processes of resonance, reverberation, aggregation, and propagation. They thus refigure the traditional relationship between media and politics and offer alternative understandings of social transformation and political solidarity.

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In the wake of the turn to affect, stimulating scholarly work has explored the vital role which affect, emotion, and feeling might play in catalysing radical social and political change. Such narratives of affective revolution are often rich and inspiring. My sense, however, is that some of them may obscure rather than enrich our understanding of how “progressive” change might occur and endure in a given context, while side-stepping the challenge of how to evaluate progress itself in the current sociopolitical landscape. Expanding concerns from the preface and introduction, in this chapter I address how critical work on habit provides different, and potentially fruitful, conceptual terrain for understanding the political, ethical and material complexities of social transformation. I also examine how thinking affect and habit together might productively refigure our understanding of “the present” and “social progress,” as well as the available modes of sensing, instigating, and responding to change. In exploring how theories of affect and philosophies of habit might jointly animate a minor ontology of social transformation, I flesh out an interpretive framework for the chapters to follow, while considering what new affective habits might reinvigorate both critical theory and everyday projects of social justice. I use the term “affect” here, and throughout this book, to encompass a varied collection of sensorial processes, relations, and experiences which range from individual expressions of feeling, to collective affective atmospheres, to more-than-human forces and relations. It is

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important to acknowledge that the diverse scholars I cite do not share a coherent approach to affect. The affective turn more broadly has been animated by ongoing debates regarding how best to define, and distinguish between, terms such as “affect,” “emotion,” and “feeling.”1 My view is that it is sometimes useful to make contingent analytical distinctions between these concepts, without suggesting that they are wholly discrete or that they necessarily “pertain to different orders” (Massumi 2002a, 26). If, for instance, we are referring to emerging and shifting intensities rather than named discursive entities, we might use “affect” instead of “emotion.” In employing a purposefully broad concept of affect, however, I seek to acknowledge how embodied sensations and psychic and cognitive experiences are constitutively intertwined in complex ways (Ahmed 2004; Pedwell 2014a) – while recognising that processes of affecting and being affected always exceed the boundaries of human subjectivity and consciousness (Clough 2007; Blackman 2012). In this view, affect is not a thing, or a property, but rather a form of sensorial relationality – as well as an interpretive approach and critical field of study. In the first section, I consider how recent scholarly engagements with affect, and particularly writing on the politics of empathy, offer a compelling conceptual vocabulary for addressing the embodied dynamics of social transformation. I argue, however, that although these narratives offer seductive explanations of how affect can spark mind-body change, they tend to provide less-convincing accounts of the (im)material processes and (infra)structures through which the effects of such change might endure. In the remainder of the chapter, I explore how we might differently encounter contemporary social and political relations through analysis of habit. Bringing the work of John Dewey, Felix Ravaisson, and William James together with more recent critical thinkers such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in the second section I unpack the concept of “habit” and trace some of its intellectual and political genealogies. I contend that it is precisely habit’s double nature – its enabling of both “grace” and “addiction” (Ravaisson [1838] 2008) – that makes it a rich concept for addressing the propensity of harmful patterns to persist in the face of widespread awareness of their damaging effects, as well as the forms of automation and coordination on which meaningful sociopolitical transformation depends.

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I develop these arguments in the third section through more detailed engagement with Dewey’s analysis of the links between habit, feeling, and progressive social reform, considering its resonances with Sedgwick’s account of “paranoia” and “reparation” in critical theory. Cognisant of the power of habituation, both thinkers, I suggest, are wary of approaches to transformation that privilege the acquisition of greater cognitive or affective knowledge. Yet, for both, meaningful change nonetheless takes shape, in part, through forms of inhabitation that enable the development of new sensorial and sociopolitical tendencies. In the final section, I bring together classical philosophers of habit with various critical theorists to examine some of the risks and possibilities of a politics of habit, focusing on the links between habit modification and pernicious modes of governmentality, subjectification, and domination. While habit is not easily disentangled from its colonialist, fascist, and neoliberal legacies, I argue that affirmative possibilities exist for its logics to furnish a renewed pragmatist politics, informed by affect theories and feminist, queer, anti-racist, and decolonial analysis. As I discuss, this speculative form of praxis approaches collective transformation through experimental action addressing the environments that shape habits as well as the cognitive, affective, and physiological processes which comprise them. It pursues social change through a reparative injunction to inhabit the present in ways that might open up habitual experience to “new modes of expression” (Manning 2016, 2). AFFeCt, eMotion, And SoCiAl CHAnge As Sedgwick argues in her compelling discussion of what Paul Ricoeur calls “the hermeneutics of suspicion” (Sedgwick 1996, 2003, 2011), we have, within social and cultural theory, become very skilled at tracing the workings of power and domination – at providing sophisticated analysis of how essentialism, stereotyping, silencing, appropriation, and discipline operate, and showing how what might look progressive or transgressive at first glance is in fact simply another reproduction of normative relations of power.2 In turn, we routinely point to various sociopolitical interventions that might lead to desired change, from education and consciousness-raising, to political protest and social

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movement-building, to policy change and legal intervention, to alternative economic planning and others forms of structural overhaul. And yet, we have remained comparatively limited in our capacity to explain how – through what (im)material processes and mechanisms – social transformation might actually happen. More specifically, we find it difficult to account for what it is that enables people (students, policymakers, journalists, capitalists, teachers, university administrators, activists, bloggers, voters, the middle classes, conservatives, white liberals, men, etc.) to change their everyday behaviours and act more consistently in ways that might be conductive to particular “progressive” aims – without assuming that human subjects are separate from nonhuman actors, (infra)structures, and dynamics – or that what social progress entails in a given context is ever uncomplicated or uncontested. Across a range of fields, and particularly those concerned with projects of social justice, diverse engagements with emotion, affect, and feeling have offered compelling ways to explain the possibilities of progressive social change. Of all the emotions, empathy – which may be understood as the act of “imaginatively experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and situations of another” (Chabot Davis 2004, 403; Boler 1999), or as a more embodied and sensorial practice of affective attunement (Bennett 2006; Foster 2011) – is the one most commonly linked to the promise of self and social transformation. Indeed, as I argue in Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (2014), across both mainstream and critical literatures, there is a widespread investment in the power of empathy to spur a kind of affective revolution at the level of the subject or collective. The hope is that in being made to feel deep empathy, such as government officials in international development immersions programs who witness the visceral reality of poverty in the Global South, or white university students who read Black enslaved narratives, people will be so profoundly affected that they will never be the same again: their views of the world will be radically transformed, as will their behaviour and actions, in the interests of social justice.3 A key point in these accounts is that, while we might theorise social inequalities and commit ourselves to ethical obligations in the abstract, a transformation at the affective level is required to make us actually feel, realise, and act on such responsibilities.

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This narrative of progressive social change tends to depend on a radical affective break, a rupture of consciousness that acts as a catalyst for subjective transformation. It is premised on a powerful spark of emotional recognition that catapults forth new forms of “knowing that transform the self who knows” (Bartky 1996, 179). Yet is this how progressive change – or indeed any enduring social change – actually works? Does a radical break or a revolution at the cognitive, psychic, and/or affective level provide the basis for sustained behavioural, institutional, or environmental transformation at a deep embodied, material, and structural level? Or is such change more likely to be fleeting, disorienting, or productive of an individualist mode of affective practice divorced from wider structural relations of power? With respect to questions of temporality, these seductive narratives of empathic transformation are often teleological: they imagine a telos or end point at which social and political tensions will be eased and antagonisms rectified. Their focus, therefore, is never really on life in the here and now, but rather always on a better imagined future on the horizon. Such perspectives, then, tend to not to be attuned to, on the one hand, the (im)material workings of change active in the present, or, on the other hand, the ways in which established expectations of “progress” have been compromised in the wake of contemporary sociopolitical and economic configurations (Freeman 2010; Berlant 2011). The underlying assumption of many calls for empathy – or indeed other emotions, whether compassion, hope, shame, or anger – as affective panacea seems to be that, deep down, people are capable of acting ethically, but are routinely prevented from doing so because they are too busy, too ignorant, or too isolated from the reality of the injustice that others endure. Such narratives suggest that if people (especially those in positions of social privilege) could only be affected powerfully enough, through being exposed to the visceral truth of others’ suffering – and their own complicity in it – they would be compelled to fundamentally alter their ways of seeing and being in the world. Yet it is this cluster of assumptions that I now find most troubling – the belief not only that we can know in advance what it means to act ethically or progressively across a range of different contexts and situations, but also that the shock of greater affective knowledge is capable of transforming human behaviour in line with such

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ethical imperatives. How to make sense of the relationship between individual action, environmental conditions, and structural relations is, of course, another longstanding question that many who overinvest in empathy’s transformative promise have difficulty engaging with critically in any sustained way. Beyond the writing on empathy, an implicit model of social change premised on the sensorial force of exposure and revelation appears in more or less sophisticated forms across a wide range of progressive scholarly analysis, including strands of my own previous work. Invoking Sedgwick’s legacy, we might say that it represents much wider affective habits in critical theory. In her discussion of the dynamics of feeling at stake in what she, drawing on the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, calls “paranoid” and “reparative” reading, Sedgwick is interested in how we have come to understand politically engaged, left-leaning social and cultural analysis as requiring a mode of critique premised on suspicion and paranoia. As I discussed in the introduction to this book, paranoia is a style of interpretation characterised by an implicit assumption that we can know in advance what is “good” and “bad” for us – and for social and political life more generally – and that we therefore can split knowledges and practices into those likely to work in the interests of social justice and those likely to work against them. Paranoia is thus fuelled by a state of constant anxiety and alertness focused on detecting and exposing “the bad” (essentialism, binary thinking, liberal adherence to the status quo) in the belief that making what is bad visible is what is most required to eradicate or change it. As such, paranoia always already knows what it will find and so the analysis it generates is often circular and foreclosing of discovery (Sedgwick 2003, 130). From Sedgwick’s perspective, paranoid interpretation is therefore limited in its capacity to either recognise or produce change, and remains remarkably naïve about the complexities of social transformation. Generating more – or more accurate – knowledge about a particular phenomenon does not necessarily do anything, or at least does not always do what we think or hope it will. Moreover, as Erin Manning argues in The Minor Gesture, when critique operates as an academic trope in this way it “stifles the very opening through which fragile new modes of existence can come to expression.” What

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epistemic and ethical possibilities might emerge, she asks, if we did not habitually assume particular forms of knowledge in advance, and “if we didn’t yet know what needed to be taught, let alone questioned” (2016, 9)? Clearly, not all writing about the relationship between affect, emotion, and social change bears the features of the empathy narratives described above. Visions of affective transformation informed by the continental philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze, for instance, neither subscribe to linear notions of time and social progress, nor tend to figure emotional identification as a driver of change. Yet, in some important respects, I argue, they resonate with the earlier accounts of empathy. Indeed, many Deleuzian-inspired narratives focus on encounters that produce “a shock to thought” (Massumi 2002b), an affective jolt that can catapult us involuntarily into critical inquiry.4 Such experiences, these narratives suggest, have the potential to move us beyond preset narratives and open up a more radical space for political and ethical engagement. While these accounts do not offer a teleological vision of social progress, they do still invest in the power of an affective break or upheaval to enable critical transformation. Granted, most theorists of affect who work in the Spinoza-Deleuze tradition would not attribute straightforward causality to affect (i.e., affect causes change); instead, they understand affect as a potential or capacity – “a body’s capacity to affect and be affected” (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, 3). Nonetheless, causality is complex rather than absent here given that affect is also frequently figured as a catalysing force, as that which “can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension” (2010, 1). So while affect might not be conceived as that which causes change, it is frequently described as that which enables or drives transformation – a subtle distinction. Indeed, what is often valued in such narratives is the promise of those fugitive affective moments in which thought might escape the discursive relations of power that normally constrain it, allowing something genuinely different to emerge. My point here is that, across varied accounts of affective transformation, we are offered enticing narratives of how sensation or feeling might spark embodied change, but less compelling explanations of the processes through which that change might produce more durable effects.

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These observations lead me to ask, might focusing on habit help to reorient theories of affective transformation, enabling us to grapple with not only how patterns of action (personal, institutional, environmental) become deeply ingrained, but also how new modes of sociopolitical engagement and responsivity might be actualised and sustained? And can it do so in ways that refigure dominant binaries of cognition and embodiment, individual and environment, and human and nonhuman – while troubling linear notions of time and progress? In posing these questions, it is important to underscore that I do not see affect, emotion, and habit as radically different and discrete concepts or processes, but rather as related and overlapping ones. We can consider, for instance, how certain emotional responses become habitual over time, and thus how we routinely engage in practices of “affective citation” (Wetherell 2013). Indeed, while fuelling explanations of social change, theories of affect also underscore powerful interpretations of political stasis and “stuckness” – from Sara Ahmed’s analysis of how “emotions can attach us to the very conditions of our subordination” (2004, 12), to Lauren Berlant’s (2011) account of how “cruel optimism” keeps us locked into self-defeating efforts to pursue “the good life” in deteriorating conditions of social and economic opportunity. Yet key accounts of habit also address the role of affect in the formation of new embodied capacities and routines, as well as the vital function of feeling in signalling when our automated habits have been disrupted. I might go as far to say, then, that there is no habit without affect, though the affective components of many forms of habituation are less-than-conscious. My aim here is thus not to laud the possibilities afforded by the substitution of one critical paradigm (affect) by another (habit); rather, I want to examine how our understanding of social change might be enriched though engaging more substantively with the ways in which the affective and the habitual are intertwined. geneAlogieS oF HAbit Intellectual concern with habit has been prominent, if not widespread, in contemporary social and cultural theory – from Michel Foucault’s work on the embodied micropolitics of discipline, to Pierre Bourdieu’s

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analysis of social class and habitus, to Judith Butler’s examination of the iterative constitution of sex and gender. The concept of habit was also important to classical sociological theorists, such as Gabriel Tarde, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim, with the latter viewing it as “a chief determinant of human action” and one of the “principle supports for the moral fabric of modern societies” (Camic 1986, 1039). Phenomenologists, in turn, examined habits in relation to the lived body, with Maurice Merleau Ponty famously linking habituation to embodied “knowledge in the hands” – an analysis that resonates with the anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s influential discussion of “techniques of the body.” Such perspectives were vital to the emergence of theories of everyday life within sociology and cultural studies, including Henri Lefebvre’s development of “rythmanalysis” to trace the patterns and flows of daily life,5 and Michel de Certeau’s account of the sociopolitical implications of quotidian practices such as reading, cooking, and walking in the city.6 In the realm of philosophy, reflection on the links between habit and human activity, which can be traced at least as far back as Aristotle, developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the work of the American pragmatist philosophers William James and John Dewey (as discussed in the introduction to this book). Contending that we are all “bundles of habits,” James, who was trained as a medical doctor and psychologist, takes particular interest in the psychic, neural, and physiological working of habituation ([1896] 2004, 1). Relatedly, Dewey, who draws on philosophy and social psychology to approach educational reform, suggests that, while we tend to think of “bad habits” as exerting a foreign power over us, in actuality, habit “has this power because it is so intimately part of ourselves” ([1922] 2012, 14). More recently, there has been renewed interest in habit’s legacy in continental philosophy, namely in the work of the French philosopher Felix Ravaisson ([1838] 2008), who developed his predecessor Maine de Biran’s analysis of the productive force of habituation.7 Ravaisson’s focus is on role of habit in processes of being and becoming – in the transformation of “a power of moving or of acting into a tendency to move or act in a particular way” (Carlisle and Sinclair 2008, 13). Together, these philosophies compel us to contemplate

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habit’s generative potential as a technology of freedom, immanence, and change. However, extending Foucault’s legacy, contemporary engagements with habit also reflect on its role in pernicious modes of discipline and governmentality. As Tony Bennett et al. argue, in positioning particular (racialised, classed, gendered, and colonised) populations as lacking in the capacity for will “due to the excessive sway of habit,” political, medical, and scientific authorities did much in the late nineteenth century to ensure that the capacity for freedom and self-governance was differentially distributed (2013, 6).8 And yet, for those positioned as “slaves to habit,” such authorities nonetheless prescribed “a reinforcement of the disciplinary rigors of habit as the only effective means of guiding conduct” (6). This assumed divide between will and habit informed many scholarly mediations at the time, including Durkheim’s “hierarchical conception of the relations between primitive and civilized races” (11).9 Its logic also permeates contemporary practices of governing marginalised groups, from the Australian Aboriginal peoples to the British “underclass” (15). Indeed, habit modification remains a primary political tactic of managing populations, as I address in chapter 3 in relation to nudge theory and policies on both sides of the Atlantic.10 In this age of digital and computational technology, we might also consider how corporations track our online practices and use them to shape consumer habits (Duhigg 2012; Eubanks 2017; Pedwell 2021), as well as the ways in which habit-tracking technologies and algorithms inform contemporary practices of securitization and the particular geopolitical disciplining of bodies and borders they produce (Amoore 2013, 2018, 2020; Clough 2018). Developing Bourdieu’s scholarship – as well as the insights of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and pragmatism – feminist, anti-racist, and other critical theorists have also long focused on the habitual ways in which social privilege is perpetuated. Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon and Julia Kristeva, Iris Marion Young influentially argues that cultural imperialism and racism are often sustained through habitual “aversive or anxious reactions to the bodily presence of others,” which are frequently “exhibited by liberal-minded people who intend to treat everyone with equal respect” (1990 11). Importantly, for

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Young – as well as for scholars writing more recently, such Shannon Sullivan (2006, 2012, 2015) in her analysis of habits of white privilege and George Yancy (2017) in his account of “white racist embodied habituation” – repeated affective reactions at the micro level are central to the reproduction of structural relations of power at the macro level. From Young’s perspective, the best way to address pernicious embodied habits is to “politicize” them, a process requiring “a kind of social therapy” mobilised through “the processes of politicized personal discussion that social movements have come to call ‘consciousness raising’” (1990, 153). Yet, as Sullivan argues, bringing problematic habits to conscious awareness is not easy or straightforward, not least because of the ambivalent workings of psychic repression and resistance. Yancy puts it more starkly: whiteness, he contends, “is a form of conscious and unconscious investment that many whites would rather die for than to call into question let alone ‘dismantle’” (2017, xxxviii). Moreover, while many critical scholars underscore the importance of becoming aware of problematic habits in order to disrupt them, they focus less on the productive role that habits might play in engendering more inclusive or liberatory sociopolitical spaces and relations (Noble 2013). What, we might ask, happens after oppressive or status-quo-enabling habits are unsettled or disrupted? These observations point to the paradox at the root of habituation: On the one hand, habit may conjure unthinking reflex, repetition, and stasis. Yet, on the other hand, without the formation of automated habits, no substantive embodied, social, or political change can take shape and become rooted enough to endure. Catherine Malabou (2008) animates this tension in her introduction to the English translation of Ravaisson’s Of Habit, first published in 1838. Here, she identifies two key European philosophical genealogies of habit: first, a line of analysis beginning with Descartes and moving through Kant, which understands habit as automated repetition that is antithetical to critical thinking, wonder, and change; and second, an older tradition emerging with Aristotle, taken up by Hegel, and resonant with more recent philosophers such as Henri Bergson and Deleuze, which conceptualises habit as the essence of being and becoming. From this latter perspective, pioneered in Ravaisson’s work, habit involves a repetition, but it is a repetition that produces a difference;

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that is, a capacity for change.11 In transforming a potentiality into a tendency through the work of repetition, habit illustrates powerfully that “if being was able to change once, in the manner of contracting a habit, it can change again. It is available for a change to come” (Malabou 2008, viii). These ideas are developed further by Bergson, who studied under Ravaisson and would have far-reaching influence on American pragmatism.12 In his first book, Time and Free Will (1889), Bergson establishes habit as crucial to the generation of “free acts.” In enabling the automated movements central to daily life, he suggests that habits provide the bodily scaffolding through which unpredictability and freedom can emerge. Subsequently, in Matter and Memory (1896), Bergson understands habit as a form of embodied memory oriented towards action which prepares the organism for future change. For Ravaisson and Bergson alike, then, habit is “a past (as result) [that] makes possible a future” (Malabou 2008, viii) – and is thus a crucial mechanism in processes of embodied and social transformation. In Malabou’s view, we have perhaps become habituated to the first understanding (habit as automated repetition), yet we might productively return to the second, older, conceptualisation (habit as being and becoming) – and indeed, appreciate how the first and second views mutually inform one another. This is precisely how Malabou interprets Ravaisson’s analysis: he demonstrates that there can never be being and becoming without some degree of automated repetition, for the same force produces habit as “grace” (ease, facility, power) and as “addiction” (machinic repetition) (2008, viii). It is worth noting, however, that while Malabou invokes Ravaisson’s work to invigorate contemporary critical theory, the origins of his account of habit are, in essence, theological.13 As Claire Carlisle points out, when the French philosopher describes habits as enabling both grace and addiction, the term “grace” refers not only to how, via repetition, particular behaviours become more precise and effortless, but also to how, through habit, “divine grace is appropriated by human beings” who nonetheless remain subject to God’s power (2014, 115).14 Ravaisson’s account of habit is thus intended, in part, to preserve the authority of dominant theological actors and frameworks for managing embodied conduct, enabling what Foucault would later call “pastoral power”: the Church’s governance of individuals through

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“sacramental mechanisms of repetition and training” oriented towards “the correction and revision of habits” (Bennett 2015, 18). Given these genealogies, caution and care are absolutely required in mobilising historical figures for the work of contemporary projects of social justice – a point to which I return later. Nonetheless, various critical theorists draw on these philosophical accounts of habit’s double nature to understand individual and collective change. In her discussion of American pragmatism, for example, Sullivan argues that habit is both limiting and enabling: it “circumscribes the possibilities for one’s action such that not all modes of engagement are available, but it also is an important means by which a person can act effectively in the world” (2006, 24).15 Relatedly, mobilising Bergson’s interpretation of Ravaisson, Elizabeth Grosz figures habit as “a fundamentally creative capacity that produces the possibility of stability in a universe in which change is fundamental” (2013, 219). In the midst of life’s ongoing transformations, she argues that habit acts as “an anchor, the rock to which possibilities of personal identity are tethered, a condition under which learning is possible, the creation of a direction, a ‘second nature,’ an identity” (219). From these perspectives, it is precisely the consolidation and automation of habit that might enable both creativity and transformation. But what exactly is a habit? Before exploring the links between habit and social change in further depth, it is useful to consider some of the most suggestive descriptions of the embodied mechanisms of habit and habituation. For James, habit is defined by two key criteria. First, a habit simplifies the movements required to achieve a given result, while also making them more accurate and less fatiguing ([1896] 2004, 26). For example, “a lock works better after being used for some time; at the outset more force was required to overcome a certain roughness in its mechanism. The overcoming of their resistance is a phenomenon of habituation” (7). Second, a habit diminishes the conscious attention with which acts are performed. In order for any new habit to emerge, repetition is thus vital: a tendency towards a particular mode of action “only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur and the brain ‘grows’ of their use” (61). Nonetheless, James does not disconnect habit from consciousness and will, a point

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underscored by the fact that affect (in the form of anxiety, frustration, or fear), immediately calls our attention to the existence of habits when they “go wrong” (43). Like James, Dewey understands habits as involving embodied automation enabled by specific material processes: “habit is impossible without setting up a mechanism of action, physiologically engrained, which operates ‘spontaneously,’ automatically, whenever the cue is given” ([1922] 2012, 26). He also claims that the more competently a habit operates, the more unconscious it will be. Nonetheless, in contrast to James (as well as to Ravaisson, Bergson, and Deleuze, and contemporary theorists such as Malabou and Grosz), Dewey does not see repetition as the essence of habit: a “tendency to repeat acts is an incident of many habits, but not all.” Rather, habit takes shape as “an acquired predisposition to ways and modes of response” (19). It is “human activity which is influenced by prior activity and in that sense acquired; which contains within itself a certain ordering or systematization of minor elements of action; which is projective, dynamic in quality, ready for overt manifestation; and which is operative in some subdued form even when not obviously dominating activity” (19). For Dewey, then, habits are learned, embodied mechanisms underlying and enabling everyday conduct which, through their responsivity, continually shape our modes of inhabiting the world. While James sometimes relies on an individualist language of habit formation, Dewey, as I have discussed, pays greater attention to how habits are produced through the “cooperation of an organism and an environment” (10), and hence how they constitutively imbricate bodies and structural and ecological conditions. From physiological habits of respiration and digestion, to patterned modes of sensation and perception, to everyday styles of walking and talking, he suggests that we are composed as human in and through “our” habits – which are, in fact, never merely personal, but rather (re)produced via ongoing transactions between bodily processes and our physical and social surroundings. Even personality traits such as “honesty, chastity, malice, peevishness, courage, triviality, industry [and] irresponsibility,” Dewey argues, are not “private possessions of the person,” but rather “working adaptions of personal capacities with environing forces” (11). Moreover, in comparison to Ravaisson and other theorists interested

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in how habituation makes possible particular futures, Dewey is more interested in the role of habit in the present, a point to which I return later. Finally, of all these classical philosophers, Dewey is perhaps most explicitly concerned with the relationship between habit and social justice. While Dewey was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a charter member of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage in the United States, his education in democracy and social reform began through his association with the philosopher and social worker Jane Addams when he joined the board of trustees of Hull House – a settlement house for European immigrant women in Chicago which Addams established in the late 1880s (Fesmire 2015). Throughout his writing on education, democracy, and social justice, Dewey is concerned with how experimenting with habit’s productive capacities could become a participatory endeavour oriented towards “liberating [people’s] powers and engaging them in activities that enlarge the meaning of life” ([1922] 2012, 115). In the next section, I flesh out key aspects of Dewey’s thought and their implications for theories of social change premised on exposure, knowledge, and the force of affect. deWeY: inHAbiting tHe PreSent The most powerful aspect of Dewey’s work for the discussion at hand is his claim that questions of moral or ethical conduct cannot be divided from human psychology and physiology or from wider environmental and structural relations. From this perspective, morals and ethics must be thought of as materialist and fundamentally linked to embodied processes of habituation. Throughout Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology ([1922] 2012), Dewey is critical of modes of social reform that depend predominantly on thought (i.e., verbal instruction of particular moral imperatives) or on the production of certain feelings (i.e., the generation of empathy, compassion, or moral indignation). The problem with both strategies, he argues, is that they tend to remove thought from embodied action and the individual from the environment. They assume that new cognitive or affective knowledge is enough to instigate “ethical”

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or “progressive” change, without attending to the bodily and environmental factors that powerfully support and perpetuate existing patterns and behaviour. With respect to moral instruction in particular, Dewey suggests that it does not follow that if you instruct or show someone what the right thing to do is, then they will actually do it. Here, he employs the example of the ineffectiveness of repeatedly telling someone with a problem with their posture to stand up straight. The assumption that verbal instruction or visual demonstration is all that is required implies that “the failure to stand erect is wholly a matter of failure of purpose and desire” ([1922] 2012, 15). Yet, as Dewey stresses, “a man who does not stand properly forms a habit of standing improperly, a positive, forceful habit . . . conditions have been formed for producing a bad result, and the bad result will occur as long as those conditions exist” (15). Moreover, compelling subjects to focus on what is wrong, on what they should not be doing, could be the worst possible approach because it maintains attention on “the bad result” rather than on a potentially generative change in the making. In this way, Dewey’s analysis resonates with Sedgwick’s account of “paranoid” modes of critical interpretation. Not only is increasing awareness of undesirable patterns insufficient to enact meaningful change, but actually, repeatedly underlining “the bad” can amplify its force (Sedgwick 1996, 2003) (see the introduction to this book). Additionally, because many of the mechanisms that enable and perpetuate behaviour operate below active consciousness – and indeed, most habitual gestures are powerful precisely because they have become automatic at a less-thanconscious level – methods of intervention that appeal exclusively to cognitive reason or critical reflexivity often miss the mark. Although Dewey acknowledges that cognitive and embodied transformation might be catalysed by affect, he emphasises the instability of feeling, namely its propensity to dissipate “into ineffectual spray” ([1922] 2012, 101).16 While empathic responses to injustice, for example, may heighten psychic and bodily responsivity, empathy alone is unlikely to lead to significant transformation if the underlying habits which guide individual and collective behaviour remain intact. Highlighting the limits of models of social change premised on affective rupture or revolution, Dewey argues: “Anyone with knowledge of the

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stability and force of habit will hesitate to propose or prophesy rapid and sweeping social changes. A social revolution may effect abrupt and deep alternations in external customs in legal and political institutions. But the habits that are behind these institutions and that have, willy-nilly, been shaped by objective conditions, the habits of thought and feeling are not so easily modified” ([1922] 2012, 44). Thus, similar to strategies of social reform premised on moral instruction, strategies which invest in the force of affect often do not pay enough attention to the embodied and environmental conditions necessary for change to be incorporated as a productive capacity that might drive more enduring forms of transformation. How, then, can progressive social change actually happen? What is required, Dewey argues, is speculative habit-oriented intervention that addresses the interaction of cognitive thought and embodied action, conscious and nonconscious processes, and individual circumstances and environmental conditions. Such an approach, however, cannot rely on the possibility of precise calculation, that is, on predictive modes of behaviour modification that fixate on already known endpoints. So, concerning the example of posture, Dewey contends, We must stop even thinking of standing up straight. To think of it is fatal, for it commits us to the operation of an established habit of standing wrong. We must find an act within our power which is disconnected from any thought about standing. We must start to do another thing which on one side inhibits our falling into the customary bad position and on the other side is the beginning of a series of acts which may lead to the correct posture. ([1922] 2012, 18) Thus, linking back to Sedgwick, we could say that in Dewey’s understanding of social transformation, meaningful change cannot depend on “paranoid” modes of knowing and prediction or on a linear model of progress. Instead, you can only concentrate on the next possible step ahead, not fix on a known end point in advance. But might Dewey’s approach nonetheless be interpreted as teleological given that it requires some guiding idea of a desired result (i.e., standing up straight)? What seems important here is that, for Dewey,

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the desired result can only ever be barely glimpsed; it never emerges in clear relief and does not remain constant. An imagined progressive result may energise or redirect a process of transformation, but with each new intervention at the level of habit this imagined outcome is itself reconfigured. In Dewey’s words, “A mariner does not sail towards the stars, but by noting the stars he is aided in conducting his present activity of sailing . . . activity will not cease when the port is attained, but merely the present direction of activity” ([1922] 2012, 89). From this perspective, ends must not be understood as endpoints at all; rather an end is a “series of acts viewed at a remote stage” (17). If we wish to approach social change at the level of habit, Dewey argues that we require “intelligent inquiry to discover the means which will produce a desired result, and an intelligent invention to procure the means” (15). Importantly, however, this embodied “intelligence” can only ever be speculative of tendencies, rather than predictive of future outcomes, because “the present, not the future, is ours” (82). In Dewey’s understanding of the links between habit and sociopolitical transformation, then, the present is not repeatedly deferred to a better imagined future; rather, it is active, brimming with change, and yet impossible to fix or isolate from other temporalities. As he puts it: “‘Present’ activity is not a sharp narrow knife-blade in time. The present is complex, containing within itself a multitude of habits and impulses. It is enduring, a course of action, a process including memory, observation and foresight, a pressure forward, a glance backward and a look outward” (110). Thus, unlike many narratives of affective revolution, change is not imagined as ignited by (or contained within) one powerful spark of recognition; rather, it is conceived as immanent and ongoing. Moreover, philosophies of habit disrupt any recourse to linear narratives of time because habit, as an embodied technology, folds together past, present, and future. Sociopolitical engagement with habit does not seek a definitive break with the past (if such a feat were possible); rather, it draws on and reanimates the past so that “its latent possibilities can be realized and acted upon” in the present (Weiss 2008, 6). In these ways, Dewey’s approach resonates with analyses of affect influenced by Spinoza and Deleuze, as well as with approaches in decolonial, queer, and feminist theory which conceptualise change as

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happening from moment to moment, as the past is reanimated in the present, thus similarly disrupting linear accounts of time and progress. The difference, perhaps, is that when we pay greater attention to habit alongside affect – or to their imbrication – we can better understand the dynamics through which affective potentials are transformed into embodied and (infra)structural tendencies (or not). Affect, arguably, cannot participate in enduring processes of materialisation without some degree of habituation that emerges through the co-constitution of bodies and environments. I unpack this last point in chapter 4 in relation to experiences of being moved by photographs of oppression and suffering. It is often assumed that repeated exposure to disturbing visual images inevitably diminishes their affective force as “compassion fatigue” takes hold – or, in Dewey’s words, as feeling dissolves into “ineffectual spray.” Yet, drawing on Ravaisson’s ([1838] 2008) writing, I note how habituated affect may produce effects other than disaffection. In particular circumstances, it is precisely the duration or iteration of sensorial experience that might enable both vital ethical questioning and embodied capacities for attention and care – or, as Jill Bennett puts it, empathies emerging from “processes of immersion and inhabitation” that are “more complex and considered than a purely emotional or sentimental reaction” (2006, 65, 24). Given that both affect and habit are inherently unstable, however, such effects are never final or fully accomplished, but rather always in composition. In this vein, if change is conceived as immanent in Dewey’s framework, this is the case not only because human bodies and subjectivities are continually transforming as “their” habits modify and multiply, but also because habits themselves are formed and reformed through the ongoing interaction of subjects, objects, infrastructures, environments, and atmospheres. While habits adapt to a given environment (and take aspects of it in), they also affect and reconfigure environments (Dewey [1922] 2012).17 From this perspective, as I have discussed, social change cannot be thought of as a project of changing the subject, but of adjusting “mind-body-environmental assemblages” (Bennett et al. 2013, 12). Moreover, “the subject,” while implicated in and constituted through such assemblages, can never be understood as a self-possessed, individual agent because, as Dewey puts it, “there is no ready-made self behind activities” ([1922] 2012, 16).18 Although

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these points certainly make grappling with the possibilities of social transformation via habit a complex endeavour, they also indicate how Dewey’s approach differs from neoliberal governmentalities of habit, which depend on adjusting individual behaviour without attention to (or indeed precisely as a means to avoid addressing) structural conditions and frameworks (see chapter 3). Furthermore, it is clear that, while affect might spark psychic, cognitive, or embodied disruption which plants the seeds for material change, the larger focus of transformative political projects needs be on adjusting more expansive assemblages and ecologies in which we are imbricated but can never master. The above mediations on habit, stasis, and change lead Dewey to formulate a suggestive understanding of social progress. Progress, he argues, “means increase of present meaning, which involves multiplication of sensed distinctions as well as harmony, unification” ([1922] 2012, 110). Indeed, if history shows progress at all, Dewey suggests that it is to be identified in “this complication and extension of significance found within experience” – which comes with our ability to generate “intelligent” habits that coordinate and expand our productive capacities in the world (110). This is quite a different understanding of progress than that which animates many contemporary projects of social justice. Unlike liberal narratives of empathy, which often pose an implicit endpoint at which sociopolitical conflicts have been resolved and grievances adjudicated, Dewey’s vision of progress is one that “brings no surcease, no immunity from perplexity and trouble” (110–11). It does not, then, imagine progress as tethered to an ideal (faraway) future, nor does it assume conflict can (or should) be banished from embodied subjectivity or sociopolitical life. Moreover, ethical imperatives or political goods cannot be known in advance of social relations in any clear or calculated way. While engaged in speculative modes of “foreseeing” the near future, Dewey’s approach is nonetheless fundamentally open to the unanticipated, and hence, to change.19 It appreciates how habits “provide the ability to change one’s tendencies, to reorient one’s actions and to address the new, to be able to experience the unexpected” (Grosz 2008, 221). As such, this understanding of progress is less future-oriented than it is attuned to inhabiting the present in all its ambivalence and complexity.

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In these ways, Dewey’s approach resounds with what Sedgwick calls “reparative” modes of interpretation. While Sedgwick was critical of paranoia in social and cultural analysis, it should be emphasised that her argument was not that we should (or could) do away with paranoid critique. Rather, she was concerned to highlight how, when “understood to be a mandatory injunction,” this particular style of interpretation habitually marginalises other ways of doing critical theory – especially recourse to reparative analysis (2003, 130). Scholars interpret Sedgwick’s call for reparative practices in a variety of ways – most commonly perhaps as an invitation to approach our research objects with an affective orientation of nurturance and a desire to provide sustenance, rather than paranoia and suspicion. Yet I find most compelling those readings that figure reparation as an interpretive practice concerned with inhabiting ambivalence (Wiegman 2014; Stacey 2014). As an affective and analytical practice, inhabiting ambivalence requires relinquishing certainty and the possibility of calculated prediction, and thus being open to the possibility of surprise and change.20 In Manning’s language, it involves dwelling in “the event” as it unfolds in order to sense the minor possibilities within major narratives and formations, without assuming that the minor “is inherently positive, or good” (2016, 6). Importantly, for each of these thinkers, it is in learning how to inhabit (rather than transcend) ambivalence, conflict, and complexity that we might move from simply diagnosing bad habits to the difficult work of creating new tendencies – ones that might take us to a more affirmative intellectual and sociopolitical place. tHe PolitiCS oF HAbit Of course, my discussion of Dewey, James, Ravaisson, and Sedgwick, and the opening out to habit their work suggests, leaves many important questions unanswered. If the sociopolitical imperative is to develop new habits, what should these habits be? Who should decide? How can they be implemented? What would a collective project of habit modification look like? Would it even be desirable? How could such efforts both involve and exceed “the subject”? How might mind-body-environment assemblages be identified and adjusted? And how can we understand the role of affect in such dynamics?

