Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

that political ecology, in combination with science studies, allows a
movement that had always been forbidden before. By emphasizing the
mediation of the sciences, one can of course tilt toward sociologism
and return to the perennial question of the human representations of
nature, but one can also make visible the distinction between the mul-
tiple presence of nonhumans and the political work that collected
them previously in the form of a unified nature. For this it suffices to
change the notion of the social, which we have inherited, like the rest,
from the age of the Caves.
We are going to distinguish between two conceptions of the social
world: the first, which can be called the social world as prison, and
the second, which I shall call thesocial worldasassociation*. When we
compare the two positions—the one derived from the myth of the
Cave and the one to which I would like readers to become accustomed
little by little—at first they appear quite similar, as is evident from Fig-
ure 1.1.
In the left-hand version, the collective is bisected in an absolute
cleavage that separates the assembly of things from the assembly of
humans. In a triple mystery (indicated by question marks), despite the
gulf between the two worlds, scientists nevertheless remain capable of
breaking with society to achieve objectivity, of rendering mute things
assimilable by human language, and, finally, of coming back “to earth”

WHY POLITICAL ECOLOGY HAS TO LET GO OF NATURE

37

Nature Society

?

?

?

Assembly of Disciplines

things

Assembly of

humans

New

nonhumans

Complication and

controversies

TWO-HOUSE COLLECTIVE COLLECTIVE WITHOUT

OUTSIDE RECOURSE

Collective

in the process

of exploring

Figure 1.1 The political model with two houses, nature and society, is based on a dou-
ble split. The model of the collective is based, conversely, on a simple extension of the
human and nonhuman members.