spect, have never really lost the habit of politely greeting the outside
that sustained them. But the long parenthesis of modernism, precisely,
prevented us from meeting the “others” under auspices other than the
anthropology of cultures—we shall see in the next chapter, once our
own collectives have become a bit more civilized, how to imagine
other, less barbarous forms of encounters, in such a way as to benefit
at last from their contributions.
Let us try for the time being to run through the various functions of
the collective, while taking the multiplicity of callings that contribute
to assuring these functions and fusing them into homogeneous tasks.
In contrast to what we did in the preceding section, we have to ask the
reader to use some imagination, for no common sense yet makes it
possible to take these badly stitched-together conglomerates to be
self-evident native forms of life.
First, we have the two houses. We have called the first one, charged
with taking into account, the upper house, and the second, charged
with putting in order, the lower house. The terms are not important,
for they too will be renegotiated, and they are here only to point out
provisional sets of competencies, to allow the diplomats to speak. We
know perfectly well that we are not dealing with ordinary assemblies,
with closed, concentrated spaces, but rather with flowing basins, as
multiple as rivers, as dispersed as tributaries, as wild as the brooks on
a map of France. We have nevertheless decided to preserve these out-
dated expressions borrowed from parliamentary democracy to the
very end, because they play no role other than that of a white flag
waved in the wind so that we can finally negotiate, as parliamentarians
do, while connecting with the republican heritage of our ancestors.^52
To follow the parade, let us keep in mind three outcomes of the pre-
vious chapters. First of all, the upper house never begins its welcome
ceremonies as a society in conflict with nature, but as one of the pow-
ers of the collective attentive to the multitude that is crowding up
against its gates. Next, this multitude is made up not of objects or sub-
jects, things or people, but of more or less well articulated proposi-
tions*, some of which are entirely new, while others have been ex-
pelled, more or less recently, by the lower house, during the previous
cycle. Finally, these multitudes always present themselves as associa-
tions of humans and nonhumans: a virus never appears without its vi-
rologists, a pulsar without its radioastronomers, a drug addict without
SKILLS FOR THE COLLECTIVE
165