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In many senses, these are difficult and potentially dangerous questions. As acknowledged earlier, governing through habit has long been tethered to oppressive aims.21 If we are looking for examples of mass projects of habit modification, Lisa Blackman suggests that Nazi Germany provides a chilling example. Popular susceptibility to, and investment in, the fascism of the National Socialist Party, she argues, was produced in part through the orchestration of rhythm and the “hypnotizing use of repetition” calculated “to facilitate processes of suggestion and imitation” (2013, 202). Moving to the contemporary realm, we can also consider how states and corporations work to adjust our rhythms and habits in the interests of global capitalism – speeding up or slowing down the pace of work and leisure (Freeman 2010), and “privileging good habits (saving, wise investment, healthy lifestyles) and punishing bad ones (the criminalization of drug addiction, the medicalization of many other types of addiction)” to suit the varying needs of the economy (Grosz 2013, 233–4). Habit’s capacities to contribute to progressive social transformation are not easily severed from these pernicious practices of discipline, control, and violence. I argue, however, that while habit’s troubling legacies should be foregrounded – not least because they persist today – they do not determine or foreclose habit’s potential. As Sara Ahmed argues, embodied and affective capacities that “depend upon a preexisting openness to others; a capacity to be affected and directed by an encounter” are always amenable to instrumentalisation for oppressive and exclusionary aims. However, “we need not let the reduction of capacity be our reduction. Capacities might exceed the ends to which they have been directed” (2014, 48–9). Indeed, the most powerful bodily and sensorial techniques and practices are equally available to different political objectives and ideologies. That technologies of habit have been employed in the interests of oppressive ideologies does not mean that they can only be; in fact, the political left might rather see this as evidence for the ethical urgency of reappropriating the (im)material force of habit. Yet even if habit need not be associated exclusively with projects of neocolonialism, fascism, or global capitalism, the question remains of what kind of biopolitical distinctions between people or groups a focus on habit may (re)produce. While Dewey suggests that social transformation requires the work of adjusting habit assemblages, he

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also argues that habit modification requires “order, discipline and manifest technique” ([1922] 2012, 10). The challenge of moral judgment, he contends, is “one of discriminating the complex of acts and habits into tendencies which are to be specifically cultivated and condemned” (23) – a task best guided by “intelligent” observation and speculation. From Tony Bennett’s perspective, Dewey’s work thus risks shoring up “a distinction within the body politic between those who combine thought and habit, and are therefore able to reflexively monitor their own conduct, and those who, subject entirely to the regimes of habit, are to be governed through mechanisms which reinforce its rigors of unreflexive repetition” (2013, 108). How, then, we must ask, is the capacity for embodied intelligence likely to be judged as unevenly distributed and what social and geo-political hierarchies and exclusions might follow? As I discussed in the introduction to this book, assessments concerning affect-habit interactions, and particularly the reflexive capacity to transform sensory impressions into productive habits, have long distinguished “civilized” and “uncivilised” populations.22 Much of what Dewey has to say in Human Nature and Conduct, however, suggests that a key objective of democratic governance should be to create conditions whereby intelligence (an embodied appreciation of the significance of one’s present actions and an openness to change) might become a capacity available to all. “In theory,” he argues, “democracy should be a means of stimulating original thought, and of evoking action deliberately adjusted in advance to cope with new forces” ([1922] 2012, 29). In his attention to how “conduct is always shared,” Dewey also considers how habits link people together in ways that might support the development of progressive movements and solidarities (11) (see chapters 3 and 5). Such connections are not necessarily (or only) about synchronicity or being together in rhythm – which can function to exclude those who are deemed “out of time” (Ahmed 2014) – but more about the “cooperation” of bodies with other bodies, as well as with objects, infrastructures, and environments (Dewey [1922] 2012). From this perspective, the potential exists for engagement with habit to furnish more affirmative practices, wherein progress is defined not as neoliberal disciplining of self-conduct in line with normative politico-economic imperatives, but rather, as an ongoing

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process of adding “fullness and distinctness” of meaning to embodied experience (110). How exactly this potential might be actualised in current social and political conditions, however, is precisely the challenge with which we must grapple. Questions may also be asked regarding the kind of progress a focus on habit affirms and enables. As discussed, Dewey (similar to Ravaisson, Bergson, Deleuze, and others) offers a nonteleological vision of progress focused on the ongoing enhancement of body-environment interactions, rather than achievement of already known endpoints. The nature of progressive ethical or political conduct cannot, from this perspective, be fully known in advance. Yet, with respect to social injustice, are there not, by now, some things we can know quite clearly in advance? Can we not say confidently, for instance, that fewer women experiencing domestic violence from men with whom they are partnered in the United Kingdom, or that fewer Black people and people of colour being killed by law enforcement in the United States, or that fewer people subjected to grinding poverty and infectious diseases transnationally would constitute progress? Indeed, in their rejection of “known” political truths or ethical principles, do such philosophical engagements with the transformative potential of habit risk an erasure of history, a forgetting of destructive cultural, sociopolitical, and economic patterns we have seen repeat again and again? Does not the relentless reproduction of gendered abuse, institutionalised racism, and entrenched global economic inequality make a “paranoid” approach to social and cultural theory and praxis all the more vital? And is it not crucial that we continue to expose – and militantly fight against – these injustices in a context in which states, corporations, and right-wing media mobilise immense influence and resources precisely to (re)produce, hide, or misrepresent them? In response to these concerns, it is essential to underscore that any potentially affirmative use of habit cannot participate in historical erasure. A critical politics of habit must, as I have suggested, be able to grapple meaningfully with dynamics of gendered, sexualised, racialised, classed, and geopolitical inequality and exclusion – points which highlight the necessity of reading classical philosophers of habit through critical feminist, queer, anti-racist, and decolonial analysis.23 In principle, however, given that the “nature of habit is to be

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assertive, insistent and self-perpetuating” (Dewey [1922] 2012, 26), attending to its logics should make us more, rather than less, attentive to systemic and endemic abuses of power.24 Importantly, Dewey’s critique of calculative prediction is not a disavowal of the salience of knowledge gleaned from past observation and experience, and indeed, his advocacy of intelligent “foreseeing” in habit adjustment is premised on careful analysis of the outcomes and implications of previous (re)actions. What is vital, however, is that efforts to foresee are flexible and speculative, rather than rigid and calculative, so that they can account for “the role of accident” and remain open to the unexpected (Dewey [1922] 2012, 23). As Sedgwick (1996, 2003) argues, when we are too confident about what we already know, and therefore about what is necessary to ameliorate suffering and produce “positive” transformation, we risk becoming blind to change itself when it is actually happening. We do need paranoia, but it should not be our only analytical mode-mood, and when we mobilise its forms of interpretation we might gain from making them more intuitive and adaptable. As a means to negotiate the possibilities of affirmative social change, a politics of habit resonates with a critical pragmatist approach that addresses mind-body-environmental assemblages through provisional political goals pursued on multiple interconnected fronts. That is, a politics committed to, as the political theorist William Connolly puts it, “the need for multiform activism” that “folds an ethos of cultivation into political practices set on several interceded scales: local, familiar, workplace, state, theological, corporate, global and planetary” (2013, 6). Given the often less-than-conscious nature of habituation, emphasis may be best placed on “indirect” techniques that address the multilayered environments and atmospheres in which habits are made and remade (Dewey [1922] 2012; Sullivan 2006). Yet, as environments and embodied subjects are co-constituted through habit, we also need experimental “technologies of the self” (Foucault 1988) which, through collective elaboration, might help to cultivate different politico-ethical tendencies and forms of attunement (Connolly 2002, 2013; Spivak 2012). Engaging politically with the repression and ambivalence central to our most pervasive (yet often invisible) habits requires a pragmatism informed by critical psychosocial theories and practices (Young 1990; Sedgwick 2003; Sullivan 2006; Yancy 2017). At

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the same time, approaching human subjects as contingent components of habit assemblages and ecologies calls for material techniques that appreciate the imbrication of organisms with diverse geographies, architectures, and infrastructures, including economic and digital ones (Latour 2005; Bennett 2013, 2015; Pedwell 2021). In other words, engaging politically with habit demands an open-ended, interdisciplinary, and more-than-human approach. As a politics oriented towards the present, pragmatism is wary of overinvestment in models of revolutionary change that promise to overthrow the entire system, not least because, in a complex and shifting world, there is no singular or self-sustaining “system” to overthrow. As Connolly argues, contemporary economic and sociopolitical structures and relations are “replete with too many loose ends, uneven edges, dicey intersections with nonhuman forces, and uncertain trajectories to make such a wholesale project plausible” (2013, 42). Instead, the focus is on a “set of interim possibilities,” pursued simultaneously in several interconnected arenas, which “combine an experimental temper with the appreciation that living and acting into the future inevitably contain a shifting quotient of certainty” (42, 37). The speculative pragmatist approach which I aim to develop in this book, then, seeks transformation on the urgent issues of the day, but also aims to sense and adapt to change as it happens. Moving beyond the exposure of damaging or stultifying habits, I focus on cultivating the capacity of habituation to support social transformation in the here and now. Yet if the pragmatist thrust of a politics of habit reorients our investment in the promise of revolutionary change, where does this leave radical and utopian thinking? Do we not require radical praxis to move beyond the status quo and towards genuine sociopolitical liberation, freedom, and affirmation of difference? These are crucial questions, especially given longstanding critiques of Dewey’s approach – and pragmatism more generally – which accuse him of prescribing “liberal reform” (rather than radical change) that deliberately avoids direct critique of ideological assumptions and structural power relations (Paringer 1990; Sullivan 2006). Like Ravaisson, Bergson, and other nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophers, Dewey’s work is not available for contemporary critical use without political baggage and risk (see the introduction to this book).

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However, we are now seeing a radical reinterpretation of pragmatist thought – one that has affinities not with political liberalism but rather with a renewed critical empiricism that grapples with the possibilities of meaningful political and ethical intervention in a world composed of changing configurations of social life, (im)materiality, temporality, and agency.25 In the aftermath of post-structuralism, varied reengagements with pragmatism are mining the work of Dewey, James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Alfred North Whitehead, and others for tools to develop modes of sociopolitical analysis and ethical-material practice that work beyond the tropes of evidence and exposure. While a politics of habit must not (and cannot) disengage from the ideological and the structural, the fact that Dewey’s work is not reducible to “ideology critique” is part of what makes it amenable to reinterpretation that approaches social thought and political praxis beyond the hermeneutics of suspicion. This does not mean that we should endorse Dewey or his style of pragmatism wholesale, but rather that we should critically reinterpret his work for the contemporary sociopolitical conjuncture. In my view, a speculative politics of habit need not invalidate the importance of radical thought or revolutionary politics. As Robin D.G. Kelley (2002) argues, it is the unbounded imagination and audacious hope of radical thought that enables those who are marginalised to envision a life far beyond their present conditions, to recognise powerfully that things could be otherwise. What a politics of habit can usefully do, however, is compel us to “suture the eventual and the endemic” (Dewsbury and Bissell 2015, 23), to appreciate how affective and political breaks or surges are (sometimes fleeting and sometimes much more significant) moments in ongoing and uneven processes of collaboration, struggle, and experimentation. As Dewey suggests, revolutionary action is necessary and vital in particular circumstances and can lead to lasting effects. His point, however, is that when revolutions are “successful,” it is because “appropriate habits of thought have previously been insensibly matured” ([1922] 2012, 44). In these circumstances, “the external change merely registers the removal of an external superficial barrier to the operation of existing intellectual tendencies” (42). This is why the most significant and influential modern social movements, from the American civil rights movement to transnational feminism, have engaged in hybrid forms

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of political engagement, combining the “shock to thought” of revolutionary action with the longer term cultivation of habits, rhythms, and forms of embodied coordination26 (see chapter 5). Imagination, affect, and habit can be vital collaborators in the workings of social transformation. For Dewey, like James and Ravaisson, affect plays a vital role in alerting us to the disruption of usually smooth-running habits and, hence, to the workings of change. It signals the emergence of “gaps, intervals and blips” in habitual practice, which can function as “actionable spaces”; that is, as Tony Bennett puts it, junctures “affording the opportunity for new forms of practice to be improvised” (2013, 126, 125).27 Moreover, theories of affect influenced by Spinoza and Deleuze overlap with Dewey’s experimental approach to habit modification. In different ways, they explore the productive potential of suspending established “solutions” and ways of knowing to develop alternative modes of approaching social and ethical problems – perhaps reconfiguring “the problem” in the process.28 We might also consider the salient affective qualities of habits deemed potentially conducive to affirmative forms of sociopolitical relationality, from Dewey’s habits of “amicable cooperation” ([1939] 1976), to Paul Gilroy’s dynamics of multicultural “conviviality” (2004), to Judith Butler’s ethics of “unwilled cohabitation” (2012).29 While the force of affect alone may not be sufficient to engender enduring forms of social change, it can help to establish new embodied capacities and (im)material assemblages, including those premised on empathic imagination and attunement between bodies (Bennett 2006). Focusing on affect-habit interactions might enable us to appreciate and generate empathies that, as I put it in Affective Relations, “open up rather than resolve, that mutate rather than assimilate, and that invent rather than transcribe” (Pedwell 2014a, 189). It might also contribute to an understanding of affective politics that remains “in process and in conflict: an ongoing practice of negotiation between the subjective and a-subjective, the human and the nonhuman – and indeed, between radical, even revolutionary, political action and ongoing attention to our everyday, habitual ways of thinking and feeling” (190). What all of this suggests is that, in approaching social change in a minor key, we need to think mind and body, affect and habit, paranoia

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and reparation, the revolutionary and the routine, and the eventual and the endemic together. We need to do so, moreover, in ways that understand the imbrication of cognitive, affective, and physiological processes with political and environmental conditions in which past, present, and future cannot be neatly demarcated. What is at stake, from this perspective, is not “the continuity of becoming” – as if sociopolitical life was infinitely open – but rather “the becoming of continuity” (Manning 2016, 3), a focus that involves inhabiting current affects, habits, and tendencies to explore how else they might come to fruition. ConClUSionS In this chapter, I have explored how bringing analysis of habit into conversation with contemporary writing on affect offers a generative framework for grappling with the logics, challenges, and potentials of social change. As I have suggested, thinking habit, affect, atmosphere, environment, and infrastructure relationally through the work of Dewey, James, Ravaisson, Sedgwick, and others enables us to understand transformation as emerging via unfolding habit assemblages and to see progress as an experiential possibility in the here and now rather than as an ideal of the faraway future. This affective practice of inhabiting the present is important, I have argued, for how it enhances our attunement to sociopolitical complexity and ambivalence and to the experiential qualities of progress and regress – while better enabling us to sense change as it is happening. This is, in turn, what orients us towards the collective, reparative work of creating new tendencies. It is, as Manning suggests, about composing with “minor gestures” that “punctuate the in-act, leading the event elsewhere than the governing fixity of the major, be it the major in the name of political structures, of institutional life, of able-bodiedness, of gender conformity, of racial segregation” (2016, 7). In the following chapters, I explore the challenges and potentialities of this speculative politics of habit across a range of affective, social, political, and economic sites and relations, and consider some of the specific approaches and techniques that might be employed to transform everyday habits and habit assemblages.

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For many on the political left, 2016 was a year of cataclysmic events and revelations. As with the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote to leave the European Union, the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency “produced shock and disbelief for liberals, progressives and leftists around the world” (Singh 2016). Particularly staggering to many in both nations was the public reintensification of explicit and crude forms of racism and xenophobia associated with these events that some assumed had long receded from the mainstream. In the United Kingdom, the Vote Leave campaign, fronted by Conservative politicians Michael Gove and Boris Johnston (who would become prime minister in 2019), mobilised aggressive anti-immigrant rhetoric that resonated with the more explicitly racist language of the far-right UK Independence Party and its leader Nigel Farage. A week before the referendum of 23 June 2016, the Labour Member of Parliament Jo Cox, known for her advocacy work with Syrian refugees, was murdered by a far-right nationalist. When her killer was asked his name in court, he replied, “Death to traitors, freedom for Britain.” After the Vote Leave coalition’s narrow victory in the referendum, hate crimes rose sharply in England and Wales (Foster 2016) and explicitly racist forms of speech began to repunctuate public discourse. In a particularly telling incident, the BBC journalist Sima Kotecha was left reeling when a Brexit voter used a racist slur in an interview with her on live television. Kotecha tweeted: “In utter shock: just been called p**i in my home town! Haven’t heard that word here since the 80s!”

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(Datoo 2016). In the weeks that followed, a Polish community centre in London was defaced with swastikas, Black people were physically abused in the streets, and Eastern European children were taunted at school (Young 2016). No longer coded or closeted but rather bold and barefaced, racism and xenophobia had found a new lease on life in Britain. While racism has, of course, long been endemic to British society, many expressed a sense that the referendum had “relegitimised” more explicit forms of white supremacy and xenophobic nationalism in public life. In the United States, Trump’s election campaign actively mobilised racism, islamophobia, and anti-immigrant rhetoric, actively eroding accepted norms of political conduct. He referred to Mexicans as “rapists” and criminals, openly mocked a disabled reporter, and was caught on tape bragging about sexual assault. A week before the election, a historically Black church in Greenville, Mississippi, was set on fire, “Vote Trump” spray-painted on its walls. The town’s mayor commented: “This kind of attack happened in the 1950s and 1960s . . . it shouldn’t happen in 2016” (SPLC 2016). Trump’s victory was widely celebrated by white supremacist groups, as highlighted by the Ku Klux Klan marching openly in Roxboro, North Carolina, carrying KKK banters, giving Nazi salutes, and shouting “white power” (Buncombe 2016). In the ten days following the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center recorded 867 incidents of racist harassment and intimidation, declaring a “national outbreak of hate” (SPLC 2016). Although hate crimes had not previously been uncommon in America, the SPLC emphasised that many of those reporting post-election incidents felt that they were “experiencing something quite new.” An Asian American woman told to “go home” as she left an Oakland, California, train station said, for instance, that she had “experienced discrimination in my life, but never in such a public and unashamed manner” (SPLC 2016). Following his inauguration, Trump appointed as his chief political strategist Steve Bannon, the architect of his election campaign and former executive of Breitbart News, a far-right news and opinion website described as “the platform for the alt-right” (Posner 2016). Previously largely assumed to be a marginal network with little mainstream political purchase, the white supremacist “alt right” had remarkably found its way to the White House.

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It might be said, then, that Brexit and Trump’s election similarly exposed and shattered lingering fantasies of progress structuring public consciousness on both sides of the Atlantic. As the psychoanalyst Susie Orbach remarked days after the UK referendum, “notions of what the UK has stood for in people’s consciousness are being shredded” and this is “pushing them to consider what kind of fantasy they (and, of course, many of us) have lived with” (2016). Relatedly, in the aftermath of Trump’s victory, critical voices pointed to the stark separation exposed between our “social orders and common understandings of them” and stressed the need to radically revise established social and political frameworks and concepts (Bessire and Bond 2017). Although linear understandings of time and social progress have been subject to sustained interrogation from various critical perspectives, the profound shock and disorientation many expressed in response to Brexit and the ascension of Trumpism revealed “the extent to which notions of progress are still embedded in our concepts and knowledge practices” (Harding 2017). Importantly, however, this experience of shock or revelation in response to the political events of 2016 and their aftermath was profoundly uneven. As Shannon Sullivan notes, many Black people and people of colour “are not surprised by the return of big-booted racism because they never thought it completely went away” (2017). It is clear that the crude and violent forms of racism and xenophobia the US election appeared to unleash had been gathering pace long before Trump’s candidacy, as the Black Lives Matter movement powerfully highlights: “Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Tanisha Anderson, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, and many others, were, as per usual, the canaries in the coalmine” (Singh 2017).1 Indeed, as David Theo Goldberg argues, the rise of claims to a “post-racial society” following the election of Barack Obama in 2008 catalysed the rebirth of public racist expression “more virile and vicious” than we have seen in the United States “since the 1960s” (2015, 3).2 Whether the events of 2016 were experienced as new and shocking or as a predictable confirmation of the intransigence of white supremacy, xenophobia, and antiBlackness, they raise important questions regarding the persistence and malleability of racism – as well as the dynamics through which “the hard-won achievements of anti-racism can be comprehensively

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undone” (Amin 2010, 1). They also compel us to rethink, yet again, the lure of progress and the limits and possibilities of progressive politics. Focusing on the US context, in this chapter I bring together pragmatist and continental philosophy with critical race theories and radical Black thought to ask how foregrounding habit might contribute to efforts to make sense of the rise of Trump and the fantasy of historical progress it exploded.3 In particular, I explore how thinking through habit can help us to grapple with the processes by which explicit racisms seem to continually hibernate and reawaken in the context of neoliberal and so-called post-race societies. Although the term “postrace” is commonly employed to position race and racial hierarchies as anachronistic, I understand post-raciality, following Goldberg (2009, 2015), as a set of discourses and practices which are concerned not with the end of racism, or with the amelioration of racial inequality, but rather with the desire to extend and liberate racist conduct under the cloak of “racelessness.” Attending to the dynamics of cognitive, psychosocial, and somatic habits, I suggest, can help to explain why changes in discursive practice seemingly indicative of the emergence of a more progressive or “post-race” sensibility in the United States following the civil rights movement were not as significant or deeply rooted as they seemed. In turn, analysing the psychic repression and resistance involved in many racist and xenophobic habits indicates why progressive strategies premised on correcting ignorance are often ineffective or insufficient. Although I concentrate here on the habitual workings of racism, it is important to acknowledge that racisms are, of course, co-constituted by and differentiated through classism, (hetero)sexism, xenophobia, and ableism, among other social processes,4 and that these articulations matter to the dynamics of Trumpism. For example, as the Guard­ ian columnist Jessica Valenti wrote of Trump shortly before the 2016 election, “It’s hard to imagine a more sexist candidate or an election that hinged more on gender politics” (2016). Addressing the widespread misogyny which characterised representations of Hilary Clinton during the election, Valenti contends that “Trump is more symbol than person at this point, representing just how juvenile and ridiculous America is when it comes to the way we think about women and leadership” (2016). It is thus clear that Trump’s election emerged from and made visible the persistent intersection of sexist and racist

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habits, as mass feminist actions such as the Women’s March (which saw nearly half a million people march in protest in Washington, DC , on the day after Trump’s inauguration, accompanied by over 500 parallel marches across the United States and internationally) have highlighted to powerful effect.5 For many critical observers, however, what Trump’s election revealed most profoundly was the fallout of neoliberal capitalism and the immense decline in trust among voters in political elites. From this perspective, both Trump and Brexit can, notwithstanding their varying national histories and manifestations, be interpreted as devastating illustrations of what happens when tensions between capitalism and democracy reach a breaking point. Linked to Bernie Sanders’s two campaigns for the Democratic Party nomination in the United States, Jeremy Corbyn’s ascent to leader of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, the rejection of the Renzi reforms in Italy, the election of Syriza in Greece, and increasing support for the National Front in France, Trumpism has, like Brexit, been understood to express a popular rejection of “corporate globalization, neoliberalism, and the political establishments that have promoted them” (Fraser 2017).6 Importantly, however, accounts figuring Trumpism as the outcome of the pent-up frustration of those “left behind” by neoliberalism often fail to address the significant role of race and racism in Trump’s election and the wider emergence of right-wing populisms.7 Indeed, such explanations often do not address the majority of Black and Latinx workers who “could not afford to ‘look past’ Trump’s hideous misogyny and racism,” nor do they account for how whiteness and masculine privilege shaped the manner in which some working-class voters “understood and articulated their distress” (Brenner 2017). They also fail to explain the many middle- and upper-class white people who support Trump: a majority of white men and white women in 2016. The factors beneath such dynamics are complicated and cannot be explained by race or racism in any simplistic way. Nonetheless, it is vital to acknowledge, as the historian Nikhil Pal Singh notes, that Trump has long been skilled in mobilising the “ever excitable layer of racist fear and contempt” underlying American social life (2016). Racial dynamics, I argue, must be considered central, rather than peripheral, to Trump’s electoral victory and to the substantial traction his ideologies found with a significant segment (though not the majority)

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of American voters.8 It is thus necessary to examine the tenacity and plasticity of racism in order to interpret the political crises of the present – crises in which the wreckage of capitalism intermingles with xenophobia and a problematic sense of whiteness under threat. My analysis in this chapter therefore interprets neoliberalism and white domination as vitally entangled,9 with an awareness that this pernicious synergy is only part of the assemblage of structures, conditions, and atmospheres animating the political events of 2016.10 Against this background, in the first section of this chapter I address the importance of situating the rise of the white supremacist alt right in the context of more subtle and persistent habits of white privilege. The public re-intensification of crude and violent racism and xenophobia in the run-up to and aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election should not be viewed as extraordinary, I suggest, but rather as predictable in a neoliberal society ordered by ingrained racist habits and hierarchies. Crucially, to figure racism as habitual is not to confine it to the workings of individual psychologies or physiologies, or to suggest that it is a “bad habit” that can be easily broken. Rather, I understand habit here – and throughout Revolutionary Routines – as a key mechanism that imbricates the individual and personal with the environmental and structural – as well as the extraordinary with the everyday. A minor ontology of social change aims to address just how deeply rooted and resilient racist habits can be, while also exploring the potential implications of their malleability. I then examine the possibilities which understanding racism through the logics of habit opens up for anti-racist praxis in the midst of Trumpism and post-truth politics. Focusing on Goldberg’s (2015) call for a “thinking response” to racism, in the second section I ask whether anti-racist strategies which emphasise rational thought can transform patterned behaviour that is, at its core, irrational (Du Bois [1920] 1999) – a question relevant to the ongoing political, media, and citizen-led efforts to expose Trump’s lies, omissions, and inaccuracies, as I discuss in the third section. Anti-racisms premised on critical thinking may also not address how racisms materially imbricate bodies and their physical, social, and psychic environments. In the final section, I thus address Sullivan’s call to remake the architectures, infrastructures, and atmospheres that enable white domination. As I contend, environmental approaches are not without their risks and

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limitations and must include the kind of affective, psychosocial, and structural transformation long called for by anti-racist thinkers and organisers. Analysis of their impetus, however, underscores my central argument in this chapter: that collective interventions that exceed, as well as differ from, rational thought and critical argumentation are necessary to tackle racist habits in the wake of Trumpism, Brexit, and far right-wing populisms internationally. HAbitS oF WHite PriVilege In a stand-up routine on the American television sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live which aired the night after Trump’s inauguration, the comedian Aziz Ansari opens by remarking how “crazy” the last couple days had been: “Yesterday, Trump was inaugurated. Today, an entire gender protested against him. Wow. Everyone should support that.” Ansari goes on, however, to warn against demonising all Trump voters as “dumb, racist, misogynist, homophobe[s],” acknowledging the likelihood that people “had different political priorities” and may have voted “with reservations.” The real problem, he suggests, is with a “tiny slice of people” enthused about the rise of Trump “for the wrong reasons”: I’m talking about these people that, as soon as Trump won, they’re like, “We don’t have to pretend like we’re not racist anymore! We don’t have to pretend anymore! We can be racist again! Whoo!” Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! No, no! If you’re one of these people, please go back to pretending. You’ve got to go back to pretending. I’m so sorry we never thanked you for your service. We never realized how much effort you were putting into the pretending. But you gotta go back to pretending. Describing this group as the “lowercase kkk,” Ansari calls on Trump to denounce their “casual white supremacy” and reaffirm the importance of equal respect and dignity for all. Ansari’s intervention is important for a number of reasons. In urging Americans not to brand all Trump supporters as bigoted, he emphasises the complexity of electoral voting behaviour in the

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context of rising economic inequalities and points to the problems with assuming that racism, sexism, and homophobia are fixed characteristics of particular demographic groups. At the same time, however, he prompts viewers to consider what it means to be willing and able to look beyond Trump’s racism, xenophobia, and misogyny. Trump supporters, Ansari jokes, are like fans of the R&B singer Chris Brown (infamous for physically and verbally assaulting the musician Rhianna and other women partners): “[I]t’s like, ‘Hey, man! I’m just here for the tunes. I’m just here for the tunes! I don’t know about that other stuff . . . I don’t condone the extracurriculars.’” This is not, he suggests, a politically innocent position. Ansari therefore cautions against essentialist characterisations of a vast segment of the US population, while nonetheless refusing to let those who are willing to turn a blind eye to Trump’s violent and exclusionary ideology off the hook.11 Yet in focusing on alt-right extremists as the most significant problem at hand, what Ansari does not do is explicitly connect this overt white supremacy with the more widespread and subtle habits of white privilege which are central to the behaviour and world views of many white people in the United States and beyond. While some people might well have been “pretending” during past political periods – hiding explicitly racist and xenophobic beliefs in public until they were “relegitimised” by the Trump regime – other more common patterns of racialised perception and conduct are more likely to be habitual, less-than-conscious, and thus not easily amenable to reflexive monitoring or censure. All such forms of racism, however, are relevant to the political events of 2016. Indeed, highlighting how white supremacy (depicted as active, conscious, and eventful) and white privilege (understood as passive, less-than-conscious, and persistent) function as overlapping and interconnected forms of white domination is essential to understanding aspects of Trumpism that cannot be explained by economic- or class-based narratives alone. Paying closer attention to the logics and workings of habit, I argue, might help us to do this. As discussed in previous chapters, within pragmatist and continental philosophy, habit is defined, in John Dewey’s ([1922] 2012) terms, as an acquired predisposition to particular modes of responsivity and action. While habits make action more graceful and efficient, they

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also reduce the need for conscious attention (James [1890] 2004). This means that actions may be experienced as effortful, deliberate, or highly charged at first, but the more automatic they become, the more we learn to anticipate them and the less aware of effort we are (Ravaisson [1838] 2008).12 Consequently, embodied habits operate most powerfully when they are least conscious to us – and yet, as evolving relationships between bodies and environments, habits also always exceed the individual. As external conditions change so, too, may habitual behaviour, but shifting collective habits can also transform everyday environments. As Dewey puts it, habits are “adjustments of the environment, not merely to it” ([1922] 2012, 24), and “the environment” is always “many, not one.” Conceived in this way, habit provides a rich conceptual framework for understanding the dynamics of racism in the context of Trumpism. In Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege, Sullivan argues that, in the decades following the civil rights movement and the landmark shifts in legislation and language it engendered, the United States did not, of course, eliminate racism. Rather, it underwent a transition from “de jure” to “de facto” racism which corresponded with a shift from practices of white supremacy to habits of white privilege (2006, 5).13 Both white supremacy and white privilege are linked to violent histories of colonialism, slavery, and segregation and, as environmentally constituted dispositions, both demonstrate how structures of white domination “take root in people’s selves” (4). Yet what differentiates habits of white privilege from more active and explicit practices of white supremacy, Sullivan suggests, is the former’s frequent operation as “unseen, invisible, even seemingly non-existent” (1). As Sara Ahmed puts it in her discussion of the dynamics of whiteness, “when something becomes part of the habitual, it ceases to be an object of perception: it is simply put to work” (2013).14 From this perspective, it is precisely the often covert nature of white privilege that makes it both powerful and persistent – an ever-present embodied infrastructure for the perpetuation of racial inequality. This is an important point that has long been made by critical race scholars and activists. As discussed in the introduction, anti-racist feminist writers such as Audre Lorde and Iris Marion Young explored in the 1980s and 1990s how racial oppression is often carried out at

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a habitual, embodied level through unconscious “gestures, speech, tone, of voice, movement, and reactions of others” (Young 1990, 23). Young writes that, despite social and legal advancements prompted by social justice movements, “racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism and ableism have not disappeared”; rather, they “have gone underground, dwelling in everyday habits and cultural meanings of which people are for the most part unaware” (24). Such quotidian gestures and habits are significant, she contends, not least because “a social structure exists only in the action and interaction of persons, it exists not as a state, but as a process” (Young 2006, 112). Or as Goldberg puts it, “experiential racisms” and “structural racisms” are mutually constituted – the structural shapes the experiential, and routinized racist responses and actions “reinforce the racial structures already shaping the social” (2015, 31).15 We might say, then, that as circuits that imbricate “the individual” and “the structural,” habits of white privilege are what reproduce racial hierarchy in societies which claim (or aim) to be post-racial.16 A defining characteristic of white privilege is the sense of ontological expansiveness that many white people take for granted: the assumption “that all cultural and social spaces are potentially open for one to inhabit” (Sullivan 2006, 25).17 It is, in large part, this ease of spatial inhabitance that reproduces whiteness as a constitutive habit of institutions, organisations, and groups. As Ahmed argues, what is at stake is not only how particular bodies come to inhabit institutional spaces, but also “the mechanisms whereby certain bodies come to be assumed as the right bodies by an institution” (2015). Like individual organisms, institutional bodies become animated by particular tendencies: “they tend toward the bodies that tend to inhabit them” (2015). As such, disorientation – the sense of not feeling at ease across spatial contexts – is unequally distributed. In this vein, the philosopher George Yancy laments how difficult it is to explain to his white university students that the academic spaces they inhabit are not racially neutral but rather “white spaces” (2017, 8). If many white students move through university environments habitually and with ease because such spaces “constitute sites of affordances,” the same is rarely true, he argues, for Black students. Against a backdrop of unmarked white intelligibility, Black students become “hyperattentive to [their own]

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movements” and the sense of being “ready for action” that habits provide is replaced with anxiety (2017, 9–10). White privilege, then, is not only an individual habit but also a collective and institutional one – or, more precisely, it is (re)constituted through the interaction of bodies and physical, social, and affective environments, with all of the damaging implications that this can entail. That habits of domination are perpetuated, in part, through iterative transactions between bodies and everyday spaces, atmospheres, and (infra)structures means, of course, that whiteness, and the privilege it accrues, is always differentiated by class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and ability, among other social factors. White, working-class Americans who may feel “left behind” by neoliberal capitalism in the aftermath of deindustrialisation, globalisation, and the financial crises of the new millennium have a different constellation of (dis)advantages compared to their middle- and upper-class counterparts. What is vital to recognise in the US context, however, is how organic alliances across differently situated groups of white people have functioned consistently to marginalise and oppress Black people and people of colour – from the enduring effects of the pernicious “deal” that emerged between the white working classes and white upper classes after the American Civil War which ensured that the former did not “combine forces economically with newly freed Black slaves and other economically struggling people of color” (Sullivan 2017),18 to the majority of the white people who voted for Trump in 2016. Moreover, although poor whites do not unconditionally reap the benefits of middle- and upper-class whiteness, such bodies nonetheless “continue to matter differentially when juxtaposed to poor Black bodies” (Yancy 2017, xv). Thus, while it is clear that different groups of white people benefit unequally from the intersection of whiteness with other privileges, there is also something shared about whiteness in America that transcends social and economic cleavages. Understanding white privilege through the logics of habit is, I want to suggest, particularly generative in making sense of the punctual re-intensification of white supremacy in so-called post-race societies – that is, how explicit expressions of racism seem to continually hibernate and reawaken in particular contexts over time, belying claims to cumulative social progress. While some people were

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shocked by the re-emergence of crude racist language and violence against minorities in the context of Trump’s election campaign and victory, this is partly because the powerful and damaging effects of white privilege have long gone undetected (by many white people).19 As Ahmed puts it, whiteness may only be “invisible to those who inhabit it, or those who get so used to its inhabitance that they learn not to see it” (2013; Rankine 2014). Moreover, within the context of neoliberal post-raciality, public discourses have worked precisely to conceal the ongoing operation of racisms, to render “obscure the structures making possible and silently perpetuating racially ordered power and privilege” (Goldberg 2015, 30). Importantly, then, if tendencies of white supremacy have not been extinguished but rather have “gone underground” (Young 1990), they remain perpetually available to reactivation in “the right” circumstances. Operating below the surface, habits of white privilege provide a potent and yet often undetectable incubator for the resurgence of active and violent white supremacy. Indeed, it is only in a context in which white domination is so deeply ingrained within both the embodied modes of perception and conduct of a vast segment of people and also the collective fibres of the majority of the nation’s institutions and (infra)structures that violent white supremacist ideologies such as those associated with Trumpism can take hold, propagate, and gain affective traction. While economic inequalities and increasing distrust in the political establishment are central to explaining the political purchase that such pernicious discourses find, so too are persistent habits of white privilege, expansiveness, and anxiety. From this angle, we might now reverse Ansari’s earlier formulation regarding the racial politics of Trumpism: the “real problem” is not the “lowercase kkk” in isolation, but rather the more pervasive habits of white domination that maintain racial inequality and assume different forms across time and space. What a focus on habit underscores with respect to contemporary racisms, then, is that when we highlight the extreme, eventful, or seemingly extraordinary, we can miss the ongoing affective, psychic, sociopolitical, and economic relations that underlie events perceived as “exceptional.” It is, in part, for this reason that critical race scholars now refer to white supremacy that

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is “uneventful, mundane and everyday” (Yancy 2017, 13), and employ the term broadly to incorporate “the webbing of social relations, institutions, implicit racial understandings, and explicit and implicit personal investments” that reinforce current systems of racial oppression (Shotwell 2012). As such, it is not the case that habits of white privilege replaced practices of white supremacy in the post-civil rights era (Sullivan 2006, 2017), but instead that white supremacy remains within white privilege and is reanimated in different ways and to varying degrees in any given current encounter. This is why active and violent forms of racist conduct are particularly susceptible to re-emergence when whiteness is perceived to be “under threat” and why, in turn, the work of anti-racism remains an ongoing political project permeated with affective “tensions, contradictions, and ambushes” (Yancy 2017, 224). rACiSM, CritiCAl tHoUgHt, And SoCiAl trAnSForMAtion If the rise of Trumpism dramatised the fallout of neoliberal capitalism, it also exposed the fragility of American multiculturalism and the illusionary nature of claims to a post-racial society. As Sullivan wrote shortly after Trump’s inauguration: “The significant and widespread changes to white America’s racist and sexist habits that we thought took place after the civil rights movement did not in fact happen . . . we thought that new laws and different language could change white Americans’ hearts and guts, but they didn’t. We thought that the disappearance of the n-word in polite company meant that white people respected black people, but they didn’t” (2017). In addition to the contradictory nature of institutional multiculturalism in the context of racial capitalism,20 what Sullivan highlights here is the inadequacy of approaches to social transformation that fail to address the (im)material relations and mechanisms which perpetuate ingrained patterns of behaviour. That is, although change at the juridical and linguistic levels is vital, it does not necessarily impact the automatic working of habit at the intersection of bodies and environments. Moreover, as Trumpism’s racial politics would appear to indicate with respect to Obama-era claims to the “end of race,” language can have productive

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material effects, but it can also conceal what is going on beneath the surface – in this case the continuing operation of deeply rooted habits of white domination. Given that the nature of habit is to perpetuate itself, and thus “being” is defined by “the tendency to persist in ways of being” (Ravaisson [1838] 2008, 28), patterned forms of perception and conduct will continue to operate as long as the somatic and environmental conditions which enable them remain intact. Or, as Goldberg puts it, “once established, racial commitments are more readily invoked” (2015, 171). This is especially the case in socioeconomic circumstances marked by contestations concerning social affordances, resource availability, labour exploitation, and “perceived threats to livelihood and security” (171) – that is, in nations stratified by the effects of globalization, neoliberalism, and ongoing financial crises. Crucial questions therefore emerge. If racism is reproduced in part through the logic of habit, what are likely to be the most effective strategies of anti-racist resistance and transformation? More specifically, given that it is largely the invisible or less-than-conscious nature of habits of white privilege that makes them potent and enduring, how can such patterned modes of conduct can be addressed and affirmatively refigured? And what particular challenges do the racial politics of Trumpism pose for the transformation of habits of white domination? For Goldberg, if racisms constitute “thoughtlessness” – both in the sense of their frequently less-than-conscious nature and in their failure to exercise empathic imagination and self-reflective judgement21 – what social transformation requires is a “thinking response.” That is, an approach that “un-thinks – that critically picks apart – the premises on which [racism] is predicated” in the context of post-raciality (original italics, 2015, 162). In Goldberg’s view, those who inhabit positions of racial power reproduce racist social relations by default. Yet, crucially, “the default is not the only position to occupy or in which to invest.” Rather, the default remains the default because “it is the given, the easiest to inhabit” (159–60) – it is, as philosophers of habit might say, that which is reproduced automatically, and hence forcefully, without the need for conscious thought or effort. Goldberg thus argues that what is needed to transform automated racisms is pervasive critical thought. Only a thinking response, he suggests, is capable

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of un-thinking – that is, “undoing or unmaking” – persistent habits of white privilege and supremacy (161). In a context in which neoliberal discourses and practices of postraciality have publically immobilised critical discussion of race, while increasingly virulent forms of racism are given free reign, Goldberg’s approach is compelling. Nonetheless, in keeping with my arguments in Revolutionary Routines so far, we also need to consider the extent to which approaches focused on rational or reflective thought are capable of transforming patterned behaviours that imbricate bodies and environments at a deep material level. When it comes to racist habits, can we equate “unthinking” with “undoing” or “unmaking,” or are these potentially quite different (if overlapping) activities and processes? These are challenging questions which, in different forms, have long been explored by anti-racist scholars and activists. In his early work, for example, the founding sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois set out to address racism as a project of correcting white ignorance. Racial prejudice, he speculated, could be eliminated by “generating and distributing accurate descriptions and data about groups that are racially oppressed” (Sullivan 2006, 20). Human beings, in this view, inherently seek to “do good” but often fail to do so because they lack the necessary knowledge and awareness. By applying scientific tools to issues of race, Du Bois thus hoped to tackle racism by establishing a “collection of specific, context-sensitive facts” (2006, 20, 19). We can note strong resonances here with contemporary social and cultural theory: as I suggested in chapter 1, invoking the work of Eve Sedgwick (1996, 2003), it has become habitual within critical thought to assume that exposing pernicious patterns or perceptions is what is necessary to change them. Similar to Du Bois’s early approach to racism, such approaches implicitly understand social change to proceed via the force of exposure and revelation: through creating awareness of bias or injustice where it is deemed to be lacking. Yet, as Sedgwick cogently argues, simply generating better knowledge does not necessarily generate the kind of transformation that we hope it will. As his scholarship progressed, Du Bois ([1920] 1999) reached a parallel conclusion: on their own, direct, rational strategies for combating racial prejudice were unlikely to be effective because racism was, at its

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core, irrational. A “thinking approach” could not necessarily engage deeply ingrained habits of white supremacy nor was it able to grapple effectively with white people’s irrational feelings of racial hatred towards Black people and people of colour.22 Nearly a century later, contemporary anti-racist thinkers continue to illustrate the agonising inadequacy of efforts to address “white terror, white injustice, white microaggressions, [and] white power” (Yancy 2017, xv) through recourse to truth, fairness, or rationality. Claudia Rankine expresses this potently in Citizen: An American Lyric: integral to “how racism feels,” she suggests, is the realisation that “randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you.” And yet, “to call this out” – to expose the hidden workings of racism – “is to be called insane” (2014, 30).23 Within a system of discrimination that operates precisely through the repudiation of rationality, approaches to tackling white privilege and white supremacy premised on revealing “the truth” may be all but impotent. trUMPiSM, PoSt-rACiAliAlitY, And PoSt-trUtH PolitiCS The inherent challenges of confronting the irrationality of racism through rational means are, I want to suggest, connected to the apparent ineffectiveness of fact-checking Trump in a post-truth era. Selected by Oxford Dictionaries as its 2016 word of the year, “posttruth” is defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (Oxford 2016). While the term had circulated for at least a decade, it spiked in frequency in the context of the Brexit campaign and the 2016 US election, as it became closely associated with the phrase “post-truth politics” (Oxford 2016). Throughout the election campaign and his first months in office, Trump became infamous for his propensity to make false or unfounded claims, many of which functioned explicitly to exacerbate racialised tensions – whether this was his assertion that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey had cheered the destruction of the Twin Towers, that 81 per cent of white murder victims are killed by Black people, or that Obama founded Islamic State.24

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Exposing and cataloguing Trump’s lies, distortions, and inaccuracies thus became a central preoccupation of mainstream and progressive media, as well as liberal politicians and members of public via Twitter and other social media. Within the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency, for instance, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker feature (first established during the 2008 presidential campaign) logged 488 “false or misleading” claims, which it organised under twelve categories such as “immigration,” “foreign policy,” “jobs,” and “biographical record.” By the end of April 2019, the newspaper claimed that Trump had “made more than 10,000 false or misleading claims” since being in office.25 We might say, then, that such evidence-oriented strategies, not dissimilar to Du Bois’s early approach to racism, seek to counter the irrationality of Trumpism through providing a “collection of specific, context-sensitive facts.” Although the longer-term impact of these endeavours remains to be seen, truth-based models of critique did not appear to have achieved significant purchase with Trump supporters prior to the 2016 election. This is partly because, as Ben Anderson argues, Trump’s control never rested on reason or evidence; rather, it has been sustained via his performance of unwavering, narcissistic self-confidence, maintained “through the absence of any interruptions to the continuity of his belief in himself and his solutions” (2016). Moreover, given that many of Trump’s supporters distrust both the political establishment and mainstream news media, criticisms of him can be easily interpreted as confirmation of media bias, “fake news,” or that “the system is mobilising to defend itself” (2016). Under such conditions, Trump’s refusal to submit to logic or evidence perversely make him all the more popular.26 Political and journalistic efforts to show “where the facts are wrong” also have to engage the terrain that those who originally made suspect claims have chosen. For example, as the Economist notes in relation the Brexit, “the more Remain campaigners attacked the Leave campaign’s exaggerated claim that EU membership cost Britain £350m ($468m) a week, the longer they kept the magnitude of those costs in the spotlight” (2016). Here we might usefully return to Sedgwick’s (2003) account of the problems with critical interventions premised

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on exposure and revelation: not only is exposing “the bad” insufficient to produce meaningful change, but repeated acts of highlighting it often work precisely to reproduce its force (chapter 1). In the context of post-truth politics, revealing and correcting Trump’s lies and omissions thus risks becoming politically counterproductive. Post-truth politics are, I suggest, closely related to and reinforced by neoliberal post-raciality. In severing race and racism from histories of violence and contemporary structures of power, post-raciality prises open “the racial” so that it can “be filled with any meanings chosen, at hand, fabricated, made up” (Goldberg 2015, 77). This is, in fact, integral to the meaning of post-truth, which, as the Economist suggests, conveys not so much that truth is falsified or contested, but rather that it is “of secondary importance” (2016). In this context, the affective purchase of Trump’s fantastical claims – and particularly his inflammatory racial rhetoric – has been explicitly enabled by the culture of “make believe” created by efforts to “bury alive racial histories” in the name of post-raciality (Goldberg 2015, 78). Indeed, the rise Trumpism is a stark illustration of how the neoliberal dynamics of “racelessness” work precisely to empower the re-emergence of increasingly venomous forms of racism and xenophobia. While attempts to address racism through appeals to truth and rationality falter when racial histories are distorted, it must also be emphasised that although white privilege may be unconscious and irrational, it is not necessarily unintentional. As critical race theorists have long stressed, habitual white ignorance is not an innocent oversight amenable to correction through cultivating greater knowledge; rather, it is “an active, deliberate achievement” that has been “carefully (though not necessarily consciously) constructed, maintained and protected” (Sullivan 2006, 20).27 The difficulty in addressing persistent forms of racism through rational thought is thus not just that habits of white privilege are irrational or less-than-conscious, but that they actively resist efforts to bring them to conscious awareness. Indeed, racialised habits aggressively defend against transformation not only because transformation risks bringing shameful values to conscious attention, but also because it is perceived to entail a loss of advantage or control. This is why “a person cannot merely intellectualize a change of habit by telling herself that she will no longer think or

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behave in particular ways” (Sullivan 2006, 9). Moreover, given how white subjectivity is embedded in historical, material, and discursive forces that signal privilege and power, whiteness is also seductive, even for those who may identify as anti-racist (Yancy 2017). Institutions that reproduce racial inequality, from government organisations, to elite universities, to celebrated tennis tournaments, are able to do so habitually, in part, though cultivating personal commitments and attachments to them (Ahmed 2004). As such, white privilege can be at once unconscious, habitual, and the product of passionate commitment – qualities which enable the efficient operation of racism and defend against social change. It thus becomes clear why collective interventions that exceed, as well as differ from, rational argument and conscious un-thinking may be necessary to tackle persistent and changing racist habits in the age of Brexit and Trump. In particular, the need for anti-racist strategies that address, without automatically reactivating, the psychosocial relations that shape, perpetuate, and protect white domination seems evident. Any serious attempt to address contemporary forms of racism and xenophobia must also grapple with white people’s continued investment in white privilege and white supremacy – a reality ever-more pressing under Trumpism. Anti-rACiSt PrAxiS, AFFeCt, And enVironMentAl CHAnge It is for these reasons that Sullivan argues that rather than tackling racist habits directly, we should focus on altering the physical, social, and affective environments in which habits are formed. The imperative, she suggests, is to “find a way of disrupting a habit through environmental change and then hope that the changed environment will help produce an improved habit in its place” (2006, 9). What is distinctive about the kind of interventions for which Sullivan advocates is that their efforts to engage psychosocial, cognitive, and behavioural transformation at the level of habit are indirect, so as to disrupt the stimulation of psychic defence mechanisms linked to white fears of lost privilege and control – while simultaneously avoiding the amplifying repetition of insidious racialising patterns and problematics that Sedgwick highlights.

