Habit is activity that has been subjected to a process of formal ordering whereby it is made repeatable. In this chapter, I discuss habit in conjunction with a range of other cognate phenomena such as custom, rhythm, ritual, collecting and tradition. In these phenomena (which may operate at either the individual or the societal level) the experience of the world receives form: it acquires, to a greater or lesser extent, the attributes of order and repeatability. A concrete example of this is the dirty habit of smoking. The legend according to which Bakhtin smoked away the only manuscript of his work on the Bildungsroman has been countered by Hirschkop on the grounds that the work itself never existed in any more than the fragmentary form that we possess today.¹ Hirschkop's secondary argument, however, casts scorn on the notion that Bakhtin, "this most ascetic of scholars was […] in equal measure casual as regards his texts and passionate about one of life's more suspect pleasures".² Although he notes Bakhtin's passion for smoking, Hirschkop's labelling of smoking as nothing but a pleasurable vice underrates the seriousness of Bakhtin's smoking.