counting systems and modeling scenarios, mathematicians, marketing
specialists, and statisticians)^12 performedthe collective by stabilizing
the relations between humans and nonhumans. We do not have agents
of economic calculation in our heads, but we do have construction of
centers for calculation and profit centers thanks to which those who
turn to them can produce in facton papercertain calculations that
sometimes make it possible to coordinate actions.^13 As soon as we have
extirpated economics both from our heads and from the world in or-
der to reduce it to a set of specific and uncertain procedures that
sometimes convey agreement, coordination, and the production of ex-
ternalities, political economics loses its venom and stops competing
with political ecology. Political ecology is quite clearly not soluble in
the gastric juices of political economics. The biblical narrative ought
to have warned us: three days later, the whale vomits Jonah up on a
beach, so that he can resume his mission.^14 Once back on its feet,
economization becomes, as we shall soon see, one of the professions
that are indispensable to the functions of the collective. Like the first
nature, gray and cold, like the second, green and warm, the third na-
ture, red and bloody, during the period when it had sole control of the
collective, was only one of the forms of modernization, one of the
ways to spare the collective the progressive composition of the good
common world. Now that no naturalization allows us to avoid the
tasks of composition, we can finally turn our attention to them.
Contribution of the Professions to the Procedures
of the HousesWe do not have to decide on our own, as one did under the old specu-
lative metaphysics, about the furnishing of the world; we have only to
define the equipment, instruments, skills, and knowledge that will al-
low experimental metaphysics to start up again, in order to decide col-
lectively on its habitat, itsoikos,its familiar dwelling. To simplify our
itinerary in this section, we are going to start with the old corpora-
tions that the old Constitution mobilized^15 and discover how they can
contribute to the entire set of functions of public life, that is, to the
four functions identified in Chapter 3 (task no. 1: perplexity; task no.
2: consultation; task no. 3: hierarchy; task no. 4: institution), to which
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