persistence

The social order is merely the order of bodies: the habituation to custom and law that law and custom produce by their very existence and persistence is largely sufficient, without any deliberate intervention, to impose a recognition of the law based on misrecognition of the arbitrariness which underlies it. (Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations 168)

Para conocer a Pinochet, basta con leer sus declaraciones [. . .] sus palabras lo dicen todo. (Nelson Caucoto, in Luis Alejandro Salinas, The London Clinic 12)

“Tiredness and waiting,” observes Deleuze, “even despair are the attitudes of the body” (Cinema 2 189). We are some distance here from nomadic lines of flight, even if Deleuze’s point is to underscore the Spinozan maxim that “we do not even know what a body can do” (189). The body opens up a world of immanent resistance and Exodus: an “imperceptible passage of attitudes and postures to ‘gest,’” a Brechtian shock that is “necessarily social and political” as well as “bio-vital, metaphysical, and aesthetic” (192, 194). Yet, “obstinate and stubborn” (189), weary and worn down, often enough the body is simply a creature of habit. At its most reduced, most contracted, affect becomes habit. For instance, the tick inhabits “a world with only three affects, in the midst of all that goes on in the immense forest” (Deleuze, Spinoza 124-125). It seeks light, to climb a branch; smell, to detect and drop down on an animal passing below; and warmth, to burrow into that animal’s skin. These three affects are an index of the tick’s power, what its body can do; and they enable the tick’s becoming, its leap and clandestine submergence within a host animal’s hide. But these same affects also structure a profound passivity, a “tiredness and waiting” that reaches its apogee in the famous Rostock tick that, as Agamben reports, zoologist Jakob von Uexküll “kept alive for eighteen years without nourishment” (The Open 47). The tick figures the persistence of habit, a captivation or “remaining-inactive” in which everything continues the same (68).

For Agamben, we are closer to the tick than ever: “for a humanity that has become animal again, there is nothing left but the depoliticization of human societies” (76). We are hardly even bored any more, for boredom is at least the “awakening of the living being to its own captivation” (70), a realization of our own habituation. On television, we are obsessed with people like us who, as with the Rostock tick, are denied almost all external stimulus (reality TV’s Big Brother). On the Internet, millions surf listlessly, perhaps with half an eye on webcams of coffee warming (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html) or paint drying (http://www.watching-paint-dry.com/). Ours is but a bare life, all the more so for the routines that fill it, captivating us as much as the tick is captivated by the meager affects that constitute its plane of immanence. Contemporary culture is pervaded with the sense that most of us are condemned to cubicles and McJobs, a world of blank indifference enlivened only by petty rivalries with co-workers or grievances towards employers. After its initial shock, even terror becomes routine: we adapt to the search procedures of airport security just as British shoppers in the 1970s adjusted to the inconveniences of IRA bomb threats. Few of us really believe either in the threat or, still less, in the measures taken to deter it (which is in part why terror maintains its power to shock); but we go along with the rigmarole, altering our habits accordingly. Our bodies become accustomed to waiting in line, to passing through metal detectors, to iris scans and security patdowns.

Few of us believe: habit persists even when ideology fades. Our contemporary condition is the cynicism outlined by Peter Sloterdijk, "a universal, diffuse cynicism," which is "that state of consciousness that follows after naive ideologies and their enlightenment" (Critique of Cynical Reason 3). The paradigmatic cynic is "an average social character in the upper echelons of the elevated superstructure" (4) who is aware that he or she is exploited in work and alienated in the face of the culture industry, but who continues on none the less, in the spirit of "a detached negativity [. . .] that scarcely allows itself any hope, at most a little irony and pity" (6). Now a host of books, from Timothy Bewes’s Cynicism and Postmodernity to Wilber Caldwell’s Cynicism and the Evolution of the American Dream, indicate that, in William Chaloupka’s words, “over and over, cynicism pops up as a description of our society’s problems” (Everybody Knows 5). Moreover, today this cynicism is more diffuse, no longer restricted to Sloterdijk’s “upper echelons.” In what is often regarded as a sign of widespread depoliticization, we are all cynical now, thanks to a “mass cultural retreat from politics itself” (Bewes 3).

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