make themselves heard once again. Keeping this virtue for humans
alone will soon be seen as the most immoral of vices.
The Organization of the Construction Site
Let us conclude this overlong section with a brief recapitulation, simi-
lar to the plans that allow the heads of construction sites to distribute
the work of the various trades in fulfilling an order. No building is
more important than the one that is to house the collective, and yet
none has benefited from so little attention. All the skills indispensable
to its construction, its elegance, and its functionality have been called
up in disorder and have never been made to work in concert. By glanc-
ing at Box 4.1, we see that it is a work of art whose beauty matters to
us more than anything—and that we are indeed talking about an im-
mense, messy, and muddy construction site!
There is no doubt about it: we have indeed extricated ourselves
from the former logic of spheres of activity: each of the trades or call-
ings shares in the same six functions, in the same two houses; they
cannot be distinguished in terms of the domain of reality to which
they formerly claimed to apply.^51 There is no doubt, either, that we can
no longer go back to modernism’s old bipartite division; no entity
is now asked to declare, before its propositions are taken seriously,
whether it is natural or artificial, attached or detached, objective or
subjective, rational or irrational. We also see to what extent each of
the skills profits from the presence of its neighbors: how much the sci-
ences improve owing to contact with politicians; to what extent econ-
omists lose their defects if they allow moralists to add their concerns
to their own efforts at modelization; how politicians seem weightier if
their compromises and deals are added to the arrangements and the
manipulations of the scientists. Those who claimed to be building
their Republics by adding together the defects of all these tradesper-
sons instead of joining together their virtues were very poor architects
indeed.
The table also shows that abandoning the old Constitution does not
deliver us up, helpless, to a confusion that is as vague as it is agreeable.
Nothing is better articulated than the notion—at first glace too uni-
tary, too totalizing, too undifferentiated—of the collective. The proof
SKILLS FOR THE COLLECTIVE
161