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

was supposed to be finished In 1982. They were heading toward homologation,production.""Yes, but it's the repercussions that count, after all.""Forgive me for insisting on this, but people thought about repercussionsafter the project was halted. There isn't any document that talks about researchor repercussions before the end of 1987 ""Yes, of course, but there they thought they were bUilding a line, I meanbefore. You do have to talk about lines; otherwise, in transportation, there's nomoney for research. People don 't like research-especially the Finance Ministry,obviously. ""Again, I apologize, but this is really the crucial point. What about you,did you think it was research or production?""I'd be tempted to say that, before, I really believed in the transportationsystem, even if I had some doubts about the technology; but afterward, yes, itwas closer to research, and besides, technologically, in the end, it worked,even though It hadn't been perfected. But the repercussions are important; it'sa good thing, too, because there are already enough skeletons like that in theclosets." [no. 13]M. Maire, RATP's technical director responsible for innovations.'"It hasn't been proved in any case that it was impossible . . .'You've been criticized, as you know, for refUSing to do a mini-VAL, forrefusing to simplify?""Those people, the ones who say that, underestimate us. We chose Aramisbecause it was more complex, more high-tech, even though our relations withMatra were pretty complicated ."Aramis is a system that is meaningless unless it remains pure. Now all thePRT systems have gotten weighed down and have lost their point-to-pointcapacity. If it's watered down, it isn't interesting."So, for example, with nonmaterial coupling, we thought that would be auseful side effect, but it wasn 't our goal."The setup was flawed industrially, defective from the start. Matra wanteduseful fallout right away, while we knew that it wouldn't happen right away-itnever does in advanced research.""So then it is research?""No [impatiently], we were aiming at the main goal, not for the fallout. Theoutcome went well; at the administrative council of the RATP everybody reactedwell: 'It's not a technological failure; there will be useful fallout.' They emphasizedthe repercussions in order to avoid sounding negative. ""