Drawing Things Together. Bruno Latour g2cx

widen. The relativistic position reached by taking the first

I

propose, and giving up grand dichotomies, looks ludicrous because of the enormous consequences of science. One cannot equate "intellectual" described study;

Goody (1977, ch,

and Galileo in

folk knowledge of medicinal herbs and the National

Institute of Health;

careful procedure of corpse interrogation in

the Ivory Coast and the careful planning of DNA probes in a California laboratory; the storytelling of in

myths somewhere

South African bush and the Big Bang theory; the hesitant

calculations of a four-year-old in culation of a

of

laboratory

the cal

Field Medal; the abacus and the new

super-computer Cray n. The differences in the effects of science and technology are so enormous that it seems

not to look

for enormous causes. Thus, even if scholars are dissatisfied these extravagant causes, even if they

we have to

before one specific science, that of economics. So, ironically, many

instead of narrowing, may even

the gap between the two

is a yawning gap be economic trends and the fine details cognitive in-

they are arbitrarily

falsified by daily experience and often contradictory, they

are in no way

"materialist" s of the emergence of material since they ignore

precise

and craftsmanship

knowing and hide from scrutiny the omniscient economic historian. It seems to me

the only way to escape the simplistic relativist

position is to avoid both "materialist" and "mentalist" explanations at an costs and to look instead for more parsimonious s, which are empirical through and through, and yet

to explain

the vast effects of science and technology. It seems to me that the most powerful explanations, that that

the most out of

those

least, are the ones that take writing

and imaging craftsmanship into . They are both material and mundane, they are so practical, so modest, so pervasive, so to the hands and the eyes that they escape attention. Each of them deflates grandiose schemes and conceptual dichotomies and [OUl£1\.....,.:>

them by simple modifications in the way in groups prints and dia

of people argue with one another using paper,

grams. Despite their different methods, fields, and goals, this strat

prefer to maintain them in order to avoid the absurd consequences

egy of deflation links a range of very different studies and endows

of relativism. Particle physics must be radically different in some

them with a

way from folk botany; we do not know how, but as a stop-gap so lution the idea of rationality is better than Lukes, 1982).

(HoWs and

which is both ironic and refreshing.2

these scholars, 1 was struck, in a

of a biology

ratory, by the way in which many aspects of laboratory practice could be ordered looking not at the scientists ' brains (1 was for-

23

22

cognitive structures (nothing nor at same for thirty years), but at transformation paper (Latour literature, and the way into inscriptions, was not my everything was I first thought, but was for what the laboratory was Instru ments, for instance , were of various types, ages, and degrees of were pieces of furniture; filled sophistication. to run. rooms, employed many technicians, and took many But their end result, no matter the field, was always a small window through which one could read a very few poor repertoire blots, bands, columns). All inscriptions, as I called were combinabl e , superimposable could, with of up, be integrated as in text were writing. Many of the intellectual feats I was could be rephrased as soon as activity of paper became the of jumping to explanations involving high theories or differences in logic, I could to the l evel of simple craftsmanship as firmly as Goody. The domestication or disciplining of was still going When on with instruments similar to those to which these resources were lacking, the selfsame stuttered, hesitated, nonsense , and displayed every kind of political Although their minds, their scientific methods, or cultural their world-views, and their cultures were still conversation could not in their proper inscriptions or the practice of could. can be broken down into many small, unexsets of skill s to and to read this stratand write But there is a major egy of Its results seem both obvious-close to being literally a too weak to vast consequences above, be denied. of science technology that cannot, we Of course, everyone might happily agree that printing, and revolution or of the visualizing are important as ides of the psychogenesis of scientific thought. They might necessary but they not. The decannot be sufficient causes. flating may rid us of one mystical Divide , but it wil l , u s into a worse kind o f mysticism i f the researcher bidden

at

in the power of with prints and images has to symbols isolated from anything else. objection. We must it that when talking of is a and print it is easy to shift from the most powerful explaof the to one that is trivial and reveals only formulists, which we want to . dictionaries, drawings, files, are put into foway and so on, depending on cus, may explain almost everything or almost nothing. It is all too argu easy to throw a set of c1icMs together of rendering Ong's ment about the Greek alphabet ( 1 9 80), or Walter ing method ( 1 97 1 ), all the way to the double-entry bookobsession with through without forgetting the Bible. Everyone agrees that but how much and writing are everywhere abilities cognitive many burden can they carry? How them? by not only facilitated , but thoroughly explained a sinking feeling that through this literature , I down in an old new firm on y we are alternatel that we know so firmly focus to way I want to find a from our deflating what to in which situations we this focus, first we must To and imaging procedures to expect changes in the any difference at all in the way we argue, prove, and believe. will, depending on the Without this preliminary step, weight. little too or context, be granted either too much to consider all the wish not Unlike L eroi-Gourhan ( 1 9 64) we with primitive man and history on writing and visual now on, we will be interending up with modern computers. writing and imaging. To in s invention specific few a only in closely at the construcmore to this specificity we have harder facts.] Who will win in an agonistic encounter between two authors and between them and all the they to build up a statement the one able to muster on the the largest number of victory is com definition llies. a faithful of well aligned and to science and show, nOW shall I mon to war, politics, law, cannot imaging and technology. My contention is that our scientific societies, "'A....... I"· themselves explain the

24 insofar as they help to make this agonistic situation more favorabie. 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 presen tation, 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 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 cliches 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 eyepieces 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 Perouse travels through the Pacific for Louis XV I with the explicit mission of bring ing back a better map. One day, landing on what he calls Sakhalin, he meets with Chinese and tries to learn from them whether Sak halin 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 Perouse.Another, who is younger, sees that the ris ing tide will soon erase the map and picks up one of La Perouse'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 closed and open pre dicaments (Horton, 1 977 ), nor primary and secondary theories (Horton, 1 9 82 ), nor divisions between implicit and explicit, or con crete and abstract geography. The Chinese are quite able to think in of a map but also to talk about navigation on an equal footing with La Perouse. Strictly speaking, the ability to draw 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,

25 cannot be, because La Perouse does something that is going to cre ate 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 gen erate many maps at will, being born on this island and fated to die on it. La Perouse 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 ing 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 Perouse's ex clusive interest in traces and inscriptions will be impossible to un derstand-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 as long as one does not take into Mercator's projection, marine clocks and their mak ers, copper engraving of maps, rutters, the keeping of "log books," and the many printed editions of Cook's voyages that La Perouse 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 dif ference whatsoever if they did not help to muster, align, and win over new and unexpected allies, far away in Versailles. The prac tices 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 counterpro ductive. To maintain only the second line of argument would offer a mystical view of the powers provided by semiotic material-as did Derrida (1 9 67 ) ; to maintain only the first would be to offer an idealist explanation (even if clad in materialist clothes).

26 The aim of paper is to pursue the two an�:umient at once. To say it in other words, we do not find all eXlplanat,ioflS in of inscription equally convincing, but only mobilization and us to understand how sources is achieved. We do not find all eXlplanaltlOI[lS social groups, or economic trends, " only those that a mechanism to sum up "interests," " and "trends": mechanisms which we bemanipulation of paper, print, lieve, depend upon on. La us the way since without new of scriptions nothing usable would have come back to Versailles from his long, costly, voyage; but without this "f ... .,... """ .."l"".VU that required him to go away and to come back so that in might be convinced, no modification in inscription would have made a bit The essential characteristics of inscriptions cannot be
2. On immutable mobiles It seems to me most ",-,'H•.<1' who have worked on the between inscription ",..""..,rln""" and cognition, have, in fact, in various ways, writing about the history of these immutable mobiles.

27 2.1 Optical

rnlrl,
Ivins I will review is one of the most wrote it years ago and saw it all in a few pages. The rationalization that took place during the so-called "scientific rev olution" is not of the mind, of the eye, of philosophy, but of the sight. Why is perspective such an important invention? "Because all the of internal invariances of its logical (Ivins, transformations produced by changes in spatial 1973:9).In linear perspective, no matter from what distance and angle an object is seen, it is always possible to translate to obtain the same object at a size as seen from another position. course of this translation, erties have not modified. This immutability figure to a second crucial picture moves without it is possible to establish, in the what he calls a "two-way" rel:'ltlcmsltllD Ivins shows us how tween and movement through space with, so to speak, a return ticket. You can and carry it with you in London in such a see a church in way as to reconstruct it in London, or you can go back to Rome With perspective exactly as with La and amend the ouse's the same reasons-a new set of movements are made you can go out of your way and come back with these are all written in the same homoall the places you allows geneous (longitude and latitude, you to to make them presentable, them at will.4 is an essential determinant of �,..i,"... technology because it creates "optical consistency," or, in simpler , a avenue through space. Without it the exas their forms for visual awareness, terior relations of in locations, or else their interior change with their do" (1973:9). The shift from the other senses to vision is a consequence of the one situation. You present absent can smell or 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 are talking to one another, feeling, hearing and touching each but they are now talking with r'A

29

28 many absent things presented all at once. This presence/absence is possible through

two-way connection established by

many contrivances-perspective, projection, map, logbook, etc. that allow translation without cOlrrupti�:m. There is another advantage of linear perspective to which he and

(1976).

attract our

are drawn with the same perspective as that which is used for ren dering nature (Edgerton, 1980:189). In the

even if

subject

tific, the printed

the printed text were

always

a rational based on the universal laws of geometry. In this sense the Scientific Revolution owes more to than to Leon

ardo da Vinci. (1980: 190) [l0I1-eve:n the ture-even

or the most sacred-and

na-

lowliest-have a

ground, a common place, because they all benefit from the same "optical consistency. "$ only can you displace cities, landscapes, or natives and go back forth to and from

along avenues through space,

as nature, with all the elements made so homogeneous in space that it is now possible to reshuffle them like a pack of ing on the painting "S1. Jerome in his study," Edgerton says:

as soon as religious or mythological themes and

is

stage, on paper, hybrids can be created that mix drawings At it pro from many sources. Perspective is not interesting pictures; on the other hand, it is interesting because vides nature seen as fiction, and fiction seen it creates complete

you can

also reach saints, gods, heavens, palaces, or dreams with the same two-way avenues and look at through same "window pane" on the same two-dimensional surface. The two ways become a freeway! Impossible palaces can be drawn realistically,

is the perfect paradigm of a new con world attained by Western European physical the sciousness of This fifteenth intellectuals by the such as Leonardo da Vinci, showed especially by Antonello's St.

