« Visualisation and Cognition:
Drawing Things Together »
Bruno Latour
in H. Kuklick (editor) Knowledge and Society
Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and
Present, Jai Press vol. 6, pp. 1-40
I. Thinking with eyes and hands
It would be nice to be able to define what is specific to our modem scientific culture.
It would be still nicer to find the most economical explanation (which might not be the
most economic one) of its origins and special characteristics. To arrive at a parsimonious
explanation it is best not to appeal to universal traits of nature. Hypotheses about
changes in the mind or human consciousness, in the structure of the brain, in social
relations, in “mentalités”, or in the economic infrastructure which are posited to explain
the emergence of science or its present achievements are simply too grandiose, not to say
hagiographic in most cases and plainly racist in more than a few others. Occam’s razor
should cut these explanations short. No “new man” suddenly emerged sometime in the
sixteenth century, and there are no mutants with larger brains working inside
modern!laboratories who can think differently from the rest of us. The idea that a
more!rational mind or a more constraining scientific method emerged from darkness!and
chaos is too complicated a hypothesis.
21- Visualization and Cognition 2
It seems to me that the first step towards a convincing explanation is to adopt! this a
priori position. It clears the field of study of any single distinction between! prescientific
and scientific cultures, minds, methods or societies. As Jack Goody !points out, the
“grand dichotomy” with its self-righteous certainty should be !replaced by many uncertain
and unexpected divides (Goody, 1977). This negative first move frees us from positive
answers that strain credulity1. All such! dichotomous distinctions can be convincing only
as long as they are enforced by !a strong asymmetrical bias that treats the two sides of the
divide or border very! differently. As soon as this prejudice loses hold, cognitive abilities
jump in all! directions: sorcerers become Popperian falsificationists ; scientists become
naive! believers ; engineers become standard “bricoleurs” ; as to the tinkerers, they may
!seem quite rational (Knorr, 1981 ; Augé, 1975). These quick reversals prove that !the
divide between prescientific and scientific culture is merely a border —like! that between
Tijuana and San Diego. It is enforced arbitrarily by police and !bureaucrats, but it does
not represent any natural boundary. Useful for teaching, !polemics, commencement
addresses, these “great divides” do not provide any!explanation, but on the contrary are
the things to be explained (Latour, 1983).
There are, however, good reasons why these dichotomies, though constantly!
disproved, are tenaciously maintained, or why the gap between the two terms, !instead of
narrowing, may even widen. The relativistic position reached by !taking the first step I
propose, and giving up grand dichotomies, looks ludicrous !because of the enormous
consequences of science. One cannot equate the “intellectual” described by Goody
(1977, chap. 2) and Galileo in his study ; the folk !knowledge of medicinal herbs and the
National Institute of Health ; the careful !procedure of corpse interrogation in Ivory
Coast and the careful planning of! DNA probes in a Californian laboratory ; the story
telling of origin myths somewhere in the South African bush and the Big Bang theory ;
the hesitant calculations of a four-year-old in Piaget’s laboratory and the calculation of a
winner o f!the Field Medal ; the abacus and the new super-computer Cray II. The
differences !in the effects of science and technology are so enormous that it seems absurd
not! to look for enormous causes. Thus, even if scholars are dissatisfied with these
!extravagant causes, even if they admit they are arbitrarily defined, falsified by !daily
experience and often contradictory, they prefer to maintain them in order to! avoid the
absurd consequences of relativism. Particle physics must be radically !different in some
way from folk botany ; we do not know how, but as a stop-gap! solution the idea of
rationality is better than nothing (Hollis and Lukes, 1982).
We have to steer a course that can lead us out of a simple relativism and, by !positing
a few, simple, empirically verifiable causes, can account for the enormous differences in
effects that everyone knows are real. We need to keep the !scale of the effects but seek
more mundane explanations than that of a great! divide in human consciousness.
1 For instance, Levi-Strauss’ divide between bricoleur and engineer or between hot and cold societies
(1962) ; or Garfinkel’s distinctions between everyday and scientific modes of thought (1967) ; or
Bachelard’s many “coupures épistémologiques” that divide science from common sense, from intuition or
from its own past (1934, 1967) ; or even Horton’s careful distinction between monster acceptance and
monster avoidance (1977) or primary theories and secondary theories ( 1982).
21- Visualization and Cognition 3
But here we run into another preliminary problem. How mundane is mundane ?!
When people back away from mental causes, it usually means they find their!delight in
material ones. Gigantic changes in the capitalist mode of production, !by means of many
“reflections”, “distortions”, and “mediations”, influence! the ways of proving, arguing
and believing. “Materialist” explanations often! refer to deeply entrenched phenomena,
of which science is a superstructure !(Sohn-Rethel, 1978). The net result of this strategy is
that nothing is empirically !verifiable since there is a yawning gap between general
economic trends and the !fine details of cognitive innovations. Worst of all, in order to
explain science we !have to kneel before one specific science, that of economics. So,
ironically, !many “materialist” accounts of the emergence of science are in no way
material !since they ignore the precise practice and craftmanship of knowing and hide
from !scrutiny the omniscient economic historian.
It seems to me that the only way to escape the simplistic relativist position is to! avoid
both “materialist” and “mentalist” explanations at all costs and to look! instead for more
parsimonious accounts, which are empirical through and! through, and yet able to
explain the vast effects of science and technology.
It seems to me that the most powerful explanations, that is those that generate! the
most out of the least, are the ones that take writing and imaging craftmanship !into
account. They are both material and mundane, since they are so practical, so !modest, so
pervasive, so close to the hands and the eyes that they escape !attention. Each of them
deflates grandiose schemes and conceptual dichotomies! and replaces them by simple
modifications in the way in which groups of people! argue with one another using paper,
signs, prints and diagrams. Despite their! different methods, fields and goals, this strategy
of deflation links a range of very! different studies and endows them with a style which is
both ironic and! refreshing2.
Like these scholars, I was struck, in a study of a biology laboratory, by the !way in
which many aspects of laboratory practice could be ordered by looking !not at the
scientists’ brains (I was forbidden access!), at the cognitive structures !(nothing special),
nor at the paradigms (the same for thirty years), but at the !transformation of rats and
2 Goody (1977) points to the importance of practical tasks in handling graphics (lists, dictionaries.
inventories), and concludes his fascinating book by saying that “if we wish to speak of a ‘savage mind’
these are some of the instruments of its domestication” (p. 182). Cole and Scribner (1974) shift the focus
from intellectual tasks to schooling practice ; the ability to draw syllogisms is taken out of the mind and
put into the manipulation of diagrams on papers. Hutchins (1980) does the opposite in transforming the
“illogical” reasoning of the Trobriand islanders into a quite straightforward logic simply by adding to it
the land use systems that give meaning to hitherto abrupt shifts in continuity. Eisenstein switches the
enquiry from mental states and the philosophical tradition to the power of print (1979). Perret-Clermont
(1979), at first one of Piaget’s students, focuses her attention on the social context of the many test
situations. She shows how “non-conserving” kids become conserving in a matter of minutes simply
because other variables (social or pictoral) are taken into account. Lave has explored in pioneering studies
how mathematical skills may be totally modified depending on whether or not you let people use paper
and pencil (Lave, 1985, 1986 ; Lave, Murtaugh and De La Rocha, 1983). Ferguson has tried to relate
engineering imagination to the abilities to draw pictures according to perspective rules and codes of
shades and colors (1977): “It has been non-verbal thinking by and large that has fixed the outlines and
filled in the details of our material surroundings... Pyramids, cathedrals, and rockets exist not because of
geometry, theory of structures or thermodynamics, but because they were first a picture —literally a
vision— in the minds of those who built them” (p.835) (See also Ferguson, 1985). These are some of the
studies that put the deflating strategy I try to review here into practice.
21- Visualization and Cognition 4
chemicals into paper (Latour and Woolgar, 1979).! Focusing on the literature, and the
way in which anything and everything was! transformed into inscriptions was not my
bias, as I first thought, but was what! the laboratory was made for. Instruments, for
instance, were of various types, ages,! and degrees of sophistication. Some were pieces of
furniture, others filled large!rooms, employed many technicians and took many weeks to
run. But their end! result, no matter the field, was always a small window through which
one could! read a very few signs from a rather poor repertoire (diagrams, blots, bands,
!columns). All these inscriptions, as I called them, were combinable, superimposable and
could, with only a minimum of cleaning up, be integrated as figures!in the text of the
articles people were writing. Many of the intellectual feats I was!asked to admire could be
rephrased as soon as this activity of paper writing and! inscription became the focus for
analysis. Instead of jumping to explanations !involving high theories or differences in
logic, I could cling to the level of simple! craftsmanship as firmly as Goody. The
domestication or disciplining of the mind! was still going on with instruments similar to
those to which Goody refers. When !these resources were lacking, the self same scientists
stuttered, hesitated, and! talked nonsense, and displayed every kind of political or cultural
bias. Although !their minds, their scientific methods, their paradigms, their world-views
and !their cultures were still present, their conversation could not keep them in their!
proper place. However, inscriptions or the practice of inscribing could.
The Great Divide can be broken down into many small, unexpected and! practical
sets of skills to produce images, and to read and write about them. But! there is a major
drawback with this strategy of deflation. Its results seem both! obvious —close to being a
cliché— and too weak to account for the vast consequences of science and technology
that cannot, we agreed above, be denied. Of !course, everyone might happily agree that
writing, printing and visualizing are !important asides of the scientific revolution or of the
psychogenesis of scientific !thought. They might be necessary but they certainly cannot
be sufficient causes.! Certainly not. The deflating strategy may rid us of one mystical
Great Divide, !but it will, it seems, lead us into a worse kind of mysticism if the researcher
who !deals with prints and images has to believe in the power of signs and symbols!
isolated from anything else.
This is a strong objection. We must admit that when talking of images and! print it is
easy to shift from the most powerful explanation to one that is trivial! and reveals only
marginal aspects of the phenomena for which we want to! account. Diagrams, lists,
formulae, archives, engineering drawings, files, equations, dictionaries, collections and so
on, depending on the way they are put into !focus, may explain almost everything or
almost nothing. It is all too easy to !throw a set of clichés together extending Havelock’s
argument about the Greek! alphabet (1980), or Walter Ong’s rendering of the Ramist
method (1971), all the !way to computer culture, passing through the Chinese obsession
with ideograms,! double-entry book keeping, and without forgetting the Bible. Everyone
agrees !that print, images, and writing are everywhere present, but how much
explanatory burden can they carry ? How many cognitive abilities may be, not only
facilitated, but thoroughly explained by them ? When wading through this literature, I
!have a sinking feeling that we are alternately on firm new ground and bogged !down in
an old marsh. I want to find a way to hold the focus firmly so that we !know what to
expect from our deflating strategy.
21- Visualization and Cognition 5
To get this focus, first we must consider in which situations we might expect! changes
in the writing and imaging procedures to make any difference at all in !the way we argue,
prove and believe. Without this preliminary step, inscriptions! will, depending on the
context, be granted either too much or too little weight.
