Latour frames this discussion using the famous McLuhan quote, “the medium is the message” but he gives this quote a new meaning. He says that the in the past, science has been portrayed by stressing the two extremes of the Mind and the World. The medium, what is in the middle of these (but not between according to L) is what we are now focused on. Mediation, he says, consists of, “the humble instruments, tools, visualization skills, writing practices, focusing techniques” (p. 422). He calls these “re-representations.” He makes a constructivist argument that these mediators do not merely sit in between the Mind and the World, but have a hand in producing that which comes in and out of mediation.
Latour finds that the field of Art History has much to offer the History of science because of the way the “constructivist character is built into the arts” (p. 423).
..it is possible to take much greater pleaser in learning the laws of the thermodynamics after having read the social historians on the of the first or second law, but this reading, precisely, takes on some aeschtetic character. The ame mediators that should have been black-boxed to produce scientific certainty, now that they are developed by the historian, generate a type of pleasure that we rightly associate with the arts. Even if I exaggerate the differences, it remains fair to say that Beauty is more easily seen as a construction than is Truth (p 423).
Latour then turns to his concept of “immutable mobiles.” (Immutable mobiles are defined most clearly by Law & Singleton, 2005, as things that move around but hold their shape, either physically or relationally/functionally). I should add here, that there is a discussion the turns more toward religion, and is fascinating, but very difficult, and not necessarily relevant, I will leave you to read it if you dare :).
Latour says that as these mediations become immutable mobiles, they are, in a sense, erased (seems tome he is saying the mediators of science are black-boxed), and what is left is a picture of “a calculating Mind, a calculable World, a substance which lies under its passing attributes, and the medium of language to circulate in between” (p 427). He says that all other mediations are “found wanting” because they fail to provide an “accurate access to the world.” Art, he says, escapes indictment because it is marginalized as “only art” and does not inform what we can know. Latour rejects this as a “hideous scenography.”
Latour proposes that we do not go down this road, but stick to the mediators we can arrive at a place where the arts will no longer be merely subjective and “impotent” and the science will no longer be “merely accurate.”
Latour concludes by suggesting that the difficulty we face is that in being iconophilic in one form of visual culture renders us iconoclastic in the others. He advocates a world in which “angels and immutable mobiles circulate, each in their own way” (p. 438).
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