FINAL Call for papers - deadline Monday 11th October
Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Seattle WA,
April 12-16, 2011

Powers of habit: tradition and change in thinking bodies

Organizers: David Bissell, The Australian National University and J-D
Dewsbury, University of Bristol

How can we think bodies in ways that attend, with greater fidelity, to their
irreducible susceptibility, vitality and vulnerability? One recent
possibility, following the translation and uptake of the work of Felix
Ravaisson (2008), is the concept of habit and the metaphysical and
practical questions it poses to the agency, creativity and change enacted
through our bodies (Carlisle, 2006). Habit incites dynamic and synergetic
ways of thinking the social through its dual logic: it suggests a
mechanical, unthinking repetition which also simultaneously acts as the
bedrock by which change can be evaluated; it takes the experiential shock
of encounter and then over time transforms the ever passive impressionable
body to a spontaneously acting one thereafter; and it illustrates how such
subsequent spontaneous acts free up our attention for other activities,
impressions and thus creativity (Malabou, 2008). Habit therefore speaks to
the bodied ways in which cultural formations, and crucially formations of
the self, come about through the technological and practical routines of
tradition and custom alongside an ever evolving, somewhat less apparent,
but politically adaptive, affective and materially-thought capacity for
subtle alteration. The challenges that habit poses have captivated a
diverse body of thinkers, threaded through the pragmatism of James and
Dewey, to the vitalism of Deleuze and Malabou; through the social theory
of Bourdieu and Wacquant, to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and
Ricoeur. So how
might geography respond - analytically, methodologically, and politically
- to the seemingly micro but effectively comprehensive grip of habits on
all aspects of our lives? Perhaps habit can act as a key concept for our
time by drawing upon recent scientific, political, ecological and health
paradigms - on neural affects, self-adaptive systems, vibrant matters,
addiction, and contemporary capital - towards researching, challenging and
instilling responsive strategies for coping and sustaining more effective
lifestyles at and through the level of the body.

Thinking about the powers of habit, this session opens up a space within
which we might push our understanding of bodies in these new directions.
Within geography, post-phenomenological ontologies have generated exciting
new forms with which to think the modulations and capacities, charges and
compositions through which bodies emerge. Building on this, we want to
invite articulations of the body that do not simply affirm the
significance of affect, sensation, practice and eventfulness to the
taking-place of bodies, but rather seek to unravel how habit in its myriad
possibilities intrudes on and agitates our understanding of these
relations, and thus our grasp of what it is to be a body. In this session
we would like to consider what powers habit might open up for apprehending
the capacities of bodies. How does habit invite us to attend to the
unstable and heterogeneous modulations of everyday life? And how might we
think habit as a transition of materiality and life? How might bodies grip
the world in ways that help us to attend to the plasticity of
body-brain-material assemblages? And how are new bodies created and how do
some bodies linger?

We invite both theoretical and empirically-focused papers which help to
address these questions and relate to the following themes:

1) Materializing Habit: What if habit is as much about the forces of
matter as it is about any sense of our own (sub)conscious will? Can the
machinations of bodily habits be accessed more effectively by thinking
through the affect inspired language and material physics of tendencies,
propensities, and catalysts? And what scientific imaginations and
apprehensions assist us in thinking and evidencing these habitual
assemblages of material affect through, for example, molecular impulses
and energies? What kinds of technologies, material interfaces and
subconscious screens are rewiring, enacting and making manifest new
personal and social habits?

2) Theorizing Habit: How does thinking through habit help us conceive,
research and write the body in itself? How do conceptualizations and
debates over affect and sensation push at the frontiers of plausible and
effective thinking? How does habit unpack the constitutive role of
passivity in rethinking the dualisms of the mind/body and the
active/inactive? And how might the logic of habit help us capture the fold
of matter and thought in ways that make us rethink the before and after of
the phenomenological tradition?

3) Training and Staging Habit: What kinds of techniques and protocols of
or for the body construct voluntary and involuntary performances (be that
in therapeutic, meditative, securitized, medical, sport or artistic
contexts), and how do these emerge or get rehearsed? How do architectural
spaces, and designed materials, imagine, engineer and affectively instruct
subtle and not so subtle new habitual dispositions? What kinds of habitual
thinking processes and practices are we adopting in realizing new
compatible and enhanced capacities of the body, and to what end?

4) Politicizing Habit: How does thinking through habit, in its dismantling
of the sovereign self, force us to rethink the relations between
knowledge, will, and responsibility? How have intimations of habit enacted
the ideological constructs enframing the body? How are (capitalist) habits
enacting our current accepted types of political and social organization?
How does habit rethink a radical politics through a revolution of the body
over that of the mind, and ultimately that of society?

In seeking to stage and address some of these questions, we want to
consider how habit might provide a conduit to think 'the body' in ways
that are much more embodied than our current thinking might permit.

Please send an abstract (max 250 words) of your paper and expressions of
interest to J-D Dewsbury ([log in to unmask]) and David Bissell
([log in to unmask]). We'd be very grateful if you could submit
abstracts to us by 11th October so that we have time to get the session
organised!