way, can disturb, transform, and perform it, the fact remains that there
are two histories, or rather one history full of sound and fury that un-
foldswithin a frameworkthat itself has no history, or creates no his-
tory. Now, this good-sense conception is precisely what we are going
to have to abandon in order to give political ecology its proper place.
The critical sophistication of the social sciences is unfortunately of
no use in drawing the lesson of political ecology, which does not even
straddle the divide between nature and society, natural sciences and
social sciences, science and politics, but is located in an entirely differ-
ent region, since it refuses to establish public life on the basis of two
collectors, two catchments, two houses. If one accepted the notion of
social representations of nature, one would fall back on the inexhaust-
ible argument about external reality, and we would be obliged to an-
swer the either-or question: “Do you have access to the externality of
nature, or are you still lying down at the bottom of the gutter in the
Cave?” Or, more politely: “Are you talking about things, or about sym-
bolic representations of things?”^41 The challenge is not to take a posi-
tion in the debate that is going to make it possible to measure the re-
spective shares of nature and society in the representations we have of
them, but to modify the conception of the social and political world
that serves as evidence for the social and natural sciences.
In the two preceding sections, I was seeking to speak of nature it-
self—or rather natures themselves—and not at all of the many human
representations of a single nature. But how can anyone speak of nature
itself? This would seem to have no meaning. And yet it is exactly what
I mean to say. When we add the discoveries made by militant ecology
to the discovery made by political epistemology, we can detach nature
into several of these ingredients, without falling necessarily into the
representations that humans make of it. The belief that there are only
two positions, realism and idealism, nature and society, is in effect the
essential source of the power that is symbolized by the myth of the
Cave and that political ecology must now secularize.^42 This is one of
the thorniest points in our argument; I must therefore proceed with
caution, the way one goes about removing a splinter stuck in one’s
foot.
The initial operation that detaches us from fascination with nature
seems risky, at first glance, since it amounts—according to the com-
mitment I made in the Introduction—to distinguishing the sciences
POLITICS OF NATURE
34