dissertation:
The Vivacity of Our Ideas: Habit in Modern Political Thought
publications:
“Play, Work, and Marcuse’s Critique of Opposition” (forthcoming at Polity)
“‘As It Regards Poetry.’ Review of Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate.” (Cleveland Review of Books, October 19, 2018).
“On Logic and the Theory of Ensembles: Formalism and Alain Badiou’s Experience of Politics” (Theory & Event, volume 20, no. 4: October 2017)
working papers:
“Criticism and Self-Criticism: The Combahee River Collective’s Account of Solidarity”
“Is Rudolf Carnap a Critical Theorist?”
“Rawls’s Humean Socialism”
“Race in Tocqueville’s Historiography of Revolution”
“National Attachments: Collectivity and Agency in Martin Delany’s Political Theory”
Image: Richard Serra installation at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2007)
Research
I study problems of collective action in contemporary political theory. More specifically, I’m interested in the challenge that behavior poses to theories of agency and social transformation. In 1969, Sheldon Wolin spoke of “regular and predictable behavior” as the downfall of a genuinely democratic society. Although his diagnosis has been influential for the subsequent study of political theory, we live today in a time of transition marked by crises of faith in the traditional markers of political stability, circumstances in which behavior has once again become a central question for the possibility of democratic politics. Inattention to this domain of political action by postwar Anglophone political theory, I argue, has meant an avoidance of the problem of agency in a world of tradition, custom, and behavior. While it’s necessary to act collectively to effect meaningful social transformation, there is a difficult and increasingly demanding tension within political theory between group attachment and transformative agency. In the absence of a theory of behavior, we lose an important tool for understanding and resolving that tension. Hence my research question: how does political theory engage and understand behavior as a site of both group attachment and social transformation? To address this question, I build on recent research that explores the 18th century traditions of moral sentimentalism and their contributions to theorizing the motivations for collective action.
My dissertation, Vivacity of Our Ideas: Habit in Modern Political Thought, is the first full-length analysis of habit as an essentially contested concept in the history of political thought. In it, I argue that by giving a shared and material rhythm to otherwise individually-felt sentiments, habit constitutes the basis for both collective and transformative action. In this project I engage a set of thinkers—David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, and Herbert Marcuse—who understood the contest over the meaning and significance of habit to be a contest over the terms of social transformation. What’s missing in our understanding of these thinkers is the regard they held for habit as a resource for collective attachment and political change: they not only provide arguments for how to act morally but understand habit as the central dimension of moral and political life. For all of our existing theories of collective action and coordinated decision-making, we still cannot account for the feeling of political solidarity. In contrast to theories of political life grounded in notions of social contract, general will, or deliberative procedure, I’m interested in the particular moral sentiments that motivate collective attachment in the first instance. The texts I work with all address the question of attachment by confronting the difference between individual decision-making and the habitual affections that animate collective agency. Attending to this nexus of concerns recasts routine as a material basis of democratic participation, and enables us to reconsider collectivity in terms of sentimentality and attachment rather than the aggregate of individual actions.
This project proposes that in a mass society like ours, the routines of habit are central elements of political solidarity. This is especially true in cases of racial politics or feminist social movements, wherein the terms of conflict call the very sources and limits of state and civic institutions into question. Other views that ground solidarity in terms of recognition, or conflict, or nondomination, tend to oppose habit to a form of individual and collective decision-making that can be uniformly described with one and the same term, namely, “action.” But it’s not so obvious that collectivities can be said to act in a manner analogous to individual agents, and these views, while attractive, often leave unanswered the questions of what motivates individuals to attach themselves to collective projects in the first place. The figures I examine take up this question by asserting the political significance of those mundane routines of everyday social life. My dissertation’s four chapters address the various ways that these figures see habit as a condition of political agency: 1. fanaticism and bad behaviors of public deliberation (Kant), 2. custom and common law (Hume), 3. routine labor and worker solidarity (Marx), and 4. the importance of “play” to multiracial organizing (Marcuse). Each chapter investigates a thinker’s attempt to reckon with the possibility of social transformation by reconstructing their account of habit and the role that it plays in the creation, maintenance, and even dismantling of social bonds. I will file the dissertation in June 2022, after which I will prepare the manuscript for publication as a book.
My research is part of a developing area of scholarship that engages with limit cases and negative affects to study the relation of perennial questions of collective action to contemporary circumstances. To this scholarly sensibility I bring an especial attentiveness to political theory’s various methods: the works and authors I survey draw upon moral, jurisprudential, and literary tools as well as upon physiology, psychology, economics and the other social sciences. I have begun to pursue these other aspects of my research in a suite of papers both published and in progress which distinguish between various accounts of collective action as canonical concepts of democratic theory. Here I’ve studied various interventions in critical theory, post-Soviet leftism, and interwar-era German liberalism that concern the relationship between ethics and economics. My first article, published at Theory & Event, offers a new reading of the relation between structural transformation and individual agency in the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s formal logic. It argues that we should think of Badiou as a theorist of habit rather than radicality, with wider consequences for how we conceptualize the relation between events, practices, and collective power. Another article, currently under review, intervenes in contemporary debates regarding the importance of “labor” to democratic politics: it documents the relation between racial liberation movements and midcentury Marxist politics to offer current debates a fruitful rethinking of the ways in which conceptions of habit have challenged economic rationalities of racial domination. In two manuscripts which I am currently preparing for submission, I study the relation between agrarian democracy, political economy, and racial disavowal in the work of Martin Delany and Alexis de Tocqueville. These article-length projects have deepened my expertise in and appreciation for sentimentalist approaches to pressing issues in contemporary political theory.
Finally, I have begun research for a second book project on the relation between interest and collective action in feminist internationalism—a vibrant tradition that includes Rosa Luxemburg, Claudia Jones, Angela Davis, and the Combahee River Collective (CRC). This project extends my dissertation’s line of inquiry into 20th century political theory in order to ask: What kind of a political problem is interest? What can these authors’ critiques of Leninism, Maoism, and other vanguardist theories of political action teach us about the relation between interest and attachment under conditions of ideology and obfuscation? Humanistic criticism often handles these questions by appealing to a distinction between subjective interests (ideology/structure) and objective interests (resistance/freedom). The figures I study, by contrast, recognize no such distinction, and indeed take composition and structural coordination to be essential to the practice of criticism and political action. Just as my dissertation argues that the abandonment of behavior by political theorists narrowed the scope of their critical vision, this project will argue that the American reduction of interest to self-absorbed egoism misses its centrality to feminist and democratic theories of political life. Whether these authors affirm the importance of organization to mass politics (Luxemburg), the centrality of black women to “anti-imperialist coalition” (Jones), “human life” over “class consciousness” (Davis), or self-criticism as a habit of solidarity (CRC), they all recognize the struggle to structure common interest to be a struggle over the sentimental structure of social transformation. By studying these authors’ intense regard for coalitional politics and their insistence that interest be thought of not in terms of egoism but rather as a sympathetic expression of collective desire, I reconstruct their feminist case for a political economy capable of addressing questions of power, authority, and collectivity today.
Image: Carol Rama, L’Isola degli occhi (1966)