Although Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Ranciere differ in their stance on what the conditions of the political are (for Mouffe, this is an internal reorganization of existing social arrangements in what are called 'articulations), for Ranciere, it is the incursion of an externality which had not yet been accounted for. In the 'arithmatic/geometric' distinctions of politics, there is a(n) (near) explicit appeal to the mechanical or mathematical: the political sustains itself by perpetuating a dialectic between homeostasis and reconfiguration (what N. Katherine Hayles might call 'pattern' and 'randomness') through a 'count' of what is internal to the police order. The mechanism of politics makes it possible for future reconfigurations only by making new inclusions, thereby rearranging the social, returning to homeostasis, and perpetuating the impossibility of a complete 'whole'. It is again a kind of rhetorical paradox which is the motor of politics: a foundational arbitrariness in who is or who is not permitted to speak.