Bruno Latour et Émilie Hermant, Paris Ville Invisible, B42, 2021
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17587
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2038-3460
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Julio Paulos
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Bruno Latour and Émilie Hermant, Paris: Invisible City, B42, 2021
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Book Reviews
2023-02-19
2023-06-30
2023-02-19
2023-10-30
165-169
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Julio Paulos
2022
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17587
165
Université de Lausanne
2038-3460
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Bruno Latour and Émilie Hermant, Paris: Invisible City, B42, 2021
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17587/16435
13
Book Review                                                               165

   Bruno Latour, Émilie Hermant
Paris Ville Invisible [Paris: Invisible City], Paris, B42, 2021, pp. 184
[reedition of Paris Ville Invisible, Paris, La Découverte, 1998]

Julio Paulos Université de Lausanne

    Why is Paris Ville Invisible considered one of actor-network theory’s
(afterwards: ANT) most influential pieces? To answer this question, I will
focus on the book’s major contribution to ANT’s intellectual project while
reviewing Éditions B42’s newly published edition of Bruno Latour and
Émile Hermant’s original piece from 1998.
    Paris Ville Invisible emerged from an unease that characterises ANT’s
core premise of avoiding structural explanations of social phenomena. In
the 2021 preface, Bruno Latour expresses how he never understood how
sociologists were so adept at explaining social phenomena. This is where
Émilie Hermant, presented amusingly in the preface as a hobby photogra-
pher as well as an eminent researcher, came up with the idea to photograph
the emergence of collective concerns. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Le città
invisibili, both embarked on a journey inside Paris to collect, make visible
and visualize the city without assuming it as a whole. It was their mission
to make Paris visible by keeping it invisible; or, put differently, by showing
how impossible it was to make Paris appear as a whole, to be one. The new
edition and the original piece thus mix photo-essay and textual passages
that allow us to explore the city of Paris in myriad ways.
    The hybrid organisation of the book follows ANT’s experimental writ-
ing genre: it contains séquences (4), figures (13) and plans (55). The four
séquences – cheminer (walking), dimensionner (scaling), distributer (distrib-
uting), permettre (enabling) – show how the city of Paris can be viewed as
things; how social phenomena can be aggregated, calculated, sorted,
grouped, related, measured, or quantified according to an assortment of
apparatuses that are put together to follow the directions “in sequence”.
The scene shifts from Mme Baysal’s office, where she organizes and allots
École des Mines’ lecture rooms from her desk, making telephone calls, fill-
ing in schedules, and filing papers, to Météo-France, where one of its em-
ployers is talking to the National television about the reports they had sent
earlier. These plans portray situations in which Paris becomes either a ge-
ographical entity, a bureaucratic designation or even a street sign. The fig-
ures display how these settings are co-articulated, aligned, or circulated in
various operational gestures. Following what has been called the “sociol-
ogy of translation”, that is ANT, we have various chains of events in which
information is passed on, moulded, fabricated, and ultimately transformed.
Hence, there is no difference between a file that has to be classified in a
folder by a university assistant, a name tag pinned to a shirt to facilitate
166                                                            Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)


