sought to plunge public life and from which political ecology can
finally extricate it. From now on, we discuss together before we de-
cide.^18 By using the word “controversy” in a positive sense, I have sup-
pressed not the certainties of the sciences but one of the old barriers
set up between the visible assembly of humans discussing and arguing
among themselves and the scientific assembly that did of course dis-
cuss and argue a good deal, but in secret, and that in the end produced
only indubitable matters of fact.^19
Nothing is resolved, however, by this first liberation of speech, be-
cause immediately people will object, in spite of everything, that the
proof-workers who conduct experiments in laboratories, who record
their inscriptions with instruments, who publish findings in journals,
who argue over implications in professional meetings, who summa-
rize conclusions in reports, who incorporate the resulting laws in
other instruments, other rules, other teachings, other habits, are all
humans. Humans and humans alone are the ones who speak, discuss,
and argue. How can there be any doubt about this self-evident fact?
And yet, let us not rush to agree. Where political ecology is concerned,
nothing can be achieved in a hurry, as I have often pointed out, for
good sense is almost as unreliable a counselor as anger.
We can go much further in the redistribution of roles between poli-
ticians and scientists if we agree to take seriously the little suffixes
“-logies”and“-graphies”that all scientific disciplines, hard or soft,
rich or poor, famous or obscure, hot or cold, have added to their enter-
prises. Each discipline can define itself as a complex mechanism for
givingworlds the capacity to write or to speak,as a general way of making
mute entities literate. It is odd, then, that political philosophy, so ob-
sessed with its own logocentrism, did not see that the greatest share of
thelogoswas to be found in laboratories. Let us remember that non-
humans are not in themselves objects, and still less are they matters of
fact. They first appear as matters of concern, as new entities that pro-
voke perplexity and thus speech in those who gather around them,
discuss them, and argue over them. Such is the form in which, in the
previous chapter, we recognized external reality, once it had been lib-
erated from the obligation imposed on objects to silence humans.
Who speaks,actually, in laboratories, through instruments, thanks to
equipment that has been set up, at the heart of the scientific assembly?
Surely not the scientist herself. If you want to heap scorn upon an ac-
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