Body &

Introduction Society
19(2&3) 3–29
ª The Author(s) 2013
Habit and Habituation: Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
Governance and DOI: 10.1177/1357034X13485881
bod.sagepub.com

the Social

Tony Bennett
University of Western Sydney, Australia

Francis Dodsworth
Open University, UK

Greg Noble
University of Western Sydney, Australia

Mary Poovey
New York University, USA

Megan Watkins
University of Western Sydney, Australia

Abstract
This article examines the issues that are at stake in the current resurgence of interest
in the subject of habit. We focus on the role that habit has played in conceptions of
the relations between body and society, and the respects in which such conceptions
have been implicated in processes of governance. We argue that habit has typically
constituted a point of leverage for regulatory practices that seek to effect some
realignment of the relations between different components of personhood – will,
character, memory and instinct, for example – in order to bring about a specific end.
In reviewing its functioning in this regard across a range of modern disciplines –
philosophy, psychology, sociology – we explore the tensions between its use and
interpretation in different lineages: in particular, the Cartesian–Kantian/Ravaisson–

Corresponding author:
Tony Bennett
Email: T.Bennett@uws.edu.au
http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/

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4 Body & Society 19(2&3)

Bergson–Deleuze lineages. The article then identifies how these questions are
addressed across the contributions collected in this special issue.

Keywords
conduct, habit, habitus, imitation, liberal government, repetition, will

Why Habit?
And why now? What issues are at stake in its analysis? How might
these best be addressed? These questions have been insistently pressed
upon us in editing this special issue of Body & Society and, before that,
in organizing the workshop at which the articles gathered together here
were initially presented.1 They are also questions which both
reviewers and the journal’s editors have raised in urging the authors
to step back from their immersion in the particularities of their topics
to clarify why and how their accounts of habit and the processes of
habituation matter. They are, though, most of all, questions that are
posed by the resurgence of interest in the topic of habit that has been
in evidence for some time now.2 If habit once hummed quietly in the
background as one of those conceptual black boxes that Bruno Latour
(1987: 2, 81–2) has made so famous, that box has now been well and
truly opened in critical work that has focused on the history of the con-
cept and the spheres and forms of its practical uses and applications.
Questions about habit – its inner workings and its role in human
behaviour – have long been a staple of philosophical inquiry. It has
a long history in modern Christian theology, particularly after Aqui-
nas’s interventions in favour of habit, and first emerges as a concept
denoting a specific field of action in the positive role that Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics attributes to habit in the cultivation of morality
and civic virtue (see Carlisle, this issue).3 A topic of philosophical
inquiry in the early development of liberal political thought, it has,
from the early 19th century onwards, been brought under the more
clinical dissection of a range of empirical disciplines: medicine, biol-
ogy, neurology, psychology and sociology, for example.
Such inquiries, however, have never been disinterested. Since
habit is central to the formation of human capacities, it has also con-
stituted a problem space in the sense that it has always been a point of
entry into conduct that is oriented to bringing particular behaviours
under the direction of either secular or religious authorities. It is,
of course, not only habit – understood as a form of more-or-less

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Bennett et al. 5

automated repetition – that is the primary target of such interven-

tions. Rather, habit has more typically constituted a point of leverage
for regulatory practices that seek to effect some realignment of the
relations between different components of personhood – will, charac-
ter, memory and instinct, for example – in order to bring about a spe-
cific end. Habit is always figured in relation to these other
coordinates of personhood, caught up with them in processes of habi-
tuation, dis-habituation and re-habituation.
In recent years, these questions have taken on new urgency for
many scholars in the humanities and social sciences attempting to
understand the relations between the human and the non-human. As
a meeting point between natural and cultural determinants of conduct,
and between the human and non-human components of personhood
(Heiner, 2009), habit has become a key component in various concep-
tualizations of modernity; at the same time it has become one of the
points of entry for critical engagements which call into question the
notion of ‘modernity’ itself. The dividing lines that have been drawn
to separate modern subjects from their predecessors have typically
been posed in terms of the degree to which conduct is habitually deter-
mined or brought under the influence of the will, reflexivity or some
other mechanism through which the force of habit is broken, moder-
ated or redirected. At the same time, however, it is clear that the proj-
ect of modernity depends in many respects upon the utilization of
particular ‘modern’ habits, particularly in its governmental dimen-
sions, as outlined above, and in several contributions to this volume.
Habit has also been a key site for interrogating body–society rela-
tionships. This is clear in the significance accorded it in current
debates focused on the relations between body and affect,4 as well
as in the radically new ways of conceiving body–society relationships
prompted by the development of genome and nanotechnologies and
the new conceptions of personhood that these make possible (Rose,
2012). Our approaches to body–society relations are also currently
under revision as it becomes increasingly clear that the histories of
human and animal bodies and forms of sociality are, and always have
been, inextricably enmeshed even – and perhaps especially – through
the history of their differentiation as separate spheres of governance
(Derrida, 2002; Nimmo, 2010). If these developments complicate
where and how – and, indeed, whether – habit can inform our under-
standing of the relations between animals and humans, so does the

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6 Body & Society 19(2&3)

insistence, from various quarters, on the significance of material actors

in the constitution and functioning of social and cultural assemblages
(Bennett and Healy, 2011; DeLanda, 2006; Latour, 2005). The pro-
cesses through which habits are formed and re-formed have to take
account of the imbrication of human conduct within socio-material
environments in which the agency of deceptively simple things, like
schoolroom desks,5 complex infrastructures, like logistical systems,
and regional ecologies have to be taken into account.

