1

Guidance for readings, 081008: Latour’s immutable mobiles and

centres of calculation

Last week we expanded our concept of mind machines from the human mind and its
computer models to include sociocultural cognitive systems. To get there, we read some
papers on distributed cognition, which analyzes cognition in terms of activities engaged
in by humans but which do not happen just inside their minds. These activities happen
in the world, and by engaging in them people exercise many different skills in their
performances of cognitive tasks. They also reveal a wide range of interactions with a
wide variety of things, whether these be other people or material objects.

The important point about sociocultural cognitive systems is that they can have
cognitive properties quite distinct from the cognitive properties of the people who
perform the specific tasks which, once coordinated, comprise the system. This is a very
important point, one which Hutchins emphasizes several times in the papers we read.
His study of “cognition in the wild” shows that the sociocultural cognitive system of
ship navigation aboard a military helicopter carrier carries out the complicated task of
navigating the ship into the San Diego harbour. No single individual could do that. This
feat of navigation, accomplished by the sociocultural, cognitive, navigation system can
be modeled by a universal Turing machine, but that machine does not model any of the
cognitive tasks performed by the humans in the system. This is an important result, and
it justifies extending our concept of mind machines to include such systems.

This week, and for the following two weeks, we focus on yet another extension of the
concept of mind machines. I’ve already mentioned the importance of the things
involved in the tasks humans perform in distributed, sociocultural cognitive systems.
We’ll now take a closer look at these things. They are all over the place, and some are so
close to us, so ordinary, that we take them for granted and therefore fail to appreciate
their role in our performance of cognitive tasks. Hutchins reminds us that these things
are part of our made environment: we make the environment in which we exercise our
cognitive powers. Because we think with these things, because we use them to think, we
can extend our concept of mind machines to include them too.

Latour’s topic is how scientific knowledge is produced. His work is relevant to the
course, and especially to this point in the course, because he does not think it is correct
to suppose that scientific knowledge is the product of individual minds. Instead, it is the
product of many different activities, distributed across a very wide terrain, but
coordinated by quite specific associations between both human and non-human actors.
Because it’s the whole network that produces the knowledge, the network can be
 2

analyzed as a distributed sociocultural cognitive system: a mind machine. But what’s

important for this week is Latour’s focus on the very important role of specific kinds of
things we find in the distributed cognitive systems of scientific knowledge production.

In his paper “Visualization and cognition: drawing things together”, Latour investigates
a very common and ubiquitous kind of made object: writings, inscriptions, documents,
and illustrations. He explains their cognitive functions in terms of two central concepts:
their mobility and their immutability. In other words, you can move them around and
they stay the same (they are stable; they don’t easily deform or degrade). They are made
to be mobile and immutable. He calls them “immutable mobiles”.

Latour’s paper is rich in examples. He mobilizes a wealth of studies to support his

claims about how immutable mobiles function as things that help bring about new
cognitive powers and the production of new scientific knowledge. When we engage
with them in our cognitive practices, they function as objects we think with. You may
want to pursue some of the areas of study he presents in your own research paper. For
this class, select some that interest you, that you find either compelling or questionable.
Select some claims Latour makes about the cases he presents, whether for your
analytical paper or to discuss in class. There’s much to choose from here: a veritable
smorgasbord of cases!

Latour ends his paper by introducing another concept, but whose development he
leaves for another paper: centres of calculation. We learn what these centres are in the
second paper for this week (“Centres of calculation”, chapter 6 of his book Science in
action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society). It explains in more detail how
these immutable mobiles operate in the production of scientific knowledge.

Here’s a list of the concepts you need to understand what Latour is saying about centres
of calculation. You can base your analytical paper on any one of these, or on another
concept you find especially interesting.

The first is the cycle of accumulation. It’s explained by a more detailed account of the
voyage of Lapérouse than we encountered in the first paper. Latour explains how, under
favourable conditions, the inscriptions collected by Lapérouse become part of a network
that has cognitive properties insofar as it plays a role in the production of scientific
knowledge. We often think, he says, that when we read such accounts (and some are
written in a fashion designed to make us think this) that when European “explorers”
encountered local peoples we see a meeting between “civilized” people and “savages”.
The differences between them, we sometimes think, can be expressed as differences in
 3

cognitive abilities. Latour denies this: he says the differences are actually differences in
the “angle, direction and scale of the observer’s movement” (p. 217).

What does this mean? It means that if we want to know the difference between
Lapérouse and the Chinese he met, we need to describe his movement relative to them
in detail: Where does he come from? What is he doing there? What does he do when he
gets there? How long does he stay? What does he carry back, and why? How does he
help make return visits easier? To what networks are he and his movements connected,
and how strong are they?

