Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach

to this are the terms ‘affections’ and ‘sympathies’, though these are redefined to encompass forces within the human which are not themselves human in origin. Bennett claims, for instance, that the ‘ahuman’ tendency for animal bodies to form connections with one another has been widely neglected in modern political discourse and that this has exacerbated earthdestroying and fascist trends that a renewed democratic culture would oppose (xix). Drawing on Thoreau’s notion of ‘solar judgment’ – a form of radical impartiality, comparable to the sun’s shining equally on all things – Bennett suggests that learning to attend more fully to the body and the forces within it which precede or exceed cognition could foster a more ecological and generous form of democracy (46–7). One cannot, Bennett grants, dwell forever in Thoreau’s solar interval; this would be antisocial and result in inaction. Folding such moments into our regular political activity, however, would provide more space for the emergence of new claims, voices, rights, identities, habits, modes of consumption, and ways of being. Bennett readily concedes that if, as many theorists have assumed, politics is nothing more than agonistic relations between human groups, then her book is strictly irrelevant to politics. It is her wager, however, that this way of understanding and practising politics is too thin and requires supplementation by any and all affects and energies capable of contributing to social transformation. By bracketing everyday, electoral politics and going back to its ontological roots, Bennett shows how we are caught up in and constantly acted upon by vibrant nonhuman forces that influence our decision-making. It is precisely because of the ubiquity of such forces that she recommends that we follow Whitman and Thoreau in sensitising ourselves to their presence in order to steer them in a more democratic and ecologically responsible direction. In the conclusion, Bennett sums up the aim of her book as being to initiate new thinking within the humanities about ‘experiences of the self that exceed anthropocentric propensities’ (118). There is good reason to think that Influx and Efflux will succeed in this.