duced and the full-scale models, and it allows us to deploy the passage
from one to the other over time. On one condition, however: that we
keep track of the pathwe have taken. A new mechanism has to be ready
to record at each moment the successive responses given to the now
reopened question of the number of collectives, by constantly com-
paring what we have been able to absorb and what remains outside.
The Third Power and the Question of the State
If we are to agree to give up the conveniences of modernism and the
hope of salvation through Science, if we are finally to secularize public
life by entrusting it to the “little transcendence” of collective experi-
menting, if we are to charge history with giving us tiny measured
doses of the enlightenment that nature can no longer provide, we need
a guarantee that can serve as a provisional absolute. This is what I call
thepower to follow up,a procedural power that must not be confused
with the power to take into account and the power to put in order.
We might call it the power togovern,if everyone agreed to use this ex-
pression to designate the relinquishment of all mastery. The art of
governing is not the necessary arbitration of reason or the necessary
arbitrariness of sovereignty; it is that to which one is obliged to have
recourse when one can no longer benefit from any shortcut. When we
have to compose the common world little by little, going from one
trial to another along the invisible path of a painful learning curve, we
need this third power that possesses not the qualities of strength but
rather those of weakness. We agree to have governors when no scale
model is possible any longer, and when it is nonetheless necessary to
scale down all the stakes to a simplified model; when there is no more
mastery possible, and when masters are needed all the same.
A trial is useful only provided that we get through it, that we docu-
ment our results, that we use it to prepare the protocol for the next it-
eration, that we make sure we have traced out a new critical path
which will make it possible to learn more the next time. In modern-
ism, as we know, there was never any realfeedback,because the past
was excluded for good and characterized as a useless archaism, as out-
dated irrationality, as subjectivity that had to be expelled to leave
room for the indisputable objects of the common world, the only one
we needed to know.^18 The metaphysics of nature prevented the slow
POLITICS OF NATURE
200