Ethopoetics and Ethopolitics: On the Government of Habit

• In Event: Ancient Greek Democracy, Aesthetics, and the Cultivation of the Political

Abstract

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle makes an argument for the centrality to politics of the ethopoetic function – that is, for the production of habit, ways of being, ethos. “For the lawmaker, by habituating/training (ethizontes) the citizens, makes them good. [...] All those who do not do this well fail [as lawmakers], and this is the difference between the good and the bad city” (1103b3-7). Habit – which I follow Aristotle in defining as a solidified tendency for action produced by the repetition of activities of a similar quality – is not merely a personal quirk: it is thoroughly political, and not only because the object of Aristotle’s politics is the formation of good citizens. The very level at which habits are produced, transformed, and governed is at the level of legislation, and hence the personal is for Aristotle directly and unavoidably a super-individual matter. The political is productive of the self, even in spite of the self itself. In this paper, I confront Aristotle’s theory of the legislation of ethos with a Foucaultian theory of government. I argue that Aristotle wanted to raise training ‘above’ the status of freely chosen leisure activity to a properly social activity, all while ‘lowering’ it below the threshold of awareness of its practitioners. Conversely, Foucault’s critical genealogy of practice technologies seeks precisely to reveal to us – in their social function and historical origin – the practice technologies that work on the work we do on the self. My goal in staging this confrontation is not only to understand ancient politics, but to use ancient politics to understand the politics of the self in general. Much of today’s leftist politics – itself largely inspired by Foucault – has been accused of replacing genuine collective action with mere aesthetics of the self. If we take seriously our cue from Aristotle, however, we can discover in ancient political philosophy a social fact that has not ceased to be true: namely, that personal identities are a product of the social, and that projects for the creation and recreation of ways of being cannot content themselves with a personal change of the way of living. Aristotle suggests a mode of political action that seeks control of what I will refer to as “the training milieu,” or in other words, a critical and concerted social action that seeks to shape the structures and institutions that train us in our daily lives—not a New Year’s resolution or the use of a new wellness app, but the targeted transformation of workplaces, schools, and leisure spaces as so many coercive ethopoetic centers. Making explicit the possibility and desirability of such a practice through a critical theory of habit formation is the condition of possibility for a sober and rational politics in which citizens create conditions propitious for the kinds of citizens they wish to be (made to) become. It might also be a promising way out of the impasse that pits against each other a structuralist “old left” and an individualist “new left.”

Author

• William Tilleczek, McGill University