Unlike Leroi-Gourhan (1964) we do not wish to consider all the history on !writing
and visual aids starting with primitive man and ending up with modem! computers. From
now on, we will be interested only in a few specific inventions !in writing and imaging. To
define this specificity we have to look more closely at !the construction of harder facts3
Who will win in an agonistic encounter between two authors, and between them and
all the others they need to build up a statement ? Answer: the one able!to muster on the spot the
largest number of well aligned and faithful allies. This! definition of victory is common to war,
politics, law, and, I shall now show, to !science and technology. My contention is that
writing and imaging cannot by! themselves explain the changes in our scientific societies,
except in sofar as the y!help to make this agonistic situation more favorable. Thus it is not all the
!anthropology of writing, nor all the history of visualization that interests us in !this
context. Rather, we should concentrate on those aspects that help in the !mustering, the
presentation, the increase, the effective alignment or ensuring the !fidelity of new allies.
We need, in other words, to look at the way in which! someone convinces someone else
to take up a statement, to pass it along, to make !it more of a fact, and to recognize the
first author’s ownership and originality.! This is what I call “holding the focus steady” on
visualization and cognition. If! we remain at the level of the visual aspects only, we fall
back into a series of! weak clichés or are led into all sorts of fascinating problems of
scholarship far !away from our problem ; but, on the other hand, if we concentrate on the
agonistic situation alone, the principle of any victory, any solidity in science and!
technology escapes us forever. We have to hold the two eye pieces together so !that we
turn it into a real binocular ; it takes time to focus, but the spectacle, I !hope, is worth the
waiting.
One example will illustrate what I mean. La Pérouse travels through the Pacific for
Louis XVI with the explicit mission of bringing back a better map. !One day, landing on
what he calls Sakhalin he meets with Chinese and tries to !learn from them whether
Sakhalin is an island or a peninsula. To his great !surprise the Chinese understand
geography quite well. An older man stands up! and draws a map of his island on the sand
with the scale and the details needed by !La Pérouse. Another, who is younger, sees that
the rising tide will soon erase the !map and picks up one of La Pérouse’s notebooks to
draw the map again with a !pencil . . .
What are the differences between the savage geography and the civilized one ? There
is no need to bring a prescientific mind into the picture, nor any distinction !between the
close and open predicaments (Horton, 1977), nor primary and! secondary theories
(Horton, 1982), nor divisions between implicit and explicit,! or concrete and abstract
geography. The Chinese are quite able to think in terms! of a map but also to talk about
navigation on an equal footing with La Pérouse. !Strictly speaking, the ability to draw
3 A fact is harder or softer as a function of what happens to it in other hands later on. Each of us acts as a
multi-conductor for the many claims that we come across: we may be uninterested, or ignore them, or be
interested but modify them and turn them into something entirely different. Sometimes indeed we act as
conductor and pass the claim along without further modification. (For this, see Latour and Woolgar,
1979 ; Latour, 1984b.)
21- Visualization and Cognition 6
and to visualize does not really make a !difference either, since they all draw maps more
or less based on the same! principle of projection, first on sand, then on paper. So
perhaps there is no! difference after all and, geographies being equal, relativism is right ?
This, however, cannot be, because La Pérouse does something that is going to create an
!enormous difference between the Chinese and the European. What is, for the! former, a
drawing of no importance that the tide may erase, is for the latter the single object of his
mission. What should be brought into the picture is how the !picture is brought back.
The Chinese does not have to keep track, since he can !generate many maps at will,
being born on this island and fated to die on it. La! Pérouse is not going to stay for more
than a night ; he is not born here and will die! far away. What is he doing, then ? He is
passing through all these places, in order !to take something back to Versailles where
many people expect his map to!determine who was right and wrong about whether
Sakhalin was an island, who! will own this and that part of the world, and along which
routes the next ships! should sail. Without this peculiar trajectory, La Pérouse’s exclusive
interest in!traces and inscriptions will be impossible to understand —this is the first
aspect,! but without dozens of innovations in inscription, in projection, in writing,
archiving and computing, his displacement through the Pacific would be totally !wasted
—and this is the second aspect, as crucial as the first. We have to hold the !two together.
Commercial interests, capitalist spirit, imperialism, thirst for! knowledge, are empty terms
as long as one does not take into account Mercator’s !projection, marine clocks and their
markers, copper engraving of maps, rutters, !the keeping of “log books”, and the many
printed editions of Cook’s voyages! that La Pérouse carries with him. This is where the
deflating strategy I outlined !above is so powerful. But, on the other hand, no innovation
in the way longitude! and latitudes are calculated, clocks are built, log books are
compiled, copper!plates are printed, would make any difference whatsoever if they did
not help to !muster, align, and win over new and unexpected allies, far away, in
Versailles.!The practices I am interested in would be pointless if they did not bear on
certain! controversies and force dissenters into believing new facts and behaving in
new!ways. This is where an exclusive interest in visualization and writing falls short,!and
can even be counterproductive. To maintain only the second line of argument would
offer a mystical view of the powers provided by semiotic material —as did Derrida
(1967) ; to maintain only the first would be to offer an idealist! explanation (even if clad in
materialist clothes).
The aim of this paper is to pursue the two lines of argument at once. To say it !in yet
other words, we do not find all explanations in terms of inscription equally !convincing,
but only those that help us to understand how the mobilization and !mustering of new
resources is achieved. We do not find all explanations in terms !of social groups, interests
or economic trends, equally convincing but only those !that offer a specific mechanism to
sum up “groups”, “interests”, “money”!and “trends”: mechanisms which, we believe,
depend upon the manipulation of! paper, print, images and so on. La Pérouse shows us
the way since without new! types of inscriptions nothing usable would have come back to
Versailles from his !long, costly and fateful voyage ; but without this strange mission that
required! him to go away and to come back so that others in France might be convinced,
no !modification in inscription would have made a bit of difference. The essential
characteristics of inscriptions cannot be defined in terms of !visualization, print, and
writing. In other words, it is not perception which is at !stake in this problem of
21- Visualization and Cognition 7
visualization and cognition. New inscriptions, and new! ways of perceiving them, are the
results of something deeper. If you wish to go! out of your way and come back heavily
equipped so as to force others to go out of! their ways, the main problem to solve is that of
mobilization. You have to go and! to come back with the “things” if your moves are not to
be wasted. But the!“things” have to be able to withstand the return trip without withering
away. !Further requirements: the “things” you gathered and displaced have to be
presentable all at once to those you want to convince and who did not go there. In !sum,
you have to invent objects which have the properties of being mobile but !also immutable,
presentable, readable and combinable with one another.!
II. On Immutable Mobiles
It seems to me that most scholars who have worked on the relations between
!inscription procedures and cognition, have, in fact, in their various ways, been !writing
about the history of these immutable mobiles.!
A. Optical Consistency!
The first example I will review is one of the most striking since Ivins wrote !about it
years ago and saw it all in a few seminal pages. The rationalization that !took place
during the so-called “scientific revolution” is not of the mind, of the! eye, of philosophy,
but of the sight. Why is perspective such an important !invention ? “Because of its logical
recognition of internal invariances through all! the transformations produced by changes
in spatial location” (Ivins, 1973:9). In !a linear perspective, no matter from what distance
and angle an object is seen, it !is always possible to transfer it —to translate it— and to
obtain the same object at! a different size as seen from another position. In the course of
this translation, its !internal properties have not been modified. This immutability of the
displaced !figure allows Ivins to make a second crucial point: since the picture moves!
without distortion it is possible to establish, in the linear perspective framework,! what he
calls a “two way” relationship between object and figure. Ivins shows! us how perspective
allows movement through space with, so to speak, a return !ticket. You can see a church
in Rome, and carry it with you in London in such a!way as to reconstruct it in London,
or you can go back to Rome and amend the! picture. With perspective exactly as with La
Pérouse’s map —and for the same! reasons— a new set of movements are made possible:
you can go out of your way! and come back with all the places you passed ; these are all
written in the same !homogeneous language (longitude and latitude, geometry) that
allows you to! change scale, to make them presentable and to combine them at will4.
Perspective, for Ivins, is an essential determinant of science and technology! because it
creates “optical consistency”, or, in simpler terms, a regular avenue through space.
Without it “either the exterior relations of objects such as their !forms for visual
awareness, change with their shifts in locations, or else their! interior relations do”
(1973:9). The shift from the other senses to vision is a !consequence of the agonistic
4“Science and technology have advanced in more than direct ratio to the ability of men to contrive
methods by which the phenomena which otherwise could be known only through the senses of touch,
hearing, taste and smell, have been brought within the range of visual recognition and measurements and
then become subject to that logical symbolization without which rational thought and analysis are
impossible” (Ivins, 1973:13).
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situation. You present absent things. No one can! smell or hear or touch Sakhalin island,
but you can look at the map and determine! at which bearing you will see the land when
you send the next fleet. The speakers! are talking to one another, feeling, hearing and
touching each other, but they are !now talking with many absent things presented all at
once. This presence/absence !is possible through the two-way connection established by
these many contrivances —perspective, projection, map, log book, etc.— that allow
translation !without corruption.
There is another advantage of linear perspective to which he and Edgerton !attract
our attention (1976). This unexpected advantage is revealed as soon as religious or
mythological themes and utopias are drawn with the same perspective as that which is
used for rendering nature (Edgerton, 1980:189).!
In the West, even if the subject of the printed text were unscientific, the printed picture always presented a
rational image based on the universal laws of geometry. In this sense the Scientific Revolution probably
owes more to Albrecht Dürer than to Leonardo da Vinci. (p. 190)!
Fiction —even the wildest or the most sacred— and things of nature —even the
!lowliest— have a meeting ground, a common place, because they all benefit! from the same
“optical consistency”5. Not only can you displace cities, landscapes, or natives and go
back and forth to and from them along avenues through !space, but you can also reach
saints, gods, heavens, palaces, or dreams with the! same two-way avenues and look at
them through the same “windowpane” on !the same two-dimensional surface. The two
ways become a four-lane freeway!! Impossible palaces can be drawn realistically, but it is
also possible to draw! possible objects as if they were utopian ones. For instance, as
Edgerton shows, !when he comments on Agricola’s prints, real objects can be drawn in
separated !pieces, or in exploded views, or added to the same sheet of paper at different!
scales, angles and perspectives. It does not matter since the “optical consisten!cy” allows
all the pieces to mix with one another. As Ferguson says, the!“mind” has at last “an eye”:!
Oddly enough, linear perspective and chiaroscuro, which supply geometric stability to pictures, also allow
the viewer a momentary suspension of his dependence on the law of gravity.!With a little practice, the
viewer can imagine solid volumes floating freely in space as detached components of a device. (Edgerton,
1980:193)!
At this stage, on paper, hybrids can be created that mix drawings from many! sources.
Perspective is not interesting because it provides realistic pictures ; on !the other hand, it
is interesting because it creates complete hybrids : nature seen! as fiction, and fiction seen
as nature, with all the elements made so homogeneous !in space that it is now possible to
reshuffle them like a pack of cards. Commenting on the painting “St. Jérome in his
study”, Edgerton says :!
