spected as one culture “among others” has on a “culture,” deprived of privileged access
to reality.
- I had tried, in my investigation of the moderns, to make anthropology “symmet-
rical” in order to allow it to absorb not nature and cultures, any longer, but what I was
then calling “natures-cultures,” two things that had become comparable against a
background other than that of the old universal nature (Latour 1993). The expression
was awkward and the attempt naïve, since no matter how hard we may try make arti-
facts symmetrical, they remain artifacts. With rare exceptions, anthropologists have re-
tained the bipolar organization of their discipline; still, see Viveiros de Castro 1998.
This is all the more a pity in that, as Marshall Sahlins has remarked many times
(Sahlins 2000a, 2000b), the notion of culture itself has changed since it was appropri-
ated by the others as a very particular form of politics, what Appadurai calls “the glob-
alization of differences”: see Appadurai 1996. - Let us recall that nonhumans are always better treated than humans, as I have
shown, after Stengers, in Chapter 2 (Stengers 1997b). In fact, their recalcitrance is not
in doubt. No one would think of speaking of them without making them speak accord-
ing to complex mechanisms in which the interpreter sometimes risks his life. Now, on
the side of humans, these mechanisms, these apparatuses, remain rare—whence the
stress placed in this section on encounters between “cultures.” These are what we have
to civilize. Encounters with nonhumans, once (political) epistemology has been ren-
dered harmless, pose comparatively few problems. With things, we always remain po-
lite because they always know how to resist! - In the old modernist theme of the “neutrality” of Science, there was a profound
form of impoliteness toward nonhumans, who were said to be incapable of making a
difference, and limited to the stupid being-there of inanimism*. On this, see Bloor 1999
and my reply. - I am borrowing the expression and the argument from Stengers 1997b.
- This is the key difference, recognized by Schmitt (1976 [1963]) between police
operations, interior to the established State, and the condition of war, defined precisely
by the absence of any agreed-on arbiter. This is why any war that is waged “as if” there
were an indisputable arbiter—for instance nature—becomes a mere police operation
(Latour 2002e). The diplomat is franker than the referee: at least he recognizes that
there is a war. - It was for this reason that Isabelle Stengers proposed “to put an end to toler-
ance”—there is in tolerance something that is in fact intolerable if it is obtained at the
price of relinquishing any requirement of reality. Such is the deleterious effect of the
ever-so-modernist notion of belief: the moderns believe that the others believe (Latour
1996b). No tolerance is worse than that of multiculturalism. The openness of mind of
someone like Hegel, doing by himself the diplomatic work of synthesis, cannot pass as
a virtue either, for he was doing his work all by himself in his study. It is fairly easy to
come to agreement with those about whom one is speaking from afar with respect,
while lodging them somewhere as a surmounted episode of the history of absolute
Mind! - On the history of this arrangement around matters of fact, see Shapin and
Schaffer 1985, and Shapin 1994. Whereas the seventeenth century had invented a way
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