tion. Things no longer threaten subjects. Social construction no longer
weakens objects.
Readers may object that there is still a total difference between hu-
man social actors and nonhuman social actors, since the former can
never be mastered and the latter must on the contrary obey nothing
but brute causality. If such an objection is raised, it is because readers
are still using the old model that viewed human subjectivity as some-
thing that intervenes to disrupt the objectivity of laws, to pollute the
quality of judgment, to suspend the succession of causes and effects.
Those readers are still making use of the old distribution of roles be-
tween the necessity of things and the liberty of subjects, either to
chasten nature and elevate man, or to glorify nature and belittle man.
In both cases, they are continuing to use the polemical energy still left
in the notions of object and subject and are continuing to function as
if we were still living in the old cosmos, with its radical distinction be-
tween sublunary and supralunary worlds. Yet it was in order to keep
human passions fromdisturbingobjects that the need for “strict re-
spect for causality” was endlessly stressed.
For readers to be fully convinced, it seems to me, they need only
take seriously the label “actor”* that was introduced in the preceding
section. Actors are defined above all as obstacles, scandals, as what
suspends mastery, as what gets in the way of domination, as what
interrupts the closure and the composition of the collective. To put it
crudely, human and nonhuman actors appear first of all as trouble-
makers. The notion ofrecalcitranceoffers the most appropriate ap-
proach to defining their action. Anyone who believes that nonhumans
are defined by strict obedience to the laws of causality must never
have followed the slow development of a laboratory experiment. Any-
one who believes, conversely, that humans are defined at the outset by
freedom must never have appreciated the ease with which they keep
silent and obey, must have failed to weigh their connivance with the
object role to which people seek so often to reduce them.^34 To distrib-
ute roles from the outset between the controllable and obedient object
on the one hand and the free and rebellious human on the other is to
preclude searching for the condition under which—the trial through
which, the arena in which, the labor at the price of which—one can,
one must, make these entities exchange among themselves their for-
midable capacity to appear on the scene as full-fledged actors, that is,
HOW TO BRING THE COLLECTIVE TOGETHER
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