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

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]M. Gontran again:'II's paradoxical, though, isn't it, that the proiect didn 't budge after theWorld's Fair fell through?"'You know, there's such a thing as an announcement effect: when you'vespent a year and a half selling a project to the press while you were actuallyjust shifting from research to development, you say, 'It's going to get done,' 'It'sgetting done.'Nobody took responsibility for shutting down. The CET was a way to stayin a holding pattern. Also, there was heavy pressure on the technicians: themerger technology, the nonmaterial couplings, the dense network, the variablereluctancemotor-all that was very seductive."Besides, at a time when a lot of innovations were being snuffed out, thiswas one of the few innovative projects in the field of transportation that thepublic could see.None of the other stuff sells politically; you can't have a ribbon-cuttingceremony to inaugurate it. All the political types had their pictures taken inAromis" [see Photos 8 and 15}.Technological projects are deployed in a variable-ontology world;that's the result of the interdefinition of the actors.In a thirty-second portion of an interview, a single interlocutor offersseveral theories of action. The same project which was "pushed" by theactors becomes impossible to shut down. So here we have a physicalmodel. Aramis is a rock-of Sisyphean proportions-that has made it tothe top of a slope owing to the work of human beings, but that then rollsback down the slope; human beings are powerless to stop it. It's a ballisticmissile like the ship's cannon Victor Hugo described in Quatre-vingt-treize:a cannon that can't fail to roll right over those who might have the foolhardycourage to oppose it. But is the "announcement effect" also a physicalmodel? No. The same Aramis project is awaited by everyone who hasread in the newspapers that it was going to get done. Now we're in thesocial, or psychosocial, realm. But also in the juridical realm, since alljournalistic publicity prepares people's thinking and forms habits that cannotbe undone without talk of "false advertising ." Already, lines of passen-THE 1984 DECISION