Rethinking Habit
Although he did not have much to say about habit as such, Foucault’s
more general arguments concerning the regimens through which intellec-
tual, spiritual and moral authorities intervene into the conduct of conduct
by partitioning the self – splitting it up into different parts so as to open up
spaces for the action of self on self and to equip the part which acts with
the resources required to bring the parts that are acted on into good order
(Foucault, 1988a, 1988b) – have been influential in rethinking habit.
There is now a considerable body of literature concerned with the role
played by habit in liberal political thought, and the influence it has exer-
cised on the development of governmental technologies that have sought
either to cultivate a liberal disposition within the person or to compensate
for such a disposition where the capacities for exercising it are judged to
be lacking or deficient (Joyce, 2003; White, 2005).6 In the Catch 22 of
disciplinary logic, late 19th-century medicine, the psy-disciplines, and
the life sciences identified a number of conditions in which the capacity
of the will was judged to be lacking owing to the excessive sway of habit,
only to prescribe a reinforcement of the disciplinary rigours of habit as the
only effective means of guiding conduct until the incapacity of the will
was repaired (Valverde, 1996, 1998a, 1998b).
There is also a considerable literature on the roles that different
conceptions of habit have played in the development of colonial
practices of governance, enough, certainly, to make it clear that these
vary considerably across the different periods of colonialism, as well
as across the relations between settler and conquest forms of coloni-
alism (Bennett, 2011; Helliwell and Hindess, 2002; Hindess, 2001).
There are also a number of difficulties that cluster around the rela-
tionships between habit and the neighbouring, but by no means iden-
tical, concepts of custom and tradition in view of the roles that these

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Bennett et al. 7

have played in justifying the denial of a capacity for liberal forms of

self-inspection and self-government to those populations positioned
as lagging behind the temporal dynamics of modernity.7 This denial
of a coeval status to the colonized as primitive has also served as a
template for the application of liberalism’s discriminations across
other social relations, notably those of class and gender, albeit that
these discriminations have their autonomous determinations that are
not reducible to this consideration (Poovey, 1995). These aspects of
liberal political thought have had a significant influence on 20th-
century social and aesthetic modernisms, particularly those critiques
of everyday life which, running from Georg Lukács through to Henri
Lefebvre, have castigated various populations, and particularly
women, as lagging behind the progressive dynamics of history in
view of their undue susceptibility to the force of habit and the rhyth-
mic pleasures of repetition (Bennett, 2004; Crook, 1998; Felski,
1999–2000; Johnson, 1996; Swandwell, 2004).
These post-Foucauldian literatures have focused largely on those dis-
courses and practices in which habit is viewed negatively. The coordi-
nates for this negative evaluation of habit derive, in the main, from Kant
for whom habit – understood as automatic, unthinking repetition –
served as a key marker of the boundary line separating nature from cul-
ture as the historically accumulating realm of free human agency (Kant,
2006: 229–30). Habit had, of course, its earlier detractors – notably Des-
cartes (see Crossley, this issue) – but it had been more positively viewed
by both Locke and Hume (see Dodsworth, this issue). It is, however,
Kant’s construction of habit as a negative counterpoint to the processes
of human self-making through which freedom is progressively won that
has exercised the more decisive influence on 19th- and 20th-century
accounts of habit. These have interacted, in complex phenomenological
accounts of the subject from Husserl through Merleau-Ponty to Bour-
dieu – a point we return to – and, in Anglophone traditions, with the
legacies of John Stuart Mill’s account of the role of character in mediat-
ing the relations between culture, habit and volition (Mill, 1967).
The still unfolding influence of Deleuze’s Difference and Repeti-
tion has pointed in a different direction, opening up lines of inquiry
in which habit forms part of a nature–culture continuum in which
human history, culture and freedom emerge out of capacities for
change and adaptation that humans share with other forms of life and,
indeed, with matter (Deleuze, 2004). As Brian Massumi puts it:

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8 Body & Society 19(2&3)

Habit lies at the hinge of nature and these divergent process lines of
culture. Habits are socially or culturally contracted. But they reside
in the matter of the body, in the muscles, nerves, and skin, where they
operate autonomously. Although they are contracted in social/cultural
context, they must be considered self-active autonomies: spontaneous
self-organisations that operate on a level with movements of matter.
(Massumi, 2002: 236–7)
It is through habit that the past is accumulated and stabilized, provid-
ing a point of anchorage for action in the present through which pro-
cesses of open-ended becoming are perpetuated. This re-evaluation,
in placing habit at the heart of the relations between the virtual and the
actual, has also led to a significant revival of interest in Henri Bergson’s
account (Bergson, 2004) of the relations between habit and memory.
This, in turn, has prompted a renewed interest in the work of Félix
Ravaisson (2008) to provide, in the Ravaisson–Bergson–Deleuze lin-
eage, an account of habit as a nature–culture hinge that serves as a coun-
ter to the dualities of the Descartes–Kant–Husserl–Sartre line of descent
(see Grosz, this issue).
It was also Deleuze who prompted the renewed attention that has
since been paid to the work of Gabriel Tarde, whom he praises, toward
the end of his introduction to Difference and Repetition, for having
elaborated better than anyone else the forces ‘in mind and nature’
working to effect ‘an ever more perfect correspondence between dif-
ference and repetition’ (Deleuze, 2004: 29). The centre of the Tardeian
revival has fallen mainly on the implications of Tarde’s work for
rethinking the social against the grain of the Durkheimian inheri-
tance.8 His account of the roles of suggestion, imitation and repetition
in the constitution of the social is, however, one that accords a signif-
icant role to the mechanisms of habit or habituation while also detach-
ing those mechanisms from some, albeit not all, of the oppositions
governing its devaluation in the Descartes–Kant tradition.
Three aspects of Tarde’s understanding of the role of imitation in
social life merit our attention here. The first is his refusal, equivocal and
patchy though it is, to differentiate societies according to the degree to
which they are subject to the force of imitation reinforced, via habit,
through repetition. He thus pours cold water on the suggestion that the
ratios between voluntary and involuntary imitation change in favour of
the former with the advance of civilization. The savage, he argues, was
no less conscious of imitating his ancestors than the modern labourer or