Hans Holbein cesco di Giorgio Martini, Albrecht more, aH of whom . . . had even developed a sophisticated for quantifying natural phenomena in pic grammar and tures. In their hands, picture making was becoming a pictorial

could communicate more informamore quickly and by (sic) a potentially wider audience than any verbal language in human history. (1980: language that, with

argument I presented in illustrates the double line are crucial but only graphism in Innovations the previous insofar as they allow new two-way relations to be established with t"f"lr<;:n,p.("TIVf"

objects (from nature or from inscriptions

to

and only

but it is also were uto- to draw possible objects as if pian ones. For instance, as Edgerton shows, when he comments on drawn in separated objects can prints, or in exploded views, or added to the same sheet of paper at different

2.2 Visual culture

angles and perspectives. It

not matter since the "optito mix with one another.

Oddly enough, perspective and supply geometric stability to pictures, also allow the viewer a momen tary suspension of his dependence on the law gravity. With a little the viewer can imagine volumes ....."".. "..,:. freely in space as detached components of a device. (Edgerton,

193)

Italian perspective described by lvins more striking than and Edgerton, is the Dutch "distance point" method for drawing been beautifully explained by Svetlana Alpers as it (1983). The Dutch, she tells us, do not paint grandiose historical

win scenes as observed by someone through a carefully the as (taken paintings their of surface very dowpane. They use on straight painted be world a retina) to let the equivalent are captured in this way there is no privileged site for When the onlooker any more.

As

says, the "mind" has at last "an eye".

allow

more mobile or to stay immutable

through all their displacements.

cal consistency" allows aH

as

tricks of the camera obscura transform

31

30 large-scale three-dimensional objects into a two-dimensional around which the may turn at will. 6 The main interest of Alpers' book for our purpose is the way she shows a "visual culture" over time. She does not on the inscriptions or the pictures but on simultaneous trans formation art, theory of vision, organization of crafts economic powers. talk of "worldviews, " 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 is to see. A citation of Comenius aptly a new um;es�aon anew: We will now speak of in which objects must sented to the senses, if the impression is to be distinct. be readily understood if we consider the process of actual If the object is to be seen It IS (I) it placed the eyes; (2) not far off, but at a reasonable tance; (3) not on one side. straight before the eyes; and (4) so that the front the objects not turned from, but UWC\';U�CI towards, the observer; (5) the eyes first take in the a whole; (6) and then proceed to distinguish parts; (7) mspeClthese in from the to (8) that be paid to and every part; (9) until they are all grasped by means of their essential attributes. If these requisites be properly observed, takes place successfully; but if one be its success is only partial. (cited in AJpers, 1983:95) This new for defining the act is to be both in the of the in modern laboratories. enius' advice is similar to both that of Boyle when he disciplined the witnesses his air-pump experiment (Shapin, 1984) and the neurologists studied by when "disciplined" cells (Lynch, 1985a). before and outside labocertainly use their eyes, but not in way. They Jook at t?e spectacle the world, but not at this new type of image signed to transport the objects of the world, to accumulate Holland, to them with and legends, to combine at will. Alpers makes understandable what Foucault (1966) on�y

how the same eyes suddenly to look at "representations. " "panopticon" she describes is afait social total that redefines all aspects of the culture. More importantly, Alpers does or the not explain a new vision by bringing in "social that renew "economic infrastructure." is art, at once what is science, sults in a worldview a little my use To economy. world a and what it is to have inven crucial few a lowland country becomes powerful by making to enhance mobility tions which allow people to accelerate up in the immutability of inscriptions: the world is thus country. this visual culture reaches the same reAlpers' description of place drawings: a new technical of study sult as is itself map The images. is designed for fact and fiction, words ethnoto but the more so when it is used such a V), or captions her chapter graphic inventories and so on. The main quality of the new space is skylines claims, "objective, " as a naIve definition of realism not to the entails y consistenc y. consistenc but rather to have optical from one of art of describing everything and the possibility lettrace to another. Thus, we are not surprised type of ilwords, perspectives, lenses, ters, come s telescope and pes, microsco books. S lustrated children' "to setogether in this visual culture. All innovations are other in done cretly see and without suspicion what is places" (cited in Alpers, 1983:201).

2.3 A new way of accumulating time and space will demonstrate that inscriptions are not interAnother or either esting per se but only because they on the immutability of traces. The invention of print and technology is a cliche of historians. But no one has science renewed this Renaissance argument as completely as Elizabeth she considers the printing press Eisenstein (1979). Why? makes a device to be a mobilization Eitime. at the same both

32

33

a secondary cause that would put all the efficient causes in re lation with one another. The printing press is obviou sly a powerful cause that sort. Immutability is by the process ing many identical copies; mobility by the numbe r of paper, the movable type. The links between places in and space are completely modified by this fantas tic acceleration of immutable mobiles which circulate in all lions in Europe. As Ivins has shown, plus the printing press plus aqua forte is the really important combination since books can now carry with them the realistic images what they talk about. For the first time, a location can accumulate other synoptically

to the eye; better still, synoptic once reworked, amended, or disrupted, can be spread with no modifi cation to places and available at other After discussing historians who propose many contra dictory inUU'I;;U\,CI> to explain the of astronomy, Eisensle n

l

Whether the sixteenth-century astronomer confro nted materials derived from fourth century B.C. or composed in the fourteenth A. D. , or whether was more to scholastic or humanist currents of thoughts, seems of signifin particular than the fact that a] l manners diverse materials were 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 the inherent data. (1979:602) Constantly, the author shifts attention with devast ating irony from mind to the surface the mobilized resources: " To discover the truth of a proposition in Euclid ," wrote John Locke, is need or use revelation, God nished us with a natural and surer means to arrive at of them:' In the eleventh century, however, God had not furWestern scholars with a natural and sure means or grasp a EucHdean theorem. Instead the most learne d men in Christendom in a fruitless search to what Euclid meant referring to interior angles. (l979:64

9)

the SeI1lsH:m. every grand question about the Revolution, and new Capitalist economy can be recast by looking at what the publisher and the printing press r:na e on ne hfe m possible. The reason why this old explanation

�

�

her treatment is that Eisenstein not only focuses on graphlsm, but I.;WlLII!'>';;1> in the graphism that are linked to the mobilization

1953) instance, she explains (p. 508 ff. following of duction jntr the between time a the puzzling phenomenon At pictures . beginning of exact printing press and . . herbanes, anatomical simply to first, the press is

�

?

cosmologies that are centuries ol and much later. If we were lookmg only at the inaccurate be deemed seem puzzling, but once we ",,..,,.,..t,,,, level this phenomenon plates, maps,

displace consider the deeper structure this is easily explained. the old texts are ment of many immutable mobiles comes can be gathered more cheaply in one spread everywhere . m But then the contradiction between them at last becomes

where these texts are synthe most literal sense. The many offer many counterexamples (different optically the coastdifferent organs with different names, different shapes laws). These the various rates of different currencies, added to the old texts and, in turn, are counterexamples can settings where this prospread without modification to all the words, errors are other resumed. may be cess of accurately reproduced and spread with no changes. But and with no further changes. are reproduced fast, at the end, the accuracy

from the medium to

.

message,

context with which it establishes a twonot come from a in " Truth" interest new A way connection. new vision, but from the same old applying itself to new

from the printed book to

objects that mobilize space The

of Eisenstein's

differently.7 is to transform

ex-

and again immutable mobiles. planations into the history . . mtellectual possIble every print of advent before that she shows scientific method, feat had been achieved-organized refutation ' data collection, theory making-everything had tried, and in all disciplines: geography, cosmology, medicine, dy

namics, politicS, economics, and so on. But each achievement stayed local

temporary just because there was no way to move

35

34 their results elsewhere and to bring in those others without new corruptions or errors being introduced. For instance, each carefully

amended version of an old author was, after a few again adulterated. No irreversible gains could be made, and so no large scale long-term capitalization was possible. The printing press does not to the to method, to the 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

old ones, but they now look at new material that

keeps track of numerous places and times. No matter how inaccurate these traces at first, they will all become h�" n_h'� as a consequence of more mobilization and more immutability. A mechanism is invented to irreversibly capture accuracy. Print plays the same

as Maxwell's demon. No new theory, worldview, or

spirit is necessary to explain capitalism, the reformation, and sci ence: they are the result

a new step in the long history

im

mutable mobiles. up Ivins' argument, both Mukedi (1983) focus

again

on

the

illustrated

book.

