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

to the State, to public authorities, to keep them separate. For Matra, it's anincredible deal: the company gets paid for development, with subsystems thatinterest it; homologation serves to make the whole thing credible. So much forthe Matra side."On the RATP side, you have the opposite problem. They ought to distinguishamong phases, but they don't have the expertise. The RATP feeds on generationsof metros that they improve incrementally; so for them, homologation isvery much like incremental development. In any case, it's not in the culture ofengineers."If people had the courage to say, 'It's risky, it's seductive, we don't knowhow to make it work yet, so we'd better take it easy, move ahead step by step,'that would allow projects to evolve in a very different way."At the RATP, the engineers don't know how to do it-it's that simple. AtMatra, the engineers do know how, but commercial logic led them to suppressor repress their knowledge. So as soon as the RATP takes on the project, andit's impossible for them not to take it on, they apply their logic of homologation."They should have taken a different approach. They should have done it inthe provinces. If they'd chosen Montpellier, I'm convinced that Aramis wouldexist today." [no. 35]All right, fine, so now it's a problem of project management. Theyweren't properly organized to answer the question of technologicalfeasibility. If the CET had been better conceived, they could haveanswered my questions. But I don't have 150 million francs to do itover, personally, plus three years and two hundred employees. I'm justone guy, and only an intern at that! You have to pay a staggering priceto answer a question that's really pretty simple. And they keep referringme to Montpellier, which I know nothing about.[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]M. Coquelet, an official with the Ile-de-France Region:"Overall, it's a failure as a transportation system but not as research-contraryto what you're saying. Locking more precise information, I think there wererepercussions, for SACEM not very convincing ones, for the second-generation