longer a matter of making the primary qualities the foundation of all
the rest, but of making a narrative reduced to its simplest expression
the provisional envelope of the collective.
This brief trajectory, which we shall follow again in the opposite di-
rection in the next section by showing the convergence of the various
professions, proves to what extent the sciences play an indispensable
role in the six functions of the collective, an all the more fruitful role
in thatthey no longer play it alone.Once the parenthesis of Science
has been closed, along with its dream of purity and externality, the
sciences, restored to the civic life that they should never have pre-
tended to abandon, finally rediscover the meaning of the word “disin-
terested,” which obviously does not mean that they are cold, detached,
“uninterested,” but that like everyone else they have to be able to de-
vote themselves to the tasks of perplexity and consultation, without
the requirements of the lower house constantly disturbing them by
asking them to be reasonable and realistic. Conversely, when they take
on the tasks of hierarchy and institution, researchers finally rediscover
the form of disinterestedness that they never should have lost, since
the upper house is no longer tyrannizing them and since they can
henceforth finally detach themselves from the unhealthy obsession
with their specialties that made them so suspect in the eyes of their
partners, who were worried to see them put their own interests and
those of their own projects above those of the common world.
When it was being taken seriously, the old Constitution made it nec-
essary to criticize the sciences constantly for the traces of ideology
that subsisted in them, for the surreptitious crossing of the yellow line
between simple facts and values, for the crushing of poor humans un-
der the weight of instrumental reason. Scientists had to be constantly
punished for their arrogance by being dragged back to the prison of
the laboratory and forced not to look higher than their own pallet. We
have done the inverse: far from criticizing the sciences, one must on
the contrary respect the diversity of their skills, allow the variety of
their qualities to be developed, their indefinite contributions to the
composition of the common world to unfold. There is no need, either,
to imagine a “metascience” that would be more complex, warmer,
more human, more dialectical, and that would allow us to “surpass the
narrow rationalism of the established sciences.” The sciences lack nei-
ther purity nor complexity: they were led astray only by the claim to
POLITICS OF NATURE
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