Antonello’s St. Jérome is the perfect paradigm of a new consciousness of the physical world! attained by
Western European intellectuals by the late fifteenth century. This consciousness s!was showed especially by
artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein and
more, all of whom… had even developed a sophisticated grammar and syntax for quantifying natural
5 “The most marked characteristics of European pictorial representation since the fourteenth century,
have been on the one hand its steadily increasing naturalism and on the other its purely schematic and
logical extension. It is submitted that both are due in largest part to the development and pervasion of
methods which have provided symbols, repeatable in invariant forms, for representation of visual
awareness and a grammar of perspective which made it possible to establish logical relations not only
within the system of symbols but between that system and the forms and locations of the objects that it
symbolizes” (Ivins, 1973 ;12).
21- Visualization and Cognition 9
phenomena in pictures. In their hands,!picture making was becoming a pictorial language that, with
practice, could communicat e!more information, more quickly and by (sic) a potentially wider audience
than any verbal! language in human history. (1980 :189)!
Perspective illustrates the double line of argument I presented in the previous section.
Innovations in graphism are crucial but only insofar as they allow new !two-way relations
to be established with objects (from nature or from fiction) and !only insofar as they allow
inscriptions either to become more mobile or to stay! immutable through all
theirdisplacements.!
B. Visual Culture!
Still more striking than the Italian perspective described by Ivins and Edgerton, is the
Dutch “distance point” method for drawing pictures, as it has been !beautifully explained
by Svetlana Alpers (1983). The Dutch, she tells us, do not! paint grandiose historical
scenes as observed by someone through a carefully !framed windowpane. They use the
very surface of their paintings (taken as the !equivalent of a retina) to let the world be
painted straight on it. When images are! captured in this way there is no privileged site
for the onlooker any more. The! tricks of the “camera obscura” transform large-scale
three-dimensional objects into a small two-dimensional surface around which the
onlooker may turn at will6.
The main interest of Alpers’ book for our purpose is the way she shows a “visual
culture” changing over time. She does not focus on the inscriptions or!the pictures but on
the simultaneous transformation of science, art, theory of! vision, organization of crafts
and economic powers. People often talk of “world!views” but this powerful expression is
taken metaphorically. Alpers provides !this old expression with its material meaning :
how a culture sees the world, and !makes it visible. A new visual culture redefines both
what it is to see, and what!there is to see. A citation of Comenius aptly summarizes a new
obsession for making new objects visible anew :!
We will now speak of the mode in which objects must be presented to the senses, if the! impression is to be
distinct. This can be readily understood if we consider the process of! actual vision. If the object is to be
clearly seen it is necessary : (1) that it be placed before the! eyes ; (2) not far off, but at a reasonable
distance ; (3) not on one side, but straight before th e!eyes ; and (4) so that the front of the objects be not
turned away from, but directed towards th e!observer ; (5) that the eyes first take in the object as a whole ;
(6) and then proceed to! distinguish the parts ; (7) inspecting these in order from the beginning to the end ;
(9) that !attention be paid to each and every part ; (9) until they are all grasped by means of their! essential
attributes. If these requisites be properly observed, vision takes place successfully ;! but if one be neglected its
success is only partial. (cited in Alpers, 1983 : 95)!
This new obsession for defining the act of seeing is to be found both in the! science of
the period and in modern laboratories. Comenius’ advice is similar to!both that of Boyle
when he disciplined the witnesses of his air-pump experiment! (Shapin, 1984) and that of
the neurologists studied by Lynch when they “disciplined” their brain cells (Lynch,
1985). People before science and outside laboratories certainly use their eyes, but not in
this way. They look at the spectacle of !the world, but not at this new type of image
designed to transport the objects of !the world, to accumulate them in Holland, to label
6 “Northem artists characteristically sought to represent by transforming the extent of vision onto their
small, flat working surface… It is the capacity of the picture surface to contain such a semblance of the
world —an aggregate of views— that characterizes many pictures in the North” (Alpers, 1983:51).
21- Visualization and Cognition 10
them with captions and legends, to combine them at will. Alpers makes understandable
what Foucault! (1966) only suggested : how the same eyes suddenly began to look at
“representations”. The “panopticon” she describes is a “fait social total” that redefines! all
aspects of the culture. More importantly, Alpers does not explain a new vision !by
bringing in “social interests” or the “economic infrastructure”. The new! precise
scenography that results in a world view defines at once what is science,! what is art and
what it is to have a world economy. To use my terms, a little! lowland country becomes
powerful by making a few crucial inventions which allow people to accelerate the
mobility and to enhance the immutability of! inscriptions : the world is thus gathered up
in this tiny country.
Alpers’ description of Dutch visual culture reaches the same result as Edgerton’s
study of technical drawings : a new meeting place is designed for fact and !fiction, words
and images. The map itself is such a result, but the more so when !it is used to inscribe
ethnographic inventories (end of her chapter IV) or captions! (chapter V), skylines of
cities and so on. The main quality of the new space is not! to be “objective” as a naïve
definition of realism often claims, but rather to have! optical consistency. This consistency
entails the “art of describing” everything! and the possibility of going from one type of visual
trace to another. Thus, we are! not surprised that letters, mirrors, lenses, painted words,
perspectives, inventories, illustrated child books, microscope and telescope come
together in this !visual culture. All innovations are selected “to secretly see and without
suspicion what is done far off in other places” (cited in Alpers, 1983 : 201 ).!
C. A New Way of Accumulating Time and Space!
Another example will demonstrate that inscriptions are not interesting per se !but only
because they increase either the mobility or the immutability of traces.!The invention of
print and its effects on science and technology is a cliché of historians. But no one has
renewed this Renaissance argument as completely as Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979). Why ?
Because she considers the printing press to be !a mobilization device, or, more exactly, a
device that makes both mobilization !and immutability possible at the same time.
Eisenstein does not look for one !cause of the scientific revolution, but for a secondary
cause that would put all the !efficient causes in relation with one another. The printing
press is obviously a !powerful cause of that sort. Immutability is ensured by the process of
printing !many identical copies ; mobility by the number of copies, the paper and the!
movable type. The links between different places in time and space are completely
modified by this fantastic acceleration of immutable mobiles which circulate everywhere
and in all directions in Europe. As Ivins has shown, perspective! plus the printing press
plus aqua forte is the really important combination since !books can now carry with them
the realistic images of what they talk about. For!the first time, a location can accumulate
other places far away in space and time,! and present them synoptically to the eye ; better
still, this synoptic presentation,! once reworked, amended or disrupted, can be spread
with no modification to! other places and made available at other times.
After discussing historians who propose many contradictory influences to !explain the
take-off of astronomy, Eisenstein writes :
Whether the sixteenth century astronomer confronted materials derived from the fourth century B.C. or
freshly composed in the fourteenth century A.D., or whether he was more! receptive to scholastic or
humanist currents of thoughts, seems of less significance in thi s!particular connection than the fact that all
21- Visualization and Cognition 11
manners of diverse materials were being seen in the!course of one life time by one pair of eyes. For
Copernicus as for Tycho, the result was! heightened awareness and dissatisfaction with discrepancies in the
inherent data. ( 1979 : 602)!
Constantly, the author shifts attention with devastating irony from the mind to! the
surface of the mobilized resources :!
‘To discover the truth of a proposition in Euclid’ wrote John Locke ‘there is little need or use! of
revelation, God having furnished us with a natural and surer means to arrive at knowledge !of them.’ In the
eleventh century, however, God had not furnished Western scholars with a natural and sure means of
grasping a Euclidean theorem. Instead the most learned men in! Christendom engaged in a fruitless search
to discover what Euclid meant when referring to! interior angles. (1979 : 649)!
For Eisenstein, every grand question about the Reformation, the Scientific!
Revolution, and the new Capitalist economy can be recast by looking at what the
!publisher and the printing press make possible. The reason why this old explanation
takes on new life in her treatment is that Eisenstein not only focuses on graphism, but
also on changes in the graphism that are linked to the mobilization process. For instance,
she explains (p.508 and seq. following Ivins, 1953) the puzzling phenomenon of a lag
time between the introduction of the printing press and the beginning of exact realistic
pictures. At first, the press is used simply to reproduce herbaries, anatomical plates,
maps, cosmologies which are centuries old and which will be deemed inaccurate much
later. If we were looking only at the semiotic level this phenomenon would seem
puzzling, but once we consider the deeper structure this is easily explained. The
displacement of many immutable mobiles comes first ; the old texts are spread
everywhere and can be gathered more cheaply in one place. But then the contradiction
between them at last becomes visible in the most literal sense. The many places where
these texts are synoptically assembled offer many counterexamples (different flowers,
different organs with different names, different shapes for the coastline, the various rates
of different currencies, different laws). These counterexamples can be added to the old
texts and, in turn, are spread without modification to all the other settings where this
process of comparison may be resumed. In other words, errors are accurately
reproduced and spread with no changes. But corrections are also reproduced fast,
cheaply and with no further changes. So, at the end, the accuracy shifts from the medium to
the message, from the printed book to the context with which it establishes a two-way
connection. A new interest in “Truth” does not come from a new vision, but from the
same old vision applying itself to new visible objects that mobilize space and time
differently7.
The effect of Eisenstein’s argument is to transform mentalist explanations into the
history of immutable mobiles. Again and again she shows that before the advent of print
every possible intellectual feat had been achieved —organized scepticism, scientific
method, refutation, data collection, theory making— everything had been tried, and in
all disciplines : geography, cosmology, medicine, dynamics, politics, economics and so
on. But each achievement stayed local and temporary just because there was no way to
7 The proof that the movement comes first, for Eisenstein, lies in the fact that it entails exactly the opposite
effects on the Scriptures. The accuracy of the medium reveals more and more inaccuracies in the
message, which is soon jeopardized. The beauty of Eisenstein’s construction resides in the way it obtains
two opposite consequences from the same cause : science and technology accelerates ; the Gospel
becomes doubtful (Latour, 1983).
21- Visualization and Cognition 12
move their results elsewhere and to bring in those of others without new corruptions or
errors being introduced. For instance, each carefully amended version of an old author
was, after a few copies, again adulterated. No irreversible gains could be made, and so
no large-scale long-term capitalization was possible. The printing press does not add
anything to the mind, to the scientific method, to the brain. It simply conserves and
spreads everything no matter how wrong, strange or wild. It makes everything mobile
but this mobility is not offset by adulteration. The new scientists, the new clerics, the new
merchants and the new princes, described by Eisenstein, are no different from the old
ones, but they now look at new material that keeps track of numerous places and times.
No matter how inaccurate these traces might be at first, they will all become accurate
just as a consequence of more mobilization and more immutability. A mechanism is
invented to irreversibly capture accuracy. Print plays the same role as Maxwell’s demon.
No new theory, world view, or spirit is necessary to explain capitalism, the reformation
and science : they are the result of a new step in the long history of immutable mobiles.
Taking up Ivins’ argument, both Mukerji (1983) and Eisenstein focus again on the
illustrated book. For these authors, MacLuhan’s revolution had already happened as soon
as images were printed. Engineering, botany, architecture, mathematics, none of these
sciences can describe what they talk about with texts alone ; they need to show the
things. But this showing, so essential to convince, was utterly impossible before the
invention of “graven images”. A text could be copied with only some adulteration, but
not so a diagram, an anatomical plate, or a map. The effect on the construction of facts
is sizeable if a writer is able to provide a reader with a text which presents a large
number of the things it is talking about in one place. If you suppose that all the readers,
and all the writers are doing the same, a new world will emerge from the old one without
any additional cause. Why ? Simply because the dissenter will have to do the same thing
as his opponent. In order to “doubt back”, so to speak, he will have to write another
book, have it printed, and mobilize with copper plates the counterexamples he wants to
oppose. The cost of disagreeing will increase8.
