Habit's Pathways: Repetition, Power, Conduct [Mīkstie vāki]

"Habit's Pathways considers the intellectual and political histories of habit. Tony Bennett takes great care in analyzing how discourses of habit and the apparatuses that deploy them are bound up in various forms of power. Bennett examines how habits as repetitive patterns of behavior are conjoined with population regulation by authorities and can also reify structures of power. The book returns again and again to the crossroad between "habit then" and "habit now," asking how the ways we think about habit have changed and continue to change. Bennett contextualizes habits through what he calls "architectures of the person": the senses, will, reflex, instinct, the nervous system, brain and consciousness. This focus comes through especially in his engagement with the works of Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Elizabeth Grosz, Catherine Malabou, and others. Habit's Pathways works at the intersection of philosophy, critical theory, history, and digital media studies"--

Tony Bennett offers a sweeping political history of habit and its use to govern conduct across a range of past and contemporary regimes of power.

Habit has long preoccupied a wide range of theologians, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and neuroscientists. In Habit’s Pathways Tony Bennett explores the political consequences of the varied ways in which habit’s repetitions have been acted on to guide or direct conduct. Bennett considers habit’s uses and effects across the monastic regimens of medieval Europe, in plantation slavery and the factory system, through colonial forms of rule, and within a range of medicalized pathologies. He brings these episodes in habit’s political histories to bear on contemporary debates ranging from its role in relation to the politics of white supremacy to the digital harvesting of habits in practices of algorithmic governance. Throughout, Bennett tracks how habit’s repetitions have been articulated differently across divisions of class, race, and gender, demonstrating that although habit serves as an apparatus for achieving success, self-fulfilment, and freedom for the powerful, it has simultaneously served as a means of control over women, racialized peoples, and subordinate classes.