For

Eisenstein these

authors,

revolution had already happened as soon as were printed.

botany, architecture, mathematics, none of these sciences can describe what they talk about with texts alone; need to show the But showing, so eS!ien.t.al

to convince, was utterly impossible before the invention of "graven images." A text could be copied with only some adulteration, not so a an plate, or a map. The effect on the construction of facts is sizable if a writer is able to provide a reader with a text that presents a large number

the

it is talking

about in one place. If you suppose that all readers and the writers are doing the same, a new world will emerge from the old one without any additional cause. Simply because the dissen

ter will have to do the same thing as his opponent. In order to "doubt back," so to he will have to write another have it printed, and mobilize with copper plates the counterexamples he wants to oppose. The cost of disagreeing will Positive will under way as soon as one is to muster a number of mobile, readable, visible resources at one

)

spot to a point. After Tycho Brahe's achievement what cos stein, 1979) the dissenter either has to quit and oofs by counterpr produce to or hard mologists say as a in money of amount le comparab a persuading his prince to invest

observatories. In this, the "proof race" is similar to the arms race one competitor because the mechanism is the same. starts building up harder facts, the others have to do the same or else submit.

argument in of immutmobiles may allow us to overcome a difficulty in her argument. she publishers' stresses the importance Although The lves. innovations themse does not for the This

recasting of

the exogeneous her printing press barges l innovations. She technica about talk they when s of many historian tion it allows into mobiliza the and print puts the semiotic aspect of the press inventing es excellent focus, but the technical necessiti

agonistic situation I use as are far from obvious. If we consider reference point, the pressure that favors something like the printing mobility of the Anything that will accelerate press is

or anything traces that a location may obtain about another ation from transform without that will allow these traces to move , perprojection , favored: geometry to another, will one , making, aqua forte, coinage new spective, bookkeeping,

printing press comes from ships (Law, 1986). The privilege of at once, but it is only one act to ns innovatio many its ability to help this simplest of aB answer to help innovation among the many that is useful scale? This questions: how to dominate on a

of since it helps us to see that the same mechanism, the effects which are described by Eisenstein, is still at work today. on an everand technology. A few scale at the frontiers of

days in a laboratory reveal that the same trends that made the print new ing press so necessary, still act to produce new data scan ne s, space telescopes, new chromatographies, new equation mind is still being domesticated. ners, new questionnaires, etc.

v:'

3. On inscriptions s What is so important in the images and in the inscriptions scientist ting, drawing, inspecting, calcula are busy and

36 and discussing? It is, first of all, the unique advantage they give in the rhetorical or polemical situation. "You doubt 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 overes timated. Eisenstein has shown it for the past of science, but eth nography 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, bands.9 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 in creased. As Dagognet has shown in two excellent books, no scien tific 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 be comes chemistry only when all the substances can be written in a homogeneous language where everything is simultaneously pre sented to the eye. The writing of words inside a classification are not enough. Chemistry becomes powerful only when a visual vo cabulary 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 com binations unfold completely and directly from their positions in the tab� e" ( � 969:213). After having carefully analyzed the many inno vations m chemical writing and drawings, he adds this little sen tence so close to Goody's outlook:

I� mi?ht seem that we consider trivial details-a slight modifica tion In the plane used to write a chlorine-but, paradoxically, . these lIttle details trigger the forces of the modern world. (1 969:p. 199)

37 study of clinical medicine, Michel Foucault, in his well-known from small-scale practice to a has shown the same transformation ). The same medical mind large-scale manipulation of records (1963 if applied to the bellies, wiIl generate totally different knowledge essive patients, or if applied fevers, throats, and skins of a few succ en bellies, fevers, throats, to well-kept records of hundreds of writt and all synoptically present. and skins, all coded in the same way in the mind, or in the eye of Medicine does not become scientific of old eyes and old minds to its practitioners, but in the application ns, the hospitaL But it is in new fact sheets inside new institutio s demonstration is clos Discipline and Punish (1975) that Foucault' main purpose of the book is to est to the study of inscriptions. The h is seen by invisible onlook illustrate the shift from a pow er whic everything about everyone. ers, to a new invisible power that sees ysis is not to focus only on The main advantage of Foucault's anal and drill , but also on the sort files, ing books, time tables, ons end up being 'so essen of institutions in which these inscripti a "panopticon" which allows tial.lO The main innovation is that of clinical medicine to emerge as penology, pedagogy, psychiatry, and fully kept files. The panopticon full-fledged sciences from their care ical consistency" necessary for is another way of obtaining the "opt power on a large scale. that "we shall be rendering a In a famous sentence, Kant asserts in discovering the path upon service to reason should we succeed "sure path of a science," how which it can securely travel." The tion of well-kept files in institu ever, is, inevitably, in the construc number of resources on a larger tions that want to mobilize a larger scale. in geology, as Rudwick has "Optical consistency" is obtained al language. Without it, the shown (1976), by inventing a new visu no matter how many travellers layers of the earth stay hidden and way to sum up their travels, and diggers move around there is no can revolution, dear to Kant's visions, and claims. The Coperni very simple mechanism: if we heart, is an idealist rendering of a come to us, or, more accurately, cannot go to the earth, let the earth earth, and come back with the let us all go to many places on the res, that can be gathered, com same but different homogenous pictu in a few places, together with pared, superimposed, and redrawn rocks and fossils. the carefully labelled specimens of

38

In a

book, Fourquet (1980) has the same for INSEE, the French institution that pro. vides most statistics. It is of course to talk about the economy of a nation by looking at "it." invisible, as as of enquirers and mS'De.;;tors filled in long questionnaires, as long as the answers have not punched onto by computers, analyzed in laboratory. Only at end can the economy be made piles of and lists. Even this is still too confusing, so that redrawing is necessary to provide a few neat grams that show the Gross National Product or the of ments. panopticon thus achieved is similar in structure to a gigantic instrument transforming the invisible world �hanges into "the economy." This is why, at the beginning, I reJected the explanation that uses or "markets" or to for 101.;11t=IU::� nology. visual construction of something like a "market" or an "economy" is what explanation, and this cannot be used to for SC14�nce. In another Fabian tries to for anthropology by craftsmanship of visualization (1983). main us and the savages, he argues, is not in the culture, in the mind, or in the brain, but in the way we them. All asymmetry is created because we create a space a time in which we 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 ours; we list their past, but they we build written but they do not. Fabian's argument, related to Goody's and also to Bourdieu's critique of ethnography (1972), is that once violence has been no mat ter what we do, we will not understand the savages any more. Fabian however, sees mobilization of all savages in a through collection, making, archives, IinJguisti(;s as something evil. With candor, he wishes to find another way to "know" savages. But "knowing" is not a tive activity; harder about the other cultures have been produced in our in the same way as other facts about ballistics, taxonomy or One place gathers in all the others

39

so as to modify the synoptically to the and number of comencounter. To make a outcome of an compatriots depart from their usual ways, many eththeir usual had to go further and longer out by convincing then come back. The constraints out and coming back, are such that this can be only if everything about the savage life is transformed into immutable mobiles that are easily readable and presentable. In spite would either cannot do better. Otherwise, of his wishes, have to 1987).

up "knowing" or give up making hard

is no detectable difference between natural and social If ""'.·... u•• ,"''' for graphism is ence, as far as were looking at nature, at economies, at stars, at organs, as a is "evidence," so to would not see 1969). "n."',,,e rE>.nnTtl'll to naIve versions of empiricism at nature something once they stop �ClenlIS'[S start and look exclusively and obsessively at prints and flat forgotten around perception, what is lions.n I n obdrift from watching confusing is this which images al two-dimension jects, to inspecting less confusing. Lynch, like all laboratory extraordinary obsession of scientists with papers, struck by abstracts and curves on graph paper. No prints, diagrams, of talk about, they start talking with some matter what believed by colleagues, only once two-dimensional shapes. The "oltljel;;t s laboratories. Hlf:edm2 is a dispatched. What is extracted from and latextraction, like the few from the Chinese by La Perouse, is all that counts. can be said about the rats, but a great (1981) and Star (Latour and Wooigar, 1979). as if shown the simplification procedures at (1983) have the images were never simple enough for the controversy to be setto there is a dispute, great pains are tled quickly. a new instrument of visualization. find, or sometimes to accelerate the readings, and, as which will enhance the

