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

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things. That's not what brought my elder brother VAL into existence."Technologically perfected, " you say. But how do you dare treat methat way, when I don't exist? How can you say of something that it isperfected, achieved, finished, technologically impeccable, when it doesnot have being! As i( existence were additional, as i( it were supplementary,accidental, added from without to beings of reason! As if breathfell miraculously onto our bodies o( clay! Accursed heretics who thuscurse your own bodies (ull of souls, your own incarnate God, and yourown Darwinian nature in perpetual agitation. But you yourselveswould not exist, at that rate!We are not little bits added one to another while waiting (o r atotality to come (rom elsewhere. We are not without humanity. We arenot. We are-ah! what are we? Whirlwinds, great loops of retroactions,troubled crowds, searching, restless, critical, unstable, complex, yes,vast collectives. They wanted simple, clear, technological solutions. Butwe technological objects have nothing technological about us. Are allyou engineers ready to hear me sputter with rage one last time, beforeI disappear (orever into the void from which I could have been saved?You hate us; you hate technologies ... A local elected official knowsmore about research, about uncertainty, about negotiation, than all youso-called technicians do. This message is veiled (rom the scientists andthe literati, and revealed to the meek and the poor! They say they loveme and don't want to search for me! They say they love technologyand they don't want to be researchers! They say they love nonhumansand they don't love humans! And then there are the others, who saythey love humans and who don't love us, us machines! Oh, you reallydo live in Erewhon, you live among things and you think you remainamong yourselves. Well then, may you perish like the residents ofErewhon, along with the object o( your hatred!"But no, no, if Aramis had been able to summon you to his side,"Norbert went on, enraptured, "if Aramis formed the center of a greatunanimous circle, he would not speak in order to point out where youwent astray. He would not speak at all. Because then he would exist!As Samuel Butler says in the Book if Machines, 'Won't it be the glory ofmachines that they can do without the great gift of speech? Someonehas said that silence is a virtue that makes us agreeable to our fellows.'Ah, Aramis, you would finally enjoy that silence. Why would you wasteEPilOGUE
your time speaking? What you aspire to is not bearing the 'I.' On thecontrary, your dignity, your virtue, your glory, lie in being a 'one.' Andit is this silence, this happy anonymity, this depth, this heaviness, thishumanity, that we have denied you. I am speaking in your place, I amoffering you the awkward detour of a prosopopoeia, but it is preciselybecause you are dead forever. 'It' wanted to become not the subject ofour discourse, but the object, the tender anonymous object by meansof which we would travel in Paris. Is that so hard to understand? Itwanted the happy fate of VAL, its 'elder brother, ' as it naively put it.lt wanted to be silence, and thing, and object, and to spread throughoutits great, finally mute body the flow of our displacements. And you, bynot speaking more among yourselves, and I, by speaking so much ofit, have turned it forever into a being of reason, the pitiful hero ofan experimental novel. Neither autonomy nor independence. Thus, itdocs not exist, since it is speaking here, since it can speak through mymouth, instead of being over there on the boulevard Victor, a happything."And Norbert sat back down to stunned silence."Ahem, ahem, thank you very much, Professor H. , " coughed thepresiding official who had ordered the study. "I must say, it's a realnovel you've done for us. I suppose there are reactions, questions . . .Yes, M. Etienne?"The discussion lasted until I was asked to present, more prosaically,the practical solutions that we had agreed to recommend to theRATP.last time.a novel."At the end of my internship, in June 1988, I met Norbert for the"What are you going to do now?" I asked him."I'd really like to publish that story, since everybody tells me it's"But it's unpublishablc! What about confidentiality? And besides,you didn't find the solution; you weren't able to prove that if you'ddone the study five vears earlier vou would have seen the flaw and savedJJmillions."E PI LOGU E•
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ARAMISTHE LOVE OF ECHNOLOGY
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Copyright © 1996 by the President
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TO SIMON SCHAFFER 7/
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By publishing this hook, I would li
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exemplary meditation on the difficu
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PROLOGUE: WHO KILLED ARAMIS?The fir
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PROLOGUE•cember 1987. A promising
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[DOCUMENT: EXCERPTS FROM AN ARTICLE
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"You see," he went on during one of
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"But during that period I found out
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-"There's one small problem," I sai
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1973: Test site at Orly; three-vehi
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1985: Scale model of two-car Aramis
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in a mass transit network, with no
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come true. Since every study has to
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load fa ctor, Professor? Your isola
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if by magic. An electronic calculat
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to be invented, if we are to track
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---) TransporterTime IS . ; To Char
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assembly line? You said "transfer"?
