them to a social construction, to prejudices, passions, or opinions that
would force you to be indignant over the domination of subjectivity?
Not in the slightest, since, here too, the associations that are presented
to you are not there to reduce the list of actions to a list of the preju-
dices, interests, or social passions that have already been recorded;
they are simply and very politely proposing toextendthe repertory of
actions through alongerlist than the one that had been available up
to now.
I maintain that this quite innocent notion of a shorter or longer list
of elementary actions suffices to redistribute the cards between hu-
mans and nonhumans, and to disengage this pair from the perpetual
battle carried on noisily by objects and subjects, the former seeking to
come together under the banner of nature and the latter wanting to re-
group in society. The notion of a longer or shorter list has, above all,
the signal advantage of banality. It leads a modest, common, civil life,
far from the great outbursts of the interminable cold war carried on
between objects and subjects—and the even more interminable war
carried out against all the others by those who claim to be “getting be-
yond” the object-subject opposition.
It is clearer now: the extension of the collective makes possible a
presentationof humans and nonhumans that is completely different
from the one required by the cold war between objects and subjects.^29
The latter were playing a zero-sum game: everything lost by one side
was won by the other, and vice versa. Humans and nonhumans for
their part can join forces without requiring their counterparts on the
other side to disappear. To put it yet another way:objects and subjects
can never associate with one another; humans and nonhumans can.As
soon as we stop taking nonhumans as objects, as soon as we allow
them to enter the collective in the form of new entities with uncertain
boundaries, entities that hesitate, quake, and induce perplexity, it is
not hard to see that we can grant them the designation of actors. And
if we take the term “association*” literally, there is no reason, either,
not to grant them the designation ofsocial actors.^30 Tradition refused
them this label, in order to reserve it for subjects whose course of ac-
tion took place in a world—a framework, an environment—of things.
But we now understand that this refusal had no cause other than the
panicky fear of seeing humansreducedto things, or, conversely, of see-
ing the prejudices of social actorsprecludeaccess to things. In order to
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