ABSTRACT
The chapter draws on Paris, Ville Invisible (1998), a rather unorthodox book little known to English-speaking readers, by Latour and the photographer Emilie Hermant. To understand and to grasp Paris, we follow and track the ‘slipping token’ of the social. By so doing we never meet the acclaimed figures of the individual and the system but find ourselves following a movement that bears no relation to either actors or social contexts. This is the movement that Latour and Hermant invite us to follow here. More specifically, there are four moves that become important: traversing, proportioning, distributing, and allowing. The chapter introduces the concepts of ‘oligopticon’ (versus panopticon), ‘interobjectivity’ and ‘plasma’, and reflects on the ‘agency’ of urban artefacts in city life. Finally, it discusses a pragmatist agenda for the study of cities and argues that a better understanding of cities could be gained by literally keeping our compass sights on the paths through the city, on the paths into and out of it, following the routes that link humans with the natural world, the subjective with the objective, the built with the unbuilt, the small with the big.
