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

epistemological; it talks and talks and goes on ta lking. Obliged to reassureitself continually as to its own sCientificity, it can be recognized by its jargon.For classical sociology, the world is an asylum of fools and traitors, ofpretenders, guilty consciences, and half-educated types. In this asylum, thesociologist is the director, the only one who has the right to go outside.You can study anything with classical sociology-anything except thesciences and the technologies, anything except projects. They go too fast.They become too soft or too hard. For sociology, they are like an extendedMichelson-Morley experiment. It is impossible to detect the ether in relationto which they displace themselves. To study them, you have to move fromclassical sociology to relativist sociology, and see in the former only aparticular case, an approximation, a valuable one to be sure, but onlywhen nothing more is moving, when projects have become objects, institutions.Relativist sociology has no fixed reference frames, and consequentlyno metalanguage. It expects the actors to understand what they areand what it is. It does not know what society is composed of, and that iswhy it goes off to learn from others, from those who are constructing society.It adds its own interpretations to those of the actors whose fate it shares,often less felicitously than they. It seeks, too, to perform reality in order tokeep its own version of the facts stabilized a little longer, and it confronts,fraternally, the contrary opinion of those it is studying. It has no strings toits bow but theirs, and it does not allow itself to throw "science" onto thescale in order to unbalance the equality between itself and its brothers withwhom it is conversing. Without any knowledge other than what it gets fromthem, it is free at least from the crushing responsibility of being morescientific than the actors. No guilty conscience, no epistemology encumberit, and thus no jargon. For relativist sociology, indeed, everything is grace.They're all gathered around the hors d'oeuvres. I'm becoming irresistible,they say. I move on; they move on to the act. They sign theacts. The die is cast. The checks are signed. The word is given. Forfifteen years they 've been meeting about me, for fifteen years they'vebeen speaking about me in a vacuum. Have they finally decided tomake me? Now they're reassuring each other about my feasibility.They're all afraid, 1 sense that, but seeing themselves all togetheraround me makes them feel braver. I am lying in the middle of the largecircle they are making around me, these ministers, cabinet heads, mu-THe ,984 DFC!S'ON