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 unbearability 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.
