and in place of that imperial politics. Box 2.1 will allow us to sum up
both the contradictory roles assigned to objects in that old state of war
and the ordinary tasks that we expect articulated propositions to ac-
complish once peace has been restored.
We have now covered the ground that we set as our objective for
this chapter. Nothing has been resolved yet, but the threat of a dra-
matic simplification of public life has at least been removed. We have
indeed secularized the collective, if by the term “secularization” is
meant the abandonment of the impossible dream of a higher transcen-
dence that would miraculously simplify the problems of common life.
We have also defined in its broad outlines the economy of peace that
can henceforth be substituted for the sole economy of war foreseen up
to now for the battalions of objects aimed at subjects and of subjects
digging their trenches to defend themselves against objectification.
Instead of the great battle between science and politics, parties that
divided up realms of reality or defended themselves against encroach-
ment by the other, we have simply proposed to make these parties
workjointlytoward the articulation of a single collective, defined as an
ever-growing list of associations between human and nonhuman ac-
tors. As I promised, we have defined the raw material of the collective
that political ecology affects. The conjunction of the two terms thus
has a meaning. Within the collective, there is now a blend of entities,
voices, and actors, such that it would have been impossible to deal
with it either through ecology alone or through politics alone. The
first would have naturalized all the entities: the second would have so-
cialized them all. By refusing to tie politics to humans, subjects, or
freedom, and to tie Science to objects, nature, or necessity, we have
discovered the work common to politics and to the sciences alike: stir-
ring the entities of the collective together in order to make them
articulable and tomake them speak.
There is nothing more political than this activity, and nothing more
scientific; in particular, there is nothing more ordinary. Let us take the
most classical, most banal representations of the sciences, and the
most canonical, most venerable forms of politics: we shall always find
them in conformity with this goal of getting the articulated entities to
“speak.” We must ask nothing of common sense except that it join the
two tasks and, next, that it refuse to attribute the speech of objects to
scientists and the speech of subjects to politicians. Apart from this
HOW TO BRING THE COLLECTIVE TOGETHER
89