the second is objective, since it reveals only primary qualities* from
the standpoint of the lab coats. How could we describe this double
tasting in conciliatory terms?
Thanks to the cooper, thanks to the gas chromatographer, we have
become sensitiveto differences that were invisible before, some on our
palate, others on logarithmic paper. We have gone beyond connecting
sensations, words, and calculations to a pre-existing external thing;
thanks to the multiplication of instruments, we have become capable
of registering new distinctions. In the production of these differences
and in the multiplication of these nuances, we must thus count our-
selves and our own noses, ourselves and our instruments. The more
devices we have at our disposal, the more time we spend in the cellar
or in the laboratory, the more our palate is exercised, the more adept
the cellar master, the more sensitive the chromatographer, the more
realities abound. In the old tradition, we always had to count the work
done to attain reality as a debt owed to realism; we always had to
choose: either it was real or it was constructed. Now, this small exam-
ple makes it quite clear that reality grows to precisely the same extent
as the work done to become sensitive to differences. The more instru-
ments proliferate, the more the arrangement is artificial, the more
capable we become of registering worlds. Artifice and reality are in
the same positive column, whereas something entirely different from
work is inscribed on the debit side: what we have there now isinsensi-
tivity.Thus the dividing line does not pass between speech and reality
through the fragile gulf of reference, as in the old polemical model of
statements that are simply true or false, but between propositions ca-
pable of triggering arrangements that are sensitive to the smallest dif-
ferences, and those that remain obtuse in the face of the greatest dif-
ferences.
Language is not cut off from the pluriverse; it is one of thematerial
arrangements through which we “charge” the pluriverse in the collec-
tive. It really did take a merciless civil war and the resultant cutting off
of language from what it talks about, to make us civilians lose sight of
something that makes self-evident good sense: we all work constantly
to make things relevant to what we say about them. If we stop work-
ing, they no longer say anything; but when they do speak, it is indeed
they that speak and not we ourselves—otherwise, why the devil would
we work night and day to make them speak?^37
HOW TO BRING THE COLLECTIVE TOGETHER
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