War of the Worlds:What about Peace?Bruno Latour

Translated from the French by Charlotte Bigg Edited by John Tresch

PRICKLY PARADIGM PRESSCHICAGO

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911

The lesson does not seem to sink in. When did PaulValéry prophetically observe that, “We have nowlearned that all civilizations are mortal?” Just afterthe so-called Great War. Many horrific disasters havepassed since, and yet we are still surprised whenanother attack seems to threaten the precariousforms of life so dear to our hearts. Since September2001, we go on dialing the same emergency number,911, and rightly so, since we have entered a state ofemergency. We look around frantically to understandwhy all that we feel is worth fighting for remains sofragile. I read in the news that Hollywoodscriptwriters rushed to revise the catastrophist

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after all. This does not mean that they are foreverlocked into the narrow confines of their own civiliza-tion, threatened by all others in a war of all againstall. It just means that they counted a bit prematurelyon possessing a sure principle that could unify thewhole world, make one accepted common world. Itis not the case that an already existing peaceful unionhas been savagely shattered. We have merely beenreminded that unity has to be made; it is not simplyobserved. Far from being self evident, unity wasnever more solid than a future possibility to strugglefor. Unity has to be the end result of a diplomaticeffort; it can’t be its uncontroversial starting point.

My argument in this tricky, prickly piece is that itmight after all be better to be at war, and thus to beforced to think about the diplomatic work to bedone, than to imagine that there is no war at all andkeep talking endlessly about progress, modernity,development—without realizing the price that mustbe paid in reaching such lofty goals. So we are atwar, aren’t we? Fine. But then three questions canfinally be raised: who is involved? What are their waraims? And finally, the most important one: whatabout peace? I will argue that we are not faced with apeace unfairly shattered, nor with a “war of civiliza-tions,” but that we have first to fathom that a war ofthe worlds has been raging all along, throughout theso-called “modern age”—this modern parenthesis.Still, nothing proves we are on the wrong side, and

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scenarios that suddenly looked obscene in the face ofa much harsher reality. In the same way, nihilismused to look like a gold mine when it was appliedhypothetically to any value worth its salt. Does suchidle criticism not look superficial now that nihilismis truly striking at “us”—at US— putting what wecall civilization in great danger of being foundhollow? Who needs to add another deconstructionto a heap of broken debris? The courageous icono-clast waving her arm in defiance, so proud of herhammer, ready to break everything with thepowerful weapon of critique—down with empires,beliefs, fetishes, ideologies, icons, idols!—does shenot look a bit silly now that what she wanted tostrike down lies in dust, already smashed to theground, and by people who do not fit at all the idealof the critical avant-garde?! What has happened tothe critical urge? Has it not overshot its target?

The word “war” is spewing out of every mouth, andalthough it sounds so disheartening at first theremight be an opportunity to seize on these clarioncalls. In “emergency” lays a hidden word, “emer-gent.” What is emerging, being “brought to light,”by the recent events? To realize that we are in themidst of a war might take us out of the complacencywith which so many people imagined an ever morepeaceful future, with all the nations convergingtoward fuzzy modernist ideals. No, Westernersmight not be able to modernize the whole planet

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The false peace offered by the onenature/many cultures divide

If we are in a state of war, who are the partiesengaged in this conflict? In earlier times thingslooked simpler: despite all their disagreements, theirdisputes and the diversity of their customs andlanguages, humans used to share, without evenknowing it, a common world, the world of nature,that physical anthropology could describe fairly well.Thus the many diverse cultures known to social andcultural anthropology stood out against a back-ground of natural unity. They could be comparedsynoptically not unlike the way a museum’s white

nothing proves either that this war cannot be won.What is sure is that it has to be waged explicitly andnot covertly. The worst course would be to act as ifthere were no war at all, only the peaceful extensionof Western natural Reason using its police forces tocombat, contain, and convert the many Empires ofEvil. That is the mistake those who still believe theyare moderns are in danger of making. On the otherhand, if we are going to bring the wars of modern-ization to an end, we cannot afford to declare that allbets are off, that premodern savagery will be metwith premodern savagery, that senseless violence willanswer senseless violence. No, what is needed is anew recognition of the old war we have beenfighting all along—in order to bring about new kindsof negotiation, and a new kind of peace.

In this blessed era of modernism, differences, inother words, never cut very deep; they could neverbe fundamental since they did not affect the worlditself. Agreement was in principle always possible, ifnot easy. There always remained the hope thatdifferences of opinion, even violent conflicts, couldbe eased or alleviated if one only focused a littlemore on this unifying and pacifying nature and alittle less on the divergent, contradictory and subjec-tive representations humans had of it. If, througheducation, rational debates or careful scrutiny, onesucceeded in bringing the one natural and physicalreality into the debates, then passions would becalmed. Thus one could always move frompassionate diversity to a reassuring and rationalagreed upon reality. Even if humanity featured diver-gent religions, rights, customs and arts, it couldalways seek solace in this haven of unity and peaceoffered by science, technology, economics anddemocracy. Passions may divide us, but we can relyon reason to reunite us. There may be many ways ofbringing up children, but there is only one embryo-genesis. Therefore, when disputes occur, we needonly to increase the relative share of scientific objec-tivity, technical efficiency, economic profitability anddemocratic debate, and the disputes will soon cease.

It is impossible now to realize the extent to whichthis solution was convenient in solving the problemof the progressive composition of the common world

wall helps to bring out the differences between exoticmasks hung side by side. There may have beenBantus and Baoules, Finns and Laplanders,Californians and Burgundians, but they all shared acommon make-up of genes, neurons, muscles, skele-tons, ecosystems and evolution which allowed themto be classed in the same humanity. If cultural differ-ences shined so vividly, this was because the unity ofnature provided the common denominator.

This denominator was even more indisputablycommon when one moved from the world of humannature to the world of non-human nature. Thepossibility of disagreement among specialists ordisciplines certainly remained, but ultimately theworld (in the singular) external nature would beenough to bring agreement among them all.Different cultures existed, with their many idiosyn-crasies, but at least there was only one nature with itsnecessary laws. Conflicts between humans, no matterhow far they went, remained limited to the represen-tations, ideas and images that diverse cultures couldhave of a single biophysical nature. To be sure,differences of opinion, disagreements and violentconflicts remained, but they all had their source inthe subjectivity of the human mind without everengaging the world, its material reality, its cosmologyor its ontology, which by construction—no!precisely, by nature—remained intangible.

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of the worlds. Diversity could be handled by toler-ance—but of a very condescending sort since themany cultures were debarred from any ontologicalclaim to participate in the controversial definition ofthe one world of nature. Although there could bemany warring parties engaged in local conflicts, onething was sure: there was only one arbiter, Nature, asknown by Reason.

