Habit’s pathways: guiding repetition, governing conduct, contested interruptions

Drawing principally on the work of Michel Foucault, this paper considers how the relations between habit and repetition have been construed in the exercise of different forms of power: disciplinary, pastoral, governmental, and algorithmic, for example. It does so by reviewing a range of the pathway metaphors that abound in the literature on habit, paying particular attention to how these differ in their interpretation of habit’s relations to repetition and the role they accord different authorities – theological, philosophical, psychological, sociological – in guiding the conduct of different social agents along the pathways that those authorities superintend. This involves considering how strategies for governing conduct are differentiated by the “politics of gapped time” according to which some populations but not others – differences constituted in a mix of classed, raced, and gendered terms – are accorded the ability to review and redirect their conduct when habit’s repetitions are periodically interrupted. These processes of habit formation, perpetuation, interruption, and re-formation are considered in the context of their operation in different social machineries and technologies.