Virtual infrastructures of habit: the changing intensities of habit through gracefulness, restlessness and clumsiness

Abstract

This paper examines how the changing intensities of habit alter the way that places are inhabited and experienced. Developing a virtual and distributed understanding of habit that underscores its transformative powers, the paper demonstrates how habit can be understood as an important virtual infrastructure in the way that it provides a charged, dynamic background that entrains and supports movement. Based on reflections on long-duration airline travel, the paper describes how the intensity of habit’s operation changes over the course of a journey, and is revealed through different qualities of bodily movement. Gracefulness, restlessness and clumsiness are presented as three movement transit..