Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

into account on alert right away. It is through this feature that I shall define civiliza-
tion* later on, and it is that which will allow us to take full advantage of the principle
of precaution (Ewald 2001).

32. We shall have to return to this crucial feature in detail in Chapter 5, when we ap-
    proach the notion of collective experience and the very particular type of normativity
    that will allow us to describe its course. I shall in fact use it to define a third power that
    could be called thepower to follow up,which amounts to imagining—to use humble
    terms appropriate to industry—a sort of “quality control” on the “traceability” of the
    procedures.

4. Skills for the Collective

1. We see this in caricatural fashion in the discussion about subjective risks and
   objective risks, another place where the distinction between primary qualities and
   secondary qualities is made crudely; the former alone refers to reality, while the latter
   refers merely to psychic states, manipulation, or culture; see Rémy 1997. Once the divi-
   sion has been made, the question arises whether to take the eliminationist model (by
   means of force or by means of pedagogy) or the model of respectful hypocrisy (through
   confinement to the ghetto of culture or through discreet manipulation). On the other
   solutions, see the testimony collected in Lascoumes, Callon, et al. 1997.


2. See Acot 1998, and especially Drouin 1991 and Anker 2001.


3. For a history of the notion of ecosystem, see the meticulous study by Golley
   (1993). The term “ecumenical” has the same root as “ecology.” The familiar expression
   “everything that goes together” to form a whole must not be abused. Ecologists know
   how incredibly difficult it is to define partial totalizations, even locally. Politicians do
   too. See the excellent example offered in Western, Wright, et al. 1994, concerning the
   difficulty of determining what does or does not form a whole around the edges of natu-
   ral parks when one puts humans and nonhumans together.


4. This is why, from the introduction on, I have refrained from distinguishing sci-
   entific ecology from political ecology. I have kept only the latter term, for it alone can
   highlight all the difficulty involved in composing a good common world. Moreover,
   speaking of “complexity” in no way guarantees that these political and procedural dif-
   ficulties will be taken into account: one can short-circuit public life just as easily
   by oversimplifying as by “complexifying.” The famous “sciences of complexity” do
   not bring us any closer to the problem of composition than do the “sciences of the
   simple.”


5. A famous line by Tennyson that has become a proverb describing Darwinism:

Man...

Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation’s final law—

Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek’d against his creed.

Tennyson, “In Memoriam AHH” (1850), Canto 56

NOTES TO PAGES 125–132

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