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

jects, are about to extract from the context and reassemble as allies orenemies of their business. At the same moment, with the same Left holdingthe same powers, the European airplane, the Ariane rocket, the Poma-2000, the Va l-de-Marne tramway, the Rafale, TRACS, VAL, though veryclose, are in other contexts.That is why the Context is such a bad predictor of a project's fate,and why the tedious argument over "individual freedom" and "the weightof structures" does not allow us to understand Aramis. The company head,the industrialist, the director of technological services-any of these peoplecould have decided, or not decided, not to bring to bear on Aramis theweight of the left, or of Technological Evolution, or of Necessary Modernization,or of the Equipment of the South Paris Region. They all could havedecided not to let these forces of different origins get mixed up with Aramis'fate. Where is the freedom of the individual actors? Everywhere, in all thebranchings of the context. Where is the structure? Everywhere, traced byall the branchings and relationships of the context.Still more foolish, the quarrel between the history of the contingentbifurcations and the sociology of the structural necessities is of no use atall. To do contingent history is also to structure, to contextualize, and thusto gain or lose in necessity. For Cleopatra's nose to have any bearing uponthe battle of Actium, you still have to have a Roman general and anEgyptian princess attached by bonds of love, and don't forget the serpentcoiled up in fruit cups. All the attachments to context are so many exquisitecorpses.[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]M. Coquelet, a transportation offiCial, is speaking in his office in theIle-de-France Region:"It's a project from the culture of the Sixties, transporting people in a privateEspace instead of in public conveyances . ."Now, obViously, we're culturally out of phase. But in 1984 a Communistminister wanted to increase pure research independently of economic factors;he wanted to showcase his enterprise so as to polish up its image withculti ng-edge research.""But I don't understand. Isn 't it really very applied, the CET\! Isn 't it seen asresearch2""Yes, but don't forget that at the time people thought they could apply it to