row, the moderns are sure, the distinction will be sharper; we shall be
able to pry the established facts more decisively away from their ma-
trix of desires and human fantasies. For the moderns, without the
hope of a Science at last extracted from the social world, there is no
discernible movement, no progress, no arrow of time, and thus no
hope of salvation. We can understand that they devote desperate en-
ergy to defending the myth of the Cave and that they see in the confu-
sion of the sciences with politics the unpardonable crime that would
deprive history of any future. If Science can no longer exit the prison
of the social, then there is no longer any possible emancipation—free-
dom has no more future than does reason.
It is all this temporal machinery, this time factory, this clock, this
time-clock, that political ecology has to attack in full awareness of
what it is doing. It has to modify the mechanism that generates the
difference between the past and the future; it has to suspend the tick-
tock that gave the temporality of the moderns its rhythm. What I
could not even attempt to do at the beginning of this book without
shocking common sense now presents little difficulty. It is a matter of
replacement parts.
On what machinery did the promised and expected distinction be-
tween facts and values actually depend? We now know: on the pro-
duction of two types of exteriorities, one used as a reservoir and the
other as a dumping ground. The front of modernization advanced in-
exorably, going outside the social to seek an indisputable common
world that served as its reservoir, in order to substitute it for the pro-
liferation of opinions, projections, representations, fantasies that were
driven out of the real world and pushed back into a vast dump, a cem-
etery filled with archaisms and irrationalities. “Moving forward,” un-
der this regime, thus consisted of filling the collective with indisput-
able matters of fact, primary qualities, and of eliminating secondary
qualities from the real world, confining them to the inner world, to
the past, or at least to insignificance and inessentiality. This immense
intake and outlet pump (taking in indisputable facts and forcing out
disputable opinions) is recognizable: it is nature, turned into our polit-
ical enemy.^6
The machine for producing “modern times” relies on an ever-
increasing naturalization—that is, as we have seen, on an ever more
rapid avoidance of the legitimate procedures through which essences*
EXPLORING COMMON WORLDS
189