we shall add two skills: the maintenance of the separation or shuttle
between the power to take into account and the power to put in order
(task no. 5), and, lastly, what could be called thescenarization*ofthe
collective in a unified whole (task no. 6).^16 We shall benefit from the
fact that all the professions contribute to developing the same job
with different skills, instead of finding themselves—as they did under
the Old Regime—charged with a sector carved off artificially within
reality: Science concerning itself with nature, politics with the social
world, morality with foundations, economics with infrastructures, ad-
ministration with the State. Like fairies hovering over the four cradles
of the new collective, each corporation is there to offer its own partic-
ular gifts.
The Contribution of Scientists
What can we expect of the sciences, once they have been delivered
from Science? That they limit themselves to simple facts, phenomena,
data, that they stay within the strict boundaries of reason, abandoning
the other functions to the corporations of morality and politics? Of
course not. On the contrary, they must share inallfunctions.^17 Let us
take one by one all the tasks to which the sciences have to contribute;
to make it easier, we shall follow the numbering given above and re-
peated in Figure 4.1. This somewhat pedantic way of proceeding will
allow us gradually to get rid of the bad habits that led us to try to make
the various professions work separately, instead of coordinating their
aptitudes for the construction of a single public edifice. Next, we shall
see how each of the other forms of skill shares in thesesamefunctions
with its own specific capabilities. In the following section, I shall re-
verse the direction of the presentation and start with the procedures
of the collective, in order to define both its dynamics and the new cor-
porations that would have to be included in it.
The sciences will give perplexity the formidable asset ofinstruments
andlaboratories,which will allow it to detect scarcely visible phenom-
ena very early (task no. 1). Let us not forget that it is a matter of bring-
ing into the collective associations of humans and nonhumans that are
endowed with speech only by means of prostheses of an immense
complexity (see Chapter 2). Now, who is better able than scientists to
make the world speak, write, hold forth? Their work consists precisely
SKILLS FOR THE COLLECTIVE
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