Science and Technology Studies / Critical Theory

Rights: World

Virgin Mary and the Neutrino Reality in Trouble ISABELLE STENGERS

ANDREW GOFFEY, TRANSLATOR

In Virgin Mary and the Neutrino, first published in French in 2006 and appearing here in English for the first time, Isabelle Stengers experiments with the possibility of addressing modern practices not as a block but through the way they diverge from each other. Drawing on thinkers ranging from Dewey to Deleuze, she develops what she calls an “ecology of practices” into a capacious and heterogeneous perspective that is inclusive of cultural and political forces but not reducible to them. Stengers first advocates for an approach to sciences that would emphasize the way each should be situated by the kind of relationship demanded by what it attempts to address. This approach turns away from the disabling scientific/nonscientific binary—like the opposition between the neutrino and Virgin Mary. An ecology of practices stimulates instead an appetite for thinking reality not as an arbiter but as what we can relate with through the generation of diverging concerns and obligations.

Isabelle Stengers is Emerita Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the Université libre de Bruxelles and is the author of numerous books, including Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse, Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science, and In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism.

Habit's Pathways Repetition, Power, Conduct

September 2023

280 pages

Sociology / Social Theory / Theory and Philosophy / Critical Theory / Cultural Studies

Rights: World

TONY BENNETT

Habit has long preoccupied a wide range of theologians, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and neuroscientists. In Habit’s Pathways Tony Bennett explores the political consequences of the varied ways in which habit’s repetitions have been acted on to guide or direct conduct. Bennett considers habit’s uses and effects across the monastic regimens of medieval Europe, in plantation slavery and the factory system, through colonial forms of rule, and within a range of medicalized pathologies. He brings these episodes in habit’s political histories to bear on contemporary debates ranging from its role in relation to the politics of white supremacy to the digital harvesting of habits in practices of algorithmic governance. Throughout, Bennett tracks how habit’s repetitions have been articulated differently across divisions of class, race, and gender, demonstrating that although habit serves as an apparatus for achieving success, self-fulfilment, and freedom for the powerful, it has simultaneously served as a means of control over women, racialized peoples, and subordinate classes

Tony Bennett is Emeritus Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University and Honorary Professor in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. Among his many books are Making Culture, Changing Society and, as coauthor, Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government.