both houses? Who will archive the results, little by little? The politi-
cians, the moralists, the scientists, the economizers may traverse the
various agencies in all directions, but nothing guarantees us that they
will not content themselves witha single cycle—which amounts to
interrupting the “collection” of the collective and to making the ex-
clusions definitive, fixing the boundaries of the collective, naturaliz-
ing the distribution between inside and outside. We must then have at
our disposal astrong procedural power,in which politicians, scientists,
economists, and moralists would share as they do in the other two,
but that would attach itself uniquely to restarting the work of collec-
tion as well as to judging the quality of learning—which amounts to
adding a seventh task to the six functions of Chapter 4.
To exercise this new power, we need a new skill, one that we did not
present in the preceding chapter, one that can be calledadministra-
tion. In the state of law of nature, a State is required, and also law.
Political philosophy did not anticipate that it would end up adminis-
tering the sky, the climate, the sea, viruses, or wild animals. It had
thought it could limit itself to subjects and their right to property; Sci-
ence would take care of the rest. Everything changes with the end of
modernism, since the collective may have as its ambition bringing
together the pluriverse. There is nothing, in this feature, that can as-
tonish the “other” cultures, which are characterized precisely by a me-
ticulous administration of thecosmos.Westerners, in this sense, only
rejoin the common fate that for a while they thought they had es-
caped. This new competency amounts to being able to establish, ow-
ing to fragile bonds of writings and dossiers, what is called a paper
trail.
Bureaucrats are viewed with almost as much contempt as politi-
cians. Still, we do not see how to get along without them for the elabo-
ration of a public life that would finally unfold according to due pro-
cess, for the excellent reason that bureaucrats aremasters of processes
and forms.As long as we imagined, with the old Constitution, that a
society existed in nature, the stubborn maintenance of forms risked
being taken as a superfluous activity, on the same basis as the slowness
of the State of law in the eyes of a police state. Immediately and effort-
lessly, everyone was supposed to discover the obvious categories of
good sense: humanity, nature, economics, society. Starting from the
moment when one passes to an experimental metaphysics, the mo-
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