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The elusive origins of the immutable mobile |
 | | Immutable mobiles, for Latour, allow centres of calculation to “act at a distance” (Latour 1987, 229), and are thus endowed with a quasi-occult power. |
 | | Here, at last was the original source of the immutable and combinable mobile, itself the unhappy victim of a series of successive mutations through the vicissitudes of print culture, in apparent contradiction of its very nature. |
 | | The tortuous paper-trail through the literature that we have had to follow to trace the origins of Latour’s immutable mobile certainly seems to argue against the inevitable stability of knowledge propagated via print, a stability that forms the basis of Eisenstein’s work and is the antithesis of Johns’ recent study. |
| www.stanford.edu /~mgorman/immutablemobile.htm (2432 words) |
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