The body is deliberately cultivated toward habits that bypass conscious choice

Evidence

In the ethnographic account I have presented of the mosque movement, the body was thematized by the mosque participants as a site of moral training and cultivation; the intentional nature of this cultivation problematizes the nar.. row model of unconscious imbibing that Bourdieu assumes in his discussion of habitus. … This was evident in Mona’s advice to the young woman when she said that one should become so accustomed to the act of praying five times a day that when one does not pray one feels just as uncomfortable as when one for.. gets to eat: at this stage, the act of prayer has attained the status of an almost physiological need that is fulfi led without conscious refl Yet it would be a mistake to say that mosque participants believe that once a virtue has taken root in one’s disposition, it issues forth perfunctorily and automatically. … This economy of self..discipline therefore draws at.. tention to the role self..directed action plays in the learning of an embodied disposition and its relationship to “unconscious” ways of being. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 964

Categorization

• XREF: Mona’s physiological-prayer analogy speaks to the reader’s interest in what practices do to subjects — directly challenging liberal notions of self-aware choice. — connects to: Even upright posture is a willed habit continually sustained by unconscious willing — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 549; Habit’s reversible soul-body translation constitutes the Self and awakens consciousness. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 573
• SEED: The paradox that self-directed cultivation produces unconscious automaticity is an angle usable for a piece on agency beyond the liberal choice model.