Bruno Latour’s Drawing Things Together radically reconceptualises scientific knowledge by arguing that the authority of science does not arise primarily from abstract rationality or superior cognition, but from the capacity to produce, stabilise, transport, and accumulate inscriptions. Rejecting both cognitive idealism and naïve realism, Latour proposes that scientific practice depends upon material operations through which complex phenomena are transformed into combinable visual traces—maps, graphs, diagrams, charts, tables, specimens, and texts—that may circulate across vast distances without losing coherence. Central to his argument is the concept of the immutable mobile: an inscription that remains sufficiently stable to preserve information while remaining sufficiently mobile to travel through institutional networks. Through examples ranging from Renaissance perspective drawing and La Pérouse’s navigational charts to geological maps and laboratory instrumentation, Latour demonstrates how power accrues to those capable of gathering dispersed phenomena onto flat surfaces where they can be compared, superimposed, recombined, and manipulated. Particularly influential is his discussion of optical consistency, whereby perspective techniques, printing technologies, cartographic systems, and scientific diagrams create standardised visual spaces enabling objects from radically different contexts to become commensurable. The essay repeatedly insists that scientific “objectivity” emerges not from disembodied observation but from infrastructures of visualisation that permit phenomena to be rendered simultaneously visible and calculable. On pages 36–37, Latour’s discussion of pathology and clinical medicine demonstrates how diseases become intelligible only after inscriptions enable physicians to aggregate and compare cases within centralised institutions. Equally significant is his claim that laboratories function as centres of accumulation where inscriptions from diverse locations are assembled into strategic archives capable of mobilising political, economic, and epistemic authority. Scientific facts therefore succeed not because they transcend mediation, but because they are embedded within durable representational systems that amplify credibility and facilitate circulation. Ultimately, Latour transforms representation itself into a material and logistical achievement, revealing that the history of science is inseparable from the evolution of visual technologies, paperwork, and inscriptional infrastructures through which the world is progressively rendered legible, transportable, and governable.
Latour, B. (1990) ‘Drawing Things Together’, in Lynch, M. and Woolgar, S. (eds.) Representation in Scientific Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 19–68.