41

40 Lynch has shown, conspire with the visual characteristics things

lines, stars

to diagrams on paper

lend

which are

the

points, well-aligned cells,

Again, the

focus should be carefully set,

the inscription

It IS not

itself that should carry the burden of explaining

the power of science; it is the inscription

as the fine edge and of a whole process of mobilization, that modifies scale of the rhetoric. Without the displacement, the inscription is worthless; without the inscription the displacement is This

final

to paper but paper always ap-

is why mobilization is not pears at the end when the

of this mobilization is to be in-

samples, Collections of rocks, artifacts, gene banks, are the first to be moved around (Star and Griessemer, 1989). What counts is

arraying

resources (biographies of naturalists,

mustering of

instance, are replete with

anecdotes about crates, archives and specimens), but this arraying is never simple enough. Collections are are

but only

th.e

and the

the labels are in

do not decay.Even

is not enough, since a museum collection is still too much for one "mind" to handle. So the collection will

drawn, recorded, and this process will take place as long as more combinable geometrized forms not been obtained the

(continuing the process through which

had been extracted from

spec-

contexts),

phenomenon we are the

is not per se, of ever simplified inscriptions that allow harder at greater cost. For

the description of hu-

man fossils which used to be through drawings, is now made by superimposing a number of mechanical diagrams on the drawings. photographs of the skies, although they produce neat little

spots, are still much too rich and confusing for a human eye to at; so a computer and a laser eye have been to read the photographs, so that astronomer never looks at the sky (too costly), nor even at the photographs (too confusing). taxonomy of plants is contained in a famous of books at Kew Gar den, but the manipUlation of book is as difficult as that of the old manuscripts it exists in only one another com puter is now being instructed to try to read the many different

of this book and provide as many

versions as possible of the

taxonomic inventory.

case of accumulation of such traces, Pinch (1985) shows a each layer being deposited on the former one only when confidence the astrophysicists "see" the is stabilized. its from the sun or any of the intermediary "blurs,"

"peaks," and "spots" that compose, by accumulation, the phenom seen? Again, we see that the mechanisms studied by enon to press are still with us today at any of the Eisenstein for the

a text to For instance, baboon ethology narrator the in prose in w hich the narrator talked about animals; had to include in the text what he or she had seen first as

frontiers of

and

a statistical rendering of the events; but with an articles now competition for the construction of harder facts,

the cascade more layers of graphic display, s is still equation and diagrams, of columns summarized by chromatography was read, a few unfolding. In molecular

include more

gray; the interpretation years ago, by bands of different shades a text is eventually , computer by done now is shades of these CGc. ... " Al ATGCGTI .. computer: the of obtained straight out many different in made be though more empirical studies should a trend in

fields,

seems to

move on

direction of the greater

They always

of figures, numbers, letters, which is greatly facilitated by their homogeneou s treatin and by computers. ment as binary simpler inscriptions that mobilize trend toward simpler

cannot be larger and larger numbers of events in one agonistic model that we use as our point from stood if of reference. It is as necessary as the race for digging trenches on his the front in 1914. He who visualizes badly loses the

does not hold. Knorr has criticised this argument by taking an ethnomethodological standpoint (981). She argues, and rightly so, that an image, a diagram, cannot convince anyone, both oe(:au:se there are always many interpretations possible, and, above all, cause the sees the power of

does not force the dissenter to look at it . She in inscription devices as an exaggeration of the one at that!). But such a position (and a

the point of my argument. It is

because

dissen-

43

42 ter can always escape and try out another interpretation , that so much energy and time is devoted by scientists to corner h i m and surround him with ever more dramatic visual effects . Although in principle any interpretation can be opposed to any text and in practice this is far from being the case ; the cost of dissenting new

with each new collection, each new

redrawing. This is e special l y true if the phenomena we are asked to believe are invisible to the naked eye; quasars, c hromosome s , brain peptides, leptons, gross national products, classe s , and coastlines are never seen but through the "clothed " eye of inscription devices. one more inscription, one more trick to enhance contrast, one simple device to decrease background, or one coloring proce dure

be enough, all things

equal, t o swing

balance

of power and turn an incredible statement into a credible one that would then

ed along without further modification.

im

portance of this cascade of inscriptions may be ignore d when study ing events in daily

but it cannot be overestimated when

science and technology. it is possible to

the inscription, but

setting in which the cascade of ever more written and num is produced . What we are really dealing with is the s taging of a scenography in which attention is

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, 1 988a). Pasteur works as on the scene and the plot. What counts at

as much on the the

is a simple visual perception: dead unvaccinated sheep ver

s u s alive

sheep. The earlier we go back i n the history of

science , the more attention we see being paid to to

Boyle,

instance,

setting and the the ...,,'''' .. ,.''' '-

ing of his vacuum pump experiment described by Shapin ( 1 984), had to invent not onl y the phenomenon, but the instrument to make it visible , the

which the instrument was displayed,

the written and printed s through which the silent could onto the

"about" the experiment, the type of witnesses itted and even the types of commentaries the potential

witnesses were allowed to utter. " Seeing the vacuum" was possible onl y once all

witnesses had been disciplined.

deis the one The staging of such "optical and another scribes: a few persons in the same room talk to one is to point out two-dim ensiona l picture s ; these pictures are all there about which they talk. Just because we are u sed see of the and breathe it like fresh air, does not mean that we to most should not describe all the little innovati ons that make it the burg, Oranien n i Brahe, powerful device to achieve power. Tycho predictions had before his eyes for the first time in history all nts; at " pre visions" --{)f the planetar y moveme that is l iterally read same place , written in the same language or code , he can to enough than more s i This his own observations. Brahe' s new " insight . " It was not because he gazed a t night skies instead o f a t old books Nor do I that Tycho B rahe d iffered from star-gazers of the he cared more for " stubborn facts" and prethink it was measurement than had the Alexand rians or the Arab s . But him, two separate he did have at his disposal , as few had , compile d theories sets of computations based on two different several centurie s apart which he could compare with each other. (Eisenstein , 1979:624) is the first to look at planetary motion, with H istorians say that a mind freed of the prejudic es of the darker ages. No, says e stein, he is the first not to look at the sky, but to look simultan down his own , written the former predicti ons ously to to,!etller in the same naked eye Danish observer was not only the last of the took full who r observe rs; he was also the first careful observe en which press-powers the new powers of advantage pinpoin t abled astronomers to detect anomal ies in old records , to

star, more precisel y and in catalogs the location of each tion observa fresh each fix , regions to enlist collaborators in many ive success in ions correct and make necessary in perman ent editions. ( 1979:625) The discrepancies proliferate, not by looking at the

but by

carefully superimposing columns of angles and azimuths. N o con-

45

44 tradiction or counter predictions could ever have been Contradiction, as Goody says, is neither a of the mind, nor of the scientific method, but is a property of letters and signs new that on alone.

The same mechanism is visible, to draw an example from a dif ferent time and place, in Roger vision of a brain peptide. brain is as obscure as messy as Renais sance sky. Even the many first-level purifications of brain extracts

nrc,v ulP a "soup" of The whole research is to get peaks that are clearly readable out of a confused background. of the which a neater is in turn purified until there is only one peak on little window a pressure l i quid chromatograph. Then the substance is injected in minute

quantities into

The contractions of the are hooked up, through electronic hardware, to a physiograph. What i s a t hand t o see the "endorphi ne" ? superimpo sition of the first peak with the in the physiograph starts to produce

an object whose limits are the visual inscriptio ns produced in the lab. The object is a real object no more and no less any other since many such visual layers can be produced. Its resistance as fact depends only on number of layers that l emin's can mobilize all at once in one front of the dis-

�

senter. each "objectio n" there is an inscriptio n that blocks the dissent; soon, the dissenter is to quit the game or to come back later with other and visual displays. Objectivit y is erected

the laboratory

ful allies.

by mobilizing more

2. They are immutable when they move, or at least everything is to obtain this result: specimens are chloroformed, "''Uf'' rr. '''' t> gelatin, even exploding stars are rf>("nr(1p,cI are stuck

_V''''''' _ v

on graph paper in each phase of their explosion.

3, They are made flat,

is nothing you can dominate as easof a few square meters; there is nothing hidden or convoluted, no shadows, no "double entendre. " In politics as i n science, when someone i s said to a question or to ily as a

a subject, you should normally look for the flat mastery (a map, a list, a file, a census, the wall of a gallery, a card-index, a repertory) and you wil l find it. 4. scale of the inscriptions may be modified at will, without _ ..�'".�'''

any change in their internal proportions, Observers never insist on this simple

no matter what

nomena, they all same average size. are

than nanometer-sized chromosomes; international of oil than mesons; scale

neries end up having the same oms. Confusion resumes outside a

we

why it is so

only with phenomena that can be dominated with the eyes and by hands, no matter when and where they come

at little cost, so that all

5. They can

this

�

or Guillemin to work on two-dimensional inscri tions instead sky, the health, or brain? What can they do with the first that you cannot do with the second? Let me a few of the advantages "paperwork. " of

l . Inscripti ons are mobile, as I indicated for La Perouse's case.

Chinese, planets ,

of maps, photographic plates, and Petri

move;

nO'WE 'IIE r

or what their

original in

i n space can This is " Eisenstein's effect. "

these inscriptions are mobile, flat, reproducible, scales, they can be reshuffled and recombined. Most

and of of what we impute to for Brahe

most

no one else

and

the "superiority" of

the instants of

inscriptions to mobilize allies

as plastic models of atsquare meters. This trivial but it is the cause

change of scale seems innocuous

6. �"jl"''''' ''''''''6

phereach they when up being studied only of galaxies are never bigger, when

trade is never much

another time and

4.