Positive feedback will get under way as soon as one is able to muster a large number
of mobile, readable, visible resources at one spot to support a point. After Tycho Brahe’s
achievement (Eisenstein, 1979) the dissenter either has to quit and accept what
cosmologists say as a hard fact, or to produce counterproofs by persuading his prince to
invest a comparable amount of money in observatories. In this, the “proof race” is
similar to the arms race because the feedback mechanism is the same. Once one
competitor starts building up harder facts, the others have to do the same or else submit.
This slight recasting of Eisenstein’s argument in terms of immutable mobiles may
allow us to overcome a difficulty in her argument. Although she stresses the importance
of publishers’ strategies, she does not account for the technical innovations themselves.
The printing press barges into her account like the exogeneous factors of many
historians when they talk about technical innovations. She puts the semiotic aspect of
print and the mobilization it allows into excellent focus, but the technical necessities for
8 For instance, Mukerji portrays a geographer who hates the new geography books but has to cry his hate
in print : “Ironically, Davis took his trip because he did not trust printed information to be as complete as
oral accounts of experiences ; but he decided to make the voyage after reading Dutch books on
geography and produced from his travel another geographical/navigational text” (Mukerji, 1983 : 114).
21- Visualization and Cognition 13
inventing the press are far from obvious. If we consider the agonistic situation I use as
reference point, the pressure that favors something like the printing press is clearer.
Anything that will accelerate the mobility of the traces that a location may obtain about
another place, or anything that will allow these traces to move without transformation
from one place to another, will be favored : geometry, projection, perspective,
bookkeeping, paper making, aqua forte, coinage, new ships (Law, 1984). The privilege of
the printing press comes from its ability to help many innovations to act at once, but it is
only one innovation among the many that help to answer this simplest of all questions :
how to dominate on a large scale ? This recasting is useful since it helps us to see that the
same mechanism, the effects of which are described by Eisenstein, is still at work today, on
an ever increasing scale at the frontiers of science and technology. A few days in a
laboratory reveal that the same trends that made the printing press so necessary, still act
to produce new data bases, new space telescopes, new chromatographies, new equations,
new scanners, new questionnaires, etc. The mind is still being domesticated.
III. On Inscriptions
What is so important in the images and in the inscriptions scientists and engineers are
busy obtaining, drawing, inspecting, calculating and discussing ? It is, first of all, the
unique advantage they give in the rhetorical or polemical situation. “You doubt of what
I say ? I’ll show you.” And, without moving more than a few inches, I unfold in front of
your eyes figures, diagrams, plates, texts, silhouettes, and then and there present things
that are far away and with which some sort of two-way connection has now been
established. I do not think the importance of this simple mechanism can be
overestimated. Eisenstein has shown it for the past of science, but ethnography of present
laboratories shows the same mechanism (Lynch, 1985a, 1985b ; Star, 1983 ; Law, 1985).
We are so used to this world of print and images, that we can hardly think of what it is to
know something without indexes, bibliographies, dictionaries, papers with references,
tables, columns, photographs, peaks, spots, bands9.
One simple way to make the importance of inscriptions clearer is to consider how
little we are able to convince when deprived of these graphisms through which mobility
and immutability are increased. As Dagognet has shown in two excellent books, no
scientific discipline exists without first inventing a visual and written language which
allows it to break with its confusing past (1969, 1973). The manipulation of substances in
gallipots and alambics becomes chemistry only when all the substances can be written in
a homogeneous language where everything is simultaneously presented to the eye. The
writing of words inside a classification are not enough. Chemistry becomes powerful only
when a visual vocabulary is invented that replaces the manipulations by calculation of
formulas. Chemical structure can be drawn, composed, broken apart on paper, like
music or arithmetic, all the way to Mendeleiev’s table : “for those who know to observe
and read the final periodic table, the properties of the element and that of their various
9 This is why I do not include in the discussion the large literature on the neurology of vision or the
psychology of perception (see for instance Block, 1981 ; de Mey, 1992). These disciplines, however
important, make so much use of the very process I wish to study that they are as blind as the others to an
ethnography of the crafts and tricks of the visualization.
21- Visualization and Cognition 14
combinations unfold completely and directly from their positions in the table” (1969 :
p.213). After having carefully analyzed the many innovations in chemical writing and
drawings, he adds this little sentence so close to Goody’s outlook :
It might seem that we consider trivial details —a slight modification in the plane used to write a
chlorine— but, paradoxically, these little details trigger the forces of the modem world. (1969 : p. 199)
Michel Foucault, in his well-known study of clinical medicine, has shown the same
transformation from small scale practice to a large scale manipulation of records (1963).
The same medical mind will generate totally different knowledge if applied to the bellies,
fevers, throats and skins of a few successive patients, or if applied to well-kept records of
hundreds of written bellies, fevers, throats and skins, all coded in the same way and all
synoptically present. Medicine does not become scientific in the mind, or in the eye of its
practitioners, but in the application of old eyes and old minds to new fact sheets inside
new institutions, the hospital. But it is in Discipline and Punish (1975) that Foucault’s
demonstration is closest to the study of inscriptions. The main purpose of the book is to
illustrate the shift from a power which is seen by invisible onlookers, to a new invisible
power that sees everything about everyone. The main advantage of Foucault’s analysis is
not to focus only on files, accounting books, time tables, and drill, but also on the sort of
institutions in which these inscriptions end up being so essential10. The main innovation
is that of a “panopticon” which allows penology, pedagogy, psychiatry and clinical
medicine to emerge as fullfledged sciences from their carefully kept files. The
“panopticon” is another way of obtaining the “optical consistency” necessary for power
on a large scale.
In a famous sentence, Kant asserts that “we shall be rendering a service to reason
should we succeed in discovering the path upon which it can securely travel.” The “sure
path of a science”, however, is, inevitably, in the construction of well-kept files in
institutions that want to mobilize a larger number of resources on a larger scale.
“Optical consistency” is obtained in geology, as Rudwick has shown (1976), by
inventing a new visual language. Without it, the layers of the earth stay hidden and no
matter how many travellers and diggers move around there is no way to sum up their
travels, visions, and claims. The Copernican revolution, dear to Kant’s heart, is an
idealist rendering of a very simple mechanism : if we cannot go to the earth, let the earth
come to us, or, more accurately, let us all go to many places on the earth, and come back
with the same, but different homogenous pictures, that can be gathered, compared,
superimposed and redrawn in a few places, together with the carefully labelled
specimens of rocks and fossils.
In a suggestive book, Fourquet (1980) has illustrated the same inscription gathering
for INSEE, the French institution that provides most economic statistics. It is of course
impossible to talk about the economy of a nation by looking at “it”. The “it” is plainly
invisible, as long as cohorts of enquirers and inspectors have not filled in long
questionnaires, as long as the answers have not been punched onto cards, treated by
computers, analyzed in this gigantic laboratory. Only at the end can the economy be
made visible inside piles of charts and lists. Even this is still too confusing, so that
10 “Un ‘pouvoir d’écriture’ se constitue comme une pièce essentielle dans les rouages de la discipline. Sur
bien des points, il se modèle sur les méthodes traditionnelles de la documentation administrative mais
avec des techniques particulières et des innovations importantes” (Foucault, 1975 :191).
21- Visualization and Cognition 15
redrawing and extracting is necessary to provide a few neat diagrams that show the
Gross National Product or the Balance of Payments. The panopticon thus achieved is
similar in structure to a gigantic scientific instrument transforming the invisible world of
exchanges into “the economy”. This is why, at the beginning, I rejected the materialist
explanation that uses “infrastructures” or “markets” or “consumer needs” to account for
science and technology. The visual construction of something like a “market” or an
“economy” is what begs explanation, and this end-product cannot be used to account
for science.
In another suggestive book Fabian tries to account for anthropology by looking at its
craftsmanship of visualization (1983). The main difference between us and the savages,
he argues, is not in the culture, in the mind, or in the brain, but in the way we visualize
them. An asymmetry is created because we create a space and a time in which we place
the other cultures, but they do not do the same. For instance, we map their land, but
they have no maps either of their land or of ours ; we list their past, but they do not ; we
build written calendars, but they do not. Fabian’s argument, related to Goody’s and also
to Bourdieu’s critique of ethnography (1972) is that once this first violence has been
committed, no matter what we do, we will not understand the savages any more. Fabian
however, sees this mobilization of all savages in a few lands through collection, mapping,
list making, archives, linguistics, etc. as something evil. With candor, he wishes to find
another way to “know” the savages. But “knowing” is not a disinterested cognitive
activity ; harder facts about the other cultures have been produced in our societies, in
exactly the same way as other facts about ballistics, taxonomy or surgery. One place
gathers in all the others and presents them synoptically to the dissenter so as to modify
the outcome of an agonistic encounter. To make a large number of competitors and
compatriots depart from their usual ways, many ethnographers both had to go further
and longer out of their usual ways, and then come back. The constraints imposed by
convincing people, going out and coming back, are such that this can be achieved only if
everything about the savage life is transformed into immutable mobiles that are easily
readable and presentable. In spite of his wishes, Fabian cannot do better. Otherwise, he
would either have to give up “knowing” or give up making hard facts.
There is no detectable difference between natural and social science, as far as the
obsession for graphism is concerned. If scientists were looking at nature, at economies, at
stars, at organs, they would not see anything. This “evidence”, so to speak, is used as a
classic rebuttal to naïve versions of empiricism (Arnheim, 1969). Scientists start seeing
something once they stop looking at nature and look exclusively and obsessively at prints
and flat inscriptions11. In the debates around perception, what is always forgotten is this
simple drift from watching confusing three-dimensional objects, to inspecting twodimensional
images which have been made less confusing. Lynch, like all laboratory
observers, has been struck by the extraordinary obsession of scientists with papers, prints,
diagrams, archives, abstracts and curves on graph paper. No matter what they talk
about, they start talking with some degree of confidence and being believed by
11 These simple shifts are often transformed by philosophers into complete ruptures from commom sense,
into “coupures épistémologiques” as in Bachelard. It is not because of the empiricists’ naïveté that one has
to fall back on the power of theories to make sense of data. The focus on inscriptions and manipulation of
traces is exactly mid-way between enipiricism and Bachelard’s argument on the power of theories.
21- Visualization and Cognition 16
colleagues, only once they point at simple geometrized two-dimensional shapes. The
“objects” are discarded or often absent from laboratories. Bleeding and screaming rats
are quickly dispatched. What is extracted from them is a tiny set of figures. This
extraction, like the few longitudes and latitudes extracted from the Chinese by La
Pérouse, is all that counts. Nothing can be said about the rats, but a great deal can be said
about the figures (Latour and Woolgar, 1979). Knorr (1981) and Star (1983) have also
shown the simplification procedures at work, as if the images were never simple enough
for the controversy to be settled quickly. Every time there is a dispute, great pains are
taken to find, or sometimes to invent, a new instrument of visualization, which will
enhance the image, accelerate the readings, and, as Lynch has shown, conspire with the
visual characteristics of the things that lend themselves to diagrams on paper (coast lines,
stars which are like points, well-aligned cells, etc.).
