Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, PDF - Dss-edit.com

the network, all the problems of automation remain. The completeAramis system is a little less problematic, but individual Aramis carsstill have to be able to move together in a train, merge, demerge, andcome together again. I have the impression that there's a fundamentalproblem here: no matter how much the implementation is simplified,the moving component remains as complicated as ever.""I may be dimwitted," I remarked, "but even if we give up theagricultural metaphors 1 don't see how we're any better equipped tostudy innovations. 1 certainly learned how to calculate trajectories inschool, but I had moving objects to work with, and degrees of speed,accelerations, measuring instruments, differential equations. How am 1supposed to study Aramis, when there are no moving objects, no fixedpoints, when there's constant drift, when no one agrees with anyoneelse, and when 1 don't think you're in a position to come up with verymany equations?""Stick to the actors, mv friend, stick to the actors. If they drift,J•we11 drift along with them.""But that's what you always say." It was actually one of my boss'slittle weaknesses: to stick to the slogans of his discipline no matterwhat, as if by repeating them he found himself less at a loss inconfronting the technological arguments where we didn't understand athing."Always simplify," he continued. "When things get too complicated,when the actors wear us down , we resimplify. After all, linguistsdescribe all the sentences of a language through paradigm and syntagma;these are their words. 'The barber, ' 'The barber left,' 'The barber leftfor the pond,' 'The barber left for the pond with a fishing pole.' Yousee, I'm following the syntagma, the syntagmatic dimension, the association,if you like; or, to make it even Simpler, I'm using AND,as inprogramming language. But if you replace the barber with 'the grocer'or 'the butcher' or 'the programmer, ' and if you change 'left' to'returned' or 'arrived' or 'spit,' and if you replace 'for the pond' with'for church' or 'for the oven' or 'for the mill,' and if instead of 'with afishing pole' you say 'with a pen' or 'with a soldering iron' and so on,SHILLY SHALLYIIG IN THE SEVENTIES