Of course, there remained a slight suspicion that thereferee of all the disputes could be biased. Maybethis world in the singular, the world of Science, ofTechnology, of the Market, Democracy, Humanity,Human Rights—in short the world of the Human—suffered from being a little ethnocentric, if not atrifle imperialist, or even merely American, not tosay Yankee…Unification proceeded, it was all tooclear, in a somewhat unfair manner, as though thetask of unifying the world had been delegated(although no one had actually delegated anything) toonly one of the cultures of the world, the onebearing the imprecise name of the West. Howeverodd, this in itself did not seem shocking to mostWesterners and their many clients, because funda-mentally “the West” was not a culture “among”others, since it enjoyed a privileged access to natureand its already-accomplished unification. Europeans,Americans, Australians and later Japanese certainlypossessed cultural traits which identified them asunique cultural groups, but their access to nature

(which is the name I give to politics). For after all,the hard work had already been done, unity had beenfully constituted, fitted out from head to foot. Theworld had been unified, and there remained only thetask of convincing a few last recalcitrant people whoresisted modernization—and if this failed, well, theleftovers could always be stored among those“values” to be respected, such as cultural diversity,tradition, inner religious feelings, madness, etc. Inother words, the leftovers could be gathered togetherin a museum or a reserve or a hospital and then beturned into more or less collective forms of subjec-tivity. Their conservation did not threaten the unityof nature since they would never be able to return tomake a claim for their objectivity and request a placein the only real world under the only real sun. Likethe wives and children of overthrown monarchs, whowere locked up in convents for life, they would beforever banned from participating in the seriousmatters of state.

Anthropologists, curators, physicians, artists, couldeven enjoy the luxury of “respecting” those diverseidiosyncrasies since they never threatened to stake aclaim in the order of the world. There were certainlywars, innumerable ones, but there was only oneworld, which, without hesitation, made it possible tospeak of one planet, one universal humanity, therights of man and of human beings as such. In thosenot-so-distant times, there could have been no wars

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less as it was disenchanted! Herein lies the wholeparadox of these strange times we call “modernity”—which retrospectively appear no longer as the motorof history, but increasingly as the partial representa-tion of one historical episode now come to an end.For if nature had the immediate advantage ofimparting unification, it also had the serious draw-back, in the eyes of its very promoters, of beingfundamentally devoid of meaning. Objective facts intheir harsh reality could neither be smelled, nortasted, nor could they provide any truly human signi-fication. The modernists themselves were fully awareof this, and even acknowledged it with a sort of sado-masochistic joy. “The great scientific discoveries,”they were glad to say with a shudder, “are incessantlywrenching us from our little village and hurling usinto the frightening, infinite spaces of an icy cosmoswhose center we no longer occupy.” Ultimately,though, this was not a matter of choice: moderniza-tion compelled one to mourn the passing of all one’scolorful pretensions, one’s motley cosmologies, of allthe many ways of life with their rich rituals. “Let uswipe away our tears,” the modernists liked todeclare, “let us become adults at last; humanity isleaving behind its myth-imbued childhood and isstepping into the harsh reality of Science,Technology and the Market. It’s a pity but that’s theway it is: you can either choose to cling to yourdiverse cultures, and conflicts will not cease, or,alternatively, you can accept unity and the sharing of

swiftly made these superficial differences disappear.If “Westernization” could be challenged or rejected,“modernization” was beyond doubt the commonproperty of humanity—and even if “modernization”came to be disputed, then “naturalization” couldprovide another, deeper uncontroversial bedrockcommon to all.

Thus, surrendering to modernization and naturaliza-tion did not mean submitting to any given imperi-alism or voluntarily imitating a cultural model, butrather coming closer to this fundamental, indis-putable source of unification that was to be rooted ina nature known by reason. The solution always wasto connect directly to the objective origin of thecommon world and thus to draw nearer to unity.Neither those who were developing nor those beingdeveloped had the feeling that they were surren-dering to another people when they respectivelydisseminated or adopted sciences, technologies,markets and democracy. They were surrendering tomodernization, which, because of its break with allcultural inheritances, simply marked the more or lessdramatic eruption of nature, indisputable andunifying—as if truth was finally shining through atear in the colorful screen clumsily painted by themany cultural representations.

There was, however, a little hitch in this peacefulmodernist version of politics: nature was as meaning-

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Strauss had often said, this was never the case for themodernists: the others were “peoples” and“cultures,” but “we,” the Westerners, were only“half” culture, as Roy Wagner has argued. For thefirst time in history, the West could occupy, alone,the position of undeniable center, without this centerhaving a particular ethnic group as its origin. Thiswas indeed precisely what enabled the difference tobe established between “them”—prisoners inside thenarrow confines of their cultures, incapable ofgrasping the unifying principles of nature—and “us,”who evidently possessed more or less emphasizedcultural traits, but whose hidden strength was tohave reached, thanks to Science, Technology andEconomics’ slow work of erosion, the rock bottom ofuniversality, the hard core of nature, the backdrop ofany history. The modernizing West may have been“naturocentric” or “ratiocentric,” but never had apolitical formation been less ethnocentric than it. Allthe more so, since with truly admirable magnanimity,it gave everybody, whatever his or her ethnic groupof origin, the chance to become universal like itself.Through the mediation of scientific objectivity, tech-nical efficiency and economic profitability, anybodycould join this fatherland without ancestors, thisethnic group without rituals, this country withoutborders; this country of reason, able to accessunifying nature through the hard work of criticismand rational discussion.

a common world, and then, naturally (in every senseof the word), this world will be devoid of meaning.Too bad, love it or leave it.” One may wonderwhether one of the many metaphysical origins of thetwentieth-century world wars did not consist of thisodd way with which the West sought to pacify allconflicts by appealing to a single common world.How long can one survive in peace when torn by thisimpossible double bind with which modernizers havetrapped themselves together with those they havemodernized: nature known by reason unifies, but thisunification is devoid of meaning?

The irresistible advance of the modernization fronthad a great advantage, and that was to help definethe difference between “us” and “them” as a great,radical break. The term “ethnocentrism” cannot bydefinition be applied to the West, contrary to whatanti- and post-colonialists might claim, since thecenter was made of nature and not of any particularculture. Although ethnocentrism, like common senseaccording to Descartes, is of all things in the worldthe most evenly distributed, and although in estab-lishing relations of trade, domination and avoidance,all peoples and all nations have placed themselves inthe center, relegating the others to the periphery, theWest, and only the West, was thought to haveescaped this fate. Whereas all the others had main-tained a fundamental equality between them, in thatthey were all at the very least peoples, as Lévi-

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perhaps,” they were told, “but you no longer havereality, or else you have it merely in the symbolic,subjective, collective, ideological form of mere repre-sentations of a world that escapes you, although weare able to grasp it objectively. And don’t be mistaken,you have the right to cherish your culture, but allothers likewise have this same right, and all culturesare valued by us equally.” In this combination ofrespect and complete indifference, we may recognizethe hypocritical condescension of cultural relativismso rightly criticized by Donna Haraway. To the eyesof the cultural relativist, those cultural differencesmake no real difference anyway, since, somewhere,nature continues to unify reality by means of lawsthat are indisputable and necessary, even if they arenot as charming and meaningful as these delightfulproductions which human whim and arbitrary cate-gories have engendered everywhere.