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Bennett et al. 9

bourgeois has. Indeed he contends, that the ratio of self-determined acts

to automatic habits has tended to increase with civilization owing to the
greater weight of the accumulated force of past cycles of imitation that
characterizes advanced civilizations (Tarde, 1903: 192–3).
Tarde derives many of his formulations here from the late 19th-
century fusions of post-Darwinian biological, anthropological and
archaeological thought which articulated the relations between the
social mechanism of habit and the somatic mechanisms of inheritance
differently across the relations between primitive and modern societ-
ies: as mutually reinforcing mechanisms of social stasis in the former
case, and as opening up a space of freedom that might act to counter
the tyranny of ancestral inheritances in the latter (see Bennett, this
issue). These were perhaps most influentially condensed, in late
19th-century French social thought, in Durkheim’s account of the ana-
tomical foundations of the division of labour as the outcome of
mechanisms of racial inheritance that were opposed to the force of
individuality (see Durkheim, 1964: 304). In place of Durkheim’s
account of a division between primitive and modern societies as one
of complexity driven by increasing functional differentiation in which
the force of racial inheritance is diminished, Tarde proposes a mechan-
ism of social variation that operates continuously in the same manner,
thus denying any basis for a division of societies into different types
based on different central coordinating principles. And in place of the
linear and teleological accounts of evolution that governed post-
Darwinian social theory, Tarde – as the second point we wish to stress
– substitutes the more contingent, circumstantial and random mechan-
isms of social change that result from unplanned innovations. These
introduce new principles of social variability whose differentiating
powers are, in turn, consolidated and perpetuated through habitual
mechanisms of repetition. It is thus in the relations between habit and
invention that the ‘curves of desire’ through which change is effected
are subject to periodic cycles of closure and openness (Tarde, 2007).
Our third point has to do with what is tied up in Tarde’s conception
of ‘the social man as a veritable somnambulist’ (Tarde, 1903: 76). In
discussing Tarde’s affiliations to late 19th-century conceptions of the
role of contagion in crowd behaviour, Christian Borsch (2007) high-
lights the role that Tarde’s frequent references to somnambulism
play in constructing an account of action as a complex amalgam of
affect and desire, irrationality and purposiveness, that takes place

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10 Body & Society 19(2&3)

in an in-between state of semi-consciousness. When he discusses

how memory and habit, as two different forms of repetition that are
inscribed, respectively, in the nervous system and in the muscular
system, interact to shape perception at the level of the individual,
Tarde refers to this as ‘an unconscious imitation of self by self’, a
case of ‘presocial or subsocial self-imitation’ (Tarde, 1903: 75).
When he discusses the operation of imitation at a collective societal
level he defines it as ‘the action at a distance of one mind upon
another’, an action which he likens to ‘the quasi-photographic repro-
duction of a cerebral image on the sensitive plate of another brain’
(1903: xiv). Brains might act on each other through the mediated net-
works of social and material relations which establish ties between
them, fashion systems being a case in point.9 However, there is no
space for a form of consciousness that is fully present to itself in
Tarde’s thought. And, consequently, no space either for distinguish-
ing between different kinds of humanity in terms of their differential
capacities for self-reflexive forms of consciousness. These, then, are
among the aspects of Tarde’s work that have made it a rallying point
for sociologists seeking an alternative to the neo-Kantian heritage of
the Durkheimian tradition.10
While Tarde was a significant force in late 19th- and early 20th-
century social thought, his influence did not last much beyond the
1920s, after which, as Matea Candea notes, he was largely air-
brushed out of the histories of continental and Anglophone sociology
prior to the Deleuze-led rediscovery of his work (Candea, 2010b: 6).
Charles Camic (1986), for example, pays no attention to Tarde in his
influential account of the role accorded habit in European and Amer-
ican sociology up to and including the 1950s. Moreover, in arguing
that habit became largely the territory of behaviourist psychology,
Camic fails to register the significance that the concept of habit
enjoyed in the social psychology of George Herbert Mead and William
McDougall, both of whom shaped their accounts of habit in a critical
dialogue with Tarde’s work. In doing so, they also reverted to the role
that habit had played in earlier forms of liberal thought in stratifying
populations in terms of the forms of personhood they exhibited. Their
accounts reinstated the significance of distinguishing between rigid
and fixed, flexible and plastic, forms of personhood in drawing the
boundary lines between superior and inferior groups, between gover-
nors and governed (Blackman, 2007, this issue; Leys, 1993).

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Bennett et al. 11

Tarde’s influence in France was equally short-lived, eclipsed almost

entirely by the translation of the Durkheimian heritage into the inter-
war project of Maussian ethnology, which consolidated its position in
the French intellectual field through the institutional bases it estab-
lished in the university, the Musée de l’Homme and the Institut d’eth-
nologie (Sibeud, 2007). If habits are, for Durkheim, the true regulatory
forces governing conduct, it was as important for Durkheim as it was
for Mill that such habits should periodically be broken down so that
conduct, in being dis-habituated, could be subjected to programmes
of re-habituation that were brought under the direction of conscious-
ness. As Camic (1986) shows, however, the cultivation of the reflexive
capacities that this required was, in Durkheim’s conspectus, limited to
the elite students who attended secondary schools, while those whose
education was restricted to elementary schooling were expected
merely to conform to prescribed codes of conduct. In this way, the
relations between consciousness and habit were translated into the
terms of the operative social divisions of the Third Republic just as,
as we have seen, they informed Durkheim’s hierarchical conception
of the relations between primitive and civilized races. These hierarch-
ized dualities continued to inform the inter-war programmes of Maus-
sian ethnology and the role it played, in terms of the governmental
problematics of Greater France, in differentiating the mechanisms
through which France’s colonial populations and the popular rural
classes were to be governed from those applicable to its metropolitan
citizens (Lebovics, 1992).
Although, ultimately, a more complicated story, Bourdieu’s account
of habit – and, more crucially, as he always insisted, of habitus as a set
of dispositions distinct from habit – brings together elements of the
Durkheimian heritage together with, first, the stronger focus on habit
as a set of embodied practices that he derived from Mauss’s work on
body techniques (Mauss, 1973) and, second, the focus on the subjec-
tive processes of habituation he derived from phenomenology (Noble
and Watkins, 2003). Simultaneously a theory of socialization and a
theory of action, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus was concerned to
determine the weight to be accorded to the embodied past relative to
present contexts of action in shaping the practices of social agents. His
resolution of these issues was, however, shaped by the traditions on
which he drew. For he too distributed the capacity to reshape the influ-
ence that the past exercised on embodied practices within the present

