Habit, instinct, survivals : repetition, history, biopower

Tony Bennett

    Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapter

    Abstract

    This somatization of race initially took the form of polygenetic accounts of racial divisions that called into question both Christian and Enlightenment accounts of human unity. While Darwin’s account of evolution opened up a space in which Aborigines might be enfolded within civilizing programs by denying that racial differences were innate or constituted unbridgeable gaps, Anderson suggests that subsequent developments in anthropology placed Aborigines beyond the reach of such programs by consigning them to the newly historicized twilight zone between nature and culture represented by the category of prehistory. As survivals of the past in the present, Aborigines presented the difficulty not of being innately different but of being too far away in time. Still on the cusp of the journey from nature into culture, they had simply too far to travel across the eons of evolutionary time separating them from the properly historical time of their colonizers before the imperatives of racial competition resulted in their elimination. I have no quarrels with this account; far from it. However, part of my purpose in this chapter is to argue that the distinctive dynamics that connected a belief in the “unimprovability” of Aborigines and the doctrine of survivals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century depended on the ways in which the relationships between habit and instinct were reconfigured in the context of post-Darwinian social, political, and anthropological thought. For this pluralized and historicized the concept of innateness in ways that reordered its relations to race. This argument also serves as a vehicle for a broader purpose: to shade and qualify the role that has been attributed to habit within liberal forms of government in the post-Foucauldian literature on governmentality. This has largely been concerned with habit as a mechanism distinguishing where the assumption that individuals are to be governed through their capacities for freedom should apply and where, instead, more coercive forms of rule should be brought into play. Where behavior has become so habituated through frequent repetition that it trespasses on the capacity for the will, guided by reflexive judgment, to be freely exercised, the shutters have been drawn on liberal strategies of rule in favor of reinforcing the mechanisms of habit as an automated form of self-rule.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationThe Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain
    EditorsSimon Gunn, James Vernon
    Place of PublicationBerkeley
    PublisherUniversity of California Press
    Pages102-118
    Number of pages17
    ISBN (Print)9780984590957
    Publication statusPublished - 2011

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Habit, instinct, survivals : repetition, history, biopower'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this