Let us sum up the situation as it was when modern-ization was at its height: a) we possessed a privileged,natural world already unified, whatever some humansimprisoned by their own symbolic representationsmight think; b) the West, alone in not being ethno-centric, contemplated the multiplicity of ways ofevading this common world with a simultaneouslywatchful, dismayed, condescending, tolerant andinterested eye; c) in addition, we could profit fromthe rich diversity provided by many cultures, allcomparable, and all of them equally disengaged from

But in the end, the meaning of this existence stillremained unsolved. For, the more one belonged tothis fatherland without father or mother, the less thisbelonging had any significance: a strange paradox,which triggered a frantic search throughout thewhole planet to discover the generic human being,who, when it was finally found, only led to despair atthe sight of what had turned out to be again merenature: animal, biophysical, genetic, neuronal—atbest a sociobiological Darwinian machinery. Thesolution for diminishing, if not solving, this contra-diction between a unifying but senseless nature, onthe one hand, and, on the other, cultures packed withmeaning but no longer entitled to rule objectivereality, was to make the notion of “culture” sacred.Cultures began to be cherished, conserved,respected, reinvented, occasionally even made upfrom scratch.

But the notion of culture, it should not be forgotten,is relational: ethnic groups do not belong in the sameontological category as cabbages or turnips. Cultureis but one of the possible ways of relating to others,one perspective on otherness, and certainly not theonly one. Multiculturalism is nothing more than theflipside of what may be termed mononaturalism. Theimpression of great open-mindedness given bymulticulturalism should not hide the price thatpeoples had to pay for the preservation of their exis-tence in the form of culture. “You possess meaning,

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From mono- to multi-naturalism

Looking retrospectively at the episode of moderniza-tion—a few short centuries of violent spasms—onecannot help but be struck by the extent to which itwas peaceful, despite the wars that were unleashedon an ever more staggering scale. This is not aparadox: the West was fundamentally peaceful sincedisagreements could never go very far. They affectedrepresentations, but they never touched thesubstance, the very fabric of the world. To speak likephilosophers, only the “secondary qualities” were atstake, never the “primary qualities.” To the Galileos,Newtons, Pasteurs, Curies, even to theOppenheimers, politics always appeared—and still

the construction of the common natural reality,which was left safely in the hands of culture-freescientists, engineers, economists and democrats; d) asan added bonus, we were offered some sort of peaceproposal which presupposed that there could be noconflict whatsoever, no real wars, no reality wars:worlds were never at stake, only the many symbolicrepresentations of the one and only world; unity wasalready complete; a general increase in the dose ofuniversal nature would bring agreement straightaway. Finally, e) since this universal nature had nohuman meaning, cultural conservatism was indis-pensable for embellishing, enriching and orna-menting, by means of values and passions, the harshworld of facts and reason—provided, of course, thatnone of these cultures claimed any ontologicalpretensions. Voila, in a few words, the now vanishedworld which the alliance of mononaturalism andmulticulturalism had proposed. “The one world isours, the many worlds are yours; and if your disputesare too noisy, may the world of harsh reality come into pacify your disputes.” A peculiar offer of peace,one which had never recognized the existence of awar in the first place!

of their cerebral movie theaters. What a perfect solu-tion: the invention of a tolerant society.

But this solution is no longer available to those whono longer live under the sway of modernism. Thereare many ways to interpret modernism and itshistory, but I have become convinced that the bestway is to treat “modernism” as an anachronisticinterpretation of the events in which the Westparticipated. In this sense the West has never beenmore modern than the French revolutionaries, in theeyes of Tocqueville and François Furet, have beenrevolutionary. Modernism has never been anythingmore than a highly biased interpretation of eventswith different and sometimes entirely opposite moti-vations. To be sure, modernism as a theory of whatwas happening has been active, and sometimes veryefficiently, in molding the events, but it was never anaccurate account of the strange ways in which theWest became entangled with every nation and everyliving and non-living entity on Earth. How to recon-cile, for instance, the war cry for emancipation,progress and detachment from any archaic constraintwith the progressive imbroglios of humans and non-humans at an ever-expanding scale that characterizesthe West? Which one of these three followingphenomena should the anthropologist study mostcarefully: the self-congratulatory talk of themodernists about becoming at last released from theshackles of the past? The harsh reality of becoming

appears to Steven Weinberg—as a violent fire that alittle more objective science could always snuff out.However terrifying the conflicts were, Westernerswere all convinced that peace was always withinarm’s reach, just behind the narrow walls of ourpassions and our representations. How could theydefine any war aims? There was no war at all. Onlythe “others” were at war because of the archaiccalling of their subjective passions.

Already we have forgotten just how reassuring, grati-fying and stabilizing was this feeling of inner peacethat the modernists enjoyed: this absolute certaintythat there would be wars, but not wars of science;that there were wars in the world, but never wars ofthe worlds—except in science-fiction stories. For allthose great ancestors, there existed no source ofconflict that could not be wiped out. Or if it couldnot be made to disappear, it could always be internal-ized, psychologized, sunk into the private depth ofour inner selves. This is what the West had managedso successfully with “religious peace.” Yes, religion isdivisive, but no, it does not involve the world, onlyone’s private salvation. Religion had to become amere culture so that nature could become a true reli-gion—what brings everyone into assent. Living sideby side implied no re-negotiation of the commonworld already constituted, but simply the acceptanceof others’ eccentricities, opinions and feelings—solong as they remained within the narrow boundaries

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nature out there; but instead many of the formerfacts have become controversial issues that createmore dissent than agreements, thus requiringanother quasi-legal or quasi-political procedure tobring closure. Facts are no longer the mouth-shut-ting alternative to politics, but what has to be stabi-lized instead. To use another etymology, “objects”which had been conceived as wholly exterior to thesocial and political realm, have become “things”again, that is, in the sense of the mixture of assem-blies, issues, causes for concerns, data, law suits,controversies which the words res, causa, chose, aitia,ding have designated in all the European languages.While in earlier times, it was still possible to imaginequieting down the turbulent political passions by asolid importation of indisputable facts, the onlypossibility now seems to add to the turmoil ofpassions the turmoil generated by hotly disputedstates of affairs. The fount of peace no longer exists“out there.” In addition, cultures no longer wish tobe mere cultures. We are now facing wars of theworlds. Mononaturalism has been replaced by amonster inconceivable only ten years ago: multinatu-ralism (to use the neologism devised by EduardoViveiros de Castro) which has joined in the devilishdance started by multiculturalism—after the latterwas blown to pieces along with the hypocriticaltolerance it entailed. No one wants to be just toler-ated anymore. No one can bear to be just oneculture “among others” watched with interest and

more attached every day to ever more opaquehybrids of law, science, technology, passion andsocial ties? Or, should she follow instead the perverseways through which the talk about progress inter-feres, accelerates, blinds and perturbs the manyentanglements of humans and non-humans that arebeing generated on an ever-expanding scale?Whichever choice is made, there is no longer anyoverlap between modernism as an interpretation andthe events it purported for so long to interpret.Through the cracks of the call for universal reasonnow appears a rather monstrous animal that nolonger looks like “the West.” If it has ceased to befamiliar to the eyes of the anthropologist, it has lostalso its inner peacefulness and, with it, its completeasymmetric distance from the “others.” “They” looka lot like “us” now—and this is why we are finally atwar with them, but what sort of battle are weexpected to lead?

