to organize society according to the ideal models supplied by reason.
The right-hand model differs from the left-hand one by virtue of three
small features, as decisive as they are infinitesimal; these will become
clearer in the next two chapters. In the first place, we are not dealing
with a society “threatened” by recourse to an objective nature, but
with a collectivein the process of expanding:the properties of human
beings and nonhumans with which it has to come to terms are in no
way assured. Next, we do not need a dramatic and mysterious “con-
version” to search for new nonhumans: the small transformations car-
ried out by scientific disciplines in laboratories are entirely sufficient.
Yes, there is indeed an objective external reality, but this particular
externality is not definitive: it simply indicates that new nonhumans,
entities that have never before been included in the work of the collec-
tive, find themselves mobilized, recruited, socialized, domesticated.
This new type of externality, essential to the respiration of the collec-
tive, is not there to nourish some great drama of rupture and conver-
sion. There is indeed an external reality, but there is really no need to
make a big fuss about it. Finally, and this is the third “small” differ-
ence, when the newly recruited nonhumans show up to enrich the de-
mography of the collective, they are quite incapable of interrupting
discussions, short-circuiting procedures, canceling out deliberations:
they are there, on the contrary, to complicate and open up these pro-
cesses.^45 The return of the scientists in charge of nonhumans is of pas-
sionate interest to the other members of the collective, but it in no
way resolves the question of the common world that they are in the
process of developing: it only complicates the issue.
In place of the three mysteries of the left-hand version, we find
in the right-hand version three entirely describable operational sets,
none of which presents a brutal rupture, and, even more important,
none of whichsimplifies the collective’s work of collection by resorting deci-
sively to an incontestable transcendence.^46 The entire genius of the old al-
legory of the Cave, now empty of its venom, consisted in making its
audience believe that the right-hand schema was the same as the left-
hand one, that there existed no other version of society than the infer-
nal social world (the social world as prison depicted in the left-hand
schema), as if one could not speak about society without at once los-
ing contact with external reality. The trap set by the epistemology
police consisted in denying to anyone who challenged the radical ex-
POLITICS OF NATURE
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