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12 Body & Society 19(2&3)

by differentiating the habitus of different social groups and classes

according to the scope for reflexivity that they offer (Bennett, this
issue). The limitation of Bourdieu’s account of habitus that is most
striking in the context of current debates, however, lies in his relative
lack of attention to the role of material agencies in shaping conduct.
This is, in truth, a limitation that is shared by most of the traditions
reviewed above. It is, however, an aspect of Bourdieu’s work that Ber-
nard Lahire (2011: 139–142) has brought into sharp focus in noting
Bourdieu’s failure to take into account the use that social agents make
of material devices to review and change their behaviour, focusing
instead on the degree to which different habitus equip agents with the
capacity to swivel on the history that has made them by reflexively
monitoring and adjusting its force.
The work of John Dewey has served as a useful counterfoil to such
conceptions in his rejection of the view of habit as solely an internal
property of the person. Habits, he argues, have rather to be seen as
‘things done by the environment by means of organic structures or
acquired dispositions’ (Dewey, 2002: 14). ‘All virtues and vices’, he
writes, ‘are habits which incorporate objective forces’ (2002: 16). It
would, then, he argued, be fruitless to pose the task of changing habit
as one of calling for the transformation of a self abstracted from its
social and material environment. The regulation of habit is not some-
thing that can be accomplished via direct action on the self; it involves
a ‘selecting and weighting of the objects which engage attention and
which influence the fulfilment of desires’ (2002: 20). Habits require
things beyond themselves in order to be put into action:
And whenever they are in action they are cooperating with external
materials and energies. Without support from beyond themselves the
eyes stare blankly and the hand moves fumblingly. They are means
only when they enter into organisation with things which independently
accomplish definite results. These organisations are habits. (2002: 26)

It is not surprising, then, that Dewey’s work is increasingly looked

to as a resource that can be brought into alignment with approaches to
habit, evident in contemporary debates about climate change and
waste management, which interpret habits as parts of mind–body–
environmental assemblages, and in which questions of dis- and re-
habituation are longer posed as matters of ‘changing the subject’ but
as ones of modifying the arrangement of such assemblages.11

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Bennett et al. 13

The Contributions
The first four articles engage with these issues by addressing two pro-
minent sets of ideas about habit that have informed some of the defin-
ing antinomies of western liberalism. As we have seen, these ideas,
which focus on the role habit plays in human agency and the forma-
tion of subjectivity, involve whether human beings are capable of
self-determination and self-governance or are so ruled by nature and
appetite that they require external control. These ideas are most
explicitly articulated in theological and philosophical writings: on
the one hand, authors otherwise as different as Martin Luther, Kant
and Herbert Spencer considered habit a sign of human enslavement;
on the other hand, philosophers like Aquinas, Hegel and Bourdieu
have found in habit openings for self-determination. These two
philosophical positions have also been expressed in two approaches
to criminality, one in which bad habits figured as one of the factors
that led to criminality, which could thus be corrected by government
intervention; and the second, which assumed that some individuals
were disposed from early childhood to acquire criminal habits and
thus could not easily be turned away from crime.
Clare Carlisle’s ‘The question of habit in theology and philosophy:
from hexis to plasticity’ explores the theological roots of habit to eval-
uate their influence on modern philosophy. She begins with the 13th-
century theologian Thomas Aquinas’s attempt to synthesize Aristotle’s
claim that habit promotes virtue with the Christian tradition, which has
generally viewed habit in negative terms. From the Thomist synthesis,
which emphasizes the individual’s ability to appropriate grace through
habit, Carlisle moves to the 16th-century theologian, Martin Luther.
Luther was much more critical of habit than Aquinas, for he viewed
grace as a gift from God that could not be appropriated or earned by
human effort. Modern responses to these two strains of theological
thought have focused on the question of human freedom: Are human
beings essentially free? Or is our behaviour determined by moral or
physical laws? Carlisle aligns Kant and Kierkegaard with Luther, for,
like Luther, they viewed habit as a sign of human enslavement. Hegel
and Felix Ravaisson, by contrast, have developed Aquinas’s more pos-
itive assessment of the role habit can play in cultivating virtue.
In ‘Habit and the limits of the autonomous subject’, Simon Lumsden
focuses on Hegel’s treatment of habit. Lumsden argues that the norms

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14 Body & Society 19(2&3)

that many philosophers associate with reasoned, free choices are better
understood through the analytic Hegel offered: as habitual articulations
of self-feeling, not reason. Because habits and the norms they help sus-
tain are intimately linked to human identity, moreover, these norms are
very difficult to dislodge – even after they have outlived their social util-
ity. According to Lumsden, the implications of Hegel’s view of habit
are that, because habits ‘want to repeat themselves’ and individual iden-
tity is deeply invested in this repetition, modern forms of living cause
deep anxiety. We live in and through outmoded habits, he argues, yet
find them difficult to change.
Francis Dodsworth’s ‘Habit, the criminal body, and the body politic
in England, c. 1700–1800’ explores the social implications of various
views of habit. Examining the way that 18th-century writers construed
criminality and the justice system that was supposed to control it,
Dodsworth argues that during the period in which the structures of lib-
eral government were created, the ‘crime problem’ was frequently
argued to result from the external factor of temptation, the social prob-
lem of imitation, and the ‘internal’ or subjective factor of habit. When
these three factors coincided, individuals could become criminals; and
the best way to prevent this was to halt the accumulation of criminal
behaviours or break the power they exercised by cultivating good
habits. According to this argument, then, habit was the explanation for
the problem of crime, as well as one possible corrective, not the prob-
lem that now seems to require explanation, as we worry about ‘habitual
criminals’ who seem psychologically predisposed to uncorrectable
behaviours. The argument that character required a long time to
develop, and was thus amenable to reformation, figures in an array
of sources ranging from Newgate records to Henry Fielding’s works
on police and was central to the legitimization of the mechanisms of
prevention and punishment which governed the fate of the criminal.
At the same time it presented a very particular relationship between the
individual and their society, one in which individual habits of virtue or
vice, embedded in the body and the mind through particular actions
and personal histories, were intimately connected to the social and
commercial circumstances in which they were located.
Tony Bennett’s ‘Habit: time, freedom, and governance’ also examines
philosophical engagements with habit and human freedom. Bennett’s
analysis is distinctive for two reasons: he focuses on the ‘architecture
of the person’ and the role that various ways of understanding human

