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

isn't the only one who doesn't know what Matra wants; this is also true ofthe minister, the minister's cabinet head, and even Lagardere himself,Matra's CEO. They, too, want to stabilize a certain interpretation of whatthey are and what they want. And there they are, ordering notes andquestionnaires, which accumulate in a file that is soon complicated enoughto require new notes, syntheses, and summaries. What does Matra want,in the end? What do we want, finally? The investigation carried out by theexternal observer can be distinguished only by the time frame, the budget,and the goal, from the innumerable investigations that punctuate the historyof the project. The final audit merely extends the ongoing audit. To makefun of the files and the bureaucrats, to make fun of the two-page notes ofsynthesis and the thousand-page appendixes, is to forget the work ofstabilization necessary to the interdefinition of the actors. It is to forget thatthe actors, large or small, are as lost in the action as the investigator is.The human sciences do not show up as the curtain falls, in order to interpretthe phenomenon. They constitute the phenomenon. And the most importanthuman sciences, always overlooked, include accounting, management,economics, the "cameral sciences" (bureau-graphy), and statistics.In order to keep their grasp on the branches, the actors install littlevalorimeters in as many points as possible, to ensure the translation of onepoint of view into another. The responsible party in the Budget Office, forhis part, sets up a counter powerful enough to let him measure the test offorce; or else the private manufacturer takes an interest in the project andpays for, let's say, at least a quarter of Aramis; or else he asks to pay only12 percent, and that proves that he's no longer interested in the project.The "deductible" is too low. As for the vice-director of the Bureau of GroundTransportation, he provided himself with a battery of somewhat morecomplex indicators to respond to his minister, who is going to meet theCEO: by looking at Matra's capital structure, by studying its indebtednessand its failures relative to exports, he thinks he can deduce the negotiatingmargin that may allow Fiterman and Lagardere to come to an agreement:Toulouse for Aramis. After all, a Marxist minister can hardly be astonishedthat the superstructure depends on the infrastructure of capital ...By multiplying the valorimeters that allow them to measure the testsin store and to prove certain states of power relations, the actors manageto achieve some notion of what they want. By doing their own economics,their own sociology, their own statistics, they do the observer's work and___ -'-T__ II_cC_ 1 9 84 Dl:CISION