Francis Dodsworth

Habit and Habituation Governance and the Social

This article examines the issues that are at stake in the current resurgence of interest in the subject of habit. We focus on the role that habit has played in conceptions of the relations between body and society, and the respects in which such conceptions have been implicated in processes of governance. We argue that habit has typically constituted a point of leverage for regulatory practices that seek to effect some realignment of the relations between different components of personhood – will, character, memory and instinct, for example – in order to bring about a specific end. In reviewing its functioning in this regard across a range of modern disciplines – philosophy, psychology, sociology – we explore the tensions between its use and interpretation in different lineages: in particular, the Cartesian–Kantian/Ravaisson–Bergson–Deleuze lineages. The article then identifies how these questions are addressed across the contributions collected in this special issue.

'Civic' police and the condition of liberty: the rationality of governance in eighteenth-century England

In this article it is argued that previous attempts to understand the organization of eighteenthcentury systems of police have failed to take into account the political implications of governmental organization. Examining the office of constable in terms of the contemporary governmental imagination reveals that concerns with the independence of the officers and the need to ward against ‘corruption’ are not simply practical requirements. The unpaid, sequential nature of eighteenth-century police service was defined in terms of the classical model of civic duty, which saw active participation in government and the rotation of public office as key conditions of the free state, and as such the liberty of the citizens. This vision of freedom as a condition of freedom from dependence or domination, not an absence of interference, was instrumental in defining the way the system of police was debated and reformed over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Given that ‘police’ in this period represents a much wider programme of administration than the simple control of law and order, this has implications for our understanding of the structure of eighteenth-century government in general.

The idea of police in eighteenth-century England: discipline, reformation, superintendence, c. 1780-1800.

In the late eighteenth century a series of English authors wrote on the subject of “police.” Their aim in these works was generally to advocate structural reform of the existing institutions of civil government, particularly focused around the introduction of regularity, uniformity and subordination into their operation. These disciplinary mechanisms would act as instruments for the production of virtue, encouraging industriousness and preventing vice by reducing the temptations of the commercial, urban environment and beginning a moral reformation in the people. This represents an institutional solution to the ancient problems of vice and corruption, establishing the conditions for national liberty.

Liberalisms, government, culture

When discussing the relations between an analytics of governmentality and that of sociologies of governance, Nikolas Rose suggests that the former is most usefully distinguished in terms of the orientation which guides inquiry and directs its focus. As distinct from the concern with the networks of relations between individual and institutional actors that characterises sociologies of governance, studies of governmentality are concerned with ‘a particular ‘‘stratum’’ of knowing and acting’ (Rose 1999, p. 19). By examining the role played by particular regimes of truth, and the ways in which these are assembled into distinctive apparatuses through which specific forms of power are organised and brought to bear on specific problems, such studies trace the conditions which make possible varied kinds of intervention into the conduct of conduct, whether of oneself or of others. And their orientation, Rose argues, is ‘diagnostic rather than descriptive’ in the sense that, by adopting ‘an open and critical relation to strategies of governing attentive to their presuppositions, their assumptions, their exclusions, their naiveties and their knaveries, their regimes of vision and their spots of blindness’, their concern is to open up a ‘space for critical thought’ that operates within and against the present (Rose 1999, p. 19). By focusing on the contingency of the forms of power that are assembled in the present, an analytics of governmentality makes it possible to think how the present could be made otherwise, and it does so, Rose argues, from the perspective of bringing about different articulations of the relations between government and freedom from those which currently obtain. There are evident similarities here between the analytic orientation of governmentality theory and that of cultural studies which has always stressed, sometimes perhaps too stridently, the radical and mobile contextualism of its own concern with the present. Lawrence Grossberg has recently urged the need to renew this aspect of cultural studies, defining its orientation, too, by calling on it to probe the contradictions of liberal modernity in order ‘to shape an alternative modernity as the future’ (Grossberg 2006, p. 1). There are differences, of course: the concept of the conjuncture that Grossberg advocates is both composed differently and, as an articulated set of relations between the economic, political and the cultural, is more unified than Rose’s conception of

Shifting religions and cultures in london's east end

ABSTRACT This article considers the ways in which well-established “traditional” religious communities—particularly Christianity but, to a lesser extent, Islam and Judaism—attempt to construct and minister to religious communities in east London in an age of super-diversity, multiculturalism, and globalization, where religious attendance and affiliation is in no way determined and cannot be taken for granted. We focus particularly on the ways in which religious communities seek to form and stabilize attachments to their worshipers in the context of the significant demographic, economic, and social flux that characterizes east London. The construction of religious communities is an essentially active and ongoing process of work which involves particular sets of practices of worship, social and organizational elements, and attachments to the buildings themselves. Ultimately, the article concludes that the mechanisms devised to practice faith, spread the word, and form attachment between worshipers and their community extended far beyond matters of identity or even religious belief: those religious groups that were able to assemble durable communities did so by forming an assemblage that was at once liturgical, material, organizational, and social.