(reconstructed)

in the mind may be explained by

of inscriptions that all have the same

sistency. " The same is true of what we call "metaphor" and Woolgar, 1979, chap. 4; Goody, 1977 ; Hughes,

1982). 7. One aspect of these recombinations is that it is possible to superimpose several images

totally different

and scales.

and economics seems an IlUj-'V:!>:!>lUJII;; link the commodity perimpose a geological map with the printout requires good documenmarket at the New York Stock

47

46 Most of what we call " structure ,"

talion and takes a few

"pattern , " "theory, " and "abstraction " are consequences of the se

advantage of inscriptions, or the surplus-value that is gained through their capitalization.

superimpositions (Bertin , 1 973) . "Thinking is hand-work , " as H ei degger said, but what is i n the hands are inscriptions. theories of savages are an

of card indexing at the College

de , exactly as Ramist's method i s , for Ong, an artifact of at the Sorbonne ; or

prints

taxonomy a re-

sult of the bookkeeping undertaken , among other places, at Kew Gardens. 8. But one of the most important advantages is that the lion can, after only little cleaning up, be made part of a written text . I have

elsewhere at

this common ground in which

inscriptions coming from instruments merge with already published texts and

new texts in

This

of

texts has been demonstrated by Ivins and Eisenstein for the past . A present-day laboratory may still

defined as the unique

a text is made to comment on

which are all

ill

it. Because the comme ntary, earlier texts (through citations and ref erences), and "things" have the same optical consistency and same semiotic homogeneity, an extraordinary degree of certainty is achieved by writing and reading

articles (Latour and

1 985 ; Lynch, 1 985a; Law, 1983). The text is not simply "illus trated, " it carries all there is to see in what it writes about. Through the laboratory,

text and the spectacle of

world

up

same character. 9. But the last advantage is the greatest . The two-dimensional of inscriptions allow them to merge with geometry. As we saw for perspective, space on paper can be continuous with th !ee-dimensional space. !,he i s that we can work o n paper

With rulers and numbers, but still manipulate three-dimensional ob jects "out there" (lvins, 1 973). Better stil l , because of this optical consistency, everything, no matter it comes from , can be converted into diagrams and numbers, and combinations of Demand tables can

used which are still

to handle than

words or silhouettes (Dagognet, 1 973). You cannot measure the sun , but you can measure a photograph

the sun with a ruler. Then th e

number of centimeters read can easily migrate through d ifferent scales, and provide solar masses for completely different object s . This is what I call , for want o f a better term, the

nine advantages should not be isolated

one another

and should always be seen in conjunct ion with the mobilization p ro cess they accelerate and summari ze. I n other word s , every possible

by innovatio n that offers any of these advantages will be color to dyes new phs, photogra new s: engineer and eager scientists paper, a more sensitive physio more cel l CUltures, new graph , a new indexing system for l ibrarians , a new notation for al

specimen s longer. gebraic function, a new heating system to role innovatio ns. is the history of H istory of as has been that of percepthe mind has been vastly an average man , wit h the or average An . 969) 1 , tion (Arnheim

same perceptual abilities, within normal social condition s , will gen erate totally different output dependin g on whether his or her av erage skills apply to the confusin g world or to i nscriptio ns. It is especiall y interestin g to focus on the ninth advantage ,

cause it gives u s a way to make "formalis m" a more mundane and go from " empirica l" to "theoreti cal" a more material reality. sciences is to go from slower to faster mobiles , from more mutable trends we studied above do not mutable inscriptio ns. to

break down when we look at formalism but , on the contrary, in formalism is the acceler crease fantastica lly. Indeed, what we To grasp this point, ation. transform without ent ation of displacem of many resource s tion mobiliza The 2. let us go back to section

scale. through space and time is essential for dominat ion on a take to ion these objects that allow this mobilizat I proposed to these argued that the best of place " immutab le mobiles. " I d , or optically consiste nt numbere written, with do to had mobiles

But I al so indicated , though without offering an ex ever more simplified with cascades planation , that we had to now to cascade a and costlier inscriptio ns. This ability to s written and imaged resource in one be explained because paper

place, even with two-way connections, does not by itself guarantee my superiority for the one who gathers them. Why? Because the traces is immedia tely swamped in them. I s howed gatherer of a such a phenome non at work in Guillemi n's laboratory ; after only few days of letting the instrume nts run , the

of printout were

49

48

enough to the (Latour and 1979, same thing happened to Darwin after a few years of collecting specimens with the Beagle; were so many crates was almost squeezed out of his house. So by themselves inscriptions do not help a location to become a center that dominates the rest of the world. Something to be done to the inscriptions which is similar to what the inscriptions do to the "things," so that at the on a vast can manipulate all the end a The same deflating strategy we used to show how "things" were how paper is turned into less paper. turned into paper, can Let us as example "the effectiveness of Galileo's work" as it is seen by Drake (1970). Drake does indeed use the word formal ism to designate what Galileo is able to do that 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 Stevin. Interestingly, in Jordan's onstration is, as you see, brought in as an afterthought to the geometry, by main force as it were" (1970, 103). diagram, this is the opposite: "The previous With situation is reversed; geometry is eliminated in favor of pure me chanical intuition" (1970, 103). So, what seems to happen is that Galileo's two predecessors could not visually .....''''JlJ'Uuvu,'..� problem on a paper surface and see the result simultaneously as both A in the geometry 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 merging geometry and physics apparent in his proof of the same theorem in his treatise on motion dating from ] 590. method suggested to him not only many corollaries but successive improvements of the proof itself of it. (Drake, 1970, 104) This ability to connect might located in Galileo's mind. In fact what gets connected are three different visual horizons held syn optically because the surface paper is considered as geometrical space:

you see how the entire demonstration constitutes a reduction of the problem of equilibrium on i nclined planes to lever, which in itself removes the theorem the isolation in which it stood 106) before. (Drake, 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 (and a "theory" is no more one. The holding allowed no less) than the holding of armies, or of stocks, or of positions efficiency explains space. It is fascinating to see that ical me geometr a of creation his of Galileo's connection in more much a is This merge. geometry and physics dium is mat" although material explanation than Koyre's idealist one, papers n o renderin g i s a certain type o f inscription ter" i n and

ways of looking at Similar tactics that use diagrams in order to establish rapid links problems are documented by cognitive between many of expsychologists. Herbert Simon (1982) compares ed question are drawing diagrams when they perts and so physical problems (pumps, water flows , about ce between experts and novices is exactly the differen The crucial same as that pointed out by Drake: in the expert behaviour was that the crucial thing that the formulation from the initial and the final condition was assema way that the relations between them and hence the in diagram]. answer could essentially be read off from it mon,

169).

With this question in �ind, one is struck by the metaphors "theo12 The two main sets use to celebrate rank of metaphors insist respectively upon increased mobility and in Good theories are opposed to bad ones or to "mere collections of empirical facts" because they access to them." Hankel, for instance, criticizes Diophanus in the Ni would use to denigrate words that a French civil highway'

so

Any requires a quite special method, which after will not serve even for the most closely allied problem s. It is on that difficult for a modern mathematician even after studying one hundred Diophantine solutions, to solve the 1 0 1 st problem' and if we have made the attempt, and some vain endeavour � read Diophantus' own solution, we shall be a�tonished to see how suddenly he leaves the broad dashes into a side path and with a quick turn reaches goal . . . (cited in Bloor, 1 976: 102) science, as Kant would say, is not the same for the Bororos and for us; are the systems of transportation identical. One could object that these are only metaphors. but the etymology of metaph oros is itself enlightening. Precisely, it means displacement, transportation, transfer. No matter if they are mere images, these metaphors aptly carry the obsession theoreticians for easy an d rapid communication. A more powerful theory, we is one that with fewer elements and fewer and simpler transformations makes it to at other theory a powerful theory is celebrated it is in of the most trivial power: holding allows me to hold all the is the problem we have encountered right through this paper: how to assemble many allies one (Latour, 1 988b). allow conscription.! A similar between ability to the practical work of resources without is seen in much of cognitive science. In Piaget's tests, for much fuss is made of water poured from a tall thin a short flat one. If the children say the water volume they are noncon serving� as any laboratory most of the p henomena upon measure to or to believe in case of discrepancy. The shift from nonconserving to conserving might not a modification in but a shift in indicators: the heigh t 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 exactly like Guillemin's endorphin is held between several from at least five different In other words, is his children " to do a laboratory experiment comparable in difficulty to that of th e