The slogan invented by journalists a few years agohas been well chosen: “Science Wars” are takingplace. What looked at first like a tempest in a teacuphas revealed itself as the tiny tell tale sign of a muchlarger transformation. One way to sum up this seachange is to say that modernity, which had beenconceived as the filling up of the world with evermore matters of fact, is now full of what I would liketo call states of affairs. Matters of fact were supposedto bring agreement by appealing to the objective

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spoken of nowadays, it is as a fatal danger, a crushingnecessity, a tragedy, a passionate commitment, or as achallenge to be taken up. In their positive as much asin their negative renderings, the global or the world-wide are spoken of as a war-like uprising, as a frontor a battle which could be lost. Going global orworldwide has become a serious problem to besolved, and is no longer the obvious solution to allconflicts as it was before, during the times ofmodernization. Even the French, despite their fond-ness for republican universality, rally “against global-ization” and start noisily demanding the right tomaintain their “cultural exception”—something thatwould have been inconceivable even ten years ago!They worship a farmer, José Bové, who brings toBerkeley a smelly Roquefort in order to stop theAmerican imperialistic grab on food production! Forthe first time, the global is becoming visibly andpublicly what is at stake in a merciless war—and nolonger the invisible unity to which everybody surrep-titiously resorted. Today, in Seattle or Porto Alegre,barricades go up against globalization and its perils:who in the past would have been mad enough to putup barricades against universality? Against nature?

Things look just as bad on the side of multiplicity.While globalization is causing problems for unity,fragmentation is now beginning to make tolerancelook equally problematic, if not positively dangerous.Has anyone sufficiently remarked upon the oddness

indifference by the gaze of the naturalizers. Reality isonce again becoming the issue at stake.

The conjunction of two words repeated ad nauseam,“globalization” and “fragmentation,” constitutes astriking symptom of these changing times. It wouldbe a mistake not to take these “globalloneys” veryseriously, for they indicate, respectively, the crisis ofunity and the crisis of multiplicity. Contrary to themisconceived impression that contemporarydiscourses on globalization might give, our age ismuch less global than it was, say, in 1790, 1848,1918, 1945, 1968 or 1989, to take a few simple land-marks of particular significance to the Europeans. Itwas still possible at these different dates to speak ofhumanity, of the human being, of world unity, ofplanet Earth, of progress and of world citizens, sincewe were under the impression of having connectedhistory to the single rational, learned, objectivesource of unity and peace, the model for which wasprovided by the natural sciences. Victory was aroundthe corner. Light was seen at the end of the tunnel.Modernization was about to triumph. “We” were allgoing to share the same world. Oddly enough, “the”world in the singular never appeared more global,total and in the process of completion, than justbefore the period when the word “globalization”started ringing in our ears.

Another paradox? No, for when globalization is

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of complaining simultaneously about fragmentation,which allegedly prevents any common world, andabout globalization, which is blamed for unifying toorapidly and without negotiation? Because, after all,we ought to be rejoicing: if globalization isdangerous, then long live the fragmentation thatshatters its hegemony; but if supposedly post-modernfragmentation is so terrifying, should we not bewelcoming globalization with open arms, as some-thing which at last provides unity and common sense?In complaining so unfairly against both globalizationand fragmentation, we identify precisely the deeptransformation that took us out of modernism andthe convenient solution it offered to the problems ofunity and multiplicity. Fragmentation shattersmononaturalism; globalization destroys multicultur-alism. On both sides, whether the aim is to createmultiplicity or unity, opponents, fronts and violentcontradictions are finally starting to appear. It ispossible to measure the staggering speed of transfor-mation with this tell tale sign: the word “global” nolonger sounds at all like “natural,” and “fragmented”no longer sounds like “culturally respectable.” Wehave seen the last of tolerance, as Isabelle Stengersprovocatively said, along with the hypocritical respectof comparative anthropology, and smug assertionsabout humanity, human rights and the fact that weare all similar inhabitants of the same world. There isnow a war of the worlds. Peace, the hypocriticalpeace of modernity, is well and truly over.

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“Qui vis pacem…declare war”

To put things in a more positive and less bellicoseway, one might say that we have moved, within thepast few years, from a situation of total war led byabsolute pacifists, to a situation of open warfarewhich offers genuine prospects for peace.

The modernists were never really at war since theydid not recognize the existence of possible conflicts,except in the realm of superficial representations,which themselves did not really involve the world ofnature as it was deciphered by reason. Is it notastounding that the modernists managed to wage warall over the planet without ever coming into conflict

As a result, of course, they cannot even begin tounderstand the demands of peace, the writing downof war aims, the necessities of diplomacy, the uncer-tainties involved in negotiation. “What negotiation?What diplomacy? Which war aims? What peacetalks? There is no war! We are just tidying things up,that’s all. We are expressing the reality of the orderthat has always been there, but which collectiverepresentations had somewhat obscured.” The onlywars the modernists ever waged were Wilsonianwars, nature having always given them a mandatemore imperative than those of the League ofNations...

It is clear that such latent wars, which never evenrecognized the enemy’s status as an enemy, whichconsidered themselves to be no more than simplepolice operations undertaken in the name of anindisputable mediator, became as unpacifiable as theywere open ended. How could they come to a close ifthey had never started? How could peace talks beundertaken if war was never declared? Contact neednot be established between the two sides of anunbridgeable gulf, since there is no such gulf, only apre-existing common world whose necessary lawssome irrational minds refuse to recognize. Whocould negotiate, since the conflict did not involvetwo sides—and, in any case, there wasn’t really aconflict, not a real conflict, not a conflict aboutreality, only a misunderstanding about symbolic

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with anyone, without ever declaring war? Quite thecontrary! All they did was to spread, by force ofarms, profound peace, indisputable civilization, unin-terrupted progress. They had no adversaries orenemies in the proper sense—just bad pupils. Yes,their wars, their conquests, were educational! Eventheir massacres were purely pedagogical! We shouldre-read Captain Cook or Jules Verne: there werefights everywhere and all the time, but always for thegood of the people. “That should teach them alesson…”