Reflections on the material and spatial cultures of religious sites and buildings in london's east end: introduction

ABSTRACT This special issue brings together a group of scholars of different academic provenance—sociology, history, planning, urban spatial analysis, religious studies—to attend to the materialities of religion in London. In the articles published here we see how mobilities and interconnections are central to the formation of religious life and its architectures in London at each historical conjuncture. The essays look at London, particularly its eastern parts and Finchley, from the seventeenth century to the present, drawing on a range of sources, methodologies, and approaches to explore different aspects of religion, religious settlement, cultural practices, place making, and community, in the context of globalization, migration, and diaspora. As such, it contributes to contemporary and historical debates on the place of religion in the social and cultural life of cities.

Habit, the criminal body and the body politic in England, c. 1700-1800

This article explores the role that ‘habit’ played in discourses on crime in the 18th century, a subject which forms an important part of the history of ‘the social’. It seeks to bridge the division between ‘liberal’ positions which see crime as a product of social circumstance, and the conservative position which stresses the role of will and individual responsibility, by drawing attention to the role habit played in uniting these conceptions in the 18th century. It argues that the Lockean idea that the mind was a tabula rasa, and that the character was thereby formed through impression and habit, was used as a device to explain the ways in which certain individuals rather than others happened to fall into a life of crime, a temptation to which all were susceptible. This allowed commentators to define individuals as responsible for their actions, while accepting the significance of environmental factors in their transgressions. Further, the notion that the character was formed through habit enabled reformers to promote the idea that crime could be combated through mechanisms of prevention and reformation, which both targeted the individual criminal and sought more generally to reduce the likelihood of crime.

The First English Detectives: The Bow Street Runners and the Policing of London, 1750–1840

In The First English Detectives John Beattie provides us not only with the first analytical history of the activities of the Bow Street Runners in London, but also with a sustained argument about t...

Two views on material and spatial understandings of religious sites and spaces

Thinking about religious sites and practices within a spatial and material perspective brings new insights to religious studies in several ways. The In Conversation section which follows highlights different facets of such an approach which informs the essays in this special issue. The first contributor is Paul-François Tremlett, who has published widely in religious studies, particularly from an anthropological perspective, his current research being based in the Philippines. Our second contributor is John Eade, who has written extensively on the global city, migration, and transnationalism and questions of religious practices and cultures. Their contributions provide some useful insights for reflecting on the essays collected together in this special issue. For Tremlett the strength of spatial analysis lies in its potential to disrupt normative assumptions about how religion is lived in the city, and indeed about the very experience of the city itself, drawing attention to continuities and discontinuities, erasures and exclusions, absence and presence. For Eade, material and spatial analysis has a different value. It enables us, he suggests, to understand the complex interweaving of social, cultural, political, and economic processes which result from processes of globalization and migration, and the ways these impact on the city at different scales. In his contribution here, Eade draws our attention to three specific binaries: territorial boundaries and mobility, prominence and discreetness, social order and change.

INTO UNORTHODOX LONDON: THE RELIGIOUS ETHNOGRAPHY OF CHARLES MAURICE DAVIES

The Rev. Charles Maurice Davies (1828-1910) was a prolific author, but he is most famous for his novels, Philip Paternoster (1858), Shadow Land (1860), Broad Church (1875) and ’Verts (1876), and for his journalism, written for the Daily Telegraph and the National Press Agency and collected and published as Unorthodox London (1873), Heterodox London (1874), Orthodox London (1874-75), and Mystic London (1875). Through this work Davies engaged in the great mid-Victorian debate about the permissible limits to unorthodox religious practice that was taking place within the Church of England. Davies’s journalistic works attracted as much criticism as his novels, but they have not been subject to the same kind of recent critical analysis. This is not to say that they have been ignored, because they are frequently utilised by historians to illustrate elements of Victorian religious culture. However, the Unorthodox London series has not been analysed on its own terms, with a view to explaining what Davies was trying to achieve with these texts, or how they relate to his other published output. In this article our aim is to illuminate this dimension of Davies’s work. The Unorthodox London series constitutes an amalgam of the genres of social investigation and sensational journalism, acting as a guidebook to the religious unorthodoxy of the city. We argue that this dimension of Davies’s texts provides an important indication of their wider strategy. These discourses point in two directions at the same time: towards the specific content of the religious practices being described and at the same time towards the kind of discourse being produced about them, urban ethnography, creating meaning through the process of analogy. Like other famous urban ethnographers of the period Davies was seeking not only to establish his own capacity to speak impartially on the subject, but he was also indicating that these religious groups were a distinct culture, already living a way of life beyond reach of the Established church. His work seeks to illustrate the futility of attempting to impose from above any particular vision of order for religious practice, and that this circumstance had perhaps developed because the church had largely ignored the needs of many people in their own communities by focusing on ritual and theology not on the social life of the religious.