Again, the precise focus should be carefully set, because it is not the inscription hy
itself that should carry the burden of explaining the power of science ; it is the inscription
as the fine edge and the final stage of a whole process of mobilization, that modifies the scale
of the rhetoric. Without the displacement, the inscription is worthless ; without the
inscription the displacement is wasted. This is why mobilization is not restricted to paper
but paper always appears at the end when the scale of this mobilization is to be
increased. Collections of rocks, stuffed animals, samples, fossils, artifacts, gene banks, are
the first to be moved around. What counts is the arraying and mustering of resources
(biographies of naturalists, for instance, are replete with anecdotes about crates, archives
and specimens), but this arraying is never simple enough. Collections are essential but
only while the archives are well-kept, the labels are in place, and the specimens do not
decay. Even this is not enough, since a museum collection is still too much for one
“mind” to handle. So the collection will be drawn, written, recoded, and this process will
take place as long as more combinable geometrized forms have not been obtained from
the specimens (continuing the process through which the specimens had been extracted
from their contexts).
So, the phenomenon we are tackling is not inscription per se, but the cascade of ever
simplified inscriptions that allow harder facts to be produced at greater cost. For
example, the description of human fossils which used to be through drawings, is now
made by superimposing a number of mechanical diagrams on the drawings. The
photographs of the skies, although they produce neat little spots, are still much too rich
and confusing for a human eye to look at ; so a computer and a laser eye have been
invented to read the photographs, so that the astronomer never looks at the sky (too
costly), nor even at the photographs (too confusing). The taxonomy of plants is all
contained in a famous series of books at Kew Garden, but the manipulation of this book
is as difficult as that of the old manuscripts since it exists in only one location ; another
computer is now being instructed to try to read the many different prints of this book
and provide as many copied versions as possible of the taxonomic inventory.
In a recent article, Pinch (1985) shows a nice case of accumulation of such traces,
each layer being deposited on the former one only when confidence about its meaning is
stabilized. Do the astrophysicists “see” the neutrinos from the sun or any of the
intermediary “blurs”, “peaks”, and “spots” which compose, by accumulation, the
phenomenon to be seen ? Again, we see that the mechanisms studied by Eisenstein for
the printing press are still with us today at any of the frontiers of science. For instance,
21- Visualization and Cognition 17
baboon ethology used to be a text in prose in which the narrator talked about animals ;
then the narrator had to include what he or she had seen in the text, as first pictures,
then a statistical rendering of the events ; but with an increasing competition for the
construction of harder facts, the articles now include more and more layers of graphic
display, and the cascade of columns summarized by tables, diagrams, and equations is
still unfolding. In molecular biology, chromatography was read, a few years ago, by
bands of different shades of grey ; the interpretation of these shades is now done by
computer, and a text is eventually obtained straight out of the computer :
“ATGCGTTCGC . . . . “ Although more empirical studies should be made in many
different fields, there seems to be a trend in these cascades. They always move on the
direction of the greater merging of figures, numbers and letters, merging greatly
facilitated by their homogeneous treatment as binary units in and by computers.
This trend toward simpler and simpler inscriptions that mobilize larger and larger
numbers of events in one spot, cannot be understood if separated from the agonistic
model that we use as our point of reference. It is as necessary as the race for digging
trenches on the front in 1914. He who visualizes badly loses the encounter ; his fact does
not hold. Knorr has criticised this argument by taking an ethnomethodological
standpoint (1981). She argues, and rightly so, that an image, a diagram, cannot convince
anyone, both because there are always many interpretations possible, and, above all,
because the diagram does not force the dissenter to look at it. She sees the interest in
inscription devices as an exaggeration of the power of semiotics (and a French one at
that!). But such a position misses the point of my argument. It is precisely because the
dissenter can always escape and try out another interpretation, that so much energy and
time is devoted by scientists to corner him and surround him with ever more dramatic
visual effects. Although in principle any interpretation can be opposed to any text and
image, in practice this is far from being the case ; the cost of dissenting increases with each
new collection, each new labelling, cach new redrawing. This is especially true if the
phenomena we are asked to believe are invisible to the naked eye ; quasars,
chromosomes, brain peptides, leptons, gross national products, classes, coast lines are
never seen but through the “clothed” eye of inscription devices. Thus, one more
inscription, one more trick to enhance contrast, one simple device to decrease
background, one coloring procedure, might be enough, all things being equal, to swing the
balance of power and turn an incredible statement into a credible one which would then
be passed along without further modification. The importance of this cascade of
inscriptions may be ignored when studying events in dally life, but it cannot be
overestimated when analyzing science and technology.
More exactly, it is possible to overestimate the inscription, but not the setting in
which the cascade of ever more written and numbered inscriptions is produced. What
we are really dealing with is the staging of a scenography in which attention is focused on
one set of dramatized inscriptions. The setting works like a giant “optical device” that
creates a new laboratory, a new type of vision and a new phenomenon to look at. I
showed one such setting which I called “Pasteur’s theater of proofs”, (Latour, 1984).
Pasteur works as much on the stage as on the scene and the plot. What counts at the end
is a simple visual perception : dead unvaccinated sheep versus alive vaccinated sheep.
The earlier we go back in history of science, the more attention we see being paid to the
setting and the less to inscriptions themselves. Boyle, for instance, in the fascinating
21- Visualization and Cognition 18
account of his vacuum pump experiment described by Shapin (1984), had to invent not
only the phenomenon, but the instrument to make it visible, the set-up in which the
instrument was displayed, the written and printed accounts through which the silent
reader could read “about” the experiment, the type of witnesses admitted onto the stage,
and even the types of commentaries the potential witnesses were allowed to utter.
“Seeing the vacuum” was possible only once all these witnesses had been disciplined.
The staging of such “optical devices” is the one Eisenstein describes : a few persons in
the same room talk to one another and point out at two-dimensional pictures ; these
pictures are all there is to see of the things about which they talk. Just because we are
used to this setting, and breathe it like fresh air, does not mean that we should not
describe all the little innovations that make it the most powerful device to achieve power.
Tycho Brahe, in Oranenbourg, had before his eyes, for the first time in history, all the
predictions —that is literally the “previsions”— of the planetary movements ; at the same
place, written in the same language or code, he can read his own observations. This is
more than enough to account for Brahe’s new “insight”.
It was not because he gazed at night skies instead of at old books that Tycho Brahe differed from stargazers
of the past. Nor do I think it was because he cared more for ‘stubborn facts’ and precise
measurement than had the Alexandrians or the Arabs. But he did have at his disposal, as few had before
him, two separate sets of computations based on two different theories, compiled several centuries apart
which he could compare with each other. (Eisenstein, 1979 : 624)
The hagiographers say that he is the first to look at planetary motion, with a mind
freed of the prejudices of the darker ages. No, says Eisenstein, he is the first not to look at
the sky, but to look simultaneously to all the former predictions and his own, written
down together in the same form.
The Danish observer was not only the last of the great naked eye observers ; he was also the first careful
observer who took full advantage of the new powers of the press —powers which enabled astronomers to
detect anomalies in old records, to pinpoint more precisely and register in catalogs the location of each star,
to enlist collaborators in many regions, fix each fresh observation in permanent form and make necessary
corrections in successive editions. (1979 :625)
The discrepancies proliferate, not by looking at the sky, but by carefully
superimposing columns of angles and azimuths. No contradiction, or counterpredictions,
could ever have been visible. Contradiction, as Goody says, is neither a property of the
mind, nor of the scientific method, but is a property of reading letters and signs inside
new settings that focus attention on inscriptions alone.
The same mechanism is visible, to draw an example from a different time and place,
in Roger Guillemin’s vision of endorphin, a brain peptide. The brain is as obscure and
as messy as the Renaissance sky. Even the many first-level purifications of brain extracts
provide a “soup” of substances. The whole research strategy is to gel peaks that are
clearly readable out of a confused background. Each of the samples which provides a
neater peak is in turn purified until there is only one peak on the little window of a high
pressure liquid chromatograph. Then the substance is injected in minute quantities into
guinea pig gut. The contractions of the gut are hooked up, through electronic hardware,
to a physiograph. What is there at hand to see the object “endorphine” ? The
superimposition of the first peak with the slope in the physiograph starts to produce an
object whose limits are the visual inscriptions produced in the lab. The object is a real
object no more and no less than any other, since many such visual layers can be
21- Visualization and Cognition 19
produced. Its resistance as a real fact depends only on the number of such visual layers
that Guillemin’s lab can mobilize all at once in one spot, in front of the dissenter. For
each “objection” there is an inscription that blocks the dissent ; soon, the dissenter is
forced to quit the game or to come back later with other and better visual displays.
Objectivity is slowly erected inside the laboratory walls by mobilizing more faithful allies.
IV. Capitalizing Inscriptions to Mobilize Allies
Can we summarize why it is so important for Brahe, Boyle, Pasteur or Guillemin to
work on two-dimensional inscriptions instead of the sky, the air, health, or the brain ?
What can they do with the first, that you cannot do with the second ? Let me list a few of
the advantages of the “paper-work”.
1. Inscriptions are mobile, as I indicated for La Pérouse’s case. Chinese, planets,
microbes —none of these can move ; however, maps, photographic plates, and Petri
dishes can.
2. They are immutable when they move, or at least everything is done to obtain this
result : specimens are chloroformed, microbian colonies are stuck into gelatine, even
exploding stars are kept on graph papers in each phase of their explosion.
3. They are made flat. There is nothing you can dominate as easily as a flat surface of
a few square meters ; there is nothing hidden or convoluted, no shadows, no “double
entendre”. In politics as in science, when someone is said to “master” a question or to
“dominate” a subject, you should normally look for the flat surface that enables mastery
(a map, a list, a file, a census, the wall of a gallery, a card-index, a repertory) ; and you
will find it.
4. The scale of the inscriptions may be modified at will, without any change in their
internal proportions. Observers never insist on this simple fact : no matter what the
(reconstructed) size of the phenomena, they all end up being studied only when they
reach the same average size. Billions of galaxies are never bigger, when they are
counted, than nanometer-sized chromosomes ; international trade is never much bigger
than mesons ; scale models of oil refineries end up having the same dimensions as plastic
models of atoms. Confusion resumes outside a few square meters. This trivial change of
scale seems innocuous enough, but it is the cause of most of the “superiority” of scientists
and engineers : no one else deals only with phenomena that can be dominated with the
eyes and held by hands, no matter when and where they come from or what their
original size.
5. They can be reproduced and spread at little cost, so that all the instants of time and
all the places in space can be gathered in another time and place. This is “Eisenstein’s
effect”.
6. Since these inscriptions are mobile, flat, reproducible, still and of varying scales,
they can be reshuffled and recombined. Most of what we impute to connections in the
mind may be explained by this reshuffling of inscriptions that all have the same “optical
consistency”. The same is true of what we call “metaphor” (see a funny case in Woolf,
1975 ; see also Latour and Woolgar, 1979 : chap. 4 ; Goody, 1977 ; Hughes, 1979 ;
Ong, 1982).
