Thinking Habits for Uncertain Subjects: Movement, Stillness, Susceptibility

• Published in: Environment and planning. A 2011-11, Vol.43 (11), p.2649-2665
• Main Author: Bissell, David
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Habits; Liberation; Modernity; Morals; Social theory; Sovereignty
• ISSN: 0308-518X; 1472-3409
• DOI: 10.1068/a43589

Stillness occupies an ambivalent position in a world of flows. Opening up space required for reflective, contemplative thought, stillness is often posited as a vital supplement to movement. Yet, in spite of its reverence as a cornerstone of moral responsibility and a key technic of modernity, reflective thought is now taken to be just one modality of thinking amongst many others that compose the body. This paper explores what happens to the capacities of reflective thought when gathered into a vitalist diagram of the body. It does this by tracing how different forms of stillness participate in the constitution of differently susceptible bodies. It considers how habit works to both hold still and move the body in different ways which helps to disrupt an understanding of a body that has a particular capacity for wilful, reflective sovereign thought. As such, and parallel to suggestions that we currently inhabit an era of thought maximisation, this paper argues that reflective thought itself might be better understood as enrolled into a particular diagram of habit that allows us to consider how reflection and contemplation might function not as a redemptive force of liberation from habit, but as the turbulent reverberations of the shock of the outside that can become debilitating.