reflexive discipline, but it does not designate anyself-regulated phe-
nomenon: it simply allows the “public” to see itself, to conceive itself,
to constitute itself as a public.^34
We shall be told that the economists must not be very useful for
maintaining the separation of powers (no. 5), since more than all
the others they have contributed to confusing it with the impossi-
ble distinction between facts and values. This would be to misunder-
stand to what extent the competencies of economics are transformed
once the distinction between economizing and what is economized,
between the requirements of the lower house and those of the up-
per house, has been recognized. As soon as the work of documenta-
tion, instrumentation, and formatting that accountants, statisticians,
econometricians, and theoreticians practice every day has been
brought to light, we notice that there is now virtually no relation be-
tween the proliferation of the links that connect humans and non-
humans on the one hand, and what economics can say about them on
the other. Common sense knows this perfectly well: it is quite pre-
pared to poke fun at the economists’ weakness in predicting even the
success of the most trivial gadget—not to mention the onset of crises.
But, here again, a weakness is transformed into a strength: no none
can confuse the indispensable work involved in translating the attach-
ments of people and goods, by reducing them to calculations on paper,
with whatreallyhappens in these people’s heads and through the
power of these goods. By their very weakness, the economists thus do
a marvelous job of protecting the inquiry of the upper house into the
exploration of the connections of its necessary reduction by the lower
house. Precisely by reducing the attachments in an unrealistic way in
the form of calculations, economics protects the distinction between
the tasks of taking into account and those of putting in order better
than any other profession. No longer can anyone confuse the world
with a spreadsheet!
If we stop a moment to measure the immense difficulties of the
tasks of hierarchy and institution, we can readily grasp the crucial
contribution of the economizers, for they are going to make it possible
to give acommon languageto the heterogeneous set of entities that
have to form a hierarchy (no. 3). Nothing could link black holes,
rivers, transgenic soy beans, farmers, the climate, human embryos,
and humanized pigs in an ordered relation, in one single cosmogram.
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