21- Visualization and Cognition 20
7. One aspect of these recombinations is that it is possible to superimpose several images
of totally different origins and scales. To link geology and economics seems an
impossible task, but to superimpose a geological map with the printout of the commodity
market at the New York Stock Exchange, requires good documentation and takes a few
inches. Most of what we call “structure”, “pattem”, “theory”, and “abstraction” are
consequences of these superimpositions (Bertin, 1973). “Thinking is hand-work”, as
Heidegger said, but what is in the hands are inscriptions. Levi-Strauss’s theories of
savages are an artifact of card indexing at the College de France, exactly as Ramist’s
method is, for Ong, an artifact of the prints accumulated at the Sorbonne ; or modern
taxonomy a result of the bookkeeping undertaken amongst other places at Kew
Gardens.
8. But one of the most important advantages is that the inscription can, after only
little cleaning up, be made part of a written text. I have considered elsewhere at length this
common ground in which inscriptions coming from instruments merge with already
published texts and with new texts in draft. This characteristic of scientific texts has been
shown by Ivins and Eisenstein for the past. A present day laboratory may still be defined
as the unique place where a text is made to comment on things which are all present in
it. Because the commentary, earlier texts (through citations and references), and “things”
have the same optical consistency, and the same semiotic homogeneity, an extraordinary
degree of certainty is achieved by writing and reading these articles (Latour and Bastide,
1985 ; Lynch, 1984 ; Law, 1983). The text is not simply “illustrated”, it carries all there
is to see in what it writes about. Through the laboratory, the text and the spectacle of the
world end up having the same character.
9. But the last advantage is the greatest. The two-dimensional character of
inscriptions allow them to merge with geometry. As we saw for perspective, space on paper
can be made continuous with three-dimensional space. The result is that we can work on
paper with rulers and numbers, but still manipulate three-dimensional objects “out
there” (Ivins, 1973). Better still, because of this optical consistency, everything, no matter
where it comes from, can be converted into diagrams and numbers, and combination of
numbers and tables can be used which are still easier to handle than words or silhouettes
(Dagognet, 1973). You cannot measure the sun, but you can measure a photograph of
the sun with a ruler. Then the number of centimeters read can easily migrate through
different scales, and provide solar masses for completely different objects. This is what I
call, for want of a better term, the second-degree advantage of inscriptions, or the
surplus-value that is gained through their capitalization.
These nine advantages should not be isolated from one another and should always be
seen in conjunction with the mobilization process they accelerate and summarize. In
other words, every possible innovation that offers any of these advantages will be selected
by eager scientists and engineers : new photographs, new dyes to color more cell
cultures, new reactive paper, a more sensitive physiograph, a new indexing system for
librarians, a new notation for algebraic function, a new heating system to keep
specimens longer. History of science is the history of these innovations. The role of the
mind has been vastly exaggerated, as has been that of perception (Arnheim, 1969). An
average mind or an average man, with the same perceptual abilities, within normal
21- Visualization and Cognition 21
social conditions, will generate totally different output depending on whether his or her
average skills apply to the confusing world or to inscriptions.
It is especially interesting to focus on the ninth advantage, because it gives us a way to
make “formalism” a more mundane and a more material reality. To go from
“empirical” to “theoretical” sciences is to go from slower to faster mobiles, from more
mutable to less mutable inscriptions. The trends we studied above do not break down
when we look at formalism but, on the contrary, increase fantastically. Indeed, what we
call formalism is the acceleration of displacement without transformation. To grasp this point, let
us go back to Section II. The mobilization of many resources through space and time is
essential for domination on a grand scale. I proposed to call immutable mobiles these
objects that allow this mobilization to take place. I also argued that the best of these
mobiles had to do with written, numbered or optically consistent paper surfaces. But I
also indicated, though without offering an explanation, that we had to deal with cascades
of ever more simplified and costlier inscriptions. This ability to form a cascade has now
to be explained because gathering written and imaged resources in one place, even with
two-way connections, does not by itself guarantee any superiority for the one who gathers
them. Why ? Because the gatherer of such traces is immediately swamped in them. I
showed such a phenomenon at work in Guillemin’s laboratory ; after only a few days of
letting the instruments run, the piles of printout were enough to boggie the mind (Latour
and Woolgar, 1979 : chap. 2). The same thing happened to Darwin after a few years of
collecting specimens with the Beagle, there were so many crates that Darwin was almost
squeezed out of his house. So by themselves the inscriptions do not help a location to
become a center that dominates the rest of the world. Something has to be done to the
inscriptions which is similar to what the inscriptions do to the “things”, so that at the end
a few elements can manipulate all the others on a vast scale. The same deflating strategy
we used to show how “things” were turned into paper, can show how paper is turned
into less paper.
Let us take as example “the effectiveness of Galileo’s work”, as it is seen by Drake
(1970). Drake does indeed use the word formalism to designate what Galileo is able to do
that his predecessors were not. But what is described is more interesting than that. Drake
compares the diagrams and commentaries of Galileo with those two older scholars,
Jordan and Stevin. Interestingly, in Jordan’s demonstration “the physical element is, as
you see, brought in as an afterthought to the geometry, by main force as it were”
(1970:103). With Simon Stevin’s diagram, this is the opposite : “The previous situation is
reversed ; geometry is eliminated in favor of pure mechanical intuition” (1970 : 103). So,
what seems to happen is that Galileo’s two predecessors could not visually accommodate
the problem on a paper surface and see the result simultaneously as both geometry and
physics. A simple change in the geometry used by Galileo allows him to connect many
different problems, whereas his two predecessors worked on disconnected shapes over
which they had no control:
Galileo’s way of merging geometry and physics became apparent in his proof of the same theorem in his
early treatise on motion dating from 1590. The method itself suggested to him not only many corollaries
but successive improvements of the proof itself and further physical implications of it. (Drake, 1970 :
104).
21- Visualization and Cognition 22
This ability to connect might be located in Galileo’s mind. In fact, what gets
connected are three different visual horizons held synoptically because the surface of
paper is considered as geometrical space :
you see how the entire demonstration constitutes a reduction of the problem of equilibrium on inclined
planes to the lever, which in itself removes the theorem from the isolation in which it stood before. (Drake,
1970:106)
This innocuous term “removing from isolation” is constantly used by those who talk
of theories. No wonder. If you just hold Galileo’s diagram, you hold three domains ;
when you hold the others, only one. The holding allowed by a “theory” is no more
mysterious (and no less) than the holding of armies, or of stocks, or of positions in space.
It is fascinating to see that Drake explains the efficiency of Galileo’s connection in terms
of his creation of a geometrical medium in which geometry and physics merge. This is a
much more material explanation than Koyré’s idealist one, although the “matter” in
Drake’s rendering is a certain type of inscription on papers and certain ways of looking
at it.
Similar tactics that use diagrams in order to establish rapid links between many
unrelated problems are documented by cognitive psychologists. In a recent review,
Herbert Simon (1982) compares the tactics of experts and novices in drawing diagrams
when they are questioned about simple physical problems (pumps, water flows, and so
on). The crucial difference between experts and novices is exactly the same as that
pointed out by Drake :
the crucial thing that appeared in the expert behaviour was that the formulation from the initial and the
final condition was assembled in such a way that the relations between them and hence the answer could
essentially be read off from it (the diagram) (Simon, 1982 : 169).
With this question in mind, one is struck by the metaphors “theoreticians” use to
celebrate and rank theories12. The two main sets of metaphors insist respectively upon
increased mobility and increased immutability. Good theories are opposed to bad ones
or to “mere collections of empirical facts” because they provide “easy access to them”.
Hankel, for instance, criticizes Diophantes in the words that a French civil engineer
would use to denigrate the Nigerian highway system :
Any question requires a quite special method, which after will not serve even for the most closely allied
problems. It is on that accord difficult for a modern mathematician even after studying one hundred
Diophantine solutions, to solve the 101st problem ; and if we have made the attempt, and after some vain
endeavours read Diophantus’ own solution, we shall be astonished to see how suddenly he leaves the broad
highroad, dashes into a side path and with a quick turn reaches the goal… (cited in Bloor, 1976 : 102)
The safe path of science, as Kant would say, is not the same for the Greeks, for the
Bororos and for us ; but neither are the systems of transportation identical. One could
object that these are only metaphors. Yes, but the etymology of metaphoros is itself
12 A nice example is that of Carnot’s thermodynainics studied by Redondi (1980). Carnot’s know-how is
not about building a machine but rather a diagram. This diagram is drawn in such a way that it allows
one to move from one engine to any other, and indeed to nonexistent engines simply drawn on paper,
Real three-dimensional steam engines are interesting but localized and cumbersome. Thermodynamics is
to them what La Pérouse’s map is to the islands of the Pacific. When going from one engine to the theory
or from one island to the map, you do not go from concrete to abstract, from empirical to theoretical, you
go from one place that dominates no one, to another place that dominates all the others. If you grasp
thermodynamics you grasp all engine, (past, present and future —see Diesel). The question about theories
is : who controls whom and on what scale.
21- Visualization and Cognition 23
enlightening. It means precisely displacement, transportation, transfer. No matter if they
are mere images, these metaphors aptly carry the obsession of theoreticians for easy
transportation and rapid communication. A more powerful theory, we submit, is one
that with fewer elements and fewer and simpler transformations makes it possible to get
at every other theory (past and future). Every time a powerful theory is celebrated it is
always possible to rephrase this admiration in terms of the most trivial struggle for
power : holding this place allows me to hold all the others (Latour, 1984b : Part 2). This
is the problem we have encountered right through this paper : how to assemble many
allies in one place.
A similar link between ability to abstract and the practical work of mobilizing
resources without transforming them is seen in much of cognitive science. In Piaget’s
tests, for instance, much fuss is made of water poured from a tall thin beaker into a short
flat one. If the children say the water volume has changed, they are nonconserving. But
as any laboratory observer knows, most of the phenomena depend upon which measure
to read, or which to believe in case of discrepancy. The shift from nonconserving to
conserving might not be a modification in cognitive structure, but a shift in indicators :
read the height of the water in the first beaker and believe it more than the reading from
the flat beaker. The notion of “volume” is held between the calibrated beakers exactly
like Guillemin’s endorphin is held between several peaks from at least five different
instruments. In other words, Piaget is asking his children to do a laboratory experiment
comparable in difficulty to that of the average Nobel Prize winner. If any shift in
thinking occurs, it has nothing to do with the mind, but with the manipulation of the
laboratory setting. Out of this setting no answer can be offered on volume. The best
proof of this is that without industrially calibrated beakers Piaget himself would be totally
unable to decide what is conserved (see also Cole and Scribner, 1974 : last chapter). So
again, most of what we grant a priori to “higher cognitive functions” might be concrete
tasks done with new calibrated, graduated and written objects. More generally, Piaget is
obsessed with conservation and displacement through space without alteration (Piaget
and Garcia, 1983). Thinking is tantamount to acquiring the ability to move as fast as
possible while conserving as much of the pattern as possible. What Piaget takes as the
logic of the psyche, is this very logic of mobilization and immutability which is so
peculiar to our scientific societies, when they want to produce hard facts to dominate on
a large scale. No wonder that all these “abilities” to move fast in such a world get better
with schooling!13
We now come closer to an understanding of the matter that constitutes formalism.