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Bennett et al. 15

interiority and biology have played in accounts of liberal governmental-

ity; and he touches on the implications such accounts can have for actual
social arrangements, such as one group’s domination of another.
Indeed, Bennett argues, the way most post-Foucauldian philosophers
have construed the capacity for self-determination tends to install a divi-
sion within the body politic, separating those who are thought capable of
governing themselves from groups who are thought to lack this capac-
ity. Thus, aligning habit with instinct has been used to assign groups,
like the Australian Aborigines or other ‘primitives’, to a subordinate
position, while aligning it with will has justified allowing other groups
self-determination. Bennett explores the questions related to habit’s
place in various architectures of the person: in the ‘organic memory’ tra-
dition, represented by Herbert Spencer and Théodole Ribot; the line of
thought developed by Ravaisson, Bergson and Deleuze that viewed
habit as a mechanism of change; and Bourdieu’s account of ‘habitus’,
which views the ‘second nature’ that habit creates as the source of at
least intermittent directed action.
Following on from Bennett’s examination of the relations between
habit, time, freedom and governance, Nick Crossley’s ‘Habit and habi-
tus’ takes a different course. While touching on some similar issues
and drawing on some similar theorists, in particular Dewey and Bour-
dieu, Crossley focuses on teasing out the differences and similarities
between the concepts of habit and habitus. He does this by interrogat-
ing how the concepts are variously deployed in the work of Mauss,
Bourdieu, Dewey and Merleau-Ponty, not in order to arrive at any
definitive definition of each but to raise a number of key points central
to understanding their role in relation to human conduct. In doing this,
Crossley determines that there is very little difference between the two
and that Mauss and Bourdieu’s preference for habitus relates more to
wanting to dissociate themselves from the mechanistic understandings
that habit can denote. Crossley also attributes the use of habitus in their
work to the appropriation of habit by psychology and, in particular, the
reductive formulations of the behaviourists. Drawing on Camic’s
(1986) influential account that maps the erasure of the term within
sociology, Crossley similarly views the use of habitus over habit as
a result of this disciplinary disjuncture. Yet Crossley and Camic both
stress that Mauss and Bourdieu also enlist habitus to perform a slightly
different and much broader role than habit. Rather than individual con-
duct, which habits tend to signify, habitus, as used by Mauss and

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16 Body & Society 19(2&3)

Bourdieu, has a distinct social function. It is used to signify behaviours

and traits common to specific social groups that are in turn, through
close association, reproduced over time. To complicate matters, Cross-
ley points out that habitus is not always used in this fashion and that in
Husserl’s work, for example, it has a more individualistic meaning.
The sociological dimension of habitus, however, is also implicit in
some uses of habit. Crossley explains how Dewey and Merleau-
Ponty not only share none of the reservations of Mauss and Bourdieu
in their foregrounding of the enabling potential of habits but, in view-
ing their formation as a function of social interaction and engagement
with the world, see them as undeniably socio-cultural phenomena.
This is very much the way in which Greg Noble conceives of habit
in his discussion of cosmopolitanism and the capacities of intercultural
conviviality. Rather than draw on habit to examine ingrained attitudes
and practices of racism, a well-trodden field of enquiry, Noble is inter-
ested in how habit might be used to explore everyday encounters of
negotiating difference. Noble’s intent is not to romanticize what he
terms ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ but to pinpoint the particular pro-
clivities that promote conviviality within culturally complex societies.
To Noble, however, this poses key methodological questions. How, he
asks, do you study habits? Wanting to move beyond the limitations of
psychological research that tends to simply measure frequency of
actions within clinical settings to determine habituated behaviour,
Noble stresses the value of ethnography in capturing how and where
habits are acquired. He is critical of the neglect of this form of inves-
tigation in the literature on habit, pointing out that ‘Turning their backs
on such methods has meant that theorists of habit refrain from dealing
with it in anything but abstract philosophical terms’. Wanting to
ground his own exploration of habit firmly in the empirical, Noble
draws on a number of snapshots of everyday practice within the con-
text of a culturally diverse school. He examines a series of encounters
between parents and students of various cultural and linguistic back-
grounds, and how these routine negotiations across difference provide
the backdrop for a more significant display of intercultural conviviality
in the form of a school musical evening in which the cosmopolitan vir-
tues of irony, openness and appreciation of otherness are profoundly
on display. It is these that Noble conceives as habits, formed and
firmly rooted in the myriad of everyday transactions of sociality of this
school and its community.