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As part of a wider anti-racist politics and praxis, environmentally attuned techniques are multiple and diverse. Many work largely imperceptibly, above or below the level of the subject, realigning embodied interactions through adjustments to environments, (infra) structures, and atmospheres – as in the design of architectures that aim to encourage ethical cohabitation and “multicultural conviviality” (Gilroy 2004; Amin 2010; Noble 2013). The geographer Ash Amin notes, in this vein, that although “everyday mixity of itself” does not automatically transform antagonistic social relations into ones that treat racial difference affirmatively, “the orchestration of collective or shared space as a commons in which majorities and minorities participate as equals can help to encourage a change in this direction” (2010, 14). Other approaches, through choreographing affective disruptions to smooth-running habits, seek to produce a “shock to thought” (Massumi 2002b) which compels reflection concerning habitual expectations of white privilege – for instance, a photo essay published in O: The Oprah Magazine, and circulated widely via social media, which features images of talking and laughing Asian women at a nail salon having their pedicures done by white women, a young white girl gazing up at multiple shelves of Black dolls, and a Latina woman in a luxurious apartment being served tea by a white maid (Harvard 2017). The hope is that, if collectively developed and persistently enacted across multiple sites of sociopolitical salience, such techniques will subtly, yet powerfully, intervene in everyday modes of seeing, feeling, relating, and responding, and so will disrupt habits of white domination and activate the development of new anti-racist tendencies and dispositions. Although the term “disposition” is defined as “a person’s inherent qualities of mind and character” (OED ), attending to the workings of habit suggests that much of what is considered inherent is in fact acquired and hence, to an extent, malleable. Central to the anti-racist dispositions Goldberg envisions is a habitual “openness to heterogeneity”; that is, a capacity to appreciate “heterogeneous aesthetic and cultural values and expression, in ways of being and doing, in modes of world-making” (2015, 162–3). Sullivan, in turn, highlights the importance of generating habitual resistance to white privilege and “an openness to the reconfiguration of habit” (2006, 31). For her, white people’s

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effective resistance to racism emerges through “a transformation of the self via one’s modes of activity” (196–7). Within these processes of psychic and somatic transformation, “the acts must come before the habit and the habit before the ability to evoke the thought at will” (Dewey [1922] 2012, 16) – an observation which underscores the utility of anti-racist praxis that works beyond rational thought or critical argumentation. In thinking social change in a minor key, this focus on cultivating anti-racist tendencies and dispositions is significant because it offers a vision of transformation centred not on heroic interventions or dramatic breaks in consciousness, but rather on the accumulation and automatization of multiple responses, actions, and interactions over time. It approaches undoing white domination as a “continuous process of disarticulation” (Yancy 2017, xxxviii) and acknowledges that “a predisposition formed by a number of specific acts is an immensely more intimate and fundamental part of ourselves than are vague, general, conscious choices” (Dewey [1922] 2012, 14). Moreover, it views anti-racist dispositions not as individual characteristics or personality types but as the product of evolving mind-body-environment interactions – while recognising the crucial need for ongoing work to transform the structural conditions which perpetuate racial inequality, from immigration policies, to policing and carceral practices, to environmental injustice, to access to education and healthcare, to market-oriented governance, which requires the support of “sustained coalitional social movements” (Goldberg 2015, 68). And yet, if Goldberg overestimates the power of critical reflection – the capacity for thinking to “undo” habitual forms of racism – Sullivan’s environmental focus arguably downplays the role of expansive forms of thought in collective transformation. While it is true that pragmatist philosophers advocate approaches to social change that privilege adjustments to environments over direct moral instruction or emotional recruitment, they also, as discussed in chapter 1, highlight the importance of embodied thought – in Dewey’s words, “intelligent inquiry to discover the means which will produce a desired result, and an intelligent invention to procure the means” ([1922] 2012, 15). Although rational, fact-based interventions may have limited purchase amidst Trumpism’s affective politics, “intelligent thought”

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entails much more than this: it involves cultivating, and making more automatic, wider capacities for imagination, speculation, experimentation, responsivity, cohabitation, and care. Moreover, from a pragmatist perspective, “thought” and “habit” are never fully separate, but rather ontologically intertwined (see the introduction to this book). Any meaningful change in everyday habits is therefore also a transformation of the conditions necessary for thought itself. At the intersection of persistent white domination, changing neoliberalisms and pervasive post-truth politics, anti-racist transformation at the level of habit would thus seem to demand a combination of environmental change and transformative thought on a collective scale. As I have discussed, environmentally oriented techniques are salient because they address the everyday ecologies and infrastructures in which racist habits are (re)produced, including post-racial discourses and neoliberal forms of governance, without overinvesting in the promise of exposure, revelation and truth. Such approaches figure “the subject” as neither bounded nor autonomously volitional and understand “consciousness” as encapsulating a range of modes of (in)attention. This seems significant in relation to Trumpism and broader right-wing populisms, wherein meaningful change is required not only of those who claim to be committed to anti-racism but nonetheless reproduce “the white gaze” (Rankine 2014; Yancy 2017), but also of those who are not motivated to change, or indeed who are explicitly invested in maintaining unequal power relations. Through remaking relevant architectures, atmospheres, and spaces, environmental interventions can move us subtly in particular ways, while generating conditions potentially conducive to “new forms of relationality” (Yancy 2017, 235). My view, however, is that, on their own, such “indirect, roundabout strategies” (Sullivan 2006, 9) are likely to be insufficient, particularly in the midst of resurgent white supremacist violence in the United States and elsewhere. If in the first decade of the new millennium Sullivan could plausibly describe American social life as “more heavily weighted with unconscious racism” and speculate that this pattern of “increasing white privilege and decreasing white supremacy” would continue (2006, 196), it is now clear that this prediction has not been borne out.28 Current sociopolitical conditions – in which explicit

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racist and xenophobic speech has returned to public discourse, racist hate crimes are on the rise, and the façade of Obama-era claims to a post-race society has been starkly exposed – indicate, I argue, the urgent need for a mix of direct and indirect anti-racist praxis and a more expansive vision of a how a speculative politics of habit might contribute to affirmative social change. It is important to underscore, in this respect, that although Sedgwick warns against over-reliance on “paranoid” modes of critique premised on “revealing the truth,” she does not devalue the ongoing need for critical thinking and reflexive introspection within diverse projects of social justice.29 Rather, similar to Du Bois, she calls for a wider repertoire of transformative techniques beyond “the drama of exposure” (Sedgwick 2003, 8) and highlights the deep affective and psychic change in ourselves which is required to enact meaningful change in our worlds. While Sullivan argues that the best way to circumvent automated habits of white privilege is to avoid triggering white people’s unconscious defence mechanisms, the risk here is that vital opportunities for psychic reflection and “working through” are negated. In both Re­ vealing Whiteness (2006) and Good White People (2012), Sullivan suggests that white fear, anxiety, shame, and other so-called negative affects are counterproductive to anti-racist transformation because they elicit defensive reactions and drain a person of the “vitality and energy it will take to make a sustained kind of change in herself or the world” (2012, 135). In the tradition of radical Black thought, however, others insist that it is precisely the absence of such affective experience on the part of racially privileged groups that contributes to reproducing racial injustice.30 In Juliet Hooker’s view, for instance, both the Brexit vote and the success of “Trump’s xenophobic, racist and misogynist campaign” were fuelled by “white inability to cope with (often symbolic) losses and the racial resentment that accompanies it” (2017, 483– 4). Because white political imagination has generally not been shaped by loss but rather by white supremacy, she argues that a “distorted form of racial political maths” emerges that perceives “black gains as white losses” or defeats. Consequently, many white people are not only unable to appreciate Black suffering, but also “mobilize a sense of white victimhood in response” (2017, 485). From this perspective, although environmental interventions can be efficient in mobilising

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change precisely because they often work subconsciously, remaking ingrained racist habits also requires more active cognitive, affective, and psychosocial transformation. In this vein, Yancy argues that undoing habituated racisms requires undoing whiteness itself – a painful process which demands that white people tarry “with the multiple ways in which their whiteness is a problem” and remain with “the weight of that reality and the pain of that realization” in the face of post-racial distortion and denial (2017, 13). Of course, this necessitates racially privileged subjects willing and able to engage in “a form of suffering” (13). Yancy’s point, however, is that, because we are always implicated in pre-existing racial power relations, even those who identify as anti-racist will continue to find themselves “ambushed” by encounters in which the calcified effects of their white privilege emerge unwilled (231). The potential for meaningful change arises, he argues, when the affective discomfort and psychic conflict such experiences may produce for white subjects is not simply repressed or moved on from but rather inhabited – so that, over time, more affirmative modes of inhabiting whiteness might be cultivated. Environment, however, is crucial here: such processes are much more likely to take shape within “lived social spaces of transacting with Black bodies” (224) that challenge habitual manifestations of whiteness.31 What the above conversation highlights, then, are the transformative anti-racist possibilities of a form of embodied dwelling resonant with what Sedgwick calls “reparation” (chapter 1) and what I term “affective inhabitation” (introduction and chapter 4). Across these modes of “staying with,” habits are understood to be transformed less through the exposure of truth or the provision of relevant facts than via the production of reoriented modes of affective attention. To the extent that such processes can support wider social change, an ongoing challenge for anti-racist praxis is to work out what combination of interventions, techniques, and environments are most likely to catalyse and sustain them for differently located subjects and populations across contexts – while ensuring that such efforts are experimental and attuned to process rather than to arrival (Dewey [1922] 2012). In the wake of Trumpism and its violent white supremacies, however, this emphasis on the processual and the speculative must not

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obscure the absolute urgency of the situation. For while white bodies “continue to falter in the face of institutionalized interpellation and habituated racist reflexes, tomorrow, a Black body will be murdered as it innocently reaches for its wallet” (Yancy 2017, 220). In addition to recognising the how “the temporal” itself is racialised, a minor ontology of social change therefore needs to enable both “responsive” and “ecological” political action. While responsive anti-racisms react to “immediate racist expressions or events,” ecological anti-racisms address “the larger landscapes of structural conditions supporting and enabling the reproduction of racist arrangements and expression” (Goldberg 2015, 168) – and it is the ongoing interplay between them that is vital to the possibility of collective change at the level of habit. ConClUSionS As the political events of 2016 simultaneously revealed and dispelled persistent fantasies of social progress, in this chapter I have explored how thinking through habit might help us make sense of the public re-intensification of crude forms of racism and xenophobia in the wake of Brexit and Trump’s election. In a context in which racism, neo-imperialism, and neoliberalism have long been entangled, I have argued that ingrained habits of white privilege provide a powerful incubator for the punctual resurgence of active and violent forms of white supremacy. At the current sociopolitical conjuncture, collective efforts to address white ignorance may seem ever more vital. Yet antiracist interventions premised on truth, fact, and rationality might not, I have suggested, be particularly effective within a system that itself operates through the repudiation of such forms of knowledge. This is not to argue that we should stop exposing the lies and inaccuracies of populist political regimes or cease engaging critically with the alt right and white supremacists more generally – indeed, such efforts remain vital. Rather, it is to explore the potential of anti-racist interventions focused on transforming the environments, atmospheres, and affects that reproduce collective forms of habituation – with awareness that “habits can be subdued only by being utilized as element in a new, more generous and comprehensive scheme of action” (Dewey [1922] 2012, 77).

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If contemporary racisms operate via evolving habit assemblages that imbricate bodies and their environments in diverse ways, a speculative politics of habit must, I have suggested, animate anti-racist interventions that work at varying scales, temporalities, and thresholds of attention to pursue social transformation. This is particularly the case in a sociopolitical context in which persistent forms of white domination are increasingly portrayed as individual aberrations – unmoored from structural conditions – and responsibility for racial inequality is, in turn, transferred to the Black people and people of colour who experience it (Goldberg 2015). Through a combination of environmental change, affective inhabitation, and transformative thought, the minor ontology of social change I have outlined in this chapter seeks to cultivate anti-racist tendencies, spaces, and relations emerging from “the quotidian [practices] of the everyday” (Yancy 2017, xv). As discussed in chapter 5, this approach resonates with the vision and praxis of Black Lives Matter in the United States and transnationally. Since 2013, Black Lives Matter has pursued sociopolitical transformation not only via direct consciousness-raising but also through collectively (re)inhabiting everyday public spaces in ways that disrupt racist habits and develop new capacities for Black life amidst the violent instrumentalities of neoliberalism, post-raciality, and posttruth politics. To the extent that social progress remains a useful concept within critical theory and anti-racist praxis, I have suggested that it cannot be assumed to indicate a dramatic rupture with the past or a more gradual process of things getting better over time. In thinking social change in a minor key, progress might alternatively be conceived as a speculative set of practices through which latent possibilities of the past are rearticulated in the present via remaking shared habits, tendencies, and dispositions at the structural, institutional, and ecological levels. Progressive politics, in turn, entails ongoing work to expand our material and ethical capacities in the world – to cultivate environments, (infra)structures, and forms of relationality that undo white supremacy and create new possibilities for living together.

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In their bestselling book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness (2008), the economist Richard Thaler and the legal scholar Cass Sunstein argue that simple “nudge” techniques can help us break bad habits and make a range of choices in our own best interests.1 Mobilising insights from behavioural economics, they suggest that by implementing minor alterations to everyday architectures and infrastructures, governments and private institutions can steer people towards making better decisions with the potential to fundamentally “improve their lives” (2008, 5). Nudge-style forms of governance have been employed most commonly in North America and Western Europe to address lifestyle issues linked to diet, exercise, and smoking; financial practices related to saving and investment; and “anti-social” behaviour such as loitering and speeding. Thaler and Sunstein, along with other nudge advocates, argue that behavioural techniques have the potential to transform a wider range of societal problems, from racism, to suicide, to climate emergency (see also Halpern 2015). What is significant about nudge theory’s approach to individual and social change, I suggest, is that it eschews direct intervention or legislation in favour of more subtle tweaks to the environments that shape lessthan-conscious, automated, or habitual behaviour. Nudge opens, for example, with the story of Carolyn, who runs a school cafeteria and has learnt that if she displays healthier food options such as fruit, vegetables, and salads in more prominent and easier to reach locations, students will be up to four times more likely to

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select them over less healthy options. In doing so, Thaler and Sunstein contend that Carolyn has the opportunity to act as a “choice architect,” nudging students towards healthier lifestyle decisions, which may make ameliorative contributions to much bigger issues, from childhood obesity to adult heart health. Importantly, the authors argue, these kinds of indirect prompts are much more effective in getting people to modify their habitual behaviour than are more heavy-handed approaches, from direct marketing to legal regulation. Moreover, unlike rules and laws, nudge techniques fundamentally preserve people’s freedom and choice. Thus, while Thaler and Sunstein acknowledge that their approach is paternalistic in claiming that it is “legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people’s behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier and better,” it is also, they argue, libertarian: people are not required to comply with nudges; rather, they remain “free to choose” (2008, 5). Nudge theory’s brand of “libertarian paternalism” was catapulted into the mainstream of American public policy with Barack Obama’s presidency, as he appointed Sunstein, a former colleague at the University of Chicago Law School, as head of the White House Office of Information and Regularity Affairs. The Obama administration employed nudge approaches in an array of areas “from healthcare and financial reform, to healthy eating and energy efficiency” (Thaler 2015, x), and behavioural thinking became embedded in the Affordable Care Act, financial law reform, climate emergency policy, and consumer protection policy (Halpern 2015). In the United Kingdom, nudge techniques and policies came to the fore with the Conservative-led coalition government’s establishment in 2010 of the Behavioural Insights Team, widely thereafter referred to as “the nudge unit.” As David Halpern, the Cambridge University psychologist appointed to lead the team, notes in his book Inside the Nudge Unit (2015), nudge approaches were particularly attractive to the UK government as part of its austerity agenda following the 2008 economic crisis because such interventions required few economic resources but could have “big pay-offs” in the form of behavioural transformation.2 Following in the footsteps of their American colleagues, one of the nudge unit’s first and most successful policy interventions was in pensions reform. While UK employers had previously, by law, required

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employees to opt into available pension programmes, the unit’s new policy required employers to automatically enrol employees into the program, while enabling them to opt out if they so wished. By changing the default options in this way, Halpern notes that the pension reforms mobilised the behavioural principle of inertia (that people have a “strong tendency to go along with the status quo or default option”) to nudge people into more prudent retirement savings habits without removing their freedom of choice (Thaler and Sunstein 2008, 8). Other experiments conducted by the unit showed that “simple” behavioural interventions could “reduce carbon emissions, increase organ donation, increase the quit rate of smoking, reduce missed medical appointments, help students finish their courses, reduce discrimination and boost recruitment” (Halpern 2015, 9). Behavioural thinking now “permeates almost every area of government policy” in Britain and nudge-style policy-making expertise is “in demand across the world” (Rutter 2015).3 Most recently, the nudge unit was enlisted by Boris Johnson’s Conservative government to encourage UK citizens to stay at home, wash their hands frequently, and practice social distancing amidst the global pandemic of COVID -19. Despite their global impact, however, nudge theory and policy are not without their significant detractors. Unsurprisingly, the paternalistic aspects of such techniques have garnered particular criticism. In the United Kingdom, for example, behavioural policies tend to “psycho-demographically segment certain portions of the population as being in most need of behavioural intervention” (Jones et al. 2012, 51), and some interpret nudge techniques as yet another avenue for elites to police working-class lifestyles and pleasures (Burgess 2012). More generally, the behaviour change agenda has been described as “marred by a tendency to disempower, as it subconsciously prompts people to act in certain ways” – a process with potential long-term consequences, as opportunities for “social learning” are elided (Jones et al. 2012, 52).4 Critics also address the problematic relationship between behavioural economics and neoliberal capitalism, highlighting how many nudge-style policies draw heavily on corporate techniques and are largely “market-corrective” in orientation (2012, 47). In this vein, some in favour of more immediate and direct measures to contain COVID -19 interpreted the UK government’s initial adoption of

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nudge techniques to address the pandemic as prioritising economic imperatives over public health and the protection of vulnerable populations (Sodha 2020). From this perspective, the deployment of nudge practices to effect changes to habitual behaviour is not neutral; rather, it reflects particular ideological commitments linked to patterns of socioeconomic injustice and inequality. For these reasons, I suggest, it is important to situate nudge techniques within much longer histories of governing through habit – genealogies which reveal the capacity for habit to be employed as an exclusionary technology of social and geo-political regulation. As discussed in chapter 1, Tony Bennett et al. (2013, 6) argue that in determining whether populations were capable of self-governance, nineteenth-century political, medical, and scientific authorities routinely discounted groups deemed excessively susceptible to habitual repetition. Colonised populations and the domestic poor were key targets for such logic, as were, of course, women across various locations and socioeconomic classes. And yet, for such groups, authorities nonetheless prescribed disciplinary practices of habit formation as necessary to produce more desirable conduct. In a similar vein, Lisa Blackman (2013) explores how pervasive liberal strategies of governmentality in the twentieth century intertwined imperialism, eugenics, and the psychological sciences through a focus on discipline and habit modification. Blackman cites the eminent psychologist Stanley Hall’s book Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relationships to Physiology, Anthro­ pology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (1904) as an influential case in point which functioned as “a eugenics handbook” and understood “psychology as being one of the key knowledge practices for identifying and mapping degeneracy” (Blackman 2013, 199–200).5 As part of a wider imperialist project, Hall sought to “diagnose” and “arrest” early signs of susceptibility to “delinquency, criminality, prostitution and psychopathology” in “both the individual and the race.” Vital to this process, Blackman notes, was the disciplining of rhythms achieved through “the inculcation of habit in the form of particular drills, instruction and forms of training” (200). For over two centuries, then, governing through habit has functioned as a double-sided disciplinary technique: purported “bad” habits, or a more general tendency towards mindless repetition, were employed to deprive whole populations of basic rights and freedoms, yet the inculcation of new

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rhythms, routines, and habits was simultaneously deemed essential to the improvement of their behaviour and governability.6 While Thaler and Sunstein recognise that the scope for government or corporate abuse of nudge-style behavioural techniques is, in principle, significant, they nonetheless claim that “not nudging” is a “non-starter” because “there is no such thing as neutral design” (2008, 3). Whether they intend to or not, governments and private institutions are always creating particular choice architectures, and so citizens, tax payers, employees, consumers, drivers, smokers, potential organ donors, etc., are continually being nudged in one way or another. Thus, the imperative, they insist, is not to refrain from nudging but rather to compel those in positions of power to “nudge for the good” (Thaler 2015, 8). Of course, this request presumes that we can know in advance the difference between “good” and “bad” behavioural interventions and outcomes – a point to which I return later on. Nudge theory, and its parent discipline of behavioural economics, is not the only framework available for thinking through the links among habit, politics, environment, and social transformation. Rich legacies of theorising habit and habituation exist at the intersections of philosophy and psychology (among other fields), which are increasingly engaged to understand the changing dynamics of sociopolitical and material life. As I have discussed in previous chapters, pragmatist philosophy, in particular, has long focused on the relationship between habits and embodied, social, and material change. In Principles of Psychology ([1890] 2014), William James argues that, in embodying the “plasticity” of living organisms and social systems, habits hold the key to material transformation. Similarly, for John Dewey, “habit-forming” is conceived most fruitfully as “an expansion of power not its shrinkage” ([1922] 2012, 41). From these perspectives, it is through the creation of habits, not their cessation, that we might achieve more progressive and enduring forms of social transformation. Central to pragmatist philosophy is, as I have argued, the idea that habits are not simply individual capacities or modes of behaviour, but rather the product of evolving transactions between organisms and the milieus they inhabit. It follows that approaches to transformation that target the individual subject in isolation or appeal exclusively to cognitive reason are not likely to be effective. As I outlined in chapter 1, Dewey illustrates this point with the example of the ineffectiveness of

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repeatedly telling someone who slouches to “stand up straight.” Given that “a man who does not stand properly forms a habit of standing improperly,” what is required for change is an approach that accounts for the imbricated embodied and environmental factors that perpetuate existing patterns of behaviour ([1922] 2012, 15) – in this case, anything from a sedentary lifestyle, to occupational demands, to a poor ergonomic work set-up. Extending classical pragmatist theories of habit, Shannon Sullivan (2006, 2012, 2015) offers a different kind of example. As I discussed in chapter 2, it has often been assumed, she suggests, that providing data around the lack of scientific basis for the category of race or raising consciousness regarding the destructive implications of racism will contribute to the end of racial discrimination. Yet, in targeting conscious rationality, such strategies do not address the less-thanconscious psychic, embodied, and social habits beneath white domination – habits which may actively resist efforts to unveil them. Rather than confronting such habits directly, Sullivan argues that we should focus on transforming the physical, social, political, economic, and psychological (infra)structures and atmospheres in which they are (re) produced. Thus, like adherents of nudge theory and policy, pragmatist philosophers advocate an approach to personal and social change that operates at the level of automated or habitual behaviour and favours environmentally oriented interventions. Despite their similarities, however, there are significant differences between nudge theory and pragmatist philosophy which point to their contrasting political and ethical sensibilities and potentialities. Taking this comparison as my focus, in this chapter I employ pragmatist scholarship, and particularly Dewey’s work, to expose nudge theory’s thin understanding of habituation and its consequently limited approach to addressing the links among habit, political governance, and social transformation. There are challenges involved in comparing existing policies and practices with a set of historical philosophical ideas – particularly given that Dewey and James provide relatively few sustained empirical examples. My focus throughout, however, is on tracing the ontological and epistemological principles underlying nudge theory and pragmatist accounts of habit and their potential sociopolitical implications.

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As necessary background, in the first section of this chapter I offer a partial genealogy of the emergence of behavioural psychology and pragmatist philosophy at the turn of the century, paying particular attention to their differing views of human nature and habituation. I then track the birth of nudge theory, and the wider behavioural change policy agenda, as a product of more recent engagements among behavioural and cognitive psychology and neoliberal economics. Drawing on these histories, in the second part of the chapter I compare nudge theory and pragmatist philosophy across four key themes, highlighting the psychosocial processes through which habits are formed; the spatialities and temporalities of habituation; the neoliberal sensibilities of behaviour modification; and the differences between predictive and speculative pragmatism. I argue that while nudge advocates focus on how policymakers and corporate leaders can intervene in the “choice architectures” that surround us to outsmart or bypass problematic human tendencies, pragmatist philosophers appreciate the necessity of collective efforts to develop new and flexible forms of habituation in order to engender more enduring and democratic forms of social change. Whereas nudge theory claims that complex social problems can be addressed through harnessing expert knowledge of pattered psychological and economic behaviour, pragmatists highlight the difficulties and pitfalls of assuming that we can know in advance the nature of progressive social or ethical conduct. What this comparison illustrates most potently, I contend, is that meaningful and inclusive forms of social change are not likely to be engendered through overly calculative, instrumentalist, or individualist techniques of habit management and modification. Thus, while in the previous chapter I explored what might be generative about environmentally oriented approaches to change at the level of habit, here I argue that there is significant variation within such interventions and that these differences matter to material, political, and ethical outcomes. nUdge tHeorY And HAbit PHiloSoPHieS On the surface, nudge theory and pragmatist analyses of habit have much in common. To start, both proponents of nudge (like Thaler,

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Sunstein, and Halpern) and pragmatist philosophers (like Dewey, James, and Sullivan) suggest that personal and social change is often best approached through a focus on habitual processes. Granted, “habit” is not the primary term employed within the nudge literature, which refers mainly to “behaviour” and addresses a range of psychological processes (such as “framing” and “priming”) that cannot necessarily be encapsulated by the language of habit or habit modification. Nonetheless, much of the behaviour that nudge advocates aim to understand and redirect, from “unhealthy” eating patterns to a tendency to select the “default option” across various administrative contexts, could be considered habitual. In other words, as Dewey puts it, it is behaviour premised on “an acquired predisposition to ways and modes of response” which is ready to spring into action when the appropriate cue is given ([1922] 2012, 19). Moreover, nudge theorists sometimes use the terms “habit” and “behaviour” interchangeably, particularly with respect to recurring forms of activity: for Halpern, for instance, habits are “repeated behavioural patterns and associations” that become “entrenched” (2015, 130).7 Significantly, like the pragmatist thinkers, nudge advocates underscore that creating more knowledge or conscious awareness of problematic behaviour, or directly prohibiting it, is often insufficient, and indeed may be counterproductive, to producing change. As Dewey underscores with respect to his example of bad posture, telling someone to “stand up straight” unhelpfully focuses attention on “the bad result.” As discussed in chapters 1 and 2, rather than catalysing transformation, repeatedly highlighting a behaviour one seeks to change often work to fuel its persistence (Dewey [1922] 2012, 15; Sedgwick 1996, 2003).8 Similarly, Inside the Nudge Unit emphasises “the big mistake” made by many policymakers and marketers alike as articulated by one of nudge’s most prominent expert advisors, the American social marketing professor Robert Cialdini: “emphasizing what people shouldn’t do, instead of what they should” (Thaler 2015, 34–5). As Halpern notes, “while laws and punishments have often proved reasonably effective at getting people to stop doing something, they are often much less effective at getting people to start doing something, and certainly to persist with it” (2015, 21). Like Dewey, Sullivan, and others, nudge advocates argue that changing entrenched behaviour is

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approached most effectively through less direct, and sometimes lessthan-conscious, strategies that work through modes other than reasoning or proscription. As Halpern puts it, “a nudge is essentially a means of encouraging or guiding behaviour but without mandating or instructing, and ideally, without the need for heavy financial incentives or sanctions” (22). Relatedly, in making sense of the workings of individual and social change, both nudge theorists and philosophers of habit focus on the connections between people and their environments. Given the lessthan-conscious nature of most forms of habituation, and the ways in which habits are constituted in and through external conditions and (infra)structures, both camps argue that it may be best to address “the environments that ‘feed’ habits” (Sullivan 2006, 9). As Dewey contends, “We may desire abolition of war, industrial justice, greater equality of opportunity for all. But no amount of preaching good will or the golden rule of cultivation of sentiments of love and equity will accomplish the results. There must be a change in objective arrangements and institutions. We must work on the environment and not merely on the hearts of men” ([1922] 2012, 13). Similarly, nudge advocates argue that behavioural change is most effectively catalysed not through passionate appeals to “hearts and minds” but rather via more subtle modifications to the choice architectures that surround us (Thaler and Sunstein 2008) – from the use of speed bumps to control dangerous driving to the adjustment of prescription drug access to reduce suicide rates (Halpern 2015). Indeed, while nudge theory emerges from behavioural economics’ fusing of psychology and economic theory, it also employs insights from cognitive design, which examines how everyday devices like thermostats or computer interfaces pose an “environmental limitation on human rationality” because they are designed with the needs of the production process rather than the user in mind (Jones et al. 2012, 14–15). From this perspective, transforming behaviour requires addressing “the irrational push of the world around us” (16). Read together, these literatures make a powerful statement about the enduring relevance of habit and habituation to individualcollective change, as well as the importance of theorising social transformation from a perspective that addresses human-environment

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interactions and appreciates the significance of psychic, embodied, and other less-than-conscious forces. Yet, as I have indicated, there are important differences between nudge theory and pragmatist philosophy with critical implications for how we understand the wider links among habit, politics, and social transformation. In order to make sense of these disparities and their material and ethical significance, it is necessary to trace some of the earlier scholarly initiatives and debates from which they emerged. reMAKing HAbit: beHAVioUriSM And PrAgMAtiSM As discussed in chapter 1, philosophies of habit date back at least as far as the work of Aristotle, who employed the concept to “explain the persistence of actions that are sometimes active, sometimes dormant” (Sparrow and Hutchinson 2013, 3). Significant developments in theorising habit and habituation, however, occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as psychology sought to separate from philosophy and form itself as a discrete discipline. By the 1890s, the “new psychology” influenced by the experimental methods of the German physiologist and philosopher Wilhelm Wundt had begun to carve out distinct disciplinary space by aligning itself with the ascendant concepts and techniques of Darwinian biology. Experimental psychology redefined habit as “an essentially biophysiological phenomenon” and accorded it a central role in explaining human behaviour (Camic 1986, 1067). This view of habit as mechanistic reflex was consolidated within early twentieth-century American psychology with the rise of the psychologist (and later advertising executive) John Watson’s behaviourist movement, which the behaviourist and inventor B.F. Skinner later popularised. Like the experimental and behavioural psychologists, the pragmatists were greatly influenced by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and associated developments in evolutionary theory and the biological sciences. James, for instance, once described habits as “nothing but the concatenated discharges of the nerve-centres, due to the presence there of systems of reflex paths, organized as to wake each other up successfully” ([1890] 2004, 43). More generally, in their empirical interest in how habitual behaviour emerged through

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interactions between organisms and environments, the pragmatists and the behaviourists covered similar ground: in fact, Dewey was one of Watson’s doctoral thesis advisors at the University of Chicago. Nonetheless, pragmatism and behaviourism are underpinned by distinct views of human nature and subjectivity with salient implications for my comparison of nudge theory and philosophies of habit. On the whole, if the behaviourists offered a mechanistic, atomistic, and scientistic view of human activity, the pragmatists advocated a more relational, processual, and socially attuned account, which resonated with both William McDougall’s social psychology9 and Alfred North Whitehead’s “process” philosophy. Widely interpreted as behaviourism’s founding document, in the essay “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It” (1913), Watson argues that psychology had at that point failed to become an objective natural science because it remained caught up in speculative questions about consciousness that could not be tested and verified by experimental means. He accordingly proposes a fundamental shift away from the study of consciousness through introspective methods and towards analysis of empirically observable behaviour. In doing so, he was strongly influenced by the rise of animal psychology, namely the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov’s famous study of conditioning in dogs, which was first translated into English in 1909 (Camic 1986). Within Watson’s framework, habits are formed via organisms’ ongoing adjustments to their environments, in which certain stimuli produce particular responses. Whether in rats, dogs, or children, responses that elicit productive environmental adaptations are likely to be repeated and so to gradually congeal into habitual modes of behaviour, whereas those that are inadequate or dangerous are likely to be avoided in the future. Crucially, the aim of behaviourism was not to understand and explain states of consciousness, but rather to determine methods by which behaviour could be predicted and controlled. As I discuss later on, behavioural psychology was an important forerunner for the development of behavioural economics, out of which nudge theory and policy emerged. Seventeen years before Watson published his behavioural manifesto, Dewey had already articulated key analytical shortcomings in the emergent stimulus-response psychology. In his influential essay,

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“The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (1896), he argues that while behaviourists understand “stimulus” and “response” as discrete and temporally sequential, this is possible only through artificially extracting seemingly linear stimulus-response reactions from the more complex circuits of “sensori-motor coordination.” In other words, sensations, thoughts, and acts cannot be as rigidly distinguished as behaviourists assume and how “stimulus” and “response” are defined depends on the position from which one views a given empirical situation. In a 1913 paper presented at the joint session of the American Philosophical and American Psychological Associations, Dewey offers further criticism of behaviourism, in particular its tendency to “ignore the social qualities of behavior” (Dewey 1913 cited in Manicas 2002, 282). In analysing how habits emerge through ongoing interactions between organisms and environments, then, the pragmatists drew on a much more expansive understanding of “environment” than did the behaviourists – addressing the “whole biosociocultural context of this or that experience, where experience is taken in its widest, deepest sense” (Fesmire 2015, 51). As such, Dewey sees habits as much more than the physiological product of repeated reactions to physical stimuli. From his perspective, “habits are arts” ([1922] 2012, 10): they are at once sociocultural and biophysical and require particular forms of intuition and ingenuity. The above points underscore the important distinction within behaviourist and pragmatist literatures between “behaviour” and “conduct” respectively. Both terms refer to activity enabled by habit, yet, in contrast to Watson’s account of behaviour as rooted in physiological reflex, Dewey’s concept of conduct encapsulates the ways in which human action imbricates the biological, physiological, psychic, social, and cultural all the way down. These divergent views of human activity open out to distinct understandings of individual and collective change. Extending Watson’s behaviourism, Skinner ([1938] 1966) argues that learned maladaptive behaviour could be transformed via conditioning techniques premised on positive or negative reinforcement. For example, a child with a debilitating fear of going to school might be conditioned to associate education with more pleasant sensations and rewards. Change, from this perspective, results from directive techniques in which trained practitioners (or other authority

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figures) intervene to redirect particular stimulus-response relationships. Whereas, from a pragmatist standpoint, transformation is an ongoing process that depends not only on efforts to alter aspects of the environments in which habits are formed, but also on “intelligent invention” on the part of subjects and collectives ([1922] 2012, 15). For instance, Dewey argues that if we want to cultivate “democratic intelligence” among citizens, we need to transform educational environments, yet these interventions should be designed precisely to enable students to develop the experimental sensibility necessary to engage in “intelligently-controlled habit” (16). That being said, as I discussed in chapter 1, for pragmatist philosophers the fact that habits form continually via interactions between organisms and their milieus means that change via habit is a process we can never master. Constituted ourselves as “bundles of habits” (James [1890] 2004, 1), we are always already part of the shifting relations in which we seek to intervene. Moreover, singular actions can have unexpected ripple effects throughout evolving assemblages and, consequently, prediction of human-environmental interactions is a tenuous exercise. Empirical observation and experimentation thus require remaining alert to the changing dimensions of a situation as it unfolds temporally and spatially, rather than assuming that fixed trajectories can be known in advance. Fundamentally, then, if we wish to approach social change at the level of habit, Dewey argues that our efforts can only speculate on present tendencies, rather than predict future outcomes. nUdge tHeorY And tHe riSe oF beHAVioUrAl eConoMiCS Moving to the contemporary realm, nudge advocates employ a discourse of “behaviour” informed by Watson’s legacy, which means that they are much less concerned with the role of wider sociocultural and political structures and relations in shaping human activity than are pragmatist accounts of “conduct.” Yet nudge approaches also draw from more recent developments in cognitive psychology which, following the “cognitive revolution” of the 1950s, returned psychologists to the concept of “the mind” that behaviourists so vehemently eschewed (Sent 2004). Consequently, nudge theory’s account of human

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behaviour is not limited to empirically observable stimulus-response reactions; it also incorporates analysis of higher mental processes such as attention, memory, perception, reasoning, and decision-making. The other key field which informs nudge approaches is economics and, as I discuss, it is the melding of psychology and neoclassically inspired economic theory that lends contemporary behaviour change policies and practices their distinctly neoliberal flavour. In Changing Behaviours: On the Rise of the Psychological State (2012), Rhys Jones, Jessica Pykett, and Mark Whitehead link the birth of behavioural economics with the publication in 1945 of the American psychologist and economist Herbert Simon’s book Administrative Behavior. In his influential account of decision-making within organisations, Simon argues that there are “practical limits to human rationality,” but that these limits are not fixed; rather they “depen[d] on the organizational environment in which individuals’ decisions take place” (Simon 1945, 240–1 cited in Jones et al. 2012, 4). Leading to the founding of the Carnegie School for the study of organisational behaviour at Carnegie-Mellon University (then Carnegie Institute of Technology), Simon’s analysis of “bounded rationality” offered a clear critique of mainstream economics’ model of rational action, as codified in the figure of homo oeconomicus. Its potential to engender a radical rethinking of human subjectivity within economic theory, however, was never born out as it was the Chicago School and its neoclassical economic agenda led by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman (who became known as the intellectual architects of neoliberalism), that would arise as dominant in the United States and internationally (Sent 2004; Jones et al. 2012). Nonetheless, the Carnegie School laid the groundwork for ongoing scholarly collaboration between psychology and economics. By the 1970s, a new wave of behavioural economics had emerged. It was associated most closely with the work of the Israeli-born scholars Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who in their work draw on cognitive psychology and economic design-making to illustrate “how human decisions may systematically depart from those predicted by standard economic theory” (Sent 2004, 736). Habitual errors occur in human decision-making, they argue, because of the “heuristics” or shortcuts we regularly rely on to make sense of complex

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and uncertain situations (Tversky and Kahneman 1974). Although indebted to Simon’s pioneering work, Tversky and Kahneman do not bring to fruition his earlier efforts to fundamentally reconceive the economic subject. Rather they maintain the “rationality assumption” of mainstream economics as “the yardstick” (Sent 2004, 747) and seek to understand how irrational behaviour can be reliably forecast and corrected – a perspective consistent not only with the founding ethos of the Chicago School, but also with the predictive thrust of Watson’s behavioural psychology. This “desire to rationalize the irrational” (Jones et al. 2012, 12) has become a central marker of the contemporary behaviour change agenda in Europe and North America. Extending Tversky and Kahneman’s work, Nudge (2008) and Inside the Nudge Unit (2015) focus on how the “new behavioural economics” can be translated into policy and practice with the help of techniques from the fields of cognitive design and social marketing. Contemporary nudge theorists explore a range of behavioural techniques (from “choice editing,” to “anchoring,” to “peer-to-peer pressure”), some of which aim to promote conscious reflection, for example, the presentation of government-produced nutritional advice in a manner more intuitive to the ways people tend to process information (Halpern 2015). Yet the majority of nudge-style interventions (like Nudge’s opening example of the reorganised cafeteria) work through lessthan-conscious means, redirecting habitual behaviour in ways deemed effective precisely because they circumvent the predictable irrationalities of human decision-making processes. It is in this respect that the paternalistic aspects of Thaler and Sunstein’s “libertarian paternalism” come to the fore: unlike Dewey’s ([1927] 1954) vision of “participatory democracy,” nudge theory represents a mode of expert governance in which leaders and professionals with requisite scientific and behavioural expertise are seen as much more capable than others in determining what constitutes rational, healthy, or prudent behaviour and how best to engineer it. Significantly, what is viewed as “rational” within behavioural economics tends to be action that would most benefit people in a market-based society, for example, “making efficiency savings, investing wisely in the financial market, and opting into company pension schemes” (Jones et al. 2012, 47–8). We might go as far as to argue that, at a time when the dominance of neoliberalism

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may be in peril, nudge advocates aim to “correct behaviour that appears to threaten the future of a market-oriented society” (2012, 50). As I have explored in the preceding sections, nudge theory and pragmatist philosophies of habit developed at different historical moments and out of disparate intellectual trajectories, which have differently shaped their ideological and ethical impulses as well as their understandings of human nature, habit, change, and political governance. In the remainder of the chapter, I explore the nature and implications of these particularities in further depth. tHe PSYCHiC liFe oF HAbitS The first key claim I make is that although nudge proponents argue that change is most effectively addressed at the level of automatic or habitual behaviour, they do not seem to appreciate just how complex and deeply rooted many habits and tendencies are. As I have discussed, pragmatist philosophers view the fact that we can modify existing habits and form new ones as central to our capacity for freedom and material transformation. However, they also acknowledge how rigid and resistant to change various forms of habituation can be. From Sullivan’s (2006, 2015) perspective, as discussed in chapter 2, this is the case in part because most habits are by their very nature less-thanconscious most of the time. The psychological workings of repression and defence mechanisms mean that transforming deep-seated habits is neither easy nor straightforward. Moreover, the psychic roots of many forms of habitual behaviour are highly ambivalent. As the legacies of Freudian psychoanalysis indicate, people may continually act in ways that seem antithetical to their own interests, repeat the “mistakes” of their past, or feel compelled to relive their traumas for a host of psychosocial reasons linked both to early life experiences and the ongoing social structures and relations in which they find themselves. As such, grappling with the complexity of human habits requires us to acknowledge the workings of psychic conflict and ambivalence – or, as Eve Sedgwick puts it, “the simple, foundational, authentically very difficult understanding that good and bad tend to be inseparable at every level” (2011, 136).