The point of departure is that we are constantly hesitating between several often
contradictory indications from our senses. Most of what we call “abstraction” is in
practice the belief that a written inscription must be believed more than any contrary
13 A nice a contrario proof is provided by Edgerton’s study of Chinese technical drawings (1980). He claims
that Chinese artits have no interest in the figures or, more exactly, that they take figures not inside the
perspective space on which an engineer can work and make calculations and previsions, but as illustration.
In consequence, all the links between parts of the machines become decorations (a complex part of the
pump becomes, for instance, waves on a pond after a few copies !). No one would say that Chinese are
unable to abstract, but it would not be absurd to say that they do not put their full confidence into writing
and imaging.
21- Visualization and Cognition 24
indications from the senses14. Koyré, for instance, has shown that Galileo believed in the
inertia principle on mathematical grounds even against the contrary evidences offered to
him not only by the Scriptures, but also by the senses. Koyré claims that this rejection of
the senses was due to Galileo’s Platonist philosophy. This might be so. But what does it
mean practically ? It means that faced with many contrary indications, Galileo, in the
last instance, believed more in the triangular diagram for calculating the law of falling
bodies, then any other vision of falling bodies (Koyré, 1966 : 147). When in doubt, believe
the inscriptions, written in mathematical terms, no matter to what absurdities this might
lead you15.
After Eisenstein’s magisterial reworking of the Book of Nature argument, and Alper’s
redefinition of “visual culture”, the ethnography of abstraction might be easier : What is
this society in which a written, printed, mathematical form has greater credence, in case
of doubt, than anything else : common sense, the senses other than vision, political
authority, tradition, and even the Scriptures ? It is obvious that this feature of society is
overdetermined since it can be found in the written Law (Clanchy, 1979) ; in the biblical
exegesis of the Holy Scriptures and in the history of Geometry (Husserl, 1954 ; Derrida,
1967 ; Serres, 1980). Without this peculiar tendency to privilege what is written, the
power of inscription would be entirely lost, as Edgerton hints in his discussion of Chinese
diagrams. No matter how beautiful, rich, precise, or realistic inscriptions may be, no one
would believe what they showed, if they could be contradicted by other evidence of
local, sensory origin or pronouncements of the local authorities. I feel that we would
make a giant step forward if we could relate this peculiar feature of our culture with the
requirement of mobilization I have outlined several times. Most of the “domain” of
cognitive psychology and epistemology does not exist but is related to this strange
anthropological puzzle : a training (often in schools) to manipulate written inscriptions,
to array them in cascades and to believe the last one on the series more than any
evidence to the contrary. It is in the description of this training that the anthropology of
geometry and mathematics should be decisive (Livingston, 1983 ; Lave, 1985, 1986 ;
Serres, 1982).
14 In a beautiful article Carlo Ginzburg speaks of a “paradigm of the trace” to designate this peculiar
obsession of our culture that he traces —precisely !— from Greck medicine, to Conan Doyle’s detective
story, through Freud’s interest in lapsus and the detection of art forgeries (1980). Falling back, however,
on a classical prejudice, Ginzburg puts physics and hard sciences aside from such a paradigm because, he
contends, they do not rely on traces but on abstract, universal phenomena !
15 Ivins explains, for instance, that most Greek parallels in geometry do not meet because they are
touched with the hands, whereas Renaissance parallels do meet since they are only seen on paper
(1973 :7). Jean Lave, in her studies of Californian grocery shoppers, shows that people confronted with a
difficulty in their computation rarely stick to the paper and never put their confidence in what is written
(Lave et al., 1983). To do so no matter how absurd the consequences requires still another set of peculiar
circumstances related to laboratory settings, even if these are as Livingston says (1993) “flat laboratories”.
In one of his twelve or so origins of geometry Serres argues that having invented the alphabet and thus
broken any connection between written shapes and the signified, the Greeks had to cope with pictorial
representation. He argues that what we came to call formalism is an alphabetic text trying to describe
visual diagrams : “Qu’est-ce que cette géométrie dans la pratique ? Non point dans les “idées” qu’elle
suppose mais dans l’activité qui la pose. Elle est d’abord un art du dessin. Elle est ensuite un langage qui
parle du dessin tracé que celui-ci soit présent ou absent” (Serres. 1990 : 176).
21- Visualization and Cognition 25
V. Paperwork
There are two ways in which the visualization processes we are all interested in may
be ignored ; one is to grant to the scientific mind what should be granted to the hands, to
the eyes and to the signs ; the other is to focus exclusively on the signs qua signs, without
considering the mobilization of which they are but the fine edge. All innovations in
picture making, equations, communications, archives, documentation, instrumentation,
argumentation, will be selected for or against depending on how they simultaneously
affect either inscription or mobilization. This link is visible not only in the empirical
sciences, not only in the (former) realm of formalism, but also in many “practical”
endeavors from which science is often unduly severed.
In a heautiful book, Booker retraces the history of engineering drawings (1982).
Linear perspective (see above) progressively “changed the concept of pictures from being
just representation to that of their being projections onto planes” (p. 31). But perspective
still depended on the observer’s position, so the objects could not really be moved
everywhere without corruption. Desargues’s and Monge’s works :
helped to change the ‘point of view’ or way of looking at things mentally. In place of the imaginary fines of
space —so difficult to conceive clearly— which were the basis of perspective at that time, projective
geometry allowed perspective to be seen in terms of solid geometry. (Booker, 1982:34)
With descriptive geometry, the observer’s position becomes irrelevant. “It can be
viewed and photographed from any angle or projected onto any plane —that is,
distorted— and the result remains true” (p. 35). Booker and still better Baynes and Push
(1981) in a splendid book (see also Deforges, 1981) show how a few engineers could master
enormous machines that did not yet exist. These feats cannot be imagined without
industrial drawings. Booker, quoting an engineer, describes the change of scale that
allows the few to dominate the many :
A machine that has heen drawn is like an ideal realisation of it, but in a material that costs little and is
easier to handle than iron or steel… If everything is first well thought out, and the essential dimensions
determined by calculations or experience, the plan of a machine or installation of machines can be quickly
put on paper and the whole thing as well as the detail can then most conveniently be submited to the
severest criticism… If at first there is doubt as to which of various possible arrangements is the most
desirable then they are all sketched, compared with one another and the most suitable can easily be chosen.
(Booker, 1982 :187)
Industrial drawing not only creates a paper world that can be manipulated as if in
three dimensions. It also creates a common place for many other inscriptions to come
together ; margins of tolerance can be inscribed on the drawing, the drawing can be
used for economic calculation, or for defining the tasks to be made, or for organizing the
repairs and the sales.
But drawings are of the utmost importance not only for planning but also for execution since by means of
them the measurements and proportions of all the parts can be so sharply and definitely determined from
the beginning that when it comes to manufacture it is only necessary to imitate in the materials used for
construction exactly what is shown in the drawing.
Every part of the machine can in general be manufactured independently of every other part ; it is therefore
possible to distribute the entire work among a great number of workers… No substantial errors can arise
in work organised in this manner and if it does happen that on a rare occasion a mistake has been made it
is immediately known with whom the blame lies. (Booker, 1982 :198)
21- Visualization and Cognition 26
Realms of reality that seem far apart (mechanics, economics, marketing, scientific
organization of work) are inches apart, once flattened out onto the same surface. The
accumulation of drawings in an optically consistent space is, once again, the “universal
exchanger” that allows work to be planned, dispatched, realized, and responsibility to be
attributed16.
The connective quality of written traces is still more visible in the most despised of all
ethnographic objects : the file or the record. The “rationalization” granted to
bureaucracy since Hegel and Weber has been attributed by mistake to the “mind” of
(Prussian) bureaucrats. It is all in the files themselves. A bureau is, in many ways, and
more and more every year, a small laboratory in which many elements can be connected
together just because their scale and nature has been averaged out : legal texts,
specifications, standards, payrolls, maps, surveys (ever since the Norman conquiest, as
shown by Clanchy, 1979). Economics, politics, sociology, hard sciences, do not come
into contact through the grandiose entrance of “interdisciplinarity” but through the back
door of the file. The “cracy” of bureaucracy is mysterious and hard to study, but the
“bureau” is something that can be empirically studied, and which explains, because of its
structure, why some power is given to an average mind just by looking at files : domains
which are far apart become literally inches apart ; domains which are convoluted and
hidden, become flat ; thousands of occurrences can be looked at synoptically. More
importantly, once files start being gathered everywhere to insure some two-way
circulation of immutable mobiles, they can be arrayed in cascade : files of files can be
generated and this process can be continued until a few men consider millions as if they
were in the palms of their hands. Common sense ironically makes fun of these “gratte
papiers” and “paper shufflers”, and often wonders what all this “red tape” is for ; but the
same question should be asked of the rest of science and technology. In our cultures
“paper shuffling” is the source of an essential power, that constantly escapes attention
since its materiality is ignored.
McNeill, in his fundamental book The Pursuit of Power (1982), uses this ability to
distinguish Chinese bureaucracy from that of the Occident. Accumulation of records
and ideograms make the Chinese Empire possible. But there is a major drawback with
ideograms ; once gathered you cannot array them in a cascade in such a way that
thousands of records can be turned in one, that is literally “punctualized” through
geometrical or mathematical skills. So here again, if we keep both the quality of the signs
and the mobilization process in focus, we may understand why careful limits have been
put in the past to the growth of the Chinese imperium, and why these limits to the
mobilization of resources on a grand scale have been broken in Europe. It is hard to
16 The link between technical thinking and technical drawing is so close that scholars establish it even
unwillingly. For instance, Bertrand Gille, when accounting for the creation of a new “système technique”
in Alexandria during the Hellenistic period, is obliged to say that it is the availability of a good library and
the gathering of a collection of scale models of all the machines previously invented, that transformed
“mere practice” into techno-logy (1990). What makes the “système technique” a system is the synoptic
vision of all the former technical achievements which are all taken out of their isolation. This link is most
clearly visible when an inscription device is hooked up to a working machine to make it comprehensible
(Hills and Pacey, 1981 ; Constant, 1983). A nice rendering of the paperworld necessary to make a
computer real is to be found in Kidder (1981). “The soul of the machine” is a pile of paper…
21- Visualization and Cognition 27
overestimate the power that is gained by concentrating files written in a homogeneous
and combinable form (Wheeler, 1969 ; Clanchy, 1979).
This role of the bureaucrat qua scientist qua writer and reader, is always
misunderstood because we take for granted that there exist, somewhere in society,
macro-actors that naturally dominate the scene : Corporation, State, Productive Forces,
Cultures, Imperialisms, “Mentalités”, etc. Once accepted, these large entities are then
used to explain (or to not explain) “cognitive” aspects of science and technology. The
problem is that these entities could not exist at all without the construction of long
networks in which numerous faithful records circulate in both directions, records which
are, in turn, summarized and displayed to convince. A “state”, a “corporation”, a
“culture”, an “economy” are the result of a punctualization process that obtains a few
indicators out of many traces. In order to exist these entities have to be summed up
somewhere. Far from being the key to the understanding of science and technology,
these entities are the very things a new understanding of science and technology should
explain. The large scale actors to which sociologists of science are keen to attach
“interests” are immaterial in practice as long as precise mechanisms to explain their
origin or extraction and their changes of scale have not been proposed.