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Bennett et al. 17

It is often claimed that the classic theoretical binary between struc-

ture and agency has long been overcome and abandoned. Any brief
perusal of current debates in the humanities and social sciences will
reveal this is as a nonsense, but the return of habit as a focus in scholar-
ship allows us to highlight ongoing conceptual tensions which, rather
than return us to the arid debates of the 1970s and 1980s, provide a
productive way of grappling with these issues. As we suggested ear-
lier, habit has been typically used to black-box complex social pro-
cesses of subjectification. Once it takes the form of a black box, of
course, it becomes a euphemism for ‘structural determination’: if we
can’t or don’t examine the intricate patterns of social interaction that
produce human conduct then we assume that there must be some inev-
itable logic within the black box. And once it is placed on the side of
‘structural determination’, then it necessarily becomes identified nega-
tively. But, as William James (1899: 64) reminds us, ‘our virtues are
habits as much as our vices’. In this sleight of hand, two crucial aspects
of habit are backgrounded: its plasticity and its role in human creativ-
ity. The final run of articles in this special issue effect a critical con-
junction of past and present approaches to habit in order to deepen
our understanding of habit as an expressive mode linked intimately
to questions of affect and mimesis.
Lisa Blackman uses the ‘forgotten’ history of 19th-century psy-
chology for her investigation of habit: particularly the work of the
neglected William McDougall, alongside the better-known work of
Tarde, Bergson and James. This period represents a moment when
the boundaries between what are now recognized as the discrete dis-
ciplines of psychology, sociology and philosophy, and others, were
porous. Working genealogically with the concept of habit that
travelled across disciplinary boundaries allows her to look at how
different concepts of habit have been put to work in different ways,
rather than making a claim about the ‘true’ definition of the concept.
Blackman uses this history to focus on the way an interrogation of
habit disrupts our presumption of a clear and distinct boundary
between nature and culture, inside and outside, self and other, the
psychological and social. Central to her article is the foregrounding
of the paradoxical nature of habit as entailing both regulation and the
body’s potential for change and creativity, particularly in relation to
affect modulation. McDougall is best known for developing a theory
of instincts, and seeing habit in terms of the disciplining of bodies.

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18 Body & Society 19(2&3)

However, as Blackman points out, his writing also draws upon vitalist
traditions within philosophy and on the contemporary interest in hyp-
notic suggestion, mimesis and telepathy which, she argues, may con-
tribute to a better understanding of the affective capacities of bodies
and what she calls the ‘trans-subjective ontologies of personhood’.
Elizabeth Grosz’s article also captures the paradoxical nature of
habit, arguing that habit, rather than being reduced to stasis, can also
be understood as a mode of engagement. Drawing on Ravaisson, Berg-
son and Deleuze, her article works with various binaries – fixity/tran-
sition, past/future, action/milieu, mute/intensify, accommodation of/
accommodation to – but rather than try to resolve them, Grosz accepts
them as productive, paradoxical junctures. Her approach allows her to
foreground habit as a complex phenomenon which cannot be reduced
to mechanical behaviour. The key to habit for Grosz is the way it pro-
vides an ‘anchor’ in an unstable world of endless change. It offers a
predictability through compressing action. Habit, then, is the way the
living adjust to the non-living and transform the non-living into an
‘accompaniment’ of life. Through habit, she argues, we tame our sur-
roundings, rather than being tamed by them. Habit is therefore regu-
lated by a double-law: through repetition it both mutes the impact of
external forces and intensifies the impact of internal forces. In other
words, habits enable one to get used to external forces; and habits
enable one to use less and less force on internal forces. As the contrac-
tion of past activities into present actions, habit brings the past and the
virtual to bear on the present and the actual. Through contraction, the
present and the material come to be laden with potential, and the pos-
sibility of being otherwise. Habit thus orients the body to temporality.
This links nicely with Melanie White’s article contrasting Bergson
and Durkheim. Her article focuses on the recurrent use of the meta-
phors of leaping in Bergson and lifting in Durkheim to explore how
each thinker conceptualizes the social dimensions of habit. White
argues that Bergson uses the theme of leaping to mark the difference
between the pressure of habit found in ‘closed’ societies and the
aspiration to creative emotion in ‘open’ societies. In contrast,
Durkheim uses the language of lifting to describe how society ele-
vates the individual from their egoistic tendencies by the collective
effervescence that energizes collective habits. She contends not sim-
ply that the language of leaping and lifting gives us powerful concep-
tual tools to examine these writers’ contrasting conceptions of the

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Bennett et al. 19

social, but also that these offer different perspectives on the way
emotion, as a creative force, attaches us to the social. While Dur-
kheim uses emotion as a way of turning to habit, White argues, Berg-
son uses it as a means to turn away from habit.
Our final two articles, comprising the Commentary section, provide
something of an overview on the subject of habit and its historical role
in liberal government, and its relation to our attempts to understand that
history through our own practices of research. Mary Poovey raises these
issues through a study of the role of habit in classical liberalism pursued
through the means of the electronic search function of a digital archive, in
this instance the database of the Online Library of Liberty maintained by
the Liberty Fund, an organization with a high profile in the dissemination
of a particular canon of texts in the history of political thought. In a sense,
then, Poovey’s research is on the relationship between habit and liberal-
ism as portrayed in the texts selected by this organization which, as Poo-
vey notes, with a few notable exceptions, is significantly biased towards
the western, particularly Anglo-American intellectual traditions with the
greatest weight placed on the 18th and 19th centuries. This research bears
out the findings of many of the other texts here in pointing to the complex
relationship between liberalism and habit, with some authors suggesting
that enslavement to habit is contrary to the notion of individual self-
fulfilment, while others develop a sense that the cultivation of good habits
was central to the operation of free society.
In essence habit figures as both problem and solution in liberalism.
There was certainly a strand of liberalism that sought to stigmatize
subjects of colonial rule in terms of their habitual behaviour, in oppo-
sition to wilful or reasonable behaviour. Equally there were English
traditions that explained their apparently unique retention of liber-
ties, in contrast to the apparent triumph of despotism on continental
Europe, to the customary practices of the English. This tension is
explored through the conception of habit as a ‘switchpoint’. If it pro-
vided a means through which individuals could operate as parts of
large social wholes, it also functioned as a way for social scientists
to extend their analyses from the individual to the social scale. This
Poovey locates in a general trajectory in which the treatment of habit
shifts from the metaphysical to the moral-psychological to the rela-
tionship between the individual and the social–though not, it should
be noted, in a straightforward chronological transition. This proble-
matic lies at the heart of liberalism: how can the individual be

