Dispositional Rifts: Toward a Marxist Analysis of Habit

Abstract This article proposes a shift in perspective within the historical study of habit—specifically, a move from the historical nominalism underlying genealogical approaches to a historical and materialist analysis inspired by Marxism. The article introduces the concept of dispositional rift , constructed by analogy with the Marxist notion of metabolic rift . However, unlike the latter—which refers to disruptions in the relationship between humanity and nature—the dispositional rift pertains to disturbances in the relationship between humans and their second nature, that is, the domain of the habitual. This concept is intended to describe disruptions in two forms of the externalization of human dispositions: imitation (examined through analyses inspired by Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, himself influenced by Gabriel Tarde) and the projection of habits onto tools and machines (based on the concept from Ernst Kapp’s philosophy of technology of projecting organs onto tools). The second, technological form of the dispositional rift, is presented as the mechanism underlying the real subsumption of labor under capital. This allows for the connection between the concept of habit and the concept of power understood in economic terms.