scriptible right to ignore the majority of beings to the necessity of ex-
cluding none of them. Complexity, “total connectivity,” the global eco-
system, the catholicity that wants to embrace everything, all this is
what always seems to accompany the erecting of an ecological way of
thinking, a way of thinking rightly persuaded that in the final analysis
everything is interconnected...Bycomparison with this magnificent
goal, every collective appears cramped, ignorant, closed. Yet the “little
transcendence” of experimentation promises, not to take everything
into account, but to exclude while assuring itself that the excluded en-
tities will be able to put it in danger and appeal to it in the following
phase. Experimentation is thus asked, not to swallow the pluriverse in
a single mouthful, but to ensure that it is indeed proceeding from a
statento a staten+1 that takes into account a greater number of be-
ings or that at least does not lose too many beings along the way. The
order and beauty that the Greek language associates with the word
cosmosthus do not apply to the totality, but to the learning curve. By
definition, all collectives, like Frankenstein’s creature, are born de-
formed; all appear barbarous in others’ eyes:only the trajectory of the
experiment gives them a civil form.The provisional totality that is com-
posed according to due process is in no way to be confused with the
totality obtained in a house or a laboratory under the name of “total-
izing” and “infinitely complex nature.” Gaia is not Mother Earth, a di-
vine ancestor from whom our collective supposedly descends, but at
best our remote great-grand-niece, whom only a civilized collective
will be able to generate according to due process.
By comparing the relative states of the same collective at two
successive moments, we thus succeed in characterizing itsvirtue,but
without falling back on definitive knowledge or moral transcendence,
either, and without wanting to embrace everything all at once. With
the notion of learning curve, in other words, we solve aproblem of
scale.While anyone can work on a small-scale model in the laboratory
at any time, once we have left the lab, we always have to grapple with
the collective at full size, without being able to wait or repeat the ex-
periment or reduce the scale, without being able to accumulate knowl-
edge of the causes and consequences of our actions.^17 No reduction of
the collective is possible; that is why nothing can replace the experi-
ment that must always be carried out without certainties. Now, collec-
tive experimentation outlines an intermediate path between the re-
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