Virtual infrastructure 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 transitions that demonstrate how practical competencies are fragile and contingent on milieu. Where much geographical inquiry has examined disruptions to physical infrastructures, this paper shows how the virtual infrastructures of habit are susceptible to different kinds of transformation, which changes bodily capacities for moving, sensing, perceiving and attending, and, thus, the lived experience of place.