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After the Event: Toward a Post-Capitalist Conception of Structure and Habit

After the Event: Toward a Post-Capitalist Conception of Structure and Habit Christopher Breu After the Event Toward a Post- Capitalist Conception of Structure and Habit on the Limits of the event Habit, Structure, Event: recent theory would privilege the later concept over the former two. As concepts, habit and structure suggest fixity, rigidity, inattentive- ness, unconsciousness—certainly not the stuff of which radical political tra - nsfor mation is usually made. If anything, habit and structure are typically understood to be akin to ideology. Thus, Pierre Bourdieu articulates his concept of habitus as an embodied conception of ideology in which a person’s class position is marked by a series of unconscious dispositions, habits, and beliefs. Similarly, Althusser in- vokes the idea of structure to theorize the workings of capitalism and the repro- duction of its conditions of production. Event, as a concept, on the other hand is transformational, sexy, revolutionary. It is the unpredictable, the new, the contin- gent, that which gives us hope in the face of capitalism’s overwhelming systema- ticity. Certainly this is how the concept has functioned in the work of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. 1 Yet, what are the conceptual limitations that structure the con- cept of the event itself? What if its alterity to all http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Comparatist University of North Carolina Press

After the Event: Toward a Post-Capitalist Conception of Structure and Habit

Breu, Christopher
The Comparatist , Volume 40 – Nov 11, 2016
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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © Southern Comparative Literature Association.
ISSN
1559-0887

Abstract

Christopher Breu After the Event Toward a Post- Capitalist Conception of Structure and Habit on the Limits of the event Habit, Structure, Event: recent theory would privilege the later concept over the former two. As concepts, habit and structure suggest fixity, rigidity, inattentive- ness, unconsciousness—certainly not the stuff of which radical political tra - nsfor mation is usually made. If anything, habit and structure are typically understood to be akin to ideology. Thus, Pierre Bourdieu articulates his concept of habitus as an embodied conception of ideology in which a person’s class position is marked by a series of unconscious dispositions, habits, and beliefs. Similarly, Althusser in- vokes the idea of structure to theorize the workings of capitalism and the repro- duction of its conditions of production. Event, as a concept, on the other hand is transformational, sexy, revolutionary. It is the unpredictable, the new, the contin- gent, that which gives us hope in the face of capitalism’s overwhelming systema- ticity. Certainly this is how the concept has functioned in the work of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. 1 Yet, what are the conceptual limitations that structure the con- cept of the event itself? What if its alterity to all

Journal

The Comparatist – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Nov 11, 2016

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