ecology thus does not share in the same history as that of modern
progress. We are going to be able to entrust treasures to the new tem-
porality that multiplies the potential allies it would have been crazy
to entrust to the old historicity. Formerly, one always had to mistrust
history, for the important things (common world, primary qualities)
eluded temporality. If there were a human history full of sound and
fury, it was always developing in contrast with a silentnonhistory,full
of promises of peace that were always slow to manifest themselves be-
cause of the infinite distance that separated them from this lowly
world.^11
As soon as we agree to differentiate the past from the future no
longer through detachment but through reattachment, political ecol-
ogy begins to profit differently from the passage of time. Unlike the
other forms of historicity that preceded it, it can confide the questions
it has been unable to answer todayto the restarting, tomorrow, of the
process of composition.It need not claim that the things it does not
know at timetare nonexistent, irrational, and definitively outdated,
but only that they are provisionally excluded beings on the path to-
ward appeal, and that it will find these beingsin any event on its way to t
+1, since it will never be rid of them. In other words, it no longer
uses any of the three labels that the moderns have always used up to
now to characterize their development: the struggle against archaism,
the front of modernization, the utopia of a radiant future. It is re-
quired to devote itself toa meticulous triage of the possible worlds,of the
cosmograms, always to be begun anew.^12 Irreversibility has changed
direction: it no longer finds itself in the abolished past, but in the fu-
ture to be recommenced.
Let us retain from the sciences the word “experiment,” to character-
ize the movement through which every collective passes in this way
from a past state to a future state, from good sense to common sense.
Public life has striven up to now to imitate Science and to await the
salvation of reason: Why would it not try to imitate the sciences a bit
by borrowing the experimentation that is incontestably their greatest
invention? An experiment, as etymology attests rather well, consists
in “passing through” a trial and “coming out of it” in order to draw its
lessons.^13 It thus offers an intermediary between knowledge and igno-
rance. It defines itself not by the knowledge that is available at the
start, but by the quality of the learning curve that has made it possi-
EXPLORING COMMON WORLDS
195