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By contrast, within nudge’s melding of behaviourism, cognitive psychology, and economic theory, human behaviour is understood as frequently “irrational”; however, this is linked not to psychosocial complexity but rather to the fact that human neural processing capabilities are limited (compared to those of machines), which means that we are frequently prone to make “errors” that lead to “poor” decisions.10 For nudge theorists, decisions themselves are generally either “good” or “bad,” and it is the role of experts (such as government officials, corporate leaders, or professional consultants) to guide people in the direction of “their own best interests” (as judged by these experts). As long as adjustments to our everyday choice architectures are employed effectively to circumvent our often short-sighted or hassle-averse modes of habitual action, nudge theorists claim, such behaviour can be easily redirected to “improve people’s lives” and address a range of “wicked” social problems (Halpern 2015, 170). From a more critical psychosocial perspective, however, people’s tendency to automatically repeat particular modes of activity cannot be explained by processing errors alone; the psychic contours of human conduct are much more complicated than nudge theories suggest. Take, for instance, Thaler and Sunstein’s opening example of Carolyn and her reorganisation of the school cafeteria. While Carolyn’s application of nudge techniques may well encourage some students (with the required financial resources) to select fruit or salads over chips or crisps when they purchase food at school, such techniques do not acknowledge the interrelated psychic, social, and economic factors that may play into cafeteria behaviour and eating habits (and related issues of malnutrition, body image, and disordered eating) – from poverty, to academic pressure, to abuse and trauma, to sexism. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the school canteen has become a microcosm of class-related inequalities and their affective dynamics – from the experiences of children who receive state-financed meals being marked in the lunch queue as “poor”; to reports on the shocking nutritional content of the catering in publically funded schools; to research which shows the huge problem of hunger, and resultant concentration deficits, among school-age children who are, for a range of reasons, not fed enough at home. As these examples begin

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to show, nudge techniques barely scratch the surface of the politics of school cafeterias. They also fail to address how commonly food becomes an affective flashpoint for a host of psychic tensions, including issues related to power, control, protection, desire, and lack11 – nor, unsurprisingly, are they interested in the relationship between eating and pleasure; indeed, pleasure and desire, more generally, sit uneasily within nudge’s rigid epistemology of self-control and future “wellbeing.” Of course, this is partly Thaler and Sunstein’s point. The nudge paradigm is attractive to many precisely because, in the tradition of Watson’s behaviourism, it promotes the fantasy that we do not have to wade into murky abyss of psychic ambivalence or sociopolitical relations to transform individual or collective behaviour. Instead, through superficial administrative tweaks, we can now simply bypass this complexity. Yet, although the kinds of environmental modifications which nudge advocates describe may prompt people to do something different than they normally would in a very specific context or set of circumstances, there is little robust evidence to suggest that such techniques work to address the roots of patterned behaviour at a deeper level – or indeed, that they help to cultivate new and enduring habits and tendencies.12 As pragmatist philosophers argue, however, it is through the constitution of habits, rather than their dissolution, that more affirmative capacities and potentialities might be actualised. Ultimately, nudge theorists are most persuasive when they describe the effectiveness of nudge techniques in the context of relatively noncontentious administrative and financial issues, such as encouraging people to save earlier for retirement or to pay their taxes on time. Their advocacy of behavioural techniques is much less compelling when they extend it to a host of more socially fraught and complex issues, from gender inequality and racial discrimination, to teenage pregnancy and suicide. In positioning nudge theory as a catch-all solution to “society’s major problems” (Thaler and Sunstein 2008, 9), its advocates can address neither the underlying structural factors at play across such a disparate range of issues, nor the differences between subjects to be nudged and their own psychological and social histories and experiences. Yet, as Dewey insists, “the distinctively personal or subjective factors in habit count” ([1922] 2012, 13).

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Although change at the level of habit is often best addressed through modifications to the environments in which embodied tendencies are formed, he argues that “the stimulation of desire and effort is one preliminary in the change of surroundings” (13). Grappling with the constitutive links among habit, tendency, and desire would thus seem to require a critical framework equipped to negotiate complex psychosocial relations. All this being said, it is important to recognise that, when it was published in the 1920s, Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct: An Intro­ duction to Social Psychology was intended, in many ways, as a counternarrative to the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis. From Dewey’s perspective, the problem with orthodox psychoanalytic perspectives is that they routinely separate “mind from body” ([1922] 2012, 19). Consequently, psychoanalysis “thinks that mental habits can be straightened out by some kind of purely psychical manipulation without reference to the distortions of sensation and perception which are due to bad bodily sets” (17). Significantly, however, Dewey is just as critical of early twentieth-century physiology. In assuming that refashioning human conduct requires only that we “locate a particular diseased cell or local lesion, independent of the whole complex of organic habits” (x), physiology similarly elides the intertwinement of the psychological and the biological. Like psychoanalysis, he suggests, it also fails to address the “objective conditions in which habits are formed and operate” (36–7). Thus, in calling for the development of a social psychology with the concept of habit at its heart, Dewey underlines the importance of a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to individual and sociopolitical change – one that integrates psychology, biology, physiology, and sociocultural analysis to make sense of, and transform, habitual conduct and relations. teMPorAlitY, SPAtiAlitY, And HAbit ASSeMblAgeS Second, I argue, nudge advocates stress the importance of redirecting habitual behaviour through modifications to the choice architectures that surround us; however, they do little to address the complexity of the ongoing interplay among bodies and environments through which habits are (re)constituted. For Dewey, like James and contemporary

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thinkers such as Sullivan, habits are never static, but are continuously modified through the constitutive interaction of subjects, objects, infrastructures, and environments. As Sullivan explains, habits are “transactional”: this “means not only that the environment helps constitute the function or habit, but also that the function or habit helps constitute, and possibly change, the world” (2015, 12). For example, “as a gendered world shapes a woman’s (and a man’s) habits of walking and occupying space, those habits both enable and constrain the way that she might respond to the world, perhaps maintaining gendered expectations regarding shoes and locomotion and perhaps challenging or transforming them. Either way, her response helps (re)constitute the environment that then feeds back into expectations for both her and other women’s (and men’s) foot-wear habits” (2015, 13). From this perspective, as discussed in previous chapters, individual habits are not discrete or fully separable from social, institutional, or environmental patterns; rather, they are always intimately intertwined. Instead of conceptualising individual habits in isolation (as if they were owned by discrete subjects), then, a speculative approach inspired by the thinking of these philosophers compels us to address the workings and implications of habit assemblages. Take, for example, the case of digestion as a habit assemblage. In order to illustrate the transactional workings of habits, Dewey compares them to physiological functions. Like respiration and digestion (which require oxygen and food to function), he suggests that habits are “not complete within the body”; they necessitate “the cooperation of an organism and an environment” ([1922] 2012, 10). Extending Dewey’s analysis, Sullivan argues that “a person can have a distinctive character based on the kind of physiological habits than compose her” (2015, 11). Digestion is a transactional habit, she suggests, not merely because it “occurs only when the stomach and intestines have food to process and absorb” (12), but also because it is continually shaped by, and materially incorporates, wider sociocultural and political relations, including those linked to social privilege and oppression. For instance, “women who have been sexually abused disproportionally suffer from gastrointestinal maladies, such as IBS and Crohn’s disease” (2015, 19). Moreover, epigenetic research indicates that “racism can have durable effects on the biological constitution of human beings,” including digestion, that can extend to future generations (20). Thus,

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like other habits, digestion is not an unchanging mechanical reflex; it constantly evolves as human psychology and physiology are reshaped by personal and transgenerational experience, as well as by wider environmental dynamics from social hierarchies to industrial farming and food-processing practices. Public health initiatives to address digestion-related disorders that focus exclusively on prompting individuals to make different dietary choices, then, are likely to be limited in the long-term as they tackle only one strand of a wider assemblage of forces. In turn, as Sullivan argues, work to transform habitual forms of sexism and racism “needs to address all aspects of that transaction, including the biological” (2015, 22) – while appreciating that each component of an assemblage is itself constantly in motion as it interacts with others. By contrast, although experts’ ability to modify “problematic” human behaviour patterns is central to nudge theory, scholars like Thaler and Sunstein present habits as curiously isolated and inert.13 Within their framework, persistent cognitive and embodied tendencies drive much of our everyday conduct, often in ways that steer us away from what is “best” for us and our societies, but can be powerfully redirected through well-executed, context-specific nudges. Yet they provide little analysis of how particular habits may have been formed in the first place, or indeed how they may continue to develop and transform after being nudged. In other words, for Thaler and Sunstein, “transformation” is located with the event-space of the particular nudge at hand, but the pre- and post-nudge periods are seemingly devoid of movement and activity. For example, a behavioural initiative that gives American high school girls a dollar for every day that they avoid getting pregnant may play a small role in reducing teenage pregnancy rates in a particular context (Thaler and Sunstein 2008) – but what happens after the girls leave the secondary school environment, particularly if they have received no adequate sexual education? How might their patterns of intimacy and sexual health shift or deteriorate as they inhabit new cultural and socioeconomic constraints, pressures, and atmospheres?14 Relatedly, nudge advocates (similar to the classical behaviourists) conceive of “environment” in a rather limited way: environment is, for instance, a temporary administrative framework that provides small monetary awards to school girls who avoid getting pregnant, but does not

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address the broader conditions of poverty and lack of opportunity in which teenage pregnancy often occurs. It is, moreover, the physical organisation of a cafeteria but not the wider sociopolitical and economic structures and relations in which student eating and foodpurchasing practices are embedded. Indeed, within nudge theory, tweaks to choice architectures can redirect human behaviour (at least temporarily), yet wider physical, sociopolitical, cultural, and economic environments are never substantively transformed. As such, nudge is, in many ways, a patently neoliberal endeavour. In extolling the benefits of “libertarian paternalism,” Thaler and Sunstein (2008) laud the concepts of “freedom” and “choice,” praise the merits of modest government, and retain faith in the regulatory role of the market (at least most of the time). Similarly, Halpern applauds then-UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s neoliberal “big society” agenda and describes the nudge unit’s role in offering individualist behavioural nudges for “wellbeing” while the Conservative-led coalition government drove forward Thatcher’s project of dismantling the welfare state (2015, 142). At the end of the day, I suggest, nudge theory’s focus is on changing individual behaviour (though superficial modifications of administrative arrangements and other choice architectures) rather than on enacting deeper structural changes, or indeed on understanding the complex and shifting interactions among bodies, infrastructures, and environments. Within nudge theory’s epistemological framework, obesity, heart disease, and teenage pregnancy are predictably figured as the result of “bad” habits fuelled by “poor” personal decisions that can, in turn, be resolved by compelling people to make “better choices” (2008, 8). This is, by now, very familiar rhetoric in a post-Fordist, neoliberal society that promotes austerity as an ideological project and repeatedly blames individuals for structural failures15 – it is also one that resonates strongly with much older biopolitical practices of governing through habit. As I discussed in chapter 1, it is true that Dewey, and pragmatism more generally, have been critiqued for pursuing “liberal reform” rather than radical social change in ways that avoid grappling directly with ideology and structural relations of power (Paringer 1990; Sullivan 2006). This might lead us to ask whether pragmatist philosophies of habit are just as amenable to neoliberal political and economic aims as other approaches to habit modification. In principle, embodied

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technologies which work at the level of habit are equally available to all political ideologies. What is vital to highlight here, however, is that, although Dewey pays careful attention to individual experience and desire, he focuses on how embodied subjectivities, capacities, and habits are continuously refashioned through wider material and sociopolitical (infra)structures and ecologies. This point underscores the differences between his approach and dominant neoliberal technologies, which pursue behaviour change in ways that purposefully elide structural conditions and frameworks. AgenCY, neoliberAliSM, And HAbitS oF deMoCrACY Third, although nudge theory stresses the importance of maintaining individual choice and personal liberty, it actually treats “ordinary” people as exceedingly impotent and inept. Viewing human subjects, with their limited cognitive capacities, as routinely bad at making “the right” choices, nudge theory delegates significant decision-making powers to officials and experts – indeed, as I noted earlier, nudge theory offers a form of expert governance which is at significant odds with more participatory visions of democracy. While the authority and agency of various political and corporate leaders is augmented through the introduction of nudge techniques, everyone else (and particularly those with less social and cultural capital and fewer economic resources) is figured as remarkably passive.16 Thus, while in the previous section I figured nudge as an exemplary neoliberal technology, it actually does not quite fit the standard neoliberal model of individual responsibilisation. As Natasha Dow Shüll argues, nudge “assumes a choosing subject, but one who is constitutionally ill-equipped to make rational, healthy choices” (2016, 12). Indeed, from Thaler and Sunstein’s perspective, the paternalistic thrust of libertarian paternalism is necessary precisely because “individuals make pretty bad decisions” most of the time (2008, 6). While nudge theory’s envisioned subject values neoliberal “freedom of choice,” they simultaneously lack the cognitive capacity necessary to be an “autonomy-aspiring actor” (Dow Shüll 2016, 12). Responsibility must therefore be delegated to choice architects who have the requisite knowledge and foresight to steer behaviour in appropriate directions. As such, the nudge paradigm at once “presupposes and pushes

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against freedom” and “falls somewhere between enterprise and submission” (12). From this perspective, nudge approaches may actually be more pernicious than previous neoliberal forms of governance. Typical neoliberal technologies of the 1990s and early 2000s were designed to compel us to develop certain cognitive, psychic, and embodied capacities and skills so that we could play full roles as responsible entrepreneurial citizens in a capitalist economy. Cultivating such self-sufficient neoliberal subjects fuelled market logics, while enabling a shrunken state and culling social and health services. However, the possibility at least existed for subjects to reappropriate such competencies and employ them against the grain of neoliberalism in ways that might have furnished alternative personal and political goals and agendas.17 Indeed, while docility, as theorised by Michel Foucault ([1975] 1995), enables a reconfiguration of embodied conduct to make individuals amenable to governance, it also endows subjects with the power to shape their own bodily movements and capacities in ways that can exceed these disciplinary aims. In a similar vein, Dewey argues that although “docility has been identified with imitativeness,” it must also be recognised as a “power to re-make old habits, to re-create.” From this perspective, it does not make sense to figure “plasticity and originality” as eternally opposed ([1922] 2012, 41). By contrast, nudge is not particularly interested in (or capable of ) harnessing embodied plasticity to build flexible and enduring capacities or skills. As I have discussed, nudge techniques work in the specific context for which they are designed, but are not generally equipped to extend to new or different settings. For example, changing the settings on a pension plan from opt in to opt out may encourage more people to pay into a recommended pension plan than would have otherwise, but does not necessarily address wider financial or savings habits outside this specific administrative configuration. As such, nudges do not tend to promote the embodied and cognitive repetition or inhabitation usually required to cultivate enduring new habits (see chapters 1 and 2). Given that nudges often operate on a less-than-conscious level, they also do not invite the kind of critical reflection that might enable subjects to hone capacities and techniques that resonate with their own experiences, goals, and desires. Indeed, as Thaler explains, nudge was envisioned as an attractive approach to improving “the efficiency

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and effectiveness of government policies” precisely because it would not require “anyone to do anything” (2015, ix–x). Moreover, and crucially, as nudge techniques are generally the purview of authorities and experts or delegated technologies, people do not have a say in the kinds of nudges to which they are subjected.18 Consequently, nudge approaches offer less of a platform for Foucauldian “projects of the self” than they do a post-neoliberal technology of paternalistic control.19 The kind of behavioural change that government and corporate nudges deliver is therefore, I argue, both limited and antithetical to genuine democratic citizenship and participation. Pragmatist philosophies of habit offer quite a different framework for theorising the subjective and political possibilities of transforming embodied habits and tendencies. From Dewey’s perspective, as discussed in chapter 1, it is through cultivating “intelligent” habits that expand our productive capacities in the world that we might activate the potential for progressive social change ([1922] 2012, 110). Intelligence, in his framework, refers not to traditional measures of IQ or to the accumulation of institutionally recognised knowledge, but rather to an embodied appreciation of the meaning and implications of one’s present actions and an openness to change. Whereas nudge offers top-down behaviour modification, Dewey envisions personal and social change as an experimental process emerging from the ground up, whereby people are enabled to assume “command of their own powers” (115). How such a participatory democratic vision might be actualised in current sociopolitical and economic conditions remains a vital and complex challenge. In his attention to how “conduct is always shared” ([1922] 2012, 11), Dewey also opens up consideration of how habituation can support the development of progressive collectives and solidarities. His focus on the workings of habit assemblages means that he is particularly interested in the “cooperation” of bodies with other bodies, both human and nonhuman. In these ways, his work resonates with more recent analysis on the collective embodied gestures and habits of social movements. Think, for example, of Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s discussion of the contemporary anti-capitalist movements which have repeatedly assembled to protest neoliberalism, austerity, and induced precarity. What is important in this coming together of bodies, and their performance of everyday habits in public squares

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around the world, Butler and Athanasiou suggest, is not that everyone “acts together or in unison,” but rather, similar to Dewey’s analysis of habit assemblages, that “enough actions are interweaving that a collective effect is registered” (2013, 80; I discuss this example further in chapter 5). Compare this to Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge and Halpern’s Inside the Nudge Unit, in which the only collectives named are governments and corporations. Indeed, within the world of nudge theory, not only do social movements and political activism have no role in processes of sociopolitical change, but the entire public sphere is almost completely evacuated. Granted, nudge theorists’ focus is on improving the efficacy of government policies, rather than on theorising the broader workings of social transformation. Nonetheless, they consistently over-estimate the capacity of behavioural techniques specifically, and government policies more broadly, to ameliorate a host of complex problems linked to entrenched histories of social conflict and inequality. It matters, therefore, that their vision of the social is considerably impoverished. Moreover, nudge theorists routinely equate social transformation with the effects of social marketing on citizen or consumer behaviour. What pragmatist philosophers like Dewey, Sullivan, and others emphasise, by contrast, is that progressive and enduring forms of change inevitably exceed the aims and technologies of political or corporate governance – they emerge from, and are embedded within, the ongoing routines, habits, experiments, and solidarities of everyday life. PrediCtiVe VerSUS SPeCUlAtiVe PrAgMAtiSM Fourth, and finally, like philosophers of habit, nudge theorists sometimes frame their behavioural account of social change as a form of “pragmatism”; yet while nudge’s pragmatism is predictive and calculative, philosophies of habit offer a more speculative and responsive approach. For Halpern, being “a pragmatist” means “we should do whatever works, particularly if it has minimal costs” (2015, 317). As I have discussed, nudge-inspired approaches argue not only that people frequently make mistakes in “remembering, predicting and deciding,” but also that “these errors [are] not random, but predictable” (2015, 29). Invoking the legacy of Watson’s behaviourism, as well as Tversky and

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Kahneman’s theories of cognitive bias, nudge advocates claim that, because human processing errors can be anticipated, experts can reliably calculate how best to avoid common “mistakes” and skillfully prod people’s behaviour in more desirable directions. If nudges can be proven to “work better” than legislation or consciousness-raising, while serving the dominant austerity agenda, nudge theorists argue that they should be integrated into the heart of governance to address a range of social problems and make people “healthier, wealthier and happier” (Thaler and Sunstein 2008). By contrast, for Dewey, the nature of “progressive” social, political, or ethical conduct cannot be fully known in advance. Calculating sociopolitical change is problematic because “good” and “bad” outcomes cannot be definitively known and pre-empted; moreover, when we assume that they can, we often fail to inhabit moving events as they unfold (see chapter 1).20 As Dewey puts it, “In quality, the good is never twice alike. It never copies itself. It is new every morning, fresh every evening. It is unique in its every presentation for it marks the resolution of a distinctive complication of competing habits and impulses which can never repeat itself” ([1922] 2012, 61). Pragmatic and openfacing approaches to social transformation therefore will “not import mathematics into morals,” but instead will “be alive and sensitive to consequences as they actually present themselves” because such dynamics “give the only instruction we can procure as to the meaning of habits and dispositions” (24). In this way, Dewey’s framework resonates with what Erin Manning and others call “speculative pragmatism”21 – an approach to sensing (and making sense of ) the changing nature of (im)material life that views gestures and acts as “singularly connected to the event at hand” and yet always “exceeding the bounds of the event, touching on the ineffable quality of its more-than” (Manning 2016, 2).22 With respect to temporality, the predictive logic of nudge-style pragmatism is geared firmly towards the future, which it assumes is actionable in particular ways. While future wellbeing is the impetus for long-term planning and wise investment, the present is the time of impulsivity, temptation, and poor decisions. As Halpern notes, “a series of studies show that what we choose for our future selves often differs greatly from what we choose for our present selves” (2015, 139). From the perspective of behavioural economics, this phenomenon is linked to hyperbolic discounting: “the further into the future a cost or

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benefit, the disproportionally smaller it becomes relative to immediate costs and benefits.” As such, Halpern argues that we are “prone to be trapped in our present” (139). In this context, nudge advocates contend that policymakers and corporations can employ well-designed nudge techniques to enable “people to shape choices for their future selves, and help them resist moments of temptation that they may later regret giving into” (141) – whether with respect to dietary choices, financial savings, or gambling practices. From the perspective of nudge theory, then, it is our “future selves” that matter, and (bad) habits are what prevent progress and what must be resisted, broken, or redirected if we are to enter the future on good footing. For pragmatist philosophers, however, current tendencies and forms of habituation are precisely what need to be felt, appreciated, and reflected upon if we are to approach affirmative transformation. When we fixate on the future as what can be colonised to make good on the promise of better selves or a more socially just world, Dewey argues that we perpetually turn away from the richness and complexity of embodied and social life in the present. Moreover, when we assume that “inducing an improved society” requires an already “formulated definite ideal of some better state” we sacrifice flexibility and responsiveness ([1922] 2012, 52). As such, it is only by inhabiting our ongoing sensorial experience in the present that we can “come to know the meaning of present acts” and develop our ability to “use judgment in directing what we do” (82). Indeed, it is precisely this empirical and speculative capacity that Dewey’s vision of lifelong education and participatory democracy seeks to cultivate. Furthermore, attending to the quality and variation of experience as it happens enables us to hone our attunement to alternative possibilities in the making – to the potential for human and sociopolitical habits and tendencies to become otherwise. ConClUSionS Through my comparison of nudge theory and pragmatist philosophy, in this chapter I have argued that rigidly predictive and instrumentalist approaches to behaviour change are not likely to lead to meaningful social transformation. Rather than focusing on the dissolution

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of pernicious habits, we might more fruitfully explore how existing forms of habituation can be opened up to alternative material, ethical, and political possibilities. As pragmatist philosophers such as Dewey make clear (contra nudge theory), the precise content of “social progress” and “ethical habits” cannot be known in advance. Yet through “watchfulness concerning the tendency of acts” and attention to “disparities between former judgments and actual outcomes” ([1922] 2012, 82), we may be able to speculatively hone new tendencies. As my discussion of nudge theory and philosophies of habit has illustrated, we need a collective approach that works at the level of habit assemblages. Yet just how to conceptualise, and intervene in, such complex and shifting sets of relations requires further critical thought and experimentation. A pragmatism informed by critical psychosocial theories and practices would seem fundamental to our ability to engage with the ways in which habitual behaviour frequently involves repression and ambivalence. Understanding habit assemblages as radically morethan-human, however, also calls for techniques that attend to the imbrication of embodied beings with diverse objects, (infra)structures, and environments. It is processual relations, interactions, and intensities that are the focus here, displacing the comparatively bounded organism of behavioural approaches. While such an approach demands specialist knowledge and expertise, a generative and inclusive praxis of habit cannot remain the exclusive purview of experts and elites. Rather, if “progressive” social transformation is the aim, then thinking, sensing, and experimenting through habit must become a participatory endeavour, engaged in by diverse collectives across multiple interconnected fronts of social, political, ethical, and environmental salience. From this perspective, the potential exists for critical engagement with habit to furnish more affirmative individual-collective practices, wherein “progress” is aligned not with dominant marketbased imperatives or the state-orchestrated disciplining of conduct, but rather with an immanent process of opening up shared experience to alternative manifestations and materialisations.

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Despite powerful critiques of “media effects” logic and longstanding critical analysis of the politics of representation, many of us who live in relative comfort in the Global North retain a persistent (if fraught) investment in the power of exceptional images to catalyse progressive social change. When we find ourselves moved by a particularly disturbing or revelatory image, we often assume that other people will be, too. We hope that the image (and what it reveals about wider sociopolitical conditions, inequalities, and forms of violence) will affectively ignite people, jolting them (and us) out of complacency and towards action that may ultimately engender greater social justice. In 2015, in the midst of the ongoing European refugee crisis, it was the heartbreaking photograph of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee whose small body washed up on the shores of Bodrum, Turkey, which awakened with powerful force such affective hopes and responses. Global media outlets had, for months, been covering the harrowing attempts of Syrians (among millions of other refugees internationally) to leave their country, as well as the horrific suffering faced by many of those who remained. Yet it was this shocking photograph, printed across the front pages of hundreds of newspapers worldwide on 1 September 2015 and shared exponentially on social media in the days and weeks that followed, that elicited an unprecedented transnational outpour of outrage, sadness, grief, and compassion, and incited widespread demands for political action and change.

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As Robert Fisk, the UK Independent’s Middle Eastern correspondent suggests, the force of public response to this particular image, taken by Nilüfer Demir for the Turkish Demirören News Agency, was not unrelated to the fact that Alan was “dressed like a little European boy, and white rather than brown-skinned.” Indeed, what was masked by the emotional torrent that Alan Kurdi’s image elicited was the fact that he was just one of tens of thousands “whose remains lie today on the sea bed of the Mediterranean, forever unrecorded and unfilmed” (Fisk 2016). Nonetheless, the photograph travelled far and wide, transforming and amplifying its affective impact as it became the subject of myriad tweets, comment pieces, memes, campaigns, and art interventions. Researchers at the University of Sheffield estimate that 53,000 tweets per hour were sent at the height of the image’s circulation and that it reached 20 million people transnationally over the course of twelve days (Ratnam 2016). In the months that followed, graffiti artists Oğuz Şen and Justus Becker created a giant mural of Kurdi on the bank of river Main in Frankfurt, Germany, intended “as both a memorial and a call to action” (Bowden 2016). Moreover, in a particularly high-profile and controversial piece, the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei recreated the photograph of Alan Kurdi by lying face-down on a beach on the Greek island of Lesbos as part of a series of projects designed to draw attention to the growing scale and human toll of the international refugee crises (Tan 2016). The photograph had, as Fisk notes, reached a status “beyond the ‘iconic’” (2016). Two days after the photograph of Kurdi’s body was published, Germany agreed to admit thousands of refugees previously stranded in Hungary, which encouraged political leaders in Central and Eastern Europe to establish a humanitarian corridor which stretched from northern Greece to southern Bavaria and leaders in Canada to commit to resettling 25,000 Syrians. Although the then-UK Prime Minister David Cameron agreed to accept only 4,000 refugees a year until 2020, this was a bigger step than his administration had previously taken (Kingsley 2016). In the longer term, the audience intelligence firm Pulsar claims, based on analysis of digital analytics, that the photograph’s global circulation may have contributed to a wide-scale public uptake of the term “refugee” (rather than “migrant”), thus signaling “a

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significant shift of perception around the humanitarian crisis and migration in general” (D’Orazio 2016). Yet by mid-2016 European leaders had abandoned their earlier humanitarian approach, as right-wing populisms rose across Europe and North America and perniciously reinforced the perceived “connection between migration and terrorism” (Kingsley 2016). A year after the release of Kurdi’s image, the number of refugees who had died at sea had increased by more than a fifth (D’Orazio 2016) and forecasts by the International Organization for Migration indicated that refugee fatalities would pass the landmark figure of 10,000 in 2016 (Townsend and McVeigh 2016). In this context, Fiske worries that little of significance has changed with respect to how we treat refugees internationally and that Alan Kurdi’s image “obscured a host of lessons which we ignored – and continue to disregard – at our peril” (2016). This example, and the hopes we pin on arresting or revelatory images more generally, are linked to wider investments in affect, emotion, and feeling as vehicles for progressive social change. As I discussed in chapter 1, in the context of the turn to affect, we have increasingly focused on how “being moved” might lead to meaningful self and social transformation. Whether via the shock of unwilled empathy, the burn of accumulated indignation, or the disorientation of undefined affective intensity, the promise of affect is that it will engender radical change at the subject or collective level. Such narratives of “affective revolution” are often inspiring and compelling. My concern, however, is that feelings are often fluid, fleeting, and hard to control. Indeed, this is one key way in which affect has been understood in critical scholarship: as linked to sensations which are temporary or ephemeral. And yet, when affective responses are sustained or repeated over time they may lose their radical edge, dissolving into desensitisation and disaffection. What is it, then, that enables meaningful cognitive, psychic, and embodied change which is catalysed (or signalled) by affect to take shape and endure rather than peak and collapse or quickly reassimilate into “business as usual’? In other words, how might we better understand the materialisation of affect in this context? As in previous chapters, I understand “affect” as an inherently relational term – it signifies emergent interactions of human and non- or

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more-than-human actors which produce different kinds of sensation and becoming. I have already suggested that paying closer attention to habit can enable a richer understanding of how, and under what conditions, affective transformation might be actualised. In bringing literatures and debates about affect and habit together, in this chapter I seek to complicate influential frameworks that would figure their logics, temporalities, and implications as unrelated or discrete. In doing so, I aim to develop arguments made in chapter 1, while extending earlier vital scholarship in affect and emotion studies.1 In her analysis of “affective practice,” for example, Margaret Wetherell explores how affect is inextricably linked with “the study of pattern” (2012, 16). Affective life, she argues, is not only or primarily about “extraordinary, spontaneous and one-off” activities; rather, it takes shape largely through processes of emotional regulation and the sedimentation of affective patterns. As such, thinking through affective practice “pushes more towards habit than the uncanny” (23). Nonetheless, from Wetherell’s perspective, the dynamics of affective patterns also offer potential – that is, the possibility for embodied relations and experience to be “otherwise” (4). Relatedly, Lisa Blackman examines how, through its role in affect modulation, habit assumes a paradoxical position: it plays a role in “regulation (in the form of discipline),” but also enables “the body’s potential for engaging the new, change and creativity” (2013, 186). In her genealogical analysis of some of the founding concepts and debates in social psychology, Blackman seeks to complicate associations of both habit and affect with unintentionality and (an overly mechanical view of ) automatism – highlighting how affect-habit interactions can produce “movement and stasis, being and becoming and process and fixity” (186).2 In this vein, I aim to illustrate that processes of affecting and being affected and of habituation and rehabituation interact with one another in complex ways and that this interaction is significant to the workings of social transformation. In order to flesh out these arguments, I explore the relations among affect, habit, visual images, and media technologies. My rationale is two-fold: first, visual culture plays a key role in the mediation of embodied habits of perception, feeling and conduct; and, second, images have long been central to how the logics and possibilities of social transformation are understood. In the first section, I review how John

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Dewey, William James, and Felix Ravaisson understand the links between habit, affect, and change. Considering the wider implications of these philosophies, in the second section I discuss how the power of shocking images to catalyse meaningful transformation has been understood as tempered by the phenomenon of affective habituation – or, as Susan Sontag (2003) puts it, by the tendency for shock to “wear off” through repetition. In the third section, I turn to digital media to consider how debates about visual culture and the promise of change have played out within ever-shifting virtual networks in which images are always connected to other images. While some scholars view digital image-based technologies as offering transformative opportunities for affecting and being affected that “cannot be reduced to cognitive saturation, distraction or disaffection” (Ash 2015, 121), others perceive the affective intensities of online visual culture as replacing political action with political feeling, repeatedly turning activity into passivity. In the fourth section, however, I employ Ravaisson’s ([1838] 2008) “double law of habit” to rethink this opposition of political feeling and political action, and the concomitant equation of repeated or sustained affect with desensitisation and passivity. I suggest that while our affective responses to images can produce a powerful spark that moves us (at least temporarily), affect can also work as a “binding technique” (Dean 2015) that protracts our relationship with an image (or visual environment), compelling us to inhabit the sensorial intensity of our encounter and its critical implications. My central argument in this chapter, then, is that understanding the role of visual images and media technologies in processes of social change requires a perspective which thinks affect and habit; feeling and action; passivity and activity together as imbricated within the nonlinear temporalities of (im)material life. Yet, as I suggest in the last section, this speculative endeavour also requires that we reapproach the meaning of social change. What analysis of the affective habits of visual digital culture underscores most suggestively is how meaningful forms of sociopolitical transformation may emerge not (or not only) through affective revolutions, but rather (or also) through the accumulation and reverberation of “minor” affective responses, interactions, gestures, and habits.

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AFFeCt, Feeling, And SoCiAl trAnSForMAtion Although not their specific focus, Dewey, James, and Ravaisson each have thought-provoking things to say about the relationships among affect, habit, and social change. As I outlined in chapter 1, for Dewey, the problem with modes of social reform that depend on the production of certain feelings is that they tend to extract thought from embodied action and the individual from their environment. Any effective approach to personal or social transformation, he suggests in Human Na­ ture and Conduct ([1922] 2012), needs to account for those (im)material mechanisms and processes that underlie everyday actions and tendencies. More generally, Dewey is wary of figuring feeling as a primary ingredient for collective change because of its ephemerality: “impulse burns itself up” ([1922] 2012, 101). In the absence of “intelligent” thought, emotion is inherently unstable: “it rises like the tide and subsides like the tide irrespective of what it has accomplished” (101). Ravaisson similarly addresses this tendency for affect to weaken over time in his elaboration of the “double law of habit” in which sensation, once repeated or sustained, dulls and loses force, whereas repeated or sustained action gains in strength and momentum. As he puts it in Of Habit: “The continuity or the repetition of passion weakens it; the continuity or repetition of action exalts and strengthens it. Prolonged or repeated sensation diminishes gradually and eventually fades away. Prolonged or repeated movement becomes gradually easier, quicker and more assured” ([1838] 2008, 49). From this perspective, approaches to social change which invest in the force of feeling are likely to falter if they fail to account for the tendency for sensation to become habituated over time. James’s analysis in The Principles of Psychology ([1890] 2004) resonates with and extends this framework. The repetition of feelings that routinely fail to be translated into action, he suggests, frequently leads to affective inertia: “The weeping of a Russian lady over the fictitious personages of the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale” (63). Although I later complicate the divide between “feeling” and “action” which these thinkers appear to mobilise, their observations highlight the limits of

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models of progressive social change premised exclusively on affective rupture or revolution. While affect may act as a trigger that drives forward embodied and material change or signals when existing habits have become disrupted, it cannot participate in enduring processes of transformation without some degree of habituation or automation. Yet when particular affective responses become routine, they can lose their force and may actually prevent meaningful action and change. What is required, therefore, are modes of speculative intervention that address the complex interaction of affect and habit within ongoing transformative processes. In this vein, it is important to note that, although Dewey is sceptical of the capacity of affect alone to produce durable change, his argument is not that the “emotional, passionate phase of action can or should be eliminated in behalf of bloodless reason.” Indeed, for him, “more ‘passions,’ not fewer, is the answer,” yet the force of feeling must be channelled through intelligently cultivated habits and vice versa ([1922] 2012, 78). Relatedly, for Ravaisson ([1838] 2008), affective attunement and responsivity are crucial to the capacity of organisms to form and reform habits and thus to the possibility of material transformation. To be capable of habituation, he suggests that an organism must be receptive to external stimuli but not so receptive that it becomes completely engulfed by that stimuli; as such, receptivity must be paired with a strong degree of resistance. Keeping these philosophical discussions in mind, in the next sections I consider how social and cultural theorists have understood the ways in which visual images and representations might move us towards change (or not), and the embodied and ethical implications of related processes. iMAgeS And tHe PoWer oF being MoVed Susan Sontag memorably opens Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), her poignant mediation on human suffering and the meanings and uses of images, with a discussion of Virginia Woolf’s reaction to the horrific images emerging from the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. Released by the Spanish government twice a week, these were the first photographs of the war’s civilian victims to be published in international

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newspapers, and therefore were wholly shocking to many. Woolf offers a disturbing description of their content in Three Guineas: “This morning’s collection contains the photograph of what might be a man’s body, or a woman’s; it is so mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig. But those certainly are dead children, and that undoubtedly is the section of a house. A bomb has torn open the side; there is still a bird-cage hanging in what was presumably the sitting room” (Woolf 1938 cited in Sontag 2003, 6). From Woolf’s perspective, as Sontag paraphrases, “the shock of such pictures cannot fail to unite people of good will” (2003, 6). The images were so arresting, so appalling, that, having seen them, Woolf implored, British people and particularly the “educated classes” could surely no longer remain passive or complicit. For Woolf, Sontag suggests, “not to be pained by these pictures, not to recoil from them, not to strive to abolish what causes this havoc, this carnage . . . would be the reactions of a moral monster” (6). In Sontag’s view, then, Woolf’s mediations offer a vivid illustration of the hopes we pin on the power of shocking images to move us towards progressive social and political change. We could draw parallels between these photographs and other harrowing representations: alarming images of the human carnage of the Vietnam War, the starvation of Ethiopian children, the torture and humiliation of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the human and environmental devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and the relentless bombing of Aleppo, Syria. While emerging from very different geo-political contexts and circumstances, various commentators and publics have invested images from each of these examples with the power to radically affect, to wrench us away from the status quo and propel us towards sociopolitical transformation. Indeed, by “making ‘real’ (or ‘more real’) matters that the privileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore” (Sontag 2003, 6), such images, it has often been thought, could not help but move people towards a recognition of the suffering of others (and their own potential complicity in it), and hence towards organising for change.3 Of course, all of such images did (and do) affect people in important ways. However, as the history of critical engagement with the politics and possibilities of representation illustrates, the reality of what images do is more complicated and less predictable than our enduring investment in their power alone conveys.

