ity. “These are the facts!” you will say, pounding the table with your
fist.^25 And you will still be right. To avoid one monster, we are ready to
defend another. For people to plunge into such battles and wear out
their fists by striking the table over and over, there must no longer be a
civil life; people must already have agreed to go down in chains into
the Cave.
Let us suppose now that someone comes to find you with an associ-
ation of humans and nonhumans, an association whose exact compo-
sition is not yet known to anyone, but about which a series of trials
makes it possible to say that its membersact,that is, quite simply, that
they modify other actors through a series of trials that can be listed thanks to
some experimental protocol.This is the minimal, secular, nonpolemical
definition of an actor.^26
Are we dealing with objects? By no means. Every nonhuman that is
a candidate for existence finds itself accompanied by a series of lab
coats and many other professionals who point to the instruments, sit-
uations, and protocols, without our being able to distinguish yet who
is speaking and with what authority. There are indeed actors here, or
at least, to rid the word of any trace of anthropomorphism,actants,
acting agents, interveners. Are we dealing with subjects? Not with
subjects either. There are laboratories, sites, situations, tests, and ef-
fects that can in no case be reduced to the gamut of actions anticipated
up to this point under the notion of subject. Here we recognize the
matters of concern we met in the preceding chapter and whose pro-
liferation, as we have seen, attests to the scope of the ecological
crises.^27
If, instead of being asked to react to the violent volley of an object or
a subject, you are thus offered,in a civil way,associations of humans
and nonhumans in a state of uncertainty, you need not become indig-
nant and pound on the table, according to the two modalities of real-
ism. No indisputable word comes to reduce you to the state of a
thing.^28 The speech prostheses are on the contrary quite visible, in-
volved in entirely explicit controversies. It is not a matter of replac-
ing a gamut of actions traditionally associated with the subject by a
shorter range of actions that would reduce the first. On the contrary,
the associations that are presented to you seek toaddto the first list
a longer listof candidates for action. Does making the speech prosthe-
sis visible take away quality from the statements made, by reducing
HOW TO BRING THE COLLECTIVE TOGETHER
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