from thesynergythat it is going to allow between the complementary
competencies that everything requires us to connect and that only the
prejudices of the old Constitution obliged us to separate into distinct
domains of reality. The collective has as much need to maintain dis-
tances scrupulously as it does to take the risk of abolishing them. If
only these nonidentical twins had not been separated at birth and
given different missions: as if the one had the job of representing na-
ture truthfully, while only the prison of the Cave was left to the other.
Without this separation, it would be easy to understand that they have
to collaborate on all the functions of the collective without confusing
their qualities at any given moment. We might just as well tell masons,
plumbers, carpenters, and painters to collaborate without ever telling
them to what public building they are to apply their successive and
complementary talents! Rather, each type of skill comes in its turn
and in its role to lend a hand in its own distinctive way to the task,
which is sorted out differently every time.
Moreover, now that we have reached this point, nothing prevents
us from saying that the sciences proceed along a straight and nar-
row path, while politics takes a crooked one, appropriating for our
own purposes old metaphors that have long served to contrast the two
regimes of public speech.^32 The establishment of referential chains
that allow us, through a series of continual and rule-governed trans-
formations, to assure ourselves of the faithfulness of representations,
does indeed trace segments of straight lines. The hesitant speech that
has to construct, through endlessly repeated gatherings, a sphere that
will serve as boundary between the inside and the outside, between
“them” and “us,” in order to ensure the faithfulness of the representa-
tion, cannot be drawn with straight lines, but only with curves. Yes,
the political animal remains the “prince of twisted words.” What
makes him untruthful in the eyes of Science would make him a liar, on
the contrary, if he tried to speak straight. Speaking of someone who
draws a straight line where a curved line is required, we say that he or
she is “going off on a tangent,” fleeing the obligations of his or her
mission. This is the way it would be with the politician who decided to
start talking science: she would be abandoning the progressive com-
position of the envelope of the collective: she would go fast, she would
go straight ahead, she would no longer be faithfully representing her
constituents. In order to grow, the collective needs these two func-
SKILLS FOR THE COLLECTIVE
149