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

also VAL; Ficheur, the contracting authority, excited about the project, isalso pursuing his own ali-tao-short career, automated transportation systems,and VAL; and of course Fn3que, Etienne, lagardere, and Matra areadvancing their own careers, their capabilities, their company, their stockholders'money, and VAl. All these interested people transform the projectand put conditions on their interest: Notebart wants a network that obligesthe nonreversibility of the early VAL to vanish; Ficheur holds stubbornly tohis one-minute interval; Freque doesn't want the CMD, which is making hislife too complicated. What do they all do? They argue. They insult eachother on occasion. In short, they negotiate and transform the project asoften as they have to for it to end up holding its ground: the one-minuteinterval stays, the CMD goes, the network gets longer, the cars becomenonreversible ...With Aramis, the general trend of the negotiation is quite different.The initial idea, an exciting one, of a point-to-point network served by amobile unit with nonmaterial couplings is downgraded, but it is not renegotiated;it hesitates to locate itself somewhere, but it is not recombinedfrom top to bottom . Aramis looks like a utopia, in the etymological senselikean idea that has no place to land. "Where are we going to put thisbloody mess?""I don't understand any more, Norbert," I confessed, increasinglyuneasy. "Is it because Aramis is not negotiable that it isn't negotiatedduring that six-year period, or is it because it isn't negotiated energeticallyenough that it isn't negotiable and that it stays in its unfinished,hesitant state, stuck between being a mobile unit that is reachingperfection and a system that drifts with the wind?""Everything is negotiable.""Not necessarily. If the very idea of Aramis is a take-it-or-Ieave-itaffair, if it's all or nothing, it can be downgraded, modified, compromisedwithout ever being renegotiated. That's what Girard implies: 'Bygiving up the point-to-point principle, they killed the project rightthen.'""But there can't be an intrinsic idea of Aramis; that would meanreturning to a diffusion model, to the autonomy of technologies, toSHILLY SHAILYING IN THE SEVENTIES