Time of practice

Scholarship on practice has been taken up from diverse contexts and a range of perspectives. The purpose of this section is to neither summarise, condense, nor define the concept of practice portrayed through these alternate lenses. Rather, the author acknowledges these influential texts by sociological and cultural geography writers but focusses upon those theories of practice led primarily by Pierre Bourdieu and recently restated by a contemporary ‘turn’ to practice.²⁷ This emerging ‘turn’ draws heavily from sociology in both referencing and testing the foundation of Bourdieu’s ‘practice theory,’ and more specifically, his concept of habitus. Nick Crossley, for instance, draws on Bourdieu’s habitus in discussing how present actions become sedimented in the body and thereby shape the present. Bourdieu holds that habitus operates beyond ‘control by the will,’²⁸ enabling, as Jennifer Lea et al. suggest, ‘more novel understandings to be developed of a mind-body-world assemblage across which habit acts as a formative and generative force.’²⁹ Characterised through the unconscious, automatic, dimension, habitus is ‘objectively “regulated” and “regular” without being in any way the product of obedience to rules.’³⁰ From a critical perspective, and as a reaction to Bourdieu’s theories, a new wave of contemporary sociological theories (referred to as the ‘practice turn’) propose to expand ‘practice’ through three notable ways. The first considers practice as ‘dispersed’ as opposed to ‘integrated’.³¹ The second accounts for the ‘other bodies’ and the ‘role of things’³² which Bourdieu’s theory failed to incorporate. The third issue is the crisis of practices³³ or the dynamic dimension of practice.³⁴ The author aligns with these efforts to free practice from automatism and reduction, that is, practice as a ‘structured structure’³⁵ that regulate and orient activity through a process of stabilisation. Hence, by contesting the Bourdieuan perspective of habitus, this chapter draws inspiration from Deleuze’s notion of habit - which ‘draws something new from repetition - namely difference.’³⁶

Given this diversion, some explanation for focussing upon habit rather than habitus is required. For Bourdieu, habitus is concerned with the ‘durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures.’³⁷ Habitus is thus a structure through which we operate, it is the capacity to generate and structure thoughts, actions, expressions;³⁸ moreover, it is an orientation: it is the manner in which actors carry themselves. Such orientations ‘function below the level of consciousness’³⁹ where particular body postures/moods become a matter of habituation or routine - we act without being able to explain exactly what we are doing. It is a taken for granted view that we carry around with us: habitus is thus our ‘second nature.’ Indeed, these issues are important, and Bourdieu’s work has much to offer theories of practice. However, the author seeks to acknowledge and align with Deleuze’s argument particularly in relation to the notion of habit. Bourdieu’s habitus remains an ‘ideological model’⁴⁰ in being predictable, tending to generate reasonable, common sense actions which are possible within the limits of certain ‘regularities.’ The Deleuz- ian habit, however, belongs more ‘to the organic stratum, to the productive, physiological capacities of the flesh.’⁴¹ Further comparative analysis of these two perspectives, while of interest, is beyond the scope of this chapter. Rather, in seeking to clarify some of the more problematic issues frequenting contemporary architectural practice discourse, the focus turns instead to developing a fuller Deleuzian interpretation of practice: one in which the notion of habit is considered more fruitful. This, because through Deleuze’s habit, practice can be understood as that which generates chance and variation, which in turn can cause chaos and disruption to a system. Thus, at any point, the game can change, and so opens the space for affect.

At a critical level, and what makes the Deleuzian habit central to the present work, is the temporality it includes. The temporality of habit is equated by Deleuze to contraction,⁴² Here, contraction implies the ‘contractive repetition of instances,’⁴³ in the sense that previous events are contracted in the passing present, then directed to the future as an expectancy. With this contraction in mind we can examine habit as moved by what Elizabeth Grosz terms the ‘force of temporality.’⁴⁴ This force is characterised as a ‘forward looking movement’ consisting of ‘complication[s], dispersion[s] or difference[s] that make any becoming possible.’⁴⁵ That which follows expands Grosz’s term to distinguish two sub-forces that characterise habit’s ‘force of temporality’: the force of directionality and the force of duration.

For Deleuze, habit as contraction ‘constitutes our expectation that ‘it’ [particular past occurrences] will continue, that one of the two elements will appear after the other [producing anticipations of recurrences in the future].’⁴⁶ However, although these recurrences resemble one another, what is repeated are actually fundamental differences that allow for each instance to occur in a moment of time. As Deleuze notes: ‘in the passage from one quality to another, even where there is a maximum of resemblance or continuity, there are phenomena of delay and plateau, shocks of difference, distances, a whole play of conjunctions and disjunctions.’⁴⁷ In other words, what is involved in a habit contraction is not the expectation of sameness but rather a looking forward to ‘unidentified, unconscious things to come.’⁴⁸ This anticipation within the contraction ‘gives the present a direction from past to future’⁴⁹ and gives habit its force of directionality. Consequently, habit involves directionality in the sense that it contains or embraces the possibility of the future in the passing present. Habit, for Deleuze, is therefore the actuality of a possibility - an ‘actuality of the possible.’⁵⁰ It is held to be actual as it embodies the ability, as a property of the body, to act or react in a certain way: that is, it possesses affects in the passing present, and so holds possibility or ability to action a particular direction towards the future.

The previous chapter, and the preceding sections of this one, have inferred the experience of difference to be the coming together of diverse movements or intensities. Contraction also suggests this synthesis of moments, or as Williams puts it, of ‘different sensations . . . brought together so that we may sense the things as a whole.’⁵¹ This ‘coming together’ or synthesis, this contraction, is the ‘duration’ of habit. This duration being the passage that we experience when passing through one moment to the next. Deleuze describes this passage as unpredictable in being a continuous motion of ‘leaps and bounds which encroach upon one another.’⁵² The contraction that is habit is thus continually fluctuating. It is important to note here that ‘the contraction caused by repetition always has a different intensity, it produces a new quality in the contemplative soul, new little impersonal selves, a change - an event.’⁵³ These new events are ‘pre-individual singularities, and a provisional network of singularities constitutes an impersonal series of habits.’³⁴ This ‘bundle of contractions’ and their variable intensities, in traversing through duration, potentiate capacity towards changing an event completely. Duration may be aligned here with ‘continuous affective variation’ where within duration there are changes of affect, that is, tendencies towards alterations of affect. Our experience of duration hence involves the passing from one intensity of affect to another, as we move from one level of capacity to act to the next.

Deleuze’s insights on habit and contraction allows the temporality of practice to be attended to as ‘rhythms of anticipation.’⁵⁵ This means that the Deleuzian habit is not a ''form of activity’ rather, it is a ‘mode of expectation.’⁵⁶ In critiquing Deleuze’s work, Somers-Hall argues such an account suggests that habit ‘does not, therefore, operate with representation of things, but rather’⁵⁷ of signs instead of impressions; hence, as a process of differentiation, it has the potential to activate affects. It is within this latter context that the present book resides - thereby shifting from the domain of analysis and representation, to the grounded, active, field of affect.