identification or a café bill printed by a machine. All these “translations”
are aggregates and need to be analysed on their own since, for instance, the
metro report never reflects the weather exactly.
    What made me say before this book was influential? Aside from not
having been published with an anglophone publisher, the book does not
appear as a major reference in Latour’s publication list or most of early-
ANT’s referential articles. Even the oversized French edition from 1998
was out of print for a long time and not reprinted by any publisher. Yet,
Latour and Hermant’s piece is of particular importance to STS scholars,
precisely for those who have taken an interest in the ways (urban) infra-
structures are involved in technological and political disputes, in mainte-
nance and care practices, or sensors and algorithms (Denis and Pontille
2014; Tironi and Criado 2015). Accordingly, the multiplicity of composi-
tions of what a city is, as shown by Paris Ville Invisible has laid the ground-
work and inspired nearly all of the prosaic STS movements that employ the
urban as a reassembled research object. This applies to STS scholars who
are interested in the coexistence of urban infrastructures, signs, and poli-
tics, as well as urban scholars searching for a companionable but uncon-
ventional “fellow” in ANT. This is why we might argue that Paris Ville
Invisible offers as much a peek into modalities of “invisible” action as it
does into the emergence of material-semiotic associations that bind all sorts
of entities into hybrid collectives.
    Apart from launching ANT into disciplinary fields that are concerned
with urban phenomena and their related infrastructures or activities, Paris
Ville Invisible offers a heuristic device for identifying the invisibility of lay-
ers of action: the oligopticon. Consider a computer displaying a coloured
map of Paris on one of those old grey cubes. On it, you can see nothing of
Paris but a map showing the city’s boundaries and some charts of water
flow meters. We have two things here, first, the megalomaniacal confusion
between a map and a territory and second, the belief that one “dominates”
all of Paris simply by looking at it. An enthralling feature of the book is
how bureaucratic procedures or daily encounters with technologies, like
scientific protocols or technical reports, or any kind of transaction for that
matter, bind objects to a reality. As such, signs on streets and subways carry
significance not because they mark locations or indicate directions, but be-
cause they articulate the coexistence of “successions” (time) and “simulta-
neities” (space) (p. 168). Objects such as synoptic maps, models, reports,
signs, or bills become entangled in kaleidoscopic practices through which
a city can be regulated, calculated, inhabited. The objects offer sometimes
mere “panoramic views” that are weakly connected to what they depict,
and sometimes these objects are implicated in various prosaic practices that
are central to the condition of water regulation, electricity systems, infra-
structure maintenance or the performativity of any urban inscription.
Book Review                                                                167

     One of the core characteristics of ANT is here empirically demon-
strated by the way it pays attention to simultaneities, or to put it in more
common ANT vocabulary, modes of “coexistence” (p. 169). In addition to
the book’s analytical intent to examine how action unfolds in irreductive
form, the main focus is on how intermediaries turn action into knowledge,
and models into action. ANT reveals one of its particular abilities here
which places everything on the same plane of existence yet it distinguishes
between the various modes through which things exist: from collected data
such as time or temperature, to their computation via sensors or computers
to the models and maps created by institutions such as law enforcement,
weather forecasters, and telecom operators. It is here that one of ANT’s
core research inclinations is presented to the reader in full capacity through
the demonstration of the relationship between modes of existence and the
establishment of those modes. In the absence of cause-effect relations,
Paris Ville Invisible is an example of ANT’s imaginary to describe a world
in constant transformation, a sequence of connections and simultaneities
in which each mode or entity fully participates.
     It may be worthwhile juxtaposing Paris Ville Invisible with one of
ANT’s most prominent, and most frequently cited, yet, most atypical
pieces: Reassembling the Social (2005). In this book, Latour offers a fully-
fledged alternative to the traditional social theory, which he believes is
prone to failure in offering social explanations. In contrast, he proposes
ANT’s “sociology of associations”. By disqualifying traditional social the-
ories, Latour paves the way to a “sociology” concerned with tracing the
mediations that give rise to collectives. Besides its aims to position ANT in
relation to social theory, Reassembling the Social can also be read in parallel
with Paris Ville Invisible. In fact, the invitation is formulated by Bruno
Latour himself in the opening pages of Reassembling the Social, and the
digital version even contains a hyperlink that provides access to what is
described as a “sociological web opera”. In the link, we are directed to the
website of Paris Ville Invisible offering much of what is covered in Reas-
sembling the Social theoretically through a series of photos and concrete
situations. We have here a multimedia essay that reflects many of the me-
diations encountered in the field through photography. On the webpage,
one can see the city in images and signs which is, according to Latour, why
it’s impossible to grasp it at a glance.
     Here may also lie the explanation as to why the book remained out of
stock for nearly two decades without being re-edited, and why it was never
published in English. The text was meant to be read alongside the photog-
raphy and images in a multimedia version. The goal is to provide a journey
through the hidden places which make urban life in Paris possible, or, as
mentioned above, to explore oligoptica from which the city can be seen as
a partial whole. This is achieved by juxtaposing urban reality and electronic
utopias; by contrasting the real and the virtual. Beyond achievement, this
168                                                          Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)