Carl Schmitt contends that only where there is nocommon mediator to whom both sides can turn forarbitration, is there an enemy against whom onecould declare war. If this is true, then one can indeedsay that that the modernist civilizers never hadenemies and modern history has never reallywitnessed a proper war. Even when fighting fiercely,they always deferred to the authority of an indis-putable arbiter, of a mediator far above all possibleforms of conflict: Nature and its laws, Science and itsunified matters of fact, Reason and its way to reachagreement. When one benefits from a mandate givenby a mediator who oversees the conflict, one is nolonger running a war but simply carrying out policeoperations, Schmitt says. Sent to work by the “call ofnature” the modernists thus simply policed the worldand could say with pride that they had never been atwar with anybody.

final goal that is to blame, but only the strange ideathat it could be reached without being at war withreal enemies. In contrast to the history that sought tomodernize, the West has to admit to the existence ofwar in order to make peace: to accept that it has hadenemies, to take seriously the diversity of worlds, torefuse to accept mere tolerance, and to resume theconstruction of both the local and the global. And itis true that, for this operation to begin, the West willhave to go through the most painful period ofmourning a unity lost. The common world we tookfor granted must instead be progressively composed,it is not already constituted. The common world isnot behind us and ready made, like nature, but aheadof us, an immense task which we will need to accom-plish one step at a time. It is not above us, like thearbiter who mediates conflicts, it is what is at stake inthese conflicts, what could become the subject ofcompromise—should negotiation take place. Thecommon world is now up for grabs.

This brutal transformation may admittedly giveWesterners cause for despair: they used to live inpeace, they are now at war. They had no enemies;they liked everybody; taking themselves to be bybirth global citizens, ready to accept all othercultures no matter how extravagant their diversities.(“Why do other people hate us so much?” ask thepost-911 Americans, “when we are so sincere, soplain-spoken, so well-meaning, so good-natured?”)

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representations, which themselves might easily co-exist, on condition of no longer claiming to graspreality for good. In the march of civilization, theWhites have only met the specter of the irrationaland the archaic. They were never faced withenemies, so how could they ever think about peace?

And yet peace is at stake here, peace is what weshould be longing for. Who could pursue othergoals? Who could delight in being forever at war?What sort of intellectual would I be if I keptcondoning such bellicose talks? But the question ishow to reach peace.

Of course, the solution cannot be to abandon thetask of composing the common world and takerefuge behind the blinkers and behind the bunkers ofone’s own culture, as Samuel Huntington advises usto do. This would mean believing once again in theexistence of culture and forgetting the task ofcreating a common world—not to mention thehorrendous difficulty of partitioning the planet intohomogeneous “civilizations.” The whole of Westernhistory would have been in vain, if we now stoop solow as to abandon, for good, the promised land ofuniversality. How could we, the descendants ofcenturies of servants of reason, look in the eyes ofour forefathers and tell them without feelingashamed that we have given up the worthy goal ofliving in one single, common world? It is not this

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attempts must be made to develop a protophysics—an indescribable horror for the modernizing peoples,but the only hope for those fighting against bothglobalization and fragmentation at the same time.Compared to the light shiver that cultural relativismmight have provoked, this mess, this pandemoniumcan only evoke at first repulsion and dismay. It wasprecisely to steer clear of all of this horror thatmodernism was invented somewhere in the seven-teenth century. It was in order to avoid having to putup with so many worlds, so many contradictoryontologies and so many conflicting metaphysics, thatthey were wisely set up as (in)different entities on thebackground of an indisputable (and, alas, meaning-less) nature full of matters of fact. But nothingproves that this “bifurcation of nature,” as A. N.Whitehead calls this catastrophic solution, is thefinal state of history.

A complete metamorphosis is now required of theformer modernizers: let them look again, right in theface of this Gorgon they had tried to hide from.However strange it might seem at first sight, themodernists, the Westerners, the Whites (whatevernickname one might wish to give them) will have toact as if they are once again making contact with theothers for the first time, as if history has given theman incredible second chance and they were back inthe seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, or twentiethcenturies and are allowed, in the twenty-first, to

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Suddenly, a few years later, here they are, forced tofight again like the others (who meanwhile haveceased to be “others” in the older, modern sense) todefine what “global” might really mean, to decidewhat meaning to give to “multiplicity.” They had aninfallible solution, they were convinced of the unityof nature and the diversity of cultures, and suddenlythey have to start all over again. And yet they havenothing to be despondent about. Their goals remainthe same; only the means are different—and thetiming. What they thought was a done deal is justbeginning anew. Negotiating the sovereignty ofJerusalem might seem like the most difficult ofdiplomatic quandaries, but what about negotiatingthe status and the sovereignty of nature, the finalarbiter of all conflicts?

Whatever follows modernism at least has the advan-tage of being clearer. There is no doubt that the warof the worlds is taking place; unity and multiplicitycannot be achieved unless they are progressivelypieced together by delicate negotiations. Nobody canconstitute the unity of the world for anybody else, asused to be the case (in the times of modernism andlater post-modernism), that is, by generously offeringto let the others in, on condition that they leave atthe door all that is dear to them: their gods, theirsouls, their objects, their times and their spaces, inshort, their ontology. Metaphysics no longer comesafter physics but now precedes it as well, and

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battle was won in advance, since there was no realbattle, no battle for reality, only the inevitable marchof progress—even if the inexplicable resurgence ofarchaism (and how indeed could they have explainedit?) and the incomprehensible rise of irrationality(and how could they have understood it?) often gavethem cause to despair the slow pace of civilization.

Modernism distinguishes itself from its successor—what should it be called? “Second modernity”?“Non-modernity”?— in this one small respect: fromnow on the battle is about the making of thecommon world and the outcome is uncertain. That’sall. And that’s enough to change everything. Allthose who put up barricades against globalization, allthose who fight against fragmentation and disinte-gration, understand the implications of a war whichthey are at risk of losing.

Two little expressions illustrate this transition, whichis as swift as it is imperceptible. The sudden appear-ance, all over the West, of the motif of “risk,” intro-duced so efficiently by Ulrich Beck, by no meanssignifies that life has become more dangerous; it indi-cates rather that everyone has once again, in theirday-to-day life, the impression that things could gowrong. For instance, the sky, this very sky my Gallicancestors feared was about to fall on their heads,could once again fall on our heads and those of ourchildren in the form of radical climate changes.

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introduce themselves properly, they who had intro-duced themselves so badly in previous centuriesthrough the most ruthless imperialism. Let themfinally agree that they have enemies, so that they canmake offers of peace.

