tories. Without the work of production of voices, there would no
longer be voices at all. Without that artificial and ingenious research,
without that continuous exploration of those who may have to sit on
the jury that rules on candidates for existence, it is impossible to speak
of successful consultation. Is the basic job of politicians not to create
out of the whole cloth voices that stammer, that protest, that express
opinions? Is this not what explains their ceaseless coming and going,
their constant alertness, their ever-renewed resumption, their uninter-
rupted worry, their speech impedimenta? Mixed from now on with
the voices of colleagues and reliable witnesses who are led to judge the
quality of matters of concern*, this production of voices is not going
to create a big ruckus, but will instead bring together an assembly that
is already more credible, more serious, more authorized. Scientists left
to themselves would never be able to extend consultation to fulfill the
requirement of relevance. They would have a tendency to agreeamong
themselvesmuch too rapidly, once the ad hoc group of competent
judges was defined. Helped by politicians, they will now be able to de-
tect, for every candidate entity, the jury that is adequate to evaluate its
existence according to its own requirements and in relation to its own
problems.^24
Despite appearances to the contrary, it is not because they deal es-
pecially with humans that politicians contribute usefully to hierar-
chy (no. 3). In practice, politicians have never dealt with humans,
but always with associations of humans and nonhumans, cities and
landscapes, productions and diversions, things and people, genes and
properties, goods and attachments, in briefcosmograms.^25 No, their
principal competence, the one that even the most imaginative scien-
tists cannot emulate, comes from their aptitude tocompromise.Politi-
cians are always criticized, with scornful accusations of compromises,
deals, and combinations, and those are precisely, at this stage, the
most indispensable of virtues. There is in fact no homogeneity in the
hierarchy of choices that must be made between the various propo-
sitions, which are always presented as improbable collages,cadavres
exquis(“exquisite corpses”). The “combing” through which it will
be possible to arrange incommensurable beings in order from the larg-
est to the smallest can come to fruition only if the interests, inten-
tions, positions, of each of the components are constantly modified.
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