Truth is best described not by the optical or pictorial metaphor of copying a true state of affairs in our mind, but by an ‘industrial’ metaphor. For ‘when [...] a student of industry insists that there have been a multitude of transformations and mediations between the oil trapped deep in the geological seams of Saudi Arabia and the gas I put into the tank of my car from the old pump in the little village of Jaligny in France, the claim to reality of the gas is in no way decreased’ (PH, p. 137). For modern philosophy, all the problems of translation occur at the single critical point where human meets world. But for Latour, translation is ubiquitous: any relation is a mediation, never some pristine transmission of data across a noiseless vacuum (Harman, 2009, 77).

1. "[…] let’s move and then, suddenly, Paris will begin to be visible. [NP ]The initial point of view doesn't count; all that counts is the movement of images. All the images are partial, of course; all the perspectives are equal: that of the baby in its pram is worth as much as that of the Mairie de Paris, of Mrs. Baysal, of the employee responsible for inspecting what he calls the regard, the man- or draught-hole for visits and repairs in a sewer, water mains, a cellar or furnace. Does that mean we should mistrust images, always too weak, and let our thoughts jump to that which always defies meaning; reach up heroically towards an absent Society in which all these partial perspectives are set, towards a divine point of view which is the perspective of no one in particular? No, the photos collected for this web site preclude such a diabolical jump (29, emphasis added).
2. No bird's eye view could, at a single glance, capture the multiplicity of these places which all add up to make the whole Paris. There are no more panopticons than panoramas; only richly coloured dioramas with multiple connections, criss-crossing wires under roads and pavements, along tunnels in the metro, on the roofs of sewers. Through the half-open windows of these control rooms we can see what anyone would see if they were limited to their own perspective: a glimpse of gardens and roofs (32, emphasis added).
3. But as soon as we fold the different forms of reference back into their respective channels […] We note that they circulate side by side in narrow pipes, identified elsewhere on another map: that of the roads planning department on a scale of 200 to 1. Yet they don't overlap, are not reduced to each other. Nothing sums them up; no camera will ever be able to zoom gradually from cable to sewer. Their forms of reference can coexist without ever being entangled (37, emphasis added).
4. [...] in order to survive, Parisians subscribe to many channels. They have gas, electricity, possibly the cable, certainly the telephone, and necessarily running water and sewerage. All these mediums pass through all the interactions, acting, silent, dangerous sometimes, closely watched, controlled, maintained, by hundreds of engineers, supervisors and accountants, workers and employees, politicians and scholars, prophets, essayists and journalists, all kneading the dough of greater Paris at the same time (91, emphasis added).
5. In the series of transformations that we followed with myopic obsession, we would have liked to have kept each step, each notch, each stage, so that the final result could never abolish, absorb or replace the series of humble mediators that alone give it its meaning and scope. Economics, sociology, water, electricity, telephony, voters, geography, the climate, sewers, rumours, metros, police surveillance, standards, sums and summaries: all these circulate in Paris, through the narrow corridors that can never be used as frames nor infrastructures nor contexts for others. By preventing intermediaries from abolishing those who precede them and those who succeed them, we increase the series of coexistences. If the philosophers were right, we would generate more space than time through mediators' movements. History, as some claim, has perhaps ended. If so, coexistence is starting. The end of modernization – and of its miserable and last avatar: conservation in museums – does not mean the end of Paris (101, emphasis added).

No one would think of saying that a secret military base or the catacombs or sewers of Paris are “intimate” spaces on the pretext that the light of day is never seen in them. There is thus no reason, either, to confuse the practical nuance between above and below, public and private, free access and restricted access, with this radical break between the intimate and the extimate, interiority and exteriority, the subjective and the objective, the material and the nonmaterial, the personal and the instituted. As every urbanist well knows, both the visible city and its invisible infrastructure must always be taken into account (188, emphasis added).

1. That which is maintained through a series of transformations (p. 107).
2. An object (such as an instrument, a document, an image, an equation) that affords the shaping of something into something else and, in that transformation, moves that which is so shaped closer to being put into words or calculations (p. 107-108; think of the pedocomparator in Pandora's Hope  (Latour 1999, 47-55) into which soil from the forest floor is packed into a literal box divided into X-Y coordinates allowing that 'raw' soil or the soil 'itself' to become transportable and comparable to a colour scheme worked out in a Muncell code and eventually translated into a paper map in a soil science journal article).
3. That which is comprised of a number or mathematical signs (p. 109). This meaning of form erases all the actual work and equipment necessary to maintain the consistency of such signs.

We have seen earlier that a mountain, a cat, a yeast, in short any line of force or any lineage at all, necessarily had to pass through a series of discontinuities [rep] to achieve continuity. To obtain being, otherness is required. Sameness is purchased, as it were, at the price of alterations. These discontinuities are totally different from those of forms in the sense that I have just defined, but they compose the passes, the passage, the past thanks to which this particular type of insistence and persistence is achieved. This is what allows the mountain to remain the same, and the cat, even if it grows old, to prolong its meditation on its proverbial mat without being interrupted by the meditation of the no less proverbial philosopher drinking his white wine fermented by yeasts. All of these (mat, cat, mountain, yeasts, and even the philosopher) move along surprising trajectories, yes, networks, composed, as we have just seen, of their antecedents and their consequents separated by a slight gap, a little leap (Latour 2013, 110-111).