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

What counts, in a technological project, is deciding what has to benegotiated, and deciding on an official doctrine that will make it possibleto proceed with any negotiation at all.To hesitate is not necessarily the same as to renegotiate. In Scrabble,too, a player may hesitate before placing the perfect word that she'scomposed so lovingly on her rack. She can even break it in two and resignherself to placing only half of the word-for example, "Ara" ("climbingbird-Platycercides-scientific name ' sittace,' large South American parrotwith brilliant plumage") instead of "Aramis" or "Ararat" ("volcanic peak inTurkey where Noah's Ark landed after the Flood"). But hesitation andbreakup do not lead to the same solutions as does the renegotiation of thewhole word according to the positions to be occupied on the board andthe leiters available on the rack. Intellectually and emotionally, the twooperations remain different, even if, for the other players, they are bothtranslated by a period of anxious waiting and a lot of head scratching.Should we hesitate to implement Aramis, or should we completely rebuildit?At this point, between 1974 and 1980, nothing yet proves that"Aramis" is a good word. Nothing yet proves that it should not be completelyreformulated. However, the people carrying the ball for the projectmake a major decision as to what is negotiable and what isn't. Implementation,size, operation, financing, the dense network-all these are opento discussion; the mobile unit with nonmaterial couplings is not. Now, sucha decision constitutes a commitment for the future, since it brings to thenegotiating table players who don't have freedom to maneuver-freedomthat they'd need in order to be able to rethink the entire project as circumstanceschange. They're obliged to maintain the mobile unit intact (it hasbecome the heart of Aramis, its essence), whereas everything else is subjectto change. Now, how can one make a clean break, in a transportationsystem, between the unit that moves and the network in which it moves andthe city in which the network is to be implanted? Yet the decision isn't reallya decision, since it remains implicit. No one entrusts the negotiators witha list of priorities and a margin of maneuverability for each item; furthermore,no one recognizes that there is negotiation going on, with a negotiatingtable, priorities, and maneuvers to be carried out successfully. Onthe contrary: in place of such a list, we find a doctrine of "common sense,"a piece of strategic advice offered by M. Frybourg, who recommendscarefully distinguishing between finding sites for the system and perfectingSH:llY SrlAllYING iN THE SEVEi'-JTIES