To arrive unannounced among other peoples and puteverything to fire and the sword with the aim ofpacifying them in the name of a fundamental andalready-constituted peace, is not the same thing, thesame mission, with the same tension, as appearing,perhaps with the same violence, the same fire andthe same swords, and fighting on the battlefield todecide which common world should be progressivelypieced together. It is not a matter of replacing intol-erant conquistadors with specialists of inter-culturaldialogue. Who ever mentioned dialogue? Who askedfor tolerance? No, conquerors should rather bereplaced by enemies capable of recognizing thatthose facing them are enemies also and not irrationalbeings, that the outcome of the battle is uncertain,and that, consequently, it may be necessary to nego-tiate, and in earnest. While the inter-culturaldialogue implies that ninety per cent of the commonworld is already common and that there is auniversal referee waiting for the parties to settle theirpetty disputes, the negotiation we should beprepared for includes the ninety per cent—God,Nature and souls included—and there is no arbiter.The modernists knew on good authority that the

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Back to square one. The first contacts are made, allover again. What? Does this mean we now have toact with care and precaution, like the others, thecowards, the pre-modernists whom the civilizerstried to replace in the risk-free running of theplanet? Yes, exactly, and in any case there is today notheme more widespread in Western societies thanthe principle of precaution, which has of coursenothing to do with suspending action, but simplymarks the return of anxious and vigilant proceduresin the areas connected with science and technology,which were, up until now, characterized by absolutecertainty. “Globalization,” “disintegration,” “risk,”“precaution”: here are a few of the popular, media-friendly, often despised words which instead point tothe world’s tremendous sea change, to the ebbingtide of modernism.

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What sort of unity? Jus naturalism or constructivism?

Despite the feeling of horror that this change incircumstances might at first provoke in them and inothers, what advantages nevertheless arise for the ci-devant modernists! With the opportunity of intro-ducing themselves properly this time, of fighting, ofrisking loss, comes also the possibility of winning!And for good this time. There is indeed no reasonto think that, in piecing together the common worldof the future, the Westerners will find themselves ata disadvantage.

the construction of the common space. Now thatthe task is at hand, it is no longer the time to dressup in a hair shirt and scratch at one’s scabs like Jobon his dung heap.

Westerners, get up on your feet! It’s up to you nowto fight for your place in the sun! You perhaps nolonger benefit from the absolute winning formula,the martingale which used to ensure your success atevery draw, but there is no reason either why youshould now always lose. After all, reason is not soweak that it can never win. It has just been a littletoo long since it had a chance to fight, for lack ofreal enemies acknowledged as such…Reason hasbecome self-satisfied and complacent, it has got usedto the Capuan luxury of naturalism and to its easycomplicities. Screaming “relativism!” whenever oneis faced with trouble is not enough to keep oneselfin good marching order, ready for the extension—yes, the extension—of rationality.

The sticky point is that to the short-term reason ofthe rationalists, one should add the long-termreason of the diplomat. To be sure diplomats areoften hated as potential traitors ready for seedybackroom compromises, but they have the greatadvantage of getting to work after the balance offorces has become visible on the ground, not beforeas in the case of police operations. Diplomats knowthat there exists no superior referee, no arbiter able

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On the condition that they don’t move, in the mean-time, from civilizing and modernizing arrogance toself-flagellation and penitence. The desperate guilttrip for past crimes committed will get themnowhere, and neither will it win them forgiveness.Again, dialogue is not the issue, and neither is toler-ance, guilt, nor pardon. What is at stake here is war,negotiation, diplomacy and the construction ofpeace. To castigate oneself, to carry on one’s shoul-ders the white man’s crushing burden is nothingother than continuing to always define by one’s selfand in the name of all, without the others havingdelegated anything, the impossible task of definingthe common world. Just as no one had asked themodernists to take themselves for universal pacifiers,no one asks them today to take themselves foruniversal culprits. Only one thing is asked of themnow: that they cease to consider universality as theirown already established territory, and that theyfinally agree to negotiate for it after the battle hastaken place. It’s just required of them that theyfinally become worthy of the prodigious initiativethey once took—no matter if it was due to God, toGold or to Science—to come into contact withothers by violence, greed, commerce, conquest,evangelization, knowledge, management and admin-istration. No one is even asking them to abandontheir search for universality, since in any case allpeoples now find themselves involved in this otherworld war, this fundamental metaphysical war about

To formulate their peace offers, to present them-selves more politely than before, to introduce thetalks in a less counter-productive way, the formermodernists, for instance, could introduce a distinc-tion between jus naturalism and constructivism. Theterm “natural law” is predominantly used in legaltheory, but it is also perfectly suited to define thewhole of the modernist solution, on condition thatthe notion of “rule” be extended to include physicallaws: there exists out there a nature whose necessarylaws make it possible to judge by contrast the diver-sity of cultural idiosyncrasies. However, jus natu-ralism is not the modernists’ only tradition: theypossess another, almost contradictory, tradition thatis much richer and that we can call constructivist.Facts, as their etymology indicates, are fabricated,and so are fetishes, gods, values, works of art, polit-ical arenas, landscapes and nations.

At first glance though, the notion of constructiondoes not seem very compelling, since it suffers fromone of modernism’s major faults: it is usually associ-ated with social construction and with the vocabu-lary of criticism. When we say that nature is“constructed,” that God must be “produced,” thatthe person must be “fabricated,” it is immediatelyassumed we are attacking, undermining, criticizingtheir supposed solidity. “So,” one could object,outraged, “neither nature, nor the divinities, norpersons ‘really’ exist; they are ‘pure’ fabrications,

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to declare that the other party is simply irrationaland should be disciplined. If a solution is to befound, it is there, among them, with them here andnow and nowhere else. Whereas rationalists wouldnot know how to assemble peace talks, as they willnot give seats to those they call “archaic” and “irra-tional,” diplomats might know how to organize aparley among declared enemies who, in the sense ofCarl Schmitt, may become allies after the peacenegotiations have ended. The great quality of diplo-mats is that they don’t know for sure what are theexact and final goals—not only of their adversariesbut also of their own people. It is the only leewaythey possess, the tiny margin of the negotiationsplayed out in closed rooms. The parties to theconflicts may, after all, be willing to alter slightlywhat they were fighting for. If you oppose rationalistmodernizers to archaic and backward opponents,there is no war, to be sure, but there is no possiblepeace either. Negotiation cannot even start. Reasonrecognizes no enemy. But the outcome might beentirely different if you pit proponents of differentcommon worlds one against the other. Because thendiplomats could begin to realize that there aredifferent ways to achieve the goals of the parties atwar, including their own. Nothing proves in advancethat modernizers might not be willing to modify theways to achieve their cherished goals if they wereshown that the cult of nature makes it impossible toreach them.

