ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will examine what phenomenological sociology can tell us about habitualization and how defamiliarization and social practices of utopian reading might undermine this process. We are born into a world of custom and convention and develop habitual ways of acting that make where we are and what we do seem obvious and inevitable. Williams calls this ‘the pressure of habitual forms and ideas’ (1965: 10). What defamiliarization can do is to undermine what we usually take for granted, what, through a process of habitualization, we have learned to see as natural and inevitable, making us complicit with the prevailing structures of power. While I am not the first to point to the absolute centrality of defamiliarization in the politics of utopian fiction, most other arguments have tended to present it as a purely textual property. Contrary to this, it is my contention that for politics to happen where it matters it has to be part of a relationship between reader and text, a relationship in which readers use fiction to disturb what currently counts as the ruling reality.
