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

eligion of Silence, as complex and pious as our religion of Speech. Whatexegesis will have to be invented to provide commentary on the Silence ofmachines? What secular history will ever be able to narrate the transcriptionof words into the silence of automatons?Beyond our infinite respect for the deciphering of Scripture, we needto have infinite respect for the deciphering of inscriptions. To propose thedescription of a technological mechanism is to extract from it precisely thescript that the engineers had transcribed in the mechanisms and the automatismsof humans or nonhumans. * It is to retrace the path of incarnation inthe other direction. It is to rewrite in words and arguments what hasbecome, what might have become, thanks to the intermediary of mechanisms,a mute function. The physical link between cars, the calculated linkbetween pairs of cars, and the little shock absorbers that authorize shocks:here is the morality of things."Hmm," I said skeptically, "we're doing theology now, are we?Considering where we 've got to, actually, we may as well start lightingcandles; we're just drifting. Anyway, from day one you've been explainingthat we have to hold onto the humans and the nonhumans. I don'tsee what's new in Phase 3B.""But it's the Achilles' heel of the whole Aramis project! We hadn'tyet grappled with the technology. It was still only a project, and projectsare words, plans, signs, that sort of thing, whereas now we 're goingright to the object, and we're still dealing with the social arena, thesocial bond, attachments and values, but now they've been altered,transformed. The question now is to find out what quantity of the socialelement Aramis can absorb, transform, displace, by getting more complicated,by folding itself up tighter. If it can hold its whole contradictoryenvironment together, then it will exist."*Madeleine Akrich, "The De-Scription of Technical Objects," in Wiebe Bijkerand John Law, eds., Shaping Technology / BUilding SOCiety: Swdies in SOCiological Change(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 205224.ARAMIS AT THE eFT STAGE