The Enchantments of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics by Jane Bennett (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 245 Jane Bennett, The Enchantments of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. viii + 213. ISBN 0-691-08812-8.£13.95. The idea of modern life as critically disenchanted, or literally de-magified (Entzau berung) is, of course, a canonically Weberian trope, and the possible choices open to any who wish to maintain a sense of personality in this bureaucratized world are amongst those laid out by Weber in his political writings especially. But would Weber's arguments countenance any form of 're-enchantment'? That is a difficult question to answer, as Weber is forever chastising those with either Utopian or back ward looking worldviews, as being incapable of dealing with the here and now. But if applied to an ethical vision of human interaction in the world, is it really possible to engage meaningfully with others, with new experiences, or to develop new proj ects and challenges without some form of enchantment. For Bennett, disenchantment narratives whether of the type outlined by Weber— the subject of some detailed discussion in chapter 4 along with Blumenberg and oth ers—or more generally, miss out the always ethical and always possibly enchanted spheres of life, where enchantment turns out to be concerned with the sense of wonder and unexpectedness of a wide variety of states and feelings. Furthermore, for Bennett, there is an ontological basis to enchantment that makes it fundamen tal to our very existence; we simply cannot act as ethical creatures without such a foundation. To illustrate this, Bennett outlines in broad brush the importance of Epicurean philosophy and the idea of the 'swerving' atom that occasionally can deviate from its original course, to outline a materialism that remains nonetheless non-teleological. It was this, she asserts, that attracted Marx to Epicurus and led to the ranking of Epicurus above Democritus in the young Marx's dissertation. But Marx infused his Epicurean atomism with the Hegelian vision of such movement as stations on the way to individual self-realization and development. Epicurean argu ments themselves sought ataraxy, or tranquillity through rational inquiry, therapy in effect from the general fear of death. On Bennett's reading this is, though, not 'an indifferent passivity', as Blumenberg suggests, but instead 'it entails the active affirmation of a world that swerves; it calls for us to work diligently to cultivate a cheerful, chagrined, or stoic (as the particulars require) acceptance of a world unsusceptible to human mastery' (p. 73). One of the political subtexts of her study is the use of environmental projects in the notion of re-enchantment, with a defence of a particular vision of nature, derived largely from Thoreau, that can be defended with such a revitalized and enchanted ontology of ethical life so that it recognizes uncertainty and the necessity of dili gent reconciliation to the circumstances one finds oneself in. A further interesting twist to her analysis, though, concerns the possibility of commodity enchantment. Taking a further cue from Marx's seminal analysis of commodity fetishism, through an engaging analysis of the GAP television advert 'Khakis Swing' of 1998 Bennett seeks to test whether commodity advertising and spectacle can still offer forms of enchantment that do not succumb ultimately to the totalizing power of capitalist social relations. Here she thinks Marx went too far in his anthropomorphizing of Epicurean atoms into human relations, offering an unbalanced philosophical anthro pology neatly detailed in a section entitled 'Marx and the Swerve' (pp. 119ff.). She moves via Marx into a critique of the dialectic of Enlightenment outlined by Adorno and Horkheimer, to suggest that their rationalist equation of wonder and enjoyment© Max Weber Studies 2008. 246 Max Weber Studies with a sense of naiveté and an absence of critical thinking really misses the point. For although commodification and consumption can doubtless involve stupidity, indo lence and whatever else, it can also 'enliven, energise, and, under the right circum stances, support ethical generosity' (p. 128), and this can then be added to an account of the creation of the self as a work of art, a work of enchantment, in a tradition that runs from Kant and Schiller to Michel Foucault. And in...