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This is where the mourning should take place, letravail du deuil, because this result leaves Westernerswithout what they believed was their highest virtue.They must face their loss—the loss of the possibilityof reaching assent by an appeal to external nature.Exactly the opposite is the case: by definition, anagreement about nature cannot be reached, becausethe notion of “nature” itself has been made, as wehave seen, to prevent a progressive agreement aboutthe slow composition of the common world. Withnature, unity is always the one thing that is nolonger at stake, which does not need to be negoti-ated. Once nature enters the debate, others haveonly subjective and biased representations of it. Ifthey persist in clinging to those representations,they are simply irrational. On the other hand, ifgods, persons, objects and worlds are taken to be“constructed” entities, that is, entities that could fail(and the notion of construction implies nothingelse), then here is perhaps a means of opening thepeace talks again by rephrasing the war aims of allparties. Such is the event no one could foresee, themajor transformation that has been going on for thelast decades and that the label postmodernismcovers so badly: contrary to modernists’ beliefs up tonow, nature cannot be generalized, while construc-tivism, in contrast, may be shared by all—at least itis worth a new diplomatic attempt. You cannotdream any longer of the modern definition of natureextending to the whole planet, but you might be

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‘simple’ social constructions? How could we not losein those new parleys if we were presenting only tothe others our constructivist profile?” And yet, wemight suggest that the former modernists are theonly ones to make this opposition: for the others(the former “others”), construction rhymes withproduction, authentication and qualification. Moreexactly, it is the very notion of jus naturalism thatforces the opposition with “artificial,” “human,”“subjective,” “fabricated.” After all, even the veryword “fact” designates what is fabricated and what isreal and beyond fabrication after the fabrication hastaken place. Constructivism, if we understand it inthis new (very old) positive sense, would have noopposite.

While the concept of nature implies antonyms, forinstance culture, the notion of construction couldserve as a lingua franca for beginning to understandeach other. From both sides of the table (if indeed itis a table) one would then hear: “At least we can besure of one thing: that your gods as much as ours,your worlds as much as ours, your sciences as muchas ours, your selves as much as ours, are constructed.”The relevant question for the diplomats would nolonger be, “Is it or isn’t it constructed?” but rather:“How do you manufacture them?” And, above all,“How do you verify that they are well constructed?”Here is where negotiations could begin: with thequestion of the right ways to build.

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introduced by the one nature-many cultures divide.Likewise, diplomacy cannot begin until we suspendour assumptions about what does or does not countas difference. There are more ways than one todiffer—and thus more than one way to agree—inthe end.

In this respect, the former modernists are perhapsbetter off than they believe, and will be able tosupply more answers to questions relating to propermethods of construction than they thought, in thedays when they paraded about, dressed up as a civi-lizing people. But to do that they have to sort outtheir heritage: they should be proud of its universal-istic goals, but not of its of its first “naturalist”attempts to realize them. Let us try to bring themback to the negotiating table, but this time let themapproach politely, showing the others theirconstructivist face instead of their naturalizing gaze.Rather than take the defining elements of themodernist constitution off the table (Science,Nature, God, the Individual, Economics andPolitics) as points beyond any discussion or conces-sion, what if they accepted these as matters to beresolved in a negotiation involving all the parties tothe composition of the common world?

Take the example of research. It is one thing topresent oneself to the world under the cover ofuniversal Science, and quite another to present

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able to go a long way towards the goal of unity byconfronting good and bad constructions of worlds.

It is at this turning point in the negotiations that theformer modernists could appeal to their ownresources, forgotten or hidden by modernism and itspretensions. The modernists felt, by definition,uncomfortable in the borrowed garb of moderniza-tion. For indeed, if modernization cannot give anaccount of others, since it forces them into a far tooexaggerated otherness, how could it give an accountof Westerners? The Whites have never beenmodern, either. If it is unfair to portray the peopleswho were civilized as irrational or as archaicsurvivors on their way towards a single world, it iseven more unfair to describe the civilizing peoplesas rational and modern. This would be a form ofinverted exoticism. “Modernism” or“Occidentalism” in this context may be understoodin the sense of “Orientalism”: it is equivalent toseeing the Europeans or the Americans with theperspective—all tropical palms, secluded harems andpainted savages—that they themselves adopt towardsother cultures. In other words, as long as themodernists are taken to be what they say they are,one treats them with the same cheap exoticism onefinds disgusting in the tourist brochures whenapplied to other peoples. Peace negotiations are notpossible unless both sides give up exoticism and itsperverse complacency with the false difference

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Jerusalem, the thrice-holy city? Can the diplomats,without being seen as traitors, offer to retain thepower of the sciences and to let Science go so thatuniversality could eventually be better composed?

Take the case of religion, which, even more thanScience, has to do with earlier, premature modernistprojects to unify the planet. Can a positive construc-tivism be applied in this instance? Might not thenearly fanatic attachment to the non-constructedcharacter of the unity of God be largely a responseto the unifying role of nature, which the negotia-tions have agreed to limit? If the latter becomesnegotiable, why not the former too? Do we mandatethe diplomats to dare to say, during the peace nego-tiations, for instance, of the God of Abraham, Isaacand Jacob, that he is well or badly constructed? Dowe allow them to point to the objects, the rituals,prayers and the manufacturing kits that would allowit to be compared with the ways of producing otherkinds of divinities? How could such an offer not berevolting, scandalous, blasphemous? Would it notamount to a reversion to the horrible archaismagainst which the great religions of the Book tooktheir stand? And yet, the comparison with nature isenlightening. If “nature” was a political concept thattried to unify too quickly and without piece-by-piece composition of the common world, could notthe same be said of the unity of God? Just assciences differ profoundly from Science, might not

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oneself as producer and manufacturer of local andrisk-laden sciences—with a small “s.” In the firstcase, the recipients of such an offer only have theoption of withdrawing into the irrational, or ofhumbly changing sides and submitting to themodernists’ pedagogy. The second case is muchmore uncertain: the sciences make suggestions or“propositions” that lengthen the list of beings withwhich the common world must be pieced together,but still more propositions may be made by others,making this list even longer and complicating yetfurther the learned confusion. A universal Sciencecannot be negotiated and thus it cannot be univer-salized for good, but sciences that aspire to incre-mental or emergent universalization can.

Independent, asocial matters of fact cannot bringabout agreement, but hairy, entangled states ofaffairs may, in the end. And the modernists alreadyproduce both at the same time: they have put forthan image of Science as a political project of unifica-tion without negotiation; but, meanwhile, they alsoproduce multiple, attractive and complex scienceswhich may participate in multiple projects of unifi-cation or localization, depending on the outcome ofthe conflicts. The diplomatic issue has shifted: canthe modernists be saved from themselves, so thatthey may share the sciences with others and leaveScience aside—this Science that they believed up tonow to be non-negotiable, like the status of

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ations: rather, it is another kind of visage to add tothe series—and the least one can say in its favor isthat this figure does not stand out as particularlyunusual in the great procession of the masksproposed by the “others.” If in the first case, modernpsychology constitutes the indisputable base of allhumanity, in the other the components of theWestern psyche appear so local, so provincial, socostly and elaborate that they surely cannot begeneralized instantly, at a single stroke. Here again,nothing can speed up the negotiation: most otherparties to the conflict do not recognize that there arehumans, subjects, individuals or rights-bearers;instead of exploring the free-floating individual theyhave multiplied the attachments—gods, fetisheslineages, ancestors—that produce possible subjectivi-ties; for them the Western individual is a monsterthat should be fiercely resisted. But again, if weauthorize our diplomats to present our types ofsubjectivities and all of the complex institutions andbelonging that make it seem free-floating, then thenegotiations might resume in earnest. After all,modernist subjects too are possessed by what TobieNathan calls their “owners,” their “proprietors,” thedivinities that make them hold together and that donot reside in the inner sanctum of private subjec-tivity. Once this price has been paid, is it notpossible to think that the rights-bearing human, thefree individual might win in the end—but this timefor good?

