"A theorization of habit that emphasizes its excessive and unsettling qualities rather than its mediating, adaptive, and stabilizing functions.
Subject Matter offers a bold counterpoint to prevalent conceptions of habit characterized by bodily fluidity and ease, as the stabilizing foundation of an emerging subjectivity, or, more negatively, as a numbing and deadening force. Instead of facilitating the coordination of action with goal and self with environment, habit appears as a disruptively recursive operation with extreme ontological implications that are often more quotidian than exceptional. Vinegar theorizes habit's more perturbing aspects, from repetition compulsion to kenosis to breakdown, through an encounter between Hegel's philosophy (of habit), psychoanalytic dimensions of repetition, Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder, and Omer Fast's feature-length film interpretation of the novel.
Vinegar starts with the premise that habit is an ""unhappy mediator,"" a disturbance of the very medium and milieu that is constitutive of the subject. Subject Matter pays close attention to those aspects of habit that are usually considered deviations from, or potential threats to, habit proper and that generate a logic of breakdown- automaticity, mechanization, thingness, inertia, and fixity. By plotting a topology of habit's unbeatability through detailed accounts of its manifestation in writing, art, aesthetics, and visuality-and through an attentiveness to the unbalanced nonrelations between mediation and immediacy, being and having, fixity and fluidity, vanishing and overflowing, abbreviation and excess, beginning and ending-Vinegar exposes habit's failure to mediate and inhabit. In doing so, he offers new and counterintuitive insights into how habit generates the unruly grounds it is supposed to settle, thus allowing us to ask how we might break down differently."
By:
Aron Vinegar
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 14mm
Weight: 306g
ISBN: 9780262546362
ISBN 10: 0262546361
Series: Short Circuits
Pages: 216
Publication Date: 05 December 2023
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Series Foreword vii INTRODUCTION: HABIT— THE UNHAPPY MEDIATOR 1 Habit without the Fly- Wheel 1 Fixity, Fluidity, and Superfluity 6 A Crack in the Mirror, a Rent in the Veil 9 The Anaesthetics of Habit 11 No Footlights— On Staging the Set- Up Error 13 Habit, Hegel, and Remainder 14 A Logic of Breakdown 19 Subject Matter and Habit 20 Kenosis and the Stained Soul of Habit 22 (Chapter) Breakdown 24 1 FALLING STUFF 29 Falling Stuff and the Destitution of Subjectivity 29 Repetition, Habit, and the Speculative Sentence 33 Satz at the Heart of Setzen and the Failure to Ingrain 38 The Fixed Subject 40 “Unhappy Tristram!” 45 Habit, Anxiety, and the Overproximity of Being and Having 47 Habit’s Death Drive and Dead Time 49 “Kerr- thunkk!”/“thump! kadump!” 52 2 PER- SEVERING HABIT AND THE DESEASE OF THE FLUID BODY 57 Rattling Off— On Chains and Streams 58 Fixity and Fluidity 60 “This being- at- home- with- oneself we call habit” 61 Bruised, Bloodied, and Stained 65 Expunging the Beautiful Soul (Porifera) 68 Compulsive Machinic Exteriority 75 Being- That- Is- Deposited 76 Understanding and the Aesthetic Ideology of Habit Change 80 Verstand and Vernunft in Habit 85 Death- Dealing Matter and Forensic Analysis 89 The Magic and Cunning of Habit 93 A Short- Circuiting Anaesthetics of the Infinite Judgment 96 3 BUFFETING AND BEING SECOND- HAND 103 Michelangelo’s Artichoke 103 The Static Logic of Habit 109 Buffeting and Being Set Adrift 112 Tingling and the Tinnitus of the Body 116 Fulgurating Lightning Rods 118 The Recoil of Vergreifen in Begreifen 121 The Ego- Function of an Organ is Impaired 123 “Not a Member is Sober” 129 Grasping at the Principle of Carrot and Stick 130 Joan of Arc’s Gaucherie and the Stained Soul of Habit 137 4 PIECES OF (FIGURE) EIGHT AND THE CRUX OF THE MATTER 141 Habit and “Un- Matter” 141 A Kenotic Anaesthetics of Habit 144 Vanishing, Vaporizing, and Overflowing 145 Pieces of (Figure) Eight 147 The Disinhabiting Ring of Habit 150 Autopilot, the Not Yet, and Remainder’s Nonending 152 Acknowledgments 155 List of Abbreviations 157 Notes 159 Index 199
Aron Vinegar is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Oslo. He writes and teaches at the intersection of art, architecture, visual studies, aesthetics, and philosophy.
