The "view from nowhere" is a philosophical concept popularized by Thomas Nagel, referring to an objective perspective that aims to be detached from personal, cultural, or social specificities. In a scientific context, this "perspectiveless" stance is challenged as a paradox of Western modernity. Drawing on the work of Haraway, Latour, Barad and Livingstone, we recognise that knowledge is never "neutral" but is always "situated." This term highlights the tension between the abstraction of information and the inescapable materiality and social contexts from which it is extracted.
The “view from nowhere” names an aspiration to speak from an objective vantage: a perspective purified of interest, partiality, and attachment, where information can be presented as if it belonged to no one. In its strongest form, it is less a method than a moral posture - distance as fairness, detachment as reliability, neutrality as proof.
Yet “nowhere” is never a place one reaches. It is a setup. It is made through instruments, standards, and formats that move judgement into procedure: the sensor that registers, the dataset that contains, the model that stands in for a world. What looks like universality is often the result of stabilising conditions so that a claim can travel across sites as matters of fact.
This operation is never free. To hold the “view” steady requires baselines, thresholds, and portocols that decide what counts as signal and what is discarded as noise. Detachment depends on infrastructures of calibration and synchronisation, and on the authority to name a measure as shared. The view from nowhere therefore describes not the absence of position, but a particular distribution of positions - some hidden as neutral, others exposed as “local,” “subjective,” or “biased.”