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Much has been written about the complexity of our affective responses to visual representations. Photographs of violence or injustice, scholars suggest, can produce a wide array of reactions among different viewers in different contexts, from empathy and compassion, to horror and fear, to indifference and irritation, and even to perverse pleasure or enjoyment.4 Furthermore, even if particular images of suffering do elicit empathetic or compassionate responses, there is no guarantee that the implications of such affective reactions will be progressive. As Lauren Berlant argues, “compassion carries the weight of ongoing debates about the ethics of privilege” (original italics, 2004, 1). And as I note in Affective Relations, decisions on the part of privileged subjects concerning whether or not to extend compassion or empathy to less privileged “others” frequently shore up (rather than disrupt) existing social and geo-political boundaries and hierarchies (Pedwell 2014a). The question of who constitutes “the ‘we’ to whom such shock-pictures are aimed’” thus remains crucial (Sontag 2003, 6). Scholars have also paid careful attention to the political uses and misuses of images, and specifically to how images are selected, framed, and combined with other materials by various governmental, media, corporate, and other political actors to modulate affect in particular ways, with a range of ideological and ethical consequences.5 As much of such work illustrates, affecting images preserve the status quo just as often as they ignite affirmative change. My specific concerns here, however, are somewhat different: even if we accept, for a moment, that particular affective reactions to visual representations may be conducive to catalysing “progressive” responses to injustice, how it is that we understand the workings of such material and sociopolitical processes? How do images move us (or not), and how does this resultant sensation drive forward wider personal or social transformation? In other words, how can we understand the relations among images, affect, habit, and change? As such, my primary concern in this chapter is less to do with “the politics of representation” (though analysis of such dynamics remains vital) and more to do with the role of images in (im)material processes of affective, perceptual, and behavioural habituation and rehabituation. As Woolf’s discussion in Three Guineas suggests, our investment in the capacity of images to ignite meaningful change is linked to ex-

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pectations of what will happen when realities of suffering are made “real” to people, when we become aware in visceral clarity of horrifying or tragic situations of which we may have previously been ignorant. In Regarding the Pain of Others, however, Sontag was concerned that the relentless onslaught of mediated images of death and disaster had produced a confusing blur of representation and reality: “The problem is not that people remember through photographs,” she famously argued, “but that they remember only through photographs” (2003, 78). In this context, “a catastrophe that is experienced will often seem eerily like its representation” (19). Rather than forcing more privileged groups to confront the reality of others’ pain, omnipresent images of suffering may function to further distance people from “the real” and “the material” – to make us feel as if representation or simulation are all there is. Furthermore, in a culture of consumption which employs shock as “a leading stimulus” and “source of value,” Sontag suggests that we risk becoming habituated to the stream of ever more dramatic or disturbing photos (20).6 From this perspective, instead of producing a “shock to thought” (Massumi 2002b) that propels us into critical inquiry or action, ubiquitous images of suffering may simply elicit “the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen” (Sontag 2003, 11). While not all images inevitably lose their ability to shock, enrage, or elicit compassion, for Sontag the point is that such affective responses, on their own, do not equal substantive change. Echoing the philosophers of habit discussed earlier, as well as more recent analysis of “compassion fatigue” (Moeller 1998), Sontag describes compassion as an “unstable emotion” that “needs to be translated into action” if it is not to “wither” (90). Similar to Ravaisson’s double law of habit ([1838] 2008), her comments imply a theory of habituation in which affective responses tend to lose their force through repetition, whereas repeated actions continuously gain in power and efficacy. While images of pain may continue to produce compassion, Sontag argues that repeated compassionate responses can become no more than an affective script, an emotional shorthand that modulates our feelings in familiar ways but does little to change our everyday habits of social interaction and political engagement.7 Moreover, like James’s ([1890] 2004) discussion of the frequent gap between ethical feelings and ethical actions,

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Sontag suggests that ultimately it is action that matters, as without meaningful action, feeling flounders. Indeed, while Woolf professed to believe that “if the horror could be made vivid enough most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war” (Sontag 2003, 12), it was only one year after the publication of Three Guineas that Britain itself went to war against Germany. Although images of war’s horrific human toll do move us, and the affect they ignite can be potent, none of this was enough, Sontag suggests, to disable the industrial war machine or to uproot the automated habits of violence and destruction central to world systems in the twentieth century and beyond. Sontag’s work has been highly influential in both cultural theory and popular culture and is indicative of a prominent strand of scholarship on images, sensation, and habit that persists today, despite notable transformations in media cultures and technologies. Yet Sontag seems to frame habituation solely in the negative: habit is what dulls affect’s force and makes it ineffectual, rather than what might make action more graceful and precise or what might enable change to become rooted enough to endure. As such, we might say that Regard­ ing the Pain of Others tells only half of habit’s story – an elision with significant implications for how we understand the links between images and social change. Writing at the beginning of the new millennium, Sontag was also not yet in a position to confront what the rise of social media would mean for the affective workings of images, specifically their networked nature and their rapid circulation and reconfiguration online. Consequently, her analysis cannot fully confront the ways in which visual digital media become folded into our embodied habits and modes of perception – or how, as Wendy Hui Kyong Chung puts it, “through habits users become their machines” (2016, 1). I address these issues and complexities in the following sections through attending to more recent scholarship on digital media, visual culture, and affect. AFFeCtiVe MediAtion And netWorKed AFFeCt If, in the late 1930s, Woolf was confronted with harrowing photographs from the Spanish Civil War in her morning newspaper a few times a week and found herself in the frustrating position of spectator,

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we now conduct our lives in and through an endless stream of mediated images and have the ability to produce, remediate, and distribute them through a host of digital technologies and applications. From the perspective of some scholars, such techno-cultural developments have enabled new and distinctive forms of affective mediation with potentially significant material and sociopolitical implications. In their introduction to the collection Networked Affect, for example, Ken Hillis, Susanna Paasonen, and Michael Petit argue that online affect “can be a mediating and mobilizing force that has the capacity to stir social action,” thus constituting “a potential channel for political agency” (2015a, 3). Similarly, Carrie Rentschler and Samantha Thrift explore, in their introduction to a special issue of Feminist Theory on digital culture and politics, how feminists “strategically deploy social media tactics as powerful tools of community building and political mobilisation” (2015a, 240). Though the use of visual memes, they argue, activists employ humour and other forms of sensorial resonance “to move feminism, not only technologically . . . but also emotionally and affectively” (240). Central to such claims is not only the observation that digital technologies connect people across social and geographical boundaries in ways that can enhance political consciousness-raising and organising, but also that the technological capacities of digital visual media may have the power to move us in novel and salient ways.8 The promise of such technological affordances is brought to life by James Ash in his contribution to Networked Affect, where he offers a cogent analysis of the affective workings of graphic interchange format (GIF ) files. A GIF can generate “novel forms of affect,” he argues, not only due to its visual or discursive content, but also because its particularities as a file type enable it to “frame and organize the types of sensation transmitted within it” (2015, 120). While Sontag was concerned that our ubiquitous exposure to disturbing images could desensitise us to their affective power (as well as their wider meanings and implications), Ash insists that GIF s do not necessarily produce “a mindless form of disaffection.” Indeed, it is precisely because of their repetitive and automated qualities that GIF s can “amplify the potential for affect” (121): “In the same way that repeatedly speaking a word causes it to sound strange and foreign, because it is uttered outside the context of familiar use, constantly looping GIF images alter the images into new rhythms of sensation. The reorganization of

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movement and color, and the introduction of repetition, give the GIF a different capacity to affect compared to its source material” (129). Ash thus understands our relationship with GIF s as primarily affective in nature; images modulated in this format can move us in viscerally embodied ways: their “constant looping” motion can, for instance, induce responses of “grip” and “grab,” causing viewers to contract their muscles as they “try to examine, grasp and visually immobilize the organized sensation of the constantly repeating image” (130). Expanding on Ash’s analysis, we might be tempted to invest GIF s with an intensified power to affect – to reach into bodies and move us (literally) at a material level that is effective because, following Dewey ([1922] 2012), it is working largely below active consciousness at the vital level of embodied sensation, reflex, and habit. Importantly, however, for Ash, Hillis et al., and others working in the Deleuzian tradition, affect cannot be understood as a human experience alone; rather, it is produced in and through hybrid networks within which sensation travels “via human, technical and non-human means” (Ash 2015, 131).9 In figuring our affective interaction with digital images as produced through assemblages in which multiple “actors are in a state of constant interaction, learning and becoming” (Hillis et al. 2015a, 10), these analyses resonate with recent critical work on “media ecologies” (Fuller 2005; Durham Peters 2015), “media ethologies” (Parrika 2015), and “media habitus” (Papacharissi and Easton 2013). Central to this emerging body of analysis are two imperatives: first, to address current media landscapes and their implications through a focus on complex networks or assemblages (rather than figuring particular media forms or technologies in isolation), and, second, to understand mediation as a process that is neither bounded or linear, but rather ontological and relational, with ongoing embodied and material implications.10 Writing nearly a century earlier, Dewey’s work resounds with these approaches in his guiding principle that gestures, affects, and habits are always produced through the constitutive transactions of organisms and environments.11 For our current purposes, what emerges clearly from these various perspectives, as Rebecca Coleman (2009, 2013) illustrates incisively, is that bodies and images are not separate; rather, bodies “become” (are constituted, materialised, and shaped) through images (a relational and ongoing process of mediation), and images are always connected to other images.

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In approaching networked affect, then, we are never addressing the potential effects of one image, one GIF , or one video in isolation, but rather, the affective relations among multiple, changing digital files and configurations. Rentschler and Thrift (2015b) reflect on the implications of such dynamics in their analysis of feminist memes.12 Focusing on the evolving network of satiric responses that erupted online following US Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” gaffe in 2012,13 they suggest that the affective power and political efficacy of visual memes is enabled by the linked dynamics of amplification and participation. Memes are, by their very nature, propagative: it is in making some small, yet notable, modification to a previous visual contribution that each new contribution keeps the meme alive and simultaneously engenders salient humour. In the minutes and hours following Romney’s comments, parodic responses in the form of a Tumblr, a Facebook page, and mock Amazon reviews for three-ring binders emerged online. Image macros bearing photos of Romney with witty captions such as “Binder? I just met her!” circulated rapidly across these sites, alongside a host of other contributions, from a picture of Patrick Swayze with the caption, “No one puts baby in a binder,” to an image of Beyoncé captioned with the phase, “Better put three rings on it” (Rentshler and Thrift 2015b). Such digital resonances and reverberations among images, digital platforms, and users, Rentschler and Thrift argue, work to amplify affect – in this case laughter that highlights the inadequacy of Republican responses to gender inequality in income and political governance.14 Furthermore, as I discuss later on, the creative and participatory elements of memes move a range of digital subjects beyond the spectator position by engaging them in the political arts of “crafting” and “making.” Enabled, in part, by the technological capacities of networked media, the dynamics of political memes could thus be seen (similar to Ash’s analysis of GIF s) to work against the passive affective habituation which Sontag describes as negating meaningful transformation. Despite their focus on the links between images, affect, and social change, what such vital contributions do not really address, however, are the (im)material logics and mechanisms by which the “intense,” “novel,” or “amplified” forms of networked affect might be translated (or not) into more enduring capacities or forms of social transformation. In other words, what does being repeatedly stimulated, moved,

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or affected via images, GIF s, or memes accomplish, and why does it matter? What kinds of wider embodied and sociopolitical changes might such everyday forms of affective mediation engender? More specifically, while Rentshler and Thrift argue that the propagative and participatory nature of memes increases their affective purchase, can this amplification lead to the development of new collective routines or tendencies – or do online flames rise high only to quickly fizzle out (Paasonen 2015), leaving little meaningful material or political trace? These questions seem important given the earlier warnings of philosophers such as Ravaisson, James, and Dewey that enduring forms of personal or collective change are not likely to emerge through the charge of affect alone; indeed, unless the complex and deep-seated habits underlying embodied and sociopolitical patterns and tendencies are identified – and affirmatively refigured – transformation is likely to be both superficial and fleeting. Particular technological and social aspects of contemporary digital culture may well mitigate against cognitive disaffection, or the “wearing off” of shock in relation to images that Sontag discusses. At the same time, a critical concern remains: what new habits are engendered through our everyday engagement with the visual affectivities of social media, and how might such processes relate to the desire for “progressive” social change in which many on the political left remain invested? In this vein, it is significant that, instead of connecting the novelty or intensity of digital affect to the promise of progressive social transformation, other contributions to Networked Affect associate it with experiences of entrapment and the reproduction of the neoliberal status quo. For Susanna Paasonen, our habitual social media use is driven primarily by a search for affective intensity. This promise of intensity is rarely delivered and thus “the search for thrills, shocks and jolts continues despite, or perhaps because of, the boredom involved in browsing from one page to another” (2015, 30). Like Paasonen, Jodi Dean understands digital affect as “a binding technique”; it fuels our compulsive attachment to social media platforms like “Facebook, Memegenerator, Tumblr, [and] Twitter” (2015, 90). Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic notions of “drive,” she contends that this repetitive process of seeking affective satisfaction online and “not reaching it” produces a certain kind of pleasure: “the subject enjoys through

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repetition” (2015, 90). Yet, crucially, it is this enjoyment – “every tweet or comment, every forwarded image or petition” – that entraps us within the affective logics of neoliberalism (90). In Dean’s view, it is precisely when we think that we are pursuing progressive social change through our digital affective labour that we provide the fuel that drives communicative capitalism. While our ongoing search for affective sparks keeps us habitually glued to various digital platforms and threads, it does not, these scholars argue, engender robust habits of political engagement, solidarity, and action. As Dean contends, our affective attachments to digital media do not produce actual political communities, but rather only “feelings of community” (91). Through our repetitive affective engagement online, we are ultimately “captured in our passivity, or more precisely, by the reversion of our active engagements and interventions into passive forms of ‘being made aware’ or ‘having been stated’” (99). Channelling Ravaisson’s double law of habit, Dean makes a clear distinction between repeated feeling and repeated action – belying our compulsive desire to seek yet another affective spark, she contends, our digital interactions routinely “turn our activity into passivity” (90). Thus, while those invested in empathy’s political promise argue that its affective charge can induce psychic or embodied transformation with the potential to spur action in the interest of social justice, Dean contends that the sensorial rhythms of contemporary digital communication in fact perpetually defer action, keeping us trapped within the affective feedback loops of global capitalism. And for Dean, like Sontag, it is ultimately action, not feeling, that matters to projects of social justice. AFFeCtiVe inHAbitAtion: tHe ACtiVitY oF SenSing Are political feeling and political action as opposed as these scholars suggest? Does habitual affect always deaden radical political force? In order to deepen our understanding of the links among visual images, media technologies, and social change, I argue that we need to think more carefully about the relations between affect and habit, and the attendant states of passivity and activity. To do so, it is pertinent to explore the logics of the “double law of habit” in greater detail.

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While Ravaisson’s analysis, as I have described it so far, appears to provide strong theoretical underpinning for the equation of repeated sensation with increased passivity, interactions of habit and affect are more complicated. As Clare Carlisle notes, the Anglican bishop Joseph Butler, writing before Ravaisson in his 1736 text The Analogy of Religion, had already noted that “repetition has contrasting effects on actions and movements on the one hand, and sensations and feeling on the other” (Carlisle 2014, 27). Butler argues, however, that in particular circumstances, feeling or sensing can be “turned into an activity” which can “engender a heightening of experience rather than a diminution of feeling” (2014, 82). From this perspective, feeling and action are not as distinct or oppositional as they may first appear, but instead are intimately intertwined. Ravaisson’s Of Habit illustrates this point through a comparison between the “drunkard” and the “connoisseur”: while the drunkard “tastes his wine less and less as he continues to drink,” the “connoisseur develops a refined palate that makes him increasingly discerning” (Carlisle 2014, 81) – his taste “becomes more and more delicate and subtle” (Ravaisson [1838] 2008, 49). That is, through attentiveness, the connoisseur transforms the effects of affective repetition so that they intensify, rather than diminish, the sensorial experience. Significantly, this kind of example does not invalidate the double law of habit; instead, it indicates that sensing has been made into an activity, “so that the law of active habit has greater effect than the law of passive habituation” (Carlisle 2014, 81). In complicating the presumed link between feeling and inaction, Butler’s and Ravaisson’s interventions resonate with Spinoza and Deleuze’s continental philosophy, as for them affect indicates constant movement, flow, and transformation in a universe where nothing ever truly repeats. These philosophical mediations on affect and habituation raise wider critical questions about how we currently understand sociopolitical activity, progress, and change; what we think counts as transformative “political action”; and how, and why, we routinely interpret passivity as that which simply reifies the status quo. If, as digital culture scholars argue, affect functions not only as a jolt or spark that might move us (at least temporarily), but also a “binding technique” (Dean 2015) that keeps us attached or “stuck” to a particular image,

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meme, or digital platform, how, I want to ask, might we consider some of the more productive implications of such affective attachment? More specifically, when might the stickiness of visual images or digital environments generate not (only) neoliberal entrapment, but (also) more affirmative forms of political “staying with”? And how, in turn, might such immersive affective experiences engender forms of attentiveness, care, and connection that transform sensing into an activity with a range of political and ethical implications? What happens when we reread affective entrapment as affective inhabitation? Jill Bennet suggestively engages such questions in Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art (2006). She explores the capacity of our affective engagement with “nonrepresentational” art to transform habitual modes of perception in ways that may be conducive to critical ethics and politics. Crucially, Bennett stresses, drawing on the work of Deleuze and of Brian Massumi, that there is an important difference between images that are simply shocking and those which produce a “shock to thought.” Beyond the “the activation of an affective trigger,” genuinely transformative engagement with visual art requires the development of an “affective connection” (2006, 5) that sustains sensation to enable different forms of affective inhabitation. In other words, while affect can provide a jolt that thrusts us involuntarily into critical inquiry, it can also work as a binding technique that protracts our relationship with an image even after we physically turn away, compelling us to inhabit – to notice, attend to, and reflect on – the sensorial intensity of our encounter and its critical implications. When this happens, I suggest, sensing can be turned into an activity that engages the possibility of transformation at the level of habit, calling our attention to, as Tony Bennett puts it, the emergence of “gaps, intervals and blips” in patterned perception which may “afford the opportunity for new forms of practice to be improvised” (2013, 126, 125). Indeed, if perception is continually mediated by “affective scripts” that have become habitual (Sontag 2003; Gibbs 2007), the very fact that such scripts are reproduced through the force of habit means that they are open to modification. It is when we are made consciously aware of such patterns of seeing, through a sense that they have been disrupted, that we become attuned to the surfacing of “actionable spaces” (T. Bennett 2013, 2015) for material transformation: for the

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remaking of dominant habits of perception, thought, and conduct. Conditions of viewing, however, are vital to such processes. As Jill Bennett argues, the repeated reincorporation of affect back into dominant scripts (through, for example, compassion fatigue) is a result of “viewing disturbing images under conditions that precisely don’t compel one’s continued involvement” (2006, 64). Under what social and environmental circumstances sensing prompted by images might become an activity that enables intervention in everyday conduct to remake existing habits of seeing, thinking, feeling, and acting, then, remains an important question. Yet what is clear from the above analysis is that transformation that makes a difference requires the ongoing interaction of “the affective” and “the habitual” – a relational dynamic central to processes of affective inhabitation. Thinking further about how our engagement with visual images might imbricate affect and habit in transformative ways, I return to digital media and culture. Recall that in Rentschler and Thrift’s (2015b) analysis of feminist online activism, the political efficacy of memes depends on both affective amplification and creative participation. In other words, in political practices of meme-making, feeling and action (or affect and habit) are never separate, but rather always materially bound up together. Memes like “binders full of women” propagate, in large part, because of the affective jolts and sensations they engender (i.e., a burst of politically salient laughter, the powerful sense of inhabiting an ad-hoc feminist community). At the same time, the very fact that memes require imaginative remixing and repurposing in order to be memes points to the active digital practice which they entail. Importantly, as Rentschler and Thrift underscore, such collective and relational forms of crafting (which frequently blur the divide between online and offline activity) constitute vital feminist techné – the embodied skills, techniques, and habits of “doing feminism” online (2015a). As such, meme-making is not only about creating “feelings of community” (as Dean has it), but also about cultivating an “embodied relationship to technology, a learned and socially habituated way of doing things with machines, tools, interfaces, instruments, and media” (2015a, 242). Thus, rather that constituting a passive form of digital entrapment, memes offer a powerful “medium of action,” a practice “that

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transforms the very material of culture” (2015b, 341) – and, I would add, the very material of bodies. Crucially, contemplating the interactions of affect and habit through the visual intensities of digital culture also enables us to re-approach the meaning and logics of social change itself. I began this chapter by noting the investment many continue to sustain in the power of visual images to act as turning points for processes of collective and structural transformation. Yet, instead of focusing on major turning points, pivotal political events, or revolutionary upheaval, Rentschler and Thrift’s analysis of digital memes calls attention to the significance of linked moments of affecting and being affected, and of making and remaking, that resound across time. From this perspective, social change is figured not as a dramatic endpoint on the horizon but rather as alive in the present in “the ‘reverberation’ or ‘resonance’ of feminist energy . . . from one event form to another, even when temporally or geographically removed” (2015a, 243). In line with my discussion so far, this is a vision of sociopolitical transformation, then, that eschews teleological narratives of historical progress to approach change as imminent and ongoing, continually pulsating through emergent affective relations and networks. In this ontology of change, the accumulation and reverberation of minor interactions, gestures, and habits may be as significant as “revolutionary” events (if not more so). Importantly, however, as Dewey ([1922] 2012) and other philosophers of habit argue, the course of “progressive” transformation cannot be plotted deterministically in advance. It may only be possible to discern in retrospect which collective actions or interactions made a difference in a given context; what peaked and fizzled and what took shape and endured. Thus, in considering the relationship between visual images and social transformation, we must ask not only how change works at an (im)material level but also what counts as change. In order to better appreciate what might be unexpectedly politically significant and transformative across time, Rentschler and Thrift shift ontoepistemological keys from the major to the minor. This is, as I have suggested, significant. As Erin Manning argues, when we maintain an “unwavering belief in the major as the site where events occur,” we

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not only reify a normative understanding of what counts as change, but also blunt our ability to sense the “minoritarian tendencies” that underlie and pulse through “the major” (2016, 1). Yet it is precisely such “minor gestures” that offer the potential for new capacities and forms of habituation “in germ” to be activated, for the “altering of what that tendency can do” (x). In turn, it is through inhabiting our ongoing sensorial experience in the present that we can hone our attunement to alternative possibilities for perception and conduct in the making – for the potential for existing habits and tendencies to be remade. ConClUSionS Through an analysis of visual images and media technologies, in this chapter I have sought to expand my argument in chapter 1 that theorising affect and habit as imbricated may enable us to better appreciate the contemporary dynamics and possibilities of sociopolitical change. While affective habituation is widely associated with the deadening process of compassion fatigue, our continual becoming through images does not, I have suggested, inevitably lead to desensitisation or disaffection. Rather, when we are compelled to inhabit our sensorial responses to visual culture, we may become better attuned to the workings and potential of everyday habits of seeing, feeling, thinking, and interacting. Thus, while affect’s role as a “binding technique” may entrap us within the compulsive circuits of communicative capitalism, it might also alert us to the malleability of our habitual ways of being in the world. As my discussion of digital media in particular has illustrated, however, our encounters with images do not act as singular turning points in the production of radical change. Rather, in a context in which images are always connected to other images (as well as bodies, atmospheres, infrastructures, and environments), more enduring forms of sociopolitical transformation may emerge less through affective revolutions than through the accumulation, reverberation, and reshaping of minor affective responses, interactions, gestures, and habits. Returning to the discussion of the haunting photograph of Alan Kurdi with which I opened this chapter, it is impossible to say with any certainty what material impact it had or may continue to have over

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time. The fact that it was this image (and not one of the thousands of other photographs of darker-skinned, less “European-looking” refugee children internationally) that elicited such a powerful public response may be interpreted as evidence of deeply rooted habits of racism and ethnocentrism being relentlessly reproduced. Moreover, the watering down or retraction of the humanitarian policies towards refugees that the photograph initially prompted might be taken as proof that affective desensitisation is inevitable and neoliberal and neocolonial habits of governance are unstoppable. And yet, the complex travels and transformations of the photograph – through print, television, social media, art, and activism – generated opportunities for affecting and being affected, habituation and rehabituation, and reflection and reverberation that exceeded the contours of its initial reception in unpredictable ways. Having seen the mural of Kurdi in Frankfurt, for example, some asked why it had been painted in Germany and not Syria – a question that prompted wider critical discussions regarding the transnational contours and causes of the European refugee crises, as well as the ethical obligations it entails (Bill 2016). When the mural was vandalized by suspected far-right nationalists a few months later (who scrawled “borders save lives” across it), conversations again erupted across a range of platforms regarding the racialised politics of international border controls. Local citizens subsequently initiated a fundraising campaign to enable the artists to restore the painting, insisting, as Şen puts it, that “No human being is illegal” (Bill 2016). Furthermore, shortly after Kurdi’s photograph was released, Buzz­ feed posted a listicle of “17 Heartbreaking Cartoons from Artists All over the World Mourning the Drowned Syrian Boy” (Broderick 2015). In response, some denounced the “memefication” of the image and queried the ethics of sharing this kind of photograph online. The Australian journalist Chad Parkhill argued, for instance, that such “derivative” images inevitably sap affective “power from the original,” abstracting from its singular capacity to reveal a “human being whose short life was ended by a catastrophic chain of human failures” (2015). Yet, for others, it is possible that the image’s creative repurposing is precisely what sustained and heightened its affective purchase. Importantly, both critical and sympathetic responses to its digital propagation signalled forms of affective connection – acts of “staying with”

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the image and the sensation it engendered. What might emerge as significant about such linked moments across time and space, and the resonance of political energy pulsing through them, remains to be known. What seems clear, however, is that the shock of Alan Kurdi’s image functioned not simply as an “affective trigger,” but also as a “hook” into “more extended form[s] of engagement” (Bennett 2006, 65). It is through the such processes of affective inhabitation, I have suggested, that our mediated habits might be remediated.

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In his essay “Walking While Black” (2016), Garnette Cadogan recalls how his love for walking began in the 1980s as a child in Jamaica: “No thanks to a stepfather with heavy hands, I found every reason to stay away from home . . . So I walked.” Although traversing the streets of Kingston at night could be “terrifying,” he devised various modes of sensibility to avoid danger: “I’d know how to navigate away from a predatory pace, and to speed up to chat when the cadence of a gait announced friendliness.” Over time, this habit of walking after dark became second nature, “so regular and familiar that the way home became home” (2016). All of this changed, however, when Cadogan left Jamaica for the United States in 1996 to attend college in New Orleans. While Kingston’s “streets had their own safety,” what shocked him was that, in America, “I was the one who would be considered a threat.” Having grown up in a “majority-black country in which no one was wary of me because of my skin colour,” Cadogan was particularly unprepared for the police: “They regularly stopped and bullied me, asking questions that took my guilt for granted”: “‘Why are you running?’ ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Where are you coming from?’” In this new and confusing environment, different “rules of engagement” were required: “No running, especially at night; no sudden movements; no hoodies; no objects – especially shiny ones – in hand; no waiting for friends on street corners, lest I be mistaken for a drug dealer; no standing near a

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corner on the cell phone (same reason).” As Cadogan’s friend put it, much of his walking became “a pantomime undertaken to avoid the choreography of criminality” (2016). Cadogan’s “tactics of survival” are, of course, devastatingly familiar to Black people and people of colour in the United States and other settler colonies marked by the founding tenets of white supremacy. To be “visibly identifiable as Black” in any American jurisdiction today is “to be subject to an extensive code of regulated appearance” (Mirzoeff 2017, 23). It is also, as Claudia Rankine wrote in the New York Times following the murder of nine African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white supremacist in 2015,1 to be subject to “the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black”: “no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black” (Rankine 2015). These everyday prohibitions on Black movement, gesture, habit, rhythm, routine – on Black life – alongside the immanent possibility of and proximity to death, constitute “the quotidian operations of antiblackness” in the United States and beyond (Rankine 2015). Of course, such modes of regulation manifest themselves differently on different bodies. As Barnor Hesse and Juliet Hooker note, “for black transgender persons, for instance, the violence of the state acts on their bodies in ostensibly non-public spaces via bathroom laws or the myriad quotidian dangers of living as a non-cisgender person” (2017, 454). More generally, however, if to be Black is to be subject to constant suspicion and surveillance, “to be white is simply to be allowed to act” (Mirzoeff 2017, 24, 23). As a woman, I am, of course, fully habituated to the embodied vigilance required in everyday environments marked by the threat of gendered harassment and violence. But as a white cis woman, my whiteness and cisness protect me from being figured as a threat by the carceral state or indeed as a target for racist, xenophobic, and transphobic abuse. The racialised microaggressions which my friends and colleagues of colour routinely experience across a range of professional and social sites and encounters do not directly shape or limit my day-to-day existence or the wider sense

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of freedom and possibility which my relative social privilege affords me. It is the nature and implications of this profound unevenness in habitual life that both interests and troubles me in this chapter. While Black people and people of colour are disproportionally subject to surveillance via traffic stops and stop-and-frisk policies, biometric and algorithmic technologies now offer law enforcement new modes of surveillance and control. A 2016 report by the Centre on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law notes that, across the United States, state and local police departments are developing facial recognition systems “more advanced than the FBI ’s,” including real-time face recognition which enables continuous scanning of “the faces of pedestrians walking by a street surveillance camera” (Garvie, Bedoya, and Frankle 2016). As Ali Breland discusses in the Guardian, this increasing use of facial recognition software has been “mired in controversy” not least because of its racialised effects: in short, “if you’re black, you’re more likely to be subjected to this technology and the technology is more likely to be wrong” (Cummings 2017 cited in Breland 2017). For one thing, disproportionately high arrest rates mean that “systems that rely on mug shot databases likely include a disproportionate number of African Americans” (Garvie, Bedoya, and Frankle 2016). Facial recognition software also, however, has problems recognising Black faces because, as Joy Buolamwini of MIT Media Lab notes, the algorithms it draws on “are usually written by white engineers” who “build on pre-existing code libraries, typically written by other white engineers” (Breland 2017).2 Although some law enforcement officials claim that algorithmic technologies “[do] not see race” (Garvie, Bedoya, and Frankle 2016), it is clear that human habits, values, and choices play into these automated decision-making systems in ways that “reinforce oppressive social relationships and enact new modes of racial profiling” (Noble 2018, 1).3 Facial recognition technologies, however, are not only used by law enforcement; they are increasingly employed in retail spaces “to analyze shopper behaviour, sell targeted space to advertisers, or for security reasons like identifying shoplifters” (Rieger 2018). They have also long been employed by platforms like Google and Facebook to identify faces in photographs. It thus becomes clear how such algorithmic architectures add a new and disturbing dimension to the

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everyday survival strategies that Cadogan and Rankine describe, and mobilise forms of digital surveillance that work beyond the sensible at the nexus of white supremacy and neoliberalism4 – or what Cedric Robinson (1983) calls “racial capitalism.”5 In its intermeshing with digital technologies, racial capitalism may work above, below, or through the subject, but tends to shore up familiar social and geopolitical hierarchies, inequalities, and exclusions. Two key points relevant to my concerns in this book regarding the relationships among habit, power, and transformation can be drawn from the above discussion. First, as I have explored in the previous chapters, habit is not a neutral concept or mechanism. Contexts marked by racism, imperialism, (hetero)sexism, cissexism, classism, and ableism offer starkly uneven opportunities for the development of embodied capacities, alongside pernicious modes of governing subjects and populations via movement, gesture, and habit.6 Indeed, underlying more recent policing tactics in the United States is a long history of monitoring and disciplining the movements of Black people and people of colour linked to slavery and Jim Crow-era segregation and, for some, the “wrong” movement or gesture at the wrong time was (and is) a matter of life or death.7 In the context of a “racially governing regime historically founded on the constitutive exclusion and violation of blackness” (Hesse and Hooker 2017, 448), embodied habits are always already marked by the spectre of slavery, colonialism, and anti-Black racism. Control of the movement of Black people and people of colour, whether across national borders or in everyday journeys and interactions, remains central to the perpetuation of white supremacy. Second, digital and computational technologies are enabling increasingly refined and pernicious ways to track, discipline, and shape embodied practice. In our current age of media analytics, an evergrowing swath of “our cultural experiences, social interactions, and decision-making are governed by large-scale software systems” that operate via algorithms (Manovich 2013).8 These dynamics work by extracting ongoing data about preferences, routines, and habits and then feeding this information back into the production of new choices and tendencies with respect to movement, consumption, and knowledge production (Pedwell 2019, 2021). Changing police surveillance systems

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provide one key example of how problematic materialisations of race are folded into algorithmic architectures; however, the racialised implications of such technologies are much wider. As Safyia Umoja Noble argues in Algorithms of Oppression, algorithms created and employed by global platforms such as Google are “serving up deleterious information about people, creating and normalizing structural and systematic isolation, or practicing digital redlining” – all of which reproduce racism, sexism, and classism while extracting maximum financial value (2018, 10). In her view, “algorithmic oppression is not just a glitch in the system but, rather, is fundamental to the operating system of the web” (10). It is thus clear that networked technologies offer new tools and infrastructures for the perpetuation of everyday racisms and the expansion of late capitalism. There is much more to say about algorithmic oppression and its implications within current sociopolitical and economic conditions – dynamics which have been engaged incisively by a range of critical scholars.9 In tracing some of the links among algorithms, habits, and social movements, in this chapter I take inspiration from this vital work. However, in line with the double logic of habit which informs this book, I am particularly interested in how the very digital networks and ecologies that enable new practices of racial profiling and capitalist colonisation also support anti-racist and anti-capitalist political mobilisation. I thus examine the utility at the current conjuncture of simultaneously contesting algorithmic oppression10 and working experimentally within existing techno-social (infra)structures and power relations to reorient the tendencies that comprise them. Focusing on Black Lives Matter and making links to the Occupy movement, I explore how these networked activisms have used algorithmic technologies to track, contest, and reorient neoliberalism and racial capitalism, while generating transnational solidarities that prefigure “the possibility of lives lived for common good, rather than personal profit” (Mirzoeff 2017, 40). Indeed, as I argue, these movements practice prefigurative politics; that is, they combine a tendency to oppose exploitation and oppression with a capacity to sense change as it is happening and thus remain radically open to alternative futures. They not only use digital technologies to monitor everyday oppressions, but they also live through such media to establish emergent

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habits and forms of relationality that generate new “diagrams for life living” (Manning 2016, 15). There are, of course, important differences between Black Lives Matter and Occupy related most profoundly to the particular (if inter-connected) histories out of which they emerged and seek to remake in the present. Initiated by the Canadian anti-consumerist collective Adbusters, Occupy Wall Street started in 2011 as a public gathering in Zuccotti Park in New York City’s financial district to take aim at rising social and economic inequality and the undue influence of corporations on government. While an immediate factor catalysing Occupy’s creation was the Obama administration’s decision to bail out the banks in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, its emergence was also linked to much longer processes of neoliberal consolidation and privatisation in the United States and transnationally (Fuchs 2015). Black Lives Matter, in turn, is part of a wave of renewed Black protest movements globally which is “centered on marking democracy’s white limits” (Hesse and Hooker 2017, 449). In the United States, the acquittal in 2013 of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, followed by the acquittal in 2014 of police officer Darren Wilson for the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, acted as flashpoints for mass protests against systematic police brutality.11 Black Lives Matter took shape in response to multilayered histories of racial injustice, yet assumed particular significance in the context of the nation’s first Black president’s apparent “unwillingness to address the effects of structural inequality” (Taylor 2016, 143). In the midst of Donald Trump’s election to the US presidency and the associated rise of extreme right-wing populisms, Black Lives Matter’s activism assumed a renewed sense of political urgency – as articulated, for instance, through its #WhatMatters2020 campaign centred on voter registration for the 2020 election. While Occupy defined itself as “anti-platform” in its broad contestation of neoliberalism and economic inequality, Black Lives Matter’s focus on the “worsening epidemic of police harassment, brutality, corruption and murder” affecting millions of Black people and people of colour nationally (Taylor 2016, 12) led various strands of the movement to develop specific goals and demands with respect to law enforcement practices and abolition. This evolved into a wider collective

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“Platform” addressing a range of social, economic, and political issues which affect Black people both inside and outside of the United States. As of 2020, Black Lives Matter describes itself as a global organisation “whose mission it is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.” Through “combatting acts of violence, creating space for Black imagination and innovation, and centring Black joy,” it works to achieve “immediate improvements in [Black people’s] lives.”12 For some critical commentators, Occupy’s radical reach was diminished by its pervasive whiteness and its failure to connect its anti-capitalist agenda directly and consistently with racial injustice (Sen and Liu 2012). Others focus more on the two movements’ overlaps and entanglements.13 As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor notes, Occupy’s criticism of “government bailouts for private enterprise while millions of ordinary people bore the weight for unemployment, foreclosures and evictions addressed some of the most important issues affecting African Americans” (2016, 146). Taylor also highlights initiatives such as Occupy the Hood, through which Black Occupy activists sought to raise the profile of the movement “in communities of color . . . and widen the range of people involved” (146). These particularities and intersections remain pertinent to any comparative analysis of Black Lives Matter and Occupy and point to some of the different and interconnected ways in which their prefigurative praxis has taken shape. My focus here, however, is on what links these activisms in the context of contemporary digital networks and practices as well as wider debates on the relations among habit, power, and transformation. Given everything we know about the pernicious interaction of networked technologies with global capitalism, international securitisation, surveillance, racial profiling, political interference in national elections, fake news, conspiracy theories, echo chambers, trolling, and so forth, my affirmative mode of engagement in this chapter might seem wilfully blind to the more disturbing realities of our contemporary digitally mediated world. My argument, however, is that precisely because accounts of the corrupting influence of digital and algorithmic technologies are so pervasive, it is increasingly difficult to imagine how techno-social life could be otherwise. Extending my chapter 4 discussion of the links between mediated images and affective

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habituation, in this final chapter I offer a speculative account of how we might re-encounter the meanings and logics of social change – and what might constitute habits of political solidarity – in the midst of shifting media ecologies. In a context in which algorithmic processes are routinely associated with that which is socially, politically, and ethically suspect, I explore how we can open up and complicate these forms of mediation in ways that may help us to better imagine, sense, and enact other possibilities for techno-social life. In the first section of this chapter, I discuss how Black Lives Matter and other networked movements practice vital forms of algorithmic politics. In the second section, I explore the histories and implications of prefigurative political approaches, highlighting how the vision of immanent transformation they offer resonates with the work of pragmatist philosophers. In the third section, I consider prominent critiques of networked social movements, namely that the fluid coalitions they generate are ephemeral and ineffectual. As I argue, however, these criticisms reproduce a particular (dominant) understanding of what social change is and how it works. For prefigurative activisms like Black Lives Matter and Occupy, meaningful transformation may emerge less through major events and more via collectively (re)animating “minor” gestures, habits, and tendencies. In the final section, I consider how we might rethink political solidarity in the digital age from a prefigurative lens. digitAl ACtiViSM And SPeCUlAtiVe ViSionS Modelling technological tactics from the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement used a range of digital platforms and networks both to spread the word and to coordinate embodied activity as it unfolded. As Paulo Guerbado argues in his comparative analysis of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the Indignados movement in Spain, social media within new protest cultures are not simply means to “convey abstract opinions,” but also enable forms of affective choreography that give shape to how people feel, move, and act together (2012, 13). Across these various movements, social media, and particularly Facebook and Twitter, have been “instrumental in instigating an emotional condensation of people’s anger” and “acting as a spring-board

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for street-level agitation” (2012, 15).14 Digital technologies and forms of techné have also, of course, been vital to the emergence and effectivity of Black Lives Matter in the United States and transnationally. Since its founding in 2013 by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi, Black Lives Matter has harnessed networked media to “organize, heighten immediacy, and widen the scope of the public that acts as witness to the disposability of black lives” (Hesse and Hooker 2017, 451). More generally, Black Lives Matter’s intersectional ethos, and its algorithmic articulation with other feminist, queer, trans, and anti-capitalist movements, has enabled “black lives inscribed differently and multiply . . . to be seen, heard, and encountered politically” (Hesse 2017, 600)15 – demonstrating that algorithmic processes are not simply antithetical to political complexity and expansiveness. Indeed, the “hashtag activisms” associated with Black Lives Matter and other networked movements can be considered vital forms of algorithmic politics. Twitter hashtags such as #Ferguson, #Baltimore, and #Cleveland (associated with the brutal police killings of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and Tamir Rice respectively) have, for example, not only expanded Black Lives Matter’s evolving digital network but also conveyed instantaneous “information about unfolding events” (Bonilla and Rosa 2015, 8), thus allowing the movement to connect with, and contribute to constituting, that which is in process. As Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa discuss in their digital ethnography of #Ferguson, in the immediate aftermath of Michael Brown’s death, social media users “well aware of the algorithmic nature of Twitter” were “purposefully hashtagging to make Ferguson ‘trend’” (2015, 7). Such aggregative practices allowed Brown’s murder to be connected to the perceived “expendability of black bodies” underlying a multitude of past killings of Black people and people of colour by law enforcement in the United States (2015, 10). They also facilitated connections with wider social and geo-political struggles, through tweets such as “#Egypt #Palestine #Ferguson #Turkey, U.S. made tear gas, sold on the almighty free market represses democracy” (2015, 10) which enabled opportunities for transnational collaboration and solidarity.16 As discussed in chapter 4, repeated or sustained exposure to violent or disturbing images tends to be associated with political desensitisation and disaffection.17 Black Lives Matter’s mobilisation of

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a “continuous loop of viral videos showing police killing unarmed blacks,” however, has made “viscerally accessible” to millions worldwide the habitual violent targeting of Black people by the carceral state in ways that have intensified (rather than dissipated) collective antiracist affect and activism (Hooker 2017, 491). Indeed, as Nicholas Mirzoeff argues in The Appearance of Black Lives Matter, the movement has leveraged the affordances of digital technology to produce a new way of seeing – a “collective way to look, visualize, and imagine” (2017, 85). Through citizen-produced documentation of police brutality shared widely via networked media, Black Lives Matter has countered law enforcement’s iterative injunction to “move on, there’s nothing to see here” (2017, 120–1). Rather than leading automatically to disaffection, the repetition and duration of these photographs and videos highlight the urgency of the situation while providing time and space for witnesses to process shock and reflect on the reality of what is happening. The unwavering digital gaze that Black Lives Matter generates thus makes possible what I term “affective inhabitation”: an immersive experience that protracts our relationship with a visual image or environment, compelling us to inhabit the sensorial intensity of our encounter and its critical implications (chapter 4). This mode of sustained looking, I want to suggest, has the potential to compel differently located subjects to confront the persistence of anti-Blackness in the United States and beyond by producing a visceral grasping of the everyday workings of racism. This is crucial because, as Rankine insists, to “inhabit our citizenship fully, we have to not only understand this, but also to grasp it” (2015). Or, as Christina Sharpe puts it, in the long aftermath of slavery, we require means of viscerally inhabiting the past in the present: “A method along the lines of a sitting with, a gathering, a tracking of phenomena that disproportionally and devastatingly affect Black peoples any and everywhere they are” (2016, 13). Importantly, at the same time that digital media enable real-time tracking of the iterative denigration and destruction of Black lives, they also offer potent opportunities for rematerialising Black life beyond the normative mediations of racial capitalism. In this vein, Mirzoeff discusses how Black Lives Matter employs networked technology to create a “space of appearance” which offers “a glimpse of the society that is (potentially) to come” (2017, 32). Spaces of appearance emerge

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through people connecting visually with one another and generating shared forms of sensation and material possibility. They are made possible via the co-constitution of physical and digital environments enabled by smart phones, social media, and other networked technologies and applications. In a context in which a modern-day racial code continues to prescribe restricted modes of movement and appearance for Black people and people of colour (Browne 2015; Benjamin 2019a), Mirzoeff suggests that Black Lives Matter has opened up “the pre-figurative possibility of appearing as Black in a way that is not codified by white supremacy” (2017, 20). Whether through vigils, marches, die-ins, highway closures, walk-outs, or meme-making, the movement creates domains in which “people act as if they are free, as if what happens there happens everywhere” (33). We could say, then, that via its networked dynamics, Black Lives Matter engages in vital forms of prefigurative politics – a speculative, everyday politics led by an imperative to build tendencies, relationships, and (infra)structures that prefigure a desired future society.18 To be sure, Black Lives Matter’s activism has not been without frustration, conflict, and antagonism. For some in positions of racial privilege, Black Lives Matter’s activities have been met not with self-reflection or solidarity but rather with defensiveness, aggression, and the explicit rhetoric of white supremacy. Indeed, Trump’s election to the US presidency in 2016 could be seen as the most prominent illustration of the potent backlash, or “whitelash” (Mirzoeff 2017), against Black Lives Matter’s increased visibility and other perceived “black gains” at the expense of “white losses” (Hooker 2017). In this context, there is concern that anti-racist activism remains locked in a repetitive cycle in which energies are increasingly depleted through protest and yet nothing ever really changes. As Hooker puts it, “if white humanity is diminished by indifference to black loss, black citizens are doubly burdened by the seemingly unceasing repetition of the following cycle: deal black body, protest, indictment (or more likely nonindictment), eventual nonconviction, killer walks free” (2017, 499). This relentless pattern threatens to sustain an agonisingly predictable impasse for radical Black politics in the United States and beyond.19 In focusing on the prefigurative thrust of Black Lives Matter’s praxis, however, the habitual recurrence of its activism is vital to the

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possibility of meaningful social transformation. As Mirzoeff suggests, “the formal similarity and repetition” across the movement’s actions “shifts them from being simply protests . . . to becoming pre-figurative invocations of what anti-anti-blackness would look like” (2017, 86–7). Indeed, what is at stake for Black Lives Matter is not only the question of how to expose and disrupt racial policing in an algorithmic age, but also the challenge of how to sustain and expand Black life beyond the injuries of racial capitalism. As Hesse argues, by mobilising around the materiality of “black lives” instead of “civil rights, human rights, or black rights,” Black Lives Matter signals its participation in a wider “black life politics” (2017, 600). In this vein, it is important to emphasise that while prefigurative approaches involve performative enactments of everyday oppressions, they also create “real relations of existence” (Mirzoeff 2017, 33) – they produce relations, habits, capacities, and solidarities that may be leveraged towards a host of immanent political possibilities. PolitiCAl tendenCieS: PreFigUrAtiVe And StrAtegiC PolitiCS In Another Politics, activist and political theorist Chris Dixon describes prefigurative politics as aiming to “ground movement building in everyday struggles” while “cultivating liberatory possibilities” (2014, 7). Within the current sociopolitical climate, he suggests that a range of anti-capitalist, anti-racist, feminist, queer, environmental, anarchist, and abolitionist movements are bound together not by political party affiliation or sectarian lines, but rather by a “political tendency” – a tendency aligned with “a rich democratic vision of everyone being able to directly participate in the decisions that affect them” and resistant to “all forms of domination, exploitation, and oppression” (2014, 6, 3). Across their differences, these overlapping activisms share a prefigurative sensibility that seeks “manifest and build, to the greatest extent possible, the egalitarian and deeply democratic world we would like to see through our means of fighting in this one” (2014, 7). In this way, Dixon argues that such movements constitute an expansive, intersectional, and cross-border politics that is both materially grounded in the present and speculatively open to the future.