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the diplomat discover in religious practices the telltale signs of constructivism? What do we knowabout the religions of the former modernists? Thediscourse of fabrication, invention and deceptionhas, until now, mostly been used for critical denun-ciation. Why not use it positively, and re-formulate,in the company of the others, the question of theright ways of constructing good divinities? Wouldwe not have here, instead of a hypothetical “inter-religious dialogue,” a more fruitful and even tech-nical exchange of procedures? The all powerfulalready existing absolute God sends his devout toholy war, but what about the relative God whichmight be unified in the slowly constructed future?

Take the case of the manufacture of persons. It isone thing to claim to have discovered the free andrights-bearing individual by asserting that it must begeneralized to the whole world; it is quite another toadd to the astounding history of the elaboration ofhuman masks, the “personae,” the strange composi-tion of the modern self. In the first case the startingpoint is the indisputable fact that there are individ-uals and that they are all free and human; in thesecond case, we bring to the negotiating table acharacter that is particularly bound, charged up,weighted down by this peculiar history: the WesternIndividual. The modernist subject does not enter thediscussion to put things in order, nor does it offerthe one and only face concealed beneath all the vari-

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Finally, take the example of politics. Here again, asalways, the former modernists issued two contradic-tory messages, the first one a war cry (all the whiledenying that war was taking place): humanity will bedemocratic or it will not be rightfully constituted.The second message indicates a profound uncer-tainty about the nature of politics: is it a question ofrepresentation, cohesion, solidarity, a commonworld, liberties, tradition, obedience, rule of law orcivility? In the first case, the rest of humanity has noother choice than to prove that it can also be arepresentative democracy—even if imitation oftenresults in caricature. In the second case, the ques-tion of how to define “politics” is re-opened; andthe outcome here, as always, is once again uncer-tain.

Those who want to extend the rule of law anddemocratic debates to the whole earth should knowthe price they are asking others to pay in terms ofinstitutions, forms of life, habits, media, courts,values, feelings. If there is one institution that has tobe carefully constructed, one which is even morefragile than the ecosystems of a coral reef, it is thepractice of democracy. It is one thing to request thateverywhere citizens should assemble in democraticagoras; it is another to recognize that for the largestpart of humanity and the longest part of history,other types of assemblages have been sought,arrangements in which humans were only tiny

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Economics too has naturalistic and constructivistfaces. It is one thing to present the market forces asthe natural bedrock of all humanity since the begin-ning of time, as the fundamental logic to whicheveryone should submit without discussion in orderto enjoy the benefits of wealth and freedom; it isquite another to present market organizations as arare, local, fragile set of mechanisms to explore themany attachments of people and goods and to calcu-late, through risky and disputable accounts, what theyare worth and how they should be distributed. Thefirst presentation is not negotiable and to oppose it istantamount to archaism, backwardness, localism andirrationality. The second deploys a rather large arenafor legitimate dissent about how to calculate, what totake into account, how to modify market organiza-tion. Is it really rational to believe in the inevitableextension of Homo economicus to the whole planet?Strangely enough, this most obviously contingentWestern elaboration is also the one that Westernershave tried to naturalize most! Is it really asking toomuch of our diplomats that they recognize the legiti-macy of dissent in matters of economics? The ques-tion is not simply to add some human values to theharsh reality of the “dismal science,” but to see howcomplex is the entanglement we call a “market,”something which is so obviously constructed, soclearly local that it cannot be spread without furtherado. What will we really lose in acknowledging theessential negotiability of market organizations?

And, of course, their offer of mediation, like mine,may fail. �

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participants. Here again should we mandate ourdiplomats to teach everyone how to behave like acitizen or should we also encourage them to learn,along with their opponents, how to practice themuch more difficult but much longer-lasting task ofcosmopolitics—meaning, in the terms of IsabelleStengers, the politics of the cosmos?

Whether in matters of science, religion, psychology,economics or politics, the former modernists clearlyhave more than one trick up their sleeve. Thereason they have appeared so clumsy up to now inmaking offers of peace is because they did not thinkthere was any war, and then, modernization seemedto them so obvious that it was not open to anycompromise. Further, when they started havingdoubts about modernization and they became post-modern, they became even more clumsy becausethey replaced arrogance with guilt, but withoutentering into more negotiations than they hadbefore. It is now time to help them, to bring themtactfully to the negotiating table, making sure theyrecognize that there is indeed a war of the worlds,and helping them carefully distinguish betweenwhat they thought was worth dying for—univer-sality—from what they really care about—theconstruction of universality. As always, the parties inthe conflict do not know exactly what they arefighting for. The task of the diplomats is to helpthem find out.

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Further Readings

Callon, M., ed. 1998. The Laws of the Market. Oxford:Blackwell.

Christin, O. 1997. La paix de religion. L'autonomisation dela raison politique au 16° siècle. Paris: Le Seuil.

Descola, P. and G. Palsson, eds. 1996. Nature and Society.Anthropological Perspectives. London: Routledge.

Jurdant, B., ed. 1998. Impostures intellectuelles. Les malen-tendus de l'affaire Sokal. Paris: La Découverte.

Latour, B. 1999. Politiques de la nature. Comment faireentrer les sciences en démocratie. Paris: La Découverte.

Lévi-Strauss, C. [1952]1987. Race et histoire. Paris:Denoël.

Nathan, T. 1994. L'influence qui guérit. Paris: EditionsOdile Jacob.

Sahlins, M. 1995. How "Natives" Think: About CaptainCook, for Example. Chicago: University of ChicagoPress.

Stengers, I. 1997. Cosmopolitiques - Tome 7: ‘pour en finiravec la tolérance’. Paris: La Découverte & LesEmpêcheurs de penser en rond.

_____. 1996. Cosmopolitiques - Tome 1: la guerre des sciences.Paris: La Découverte & Les Empêcheurs de penser enrond.

Viveiros de Castro, E. 1998. “Les pronoms cosmologiques et leperspectivisme amérindien” in E. Alliez (ed.), GilleDeleuze. Une vie philosophique. Paris: Les Empêcheursde penser en rond, pp. 429-462.

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Acknowledgments

Translated from the French by Charlotte Bigg. The occa-sion to write this piece was provided in August 2000 bythe meeting “Guerre et paix des cultures” organized byTobbie Nathan and Isabelle Stengers at Cerisy La Salle. Ithank the participants for many helpful comments. It hasbeen revised in December 2001 and again in April 2002thanks to John Tresch’s careful reading. I have also greatlybenefited from remarks by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,Sophie Houdard and Masato Fukushima.

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