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20 Body & Society 19(2&3)

understood as free and self-determining if they are also subject to the

wider forces of society?
These issues are further explored in Tom Crook’s response to Mary
Poovey’s text. Crook takes up Poovey’s point that the term ‘habit’
originally had a twin meaning: referring, first, to one’s dress and out-
ward appearance and, second, to internal dispositions. In terms of the
latter he draws out the Victorian distinction between habit and custom,
the former figuring as the consequence of the latter, or the individual
acts of behaviour rather than practices common to bodies of men: cus-
toms are followed and are national and social, habits are acquired and
are personal. Habit in this sense is rooted in the mind or body of the
individual. Once again, we return to habit as the switchpoint between
the individual and the social, but modified in relation to the concern
with the ‘avalanche of printed numbers’, the development of statistical
analysis which was so characteristic of the early Victorian period,
coupled with the new social scientific methods of social investigation.
Of course, these concerns are radically different from Poovey’s med-
itations on the search term in the digital age, but they once again draw
out the significance of habit in relation to the history of the social sci-
entific enterprise itself, and especially the extent to which ‘habit’ has
functioned as an explanation in social science, particularly an explana-
tion for that most problematic of relationships: between the individual
and the social, the body and society, mankind and the environment.
The malleability of habit as a concept and its capacity to function as
‘switchpoint’, Crook suggests, has been the source of its success as
a mode of social explanation which can be deployed in an array of con-
texts, of which liberalism is only one.

Habit Now
Where, then, is habit now? The question is different from our opening
questions – why habit? and why now? – and more difficult to answer.
This is partly because, although we have ranged across discussions of
habit from Aristotle through to Deleuze, we have focused more on
some traditions than on others and, indeed, have neglected some
entirely. Our treatment of the spheres of practical application in which
discourses of habit have become entangled has been similarly selec-
tive. There are many spheres of life we have not engaged with in which
questions of habit and their transformation are matters of widespread

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Bennett et al. 21

everyday, practical concern. Wikepedia reports that Stephen Covey’s

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Per-
sonal Change, a self-help manual for success in business, had logged
up combined book and CD sales of over 40 million by 2011. If popular
manuals of this kind abound, there is similarly no diminution of inter-
est on the part of governments or other agencies with regard to how
habit, or habits, might be changed. This is nowhere more evident than
in the campaigns around healthy living, specifically eating, drinking,
smoking, and taking regular exercise, which are frequently voiced in
terms of habit as both problem and solution to the apparent problems
of obesity and unfitness which are a contemporary obsession.
A second difficulty is that different approaches to the question are
suggested by the range of positions that are canvassed across the dif-
ferent papers. As Elizabeth Grosz asks, and answers, the question as
to where habit is today more directly in her contribution to this spe-
cial issue than the other contributors, it will repay our attention to
look briefly at the answer she proposes. While the significance of the
Ravaisson–Bergson–Deleuze lineage is engaged with across a num-
ber of articles (Bennett, Carlisle and White, for example), these do
not all share Grosz’s assessment of the ‘utterly transformative’
effects of this tradition. These consist, she argues, in its calling into
question the assumption ‘that habits are that part of us that can be
adjusted, altered, oriented in one way or another, manipulated to
attain various goals’. The result of philosophical reflection rather
than of any specifically interested form of knowledge concerned with
bringing about changes in specific regions of behaviour, the Ravais-
son–Bergson–Deleuze lineage is to be valued for its production of
concepts. Its productivity in this regard consists in its reconceptuali-
zation of habit as occupying ‘the border between the absolutely con-
strained and the radically free’, and thereby transforming ‘the
constrained into degrees of freedom, degrees of openness’. This ‘not
only opens up the living being to the acquisition of new characteris-
tics and capacities; it also opens up the universe to being otherwise
. . . with its necessary complication of the present and the actual with
the unspent forces of the past and the virtual’.
This is a compelling distillation of the effects of this lineage when
understood on its own terms: that is, in acceding to philosophy its
Deleuzeian conception as a practice that creates new concepts through
processes that are distinct from the procedures informing the empirical

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22 Body & Society 19(2&3)

disciplines of the life sciences and social sciences. From another per-
spective, however, such conceptions are interpretable as among the
moves that philosophy makes as a means of organizing its own distinc-
tive forms of power and effectivity – its own spheres of intervention –
relative to the empirical disciplines. Ian Hunter’s work has pointed in
this direction for some time in reviewing the mechanisms and devices
though which philosophers, from Kant through Husserl to the moment
of theory, have cultivated various ways of withdrawing from the world
in order to produce distinctive forms of authority within it (Hunter,
2006). From this perspective, the Ravaisson–Bergson–Deleuze lineage
would need to be assessed in terms of the forms of authority it has
opened up for philosophy relative to other disciplines with regard to
the debates about the ways of shaping and directing behaviour that the
concept of habit has always been implicated in. It is also in this con-
nection pertinent to recall Foucault’s strictures in The Birth of Biopo-
litics (2008) against posing questions of governance and questions of
freedom as opposites. Freedom, he argues, has constantly to be made
up as a set of attributes that liberal forms of government work through
and depend on for their exercise. And philosophy, in its various
accounts of the relations between habit, will and instinct, between
innovation, creativity and innovation, has been no idle historical
bystander with regard to these processes.
All of which is by way of saying that, as these articles attest, habit
today is still disputed territory, still an aspect of conduct whose inter-
pretation is contested, and still a significant locus for debates and
empirical research concerning the issues that are at stake in the vari-
able ways in which freedom, human capacities and governance are
understood and interpreted.