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Although the term “prefigurative politics” has gained recent currency, it has a longer genealogy linked to analysis of 1960s New Left movements in the United States.20 As Mark and Paul Engler discuss, rejecting both traditional political parties and the Leninist vestiges of the Old Left, “members of the New Left attempted to create activist communities that embodied the concept of participatory democracy, an idea famously championed in the 1962 Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society” (2014) – as well as, of course, Dewey’s philosophical and political writing (chapter 3). A key historical example is provided by the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee, a major organisation of the American civil rights movement which “based itself on radical egalitarianism, mutual respect, and unconditional support for every person’s unique gifts and contributions” (Engler and Engler 2014). Second-wave feminism also pioneered such participatory practices, as did radical anti-nuclear movements of the 1970s and 1980s, through “affinity groups, spokes councils, and general assemblies” that, in turn, came to characterise the global justice movements of the 1990s and 2000s. Rather than “waiting for revolution in the future, the New Left sought to experience it in the present through the movements it created” (2014) – an ethos that resonated with the injunction associated with Ghandi’s legacy to “be the change you want to see in the world.” More recently, the Occupy movement has engaged in “consciously-conceived, prefigurative political action,” though, for example, Occupy London’s Tent City University and Welfare and Well-Being Working Group (Howard and Pratt Boyden 2013, 730). Prefigurative approaches, I suggest, align with the visions of social transformation offered by Dewey, James, Sullivan, and other pragmatist thinkers. As Dewey argues in Human Nature and Conduct ([1922] 2012), change is not a faraway destination on the horizon but rather is continually unfolding in the present through the evolving interactions between organisms and their milieus. As discussed in chapter 1, although critical of the “short-cut revolutionist” who fails to see how social norms and institutions live on in collective habits, Dewey nonetheless recognises that revolutionary action may be vital and can lead to durable change. His point, however, is that when revolutions

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are “successful,” it is because “appropriate habits of thought have previously been insensibly matured” ([1922] 2012, 44). From this perspective, change at the level of habit is not antithetical to radical politics, but rather is potentially radical and revolutionary. Today, prefigurative approaches highlight the generative links between social change and the affect, gestures, habits, and solidarities of daily life. They pursue a politics of feeling and a politics of habit that are, as Ann Cvetkovich puts it, “manifest not just in overt or visible social movements of conventional politics but [also] in the more literal kinds of movement that make up everyday life” (2012, 199). Think, for instance, of the anti-capitalist movements including Occupy, but also the Indignados of Spain and the Outraged of Greece, which have repeatedly assembled to protest neoliberalism and austerity. As Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou discuss, through performing everyday habits and routines in the public space of the square – sleeping and living there, cooking for one another, working remotely together, “taking care of the environment and each other” – these activists pursue prefigurative politics; that is, they cultivate “the relations of equality that are precisely those that are lacking in the economic and political domain” (2013, 102). While they highlight the insidious harms of neoliberal governance and induced precarity, these performative practices also constitute collective relations and capacities which might support a range of political and ethical possibilities. Not unlike Dewey’s pragmatism, such prefigurative politics inhabit transformation in the present through the interaction of “the revolutionary” and “the routine,” while approaching the future with an orientation of openness and experimentation.21 Black Lives Matter has also regularly intervened in everyday public spaces – through, for example, the mass weekly die-ins at Grand Central Station in New York City from 2014 to 2015, which, via their digital mediation, generated international solidarity actions including a collective die-in at a major shopping centre in London, United Kingdom. As Mirzoeff notes, in repeatedly taking over these spaces of circulation and consumption, Black Lives Matter activists make visible “the spatial component of the policed society” while also disrupting “the circulation of commodities” (2017, 105, 106–7) – thus highlighting the imbrication of racism and capitalist consumer culture. Drawing

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on pragmatist philosophies, we could say that these everyday activisms intervene at the level of habit assemblages – they work through re-figuring the habitual relationships between bodies and physical, affective, social, and economic environments in the context of racial capitalism. The die-ins, similar to the performative logics of #HandsUpDontShoot – which became one of Black Lives Matter’s most powerful hashtags as well as a collective mimetic gesture of solidarity – mobilised an “appropriative reversal of vulnerability” to “reclaim the right to existence” (2017, 96). They created a space wherein those routinely subject to racialised technologies of control could improvise new collective routines and relations and discover “unexpected potentialities in [their] habits” (Dewey [1922] 2012, 24). Concerning the logics and possibilities of sociopolitical transformation, prefigurative approaches have frequently been counterposed to “strategic politics” oriented towards “achiev[ing] power so that structural changes in the political, economic and social orders might be achieved” (Breines 1980 cited in Engler and Engler 2014). In this oppositional framing, strategic approaches favour “the creation of organizations that can marshal collective resources and gain influence in conventional politics,” whereas prefigurative practices decentre activities that pertain to the state and focus instead on creating “liberated public spaces” and “alternative institutions” (Engler and Engler 2014). While the terms “prefigurative” and “strategic” politics emerged from analysis of US social movements of the 1960s, they reflect a much longer-standing tension between approaches that seek instrumental gain within the current system and those that operationalise radical values in the here and now – a tension which resonates with more recent debates within the political left concerning how to proceed in the face of Trumpism, Brexit, and the rise of right-wing populisms internationally. In some significant ways, both Black Lives Matter and Occupy have embraced a prefigurative sensibility explicitly distinguished from the aims and techniques of traditional strategic politics. Frustrated with the centralised party structure and its neoliberal consensus in the United States and transnationally, the Occupy movement sought to create its own political processes via “directly democratic decisionmaking in general assemblies [and] alternative institutions such as

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camp-based kitchens and clinics” (Dixon 2014, 1, 53). In turn, contemporary radical Black activisms internationally, including Black Lives Matter, lament the futility of directing activism towards governing regimes “motivated by the desire to avoid any racial disruption to the institutional arrangements that privileged the normativity of white hegemony” (Hesse and Hooker 2017, 447–8).22 Occupy consequently aimed to think beyond the state as the locus of political action and transformation and significant strands of Black Lives Matter continue to do so. Both movements have focused energies instead on building psychic, social, political, technological, and ecological relations and capacities with the potential to prefigure new modes of life-living. For Black Lives Matter, this work extends a tradition of “direct action on health, food, education, and policing issues” more in line with the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s than with civil rights organising or indeed more contemporary multiculturalism politics (Hesse 2017, 598). More generally, however, it is increasingly difficult to establish a discrete divide between prefigurative and strategic approaches in our contemporary sociopolitical and media landscape. Traditionally, for example, prefigurative politics have been understood as indifferent “to the attitudes of media and of mainstream society” and limited by “a tendency towards self-isolation” (Engler and Engler 2014). Yet Black Lives Matter, Occupy, and other networked movements can hardly be described as isolated or disengaged from popular media optics. Rather, through combining prefigurative sensibilities with digital logics and capacities, they are radically refiguring the relationship between politics and media in the twenty-first century. Indeed, unlike most mainstream media in which “the experience of racialized populations is overdetermined, stereotyped, or tokenized,” Bonilla and Rosa suggest that “social media platforms such as Twitter offer sites for collectively constructing counternarratives and reimagining group identities” (2015, x).23 Algorithmic technologies have allowed these overlapping activisms to connect millions of people globally, disrupt traditional media logics, and establish pragmatic coalitions as their necessity arises. As Mirzoeff notes, for example, #Ferguson was used “21.6 million times from June 2014 to May 2015” and supported the emergence of

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a number of political collectives – from Campaign Zero to the Movement for Black Lives (2017, 178–9). Campaign Zero created a ten-point agenda for law enforcement including “community involvement, police use of body cameras and independent investigations into police conduct,” which they recognised would be difficult to achieve under the political regime in office at the time. By contrast, the Movement for Black Lives knew that neither major party in the United States would adopt their visionary agenda, but nonetheless offered a vital prefigurative account of what genuine liberation for Black people and people of colour in the United States and internationally might look like: “1) End the war on black people 2) Reparations 3) Invest-Divest 4) Economic justice 5) Community control, and 6) Political power” (2017, 178). As these examples indicate, Black Lives Matter and other networked activisms combine strategic and prefigurative techniques to explore how “electoralism and liberation” can “form related threads in the braid of resistance” (178–9).24 Far from retreating into isolation or a paralysing politics of purity, these movements practice an openended politics of liberation that is both pragmatic and speculative. Minor geStUreS, netWorKed MediA, And ontologieS oF CHAnge It is true that the often site-specific, temporary, and shifting coalitions that networked technologies enable have been derided as “not real,” ineffectual and/or limited by their lack of structure and coordination. For Jodi Dean, as discussed in chapter 4, social media habitually produces “feelings of community” rather than “actual communities” in ways that revert political activity into passive forms of “being made aware” or “having been stated” (original italics, 2015, 95, 99) – a critique which echoes pervasive diagnoses of social media “clicktivism” or “slacktivism” (Gladwell 2010; Morozov 2011). Moreover, claims regarding the problematically decentralised and disorganised nature of digital activism25 resonate with earlier assessments of prefigurative politics as hampered by the “tyranny of structurelessness” (Freeman 1970). As Jo Freeman famously argues concerning second-wave feminism, a key consequence of a prefigurative avoidance of formal leadership and organisational structures is a tendency for the movement to generate

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“much motion and few results” (Freeman 1970). What these analyses share is a concern that the considerable affective energy generated by prefigurative politics is rarely translated into meaningful transformation in political governance and policy or into the kind of structural upheaval traditionally envisioned as revolutionary change. While highlighting salient issues for leftist political organising at the current sociopolitical conjuncture, these perspectives reproduce a particular (dominant) understanding of what social change is and how it works. Extending my discussion in previous chapters, we could say that they attend to what Manning (2016) refers to as “the major,” or that which aligns itself with what is already assigned value within the field of social and political intelligibility. If the major is identified via pivotal political occurrences or events, the minor, as “a force that comes through it, unmooring its structural integrity, problematizing its normative standards,” is not generally discernible in the same way (2016, 1). This does not mean, however, that the major is always where transformative power lies; rather, as Manning argues, the grand is accorded the status it has “because it is easier to identify major shifts than to catalogue the nuanced rhythms of the minor” (2016, 1). In response to claims that prefigurative approaches produce “much motion and few results,” then, it is important to underscore that these forms of political engagement are informed by a different ontology of social change – one that, in putting into question the very meaning of “results,” may not be intelligible in the major key. Indeed, within this processual ontology of transformation, ends are never “endpoints at all” but rather “acts viewed at a remote stage” (Dewey [1922] 2012, 17). What is vital is not that targets are set and achieved as if they represented static political goods, but rather than we develop more effective means of working with the varied forms of change already ongoing in ways that continually transform both social problems and their “solutions” (see chapter 1). Unlike the (neo) liberal pragmatist whose mantra of “whatever works” informs political expediencies that reproduce the sociopolitical status quo (chapter 3), this philosophical pragmatism requires experimental praxis. It is about recognising that within any actual set of relations (intelligible in the major key) there exist a host of minor tendencies “already in germ” that carry potentialities for becoming otherwise – and engaging

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speculatively with such tendencies to discover “how else experience can come to expression” (Manning 2016, ix–x, 2).26 From this perspective, as I have discussed in previous chapters, meaningful and durable forms of transformation might emerge through catching gestures and tendencies “in the act” and finding ways to collectively activate or realign them (2016, x) – dynamics that necessitate ongoing engagement with everyday social relations and routines. As such, many of the purported limitations of prefigurative politics might instead be interpreted as precisely where the strengths and possibilities of these approaches lie. Recall that, for Dixon, a number of contemporary movements for social justice are linked not by rigid identities, ideologies, or affiliations but rather by a political tendency that is “anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist and non-sectarian” (2014, 1). The term “tendency,” as “an inclination towards a particular characteristic or type of behaviour” (OED 2017), conveys both a likelihood to lean in a particular direction and also a propensity to act. Proceeding via inclination rather than determination, tendencies coordinate habits and capacities to provide focus and propulsion, yet not fixity; they are flexible and responsive, rather than rigid and deterministic. Political tendencies might therefore be understood as evolving assemblages of habits which work in an anticipatory mode, but one that is intuitive and speculative instead of predictive and calculative – and thus capable of connecting with “a moving world” (Dewey [1922] 2012, 83) and sensing the potentiality of that which “has not yet come” (Williams 1977, 130). In other words, while we may associate the term “tendency,” like “habit” and “habituation,” with the automatic reproduction of things as they are, political tendencies are simultaneously what enable the potentiality of different futures.27 With this in mind, if prominent social movements which comprise the political tendency that Dixon describes have not been led by clearly defined policies, targets, or end-points (which was a dominant critique of Occupy), this is, in part, because they understand the political risks, as Dewey puts it, of simply “substituting one rigidity for another” (Dewey [1922] 2012, 52). Moreover, in the spirit of Eve Sedgwick’s (2003) reparative thinking (see chapter 1 in this book), they appreciate the importance, in a complex and shifting world, of sensing and responding to change as it is happening.28 Unlike regressive or

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fascist movements which depend on rigid identity positions and seek a return to exclusionary version of an imagined “the past” (i.e., “Make America Great Again” and the colonial nostalgia of Brexit), many broadly leftist networked activisms are characterised by a particular kind of openness to the future29 – that is, by a deep commitment to pursuing democracy, freedom, and solidarity that does not assume that we can know deterministically what “social justice” might constitute in a given context or, indeed, how it might be delivered. In this respect, it is significant that Black Lives Matter describes itself as “adaptive and decentralized, with a set of guiding principles”30 – an ethos which enables exploratory and responsive modes of praxis led by “Black imagination and innovation” rather than rigid formulas.31 In practical terms, this speculative approach is enabled, in part, by these movements’ networked qualities, including digital media’s capacity to connect members to moving events as they unfold. Much has been written about the propensity of social media to produce echo chambers that polarize ideological differences rather than exploring what might be generative about their grey areas (Miller 2017; Benkler et al. 2018). Through a prefigurative lens, however, we can alternatively consider how the immanent, real-time dynamics of digital media enable participants to “learn and act in the midst of ongoing, unforeclosed situations” (Anderson 2017, 594).32 This is significant because, as Manning argues, “a politics attuned to emergent difference” must begin “in the midst, where force has not yet turned to form. In the middle, where the event is still welling” (2016, 15) – an observation that resonates with both pragmatist and continental philosophies of habit.33 As such, we can appreciate how networked social movements are leveraging (or have the capacity to leverage) the affordances of digital technologies to pursue a prefigurative politics attuned to the potentialities pulsating within the actual – thus “opening the way for new tendencies to emerge” (2016, 8). Of course, we know algorithmic media tend in certain directions and thus the forms of becoming they might support are by no means open or unlimited – a reality that makes ongoing work to contest “algorithmic oppression” and the wider links between networked technologies and neoliberal capitalism vital.34 Relatedly, it is imperative to recognise how networked media and algorithmic architectures

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have fed into state-led practices of surveillance and racial profiling of Black Lives Matter, Occupy, and related political activisms. As Louise Amoore notes, for example, during the 2015 protests in Baltimore following the police killing of Freddie Gray, the tech company Geofeedia supplied the Baltimore Police Department and the US Department of Homeland Security with machine learning algorithms which “had been had been trained on social media data, analysing the inputs of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram” to detect “risk” in relation to political protests. Among those arrested and detained on the basis of these algorithms were “forty-nine children, with groups of high school students prevented from boarding buses downtown because the output of the algorithm had adjudicated on the high risk they posed in the crowd” (2020, 4). It is thus evident that “social media in a contradictory society [have a] contradictory character” (Fuchs 2014, 131). As Christian Fuchs discusses in his analysis of Occupy’s use of digital technologies, while nonprofit social media platforms like Occupii, N -1, and Diaspora resonated with Occupy’s anti-capitalist ethos and avoided “the risk of censorship and police surveillance” that corporate sites like Twitter and YouTube entail, they could not reach “the broader public of non-activists” and faced a constant struggle of resource mobilisation (2014, 133, 136). Networked activisms must therefore continually confront “the antagonisms and inequalities that shape the media system” (161). Moreover, far right forces have adopted similar digital techniques to those employed by progressive social justice movements. As Yochai Benkler et al. argue, alt-right memes are amplified by major right-wing outlets such as Fox News in the United States, which “are adept at producing their own conspiracy theories and defamation campaigns” (2018, 13). Consolidating long-term changes in American politics and the uneven landscape of news media, such digital dynamics leveraged a media ecosystem ripe for the re-emergence of far-right ideologies and indeed white supremacies. Yet, for movements such as Black Lives Matter and Occupy, staying “in the midst” of unfolding sociopolitical and material relations also means recognising that there is no politically pure position from which to operate outside the dynamics of neoliberalism or racial capitalism. Rather, what is required are means of working speculatively

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within existing (infra)structures and power relations to reorient the tendencies that comprise them. In this vein, one of the strengths of the pragmatic coalitions that algorithmic technologies enable is that they are flexible and responsive and can form and recalibrate tactics as situations unfold, and thus potentially “mobilis[e] a lithe and powerful response able to resist, rework, and undo [hegemonic] social relations and practices” (Katz 2017, 598). In providing a running archive of the affects, gestures, and habits of everyday life, social media may also aid activists in developing modes of intervening in neoliberal governance or racial capitalism that more viscerally grasp how these structuring sociopolitical forces work – how they feel and take shape across particular contexts and sets of relations. The logic of slacktivism or clicktivism suggests that digital political labour is problematic because it habitually takes the place of “real” or meaningful (i.e., offline) political action, while continually providing the data to fuel communicative capitalism (Dean 2015). Caught up in a compulsive cycle of online virtue signalling, the narrative goes, social media users are consequently not marching on the streets, mobilising at the local level, or running for political office. Yet this is often not, in fact, what recent ethnographies of networked social movements indicate. Rather, they point to a vital imbrication of “online” and “offline” relations that make relying on an online/offline binary to judge the efficacy of political practice increasingly untenable.35 The near-complete embeddedness of smart and computational technologies in daily life and the ubiquitous possibility of connecting to wireless networks on the move also beg the question of what would constitute “offline” or “un-networked” political action in the current techno-social landscape. In their ethnography of #Ferguson, for example, Bonilla and Rosa highlight the experience of the twenty-five-year-old American protester Johnetta Elzie (who became a prominent voice within Black Lives Matter), who first encountered other activists online, with whom she “live-tweeted, Vined and Instagrammed” every Black Lives Matter protest in Ferguson during the summer of 2014 (2015, 10). Coming to call themselves Millennial Activists United, these social media users soon expanded “their role from “documenting” their actions to “generating” new forms of community” – including the use

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of #FergusonFriday to curate a weekly digital space for political reflection and “national ‘fireside’ conference calls during which activists based in Ferguson could speak directly with those following the events from afar” (2015, 10). Such networked initiatives led, in turn, to the formation of influential political coalitions, including Campaign Zero, which have combined physical and digitally mediated discussions and mobilisations to gain significant participation and support. What these examples illustrate is not the usurpation of face-to-face organising by digital activism, but rather a symbiosis of online and offline activity that reflects the wider entanglement of such dynamics contemporary social and political life. Moreover, and importantly, for Elzie, like many other young Black people and people of colour, engaging in anti-racist activism at local and national levels became possible via Twitter and other digital platforms in a way it may not have been before – an observation that seems even more salient in the context of the global coronavirus pandemic and the intensified modes of digital communication and collaboration it has mandated. This synergy of digital and face-to-face encounters is also evident transnationally through, for example, collaboration between Black Lives Matter and Palestinian activists. As Mirzoeff notes, when political resistance began in Ferguson, Palestinians sent digital messages of support as well as advice on how to deal with tear gas and others practical elements of counterinsurgency (2017, 92–3). These gestures of solidarity led Black Lives Matter activists to organise a research trip to Palestine in 2014, which was followed in 2015 by the release of a YouTube video, “When I See Them, I See Us,” showcasing African American and Palestinian artists and activists (2017, 93). Through such practices, Mirzoeff suggests that solidarity is taking a new form; it is arising via “a mutual seeing, enabled by social media, which creates a transnational space of appearance that might in turn form a different kind of politics” (93). In other words, live tweeting, image sharing, and meme making function not, in these cases, a distraction from, or impediment to, the formation of transnational political coalitions and solidarities, but rather the very condition of their possibility across social and geopolitical boundaries. Moreover, the sense of “collective sensorial solidarity online” (2017, 91) that digital technologies enable does not automatically defer or replace other kinds of political

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affectivity and organising but can instead catalyse their emergence and support their ongoing duration and development. Importantly, however, even if particular forms of political engagement do work primarily or exclusively via the relations and rhythms of networked media, this does not mean that they are not doing anything or that they inevitably run counter to the “real” work of sociopolitical change. If we understand social transformation as operating not only in the major key, but also via a range of minor currents and forces that make “the lines tremble that compose the everyday” (Manning 2016, 2), then social media practice in and of itself matters to prefigurative projects of social justice. It matters, that is, to the patterned ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and acting that constitute our capacities for being and becoming political in the world (chapter 4). If such perceptual, psychic, and embodied habits are formed and reformed via ongoing interactions between organisms and environments, then digital ecologies and interfaces have a key role to play in such processes. What is at stake is how digital technologies can be mobilised to “train the elasticity and capacity of our imagination” (Papadapoulos 2018, 20) and to sense and enact alternative ways of organising society in the midst of racial capitalism – a challenge that is not unrelated to or separate from wider political and legislative efforts to enact greater regulation of the internet and its central profit-driven online platforms and to contest the racialised modes of surveillance that social media and machine-learning algorithms are enlisted to furnish (Noble 2018; Amoore 2020). From this perspective, the logic of slacktivism or clicktivism only holds if we define political action quite narrowly, eliding the more emergent, diffuse, and minor modes in which sociopolitical change continually unfolds.36 In light of the above discussion, what is portrayed the lack of vision, structure, and results hampering prefigurative approaches might alternatively be understood as a shared desire to work otherwise to a (neo)liberal politics that achieves set targets but never upsets the status quo, as well a traditional revolutionary model that, in overinvesting in the idealised society to come, continually turns away from the richness and diversity of the present. As addressed earlier, this does not mean that these networked activisms are disengaged from more strategic aims and techniques or indeed from the realm of electoral

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politics. To the contrary, for movements like Black Lives Matter and Occupy, pursuing a multilevel politics across several interconnected planes of significance is necessary.37 In the context of the growing rise of far-right politics internationally, coordinated mobilisation to secure democratic political representation at the national, regional, and local political levels is vital. So too are ongoing efforts to pursue change at the level of affect, gesture, habit, and tendency – which might, over time, have deeper and more durable impacts. As Gayatri Spivak argues, what is required to generate meaningful change beyond the work of exposure or revelation is the development of “ethical reflexes” that make automatic our ability to think, feel, and respond ethically at the deepest levels of embodied being (2012, 519).38 What is perhaps most important from a prefigurative perspective is that projects of social justice remain “in process and unfinished, something that consciously pushes beyond available political categories, and yet something that can be shared, held in common” (Dixon 2014, 6). It is precisely this kind of openness, inclusivity, and processuality that constitutes the power of Black Lives Matter and Occupy as movements, statements, and rallying calls. As Mirzoeff argues, “to say ‘Black Lives Matter’ is to reopen the dialogue about blackness, while taking action to insist on the presence and value of Black people” (2017, 175). When those marching, occupying, filming, or live tweeting repeat “Black Lives Matter,” the “sense of being present in a particular space is evoked and remains open”; the reiteration “makes common a way to be in the future” that is “always becoming, always in formation” (2017, 33, 92). The injunction to “#Occupy,” and the parallel anti-capitalist slogan “we are the 99 per cent,” worked similarity – they provided the iterative basis for inclusive modes of collective political action and solidarity that remain open to a host of material and ethical possibilities. The forms of affinity and cooperation that such iterative digital dynamics enable are not framed by a “teleological goal”; rather, “repetition creates the space for encounter, movement and difference to emerge” (Sharma 2013, 62–3). A key point here, then, is that we do not yet know what the most salient impacts of such movements might be or what new forms they will take in the future – their political results and potentialities are emergent and multiple and likely to be distributed across varying

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modes of (non)visibility, (non)sensibility, and (im)materiality. Yet by engaging with social change beyond the major, we might become better attuned to the prefigurative possibilities which run through neoliberalism and racial capitalism – as well as how algorithmic technologies may be amenable to expansive forms of political engagement. MoVing SolidAritieS If prefigurative approaches offer an alternative view of social change, they also point to how we might begin to rethink political solidarity. In the midst of the public reintensification of crude and violent forms of racism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, and anti-trans ideology, the possibility of creating international solidarities across social, political, and economic differences may seem increasingly remote. From Hooker’s perspective, as I discussed in chapter 2, racial injustice in the United States and transnationally is reproduced, in part, by “white inability to cope with (often symbolic) losses and the radical resentment that accompanies it” (2017, 482) – as indicated, for instance, by the rise of #AllLivesMatter as a response to Black Lives Matter’s activism.39 In such circumstances, what prevents the formation of solidarities across racial lines is “white citizens’ continued investment in forms of political mastery or rule that are not only incompatible with but indeed directly opposed to racial justice and democratic politics” (2017, 485). And when the modus operandi of leading political figures is to fan the flames of racism and xenophobia and to amplify claims of white grievance, the likelihood of creating communities of shared vision around which to unite may feel implausible at best. Influential understandings of solidarity, however, tend to expect quite a lot of imagined citizen-subjects. In Political Solidarity, for example, Sally Scholz defines the concept as “a moral relation that makes a social movement wherein individuals have committed to positive duties in response to a perceived injustice” (2009, 6). Political solidarity in this view requires “a unity of individuals” who assume “a form of collective responsibility” and make “positive obligations to act” (2009, 12, 13, 11). Within the realm of electoral politics in particular, the promise of solidarity depends, in theory, on the possibility of winning over potential voters by convincing them of the “rightness” of a particular

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policy platform or ideology. Yet this vison of self-present political subjects who uphold coherent ideological positions and act wilfully to establish “moral obligations” and commit to “active duties” (2009, 12, 6) does not illuminate the more complex and diffuse ways in which political affinities might emerge and persist beyond “a hierarchy of conscious versus nonconscious experience” (Manning 2016, 23). As I discussed in previous chapters, understanding habit as central to human conduct reconfigures traditional ideas of agency, will, and intentionality, and demands that we “turn away from the notion that it is the human agent, the intentional, volitional subject who determines what comes to be” (Manning 2016, 3). Indeed, for Manning, in line with Henri Bergson’s philosophy as well as pragmatist accounts of habit, human behaviour consists of an ongoing interplay of conscious and nonconscious movement, with the latter being vital to the creative potential of emergent gestures and habits. From this perspective, visions of political solidarity that require “ideological coherence,” “active commitment,” and “positive obligation” not only limit the range of activity that might be significant to its workings, they also reify a model in which the human subject “is situated as the motivator of experience” (2016, 15). By contrast, conceptualising political solidarities as mediated ecologies of practice that operate across a wider spectrum of (non)consciousness and (in)attention might not only expand the kinds of bodies, actions, and modes of responsivity included in their dynamics but also lighten the load of the concept’s normative expectations. Instead of requiring “a unity of individuals” (Scholz 2009), solidarity might take shape as moving assemblages of affects, gestures, and habits – which could open up connections across social and political differences that may previously have seemed untenable. In this vein, William Connolly argues that political solidarities often emerge and gain force less through considered common interests or consistent ethical principles than via modes of affective resonance in which “heterogeneous, unconnected or loosely associate elements fold, bend, blend, emulsify, and dissolve into each other” (2005, 870). While Connolly’s focus is on how “cowboy capitalism” and “evangelical Christianity” became bound together in their support for the US Republican party despite their significant ideological asymmetries, his analysis of political “resonance machines” has much

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wider critical implications. Most pertinently, he suggests that, within contemporary media ecologies, political affinities are partly generated via affective circuits which operate below active consciousness and materialise shared “habitual patterns of perception, identity, interest, judgement and entitlement” (2005, 871, 878). Although the political right in the United States (and elsewhere) has become adept at mobilising resonance machines to achieve its goals,40 the left has more to learn on this front.41 Black Lives Matter, Occupy, and other broadly leftist networked activisms, however, powerfully illustrate how digital technologies can be leveraged to generate affective solidarities that connect a wide range of constituents though varying gestures of witnessing, cooperation, and participation. They have produced forms of political resonance via “the co-presence of bodies, mutually engaged in common tasks” (Miller 2015, 9), which exceed traditional notions of political identification, community, and solidarity. Importantly, this is by no means to devalue the vital genealogy of feminist, and particularly Black feminist, theory and praxis that emphasises how political solidarities must be struggled for (hooks 1986) – how feminist solidarity, for instance, requires “tough conversations about how white women simultaneously benefit from white supremacy while experiencing gender and class discrimination” (Emejulu 2018, 272). Such an ethos has been crucial to Black Lives Matter’s political interventions, as reflected in its intersectional guiding principles,42 its production of online toolkits for “Black and Non-Black POC Organizers” and “white people” respectively,43 and the reflexive modes of anti-racist praxis in which differently situated activists have engaged across a range of political sites. It is important to note in this respect that there are significant differences between mainstream accounts of political solidarity and critical practices of allyship that foreground the importance of white allies explicitly recognising and working to dismantle white supremacy (Yancy 2017; Clarke 2019).44 More generally, efforts to prefigure the anticipated society of the future “through our means of fighting in this one” require robust methods of addressing everyday relations of power, conflict, and antagonism (Dixon 2014) – including deeply rooted manifestations of “white domination” (hooks 1986; Sullivan 2006), “white grievance” (Hooker 2017), and “white terror” (Yancy 2017). It seems clear, then, that the kind of

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radical solidarities across differences that feminist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist thinkers and activists envision necessitate reflection, work, and struggle. My argument, however, is that while solidarities premised on radical commitment play a crucial role in catalysing and sustaining contemporary social justice movements, our current sociopolitical context also requires modes of political relationality that can reach a broader range of subjects beyond those willing and able to establish “positive obligations” and a broader range of actions beyond those defined as fully conscious, intentional, or considered. As Dewey argues, “an activity has meaning in the degree to which it establishes and acknowledges variety and intimacy of connections” ([1922] 2012, 114– 15). In these times of political dissonance, upheaval, and uncertainty, those who want to pursue affirmative social change arguably need to generate a multiplicity of (im)material connections which exceed those subjects who have already made up their minds, expressed clear ideological affiliations, or committed to particular modes of collective action – a challenge for which, as I have argued, the algorithmic capacities of digital media can offer considerable affective and infrastructural support.45 Although it might be argued that opening out political solidarity in this way problematically dilutes its meaning, my view is that it unfolds “a more complex compositional field” for prefigurative political praxis (Manning 2016) – one in which there is still potential for what has not yet been felt, thought, or perceived to alter the nature of what comes to be. This expansive vision of political solidarity avoids assuming the existence of individuals or collectives inhabiting predetermined ideological positions, acknowledging the ambivalence and lack of selfpossession that constitutes subjectivity – as well as how bodies are always open to recruitment by a range of political processes and technologies. Such an approach is vital, I want to suggest, in a context in which essentialist constructions of, for example, “the white working class” or “Trump voters” routinely elide the fact that “racist commitment is not a fixed character of an already defined group of people, but an ever active layer within our common political life that needs to be articulated and given form and constituency” (Singh 2016). As I outlined in the previous section, political tendencies are not

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predetermined or fixed but rather amenable to realignment within conducive environmental conditions. Nikhil Pal Singh argues in this vein that “so-called white people and white workers in particular can be won for a non-racist, economic justice centred politics; but we must actively build the constituency for that politics” (2016)46 – as well as, I would argue, the gestures, habits, and tendencies necessary to support such processes. There is much more to say about the particular environments, relations, and techniques through which such elusive affinities might be generated; however, my point is that we require a concept of solidarity that is open to their emergence – to forms of political resonance, that is, that are “enacted and re-enacted in the present moment” (Miller 2015, 9). As I have discussed, understanding solidarity at the level of habit also highlights the significance of everyday routines and responsivities to social justice projects and the networks of connection and affinity they require – disrupting the traditional assumption that “participation in public affairs requires social actors to disentangle themselves from their everyday material concerns” (Marres 2015, 13–14).47 Moreover, in attending to the dynamics of what Noortje Marres calls “material participation” – a mode of political engagement that foregrounds “the specific roles played by things, technologies and environments as notable participants in the doing of politics and democracy” (2015, xiii) – a prefigurative approach highlights the ways in which political solidarities are always more-than-human. Consequently, digital devices, platforms, and infrastructures might be figured not simply as tools or environments for anti-racist and anticapitalist activism, but also as vital collaborators in the generation of (im)material solidarities – a proposition that becomes increasingly salient when we consider how digital and algorithmic technologies are already part of ourselves, working to re-mediate human habits of cognition, memory, and responsivity (Serres 2015; Pedwell 2019, 2021). From this perspective, the key question is not really whether digital media are “good” or “bad” for progressive politics, but rather how we might understand the political and ethical potentialities of emergent digital forms of personhood characterised by a growing propensity towards “algorithmic thought.”48

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Perhaps most vitally, a prefigurative lens enables us to appreciate solidarities as always shifting, changing, and taking shape at varying sites of embodied, material, and political salience. The algorithmic nature of networked media, as I have discussed, enables movements like Black Lives Matter and Occupy to establish site-specific coalitions and moving solidarities to address changing issues and situations. These political affinities emerge via processes of resonance, reverberation, aggregation, and propagation – iterative dynamics which overlap with what Sefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013) call “the undercommons.” As an emergent political collectivity, the undercommons operates not primarily through exposure or critique but rather via situated modes of encounter and inhabitance that aim to more profoundly reorient the political field. It is, as Manning argues, “an activator of tendency more than it is an offering of commonality” (2016, 8). The forms of political relationality which prefigurative networked approaches offer are thus not static or set but rather fluid and performative and must be continually renewed through collective gestures, experimentation, and praxis. ConClUSionS Focusing on Black Lives Matter and making links to Occupy, in this chapter I have explored how digitally mediated habits are at once sites for pernicious modes of surveillance and control and the basis for a prefigurative politics of transformation. Networked media operate via forms of algorithmic oppression which perpetuate the logics of racial capitalism, yet these same devices, platforms, and infrastructures also facilitate algorithmic politics which enable activisms like Black Lives Matter to reimagine Black life in powerful ways. Through their speculative inhabitation of algorithmic relations, these movements facilitate the means by which “social change metabolizes, creating a form of counterpower” (Mirzoeff 2017, 29) – while also contesting the embedding of discrimination “in computer code and, increasingly, in artificial intelligence technologies that we are reliant on, by choice or not” (Noble 2018, 1). Experimenting with how everyday gestures, habits, and tendencies could materialise otherwise, they practice a speculative

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politics of “the minor” that rethinks what counts as political action and expands the meanings and possibilities of social transformation. Although Black Lives Matter has evolved from the point I discuss in this book and Occupy has dissipated, their ethos and praxis point to a range of issues and possibilities central to the vision of social change I develop. Mobilising the double logic of habit, they illustrate how the force of habituation underlies the persistence of pernicious modes of regulation, exclusion, and violence and also the capacity for affirmative transformation. In pursuing liberation, solidarity, and collective becoming through remaking everyday relations and environments, these networked movements and their aftermaths animate a minor ontology of social change that figures progress as active in the dynamic evolution of habit assemblages. They show how affect, habit, and thought interact with and co-constitute one another within processes of transformation that work at the intersection of the eventful and the endemic and implicate wider sociopolitical, economic, and digital ecologies. Most profoundly, the ongoing and yetto-be-articulated implications of their prefigurative politics conjure a vision of “the revolutionary” that works not against “the pragmatic,” “the habitual,” or “the routine” but rather in and through these dynamics. They bring to life the immanent possibility of radical change in the present.