None of these questions are adequately answered without paying attention to

Lapérouse’s gathering of inscriptions. That activity is a large part of its point and purpose.
He brings back home resources that allow people to see a distant thing and then travel
back to the source and bring back more such resources. These resources are accumulated
in a centre. If Lapérouse makes possible further movements that build on his, a cycle of
accumulation is established. This cycle has cognitive properties. Why? Because as Latour
defines it, knowledge can be described only by considering this cycle: “how to bring
things back to a place for someone to see it for the first time so that others might be sent
again to bring other things back” (p. 220).

But in order to understand the cycle of accumulation — hence to understand

knowledge (and cognition) — one has to understand a wide variety of elements that have
to be brought into coordination. This brings us to our second main concept: the
conditions that allow a cycle of accumulation to take place (hence to understand
knowledge and cognition). Latour explains those conditions by reference to Lapérouse’s
voyage on pp. 221-222; they include designs for and construction and functioning of
ships, navigation by the sun and stars, new instruments, training in their use, and
handbooks on techniques, among others. Our voyage of understanding a cycle of
accumulation leads us through, as Latour puts it, technoscience, which is an important
element of technoculture (which gets us back to what this course is about).

Once a cycle of accumulation is established, let’s ask: what is accumulated at its centre?
Is it knowledge? Power? Profit? Capital? Latour says it is none of these, but instead the
resources to bring to the centre specific, unfamiliar events, people, and places. But what
kind of resources are they? They are wrings, inscriptions, documents, illustrations, and
objects. And here we encounter our third concept: the properties that account for the
success of these resources. They must be mobile, immutable, and combinable (p. 223).
Latour gives some examples of domains in which these properties succeed in “making
dominance at a distance feasible”: cartography; collections; probes; observatories;
enquiries (you may want to pursue some of these domains in your research paper).
 4

The next concept for this reading guideline is a big one: the management of the
immutable, combinable mobiles at the centres of calculation. It’s big because it sweeps
in many other concepts. Let’s stick just to the basics, and use the term “documents” to
refer to what is collected at the centres. So our new question becomes: How are all these
documents managed?

Latour’s answer is that they are managed through the production of more documents!
How is this possible? It’s possible because the new documents are meta-documents: they
condense, summarize, reduce, transform, and collect other documents. A cascade of
document levels or degrees or orders of inscriptions is therefore set up in a centre of
calculation. Latour says that when you hold an nth-order inscription, you thereby hold
the inscriptions at the lower orders that the nth-order inscription refers to, summarizes,
etc. The higher order translates the lower order and in that way, it increases the mobility
of the lower order inscriptions by pumping them up the chain and across a wider terrain.

Latour’s concept of how documents are managed in such centres materialize the
concept of what it is to think abstractly, which is our next concept. For Latour, abstract
thought is not something happening in the head, but something much more mundane,
but very powerful: “abstract thinking” refers to the centre’s activities of handling higher-
order inscriptions; thus handling nth-order inscriptions is thinking more abstractly than
handling n-1 order inscriptions.

Theory is our next concept. For Latour, “theory” refers to the order of inscriptions that
allows the centre “to mobilize, manipulate, combine, rewrite, and tie together all the
traces obtained through the ever-extending networks” p. (241-242). A theory should not
be severed from what it is a theory of, i.e. from its lower-order inscriptions; the word
does not refer to some sort of abstract, mental entity. Mathematics and other formalisms
should also be understood in terms of their place as very high-level inscriptions with a
very high mobility, capable of travelling across multiple domains.

We’re almost done; the next concept is the application of science to the world. How is
that done? Latour says it’s a matter of extending the network from the centre to the
periphery. It is not a matter of connecting two disparate realms, one conceptual, or
“cognitive” and another “natural” or “material”. Extending the network in this way
involves very difficult, practical labour. Sometimes there are resistances and ruptures to
the work of network extension; actors often refuse to be enrolled. In such cases, and
Latour gives an example (pp. 248-249), the “theory” cannot be “applied” after all.
 5

One of the ways of extending networks from the centre to the periphery is through
metrology (our final concept!). “Metrology” refers to the creation of standards;
standard time, standard units of weight, temperature, measurement, and so on. Latour
calls this “the gigantic enterprise to make of the outside a world inside which facts and
machines can survive”. Networks can be extended from the centres to the peripheries
because “scientists build their enlightened networks by giving the outside the same
paper form as that of their instruments inside” (p. 251). The intrusion of metrological
chains into our lives is well described on p. 252, where Latour’s work reminds us of
Hutchins’s notion of our made cognitive environment.

I hope these guidelines help you through these two texts. If you are writing an
analytical paper on them, you have until Friday midnight (10 October) to benefit from
them.