ternality of Science the right to continue to talk about any external
reality at all: those who had doubts about Science were supposed to
content themselves with the gruel of social conventions and symbol-
ism. They could never have gotten out of the prison of the Cave on
their own. Yet we can now see that precisely the opposite is true. In
the appeal to external reality, two elements that are now clearly sepa-
rate were deliberately confused: on the one hand, themultiplicityof
the new beings for which room must be made from now on so that
we can live in common; on the other hand, theinterruptionof all dis-
cussion by recourse to a brutally and prematurely unified external
reality. Such recourse is effective only because it short-circuits the
work proper to politics, thanks to a nonpolitical supplement called
Science that is supposed to have already unified all beings under the
auspices of an illegally convoked assembly called nature. In the left-
hand schema, one could not appeal to the reality of the external world
without leaving the social world or silencing it; in the right-hand
schema, one can appeal to the external worlds, but the multiplicity
that is being mobilized in this waydoes not bring definitive resolution to
any of the essential questions of the collective.In place of the social world
as prison that sociology has inherited without ever inquiring into its
original flaws, there appears another sense of the social, closer to the
etymology of the term, as association and collection.^47 On the left in
Figure 1.1, Science was part of the solution to the political problem
that it was also rendering insoluble by the continual threat of disquali-
fication hanging over the human assemblies; on the right, the sciences
are part of the solution only because they are part of the problem as
well.
When the mediation of the scientific disciplines is added, when the
work of scientists is shown, when the importance of the history of the
sciences is stressed, it seems at first glance that we have no choice but
todistance ourselveseven further from nature in order to move closer
toward humans. The temptation is great; we need only let ourselves
go; the highway is open and toll-free; the entire landscape of good
sense has been fashioned for this effortless slippage, this glide down a
slide. But thanks to the argument of the collective, one can also move
toward a different position, one less well marked, more twisted, and
more costly, a position toward which the entire future common sense
of political ecology nevertheless pushes us. By making the mediation
WHY POLITICAL ECOLOGY HAS TO LET GO OF NATURE
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