51

winner. I f any shift in thinking occurs, i t has average Nobel the mind, but with the manipulation of the labnothing to do oratory setting. Out of this setting no answer can be offered on volume. proof of this is that without industrially calibrated beakers himself would be totally to decide what is and Scribner, c hapter) . So again, a priori to "higher cognitive functions" might most and written with new calibrated, be concrete Piaget is obsessed with conservation and objects. M ore and Garcia, displacement through space without alteration 1 983). Thinking is tantamount to acquiring the ability to move as as possible. fast as possible while conserving as much of the What Piaget takes as the logic of the psyche, is the very logic of immutability which is so peculiar to our scientific mobilization to dominate on a want to produce hard societies, when such large scale. No wonder that all these "abilities" to move with schooling!13 a world get to an understanding of the matter that conWe now come stitutes point of departure is that we are constantly hesitating between several often contradictory indications from our senses. Most practice the belief we caU "abstraction" is that a written inscription must be believed more than any contrary indications from the senses. 14 Koyre, for instance, has shown that Galileo believed in the inertia principle on mathematical grounds even against the not only by the evidences offered to that Scriptures, but also by the senses. Koyre might to Galileo's Plalonist of the senses was with faced that means It it mean practically? be so. But Galileo, in the last believed falling bod Ulll,�Ul"!.l diagram for calculating the law falling bodies (Koyre, 1 966 : 1 47). When ies, than any other in doubt, believe the inscriptions, written in mathematical , no matter to what absurdities this might lead YOU , IS the reworking After Eisenstein's redefinition of "visual culture," argument, be easier: What is raphy of abstraction case a written, printed, mathematical form has ....." "t&... common sense, the senses other than of doubt, It is tradition, and even the vision, political obvious that of society is overdetermined since it can

52

S3

be found in the written (Clanchy, 1 979); in the biblical exe�llesis and in the history of geometry of the Holy 1 954; Derrida, 1 967; 1 980). Without this peculiar ten,(lellCV to privilege what is written, the power of inscription would tirely lost, as in his discussion of Chinese No matter how beautiful, r ich, precise, or realistic inscriptions may what they showed, if they could con be, no one would tradicted by other evidence of local, sensory origin or pronouncements of authorities. I feel that we would step forward if we could this peculiar feature of our ",UlllUI \;; the mobilization I have outlined several psychology and but is strange anthropological .. . a in schools} to manipulate array them in ""')'-'
�. �

S. Paperwork

There are two ways in which the visualization processes we are all i gnored ; one is to grant to the mind granted to the hands, to the eyes, to the exclusively on the signs qua UL,UI\J'U of which they are but making, equations, chives, instrumentation, argumentation , lected or depending on how they "'lUll .. . ..,,,., ,",, ,,,,,::>! either inscription or mobilization. This link is visible not not only in the (former) realm empirical also in many endeavors from which SClem:e duly ''''''''e""·,,,• .-I In a beautiful book, Booker retraces the history drawings ( 1 982). Linear perspective (see above) " changed of pictures from being just that of their projections onto planes" (p. 3 1 ). Bul < still on the observer 's position, so the objects could not

really be moved Monge's works

�''''' P '''''''�PC>

without corruption. Desargues 's and

view" or way of looking at the helped to mentally. In place of the imaginary of space-so difficult to were the basis of perspective at that allowed perspective to be seen 1 982:34) With descriptive geometry, the observer's position viewed and photographed from any or irrelevant. " It can is, distorted-and the result remains projected onto any still better Baynes and Push ( 1 98 1 ) in a true" (p. 35), 1 98 1 ) show how a few en�tine:ers splendid book could master enormous machines that did not yet exist. These feats without industrial drawings. Booker, I,.I U'JLUII/: cannot be of scale that allows the an dominate the many: drawn is like an ideal that costs and i s easier to but in a i s first well thought out, and or steel. . . . If sential dimensions determined by calculations or or installation of machines can be quickly a plan most thing as well as the detail can on paper and conveniently be submitted to the severest criticism . . . . If at is there is doubt as to which various possible most desirable then they are all sketched, compared with one the most suitable can easily be chosen. (Blool�er another 1 982, 1 87) not only create a paper world that can dimensions. It also creates a common inscriptions to come together; the on erance can for economic calculation, for defining the tasks to organizing the sales. Industrial

the utmost importance not only for But rtr",u",,, ,,,,, by means of them the measurements but also for eXlecllticm

and proportions of all the parts can be so sharply and definitely the beginning that when it comes to manufacdetermined ture it is only to materials used for conin struction exactly what is shown in the Every part of the machine can in general be manufactured possible to it is every other dependently tribute the work among a g reat number of ".�,-,,--No substantial errors can arise work organised in this manner and if it does happen that on a rare a been made it is immediately known with whom the blame (Booker, 1 982, 1 88) apart (mechanics, economics, Realms of reality that seem marketing, scientific org anization of work) are inches apart, once The accumulation of flattened out onto the same in an optically consistent space once "universal exchanger" that allows work to be planned, dispatched, and attributed. 16 responsibility to The connective quality of written traces is still more visible in most despised the me or the record. The "rationalization" g ranted to bureaucracy since Weber has been attributed by mistake to the "mind" of (Prussian) bureau crats. It is all the mes themselves. A bureau in many ways, and more and more every year, a small laboratory in many elements can together just because their scale nature been averaged out: texts, standards, payrolls, maps, surveys (ever since Norman conquest, as shown by Clanchy, 1 979). Economics , politics, sociology, hard ences, not come into grandiose entrance of "interdisciplinarity" but through the back door of the file. hard to study, but of bureaucracy is mysterious empirically studied, and which " bureau" is something explains , because of its why some power i s t o an domains which are far apart by looking at average mind become literally inches apart; domains which are hidden become flat; thousands of occurrences can be looked at syn optically. More importantly, once mes start being every where to ensure some two-way circulation of immutable HU" UIlt:S. they can arrayed in a cascade: files of files can be generated and

this proces s can be continued until a few men consider millions as Common sense ironically the palms of if they were makes fun of these "gratte-papiers" or "paper shufflers," and often but the same question is this " red wOlnd'ers what should be asked of the rest of science and technology. In our tures "paper shuffling" is the source of an essential power, that constantly escapes is ipnlorf�d its of Power ( 982), Pursuit The book McNeill, in his fundamental ability to distinguish Chinese bureaucracy from that of the uses accident. Accumulation of records and ideograms make Chinese Empire possible. But there is a major drawback with you cannot array them in a cascade in such a grams ; once way that thousands of records can be turned in one, that is literally So "punctualized" throug p geometrical or mathematical again, if we keep both the quality of the signs and the mobilization careful limits have process in focus, we may understand to the growth of the Chinese imperium. and why the put these limits to the mobilization of resources on a grand scale have the power that is to been broken in Europe. It is gained by concentrating files written in a homogeneous and com binable form (Wheeler, 1969; Clanchy, 1 979). is qua writer the bureaucrat qua role always misunderstood because w e take for g ranted that there exist, macro-actors that naturally dominate the somewhere in scene: Corporation, State, Productive Cultures, ism, "Mentalit6s," etc. Once accepted, these large entities are then a spects of "....,,<0 .....,.., used to explain (or to not explain) and technology. The problem is that these entities could not exist at all without the construction of long networks in which numerous which are, in in faithful turn, summarized and displayed to convince. A " state," a "corpo ration," a " culture," or an "economy" are the result of a punctual out of many traces. In a few ization process that order to exist these entities have to be summed up somewhere to the un (Chandler, 1 977; Beniger, 1 986). Far from being the the very are entities technology, and science of derstanding things a new understanding of science and technology should ex actors to which sociologists of science are plain. The keen to attach "interests" are immaterial in practice as long as pre-

56

cise mechanisms to their origin or and their have not been proposed . A man is never more powerful than any a man whose eye dominates a throne; some sort connections are established with may be said to dominate. This domination, " "" " ""'''" ",p but a slow construction and it can be corroded , stroyed if the files, and figures are made readable, less combinable , or unclear when d ismore played. I n words , the scale o f a n actor i s not all absolute term but a relative one that varies with the ability to capture, nn", ..,.,.....t information about and times Even the very notion of to nn,rI"" ct<.nrl without an i....'rrii"'tiin... or a map "great man" is a little man looking at a map . I n Mercalor's is transformed from a god who world who holds it in his hand ! . into a Since beginning of this presentation on how to draw things together, I have been recasting the simple of power: how the few may dominate the many, After McNeill's major reconceptualization history of power in of mobilization, this ageold political philosophy and sociology caD be rephrased in way: how can distant or foreign and times be gathered in one in a form that allows all a nd times to at once, and which allows Talking of power is an task; talking of gathering, fidelity, lip, lransmission, is an empirical one, as has illustrated in a recent study by John of the Portuguese ( 1986) . Instead using large-scale entities to explain and technology as most sociologists of science do, we should start from the inscriptions their mobilization and see how help small entities to become ones. In this shift from one research program to another, and technology" will cease to be t he mysterious cognitive object to be explained by social world . It wil l be the main sources of power (McNeil l , 1982). To take " - < - - _. . macro-actors for granted studying the maand socithem "macro," is to make To take the fabrication as our

