The spokespersons must in return modify those whose opinion they are sup-
posed to represent faithfully.Faithfulness changes meaning. No scientist
deigns to follow this perilous path which to him looks likea lie.
However, it is on this point that we see the full advantage of the col-
laboration between scientists and politicians, a collaboration of which
the old distinction between the paradise of Science and the hell of the
social world deprived us up to now. In fact, the politicians’ capacity for
translation/betrayal corresponds to the requirement of hierarchy, only
provided that they can constantly rely on the scientists’ aptitude for
offering innovations and compromises:only togethercan they succeed
in modifying the opinions of their constituents and also displace the
burdens onto other, less important beings. The two representations
can work only in concert, with all their ingenuity combined to dis-
cover how to knit together the least objectionable of awkward com-
promises among incommensurable actors, each of whom is seeking to
pass the buck, in order to make others pay the price for compromises
that are nevertheless indispensable.^26 We must learn to respect these
collaborations in the search for the best combination: deprived of the
marvelous help of a world beyond, this is our only chance to obtain
thebestof allpossibleworlds.
With the obligation to succeed, politicians shed their brightest
light. “We have to get on with it, and in a hurry; time is passing;
let’s decide.” Such is the impulse that suddenly animates the second
house when the politicians add their grain of salt. Researchers, too,
know how to make decisions, to get on with it, as we have seen, but
politicians add an even more indispensable skill: they canmake ene-
mies.^27 Without this ability, the meaning of decisiveness, the ability to
“cut to the chase,” would be only the mark of arbitrariness—the arbi-
trariness that so frightened scientists in the other Constitution, wor-
ried as they were that they would be obliged to know too soon.^28 With-
out the ability to divide the collective into friends and enemies, the
requirement of closure could never be fulfilled: one would want to
embrace everything, keep everything, satisfy everyone, all the humans
and all the nonhumans together, and the collective, left agape, would
no longer be able to learn, because it would no longer have the capac-
ity to take up again, in the next cycle, the integration of the excluded
entities that would have appealed.^29
We can deal quickly with the contributions of politicians to the sep-
POLITICS OF NATURE
146