ConClUSion inHAbiting tHe PAndeMiC

In this book I have argued that if we want to better understand the workings of social change, we need to appreciate the double logic of habit: that is, the role of habituation in both enabling and preventing transformation. Or, as William James puts it, we must recognise how “our virtues are habits as much as our vices” (1899, 64). Yet to do this, I have suggested that we also require a transformed conception of habit itself. Instead of reducing habits to individual forms of behaviour that keep existing patterns in place, in Revolutionary Routines I have figured them as shifting collaborations between bodies and environments that can actualise new capacities, solidarities, and modes of cohabitation. At the intersection of (post)neoliberalism, racial capitalism, populism, algorithmic life, and an unfolding global pandemic, morethan-human habits are both what sustain persistent injustices and what make possible meaningful, enduring, and imaginative change. Thinking through habit, however, also changes how we understand change. Within the alternative ontology of transformation I have offered, minor processes are as significant as major events and progress is continually unfolding via the evolution of everyday gestures, affects, and habits. What is vital to the possibility of collective change, from this perspective, is cultivating shared capacities to sense the minor currents which run through major configurations (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 1994; Manning 2016); modes of affective inhabitation which attune us to the emergent possibilities for current tendencies and relations to materialise otherwise. It is through working speculatively within existing sociopolitical (infra)structures and ecologies

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to reorient the habits that comprise them, I have argued, that more affirmative modes of social life might begin to take shape. In doing so, it is imperative that we confront the full range of habit’s biopolitical implications. As I have discussed, the underside of the grace, efficiency, and readiness for action that embodied habits can provide is uninhabitability – lives made unliveable or less than human via the governing apparatus of habit (Butler 1993, 2004; Rankine 2014). The speculative pragmatist approach to thinking transformation which I have offered thus combines an emphasis on process, possibility, and prefiguration with attention to the entanglement of capacity and incapacity central to genealogies of both habit and affect. My aim throughout has been to foreground immanence, malleability, and unpredictability without underestimating the persistence of habits, including those linked to technologies of surveillance, regulation, exclusion, and violence. Although my thrust in Revolutionary Routines has been more theoretical and philosophical than empirical and practical, my hope is that it has offered food for thought concerning not only how we might generatively rethink social change but also how we might more effectively pursue it across a range of sociopolitical sites and relations. As I suggested in chapter 1, our dominant habit of critique within social and cultural theory has assumed that making “the bad” visible it what is most required to change it. Yet the techniques of revelation and exposure associated with what Eve Sedgwick (2003) calls “paranoid reading” often do not address the powerful forms of habituation which underlie ingrained patterns of behaviour, nor do they necessarily consider the emergent habits and tendencies that might enable alternative social relations and capacities to come into being. Importantly, such dynamics extend far beyond the quotidian practices of academic theory. As I discussed in chapter 2, for instance, everyday habits of white domination do not persist through ignorance alone but rather via affective, psychosocial, and structural processes that are not undone simply by revealing injustice. As critical race scholars and activists have long argued, many white people are deeply invested in maintaining their privilege and will weaponise white fragility in the face of perceived vulnerability (Ahmed 2013; Hooker 2017; Yancy 2017) – a truth particularly evident in the wake

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of Trumpism and its affective politics. This raises the question of whether change might be more effectively pursued through indirect techniques which focus on altering the environments, (infra)structures, and atmospheres in which habits are reproduced. The claim is that such approaches can shift habitual behaviour without requiring conscious commitment or activating psychic defence mechanisms (Sullivan 2006) – or indeed without amplifying the transformative lure of revealing the truth. Environmentally oriented strategies, however, are informed by varying ontologies and ideologies, and the logics of habit are understood and deployed differently across the realms of philosophy, political governance, and social movements. As I discussed in chapter 3 in relation to nudge theory and pragmatist thought, it is important to distinguish between top-down modes of governing through habit led by neoliberal market logics on the one hand, and more speculative and participatory practices of habit transformation emerging from the shared routines and relations of everyday life on the other hand. Although pursuing habit modification through environmental change can be effective precisely because such techniques often operate subconsciously, this is also, of course, what makes them amenable to paternalism as well as authoritarian political aims. Beyond the spectre of fascism, the risk is that such approaches do not engage people’s own experiences, desires, and visions, or enable the kind of affective and psychosocial processing vital to more-than-fleeting transformation. In approaching social change in a minor key, the challenge, then, is to elaborate collective means of experimenting with habit that address the co-constitution of bodies and environments, alongside varied opportunities for introspection and inhabitation that might help to cultivate new tendencies and modes of attunement. It is about making thinking, sensing, and speculating with habit a shared endeavour, without equating agency with rational thought or participation with the myth of fully intentional, volitional subjects (Manning 2016). This involves opening up the modes of consciousness, attention, and cooperation through which transformation might emerge, while fostering conditions that “widen the horizon of others” and “give them command of their own powers” (Dewey [1922] 2012, 115). As I have argued, the imperative is to hone speculative approaches to change via

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habit that exceed the tropes of evidence, exposure, and affective revolution, without disavowing the need for critical engagement, transformative thought, and affective attention. Attending to the relationship between “the habitual” and “the affective” is, I have suggested, key to how particular habits might be transformed. Although environmental approaches often reorient behaviour below active consciousness, interventions in everyday architectures, interfaces, and atmospheres can also make people affectively aware of automated ways of seeing, thinking, feeling, and interacting, thus creating “actionable spaces” for change (Bennett 2013). What is vital to the development of new embodied tendencies and dispositions, however, are conditions that compel us to affectively inhabit arresting or uncomfortable encounters and their political and ethical implications. From this perspective, it is when sensing “becomes an activity” (Ravaisson [1838] 2008) that change at the level of habit becomes possible. As discussed in relation to the white gaze (chapter 2), online practices of meme-making (chapter 4) and digital witnessing of suffering and injustice (chapters 4 and 5), the potentiality at stake here is not so much that such experiences act as radical turning points, but rather that more durable forms of transformation emerge via their accumulation, iteration, and reverberation. Remaking embodied tendencies and dispositions is not insignificant to wider sociopolitical transformation, given how “the experiential” and “the structural” are mutually shaped (Goldberg 2015). Nonetheless, my argument has not been that structural change emerges in a straightforward manner via the aggregation of individual or personal habits. For one thing, such a linear vision obscures how “customs persist because individuals form their personal habits under conditions set by prior customs” (Dewey [1922] 2012, 26). It also, however, fails to address the role of more-than-human forces in the emergence and adaption of structural processes and oppressions – a reality particularly evident in our digital age in which adaptive algorithmic architectures track, discipline, and produce our habits in ways that far exceed human intentionality or control (chapter 5). The global outbreak of the new coronavirus also provides a stark example of how sudden changes to “external” conditions can disrupt shared routines, interactions, and infrastructures in unprecedented

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ways. As the novelist Arundhati Roy remarks, underscoring the role of nonhuman objects and agencies in the pandemic’s rapid restructuring of everyday habits: “Who can look at anything anymore – a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables – without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, unloving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves onto our lungs” (Roy 2020). The pandemic thus brings into relief the fundamental and yet fragile relationalities that compose our moving world, highlighting how “a poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy societies’ health” (Roy 2020) – and disrupting any lingering notion of nonpermeable boundaries between human or geopolitical bodies. In this context, in Revolutionary Routines I have examined how the dynamics of habit compel continued rethinking of the very meaning of “individual” and “structure” within more-than-human ecologies, in ways that resonate with of actor-network-theories, new materialisms, affect theory, and a range of ecological and infrastructural approaches. If habituation is, by definition, the product of evolving body-environment interactions, then habits are never simply individual or personal and the categories of human and nonhuman are both in flux and also inseparably intertwined. Structure, in turn, is an unfolding set of dynamics that must be continually inhabited from different angles to appreciate the processual qualities at play; rather than a static truth regularly invoked yet rarely unpacked. In conjunction with physiological, psychic, and affective processes, habit helps to explain how social structures are lived and materialised: how racism and sexism, for instance, work to “constitute the body’s muscle fibres, chemical production, digestive processes, genomic markers, and more” (Sullivan 2015, 17). Or how, in the midst of a global pandemic, “whether people live or die when they get sick depends on a web of social relations, the history of oppression carried in their bodies, what care is made available for them to receive, and so much more that we don’t yet understand” (Shotwell 2020). As a joint that sutures what I have termed “the individual” and “the structural,” habituation also, however, generates processes of difference, creativity, and becoming (Bergson [1896] 1991; Grosz 2013). Habits enable forms of agency that are radically distributed among organisms, objects, atmospheres, infrastructures, and environments.

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This is why I have argued that collective transformation requires speculative intervention at the level of habit assemblages, informed by ongoing attunement to the sensorial qualities of everyday experience. In the tradition of pragmatist and continental philosophies of habit, the processual dynamics discussed above also highlight the utility of approaching social life through the lens of “emergent properties,” in which “there is no such thing as an environment in general; there are only changing objects and events” (Dewey [1922] 2012, 62). Yet in a context animated by radically changing configurations of health, technology, (im)materiality, relationality, and agency, we also, I suggest, need to continually reassess what can be said to constitute “minds,” “bodies,” and “environments” – while appreciating that not all aspects of contemporary habit ecologies are amenable to human perception or sensibility (Pedwell 2021). What, then, does it look like to build a speculative politics of habit which is both committed to social justice and attuned to the unpredictability of more-than-human agencies and assemblages? In its emphasis on shared routines and responsivities as vital to the immanent enactment of social change, the tradition of prefigurative politics, I have suggested, provides a generative working blueprint for habit-oriented praxis that is at once participatory, liberatory, and open-facing. Attuned to the possibilities of shifting sociopolitical and media ecologies, the Black Lives Matter and Occupy movements, as discussed in chapter 5, have mobilised algorithmic media to inhabit dominant gestures and tendencies in process and to find collective ways to reimagine and reorient them. Through their iterative interventions in the everyday spaces and circuits of neoliberalism and racial capitalism, these networked activisms have generated new ways of thinking, feeling, and moving together – while enabling those most subject to pervasive technologies of control to prefigure alternative habits, freedoms, and modes of life-living. At a time when we might well have lost all hope in the transformative promise of progress and progressive politics, in this book I have developed a minor theory and praxis of social change focused on cultivating the capacity of everyday habits to activate processes of becoming otherwise in the present. Recognising the fundamental links between the revolutionary and the routine, this politics combines

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action on the urgent issues of the day with ongoing ecological intervention in physical, sociopolitical, cultural, economic, affective, and psychic conditions of possibility – while privileging speculation over prediction, responsivity over mastery, and the yet to be imagined over the already mapped out. In conceptualising solidarity beyond a model of “positive obligation” (Scholz 2009), it values more-thanhuman alliances and draws together a wide range of subjects, affects, gestures, and technologies in the political resonances and relationalities it aims to generate. Most vitally, perhaps, it is a collective project of social justice that remains in progress and unfinished – and therefore alive to habit’s emergent traces, connections, and potentialities. As I compose these concluding thoughts, we remain within the stretched-out present of the global coronavirus pandemic, a phenomenon that has put the world on pause in ways we might never have expected. It has “mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest – thus far – in the richest and most powerful nations in the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a shuddering halt” (Roy 2020). The loss of life is staggering and the devastating material, psycho-social, sociopolitical, and economic implications continue to unfold. Yet in inhabiting these new and distressing conditions, generative opportunities for dwelling, reflection, and change have also emerged. In Roy’s words, “the pandemic is a portal”: it compels us “to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves” (2020). Or, as the feminist philosopher Alexis Shotwell puts it, “COVID -19 is a virus; it’s also a relationship” (2020). When we approach coronavirus as a relationship, she suggests, “we can make ethical, political, and ecological evaluations of the relationships we proliferate in response to [it].” We can ask, for instance, whether we are cultivating relations and habits of “freedom and care, or containment and control” (2020). In this way, we might begin to sense the minor potentialities percolating within major responses to the virus; the prefigurative possibilities for a “world we want to be in relationship with” – not in the faraway future, but in the here and now.

noteS

PreFACe 1 I do not wish to frame a particular trajectory of learning to sleep as universal or transhistorical. As Jonathan Crary notes, sleep “has a dense history . . . It has never been something monolithic or identical, and over centuries and millennia it has assumed many variegated forms and patterns” (2013, 11; see also Fuller 2018). As I discuss later on, to describe sleep as habitual is precisely to understand how it is influenced by a wide range of environmental factors, and therefore variable across time and space. Interpreting sleep through the lens of habit also addresses how its “natural” or “instinctive” qualities are, in an important sense, acquired. In this vein, it is worth noting that the social theorist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss includes sleeping and waking in his discussion of “Body Techniques,” in which he argues that a range of “seemingly instinctive behaviours were in fact learned” (Crary 2013, 12). 2 There is a long history of philosophical and sociological engagements with sleep, including work that connects sleep, habit, and (in)attention. Descartes, Hume, and Locke each “disparaged sleep for its irrelevance to the operation of mind or the pursuit of knowledge,” instead valuing consciousness and rational thought (Crary 2013, 12). Yet for the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, human behaviour generally occurs in an in-between state of semi-consciousness. Tarde employs the concept of somnambulism – or sleepwalking – to describe the intermingling of nonconscious experience, mechanical habit, and volition in everyday conduct. As he puts it, there is no “absolute separation . . . between the voluntary and the involuntary . . . between the conscious and the unconscious. Do we not pass by insensible degrees from deliberate volition to almost mechanical habit?” (Tarde [1903] 2013, xi). In this respect, Tarde’s perspective resonates with Henri Bergson’s account of the role of memory

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and habit in human activity, as well as with the pragmatist philosophies of James and Dewey, who reject any notion of rational thought extracted from embodied habit and understand human conduct as always informed by lessthan-conscious processes and capacities. It also overlaps with the work of contemporary critical thinkers such as Erin Manning, whose account of more-than-human agency rejects any “hierarchy of conscious versus nonconscious experience” (2016, 23, 19) (see chapters 1 and 5 in this book). See Pedwell (2014, 2017a, 2017b). See also Sullivan (2006, 2012, 2015). Yet, as Manning notes, those who have been marginalised “may carry a special affinity for the minor and wish to compose with it” (2016, 7). Manning’s account of the “minor gesture” is also informed by James’s investigation of action and volition, Bergson’s work on memory and creative evolution, Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of “the actual occasion,” and Isabelle Stengers’s writing on ecology “in a minor key,” among other continental, pragmatist, and critical philosophies. See Ahmed (2004), Berlant (2011), Wetherell (2012), Blackman (2013), and Pedwell (2017a, 2017b, 2019). See Ahmed (2004), Clough with Halley (2007), Gregg and Seigworth (2010), Pedwell and Whitehead (2012), and Pedwell (2014, 2017a, 2017b, 2019, 2020a). See also Duhigg (2012). See Malabou (2008). See Sullivan (2006, 2012, 2015) and Ahmed (2010, 2015). See also Sullivan (2006, 2012, 2015). introdUCtion

1 See Camic (1986), Carlisle and Sinclair (2008), and Bennett et al. (2013). 2 We should, of course, recognise Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977, 1984, 1999) influential work on socioeconomic class and habitus and its considerable impact within contemporary social theory. Bourdieu’s account of habitus remains relevant to contemporary debates concerning habit and social reproduction (despite his own efforts to distinguish “habitus” from “habit”). I do not, however, foreground his work in Revolutionary Routines, not only because there is so much incisive scholarship that already does so, but also because the more speculative approach to the links between habit, becoming, and transformation found in pragmatist and continental philosophies is most relevant to my project. 3 See also Blackman (2012, 2013) and Grosz (2013). 4 This is evident in the publication of special issues of Body and Society (Bennett et al. 2013) and Cultural Geographies (Dewsbury and Bissell 2015), as well as in

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a range of prominent books and articles foregrounding the concept of habit. See, for example, Sullivan (2006, 2012, 2015, 2017), Carlisle and Sinclair (2008), Malabou (2008), Shilling (2008), Tarr (2008), Weiss (2008), Bennett (2013, 2015), Bissell (2013, 2015, 2018), Grosz (2013), Sparrow and Hutchinson (2013), Carlisle (2014), Fraser et al. (2014), Chun (2016), Pedwell (2017a, 2017b, 2017c, 2019, 2020b, 2021), and Bennett et al. (2021). See Sullivan (2006, 2012, 2015), Shilling (2008), Bennett (2013, 2015), Bennett et al. (2013), Blackman (2013, 2019), Connolly (2013), Massumi (2015), Manning (2016), and Wilkie et al. (2017). See Massumi (2015) and Manning (2016). For Massumi, “when the world becomes speculative in this way, the history of the present is forced onto the same speculative terrain” (2015, 242). He argues that “what the antiwar, anticapitalist left needs is not to discard the modes of action-perception that have characterised its enactive history for a few short decades. It needs to hone them. It needs to continue to engage the only terrain there is: becoming” (243–4). As Butler explains in the tenth anniversary preface to Gender Trouble, her “dogged effort to ‘denaturalize’ gender” at the end of the 1980s emerged from “a strong desire” to “uncover the ways in which the very thinking of what is possible in gendered life is foreclosed by certain habitual and violent presumptions.” That is, to expose how everyday habits of thought produced via dominant scientific, medical, religious, and political discourses not only constrained a range of possibilities for gendered life, but in fact “rendered them unthinkable” (1999, viii). As Butler argues, “the very terms that confer ‘humanness’ on some individuals are those that deprive certain other individuals of the possibility of achieving that status, producing a differential between the human and the less-thanhuman” (2004, 2). She notes, however, that there may be advantages to remaining unintelligible if intelligibility is understood as “that which is produced as a consequence of recognition according to prevailing social norms” (3). See also Puar (2007). As I have suggested, some working under the banner of “the speculative” figure transformation as materialising via unforeseen events that fundamentally rupture existing ecological conditions. Savarnsky et al., for example, associate speculative thinking with “an eventual temporality which assumes that ‘continent, unexpected and inherently unpredictable events can undo and alter the most apparently durable trends in history’” (Sewell 2005, 102 cited in Savranksy et al. 2017, 7). An abbreviation of alternative right, the alt-right is a far-right political movement that emerged in the United States during the 2010s and became a transnational phenomenon through its networked dynamics. It has been

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associated with white nationalism, white supremacism, right-wing populism, anti-immigration, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, antifeminism and homophobia. For an analysis of the links among the alt-right, Trump, and “online culture wars” see Nagle (2017). See discussion in Sontag (2003) and Pedwell (2017b). See Pedwell (2014a, 2017a, 2017b). See Foucault ([1975] 1995, 2008), Bennett (2013, 2015), Bennett et al. (2021), Blackman (2013), and Pedwell (2017c). Schuller understands impressibility as “the capacity of a substance to receive impressions from external objects that thereby change its characteristics. Impressibility signals the capacity of matter to be alive to movements made on it, to retain and incorporate changes rendered in its material over time” (2018, 7). Defined as such, impressibility resonates with James’s and Dewey’s concept of “plasticity,” which I discuss in chapter 3. In The Right to Maim, Jasbir Puar associates debility with “forms of slow death” and addresses “the quotidian modalities of wide-scale debilitation so prevalent due to capitalist exploitation and imperialist expansion.” In her framework, capacity and debility are bound to one another – and to disability – in the aftermath of colonialism and contemporary forms of neo-imperialism and racial capitalism (2017, xvi). As discussed in chapter 3, I use the term “(post-)neoliberal” to indicate how contemporary practices of governing through habit informed by behavioural economics both incorporate and move beyond the neoliberal principle of individual responsibility. See also Thaler and Sunstein (2003a, 2003b, 2006) and Sunstein (2015). See Pedwell (2017c). See Sedgwick (2003) and Pedwell (2014b). See Stengers (2005) and Manning (2016). See discussion in Sullivan (2006, 2015), Bennett (2013, 2015), and Pedwell (2017c). Anderson emphasises, however, that governing through affect is not new but rather has a long history (2014, 29). Moreover, such techniques do not constitute “a single or coherent phenomenon that can be easily mapped onto contemporary political-economic transformations.” Rather, affective manipulation constitutes “one modality of action that takes place alongside others” (30–1). For more on affective governance, see Pedwell (2012, 2014a), Closs Stephens (2016), and Jupp, Pykett, and Smith (2016). For more on the relationship between habit and addiction, see Malabou (2008) and Fraser et al. (2014). As Carlisle and Sinclair explain, “the essence of this modern project is the emancipation and purification of reason from all historical contingencies,

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cultural prejudices and bodily impulses – from tradition, from superstition, from the passions, and from all the illusions of the senses from habit.” A such, “the liberated, autonomous subject would ground its knowledge and legitimize its actions on the basis, and without the limits of, reason alone” (2008, 6). See also Dewey (1896). As Carlisle and Sinclair discuss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty details the role of habit in the formation of the lived body in The Phenomenology of Perception (1945). Habit, Merleau-Ponty writes, is “knowledge in the hands,” and he emphasises that “it is the body which understands the acquisition of habit” (Carlisle and Sinclair 2008, 19). What is vital to the embodied intelligence of habits is their capacity to anticipate the future. As Malabou notes in her reading of Ravaisson, while a habit first emerges as the effect of a repeated change, “it gradually becomes a cause of change itself, as it initiates and maintains its repetition” (Malabou 2008, ix–x). From this perspective, habits are the result of past action, but they are also what make possible a range of future possibilities (viiii). As Grosz puts it, synthesising the philosophies of Ravaisson, Bergson, and Deleuze, “habit is change contracted, compressed, contained . . . It remains there as possible or potential action even when the change which brought it about ceases. It thus anticipates a possible change. It is, in other words, a potentiality, a possibility, a virtual mode of addressing a future change.” In temporal terms, then, a habit transforms a being “so that its past experiences act to anticipate what the future may require” (Grosz 2013, 220). Manning’s theorisation of “the event” draws from Alfred North Whitehead’s ([1927] 1979) account of “the actual occasion.” In his writing, as she notes, “it is the event’s atomicity, its capacity to be fully what it is, that ultimately opens the way for the potential of what is to come” (2016, 3). See also Bennett et al. (2013). The term “racial capitalism” was coined by Cedric Robinson (1983). See discussion in chapter 5. CHAPter one

1 See Massumi (2002a), Hemmings (2005), Blackman and Venn (2010), Gregg and Seigworth (2010), Blackman (2012, 2013, 2019), Pedwell and Whitehead (2012), Wetherell (2012), Anderson (2014), and Pedwell (2014a). 2 See also Hemmings (2014), Pedwell (2014b), Stacey (2014), Wiegman (2014), and Felski (2015). 3 See Pedwell (2012a, 2012b, 2013, 2014a, 2016, 2017a, 2017b). 4 See also Bennett (2005) and Amin and Thrift (2013). 5 For an insightful account of Lefebvre’s rythmanalysis as a theory and method, see Lyon (2018).

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6 For more on the links between habits and everyday life, see Felski (1999, 2015), Highmore (2002, 2010), and May (2020). 7 See Bennett et al. (2013), Sparrow and Hutchinson (2013), Carlisle (2014), and Dewsbury and Bissell (2015). 8 See also Bennett (2013, 2015). 9 See also Blackman (2013). 10 See Thaler and Sunstein (2008). 11 See also Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, a key text for the renewed interest in habit in critical theory and continental philosophy, in which the fundamental intertwinement of repetition with singularity and the production of difference means that “habit never gives rise to true repetition” ([1968] 2011, 5). 12 See Lawlor and Moulard (2020). 13 As Bennett discusses, Ravaisson was writing at a time in nineteenth-century Europe when physical psychology and neuropsychology began to interpret habits “as a purely physio-anatomical set of instinctual reflexes” in ways that “trespassed on questions of the will, consciousness and freedom that had been the exclusive terrains of theology and philosophy” (2015, 6). In response to such tensions, Of Habit ([1838] 2008) offers a reading of habituation that enables earlier theological and philosophical notions to align with, without fully capitulating to, the emerging physical sciences. 14 As Carlisle argues, from this perspective, human beings can possess the “divine gift” of grace, and “even cultivate it through their own actions,” but they are never fully in control of this “divinely infused habitus” because it “has its own momentum” – a momentum orchestrated by God (2014, 120–1). 15 See also Shilling (2008), Weiss (2008), and Coleman (2014). 16 As I discuss in chapter 4, Ravaisson similarly addresses this tendency for affect to weaken over time in his discussion of the “double law” of habit. 17 See also Shilling (2008), Grosz (2013), and Coleman (2014). 18 In these ways, Dewey’s framework resonates with other prominent strands of contemporary social and cultural theory, such as Butler’s analysis of gender and sexuality, that conceptualise embodiment and subjectivity as performatively constituted, as well as those that understand social relations and phenomena as working through pulsating networks or assemblages, from Lefevre’s analysis of everyday life and the social production of the city, to Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory, to various new materialisms and ecological approaches. 19 Dewey’s approach here again overlaps with theories of affect influenced by Spinoza and Deleuze. 20 See Pedwell (2014b). 21 See Bennett (2013, 2015), Bennett et al. (2013), and Blackman (2013). 22 See Ahmed (2010) and Schuller (2018).

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23 With respect to gendered power relations, for example, Dewey acknowledges at various points that there are “differences in men’s and women’s viewpoints brought about by male domination” and “that marriage and family life often oppress women” (Sullivan 2000, 23). In turn, in his 1940 defence of the philosopher Bertrand Russell (who was denied a prestigious academic position due to his nontraditional views concerning religion, marriage, and sexuality), Dewey begins a conversation with the potential to challenge dominant “beliefs about gender by questioning prevailing notions of sex and (hetero)sexuality” (Sullivan 2000, 23–4). Nonetheless, he never exploits this critical potential because his references to the particularity of women’s experiences, and that of those outside the heterosexual mainstream, remained too brief and underdeveloped. Dewey might well have considered normative ideas about sexual difference and sexual morality as part of the social environments within which embodied habits are (re)produced; however, this does not (and perhaps could not in the historical context in which he was writing) lead him to understand habit, along Butler’s (1989, 1993) lines, as ontologically gendered and sexualised. Moreover, although he is more open-minded about homosexuality than many of his contemporaries, Dewey, like Russell, “adhered to the thenprevailing ‘it’s just a phase’ view among psychologists that only heterosexual is ‘normal’ as an end stage of sexual development” (Fesmire 2015, 30). Consequently, Dewey’s short intellectual foray into the realm of non-normative sexuality ends up reifying the pervasive heteronormativity that Butler and other queer and feminist scholars and activists would later critique. 24 See Sullivan (2006, 2015) and Weiss (2008). 25 See, for example, Connolly (2002, 2013), Sullivan (2006, 2015), Shilling (2008), Bennett (2013), Bennett et al. (2013), and Noble (2013). 26 See Young (1990), Kelley (2002), Freeman (2010), and Duhigg (2012). 27 See also Bennett (2015) and Shilling (2008). 28 These approaches also resonate with Bergson’s account of intuition as an immersive form of sensorial engagement with the richness and flux of material life which operates before, or in excess of, the parsing categories of analytical thought (see discussion in Pedwell 2019). As Manning discusses, Bergson “suggests that the best problem is one that opens up an intuitive process, not the one that already carries within itself its fix” (2016, 10). 29 See Noble (2013). CHAPter tWo 1 See also Hesse and Hooker (2017). 2 Emerging from the ruins of multiculturalism, post-raciality and its conservative cheerleaders employed the election of America’s first Black president as

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evidence that race was no longer relevant, that “key conditions of social life are less and less now predicated on racial preferences, choices and resources” (Goldberg 2015, 2). They could do so, Goldberg suggests, in a context in which neoliberalism’s obsession with individual self-responsibility had produced “exploding impatience [with] group or communal claims,” while simultaneously concealing the structures perpetuating racial inequality and injustice (2015, 27–8). See also Melamed (2006), Goldberg (2009), and Yancy (2017). The concept of habit has long been present within, if not central to, interdisciplinary discussions of race and racial discrimination, particularly since the publication of the psychologist Gordon Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice (1954). As Greg Noble notes, if research emerging in the wake of Allport’s landmark text tended to portray racism as “a ‘bad habit’ which has to be broken and replaced with good habits which inhibit prejudice,” more recent scholarship in the pragmatist philosophical tradition, including work by Shannon Sullivan and Thomas MacMullan, focuses on how racial habits “operate as dispositions for transacting the world and orienting humans in social environments” (2013, 164). Developing elements of this latter line of thought, I follow Dewey in understanding habits as (re)constituted through the interaction of bodies and environments, wherein “environment” is understood to incorporate the physical, material, social, political, cultural, economic, psychic, affective, and atmospheric. I also, however, examine how pragmatist and continental philosophies of habit might be enriched and transformed through engagement with critical race theories and radical Black thought, including the work of Sara Ahmed, David Theo Goldberg, Shannon Sullivan, George Yancy, Claudia Rankine, Christina Sharpe, and others. As Miri Song (2015) argues, it is problematic to assume “racial equivalence” among racist discourses and practices that take shape differently across space and time and in relation to different racialised groups. See also Amos et al. (1984), Ahmed (2000, 2012), and Moreno Figueroa (2010). Clinton’s candidacy, however, also raised complex issues at the intersection of race, gender, class, and American imperialism, with many younger voters in particular opting to support her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders because of her perceived complicity in the racialised “war on crime” policies of Bill Clinton’s administration in the 1990s, alongside her support for military intervention in the Middle East and her wider alignment with neoliberal values and practices. As Nancy Fraser argues, despite their major ideological differences, rising populisms of the right and left in North America and Europe represent shared responses to the structural crisis of contemporary capitalism and its “lethal combination of austerity, free trade, predatory debt, and precarious, ill-paid work” (2017).

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7 For analysis of the intersections of race and class in Brexit and Trump’s election, see Bhambra (2017). 8 Unpacking the significance of white privilege and anxiety to the emergence of Trumpism, however, requires a perspective that moves beyond the “exceptional” figure of Trump to address a wider host of political actors and relations. Long before Trump’s emergence, the US Republican Party “was the most politically entrenched, racially homogenous, far right political party in the Western world” – one that regularly mobilised anti-immigrant rhetoric and “racially coded appeals to law and order” (Singh 2016). The Trump campaign’s hostility towards nonwhite immigrants and Muslims also reflected sentiments amplified over many years by the neoconservative “war on terror.” Where Trump differs from Republican leaders of the recent past is in his direct (rather than implicit) attacks on marginalised groups and his licensing of crude forms of racist and xenophobic speech (Sullivan 2017). It is also clear, however, that the Democratic Party has not been consistently averse to “the deployment of bigotry to suit electoral ends” (Young 2016) – as evident in the 1990s when Bill Clinton’s progressive neoliberalism subtly appropriated “the right’s dog whistle racism and policy preferences,” while confining “racial inequality to a repertoire of symbolic, theatrical and empathetic nods to diversity” (Singh 2016). Indeed, although multiculturalism first emerged “from below,” as anti-racist activists and communities sought to address continuing racial and ethnic cleavages in the wake of the civil rights movement (Goldberg 2009), its state-sanctioned forms (both Republican and Democrat) have been undermined through their intertwinement with racialised market logics, neo-imperialist foreign policy, and domestic carceral practices which disproportionally target and punish Black people and people of colour. See also Davis (2001, 2016), Puar (2007, 2017), and Goldberg (2015). 9 In this respect, I am indebted to Goldberg’s work on racial neoliberalism (2009, 2015) as well as to wider scholarship on racial capitalism (Robinson 1983). 10 Although Trump’s election campaign moved decisively away from the neoliberal status quo, offering in its place a “producerist populism on the economy” (Singh 2016), his success was arguably made possible by decades of neoliberal social and economic ideology and policy. Trumpism and its racial politics should thus be viewed as emerging via the constitutive intersection of neoliberal governmentality and much older forms of racial hierarchy and habituation, among other sociopolitical and economic processes and relations. 11 However, not long after his Saturday Night Live performance, Ansari became embroiled in a sexual harassment controversy after he was publically accused of taking advantage of a woman on a date – an incident that certainly complicates his reference to Brown and indeed his broader “feminist” public persona. See Katie Way, “I Went on a Date with Aziz Ansari. It Turned into the Worst

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Night of My Life,” Babe, 13 January 2018, https://babe.net/2018/01/13/azizansari-28355. As Felix Ravaisson’s ([1838] 2008) work in particular illustrates, habits are formed and reformed via an embodied capacity for receptivity that enables us to intuitively react to and assimilate particular aspects of our physical and social surroundings without becoming overwhelmed by them. See also Sullivan (2015, 2017). See also Ahmed (2007). This is an insight most famously developed in relation to wider socioeconomic processes through Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977, 1984) concept of “habitus.” This should not, however, be taken to mean that individual habits are temporally prior to collective or structural habits and that it is therefore the consolidation of individual habits that makes certain gestures and modes of response collective. I discuss this point further in the conclusions to this book. See also Ahmed (2007, 2010, 2015), MacMullan (2009), Noble (2013), and Wise and Noble (2016). Paraphrasing Du Bois’s discussion of “the wages of whiteness” in Black Recon­ struction in America, 1860–1880 (1935), Sullivan notes how this deal “protected upper class white people by fracturing the energy, power, and focus of the working class, pitting white and black workers against each other” (2017). While the deal largely worked against the economic interests of workingclass white people, it ensured they “would be paid public and psychological wages tied to their whiteness in lieu of higher economic wages.” This included “publicly performed rituals of respect and deference: being addressed as ‘Mister’ rather than ‘boy,’ walking on the sidewalk while black people stepped out of your way onto the street, enjoying whites-only spaces such as swimming pools and water fountains, and overseeing people of color as police officers and in other positions of social authority” (2017). For Black people and people of colour, the embodied and psychic effects of such receptivity to white domination can be potent. Indeed, habitual exposure to racial microaggressions may, most profoundly, lead to foreshortened lives, rendering their objects “more vulnerable targets of legitimated violence and ultimately unnoticed or overlooked death” (Goldberg 2009, 27). See also Rankine (2014), Puar (2017), and Yancy (2017). See Goldberg (2009). Goldberg here draws on Hannah Arendt’s concept of “thoughtlessness” (Arendt [1963] 2006, 234–52). Racism is a form of “thoughtlessness,” Goldberg argues, because “in a deep sense, racists do not know – or at least not fully – what they do. They may, of course, seek to irk, degrade, or dehumanize. Yet even in those cases they are most likely utterly unthinking about the full dimensions of their actions and their impacts, refusing the implications for all involved” (2015, 161).

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22 See also Fanon ([1952] 1986). 23 Employing an amalgam of different genres, from poetry, to criticism to visual imagery, in Citizen Rankine addresses appalling incidents of racist hate and violence portrayed in media and public culture as flashpoint events: the beating of Rodney King, the treatment of the Jena Six, and the murders of Trayvon Martin and Mark Duggan. Yet, underlying and pulsating through these events is the most arresting element of Rankine’s narrative: her relentless accounting of everyday racialised microaggressions. She depicts the white friend who when distracted would call Rankine by the name of her Black housekeeper; the white mother who switches seats on the plane so that her daughter does not have to sit beside the Black lady; the white colleague who tells Rankine that it seems like she is always on sabbatical; the white customer who is surprised to be told that he has jumped the cue ahead of Rankine because he “really didn’t see [her]” (2014, 77). In this way, she illustrates compellingly how “extraordinary” events of white supremacy and racist violence are inherently linked to the habitual dynamics of white domination – and hence are not extraordinary at all. 24 See the Economist (2016). 25 See Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly, “President Trump Has Made More than 10,000 False or Misleading Claims,” Washington Post, 29 April 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/29/president-trumphas-made-more-than-false-or-misleading-claims/. 26 See Butler (2016). 27 This is consistent with how continental and pragmatist philosophies of habit understand the relationship between consciousness and will. Although habits may not be conscious to us, they nonetheless indicate a particular form of will or intention; they are, as Dewey suggests, “active means, means that project themselves, energetic and dominating ways of acting” ([1922] 2012, 14) (see the introduction to this book). 28 Sullivan acknowledges this in her more recent work. See Sullivan (2017). 29 See Pedwell (2014b). 30 This is a key aspect of Sullivan’s analysis in Good White People (2012) that critical race and decolonial scholars have critiqued. See, for example, Shotwell (2013). 31 As mentioned earlier, this is not, of course, to suggest that social proximity necessarily promotes convivial or indeed anti-racist relations – the violent histories of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism and their legacies bely any such claims. Focusing on contemporary multicultural relations, Noble notes in this vein that “habitual contact is no guarantee of cultural exchange because it can entrench animosities” (2013, 165). He cites Amin’s acknowledgment, for example, that housing estates often “fall short of inculcating inter-ethnic understanding because they are not structured as spaces of interdependence

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and habitual engagement” (Amin 2002, 969 cited in Noble 2013, 165). Significantly, these complexities of cross-racial engagement in the context of white domination relate to a particular aspect of Dewey’s understanding of racial discrimination that Sullivan takes issue with. In assuming that “the problem of racial prejudice” can be addressed via a “transformation of the foreign into the familiar” achieved through “more interaction and “mutual assimilation” between different cultures,” Dewey fails, Sullivan argues, to understand the real nature and impact of “racial friction” (2006, 36–7). CHAPter tHree 1 See also Sunstein (2015), Thaler (2015), and Thaler and Sunstein (2003a, 2003b, 2006). 2 See also Burgess (2012). 3 The “nudge unit” has since detached from government to become a social purpose company, the Behavioural Insights Team (Halpern 2015). Significantly, as Sonia Sodha notes, the Behavioural Insights Team is now a multimillionpound venture, “which pays Halpern, who owns 7.5% of its shares, a bigger salary than the prime minister” (2020). 4 For further critical analysis of nudge theory, see Bovens (2008), Selinger and Whyte (2008), John, Smith, and Stoker (2009), Hussman and Welch (2010), Dow Shüll (2016), Jupp, Pykett, and Smith (2016), and Sodha (2020). 5 Hall, it is worth noting, was a pupil of William James at Harvard and would go on to found the American Psychological Association, of which John Dewey would later become president (Blackman 2013; Fesmire 2015). 6 See also Bennett (2013, 2015). 7 See, for example, Halpern (2015, 111, 128, 132). 8 See also Pedwell (2017a). 9 As Lisa Blackman (2013, 191) explores, neovitalist thinkers such as McDougall draw on the work of Gabriel Tarde to develop an account of the role of less-than-conscious processes (including but not limited to habit) in shaping human conduct which “challenged the increasing mechanization” of behavioural psychology. 10 See also Hausman and Welch (2010). 11 See, for example, Bordo (1993). 12 See also Bovens (2008) and John, Smith, and Stoker (2009). 13 See also John, Smith, and Stoker (2009). 14 As the geographer David Bissell explores, the forces propelling change in particular habits (or habit assemblages) can be both material and immaterial, including the “powers of atmospheres and anticipations, stresses and strains: in short: the nonrepresentational powers of affect that work to bind together

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bodies and environments” (2013, 121). See also Wetherell (2012), Blackman (2013), Anderson (2014), Closs Stephens (2016), and Pedwell (2017a, 2017b, 2020b). See Brown (2015) and Rose (1989, 1996). See also Bovens (2008) and John, Smith, and Stoker (2009). See Brown (2015) and Rose (1989, 1996). Jones et al. (2012) do, however, discuss recent efforts by community groups to appropriate elements of behavioural change thinking to address particular neighbourhood issues (such as speeding) at a grassroots level. “Neoliberalism” and “paternalism” should not be seen as mutually exclusive. As Mitchell Dean (2010) argues, neoliberal forms of governance are plural and fragmented and advanced liberal societies have regularly combined neoliberal ideologies and practices with neoconservative, neo-paternalist, and even sovereign coercive technologies. See Sedgwick (2003). See also Massumi (2015) and Wilkie et al. (2017). Importantly, as discussed in chapter 1, the critique of calculative prediction philosophers of habit offer is not a disavowal of knowledge gleaned from past experience – indeed, Dewey’s advocacy of intelligent “foreseeing” in grappling with habits is premised on careful reflection concerning the outcomes and implications of previous (re)actions. CHAPter FoUr

1 See, for example, Ahmed (2014), Berlant (2011), Blackman (2012, 2013), Wetherell (2012), and Grosz (2013). 2 See also Blackman (2012), Bissell (2013), Grosz (2013), and Pedwell (2017b). 3 There are some resonances between claims regarding the power of revelatory images to catalyse change and modernist investments in the transformative capacity of “defamiliarisation” (Shklovsky 1914) via literature and the arts. For example, in making social processes and routines seem unfamiliar rather than automatic, the defamiliarising effect of particular aesthetic images was interpreted by modernists as having the capacity to bring about changes in habits of perception and behaviour. 4 See Sontag (2003), Carby (2004), and Chouliaraki (2006). 5 See Hall (1997), Mirzoeff (2006), and Zeilezer (2010). 6 See also Sontag (1977). 7 In this vein, Anna Gibbs argues that human perception is mediated both by learnt “affective scripts” and by popular media genres, which render scenes “that would otherwise require time for close inspection quickly intelligible” (2007, 127). This means that when “real-life” images are viewed through, for

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example, the genre of “horror” (as epitomized by the “horror film”), their effects (and affects) depend “as much on familiarity and photographic convention” as they do “on shock” (127). For more on digital media, affect, and politics, see Karatzogianni and Kuntsman (2012), Hesse and Hooker (2017), Nagle (2017), Barnett and DeLuca (2019), Pedwell (2019), Boler and Davis (2020), and Ingraham (2020). See also Ash (2012). See also Kember and Zylynska (2012). Embodied habits, Dewey suggests, work by adapting to a given environment (and taking aspects of it in), but they also function to affect and reconfigure environments – and because “environment” is always multiple, human nature too “is plural” ([1922] 2012, 24). For more on the affective politics of feminist digital memes, see Keller, Mendes, and Ringrose (2016), Ringrose and Lawrence (2018), and Mendes, Ringrose, and Keller (2019). As Rentschler and Thrift note, “On 16 October 2012, the Internet exploded with humorous visual image macros in response to Romney’s answer to a voter’s question regarding women’s pay inequity during the televised presidential debate. He replied, ‘I went to a number of women’s groups and said: “Can you help me find folks,” and they brought us whole binders full of women’” (2015b, 330). For more on affective amplification in digital environments, see Ash (2012), who explores how videogame creators employ principles of “affective design” involving techniques of “amplification and modulation” to capture gamers’ attention in particular ways. CHAPter FiVe

1 Cynthia Hurd, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson, Ethel Lee Lance, Susie Jackson, Depayne Middleton Doctor, Clementa Pinckney, Daniel L. Simmons, and Tywanza Sanders were murdered by a white supremacist at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on 15 June 2015. 2 As Breland notes, although the software is designed “to get smarter and more accurate with machine learning techniques, the training data sets it uses are often composed of white faces. The code ‘learns’ by looking at more white people – which doesn’t help it improve with a diverse array of races.” Furthermore, “law enforcement agencies often don’t review their software to check for baked-in racial bias – and there aren’t laws or regulations forcing them to” (Breland 2017). 3 In a case in Calgary, Canada, for example, the Cadillac Fairview group defended its use of facial recognition technologies “to track shoppers’ ages and genders

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without notifying them or obtaining their explicit consent” at two Calgary shopping centres on the basis that its software “does not record or store any photos or video from the directory cameras” (Rieger 2018). For more on the links among race, racism, and surveillance, see Browne (2015), Benjamin (2019a), and Amoore (2020). Simone Browne uses the concept of “racializing surveillance” to address “a technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise ‘a power to define what is in or out of place’” (Browne 2015, 16). The term “racial capitalism” was coined by the political theorist Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983). As Robin D.G. Kelley notes, Robinson was interested in how Marxism “failed to account for the racial character of capitalism” and sought to theorise how “capitalism and racism . . . did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of ‘racial capitalism’ dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism and genocide.” For Robinson, “capitalism was ‘racial’ not because of some conspiracy to divide workers or justify slavery and dispossession, but because racialism had already permeated Western feudal society” (Kelley 2017). In its contemporary usage, as Gargi Bhattacharyya notes, racial capitalism addresses “the role of racism in enabling key moments of capitalist development” (2019, ix). It “includes the sedimented histories of racialised dispossession that shape economic life in our time” as well as “new and unpredictable” modes of controlling and extracting value from Black bodies (2019, x). See Ahmed (2014) and Puar (2017). As Mirzoeff discusses, “if an enslaved person looked at an overseer or owner it was considered ‘eye service,’ and was immediately punishable” (2017, 88). In the Jim Crow period, looking across the colour line was referred to as “reckless eyeballing,” an act with “the added connotation of forbidden desire . . . that authorized fatal violence in response” (2017, 88). Relatedly, Ruha Benjamin coins the term “the New Jim Code” (a riff on Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow) to describe technological “innovation that enables social containment while appearing fairer than discriminatory practices of a previous era.” She addresses “how the reproduction of racist forms of social control in successive institutional forms (slavery, Jim Crow, ghettoization, mass incarceration) now entails a crucial sociotechnical component that hides not only the nature of domination, but allows it to penetrate every facet of human life” (2019b, 3). See also Hartman (1997), Browne (2015), Sharpe (2016), and Benjamin (2019a). An algorithm is “a finite set of instructive steps that can be followed mechanically, without comprehension, and that is used to organise, calculate, control, shape and sometimes predict outcomes” (Coleman et al. 2018, 8) – for

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example, the “promise to be able to identify the relations of AB in association with XY , where W is also present” (Amoore 2013, 43). Whether via the aggregative nature of social media, the filtering of results on search engines, or the dynamics of contextual advertising and automatic news production, algorithms have come to play an increasingly central role in everyday life. What is distinctive about contemporary machine learning algorithms is “their capacity to learn something in excess of taught rules”; to continually adapt in response to the features they encounter in their “data environments” (Amoore 2020, 65). As Louise Amoore suggests, what is most instructive in the critical study of contemporary algorithms is how different algorithms experiment and learn in practice; “their empirical profusion and practical existence in the wild” (Seaver 2017, 2 cited in Amoore 2020, 10). 9 See, for example, Amoore (2013, 2018, 2019, 2020), Eubanks (2017), Noble (2018), and Benjamin (2019a). 10 How to address particular practices of algorithmic oppression, however, is not always clear or uncomplicated. As Amoore notes, many of those concerned with algorithmic discrimination have “argued for removing the ‘bias’ or the ‘value judgements’ of the algorithm, and for regulating harmful and damaging mathematical models.” Yet such calls, she argues, often assume that “there is an outside to the algorithm – an accountable human subject who is the locus of responsibility, the source of a code of conduct with which algorithms must comply” (2020, 5). When we consider how we are always already enmeshed in the data that algorithmic architectures produce – and how machine learning algorithms “are generative agents conditioned by their exposure to the features of data inputs” in ways that far exceed human control or awareness – it becomes clear how “removing bias” from a given algorithm is not a straightforward operation. For example, “the removal of a step one assumed to contain sensitive data on race . . . would not remove or delete the process of learning via proxies how to recognize by means of racialized attributes” (2020, 10). In Amoore’s view, confronting the links among algorithms, power, and ethics requires understanding how, through their regimes of recognition, “algorithms are generating the bounded conditions of what a democracy, a border crossing, a social movement, an election, or a public protest could be in the world” (2020, 5). She advocates a “cloud ethics” that involves “reopening the multiplicity of the algorithm, digging under the stories, and attending to the branching pathways that continue to run beneath the surface” – an approach, in other words, which is attuned to the minor currents and possibilities of algorithmic technologies and politics. 11 In a public letter reflecting on Black Lives Matter’s inception, its co-founder Patrisse Cullors notes how, following the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer in 2013, she “saw the phrase Black Lives Matter spelled out by Alicia Garza in a love letter towards Black people [and] . . . decided to put a hashtag on

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it.” Initially created by Cullors, Garza, and Opal Tometi as an “online community to help combat anti-Black racism across the globe,” #BlackLivesMatter expanded in conjunction with the protests following Mike Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and subsequently developed into the Black Lives Matter Global Network, a decentralised, member-led network with more than forty chapters, as well as the Black Lives Matter Foundation, Inc. See Black Lives Matter, “Six Years Strong,” https://blacklivesmatter.com/six-yearsstrong/. See Black Lives Matter, “About,” https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/. This was evident, for example, in the collaboration of anti-racist activists and Occupy participants in protesting the 2011 execution of Troy Davis, a working-class Black man whom many believed to be falsely accused (Taylor 2016). Digital media have also enabled protesters to redirect crowd activity in realtime to avoid the containment strategies of authorities. During the student protests against the increase in UK university fees in 2011, which became linked in with Occupy UK , for example, the app Sukey enabled activists to avoid police kettleing in London by allowing them to both “submit and access information about which road junctions are clear and which are blocked by the authorities” (Geere 2011). Black Lives Matter explicitly defines itself as “an inclusive and spacious movement” which “centres those who have been marginalized within Black liberation movements” and affirms “the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, undocumented folks, folks with records, women, and all Black lives along the gender spectrum.” See Black Lives Matter, “About,” https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/. See also Davis (2016) and Hesse and Hooker (2017). See, for example, Moeller (1998) and Sontag (2003). See Engler and Engler (2014). See Hesse and Hooker (2017). The term “prefigurative politics” was coined by the political theorist Carl Boggs and popularised by the sociologist Wini Breines (Engler and Engler 2014). For more recent work in this area see, for example, Howard and Pratt Boyden (2013), Cornish et al. (2016), and Mirzoeff (2017). Digital technologies and ecologies are, as I have discussed, vital to such prefigurative possibilities. Indeed, as Imogen Tyler argues, it is often not the “events of protest or resistance in themselves” but rather their re-mediation, that is, “the storying of revolts . . . which matters most” (original italics, 2013, 12–13). From her perspective, “it is the vitalization and proliferation of political protests and acts of resistance within their many documentary afterlives that allows for the weaving of alternative political imaginaries with which to perceive differently the state we are in” (2013, 13).

