Must it abandon forward movement? For want of being modern,
must it resign itself to the postmoderns’ running in place? Or, worse
still, as it goes the other direction on the moderns’ path, will it have to
accept the designation “reactionary”? No, of course not, for while it
does not have either the reservoir or the dumping ground of the Old
Regime, it possesses other transcendences: an exteriority constructed
according to a well-formed procedure that produced provisional ex-
cluded entities and postulants. It is thus quite capable of showing a
difference between past and future, but it obtains that differenceby
way of the gap between two successive iterationsand no longer by way of
the old distinction between facts and values: “Yesterday,” it might say,
“we took into account only a few propositions; tomorrow, we shall
take others into account, and, if all goes well, even more; yesterday, we
gave too much importance to entities whose weight will decrease to-
morrow; in the past, we could compose a common world with only a
few elements; in the future we shall be able to absorb the shock of
a larger number of beings that were incommensurable before now;
yesterday, we could not form acosmos,and we found ourselves sur-
rounded byaliensthat no one had formed—the former reservoir—and
that no one could integrate—the former dumping ground; tomorrow
we shall form a slightly less misshapencosmos.”
We have changed futures at the same time as we changed exteriors,
and we have modified the exterior because the political institutions in-
scribed in the Constitution have been overturned. Whereas the mod-
erns always went from the confused to the clear, from the mixed to the
simple, from the archaic to the objective, and since they were thus al-
ways climbing the stairway of progress, we too are going to progress,
but by always descending along a path that is, however, not the path of
decadence: we shall always go from the mixed to the still more mixed,
from the complicated to the still more complicated, from the explicit
to the implicit. We no longer expect from the future that it will eman-
cipate us from all our attachments; on the contrary, we expect that it
will attach us with tighter bonds to more numerous crowds ofaliens
who have become full-fledged members of the collective that is in the
process of being formed. “Tomorrow,” the moderns cry, “we shall be
more detached.” “Tomorrow,” murmur those who have to be called
nonmoderns,^8 “we shall be more attached.” Mark Twain declared that
nothing was certain but death and taxes; from now on, we shall have
EXPLORING COMMON WORLDS
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