ing more straightforward than this notion; there is actually nothing
more diabolically political. Every single aspect of its definition is de-
signed to avoid the power of some monster and to accelerate the ac-
cess to power of a still more horrible monster that will erect a barrier
against the first.
We shall see in the following chapters how to replace the ill-
founded externality of the current polemics with a desired exterior-
ization that has been discussed and decided on through due process.
For the moment, we must simply be sure that when we bring the so-
cial actors endowed with speech together in the collective, we are not
going to lose all access to external reality in the process, and find our-
selves with the usual phantoms of the social sciences: symbols, repre-
sentations, myths, and other nonexistences of the same stripe that
never hold up except by contrast with nature, which is reserved for the
natural sciences. If we want the collective to be able to come together,
it behooves us to dissociate the notion of external reality from that
of indisputable necessity, in order to be able to distribute it equally
among all human and nonhuman “citizens.” We are thus going to as-
sociate the notion of external realitywith surprises and events,rather
than with the simple “being-there” of the warrior tradition, the stub-
born presence ofmatters of fact.
Humans are not specially defined by freedom any more than they
are defined by speech: nonhumans are not defined by necessity any
more than they are defined by mute objectivity. The only thing that
can be said about them is that theyemerge in surprising fashion,length-
ening the list of beings that must be taken into account. It is important
to understand here that the solution in question is not fabulous, dia-
lectical, new, exotic, baroque, Oriental, or profound. No, its banality is
its best quality. It belongs to the everyday world; it is secular; it is or-
dinary; it is superficial; it is drab.^32 Its very banality makes it an ideal
candidate to replace the fuss and bother of the subject-object opposi-
tion. What better foundation for common sense than the very self-
evidence of these human and nonhuman actors whose associationis
sometimes surprising?Nothing more. Nothing less.
We understand better now the lesson of political ecology that
seemed paradoxical when we first encountered it in Chapter 1: ecolog-
ical and health crises, I said, can be spotted through the ignorance of
connections between the actors and through the sudden impossibility
HOW TO BRING THE COLLECTIVE TOGETHER
79