A man is never much more powerful than any other —even from a throne ; but a
man whose eye dominates records through which some sort of connections are
established with millions of others may be said to dominate. This domination, however, is
not a given but a slow construction and it can be corroded, interrupted or destroyed if
the records, files and figures are immobilized, made more mutable, less readable, less
combinable or unclear when displayed. In other words, the scale of an actor is not an
absolute term but a relative one that varies with the ability to produce, capture, sum up
and interpret information about other places and times (Callon and Latour, 1981). Even
the very notion of scale is impossible to understand without an inscription or a map in
mind. The “great man” is a little man looking at a good map. In Mercator’s frontispiece
Atlas is transformed from a god who carries the world into a scientist who holds it in his
hand (Mukerji, 1985) !
Since the beginning of this presentation on visualization and cognition, I have been
recasting the simple question of power : how the few may dominate the many. After
McNeill’s major reconceptualization of the history of power in terms of mobilization,
this age-old question of political philosophy and sociology can be rephrased in another
way : how can distant or foreign places and times be gathered in one place in a form that
allows all the places and times to be presented at once, and which allows orders to move
back to where they came from ? Talking of power is an endless and mystical task ;
talking of distance, gathering, fidelity, summing up, transmission, etc. is an empirical
one, as has been illustrated in a recent study by John Law of the Portuguese spice road to
India (1986). Instead of using large-scale entities to explain science and technology as
most sociologists of science do, we should start from the inscriptions and their
mobilization and see how they help small entities to become large ones. In this shift from
one research program to another, “science and technology” will cease to be the
mysterious cognitive object to be explained by the social world. It will become one of the
main sources of power (McNeill, 1982). To take the existence of macro-actors for
granted without studying the material that makes them “macro”, is to make both science
and society mysterious. To take the fabrication of various scales as our main center of
21- Visualization and Cognition 28
interest is to place the practical means of achieving power on a firm foundation
(Cicourel, 1981). The Pentagon does not see more of the Russians’ strategy than
Guillemin does his endorphin. They simply put faith in superimposed traces of various
quality, opposing some to others, retracing the steps of those that are dubious, and
spending billions to create new branches of science and technology that can accelerate
the mobility of traces, perfect their immutability, enhance readability, insure their
compatibility, quicken their display : satellites, networks of espionage, computers,
libraries, radioimmunoassays, archives, surveys. They will never see more of the
phenomena than what they can build through these many immutable mobiles. This is
obvious, but rarely seen.
If this little shift from a social/cognitive divide to the study of inscriptions is accepted,
then the importance of metrology appears in proper light. Metrology is the scientific
organization of stable measurement and standards. Without it no measurement is stable
enough to allow either the homogeneity of the inscriptions or their return. It is not
surprising then to learn that metrology costs up to three times the budget of all Research
and Development, and that this figure is for only the first elements of the metrological
chain (Hunter, 1980). Thanks to metrological organization the basic physical constants
(time, space, weight, wave-length) and many biological and chemical standards may be
extended “every-where” (Zerubavel, 1982 ; Landes, 1983). The universality of science
and technology is a cliché of epistemology but metrology is the practical achievement of
this mystical universality. In practice it is costly and full of holes (see Cochrane, 1966 for
the history of the Bureau of Standards). Metrology is only the official and primary
component of an ever increasing number of measuring activities we all have to
undertake in daily life. Every time we look at our wristwatch or weigh a sausage at the
butchers shop ; every time applied laboratories measure lead pollution, water purity, or
control the quality of industrial goods, we allow more immutable mobiles to reach new
places. “Rationalization” has very little to do with the reason of bureau and technocrats,
but has a lot to do with the maintenance of metrological chains (Uselding, 1981).
This building of long networks provides the stability of the main physical constants, but
there are many other metrological activities for less “universal” measures (polls,
questionnaires, forms to fill in, accounts, tallies).
There is one more domain into which this ethnography of inscription could bring
some “light.” I want to talk about it, since at the beginning of this overview, I rejected
dichotomies between “mentalist” and “materialist” explanations. Among the interesting
immutable mobiles there is one that has received both too little and too much attention :
money. The anthropology of money is as complicated and entangled as that of writing,
but one thing is clear. As soon as money starts to circulate through different cultures, it
develops a few clearcut characteristics : it is mobile (once in small pieces), it is immutable
(once in metal), it is countable (once it is coined), combinable, and can circulate from the
things valued to the center that evaluates and back. Money has received too much
attention because it has been thought of as something special, deeply inserted in the
infrastructure of economies, whereas it is just one of the many immutable mobiles
necessary if one place is to exercise power over many other places far apart in space and
time. As a type of immutable mobile amongst others it has, however, received too little
attention. Money is used to code all states of affairs in exactly the way that La Pérouse
coded all places by longitude and latitude (actually, in his log book La Pérouse registered
21- Visualization and Cognition 29
both the places on the map and the values of each good as if it were to be sold in some
other place). In this way, it is possible to accumulate, to count, to display, and to
recombine all the states of affairs. Money is neither more nor less “material” than map
making, engineering drawings or statistics.
Once its ordinary character is recognized, the “abstraction” of money can no longer
be the object of a fetish cult. For instance, the importance of the art of accounting both
in economies and science falls nicely into place. Money is not interesting as such but as
one type of immutable mobile that links goods and places ; so it is no wonder if it quickly
merges with other written inscriptions : figures, columns, double-entry bookkeeping
(Roover, 1963). No wonder if, through accounting, it is possible to gain more just by
recombining numbers (Braudel, 1979, especially vol. 3). Here again, too much emphasis
should not be placed on the visualization of numbers per se ; what should really be
stressed is the cascade of mobile inscriptions that end up in an account, which is,
literally, the only thing that counts. Exactly as with any scientific inscription, in case of
doubt the new accountant prefers to believe inscription, no matter how strange the
consequences and counterintuitive the phenomena. The history of money is thus seized
by the same trend as all the other immutable mobiles ; any innovations that can
accelerate money to enlarge its power of mobilization are kept : checks, endorsement,
paper money, electronic money. This trend is not due to the development of capitalism.
“Capitalism” is, on the contrary, an empty word as long as precise material instruments
are not proposed to explain any capitalization at all, be it of specimens, books,
information or money.
Thus, capitalism is not to be used to explain the evolution of science and technology.
It seems to me that it should be quite the contrary. Once science and technology are
rephrased in terms of immutable mobiles it might be possible to explain economic
capitalism, as another process of mobilization. What indicates this are the many
weaknesses of money ; money is a nice immutable mobile that circulates from one point
to another but it carries very little with it. If the name of the game is to accumulate
enough allies in one place to modify the belief and behavior of all the others, money is a
poor resource as long as it is isolated. It becomes useful when it is combined with all the
other inscription devices ; then, the different points of the world become really
transported in a manageable form to a single place which then becomes a center. Just as
with Eisenstein’s printing press, which is one factor that allows all the others to merge
with one another, what counts is not the capitalization of money, but the capitalization
of all compatible inscriptions. Instead of talking of merchants, princes, scientists,
astronomers and engineers as having some sort of relation with one another, it seems to
me it would be more productive to talk about “centers of calculation”. The currency in
which they calculate is less important than the fact that they calculate only with
inscriptions and mix together in these calculations inscriptions coming from the most
diverse disciplines. The calculations themselves are less important than the way they are
arrayed in cascades, and the bizarre situation in which the last inscription is believed
more than anything else. Money per se is certainly not the universal standard looked for
by Marx and other economists. This qualification should be granted to centers of
calculation and to the peculiarity of written traces which makes rapid translation
between one medium and another possible.
21- Visualization and Cognition 30
Many efforts have been made to link the history of science with the history of
capitalism, and many efforts have been made to describe the scientist as a capitalist. All
these efforts (including mine —Latour and Woolgar, 1979 : chap. 5 ; Latour 1984a) were
doomed from the start, since they took for granted a division between mental and
material factors, an artifact of our ignorance of inscriptions17. There is not a history of
engineers, then a history of capitalists, then one of scientists, then one of mathematicians,
then one of economists. Rather, there is a single history of these centers of calculation. It
is not only because they look exclusively at maps, account books, drawings, legal texts
and files, that cartographers, merchants, engineers, jurists and civil servants get the edge
on all the others. It is because all these inscriptions can be superimposed, reshuffled,
recombined, and summarized, and that totally new phenomena emerge, hidden from
the other people from whom all these inscriptions have been exacted.
More precisely we should be able to explain, with the concept and empirical
knowledge of these centers of calculation, how insignificant people working only with
papers and signs become the most powerful of all. Papers and signs are incredibly weak
and fragile. This is why explaining anything with them seemed so ludicrous at first. La
Pérouse’s map is not the Pacific, anymore than Watt’s drawings and patents are the
engines, or the bankers’ exchange rates are the economies, or the theorems of topology
are “the real world”. This is precisely the paradox. By working on papers alone, on
fragile inscriptions which are immensely less than the things from which they are
extracted, it is still possible to dominate all things, and all people. What is insignificant
for all other cultures becomes the most significant, the only significant aspect of reality.
The weakest, by manipulating inscriptions of all sorts obsessively and exclusively,
become the strongest. This is the view of power we get at by following this theme of
visualization and cognition in all its consequences.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This paper was prepared as an introduction for the international seminar organized
at Ecole des Mines for the CNRS December 12, 13 and 14, 1983 and entitled
17 The direction we go to by asking such questions is quite different from those of either the sociology of
science or the cognitive sciences (especially when they both try to merge as in de Mey’s synthesis (1982)).
Two recent attempts have been made to relate the fine structure of cognitive abilities to social structure.
The first one uses Hesse’s networks and Kuhn’s paradigms (Barnes, 1982), the second Wittgenstein’s
“language games” (Bloor, 1983). These attempts are intersting but they still try to answer a question
which the present review wishes to reject : how cognitive abilities are related to our societies. The question
(and thus the various answers) accept the idea that the stuff society is made of is somehow different from
that of our sciences, our images, and our information. The phenomenon I wish to focus on is slightly
different from those revealed by Barnes and Bloor. We are dealing with a single ethnographic puzzle :
some societies —very few indeed— are made by capitalizing on a larger scale. The obsession with rapid
displacement and stable invariance, for powerful and safe linkages, is not a part of our culture, or
“influenced” by social interests : it is our culture. Too often sociologists look for indirect relations between
“interests” and “technical” details. The reason of their blindness is simple : they limit the meaning of
“social” to society without realizing that the mobilizing of allies and, in general, the transformation of
weak into strong associations, is what “social” also means. Why look for farfetched relations when
technical details of science talk directly of invariance, association, displacement, immutability and so on ?
(Law, 1986, Latour, 1984b ; Callon, Law and Rip, 1986).
21- Visualization and Cognition 31
“Visualization and Cognition”. The proceedings of this seminar are published in French
in the journal Culture Technique no. 14, June 1985 under the title “Les ‘vues’ de l’esprit”.
I thank the CNRS and all the participants of the seminar for help in shaping my
ideas. I especially thank John Law who painstakingly reviewed the English version. I also
thank Elihu Gerson, Howard Becker and Steve Shapin.
I extend my thanks to all my colleagues who steadfastly refused to share my passion
for “inscription devices” and forced me to read all the literature mobilized in this article
in order to try to convince them.
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