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

involved. By moving from conceptual phases to preproduction phases, youmove from saints to the God they serve. Since the project is becoming moreand more costly, since it is agitating more and more people, since it ismobilizing more and more factories, since the nonhumans it has to line upare numbered in the thousands, since it is a matter no longer of plowing abeet field but of tearing up parts of southern Paris, actors capable ofproviding resources adequate to the new scale must henceforth be reckonedwith. Ten times as many actors are now needed for the project, andthey cannot be recruited one by one-one pipe smoker after another, oneiron bar at a time. We have to move from those who represent smallnumbers to those who represent large numbers. In other words, the actorswho are recruited and interested have to be spokespersons who alreadyaggregate resources that are themelves multiplied: the region, the Parismayor's office, the Left, the Right, France, industry, the country's balanceof payments, exports. But the more the fate of the project is bound up withthese new participants, the more room they take up, comparatively speaking.The only thing a technological project cannot do is implement itselfwithout placing itse/fin a broader context. If it refuses to contextualize itself,it may remain technologically perfect, but unreal. Technological projectsthat remain purely technological are like moralists: their hands are clean,but they don't have hands.This change of scale makes a project resemble an onion in whicheach layer of skin would be ten times larger than the one before, and itaccounts for the impatience of the public. So: Is Aramis finished or not? Isit real or not? The answers to these questions depend not on the earlierstages but always on the latest one, which is also the most expensive, themost troublesome, the fussiest, the most complicated. Every two years theproject bets its life on the red carpet, double or nothing! Ninety-eightpercent of projects disappear in this game of roulette-so much for the finefolk who complain about irreversibility and the autonomy of technology.How the Matra and RATP engineers would like Aramis to be irreversibleand autonomous! Would to heaven that the fine folk were right. The projectengineers would light candles to Saint Ellul-never mind that he's Protestant-ifit would help Aramis lose a little of its discouraging reversibility.INTERPHASF