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

then you're descending, digging in; you're exploring all along theparadigmatic dimension. You're creating, setting up, the list, the series,the dictionary of all words and all expressions that could be substitutedwithout altering the sentence's meaning, its plausibility. 'Spit,' forexample, can't be substituted in this sentence, so it doesn't belong tothe paradigmatic-that is, to substitution, or (if we simplify again) tooR, as in programming. AND and OR, association and substitution: it'sas easy as pie."It's the same with Aramis. All the technological projects in theworld couldn't make a set larger than all the possible sentences in alanguage. If linguists don't get discouraged, why should we? With thesetwo dimensions, the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic, OR and AND,we can follow all the drifts. At first, everything goes along fine; sentenceelements are added. 'Aramis is point-to-point,' 'Aramis is nonstoppoint-to-point,' and then, bang, you suddenly run into a statement thatdoesn't make sense: Aramis is feasible, but at infinite cost. End of thesyntagmatic line. It doesn't hold together any longer. So you have toreplace some of the sentence elements by other ones. You have toreplace 'nonstop' ""ith 'with some stops,' and 'stations every 300 meters'with 'polystate.' And that's how it works: you keep on drifting untilyou have a sentence, a project, that makes sense. You see, we're gettingour bearings perfectly well, there's nothing to panic about."Norbert took so much pleasure in enlightening me, he filled inhis charts with so much satisfaction, that I would have felt guiltysounding skeptical. Student engineers (like engineers themselves, as Iwas soon to learn) can maintain a little peace of mind only if theyrespect the technological manias of their bosses and patrons.In any event, I had learned something from M. Gueguen that wasmore important to me than that mishmash of paradigms and syntagmas.Every time I was squeezed in the metro at rush hour, I now knew thatthis was the RATP's way of adapting the supply of transportation to thedemand. What gives an economic function its elasticity is the flexibilityof my body! I found it easier to put up with the long rides ourinvestigation required.SHILLY SHALLYING IN THE SEVENTIES