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

"Exactly.""As I was saying," I sighed. "1 should have stayed in the Man­Machine Interaction program and AI.""'Hee haw!' you mean, 'hee haw!' You're just like Buridan's ass,you are-you never know what you want . . ."[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]M. Cohen, head of the Aramis proiect at Matra in the Orly days:"They're 'conversational,' you know, the relations between people andtechnological projects."The personalities of the project heads have a lot to do with it. If Frequehad headed up Aramis at the start, the project would have developed differently,there's no doubt about it. And if I'd been the head of VAL, it would havebeen a different VA L.There's no question that if you compare the Aramis project team and theVAL team (there were about ten people on each), you see that every projecthas a personality. One project reasoned in terms of redundoncy and looserreliability: that was Aramis, automatically more creative. And on the other side,with more intrinsic security but with its creativity more stifled, more strict as well,more rigorous, there was VAL."The change of team accounts for a lot. The VAL team that took Aramis inhand [after 1 984J overturned everything, and what they produced looked likeVAL."What's more, we know something now that we didn't know at the time,namely how much a transportation system costs. No mailer how big Matrawas, they could not have done both at the same time. And they made ajudicious choice: they came down in favor of VAL. That was realistic, sincethere were two concurrent systems."'All that's left is the size difference between Aramis and VA L. ""Yes, the size difference remains." [no 45]To study technological projects you have to move from a classicalsociology-which has fixed frames of reference-to a relativistic sociology-whichhas fluctuating referents.THE 1984 DECISION