Visualisation and Cognition — Drawing Things Together (Bruno Latour)
| Author | Bruno Latour |
|---|---|
| Format | Research paper |
| Original | Read the original |
TL;DR — Bruno Latour’s essay arguing that science’s power comes from inscriptions (maps, diagrams, tables) that can travel unchanged and be combined.
Latour sets aside explanations of the scientific revolution that rely on a changed mind, method or society, and asks a narrower question: what can scientists and engineers do with paper that others cannot? His opening example is the explorer La Pérouse, who has islanders draw a map of their island in the sand and takes it away in a notebook. The islanders know the place better. What La Pérouse has is a drawing that can be carried back to Europe and combined with other drawings.
From this he develops the idea of “immutable mobiles”: inscriptions that can move without changing and can be presented, read and combined. He draws on William Ivins on linear perspective and Elizabeth Eisenstein on the printing press, then on laboratory studies, to argue that the advantage of inscriptions is rhetorical. A scientist who doubts a claim is answered with figures, plates and tables laid out on the desk.
A central section lists what this “paperwork” makes possible: inscriptions are mobile, kept immutable, flat, rescalable, cheap to reproduce, recombinable, and can be superimposed. The last part extends the argument to engineering drawing, bureaucratic files, accounting and money, and proposes “centers of calculation” (places where inscriptions from many sources are gathered and worked on) as a better unit of analysis than merchants, princes or scientists considered separately.
What it is: a 33-page essay by one of the best-known sociologists of science. It is an argument and a way of seeing, built on examples and secondary literature, not an empirical study. The text cites its first publication in Knowledge and Society vol. 6 (JAI Press, pp. 1–40), but its bibliography includes works from as late as 1993, so this is a revised version of the essay.
Where this came from
- Saved in a Roam daily note, April 2020
- Published by the author on bruno-latour.fr
33 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.