Dr David Bissell, ARC DECRA Research Fellow, School of Sociology,
The Australian National University. 

Larry Saha Seminar Room 2175, Level 2, Haydon-Allen Building,
The Australian National University. 

In his brilliant exposition of the torsion of voluntary and involuntary action, Paul Ricoeur asks: “what is hidden behind this enigmatic submissiveness of habit which effaces the traces of its own history?” In this paper, I detail how practice theory, a key sociological tool that has attracted significant policy interest in recent years, resuscitates habit histories through a genealogical method. This method is effective at spotlighting significant events in the evolution of practices and thus possible sites through which transformations can be staged that acknowledge the distributed, knotty configurations of agencies at play. Yet the analytical operation of revelation that this method relies on occludes the crucial virtuality of habit’s dynamic which ensures that practices are always more excessive than their local manifestation in effective action. Drawing primarily on Bergson’s writings on relations of matter and life, I argue that this omission is significant because the incremental transformations that are implied in much sociological analysis on practice synchronisation are precisely contingent on habit’s virtuality. Conceptually, this means that the efficiencies of practice and the excessiveness of matter are not opposing logics, but are mutually constituted. Politically, this means that acknowledging the unactualised potentials of the virtual that inheres in all matter points to other, possibly more obscure sites of social transformation that might otherwise escape our attention.