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

actors whom they endow with qualities, to whom they give a past, to whomthey attribute motivations, visions, goals, targets, and desires, and whosemargin of maneuver they define. It is precisely because of this work ofpopulating that they are called actors. For a given actor, this is the way thesfrategy of the other actors is interdefined. What does Matra want? It's M.Girard, head of the RATP, who says what Matra wants. According to him,because of its past, as builder of VAL, Matra is clinging to its own way ofbeing and no longer wants Aramis, in which it has very little faith; now itwants VA L. What does the RATP want? According to the head of the Aramisproject at Matra, the RATP finds itself lagging behind Matra and wants tocatch up, presumably to get even. From this attribution of a past and afeeling, Freque deduces a behavior by applying a rule of continuity betweenthe past and the future: the RATP doesn't want a project that wouldresemble VA L; only a sophisticated system is worthy of its interest. Howmuch maneuvering room does Matra have, as the RATP sees it? Not much.From Matra's customary behavior-the behavior of a company capable ofproducing VAL-is deduced a tendency, a weight, an attractor: makeAramis a mini-VAL. Why not make it an Araval? Because Matra doesn'tdare displease the left-wing administration, and its director has bound upAramis' fate with the Left. How much maneuvering room does the RATPhave, in Matra's view? Not much. The RATP has the desire to producesomething other than a mini-VAL, at any price. The attractor, here, is VALas foil. Does there really exist a causal mechanism known only to thesociologist that would give the history of a technological project the necessitythat seems so cruelly lacking? No, the actors offer each other a versionof their own necessities, and from this they deduce the strategies theyascribe to each other.What are the strategies that the two actors can deduce on the basisof their own reconstructions of the motivations and maneuvering room ofthe other actors? Matra draws the conclusion that "it's especially criticalnot to give M. Quin the impression that we're pursuing an Araval underthe guise of an Aramis"-that Matra has to "change its language," has todissimulate its "real goals," which are to take on the fewest possiblecomplications while aiming at Araval. The head of the RATP concludes that,once desires have been inscribed in Matra's nature, nothing more can bedone. Aramis has been in a state of abandonment since Bardet's day.Among the possible results of this interdefinition of the past, of motives,goals, and more or less indirect means, it turns out that the two interviewees_________ _ _ T_f __ i[ __l 98 4 D [ C S I ON