57

main center of interest is to place the practical means of achieving Pentagon does not foundation (Cicourel, 1 98 1 ) . does his e ndorthe Russians' strategy than put faith in ODIDOSlnf,l some to dubious, and spending billions to create new branches of science the mobility of traces, perfect .....,UllIV"'IIH that can immutability, enhance readability, ensure their compatibility, quicken their display: satellites, networks of espionage, computers, radioimmunoassays, surveys. They will never see more of the phenomena than what can build through these many immutable mobiles. This is obvious, but rarely seen. If this little shift from a sociallcognitive divide to the study of inscriptions is accepted, then the importance of metrology appears organization of stable proper light. M etrology is the nt is stable measureme no it Without standards. and nts measureme s or their inscription the ty homogenei \;; lUJUl'�H to allow either the return. It is not to that metrology costs up to three times the budget of all development, and that of the metrological is for only the first the basic 1 980). Thanks to constants (time, space, weight, wavelength) and many biologi"everywhere" and chemical standards may (Zerubavel, 1 982; Landes, 1 983). universality of science and technology is a cliche of epistemology metrology is the practical achievement of this mystical universality. In practice it is costly and full of holes (see Cochrane, 1 966 for the history of the Bureau of and primary component M etrology is only the activities we all have to an ever-increasing number of undertake in daily life. Every time we look at our wristwatch or every time applied laboraa sausage at the tories measure lead pollution, water purity, or control the quality mobiles to reach new industrial goods, we allow more with the reason of do to little very has "Rationalization" the maintenance with do a lot to bureau- and technocrats, but metrological chains 1 98 1 ). This building of long networks provides the stability of the main physical constants, but for less "universal " there are many other metrological to fill in, s, tallies). measures (polls, questionnaires,

58

There is one more domain into which this .... .. .,UVj"'. " I want to talk about it some lion could I rejected dichotomies between "mentalbeginning of this and "materialist" explanations . Among the interesting " ...U U I . able mobiles there i s one that has received both loo little too much attention: money. anthropology of money is as compli· as that of writing, but one thing i s dear. As cated and soon as money starts to circulate through different cultures , it de velops a few clearcut characteristics : it is mobile (once in pieces), it is immutable (once in it is countable (once i t is can circulate from things . ._�." combinable, to center evaluates and back. Money has received too much attention because it been thought of as something special, deeply in the infrastructure of economies, whereas it i s just one of the many mobiles necessary if one place is to exercise power over many other places far apart space time. a type of immutable mobile among others it has, however, received too little attention. Money is used to all states by longitude in exactly the way that coded all and latitude (actually, in his log book P�rouse ed bot h the places on the map the of each good as if it were t o sold i n some other place). In this way, i t i s ...",,,,,,Ikl.. _�"

to display, and to recombine al l to Money is neither more nor less "material" than mapmaking, engi neering drawings, or statistics. Once its ordinary is recognized, "abstraction" of money can no longer be object of a fetish cult. For InSlanCe , importance o f art of ing both in economies and falls nicely into place. Money is not interesting as such but as one so it is no and of immutable mobile that l inks wonder if it quickly merges with written inscriptions as (Roovel", 1 9(3) . columns, and double-entry No wonder if, through ing, it i s possible to gain more just by recombining numbers (Braudel, 1 979, e specially vol. 3; Chan should not be dler, 1 977). Here again, too much on per se; what should really be ,,11"0" """ " ISUaJl,rntllon of i s the cascade of mobile inscriptions that end up in an , which is, literally, the only thing that counts. Exactly as with any scientific inscription, in case of doubt new ant prefers

59

to believe inscription, no matter how strange the consequences and counterintuitive the phenomena. history of money is thus seized by the same trend as all the other immutable mobiles ; any money to its power innovations can bilization are kept: endorsement, paper money, money. This trend is not due to the development of capitalism. "Capitalism" on the contrary, an empty word as long as material instruments are not proposed to explain any capitalization at be it books, information or money. Thus, capitalism is not to be used to explain the evolution of scithe ence and technology. It seems to me that it should be in of technology are immutable mobiles it might be possible to explain economic capi talism as process of mobilization and conscription. What indicates this are the many weaknesses of money; money is a nice immutable mobile that circulates from one point to another but it If the name the game is to ac(�ur:nulla "''',...... &." very 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 other world become really transdevice s ; then, the different points of then place ported in a manageable to a is one factor which , s pres printing Eisenstein's with a center. Just as counts is what that allows all the others to merge with one another, of com not the capitalization of money, but the patible inscriptions. Instead of talking of merchants, princes , sciastronomers, and engineers as having some sort of rellltlcm with one another, it seems to me it would be more productive to talk about "centers of calculation. " currency in which they that they calculate only with the ,-
61

60 Many efforts have been made to link the history of the history of capital ism, and many

with

have been made to

scribe the scientist as a capitalist. Al l these

(including

mine-Latour and Woolgar, 1979, chap. 5; Latour, 1 984a) were doomed from the start,

they took for granted a division be-

tween mental and material

an artifact of our ignorance of

i n scription s . 1 1 There is not a history of engineers, then a history capitalists, then one of scienti sts, then one of mathematicians, t hen one of economists. Rather, there is a single history of these centers of calculation. It is not only

they look exclusively at maps,

books, drawings, legal texts, and files, that cartographers, jurists,

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 nomena emerge, hidden from the other people from whom all these inscriptions have

exacted .

More precisely we should

able to explai n , with the concept

and empirical knowledge of these centers of calculation, how i nsig nificant

working only with papers and signs become the

most powerful of all . Papers and signs are incredibly weak and fragThis i s why explaining anything with them

so

at first. La Perouse's map is not the Pacifi c , any more than Watt ' s drawings and patents are t h e engines, o r t h e bankers' rates are the economies, or the theorems of topology are "the real worl d . " This is precisely the paradox. on

working on papers alone,

inscriptions that are immen sely less than the things

which they are extracted, it i s still possible to dominate al l things and all people. What i s

all other

becomes

the most significant, the only significant aspect of reality. The weakest, by manipulating inscriptions of all sorts obsessively and exclusively, become the

This is the view of power we

at by fol lowing this theme of visualization and cognition in all its consequ ences. If y ou want to understand what draws things to gether, then l ook at what draws things together.

Notes l . For instance, Levi-Strauss' divide between bricoleur and

or between hot and cold societies ( 1 962) ; or Garfinkel's distinctions between

everyday a n d scientific modes of thought ( 1 967) ; or Bachelard's many "coupures epistemo!ogiques" that divide science from common sense, from intuition, or from its own past ( 1 934, 1 967); or even Horton's c areful d istinction between monster acceptance and monster avoidance ( 1977) or

primary theories and secondary theories ( 1 982). 2. Goody ( 1977) points to the importance of practical tasks in handling graph ics (lists , dictionaries , inventories), and concludes his fascinating book by mind' these are some of the saying that "if we wish to speak of a instruments of its domesticatio n" (p. 182). Cole and Scribner ( 1974) shift the focu s from intellectual tasks to schooling practice ; the ability t o draw :SyllUl!!:l:Sll.l� is taken out of the mind and put into the manipulation of dia

grams on paper. Hutchins ( 1 980) does the opposite in transforming the "illogical" reasoning ofthe 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 philosophic al tradition to the power of print ( 1 979).

students, focuses her atten Perret-Cler mont ( 1 979), at first one of tion 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 . Lave has explored in pioneering studies how mathematical skills may be totally modified depending o n whether or not you let people use paper and (Lave, 1986, 1988; Lave, Murtaugh and De La Rocha, 1 983). Ferguson has

tried to relate engineering imagination to the abilities to draw pictures ac cording to perspective rules and codes of shades and colors ( 1 977): " I t has been nonverbal thinking by and large that has fixed the outlines and filled and in the details of our material surroundings . . . . Pyramids, rockets exist not because of geometry, theory of structures or thermody namics, but because they were first a picture--l iterally a vision-i n 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. 3. A fact is harder or softer as a function of what happens to it in other hands later on. Each of u s acts as a multi-conduc tor for the many claims that we come across: we may be uninterested, or ignore them, or be i nterested but entirely different. Sometimes modify them and turn them into indeed we act as conductor and the claim along without further mod ification. (For this see Latour and Wooigar, 1 979; Latour, 1 984b.) have advanced in more than direct ratio to the 4 . "Science and by which the phenomena which other methods contrive ability of men to taste and wise could be known only through the senses of touch, smel l , have been brought within the range of visual recognition and mea surements and then become subject to that logical symbolization without

which rational thought and analysis are impossible" (lvins, 1973, 13). 5 . "The most marked characteristics of European pictorial representatio n since the fourteenth century, have been on the one hand its steadily in creasing naturalism and on the other its purely schematic and logical ex-

63

62 tension. I t is submitted that both are due in largest part t o the developme n t and

ID

of methods which have provided symbols,

m

for representation of visual awareness and a grammar of which made i t possible t o establish logical relations not cruy with i n the system of symbols but between that system and the forms and

locations of the objects that it symbolizes" (lvins, 1 973, 6. " Northern artists characteristically sought to represent by transforming the extent of vision onto their smal l , 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

i n the North"

(Alpers, 1 983, 5 1).

7. The proof that the movement comes first, for

lies in the fact

that it entails exactly the opposite effects on the

The accuracy

of the medium reveals more and more inaccuracies in the message, which is

The

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. 1 983). 8. For instance, Mukerji portrays a geographer who hates the new geograp h y books b u t has to c r y his hate in print: " Ironically, Davis took his cause he did not trust

be

information to be a s complete as oral ac

counts of experiences; but he decided to make the voyage after Dutch books on geography and produced from his travel another geograph ical/navigational text" (Mukerji. 1 983, 1 14).

