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

"You think we 're going to have to go into the bits?" Norhert askedme, sounding more and more worried."Follow the actors, my dear man, follow the actors. Those areyour methods, right?""But the farther we go, the more crowded it is. Every part of thesystem is as complicated as the system as a whole. Every plate we unfoldis itself made up of plates to be unfolded!""Pure Borges, my dear mentor. Why let it upset you? You loveliterature, after all-and you love folds.""I'm not upset," he said stiffly. "I simply have the feeling we 'regetting bogged down.""The only question is whether the details are strategic or not. Andthese particular ones are important; they're at the heart of Aramis'autonomy, the adjustable mobile unit. If it can do that, it's an autonomousbeing, a real automohilist. It can exist.""A heteromobilist, still; we're the ones who give it its laws.""No, it becomes autonomous for real; we've given it its laws forall time.""But it's like us," Norbert snapped back furiously. "If we werecharacters in novels, we wouldn't escape our author.""We would, too, just like Aramis. That's what we used to say whenwe were kids: 'You gave it away, you can't have it hack.' Look, youtaught me yourself, the creature certainly escapes Victor's control, andthe Frankenstein character escapes Shelley to the point where themonster that was created is called by the name of the monster whocreated it.""But that's just the point," said Norbert irritated by my newmastery of the project. "We know now that Shelley wrote nothing butlies. None of them can escape on their own. They need a following,company, a crowd. Even Adam can't go on alone. Even to sin, he stillneeds grace."Theology allowed Norbert to hide the fact that he had lost hisgrip and could no longer write any "sociological commentary," as hepompously called it, on what we were discovering.The next plate administered the coup de grace [Figure 17].ARAMIS AT THE eET STAGE