>Mathew Forstater writes:
>alec ramsdell wrote:
>
>> An aside to everyone: has anyone read William James on habit?
>
>Interesting post, alec. Do you recommend looking at anything in
particular?
>How does it compare to Peirce? Peirce was initially interested in
habit
>formation, but became increasingly concerned with habit *change*. What
do
>we do if our habits become faulty? How do we reform our habits? Two
>interesting secondary sources here are:
>
>Neville, Robert Cummings, 1992: The Highroad Around Modernism, Albany:
SUNY
>Press.
>
>Ochs, Peter, 1993: "Charles Sanders Peirce," in D. R. Griffin, et al.:
>Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy, Albany: SUNY Press.
>
>I have tried to draw on this work in exploring alternative approaches
to
>economic planning other than optimal/rational planning.
>
>Vygotsky's work on children's free play and socialization is also
similar to
>Peirce's discussion here in stressing the importance of the
imagination.
>
>Mat (hundreds and hundreds of posts behind)
Thanks for the biblio info, Mat. I'm headed that way via this, from "Epidemics of the Will" in Eve Sedgwick's _Tendencies_, p. 138:
It is not so hard, then, to come up with a proliferation of--not causal *explanations* for the present epidemic of addiction attribution--but at least aspects of the present historical moment that seem to engage the addiction model in politically fraught, discursively productive mutual relations of representation and misrepresentations.
. . .
I'll just suggest briefly that the best luck I've had so far in reconstructing an "otherwise" for addiction attribution has been through a tradition that is, not opposed to it or explanatory of it, but rather one step to the side of it. That is the tradition of reflecting on *habit*, a version of repeated action that moves, not toward metaphysical absolutes, but toward interrelations of the action--and the self acting--with the bodily habitus, the apparelling habit, the sheltering habitation, everything that marks the traces of that habit on a world that the metaphysical absolutes would have left a vacuum. Though perpetuated and fairly intensively moralized from at least Cicero up to at least William James, with an especially acute psychologizing currency around, for instance, the eighteenth-century and Romantic origins of the English novel, the worldly concept of habit has dropped out of theorized use with the supervention in this century of addiction and the other glamorizing paradigms oriented around absolutes of compulsion/voluntarity. And indeed, I can understand the mistrust of modern versions of "habit," such as ego psychology, whose dependence on a metaphorics of *consolidation,* [I might mistrust the same re union building -Alec] and whose consequent ethicization of the unitary self, seem to render it peculiarly vulnerable to unacknowledged forms of moralism. Yet the unmoralized usage of the language of habit in, for instance, Proust is as scouring as any version of contemporary addiction attribution--without at all requiring the hypostatization of a ghostly, punitive free will on the receding horizon. Proust treats habit as, in the first instance, a perceptual matter, which means that his wealth of resources for denaturalizing the polarities "active" and "passive" in perception is at work in all his discussion of habit, the human faculty that can "chang[e] the colour of the curtains, silenc[e] the clock, [bring] an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass." Habituation is "that operation which we must always start afresh, longer, more difficult than the turning inside out of an eyelid, and which consists in the imposition of our own familiar soul on the terrifying soul of our surroundings" (vol. 2, p. 791). A banal but precious opiate, habit makes us blind to--and thus enables to come into existence--our surroundings, ourselves as we appear to others, and the imprint of others in ourselves.
. . .
It is extraordinarily difficult to imagine an analytically usable language of habit, in a conceptual landscape so rubbled and defeatured by the twin hurricanes named Just Do It and Just Say No.
[end excerpt]
This last sentence brings me back to the question of slogans, and the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality. In my numerous attendances at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, I've seen how such a confusion operates ideologically, and how the ship isn't always run so tight, thus the high recurrance of relapse.
Questions of metaphysical absolutes aside, and the twelve-step program is embedded in a "structurally receding" metaphysic of the Higher Power, what happens at an AA meeting, as a way of starting afresh the consolidating of group identity, is the group participation in certain speech-acts. The narratives, the drunk-a-logs and drug-a-logs, more often than not follow a set narrative, *explicitly stated by the speaker time and again* as "What it was like. What happened. And what it is like now." This shared narrative tends to confuse on a group level linguistic and phenomenal reality, under the banner of a master narrative and consolidation of individual identities (we're all essentailly different from "normies"). The shared narrative does a lot of the work of attribution in it's coerced binding of identity and temporality: there are no ex-alcoholics, "we claim progress not perfection." Their remains the stress point between the individual subject, the unique body, and the consolidation of group identity, mediated by the AA's particular ideological operation of confusing linguistic (the master group narrative) and phenomenal (the uniqueness of each life/body) reality.
Basically, a lot of slogans are used to stress the importance that one "keep coming back." AA works, it seems, because of that keep coming back, the habit of attendance in "these rooms". Quite simply, the meetings provide community for people whose narratives are predominantly of asociality and anti-sociality. Along this line, I would say that the confusion of linguistic (the AA slogans everyone finds tedious, but are perpetuated with "it's a cliche because it's true"--ugh) with phenomenal (the success of AA based on the habitus, community-meeting aspect) reality causes many people to relapse, at their distrust, or indeed disgust, at the vapid religious discourse and gothic morality of the twelve-steps. The "personal responsibility" and "character defects" that are so at odds in many ways with the social quality of the meetings. We're all essentailly outcastes from society, but we are so together: this makes it tricky for some, it seems to me, to negotiate living among "normies", and contributes to the relapse rate, and more precisely to that locus of (meta)physical anxiety: the "relapse". I write this as one who was "strung out" on IV heroin (and cocaine) use for a few years, but now enjoys drinking with friends.
More Sedgwick on habit:
p. 139
Habit also, however, demarcates the space of perceptual and proprioceptive reversal and revelation--revelation at which introspection itself can never arrive. . . . Habits in Proust, like lies and foolish sorrows, resemble "servants, obsucre and detested, against whom one struggles, beneath whose dominion one more and more completely falls, dire and dreadful servants whom it is impossible to replace and who by subterranean paths lead us towards truth and death" (vol. 3, p. 948). And yet it is also they, the habits "--even the meanest of them, such as our obscure attachments to the dimensions, to the atmosphere of a bedroom--that take fright and refuse, in acts of rebellion which we must recognize to be a secret, partial, tangible and true aspect of our resistance to death" (vol. I, p. 722).
[end quote]
But of course, the people I've met who've spent time in institutions and prison didn't mention anything about being supplied with magic lanterns for their cells. And who's going to apply Proust to understanding their chemical habits when structural racism denies them the privilege of extensive education?
-Alec
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