these propositions well-articulated or not? Do they form a good or a
bad common world? It no longer suffices to exist in the upper house
in order to exist in the lower one. It no longer suffices to have been re-
jected by the lower house to cease to exist in the upper one.Provided
that they work in a loop,the two assemblies have as their result the pro-
duction, at a given moment, of provisional assemblies, what could be
called a duly processed matter of concern(de facto de jure).
“So you want to entrust all morality, all truth, all justice to the
simple passage from one version of the collective to the following ver-
sion? You would abandon certainties for groping? The great transcen-
dence of the True and the Good for the minuscule transcendence of
hesitation and starting over? We’d have to be crazy to deprive our-
selves of the appeal to reason that critical unveiling allows.” Not crazy,
but we’d have to stop being modern. It’s a good thing: we have never
been modern.
Time’s Two Arrows
From the beginning of this book, I have contrasted the expressions
“modernism” and “political ecology,” to such an extent that I can
sum up our trajectory with a parody of Hamlet: “To modernize or to
ecologize? That is the question.” I have given the adjective “mod-
ern”—a term ordinarily used without reflection—a meaning that is,
if not pejorative, then at least suspect; this may have surprised the
reader. I could not explain it more fully earlier, because its definition
depended on the strange conception that the moderns have of Science
and politics. It so happens that the direction of what is called time’s
arrow derives from the relation between Science and society.^5 The
moderns, they themselves say, “are thrusting forward.” But what sign
allows us to tell that they are progressing rather than going backward
or running in place? Some feature has to allow them to differentiate
the radiant future from the dark past. Now, it isfrom the classic relations
between object and subjectthat they borrow the reference point that is
going to serve as their check-off device: the past mixed together what
the future will have to separate. In the past, our ancestors confused
facts with values, the essence of things with the representations they
had of things, harsh objective reality with the fantasies that they proj-
ected onto reality, primary qualities with secondary qualities. Tomor-
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