is a demonstration of how the invisible city of Paris can alter social theory.
Through highlighting the fact that society is complex, both partially visible
and invisible, and how knowledge and reality have never been linear, but
always rely on mediations and inscriptions (i.e., maps, street signs, satellite
images, etc.). Zooming out, two other themes stand out as central: the re-
curring theme of “composition” and the idea that Paris constitutes an as-
semblage or amalgam: “from the entire Paris set in one view to the multiple
Parises within Paris, which together comprise all Paris and which nothing
ever resembles” (p. 23, my translation). A theme that is at the core of
ANT’s entry into urban studies (Farías 2010).
     The virtual is another topic that frequently appears throughout the
book and can be depicted if we look at the rest of the citation figuring
above: “we are going, in this little book, from the cold and real society, to
the hot and virtual plasma: from the entire Paris …”. Even though Latour
and Hermant do not explicitly explain how they conceptualize the virtual,
it is important to recognize it as part of ANT’s analytical styles which ex-
periments with linguistic repertoires. Not only is there a difference in how
words “act” between French and English, but words become tools to think
and experiment within the ANT imaginary. A demonstration of this is of-
fered by Latour’s homonymous essay, which compared to the book has an
addition in its title: “the plasma” (Latour 2012). By using plasma, Latour
substitutes the word space, which carries a too rigid connotation, with a
more fluid concept allowing him to better grasp imaginaries of space, place
and context (see p. 171). Plasma also allows Latour to suspend the zoom
on multiple, situated “hot takes” to provide an actual background, or con-
texts in action – whether political, economic, social, cultural, etc. – to in-
quire the partial explanation of how one, or a few, of these virtual mo-
ments, or how oligoptica hang together. Plasma is a way of questioning
composition; it is a way of suspending the zoom.
     The new edition is now published by Éditions B42, an editor who deals
with architectural books publishing in an avant-gardism style. There may
be plenty of reasons why Éditions B42 is reediting the book 20 years after
its initial publication with La Découverte in 1998. It goes without saying
that Latour’s accomplishments in disciplines including law, ecology, polit-
ical science or architecture are indisputable, which is not surprising given
his a-disciplinary generosity of thought over his lifetime and especially in
the last few years. Although some of his work, not the least its ANT-frac-
tions, have not been fully refined in response to the empirical research of
the various field. Consequently, Latour’s arguments sometimes become
frictionless models rather than provocations to open up disciplines. Yet,
rather than only being taken à la lettre, ANT’s intellectual project, as it can
be seen by Paris Ville Invisible, offers a repertoire full of moments, trajec-
tories, vocabularies, and genres. The book Paris Ville Invisible is one of
those hidden gems every ANT-aficionado should have in their library, even
Book Review                                                                      169

if they do not read French. Aside from providing an array of tools for prob-
lematizing cities, as well as exploring how to conduct fieldwork in the myr-
iad, but invisible oligoptica of cities-in-the-making, it is also a more-than-
textual writing experiment that combines both photographic and essayistic
genres. More so, Paris Ville Invisible is a thoughtful exploration into in-
ventive ways of writing; it is full of tropes into Frenchness, hints at the
popularisation of Paris in films, novels, and souvenirs and stands for a
whole generation of ANT that is preoccupied with composing texts that
reflect the heterogeneity of the worlds that are enacted.

Afterwords
     The entire book review was written before Bruno Latour’s passing and should
not be read as an obituary but as a tribute to the broader lessons that Latour’s work
and ANT’s early generation have taught us, especially to STS and urban research-
ers. Lessons for which I will be forever grateful.

References
Denis, J. and Pontille, D. (2014) Maintenance Work and the Performativity of Urban
        Inscriptions: The Case of Paris Subway Signs, in “Environment and Planning
        D: Society and Space”, 32(3), pp. 404-416.
Farías, I. (2010) Introduction: Decentring the Object of Urban Studies’, in I. Farias
        and T. Bender (eds.), Urban assemblages: How actor-network theory changes
        urban studies, London and New York, Routledge, pp. 1-24.
Latour, B. (2012) Introduction: Paris, Invisible City: The Plasma, in “City, Culture
       and Society”, 3(2), pp. 91-93.
Tironi, M. and Sánchez Criado, T. (2015) Of Sensors and Sensitivities: Towards a
        Cosmopolitics of “Smart Cities”?, in “Tecnoscienza: Italian Journal of Sci-
        ence and Technology Studies”, 6(1), pp. 89-108.

                                      ***

   Christian Fuchs
Digital Capitalism: Media, Communication and Society Volume Three,
London, Routledge, 2021, pp. 342

Maurizio Teli, Department of Planning, Aalborg University, Denmark

   Christian Fuchs’s work is well known by whoever has navigated sociol-
ogy of media and communication in the last fifteen years. Since the monu-
mental Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age (Fuchs
