Suchergebnisse

Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order. By Thomas Princen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. 224p. $22.95.When you are trying to get someone to embrace new habits of mind and body, like, say, those of ecological sustainability, it sometimes works to appeal to common sense. Thomas Princen employs this stragegy of persuasion—he also invokes enlightened self-interest, but I think he prefers to appeal to common sense—in his bold, tolerant, honest, and powerful short book. To be more specific, he invokes a set of minor or currently rather quiet "segments" (p. 171) inside the mixed bag that is American common sense. Common sense is not, after all, a stable block but a conglomeration of diverse parts, some of which do not fit at all well with the others. And it is the heterogeneity of the common store of wisdom that makes possible Princen's reorganization of it. He highlights some underutilized segments of the "old normal" and harnesses their power to the project of building a society that "takes infinite material growth as impossible," "embraces limits" (p. 187), and is devoted to "living well by living well within our means" (p. 124).

Tom Princen and I share many commitments—to treading lightly on the earth, to the political potential of everyday habits, to practicing the difficult art of countercultural persuasion, to a political economy of sustainability, and to the advantages of short and earnest books.

Jane Bennett is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and a founding member of the journal theory & event. Her recent publications include The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001)and "The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter"(Political Theory, 2004). She is working on a book that explores the ecological implications of different conceptions of materiality in contemporary political thought.

This essay seeks to give philosophical expression to the vitality, willfullness, and recalcitrance possessed by nonhuman entities and forces. It also considers the ethico-political import of an enhanced awareness of "thing-power." Drawing from Lucretius, Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, and others, it describes a materialism of lively matter, to be placed in conversation with the historical materialism of Marx and the body materialism of feminist and cultural studies. Thing-power materialism is a speculative onto-story, an admittedly presumptuous attempt to depict the nonhumanity that flows around and through humans. The essay concludes with a preliminary discussion of the ecological implications of thing-power.