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22 Within the Black radical tradition that takes inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois, Cedric Robinson, Sylvia Wynter, Angela Davis, and others, race is understood “as constitutive of the episteme of Western normative rule” in the aftermath of slavery (Hesse and Hooker 2017, 445). Although Hesse and Hooker do not suggest that “black politics should retreat entirely from the formally political,” they emphasise the importance of thinking against and beyond the state as the key site for political action and intelligibility (2017, 449). 23 See also Sanjay Sharma (2013) on the radical political possibilities of Black Twitter. 24 See also Taylor (2016). 25 See, for example, Gladwell (2010). 26 See also Delezue and Guattari (1994). 27 See Malabou (2008) and Pedwell (2017a, 2017b, 2019, 2020b). 28 Although Black Lives Matter and other contemporary anti-racist, feminist, queer, and trans movements have been characterised by conservatives, centrists, and some critical theorists as constituting essentialist forms of “identity politics,” they are in fact, I argue, linked by an orientation of political expansiveness. As Butler notes in her discussion of Occupy Wall Street, for instance, “no one is ever asked to produce an identity card before gaining access to such a demonstration. If you appear as a body on the street, you help to make the claim that emerges from that plural set of bodies, amassing and persisting there” (2015, 58). 29 That being said, it is not possible or desirable to draw rigid distinctions between the political left and right in North America, Western Europe, or transnationally; indeed, within current sociopolitical conditions and infrastructures, we are arguably witnessing greater blurring and cross-utilisation of ideologies and tactics across the political spectrum. Far-right forces practice their own forms of prefigurative politics to the extent that they seek to actualise their desired future society in the present via their means of living and organising. 30 See Black Lives Matter, “Herstory,” https://blacklivesmatter.com/herstory/. 31 See Black Lives Matter, “About,” https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/. 32 See also Coleman (2017). 33 This is a vision that resonates not only with Dewey’s philosophy, but also Deleuze and Guattari’s politics of “the minor”; Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling”; and a long history of feminist, queer, postcolonial, and other critical praxis engaged with the politics and possibilities of everyday life. 34 See Eubanks (2017) and Noble (2018). 35 As Fuchs notes, Occupy was not created online but rather emerged from local organising by Adbusters and others and required “face-to-face meetings and contracts with activists” to get off the ground. Participants initially “made use

noteS to PAgeS 156–64

36 37

38 39

40 41 42 43 44

45

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of email lists as a communication tool for staying in touch”; however, as the movement grew, “live video streaming and Twitter” became important means of reporting from events (2015, 25). What was vital to Occupy on the whole, he suggests, was the “dialectic of online and offline protest communication” which worked “to mutually reinforce each other” (59). On the interconnection of online and offline practices central to the activities of Black Lives Matter, see Bonilla and Rosa (2015) and Hesse and Hooker (2017). See Ahmed (2010) and Pedwell (2017b, 2019). In this respect, it is important to underscore that a politics of “the minor” cannot be “allied to any particular scale or register of significance”; rather, “micropolitics and the minor are always, already present; it is what one makes of it as a mode of action that matters” (Jellis and Gerlach 2017, 564). For a discussion of Spivak’s account of “ethical reflexes,” see Pedwell (2014b). As Hooker notes, “the symbolic decentering of whiteness implied by saying #BlackLivesMatter could only be taken as a devaluation of white lives by those who believe that politics should always centre on the concerns of whites as a group” (2017, 494). The affective politics of Trumpism clearly offer a disturbing case in point. See Anderson (2016). See Benkler et al. (2018). See Black Lives Matter, “About,” https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/. See Black Lives Matter, “Resources,” https://blacklivesmatter.com/resources/. In her discussion of Black Lives Matter’s digital politics, Meredith Clarke outlines three key principles central to interdisciplinary literatures on white allyship: “First, potential allies must see themselves as White, rather than assuming their ethnic identities and positions within the dominant culture as the default. Second, White allies in racial justice movements must recognize the power and privilege conferred by White identity. Third, these individuals must actively work to dismantle systems of White supremacy, and be willing to both confer and share power with members of subjugated groups” (2019, 6). As Sharma argues in his discussion of Black Twitter, the immanent nature of such assemblages allows for modes of connection with “another body, aggregation of users or a network,” which offer “the creative potential of entering into a process of becoming” (2013, 55) – opening up possibilities for unexpected resonances and solidarities. See also Taylor (2016). See also Paul Gilroy (2004) on “multicultural conviviality,” Mica Nava (2008) on “visceral cosmopolitanisms,” and Greg Noble (2013) on “cosmopolitan habits.” See Pedwell (2019, 2021).

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index

abolition, 140, 146 activism, See social movements activity: and affect, 12, 116, 126–30; and definitions of habit, 18, 41, 77, 90; and passivity, 116, 126–30 actor-network-theory, 171, 180n18 addiction: and Felix Ravaisson, 13, 29, 39; and habit, 13, 18, 29, 39, 49, 178n24; and John Dewey, 18; affect: and emotion, xv, 21–2, 29–35, 46, 114–18, 121; and habit, xix, xxi, 9, 21–4, 28–30, 35, 40–1, 43–8, 52, 54–6, 75–6, 79–82, 114–34, 148, 168–70; and racism, 66, 69, 72, 75–6, 79–80, 144; and social movements, 21–4, 54–6, 142–6, 148–9, 151, 156, 161; and social transformation, xv, 12–13, 21–4, 28–35, 54–6, 75–6, 79–82, 114–34, 161; theory, 6, 34–5, 45–6, 55–6, 114–15, 117; and Trumpism, 73–82, 145–6, 154, 160, 169; the turn to, xix, 28–9, 114 affective: atmospheres, xxi, 12, 21, 28, 62, 76–8, 103, 186n14; attachment, 75, 126–9; attention, xiii, xvi, 12, 18–21, 40–1, 43, 46, 74, 78–82, 170, 161–2, 188n14; attunement, 31,

52, 118, 132, 169, 172; connection, 12, 129–30, 133, 161–4, 193n45; entrapment, 126–30; habits, 33, 116; habituation, 116, 118, 121–2, 125, 128–33; inhabitation, 12, 30, 46, 79–82, 127–34, 144–5, 165, 167–9; materialisation, 46, 114; mediation, 123, 126; patterns, xix, 115; politics, 55, 77, 123, 125–7, 169, 188n12, 193n40; practice, 32, 56, 115; revolution, xix, 28, 31, 45, 114–16, 132, 170; scripts, 121, 129, 187n7 agency: and consciousness, 12, 18–20, 161, 169, 176n2; and habit, 12, 18–31, 104–7, 161, 169, 171, 176n2; morethan-human, 19, 169, 171, 176n2; and nudge theory, 104–7; and rational thought, 18–20; and will, 18–20, 161, 169 Ahmed, Sara, xv, 13, 49, 65–6, 68 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP ), 21–2 algorithmic: architectures 5, 137–9, 154–5, 170, 190n10; life, 4, 167; oppression, 8, 23, 137–9, 154, 190n10; politics, 22–3, 27, 139–40, 142–3, 150–60, 163–5, 172; thought, 167

214

index

algorithms: definition of, 138, 189–90n8; and ethics, 137–9, 190n10; and habit, xx, 4–5, 8, 16–17, 37, 135–66; machine learning, 155, 158, 188n2, 189–90n8, 190n10; and surveillance, 8, 17, 37, 137–9, 154–5 alt-right, 11, 58, 62, 64, 81, 155, 177–8n11. See also Trumpism ambivalence: and habit, 7, 38, 47–8, 52, 98, 100, 111; and inhabitation, 7, 47–8, 56; psychic, 38, 52, 98, 100, 111; and social transformation, 7, 47–8, 56, 98, 100, 111; and subjectivity, 38, 52, 98, 100, 111, 163 American civil rights movement, 54, 147 American civil war, 67 American Psychological Association, 94, 186n5 Amin, Ash, 76, 185–6n31 Amoore, Louise, 17, 155, 189–90n8, 190n10 anarchism, 146 Anderson, Ben, 17, 73, 178n23 Ansari, Aziz, 63–4, 68, 183n11 Anthropocene, xx anti-Blackness, 59, 138, 144–6, 190–1n11. See also racism anti-capitalism, 22–3, 27, 107, 135–66. See also Occupy movement anticipation, 10, 47, 65, 153, 179n28. See also pre-emption anxiety, xiii–iv, xix, 33, 41, 67, 68, 79, 183n8 Arab Spring, the, 142 Aristotle, 36, 38, 92 artificial intelligence, xx, 155, 158, 165, 188n2, 189–90n8, 190n10 See also algorithms Ash, James, 123–4, 188n14 assemblage: and agency 18–21, 46–7; and climate emergency, 15;

and digestion, 102–3; and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 15; and governance, 16–17, 101–5, 107–8, 111; and habit, xvii–xviii, 15–24, 46–7, 52–6, 95, 101–5, 107–8, 111, 149, 153, 161, 166, 172, 180n18, 186n14; and media, 15, 124, 193n45; and racism, 15, 76–82; and social movements, 21–4, 107–8, 149, 153, 161, 166; and transport, 15 attention: and affect, xiii, xvi, 12, 18–21, 40–1, 43, 46, 74, 78–82, 170, 161–2, 188n14; and habit, xiii, xix, 20–1, 24, 40–1, 46, 65, 78, 80–2, 90, 129, 161, 169, 175n2; and social transformation, xvi, 12, 20–1, 24, 43, 46, 80–2, 90, 129, 161, 169, 170 automation: and habit, 12, 19, 24, 29, 35, 38–41, 65, 69–70, 77–8, 88, 98, 115, 118, 153, 159, 170; and networked technologies, 123, 137 Bannon, Steve, 58 behavioural economics, 17, 83–111, 178n17. See also nudge theory Behavioural Insights Team, 84, 186n3. See also the Nudge Unit behaviourism, 14, 92–5, 99–100, 108 Benkler, Yochai, 155 Bennett, Jill, 46, 130 Bennett, Tony, 15, 37, 50, 55, 86, 129 Bergson, Henri, 10, 19–20, 38, 39–41, 51, 53, 161, 175–6n2, 176n6, 178n28, 181n28 Berlant, Lauren, 35, 120 biopolitics: and habit, 4, 10, 13, 49, 104, 168 biosensing technologies, xix, 17 Bissell, David, xvii, 15, 186n14 Black Lives Matter: and #AllLivesMatter, 160, 193n39; and allyship, 162, 193n44; and

index Black Power movement, 155; and Campaign Zero, 150, 157; and #Ferguson, 143, 150–1, 156–7; and #HandsUpDontShoot, 149; and intersectionality, 143, 162, 191n15; and Palestine, 150, 157; and prefigurative politics, 22–4, 139–42, 145–6, 148–51, 154–60, 162–3, 165, 172; and surveillance, 154–5 Black Power Movement, 150 Blackman, Lisa, 20, 49, 86, 115, 186n9 Bonilla, Yarimar, 143, 150, 156 Bourdieu, Pierre, 21, 35, 37, 176n2, 184n15 Breitbart News, 58 Brexit: and capitalism, 61; and racism and xenophobia, 57–9, 61, 75, 79, 81–2, 149, 154, 183n7; and posttruth politics, 11, 72–3; and social transformation, 3, 11, 57–9, 149 Brown, Michael, 59, 140, 143, 190–1n11 Butler, Judith, 7–8, 36, 55, 107–8, 148, 177n8, 177n9, 180n18, 181n23, 192n28 Cadogan, Garnette, 135–6, 138 Cameron, David, 104, 113 Campaign Zero, 150, 157 capacity: and incapacity, 13, 50 capitalism: communicative, 22, 27, 132, 156; and habit, xiv, xx, 4–5, 22–3, 27, 30, 47, 49–50, 60–2, 67, 69–71, 74, 78, 81–2, 96–8, 104–8, 133, 135–66; and networked media, 22–3, 27, 126–7, 129, 132, 138–139, 141, 144–9, 154–60, 165; racial, 22–3, 27, 69, 138–9, 144–9, 155–60, 165, 167, 172, 178n16, 179n31, 189n5; and Trumpism, 61–2, 67, 69, 85. See also neoliberalism

215

Carlisle, Claire, 39, 128, 178–9n25, 179n27, 180n14 Carnegie School, of economics, 96 Centre on Privacy and Technology, Georgetown Law, 137 Chicago School, of economics, 96–7 Cialdini, Robert, 90 class: and habit, 18, 35–6, 67, 85, 99, 176n2; and Trumpism, 61–4, 67, 163, 183n7; and white privilege, 67, 184n18 classical sociological theory, 4, 36–7, 18–19, 175n2, 186n9 climate emergency, xviii, xx, 15, 83, 108 Clinton, Hilary, 60, 182n3 cognitive behavioural therapy, xiv, xvi cognitive bias, 96–7, 109 cohabitation, 15, 55, 76, 78, 167 Coleman, Rebecca, 124 colonialism: and habit, xx, 12–13, 30, 49, 65, 133, 138, 154, 178n16, 185n31 compassion, 32, 42, 46, 112, 120–1, fatigue, 46, 120–1, 130, 132 conduct: and behaviour, 94–5 Connolly, William, 52–3, 161–2 consciousness: and habit, 6, 12, 18–21, 24, 26, 29, 32, 40–1, 43, 59, 77–8, 93, 124, 161–2, 169–70, 175n2, 180n13, 185n27; raising, 30, 38, 82, 88, 109, 123 Corbyn, Jeremy, 61 Covey, Stephen, xix COVID-19, 14, 85–6, 157, 171, 173 Cox, Jo, 57 Crary, Jonathan, xiii, 175n1 creativity: and habit, 19, 40, 115, 171 critical race theories, xxii, 5, 8, 57–82, 135–66, 168, 182n3. See also radical Black thought

216

index

critique, xv, 7, 14, 33, 48, 79, 165, 168; and ideology, 54; and post-truth politics, 73, 79 Cvetkovich, Ann, 148 Darwin, Charles, 92 data: and algorithms, 17, 22, 138, 155, 188n2, 190n8, 190n10; biometric, 17; and habit, xix, xxiii, 16–17, 22, 138, 155 Dean, Jodi, 126–30, 151 debility, 13, 178n16 De Biran, Maine, 36 De Certeau, Michel, 36 decision-making: automated, 8, 137– 8; and habit, 8, 20, 83–4, 96–9, 137– 8, 104–5, 109; and nudge theory, 83–4, 96–9, 137–8, 104–5, 109 Deleuze, Gilles, xviii, xxi, 16–17, 34, 38, 41, 43, 51, 55, 129, 179n28, 180n19, 192n33 Derrida, Jacques, xxi Descartes, Rene, 18, 38, 175n2 desensitisation, 12, 114, 116, 123, 132–3, 143–4 desire: and habit 43, 100–1, 105–6; and nudge theory, 100–1, 106 Dewey, John: and affect, 42–8, 116–18, 124–6, 131; and education, 42, 95, 110; and gender, 7–8, 42, 181n23; and habit, xiii, xviii–xix, xx, 5, 7, 15–20, 36, 41–8, 49, 51–2, 65, 87–8, 90–1, 93–5, 100–2, 106–11, 176n2, 182n3, 185n27, 188n11; and liberalism, 7–8, 53–4, 104–5; and participatory democracy, 7–8, 42, 50–1, 147; and racism, 7–8, 42, 186n31; and sexuality, 181n23; and social transformation, xvi, 10, 15–18, 21, 41, 42–9, 51–2, 54–5, 87–8, 90–1, 106–10, 124, 126, 131, 147–9, 153, 163

digestion: and habit, 41, 102–3 disaffection, 13, 26, 114–16, 123, 126, 132, 143–4 discipline: and habit, 8, 13, 17, 35, 37, 49, 50, 86, 115, 138, 170; and Michel Foucault, 35, 37 disposition: and habit, xvii–xix, 15, 41, 64–5, 76–7, 82, 90, 109, 170; and racism; 65, 76–7, 82, 182n3 Dixon, Chris, 146, 153 docility: and habit, 106 Du Bois, W.E.B., 54, 71–3, 79, 184n18, 192n22 Duhigg, Charles, xix Durkheim, Emile, 36–7 dwelling, xv, 48, 80, 173. See also inhabitation eating: and habit, xv, 84, 90, 99–100; and nudge theory, 84, 90, 99–100, 104 ecologies: media, 27, 57, 124, 139, 158, 191n21; theories of, 15–21, 41, 81, 101–5, 171–3 Elias, Norbert, 13 Elzie, Johnetta, 156–7 emotional regulation, 115 empathy, xv, 29, 31–4, 42–3, 47, 114, 120, 127 empiricism, critical, 6, 54; and Dewey, 94–5, 110. See also experience Engler, Mark and Paul, 147 epigenetics: and habit, 102–3 ethics: and affect, 31–4, 42–3, 46, 122, 129, 122; and habit, 20, 31–4, 42–3, 46, 51–2, 76, 82, 89, 109, 111, 129, 148, 159, 160, 164, 170, 173, 190n10, 193n38; and social transformation, 42–3, 46–7, 51–5, 82, 89, 109, 111, 129, 148, 159, 160, 164, 170, 173 eugenics: and habit, 86

index everyday life: and affect, xv, 148, 156; and algorithms, 137–9, 189–90n8; and habit, xx, 6, 20, 36, 148, 156, 169, 180n6, 180n18; and the minor; xv, xviii, 156, 192n33; and networked media, xx, 156; and social transformation, xviii, 6, 20, 108, 148, 156 experience: and affect, xv, 79–80, 110–11, 115, 121, 124, 126–32, 144, 172; and habit, xv, xvii–iii, 18, 30, 46–7, 65, 100, 111, 153, 161, 172; and pragmatist philosophy, 47, 51–2, 94, 100, 105 fake news, 73, 141 Fanon, Frantz, 37 Farage, Nigel, 57 fascism: and habit, 5, 49, 58, 169. See also Nazi Germany feminism: and digital media, 123–5, 130–2; and habit, 54, 123–5, 130–2; second wave, 147, 151; transnational, 54 feminist theory: and habit, 7–8, 13, 36, 45, 123–5, 130–2, 162, 177n8, 177n9 financial crisis, 67, 70, 140 Fisk, Robert, 113–14 Foucault, Michel, 35, 37, 39, 106–7 freedom: and habit, xxii–iii, 19, 37–9, 53, 84–5, 98, 104 Freud, Sigmund, 98, 101 Friedman, Milton, 96 Fuchs, Christian, 155, 192n35 gambling, 18, 110 gender: and habit, 7–8, 18, 36–7, 51, 60, 63, 67, 100, 102, 125, 162, 177n8, 180n18, 181n23 Goldberg, David Theo, 59–60, 66, 70–1, 76–7, 181–2n2, 184n21

217

Google, 137, 139 Gould, Deborah, 21–2 Gove, Michael, 57 governance: affective, 17, 73, 178n23; authoritarian, 20, 49; biopolitical, 4, 7, 10, 17, 20, 50, 86, 168, 178n23; and colonialism, 12–13, 37, 86–7, 133, 138; corporate, 16, 20, 49, 83–111; expert, 83–111; and habit, 4–5, 10, 13–14, 16–17, 20, 25, 37, 39–40, 49–50, 78, 83–111, 133, 138–41, 148, 150, 152, 156, 168–9, 178n16, 187n19; neoliberal, 47, 49–50, 78, 85–6, 104–8, 133, 138, 140–1, 148, 156, 168–9, 178n16, 183n10, 187n19; and nudge theory, 13–14, 17, 20, 83–111, 168–9; and pastoral power, 39–40; post-neoliberal, 5, 13, 105–7, 178n16; self-, 37, 83–111 Gray, Freddie, 143, 155 Grosz, Elizabeth, 19, 40–1, 179n28 Guattari, Felix, xviii, 16, 192n33 Guerbado, Paulo, 142–3 habit: assemblages, xvii–iii, 15–24, 46–7, 52–6, 95, 101–5, 107–8, 111, 149, 153, 161, 166, 172, 180n18, 186n14, definitions of, xviii–xix, xxii–iii, 3–4, 7–8, 15–21, 40–2, 46, 64–5, 70, 89–95, 153, 167–8, 171; double nature of, 4, 29, 40; double law of, 26, 116–17, 121, 127–8, 180n16; genealogies of, 3–5, 7–8, 13–14, 18–22, 35–48, 53–4, 86–7, 89–98, 117–18, 128, 13; as pharmakon, xxi habitus: 180n114; and Bourdieu, 36, 176n2, 184n15; emotional, 21; media, 16, 124 Hall, Stanley, 86, 186n5

218

index

Halpern, David, 84–5, 90–1, 104, 108–10, 186n3 Hayek, Friedrich, 96 Hegel, G.W.F, 38 hermeneutics of suspicion, 30, 54 Hesse, Barnor, 22, 136, 146, 192n22 Hooker, Juliet, 79, 136, 145, 192n22, 193n39 Human, the, x, xiii, 8, 41, 161, 168, 177n9 human/non-human interactions, xx, 10, 16, 18, 20–1, 31, 33, 53, 55, 91, 95, 107, 114–15, 124, 137 164, 170–3, 190n10. See also assemblage human nature, 6, 89, 92–4, 98

95, 107, 117–18, 187n22; embodied, 19–20, 45, 50, 179n38 International Organization for Migration, 114 intuition: and habit, 94; and Henri Bergson, 181n28

identity, 40, 162, 193n44 identity politics, 9, 154, 192n28 ideology critique, 55 ignorance: and racism, 60, 71–2, 74–5, 81, 168–9; and social transformation, 11, 32–4, 60, 71–2, 74–5, 81, 121, 168–9 imperialism: and habit, 12–13, 37, 81, 86, 138, 178b16, 182n5, 183n8, 185n31, 189n5 Indignados movement, 142, 14 inhabitation: and affect, 12, 30, 46, 79–82, 127–34, 144–5, 165, 167–9; and social transformation, xvi, 6–7, 10, 16, 22, 24, 30, 41, 15–19, 56, 80–2, 106, 109–10, 116, 127–34, 144, 148, 165, 167–73; and racism, 66–8, 70, 80–2, 144, 168, 172. See also dwelling; uninhabitability insomnia, xiii–xiiii. See also sleep instinct: and habit, 19, 175n1, 180n13. See also reflex intelligence: democratic, 95; and Dewey, 19–20, 45, 47, 50–2, 77–8,

Kahneman, Daniel, 96–7, 109 Kant, Immanuel, 18, 38 Kelley, Robin D.G., 54, 189n5 Klein, Melanie, 33 Ku Klux Klan, 58, 63, 68 Kurdi, Alan, 11, 112–14, 132–4

James, William: and affect, xiii, 55, 117–18, 121–2, 126; and the minor, 176n6; and plasticity, 87, 187n15; and social transformation, 10, 15, 54, 56, 87, 147; and understanding of habit, xiii, 5, 7, 36, 40–1, 87, 92, 102, 126, 167, 175–6n2 Johnson, Boris, 13, 85

Lefebvre, Henri, 36, 179n5 liberalism, 6–7, 20, 47, 53–4, 86, 104. See also neoliberalism Lorde, Audre, 65 Malabou, Catherine, xxi, 3, 38–9, 41, 179n28 Manning, Erin: and action, 20–1, 161; and consciousness, 20–1, 161, 176n2; and critique, 33–4, 181n28; and the minor, xviii, 23–4, 48, 56, 131–2, 152–4, 176n5, 176n6; and social transformation, xv, xviii, 10, 23–4, 33–4, 48, 56, 109, 131–2, 152–4, 165, 179n29; and speculative pragmatism, 109 Marres, Noortje, 164

index Martin, Trayvon, 59, 140, 185n23, 190n11 Massumi, Brian, 6–7, 129, 177n7 Mauss, Marcel, 36, 175n1 McDougall, William, 93, 186n9 media: analytics, 138; computational, 17, 27, 37, 135–66, 170; networked, 17, 27, 37, 112–34, 135–66, 170; ecologies, 27, 57, 124, 139, 158, 191n21; effects logic, 112; images, 11, 112–34, 143–5, 157; memes, 125–6, 128–34, 145, 157, 170; social, 73, 76, 112–34, 135–66. See also algorithms; mediation mediation: and habit: 16, 112–34, 135–66 meditation, xiv memory: and habit, 39, 45, 96, 164, 175–6n2, 176n6 Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage, 42 microbiome, xx Migration, 112–14. See also refugee crisis mind/body dualism, 18–19 mind-body interactions, xiv, 15, 18–19, 25, 29, 46, 48, 52, 55–6, 76–7, 95–6, 101, 175n2. See also assemblage mindfulness, xiv–xvii minor, the: and social transformation, xvii–iii, xix, 6, 10–15, 21, 23–4, 28, 33, 48, 55–6, 62, 77, 81–2, 131–2, 142, 152–60, 166, 167–73, 176n5, 176n6, 190n10, 192n33, 193n37 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 22, 144–6, 148, 150, 157, 159, 189n7 MIT Media Lab, 137 multiculturalism: American, 69, 150, 181n2, 183n8; and conviviality, 15,

219

55, 76, 193n47; and habit, 15, 55, 76, 185–6n31 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 42 nature/culture dualism, 18, 40 Nazi Germany: and habit, 49. See also fascism neocolonialism: and habit, xx, 49, 133. See also colonialism; imperialism neoliberalism: and activism, 23–3, 27, 126–7, 135–66; and habit; xiv, xx, 4–5, 22–3, 27, 30, 47, 50, 60–2, 67, 69–71, 74, 78, 81–2, 96–8, 104–8, 133, 135–66. See also capitalism; governance neuroscience, 4, 17 new materialisms, 171, 180n18 Noble, Safia Umoja, 8, 139 nudge theory, 13–14, 17, 20, 37, 83–111, 169, 186n3, 186n4 Nudge Unit, The, 84–5, 90, 97, 104, 108, 186n3. See also Behavioural Insights Team object-oriented-ontology, 9 Occupy movement” and prefigurative politics, 22–5, 139–42, 149, 153, 155–6, 159–60, 165–6, 172 ontological turn, 9 Orbach, Susie, 59 Outraged movement, 148 Paasonen, Susanna, 123, 126 participatory democracy: and expert governance, 105; and John Dewey, 7–8, 14, 42, 97, 105–7, 110, 147; and pre-figurative politics, 147; and social transformation 111, 169, 172

220

index

Pavlov, Ivan, 93 perception: and habit, xviii, 41, 64–5, 68, 70–1, 96, 101, 115, 120, 122, 129–32, 158, 162, 172, 187n3, 187n7 phenomenology, 4, 36–7, 179n27 physiology: and behaviourism, 92–5; and habit, xiii, xxii, 11, 18, 24, 30, 36, 41–2, 56, 62, 86, 92–5, 101–3, 171; and pragmatist philosophy, xxii, 11, 18, 36, 41–2, 92–5, 101–3, 171 plasticity: and habit, xiv, xxi, 10, 62, 87, 106, 178n15; and pragmatist philosophy, 87, 106, 178n15 Ponty, Maurice Merleau, 36, 179n27 populism, xviii, 3, 61, 63, 78, 81, 114, 140, 149, 167, 177–8n11, 182n6, 183n80. See also alt-right; Trumpism post-neoliberal: governance, 5, 13, 105–7, 178n16. See also neoliberalism; capitalism post-raciality, 59–60, 66–71, 74, 78, 80, 82, 180–1n2. See also racism post-structuralism, xxi, 54 post-truth politics, 11, 72–5, 78 pragmatism: political, 14, 108–10, 152–3; speculative, 6–10, 26, 53, 108–10, 168. See also pragmatist philosophy pragmatist philosophy: and affect, 42–8, 75–82, 116–18, 124–6, 131; and experience, 7, 51–2, 94, 100, 105; and gender, 7–8, 42, 181n23; and habit, xiii, xviii–xix, xx, 5, 7, 15–20, 36, 41–8, 49, 51–2, 65, 87–8, 90–1, 93–5, 100–2, 106–11, 176n2, 182n3, 185n27, 188n11; and physiology, xxii, 11, 18, 36, 41–2, 92–5, 101–3, 171; and plasticity, 87, 106, 178n15; and psychology, 36, 42, 87–9, 92–3; and racism; 7–8, 42, 57–82, 186n31;

and social transformation, xvi, 10, 15–18, 21, 41–9, 51–2, 54–5, 87–8, 90–1, 106–10, 124, 126, 131, 147–9, 153, 163; and speculation, 6–10, 16, 26, 30, 44–5, 47, 50, 52–4, 78–82, 89, 95, 102, 108–11, 168; and temporality, 6, 26, 42–8, 54, 95, 101–5, 109–10 pre-emption, 6, 109 prefigurative politics: and Black Lives Matter, 22–5, 139–42, 145–6, 148–51, 154–7, 159– 60, 162, 165–6, 172; critiques of, 23, 151–60; and habit, 22–5, 139–42, 145–6, 146–8, 166, 172–3; histories of, 146–9, 151; and networked media, 22–5, 139– 42, 145–6, 148–9, 151–60, 164–6, 172; and Occupy, 22–5, 139–42, 149, 153, 155–6, 159–60, 165–5, 172; and second-wave feminism, 147, 151–2; and strategic politics, 149–50, 158–9 process philosophy, 93 progress: fantasies of, 59–60; and habit, 3, 5–6, 11, 14, 18, 28, 35, 42–7, 49–53, 56, 67–8, 81–2, 87, 107–11, 112–22, 126–33, 166–7, 172–3; and racism; 59–60, 67–8, 81–2; and social transformation, 3, 5–6, 28, 30–5, 42–7, 49–53, 56, 59–60, 67–8, 81–2, 87, 89, 107–11, 112–22, 126–33, 166–7, 172–3; and temporality, 11, 32, 44–8, 53, 56, 81–2, 107–11, 126–33, 166–7, 172–3 psychoanalysis, xviii, 4, 33, 37, 59, 98, 101, 126 psychology: behavioural, 92–8, 99– 101, 186n9; cognitive, 95–8, 99–101; experimental, 92–3, 180n13; and habit, 62, 86–101, 115, 180n13; and nudge theory; 14, 89–92, 95–101; and pragmatist philosophy, 36,

index 42, 87–9, 92–3; social, 36, 42, 93–5, 98–103, 115, 182n3. See also cognitive behavioural therapy; psychoanalysis; psychosocial approaches psychosocial: approaches, 17, 52, 63, 80, 98–101, 111; habits, xix, xxii, 60, 75, 80, 98–101, 111, 168–9 queer theory; and habit, xvi, xxii, 7, 30, 45–6, 51, 181n23, 192n33 racial capitalism. See capitalism racism: and algorithms, 137–8, 190n10; biological impact, xxii, 102–3; and networked media, 133, 135–66; environmental responses to, 15–16, 75–82, 88, 168–9; and habit, xxii, 9–10, 15–16, 37–8, 51–2, 57–82, 88, 102–3, 133, 135–66, 168–9; and surveillance, 8, 10 135–9, 151, 158, 165, 189n4; and white supremacy, xxii, 9, 38, 57–82, 135–66, 168–9 radical Black thought, 7–8, 60, 79, 137–8, 145, 150, 182n3, 189n5. See also critical race studies radical praxis, 14, 53. See also prefigurative politics; social movements Rankine, Claudia, xxii, 8, 72, 136, 138, 144, 185n23 rationality: and habit, 12, 14, 18–21, 62–3, 71–2, 77–8, 81, 88, 169, 175n2, 175–6n2; and nudge theory, 14, 91, 96–7, 99 105–6 Ravaisson, Felix: and affect, 5, 12, 55, 117–18, 126, 128, 180n16; and habit, 5, 7, 10, 12, 15, 19, 36–7, 39–42, 48, 51, 53, 56, 117–18, 126, 179n28; and social transformation, 5, 10, 12, 15, 36–7, 39–40, 48 51, 56, 117–18,

221

126, 179n28; and theology, 39–40, 180n13 reflex: and habit, 24, 38, 81, 92–4, 103, 124, 159, 180n13, 193n38. See also instincts reflexivity: and habit, 11, 13, 30, 43, 50, 64, 79, 162 refugee crisis, xviii, 11, 112–14, 132–4 Rentschler, Carrie, 123, 125, 130–1, 188n13 rhythmanalysis, 36, 179n5 Rice, Tamir, 59, 143 Ricoeur, Paul, 30 risk management, 17, 155. See also security state Robinson, Cedric, 138, 179n31, 189n5, 192n22 Romney, Mitt, 125, 188n13 Rosa, Jonathan, 143, 150, 156 Roy, Arundhati, 171 Sanders, Bernie, 61, 182n5 Saturday Night Live, 63–4, 183n11 Scholz, Sally, 160–1 Schuller, Kyla, 13, 178n15 security state: and habit, 6–7, 17, 155 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky: and affect, xvi; and habit, 98; and the hermeneutics of suspicion, 30; and paranoia, 7, 14, 33, 43–4, 52, 75, 79, 168; and reparation, 33, 48, 80; and social transformation, xvi, 7, 30, 43, 52, 71 segregation, 56, 65, 138. See also racism self-help: and habit, xix–xx sexuality: and habit, 21, 67, 180, 181n23 Sharpe, Christina, 144 Shotwell, Alexis, 173 Simon, Herbert, 96

222

index

Singh, Nikhil Pal, 61, 164 Skinner, B.F., 92, 94 slavery: and habit, 31, 37, 65, 67, 138, 144, 185–6n31, 189n5, 189n7 sleep, xiii–xvi, xix–xxii, 148, 175n1, 175n2. See also insomnia social marketing, 20, 90, 97, 108 social movements, xx, 3, 5, 9, 21–4, 38, 52, 54–5, 77, 107–8, 123, 130, 135–66, 169, 172, 190n10. See also AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP ); Black Lives Matter; civil rights movement; feminism; Indignados movement; Occupy movement; Outraged movement; prefigurative politics solidarity: and affect, 21, 23–4, 127, 145, 160–6, 173; and allyship, 152, 193n44; and habit, 21, 23–4, 127, 143, 160–6, 173; and networked media, 127, 143, 148–9, 157–9, 160–5; political, 21, 23–4, 127, 143, 145, 154, 157, 160–6, 173 Sontag, Susan, 116, 118–27 Southern Poverty Law Center, 58 Spanish Civil War, 118–19, 122 Spinoza, Baruch, 34, 45–6, 55, 128, 180n19 speculation: and governance, 17, 89, 108–11; and the politics of habit, 13–14, 16, 21, 23, 30, 54, 78–92, 142, 145–6, 151–5, 165–72; pragmatist philosophy, 6–10, 16, 26, 30, 44–5, 47, 50, 52–4, 78–82, 89, 95, 102, 108–11, 168; and social transformation, xxi, 6–12, 14, 16, 23, 30, 44–5, 47, 50, 52–4, 78–82, 89, 95, 108–11, 116, 118, 145–6, 151–5, 165–6, 167–72 speculative realism, 9 Spivak, Gayatri, 159, 193n38

Stewart, Kathleen, xv strategic politics, 149–51, 158 Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee, The, 147 subjectivity: and governance, 15, 17–18, 46, 97, 105–7, 138; and habit, 15, 17–20, 46, 126–7, 161, 178–9n25; and networked media, 126–7, 190n10; and transformation, xv, xxiii, 15, 31, 46, 48, 76, 78, 87–8, 114, 161 Sullivan, Shannon: and gender, 100, 102–3, 181n23; and racism, 3, 8, 59, 65–9, 75–9, 88, 182n3, 184n18, 185n28, 185n30, 185–6n31; and sexism, 102–3, 181n23; and social transformation, xxi, 88, 90–1, 102–3, 108, 147, 102–3; and understanding of habit, xxi, 38, 40, 98, 100, 182n3 Sunstein, Cass, 26, 83–4, 87, 89–92, 103–5 surveillance: and algorithms, 8, 17, 137–8, 151, 158; and Black Lives Matter, 151; and facial-recognition technologies, 8, 17, 137–8, 188–9n28; and habit, 8, 10, 16–17, 136–9, 165, 168, 173, 141, 151, 165; and Occupy, 151; and racism, 8, 10, 136–9, 151, 158, 165, 189n4 Tarde, Gabriel, 18–19, 36, 175–6n2, 186n9 Taylor, Keenaga-Yamahtta, 141 technologies of the self, 52. See also discipline; Michel Foucault temporality: and habit, xxiii, 9, 14, 16, 25, 30, 39, 42–8, 53–4, 56, 81–2, 95, 101–5, 109–10, 179n28; and pragmatist philosophy, 6, 26, 42–8,

index 54, 95, 101–5, 109–10; and social transformation, xv, 7, 9, 11, 14, 25–6, 30–9, 42–8, 53–4, 56, 81–2, 95, 145–8, 159–60, 162, 173 tendency: definition of, 153; and habit, xix, 23, 36, 39–40, 41, 70, 80, 86, 101, 111, 132, 139, 153, 159, 165; political, 139, 146, 153 terrorism, 114, 183n8 Thaler, Richard, 26, 83–4, 87, 89–92, 103–5 theology, 5, 39, 52, 180n13 Thrift, Samantha, 123, 125, 130–1, 188n13 Trump, Donald, 3, 9, 11, 57–64, 67–8, 72–5, 79, 81, 140, 145, 177–8n11, 183n7, 183n8, 183n10 Trumpism, 11, 59–65, 68–70, 72–5, 77–82, 149, 169, 183n8, 183n10, 193n40 Tversky, Amos, 96–7, 109

Valenti, Jessica, 60 vulnerability, 149, 168

undercommons, the, 165 uninhabitability, 7–8, 168 utopianism, 53

Yancy, George, 38, 66, 80 Young, Iris Marion, 37–8, 65–6

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walking: and gender, 102; and habit, xv, 36, 41, 102, 135–7, 184n18; and racism, 135–7, 184n18 Watson, John, 92–5, 97, 100, 108 Weber, Max, 36 wellbeing, 100, 104, 109 Wetherell, Margaret, 115 Whitehead, Alfred North, 54, 93, 176n6, 179n29 will: and habit, xxiii, 18–21, 37, 39–41, 161, 180n13, 185n27. See also agency Williams, Raymond, xv, 192n33 Women’s March, The, 61 Wundt, Wilhelm, 92 Xenophobia, xviii, 9, 25, 57–64, 74–5, 79, 81, 136, 160, 177–8n11, 183n8. See also racism