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

With a technological project, interpretations of the project cannot beseparated from the project itself, unless the project has become an object.The actors' or observers' interpretations of the actors' motivationsand interests become more real and less real as a function of the progressiverealization or derealization of those interpretations. Freque attributesintentions to his CEO, to the company head, to the RATP, to nonmaterialcouplings, and to variable-reluctance motors, just as he attributes rules ofbehavior to provincial cities, to France, to the private sector, to the publicsector, and to humanity in general. He lines up the actors, humans andnonhumans alike, in a narrative; he mobilizes them in a scenario in thecourse of which Aramis exists for real on the Petite Ceinture; he offers themroles, feelings, and ways of playing. He creates a whole world, a wholemovie, a whole opera. Will they follow along? Will they play with him? Ifthe actors lend themselves in large numbers to what Freque expects of them,then his interpretation of their roles as well as the Aramis object that they'recharged with creating will both be realized.But some of them protest. "Intentions are being attributed to me!"they cry indignantly. "I never wanted to pursue Aramis beyond the World'sFair project," say the public authorities. "It was never a question of anythingbut research on automation," say the researchers. "You're giving me therole of the Rat, but I want to play the Mouse." "You don't know thosepeople-they're Machiavellian." And there goes Aramis, moving backwardalong with the interpretations of one of the screenwriters. The actors,disbanded, are recruited by other screenwriters, given new roles, dressedin new costumes, entrusted with new scripts, and there they go again ...So translation is not the starting point for an action, but the first resultof a preliminary scenarization. To make someone deviate from her goals,that someone first has to be defined; goals have to be attributed to her, asocial physics has to be proposed that makes her susceptible (or not) todeviation, and a psychology has to be proposed that will make it possibleto explain the deep feelings of the being in question, whose desires arethen translated. Without that preliminary work, translation would be impossible.There would be actors on the marked borders who would know whatthey wanted and who could calculate the path that leads to their goals!There would be well-defined social groups endowed with well-understoodinterests! The world would be rational and full-and technologies wouldtherefore be impossible!TH 1984 DECSION