Radical Habits

Radical Habits Kathy E. Ferguson (bio) Carolyn Pedwell. Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021. 223 pp. $34.95 (pb). ISBN: 9780228006220. This book focuses on habit as a site of “minor change” (p. xvii) that can become an alternative to larger processes of collective transformation. Drawing on a rich grounding in process philosophy, Pedwell defines habits as “moving assemblages that enable new affective, material, and political capacities and collectives to emerge.” (p. xvii) She focuses our attention on the political potential of interventions at the level of “the minor” without dispensing with “the major.” Rather, she seeks useful bridges between the two. She wants to “rethink the relationship between “the revolutionary” and “the routine” (p. xix) to see them as “fundamentally imbricated” so that “minor tendencies, gestures, and interactions may be just as important as major events.” (p. 11) Pedwell builds primarily on three “philosophers of habit” (p. 5): Felix Ravaisson, William James, and John Dewey, along with current process-oriented thinkers including Erin Manning, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Catherine Malabou, Eve Sedgwick, and others to develop her idea of “the minor”: “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.” (p. xii) So major here does not necessarily mean bigger, it means more orthodox; while minor does not necessarily mean small, it means minoritarian. Pedwell initially defines affect as “a form of sensorial relationality productive of different kinds of interaction and becoming.” (p. xix) As the argument advances, she uses “affect” very broadly: “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.” (p. 28) I am not sure that it best serves her argument to collapse such a substantial range of sensations and relations into one term. I suspect that she loses an important distinction between a subject-centered feeling, which I would call emotion, and the larger terrain, which I would call affect, that enables a certain grammar of feeling. Pedwell takes greater care to preserve useful distinctions in her discussion of habit. She initially defines habit as “embodied technologies that bring forward (the result of) past actions into the present and future.”(p. xxii) Habits are always more than micro-level arrangements; they always entail “ongoing transactions” between individuals and others. (p xxiii) They are always embedded in assemblages of “permeable bodily processes and heterogeneous and changing milieus which are entangled within emergent ecologies.” (p. 17) She recalibrates habit to forge fresh connections to solidarity (“a moving assemblage of affects, gestures, and habits”). (p. 24) [End Page 216] Chapter 1 investigates the “double nature” of habits (p. 4): they can certainly sustain the status quo, but they can also “become otherwise.”(p. 6) While habits can be “automated repetition,” they can also be emergent opportunities for progressive activism. (p. 38) “Acquired predispositions,” as Dewey wrote, compose us in relations of bodies to their contexts; they may catalyze us into transformations and just as easily they may disperse “into ineffectual spray.” (p. 43) We can intervene in habit’s realm, and redirect its ongoing chain of actions to activate other possibilities, but without any sort of guarantee that the newly realized directions will be either predictable or preferable. Chapter 2 reflects on the racism and xenophobia in the Brexit campaign and the Trump election, telling stories of the habits of domination fostered in neoliberalism and white power. “Understanding white privilege through the logics of habit” helps us understand racism’s periodic retreat and predictable return in the mundane, not just the extraordinary, registers of politics. (p. 67) Aware that merely pointing to racism may only reinforce it, rather than challenge it, she suggests that a better approach is to reorient our modes of affective attention: to pay attention differently, to engage in material and ethical processes that may take us elsewhere. Chapter 3 takes on some of the purveyors of habit governance who are dangerous to Pedwell’s project, the advocates of “nudging” people via “subtle tweaks...

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