Below is a sustained, essay-style account of how Stengers answers the old political question “What is to be done?” — not as a recipe or manifesto, but as a constellation of diagnoses, political aims, and practical dispositions that recur across her work (especially In Catastrophic Times, Another Science Is Possible, Capitalist Sorcery, and various interviews and essays). I’ll indicate the main sources as I go. Topological Media Lab+4Open Humanities Press+4Humanities Commons+4

1. A different starting point: diagnose before prescribing

For Stengers the political question cannot be answered from the usual liberal script (policy levers, technocratic fixes, or revolutionary blueprints). She insists we begin with a careful diagnosis of our situation: a world in which ecological processes — what she calls the “intrusion of Gaia” — force events and questions into view that the prevailing institutions (the market, managerial science and the “Guardians” who speak for it) are structurally incapable of answering. This diagnosis shapes everything: the problem is not only that policies are inadequate, but that dominant practices produce a peculiar form of political denaturation — “cold panic,” ritualized techno-solutions (geo-engineering, managerial triage), and a denial that closes off real alternatives. From that diagnosis flows a different question of what is to be done: not grand designs but collective experimentation and care. Open Humanities Press+1

2. The ethic and politics of “care of the possible”

One of Stengers’s central political prescriptions is captured by the phrase she repeatedly uses: “the care of the possible” (le soin des possibles). Rather than attempting to guarantee a particular utopian end, she asks us to cultivate practices that preserve and multiply possible futures — to make the world more responsive, less enchanted by a single extractive logic, and more hospitable to diverse forms of life and knowledge. This is an ethic of modest responsibility: to attend, to experiment, and to protect openings rather than to seize immediate control. It reframes the political actor as a caretaker and experimenter rather than a commander. Amazon Web Services, Inc.+1

3. Slow science and remaking expertise

A major part of Stengers’s answer concerns how knowledge is produced. In Another Science Is Possible she attacks the neoliberal, metricized, speed-driven academy and calls for a “slow science” that privileges collective, public-oriented research, humility about uncertainty, and co-production of knowledge with affected publics. The political move here is institutional: build scientific practices that are deliberative, plural, attentive to situated norms and values, and capable of listening to non-scientific actors (citizens, practitioners, other species). In short, to change what gets called “evidence” so that politics and science become co-composing practices rather than a hierarchical relation of experts instructing a passive public. For Stengers, this is not mere epistemology but a political tactic: changing how knowledge is made changes what political futures remain possible. Humanities Commons

4. Break the spell: demystifying “capitalist sorcery”

Alongside remaking institutions for knowledge, Stengers (with Philippe Pignarre in Capitalist Sorcery) diagnoses capitalism as a kind of enchantment or “sorcery” — a system that manufactures desires, silences alternatives, and naturalizes extraction and commodification. Her political prescription is programmatically anti-magical: “break the spell” by making visible the mechanisms by which markets and managerial reason colonize time, care, and language. Practically, this means supporting forms of collective empowerment that expose and interrupt capitalist rituals (workplace practices, pharmaceutical regimes, consumer enchantments), and cultivating practices that re-embed life beyond exchange value. The tactic is not a single overthrow but a multiplicity of de-enchantments and constructive alternatives. Xenopraxis+1

5. Composing publics and experimenting politically

Stengers is skeptical of universalist, top-down politics. Instead she urges composition — the deliberate bringing together of heterogeneous actors into experimental collectives that can “make sense in common.” This is political meso-work: creating forums, prototypes, commissions, artistic projects, technical trials, and local governance forms where different knowledges, species’ agencies, and values can meet, dispute, and produce shared responses. These experiments are not guaranteed to scale, and Stengers explicitly values their contingency: we should multiply such experiments, learn from failures, and allow successful practices to travel in ways that preserve situatedness. Politics thus becomes a craft of composition and care. Topological Media Lab+1

6. Practical stances: restraint, patience, and prototyping

Across her writings Stengers repeatedly prescribes certain dispositions rather than single policies:

Restraint — refuse grandiose techno-fixes that erase political judgment (e.g., blanket geo-engineering).
Patience and slowness — favor slow, iterative practice over rapid, scalable “solutions.”
Prototyping — treat political action as collective experimentation; set up limited trials that can be revised.
Cultivating perception — she famously speaks of training a “palate” to taste different forms of catastrophe and life so responses are sensitive rather than schematic.
These are tactical recommendations meant to reshape the habits of institutions, movements, and experts. Open Humanities Press+1