Notes
1. The workshop ‘Habit, Governance, the Social’ was held in April
2010 at the Centre for Cultural Research (CCR, now the Institute
for Culture and Society) at the University of Western Sydney
(UWS) in Parramatta. We jointly organized the workshop on behalf
of CCR, the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change
(CRESC) at the Open University and the University of Manchester,
and the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at
New York University. In addition to the articles collected here,
papers were presented by Barry Hindess from the Australian

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Bennett et al. 23

National University (ANU), Shannon Sullivan from Penn State

University, Ghassan Hage from the University of Melbourne and
Megan Watkins from CCR. The workshop was greatly enriched
by the contributions of our discussants: Ien Ang and Kay Anderson
from CCR, David Bissell from ANU, Anna Gibbs from the College
of Arts at UWS and Ruth Barcan from the University of Sydney.
2. The British Phenomenological Society, for example, convened a
symposium on ‘Habit as Second Nature’ at the University of
Oxford in April 2010. An edited selection of the papers presented
at this symposium has since been published as a special Habit issue
of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (42 (1),
January 2011). Habit has also become a lively topic in the ecologi-
cal humanities, where its role in programmes of environmental
management and climate change has been foregrounded: see, for
example, Gay Hawkins (2006) and Matt Grist (n.d.). The latter
forms a part of the Social Brain programme organized by the
Action and Research Centre of the Royal Society for the Encour-
agement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. This programme
explores the implications of critical social science perspectives
on habit and the findings of contemporary neuroscience regarding
the relations between habit and other neural operations for contem-
porary questions of social governance. The Monash Sustainability
Institute at Monash University brings similar perspectives to bear
on questions of environmental management. Graybiel (2008) and
Yin and Knowlton (2006) provide useful overviews of the debates
over habit in the neurosciences. Duhigg (2012) testifies to the con-
tinuing influence of the topic in manuals for daily living and self-
improvement.
3. For Aristotle, moral virtues are not engendered by nature nor
developed in opposition to it; nature equips us with the capacities
needed to receive moral virtues, but their full development is due
to habit. See Aristotle (2000).
4. See, for a presentation of the concerns of affect theory that
relates closely to our concerns here, the special issue of Body
& Society on Affect (16(1), March 2010) edited by Lisa Black-
man and Couze Venn.
5. For an account of the role played by varied material actors in the
processes through which disciplined techniques of learning are
acquired and become habituated, see Watkins (2012).

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24 Body & Society 19(2&3)

6. While they are clearly connected, it is important to distinguish

the traditions of liberal political thought and philosophy from the
practices of liberal government, in the sense that Foucault gives
to this term. The latter are not restricted to the former for reasons
that Foucault (2008) explores in some detail.
7. Campbell (1996) reviews the tendency for the concepts of custom,
tradition and habit to be merged into one another in 19th-century
social thought, while also offering good reasons for holding them
to be distinct. That said, the distinction he proposes (seeing habit
as involuntary and participation in custom and tradition involving
some kind of elective component) is merely one variant among
many possibilities. Tönnies (1961) distinguishes custom and habit
clearly, but on quite different grounds. Interpreting habit as a kind
of congealed will – ‘that is, will which has become lord and mas-
ter through practice’ (Tönnies, 1961: 34) – he casts custom in the
role of a conservative halter on the dynamics that translate new
cycles of volition into the real and essential form of will as habit.
8. Latour has played the leading role in the Tarde revival, initially
in Latour (2002) and subsequently in his role in restaging the
1903 Durkheim–Tarde debate in Latour (2010). Toews (2003)
and Barry and Thrift (2007) – their introduction to a special issue
of Economy and Society on Tarde – provide good overviews,
while Candea (2010a) offers a good collection of different
assessments of Tarde’s work from a range of contemporary posi-
tions and perspectives.
9. The Tarde revival has so far paid little attention to Tarde’s influ-
ence on the tradition of Americanist anthropology represented by
Franz Boas and his students. Yet this was significant. Boas
(1911) drew on Tarde in his account of the significance of imitation
in both civilized and savage societies while Clark Wissler (1923),
one of Boas’s students and his successor at the American Museum
of Natural History, drew on Tarde’s account of imitation as crucial
to the diffusion of cultural traits from one cultural area to another.
10. Tarde’s work is somewhat less singular if viewed from the perspec-
tive of the role that he accords the aesthetic and genius, as sources
of creative innovation, in relation to processes of imitation.
Vincent-Antonin Lepinay (2007) usefully highlights these ques-
tions in his discussion of the role that ‘germ capital’ plays in
Tarde’s rebuttal of the labour theory of value. The product of

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Bennett et al. 25

genius, germ capital introduces discontinuity into the purely repe-

titive processes which convert labour into capital accumulation; it
provides a new model which labour henceforth merely copies
mechanically and automatically. It is only the capacity for innova-
tion provided by genius, the sole source of value, that provides the
conditions for new cycles of accumulation. As such the accumula-
tion of value is dependent on the unequal distribution of leisure as
the necessary precondition for creative innovation. The purely
repetitive role of labour adds nothing. Tarde’s argument here
echoes the distinction between liberal and mechanical occupations
that was central to the role that the aesthetic played in the early for-
mulations of liberal government in distinguishing its subjects
(those with free time) from its objects (those subject to the con-
straints of necessity and the intellectual closures produced by the
routines of repetitive labour [Klein, 1994; Poovey, 1994a, 1994b]).
11. These are not, though, the only perspectives from which Dewey’s
work has been returned to in the context of present debates on
habit. Shannon Sullivan’s work attempts to effect some rappro-
chement between Dewey’s work and post-Freudian theory in her
approach to racism as a form of unconscious habit (Sullivan,
2000, 2004, 2006). Terrance Macmullan (2009) has taken issue
with the uses Sullivan makes of Dewey for this purpose.

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Authors’ biographies
Tony Bennett is Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory in the
Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney,
Australia.
Francis Dodsworth is a Research Fellow in the ESRC Centre for Research
on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC) at the Open University, UK.
Greg Noble is a Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Univer-
sity of Western Sydney, Australia.
Mary Poovey is Samuel Rudin University Professor in the Humanities and
Professor of English at New York University.
Megan Watkins is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and mem-
ber of the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western
Sydney.

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