This paper draws on the account of second nature in Aristotle, Dewey and Hegel to examine the way in which norms become embodied. It discusses the implications of this for both the authority of norms and how they can be changed. Using the example of veganism it argues that changing norms requires more than just good reasons. The appreciation of the role of second nature in culture allows us to: firstly, better conceive the difficulty and resistance of individuals to changing (...) norms because of the material resilience of norms, habits and customs in a culture. Secondly, it argues that the effective adoption of a new norm such as veganism or the behavioral change necessary to respond to climate change, requires not just more good reasons but the creation of material pathways in the culture in which those revised norms can be inhabited. (shrink)

This article explores the links between habit, fashion and subjectification to extend analysis of the clothed body beyond the semiotic frames that have tended to dominate discussions of fashion across the social sciences and humanities. Our goal is to explain how fashion’s diverse materialities participate in the modulations of subjectivity, affecting bodies in diverse encounters between matter, signs and practices. We develop our analysis by way of Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of encounters, habit and memory. Our principal contention is that fashion (...) may usefully be theorised in terms of specific habits of coordination by which affects, memories, sensations and desires are transmitted between bodies in varied spatial, temporal, material and affective encounters. Following the work of John Protevi, we argue that such coordination expresses a distinctive mode of subjectification according to the specific encounters immanent to it. We ground this discussion in detailed analysis of the work of Melbourne artist Fiona Abicare. Abicare’s installation and performance-based practice invokes the affective and habitual aspects of fashion as each is instantiated in encounters between bodies. Abicare’s attention to the habits and memories of the clothed body alludes to the varied practices of subjectification by which diverse subjects of fashion emerge. (shrink)