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

the World's Fair; then they said it would serve as a transportation system. Butafter the proiect was abandoned, the costs turned out to be considerable."The contract of the State-Region Plan is an addition, a compromise if youlike, between the enthusiasm of Fiterman and Quin [on the Left] and theenthusiasm of people from the Ile-de-France Region, such as Giraud andFourcade [on the Right}."Aramis was supposed to be a matter of compromises, like the Val-de-Marnetramway, with less reticence about Aramis because of the research aspect. Inthe Plan contract, Aramis was provided for in the document that confirms thecommitment, under the heading of transportation and traffic. It isn't on the listof "extensions of the metro"; it has its own rubric, but it isn't under research,either-we don't have that. It's not the Region's iob to finance research."I think that at the top they didn 't see the skepticism of the technologicallevels. I personally was very skeptical. My president was very skeptical."At Matra and the RATP, they had the impression that the engineers wereunanimously defending the project. They told us that it was going to work, soyou can understand that when they came to find us later [in J 987] and toldus, 'We've used up the money, ' when they hadn't even gotten to the testingphase, we said, 'No, we've got to cut our losses.'"I never had to convince Giraud to give it up, since we weren't enthusiasticanyway. It was a compromise."The snag was a pretty big one, anyway. We'd spent 100 percent of ourbudget, and we were in the middle of the river without any ideo how deepthe ford was."In any case, the Region's commitment was a compromise; we had insistedon specific sites and we had accepted Aramis as a compromise, so 05 soonas there was a problem, we didn 't put up a fight. The proiect wasn't supportedby anything but on idea on the part of some technologists."Then the beast hod to be snuffed out. It wasn't a 'filthy beast, ' of coursebutit was a Rolls Royce. I may have been a little harsh, but Aramis is a bit oldhot, after 011-0 bit outdated. We need moss transportation, not individualtransportation." [no. 34J"You sec?" Norbert remarked. "He tells us that it's a technologists'idea, and in the same breath that the people at the top didn't see thetechnologists' skepticism. Really, we need an even more refined soci-I NTERPHA SF