7. Politics as practice, not proclamation

Putting the pieces together: Stengers’s answer to “What is to be done?” is not a single managerial program, nor a revolutionary catechism; it is a set of meta-political commitments and practical arts — to care for possibilities, to democratize knowledge production, to break the enchantments of capitalist ritual, and to compose experimental collectives that can learn. Her politics is therefore plural, experimental, and modest in its claims: do the grounded work of translating problems into shared practices, protect openings for alternative lives, and build institutions that can sustain the judgment, attentiveness, and patience the era requires. Open Humanities Press+2Humanities Commons+2

Conclusion — the democratic craft

If you want a short capsule: Isabelle Stengers answers “what is to be done?” by refusing the logics that demand immediate, totalizing fixes and by urging the patient art of composition: cultivate the possible; slow and democratize expertise; demystify capitalist enchantments; prototype plural practices; and build publics that can listen and decide together. Her politics is a craft — democratic, experimental, and irreducibly plural — aimed at making livable worlds rather than imposing a single vision of the good world. Open Humanities Press+2Humanities Commons+2

Hesitation is one of Isabelle Stengers’s signature concepts, and it threads through much of her work as both a political ethic and a mode of thought. Let me give you a careful account of what she means by it, why she values it, and how she frames its importance.

1. The meaning of hesitation

For Stengers, hesitation is not weakness or indecision, but a cultivated interruption of the automatic, linear momentum of dominant practices — especially those driven by the demands of efficiency, speed, and solutionism. It is the act of suspending the rush to decide, to close questions, or to apply a prefabricated answer.

She defines it as a kind of pause in which other voices, other beings, and other possibilities may enter. Hesitation makes room for what the situation itself might be saying, rather than what managerial logics already know in advance.

In In Catastrophic Times, she writes about the need to “learn to hesitate” when confronted with Gaia’s intrusion: to resist the false urgency of techno-fixes or denial, and instead open a space in which the gravity of the situation can be collectively felt and thought. For her, hesitation is a political act because it interrupts the pre-scripted tempo of capitalism and technocracy.

2. Why hesitation is important

Counter to capitalist speed: Neoliberal capitalism thrives on acceleration, on making every decision calculable and every response immediate. Hesitation breaks that spell, disrupting the automatic response of “there is no alternative.”
Space for the possible: By suspending action, hesitation allows “the possible” to be cared for — futures that might otherwise be foreclosed by hasty solutions. It gives breathing room to fragile alternatives.
Ethical attention: Hesitation forces us to attend to the situation, to those affected, and to the non-human agencies at play. It creates time to listen and to let new obligations emerge.
Political practice: Hesitation is also collective. It is not just about individual reflection, but about generating occasions where groups can resist being hurried into consensus or pre-ordained solutions, and instead allow the problem to “make them think.”

3. How Stengers frames hesitation in practice

A cultivated skill: She describes hesitation almost like a discipline, something to be trained and learned — a “craft of attention” that resists both paralyzing doubt and impulsive certainty.
Linked to care: Hesitation is inseparable from her call for care of the possible. To care means to hesitate before foreclosing; to hesitate means to care enough not to rush.
Political refusal: Hesitation also functions as refusal — to not be captured by the urgency defined by others (states, markets, managerial experts). It is a way of reclaiming time and judgment.
Not pure inaction: Hesitation is not the same as doing nothing. It is an active pause, a generative slowing down that makes thoughtful and situated action possible.

4. Illustrative example

In the context of climate change, for instance, hesitation does not mean delaying response out of denial. It means refusing the managerial reflex of geo-engineering as “the solution,” and instead hesitating long enough to listen to communities, ecologies, and histories — so that actions are not just solutions but responses rooted in care and accountability.

5. In sum

For Stengers, hesitation is a political virtue and a collective technique of resistance. It is the refusal to be rushed into the closure of possibilities by the temporal regime of capitalism and technocracy. It is the creation of time to attend, to care, and to allow other futures to be composed. In this sense, hesitation is both a philosophical gesture (interrupting premature closure of thought) and a political tactic (interrupting premature closure of worlds).

LLM

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Friday, 26 September 2025