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

"What I think is that the Matra engineers were treading water so Iheywouldn't go under." [no. 16]Thanks to computers, we now know that there are only differencesof degree between matter and texts.We knew perfectly well that a black box is never really obscure butthat it is always covered over with signs. We knew that the engineers hadto organize their tasks and learn to manage the division of their labor bymeans of millions of dossiers, contracts, and plans, so that things wouldn'tall be done in a slapdash manner. Nothing has a bigger appetite for paperthan a technology of steel and motor oil. We were well aware that theyhad to draw, calculate, anticipate the shape of each piece on plans andblueprints; we knew that every machine is first of all a text, a drawing, acalculation, and an argument. No machine without a design department;no huge machine without a huge design department. * We were well awarethat mechanisms are saturated with instructions for using them, with technicalnotices and maintenance diagrams that make it possible to read themlike a book. Every machine is scarified, as it were, by a library of tracesand schemas. We were well aware that thousands of sightings, "looks,"sensors, feelers, signals, alarm bells make it possible to transcribe by sighton a control panel what the mechanism seals up. No machine without itscontrol panel.But we still thought, in spite of everything, that the agents mobilizedby machines eluded forms and programs. We thought there was a frontierbeyond which one really moved into matter, that inert and cold stuff,functional and soulless, which earned the admiration of materialists andthe scorn of the humanists. But no, calculators continue to accumulate layersof forms and diagrams, adding them to other forms and other masks, halfspirit and half matter, half imprint and half text, without our ever crossingthe famous barrier between sign and thing, between spirit and matter.Thanks to microprocessors, we know that "processes" proliferate constantlyat all levels, from the infinitely large-organizations-to the infinitelysmall-electrons. In fact, ever since a literary happy few started talking*See P. J. Booker, A History of En8ineerin8 Drawin8 (London: Northgate, 1979),and the fascinating testimonies offered in E. Robbins, cd., Why Architects Draw (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).ARAMIS AT THE CH STAGE