Affective Habit Ecologies: Material dispositions and immanent inhabitations

The paper engages with the question of ecology and performance through two compound concepts, that of material dispositions and immanent inhabitations, which juxtapose environmental memory with immediate performance. Drawing out the temporal and spatial material affordances and affective impositions to be understood as habit ecologies, the argument will focus on the relationship between intimacy and engagement in everyday action as the site for ecological ethics in the C21st. Conceptually, the paper positions itself in relation to ‘New Materialist’ debates through a reading of four recent publications: Malfeasance: appropriation through pollution by Michel Serres; Neither Sun nor Death by Peter Sloterdijk; The Machinic Unconscious by Felix Guattari; and Of Habit by Felix Ravaisson. Three philosophical agendas are proposed in suggesting forward looking conclusions: for attention to be paid to vital experiential intensities that solicit the body to action through materially afforded practical activity; for dwelling longer within in situ present tense ecologies towards rewiring the capacity of our bodies to become differently in new habits; and for an ethical vitalism as an intensification of configurations of life and of theory that make us more hopeful about the capacity for human change but less nostalgic about the human condition we think we should preserve. All of which heighten our capacities to feel ecologically.