Force of habit

The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote a lot about habit, in particular something that he called the habit body. For Merleau-Ponty, habit is the way we make the world, our world. It shows how we can absorb new meanings, demonstrating that we have ‘assimilated a fresh core of significance’,about ourselves and our surroundings. He believed that some habits are not stored in thought or even really in the physical body; they are only revealed in how we interact with our environment. Think about the way we can leave the house unsure if we shut all the windows or turned off the oven. On returning to double check we see that we did do these things but without a conscious awareness. Our bodies complete the task while our minds are elsewhere, already thinking about where we are going or what we need to do when we get there. This is part of what he is saying but it isn’t the whole story. If you needed to consciously shut the windows or turn off the oven you would ‘know how’ to do it, this know-how is stored in your conscious mind even though the tasks can be performed without it. But some habits are captured in the body itself, or more specifically in the way the body interacts with the world. Through this they can be hidden from view, only revealed when they are disrupted.

I recently learnt this in a fairly embarrassing way on trying to type the PIN for my bankcard into a machine where the numbers weren’t in their usual place. My fingers habitually flew to where they usually went but when I realised the keypad was different, I couldn’t actually remember what the individual numbers were. Even trying to imagine a key pad didn’t work; I had to physically draw the usual keypad and let my fingers do their thing, to be able to pay for breakfast. The ways in which my PIN was embodied, revealed only through my interaction with the world, is what Merleau-Ponty means by the habit body. What Theodora and Cathy alert us to below are the ways in which this may operate in relation to women’s safety work.