separate domain of reality—the social world, values, power relations.
They share, at first glance, in thesamefunctions as the scientists but
withotherskills. At first glance, it may seem strange to ask politicians
to make a contribution, right alongside the instruments of laboratory
researchers, to the perplexity of the collective (no. 1), according to a
scarcely acceptable prejudice that contrasts the scientist, attentive to
the facts, with the politician who would betray the people who voted
for him by speaking in their place.^23 In truth, neither the one nor the
other can be unaware of the speech of those whom they represent
both precisely and faithfully. But what politicians add of their own isa
certain sense of dangerstemming from the multitude of excluded enti-
ties that can return to haunt the collective and demand to be taken
into account this time. Let us recall that the power to take into ac-
count is never the absolute beginning of the process, but always its
resumption.Nothing proves that those—humans and nonhumans—
whom we have decided to do without are not going to come back and
knock at the door, thanks to imperceptible movements that will have
to be detected as quickly as possible. The entire competence of politi-
cians consists in living in this permanent state of risk through which,
when they attempt to form an “us,” they hear responses in the form of
more or less inarticulate cries: “You, maybe, but not us!” It is precisely
in collaborating with scientists and hovering over the same instru-
ments that the detection of dangerous propositions by politicians is
going to be able to nourish public life by responding to the require-
ment of external reality.
No one will deny that politicians have the skill that will allow them
to contribute decisively to consultation (no. 2). Just as the researchers
have learned to construct controversies and to referee them through
convincing experiments, the politicians have learned, more than any-
one else, to formconcerned parties,reliable witnesses, opinionated
stakeholders. Politicians are often criticized for the artificiality of the
constructions through which representative authorities are produced,
agencies that have the right to speak, even though they have nothing
special to say because they have not been given the capacity to pro-
duce their own questions. Their critics forget that the multiplication
of artifices to fabricate agents that can say “yes” or “no” is at least as
important a skill as the construction of facts by researchers in labora-
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