I think the answer to this serious political and analytical question lies in two related turns: 1) unblinding ourselves from the sun-worshiping stories about the history of science and technology as paradigms of rationalism; and 2) refiguring the actors in the construction of the ethno-specific categories of nature and culture. The actors are not all "us." If the world exists for us as "nature," this designates a kind of relationship, an achievement among many actors, not all of them human, not all of them organic, not all of them technological.10 In its scientific embodiments as well as in other forms, nature is made, but not entirely by humans; it is a co-construction among humans and non-humans. This is a very different vision from the postmodernist observation that all the world is denatured and reproduced in images or replicated in copies. That specific kind of violent and reductive artifactualism, in the form of a hyper-productionism actually practiced widely throughout the planet, becomes contestable in theory and other kinds of praxis, without recourse to a resurgent transcendental naturalism. Hyper-pro­ ductionism refuses the witty agency of all the actors but One; that is a dangerous strategy—for everybody. But transcendental naturalism also refuses a world full of ca­ cophonous agencies and settles for a mirror image sameness that only pretends to dif­ ference. The commonplace nature I seek, a public culture, has many houses with many inhabitants which/who can refigure the earth. Perhaps those other actors/actants, the ones who are not human, are our topick gods, organic and inorganic.11


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