farmers, Eurocrats, consumers, and producers of animal-based feed,
not to mention cows and prime ministers. Candidates for existence,
prions bring with them all the external reality necessary to stir up the
collective. The only thing they no longer bring—but no one asks it of
them any longer, except inveterate modernists like M. Chirac—is the
capacity to silence the collective with their indisputable essence. From
this point on, they are waiting to gain this essence from a procedure
that is under way.
Who is to judge these prions, candidates for a durable and danger-
ous existence? Biologists, of course, but also a large assembly whose
composition must be ensured by the slow search for reliable witnesses
capable of forming a voice that is at once hesitant and competent—re-
quirement no. 2, relevance of the consultation. This search for good
spokespersons is going to necessitate a rather complicated course of
action as well for veterinarians, cattle farmers, butchers, and govern-
ment employees, not to mention cows, calves, sheep, and lambs, who
must all be consulted, one way or another, according to procedures
that have to be reinvented every time, some coming from the labora-
tory, others from political assemblies, a third group from the market-
place, a fourth from government, but all converging in the production
of authorized or stammering voices. It is clear that the power to take
into account is translated into a sort of state of alert imposed on the
whole collective: laboratories do research, farmers investigate, con-
sumers worry, veterinarians point out symptoms, epidemiologists an-
alyze their statistics, journalists probe, cows mill about, sheep get the
shakes.^17 It is critical not to bring this general alert to an end too soon
by assigning stable facts to the common world of external nature and
putting the multiplicity of opinions in the social world, as if this world
could be equated with the more or less irrational representations that
humans make of it. If there is one thing that must not be reintroduced
artificially in this business, it is preciselythe good-sense distinction be-
tween facts and values!
Still, there is no need to mix everything up: the new separation of
powers is going to manifest its relevance by making the collective un-
dergo an operation that would be illicit in the power to take into ac-
count but that will take on its full meaning with the power to put in
order*. Thesameheteroclite and controversial assembly of prions,
farmers, prime ministers, molecular biologists, and beef-eaters is now
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