9. This i s why I do not include i n the discussion the

literature on the

neurology of vision or on the psychology of perception (see for i n stance

1 98 1 ; de Mey, 1 982). 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 ethnograph y of the crafts and tricks of the visualizatioll_

1 0. " U n 'pouvoir d 'ecriture' se constitute comme une piece essentielle dans les rouages de la Sur bien d e s points, i l s e modele sur les mil th odes traditionnelles d e l a documentation istrative mais avec des techniques

1 9 1 ).

(Foucault . 1975.

e t des innovations

1 1 . These simple shifts are often transformed

philosophers into complete

ruptures from common sense, into "coupure s epistemologiques" as i n Bachelard. I t is n o t because o f the empiricists' naIvete t h a t o n e has t o fall back on the power of theories to make sense of data. The focus on tions and manipulation of traces is exactly midway between empiricis m and Bachelard's argument on the power of t heories.

1 2. A nice is that of Carnot's thermodynamics studied by Redondi ( 1 980). Carnot's know-how is not about building a machine but rather a This diagram is drawn in such a way that it allows one to move from one engine to any other, and indeed to nonexistent drawn on paper. Real t hree-dimensional steam

simply

are interesting but

localized and cumbersome. Thermodynamics is to them what La Perouse's map is to the islands of the Pacific. When going from one

to the

� theory or from one island to the map, you d o not go from concrete t domi that place one from go you heoretical, t to empirical from , t abstrac nates no one, to another place that dominates all the others. If you grasp . (past , present and future-see Die thermod ynamics you grasp all sel). The question about theories is: who controls whom and on :v hat scale.

1 3 . A nice a contrario proof i s provided by Edgerton's study of Ch mese tech nical d rawings ( 1 980). He claims that Chinese artists have no interest in

the figures or, more exactly, that they take figures not inSide. the perspec pre tive space on which an engineer can work and make calculatlon S and . parts of between hnks the all , ce visions, but as illustrations. In consequen becomes , pump the of part complex (a s decoration become the machines for instance, waves on a pond after a few copie s !). No one would say that

Chinese are unable to abstract. but it would not be absurd to say that do not put their full confidenc e into writing and imaging. of a " paradigm of the trace" 1 4 . In a beautiful article Carlo Ginzburg e to designate this peculiar obsession of our c ulture t h�t he traces-pr hro�gh t story, ve detectl Doyle's Conan to cisely !-from Greek medicine, . Freud's interes t in lapsus and the detection of art forgenes ( 1 980). Falhng

back , however. on a classical prejudice. G i nzburg puts physics and hard sciences aside from such a paradigm because, he contends. they do not rely on traces but on abstract, u niversal phenomen a! 1 5. lvins explains, for instance, that most Greek parallels in geo�etry do not meet because they are touched with the hands. whereas Renaissan ce par Jean Lave, i n allels do meet since they are only seen on paper

h e r studies of California n grocery shoppers, shows that people confronted with a difficulty in their computati on rarely stick to t he paper and never so no put their confidence i n what is written (Lave et al . , 1 983). To do matter how absurd the consequen ces requires still another set of peculiar circumstan ces related to laboratory settings, even if these are as

ton says ( 1 986) "flat laboratorie s . " In one of his twelve or so origins of geometry Serres argues that having invented the alphabet and thus broken t he Greeks had any connection between written shapes and the came to call we what that argues He tion. to cope with pictorial representa formalism is an alphabetic text trying to describe visual dans la pratique? Non point dans les 'idees' ce q ue ceUe . suppose mais dans J'activite qui la pose. E l � est d 'abord un �rt .du essm. parle du dessm trace que celul-cl SOIl pr�sElle est ensuite u n Jangage

�

I

ent ou absent" (Serres. 1 980, 1 76). that 1 6. The link between technical thinking and technical drawing is so .close when Gllle, Bertrand instance, For . nwillingly u even it scholars establish in Alexandria aC1COImtmg for the creation of a new "systeme lity of availabi the is it that say to during the Hellenisti c period, i s obliged the of models scale of collection a of gathering the and a good library . machines previously invented , that transformed " mere practice mto .

�II.

the techno-logy ( i 980). What makes the "systeme technique " a system is taken all are which nts achieveme technical former the all of synoptic vision

65

64 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

1 98 1 ; Constant, 1983). A nice rendering of the paper world

necessary to make a computer real is to be found in Kidder ( 1 98 1 ) . " The

soul of the machine" is a pile of paper. . . .

1 7 . The direction we go 10 by asking such questions is quite different from

those of either the sociology of science or the cognitive sciences (espe

cially when

both try to merge as in de Mey's synthesis ( 1 982». Two

recent attempts have been made to relate the fine structure of cognitive abilities 10 social structure. The first one uses Hesse's networks and

Kuhn's paradigms (Barnes, 1 982), the second Wittgenstein's "language

games" (Bloor, 1983). These aUempts are interesting but Ihey still try to

answer a q uestion 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 dif ferent from that of our sciences, our images, and our information. The

phenomenon I wish to focus on is slightly different from those revealed b y Barnes a n d B loor, We are dealing w i t h a single ethnographic puzzle: some

societies--ver y 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 far

fetched relations when technical details of science talk directly of i nvari

ance, association, displacement, immutability, and so on? (Law, 1986;

Latour, J 984b; Callon, Law, and Rip, 1 986).

References Alpers, S. ( 1 983). The Art of Describing: Dutch A"r/ in the 1 7th Century. Chicago: U niversity of Chicago Press.

Arnheim, R. ( 1 969). Visual Thinking . Berkeley: U niversity of California Press. Auge, M. ( 1 975). Theorie des Pouvoirs et Ideologie. Paris: Hermann .

Bachelard, G . ( 1 934). Le Nouvel

Scienti/ique . Paris: PUF.

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�

Representation

realist-constmctivist controversy

PAUL TIBBETTS

Department

rmws('}vnv. University

ofDaytOll.

USA

OH

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Pinc h , T. ( 1985 . "Toward an anal ysis of scien tific obse rvati ons: the . of eVide ntial 0f 0 b serv atlOn ' al reports In . I ' physIcs . . ' " Socia Studies 1 5 :3-37 . Redo n i , P. ( I 80). 'accueil des Idees de Sad; Carn ot: de la et i'His101re. Pan s: Vrm . Roov er, R. de The Rise and Decline of the Medici Banle_ MA : Harvard Press . Rudw ick, M. "The emerg ence of a visua l 'U"flU «E;" for op.r""'r,, � � science : 1 7'''' uv- 1 840.' ' .1'Science 1 4: 148- 1 95 . OJ Serr es, M . ( 1980). L e I"n " �'H" " du Nord-Oeu st. Paris : Minu it. S erre s , M. Herm es. Balti more , MD: John s H01DkillS . Press . Shap m , ( I 9 4). " P�m p and circu msta nce: Rob ert Boy le's technology. Socll1l Studies of Science 1 4:48 1 -52 1 . . Slmo n • H . "Co�m'f!Ve processe s of expe rts and novi ces . " ClI.lJiers de la Archives Jean Plaget 2(3): 1541 78. Sohn -Ret heJ, A. ( 1 978) . Man ual and Intellectual Labor: A mology. Lon don: Mac miU an. Star, S L. ( 1 983). "Sim plific ation in scien tific work: an : exam ple from neur o sCien ce researc h . " Social Stud ies of Scie nce 1 3 : 205-228 . Star, S. L. and J. R . ( 1 989). "Institutio nal and Ama teurs and professio nals in of 1 907- 1 939 . " Social Studies

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and R. Post soni an Insti tute Pres s. Whe eler, J. ( 1 969). On Reco rds Files and Dossiers in A meri can New York: RusseJl Zeru av , E . O 82). "The stand ardiz ation of time : a SOC:lo tust,o rj<:a perspectlve. American Review 88( 1 ): 1-29.

?

.", ...au\,a

sentation : electrical

The realist constmctivist

"'''' ''011_'''

issues surrounding the problem

There are at (l)

repre-

representational device or RD

diagrams,

maps,

chemical formulae, models, etc.) and the

to which such RDs are socially

�

techn ique s and Yanke e Enterprise .

� ��

1 . introductory

ontological status ; (2) (3) questions concerning the

interpreted object

of the

accuracy with which ( l )

the realist , RDs

some inde-

pendently existing n on-cognitive stmcture

Realists

constmctivist dimension to by

and their use are gen t onto

though they insist that RDs ultimately have to map some

realists, if

For

inquirer-independent,

ing at all and therefore the data points provided (For variations on Bhaskar, Popper,

noth-

were not the case then RDs wou]d

] 978 ; 1 972.)

Jarvie,

1 983 , 1 984 ;

RDs would position see :

Laudan,

1 977, 1 98 1 ;

and

problem with such realist s concerns j ust what it is RDs represent (issue sponse to

(2)

above). A pragmatic reto metaphysi-

query is that this is a n concerned with questions

does matter - on this line of thinking those p oints that : t heoretically interesting,

(0 (iii)

a re

tension, and (iv) have heuristic value

ontology . What

are the data points, parwith theory ,

(H)

are

t heoretical revision or exfurther research.

why would the realist - or anyone else for that matter

be

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