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primly, without acknowledging my cl
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defensive about playing "amusing me
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curves: DATAR, the RATP, Paris, bef
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fellow. It's like the Galileo affai
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Time To-1 2 3 4 5CJIII __ _ Time T1
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fic off the roads , it improve s tr
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ter-who speaks in the name of the g
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are solemnly and eternally committe
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me, Aramis isn't a PRT Iype of tran
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Aeroport de Paris said. IF you map
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IS ARAMIS FEASIBLE?"Now we can go o
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workshop, a control post, a recepti
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the optical sensor so it will maint
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evolutionary system of transportati
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"For my part, " the motor declares,
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-otherwise, it instructs the car to
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not only determined the laws accord
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[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]M. Lamoureux, r
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they have to change the motor, mult
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there would be a lot of new functio
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"The idea was that it was seductive
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know who, among the engineers, exec
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of admiring the architecture, the s
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control room, by Ferbeck (who is al
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has the massive dimensions it takes
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come back to print. The whole passa
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"Do you comprehend the crime, the u
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[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS)At Matra headqu
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[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]M, Parlat, proi
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Stationl00o
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destinations: that's the idea that
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the network, all the problems of au
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[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]M. Etienne, hea
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ody can commit himself; it's imposs
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configuration on the board. Besides
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to the real transportation system,
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As a young engineer, I refused to c
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[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS)In M. Hector's
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[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]M. Parlat is sp
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did his field work in the Amazon ra
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What counts, in a technological pro
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"That's an interesting theory all r
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"With VAL, we moved gradually from
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hard; you'd need to build it into t
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also VAL; Ficheur, the contracting
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completely ignores economic conditi
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INTERPHASE :THRE E YEARS OF GRAC E"
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construction of the Center for Tech
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[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]At the Ministry
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every year?* You could pay for Aram
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A "trashable explanation" ! The exa
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II est passe par iciII repassera pa
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uilding reliable, predictable, conv
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public funds vampire-fashion and th
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"Number 7 is incompatible with numb
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"Yes, we 've made a lot of progress
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Orly-Val], and then Montpellier. We
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Norbert's sociology, he respected m
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"In fact, I should have spent a cou
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The rationality of technologies wri
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Why not go see Ronald Reagan, or th
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"I called several meetings to verif
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the World's Fair; then they said it
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attaching to me dozens of poor devi
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3. In 1973, in a beet field near th
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7 The control room for VAL in Lille
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1 I. Aramis really does exist now;
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] 5. [n March 1987, seven months be
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19. Since no engineer could prove m
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we are often the first to see, in a
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"The RATP said to itself, 'I'm behi
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agree. "They're aiming at VA L in s
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"He agrees with me," I remarked mod
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viewpoints, goals, and desires, so
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If the actors in a project define n
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With a technological project, inter
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gers impatient to show up at Bercy
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allies. Thus, not only is the actor
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from one extreme to another. If you
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isn't the only one who doesn't know
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"Aramis has a lot of advantages bec
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hour. The human being in these scen
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the subway, by virtue of its access
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even includes direct quotes! A prot
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Regie Autonome des TransportsParisi
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etween us had evaporated with Norbe
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ITY OF THE INDIVIDUALS AND COMPANIE
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opinion of the capitalists had "per
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An accusation that's so watered dow
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epistemological; it talks and talks
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conception, which exists in fact on
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put it. If Aramis existed, you woul
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"So we had to increase the absolute
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[SUMMARY OF A GROUP INTERVIEW]The s
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engineering, all the ingenuity, all
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"We've found the hidden staircase,"
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dominated by, people. But there is
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-Vehicle110,000f-PCC spervisio Stat
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[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]-M. Freque, pro
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problem. This task, for the project
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"What I think is that the Matra eng
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"As for the automation, I agree wit
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inappropriate, as if it were clear
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PIaorm 1X" StationI / Plaorm 2Subst
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"Level III: the fixed equipment, ea
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But since you're not human, I'd be
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--wheels, supply information about
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little I was becoming the Aramis mo
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the cars located in the sector, as
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So it givesa recalibration that'sre
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OrdinateViewpoint of mobile unit/I-
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Phonic wheelCoded equidistant cross
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Page 272 and 273: Norbert woke up terrified.The next
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Page 278 and 279: short-term vision. 'As long as ther
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Page 282 and 283: ecause if someone says, 'After fift
Page 284 and 285: Well then, that's reassuring. I sta
Page 286 and 287: thing, give or take a nuance or two
Page 288 and 289: that's too bad Obviously, to go fro
Page 290 and 291: They sound awfully sure of themselv
Page 292 and 293: "Either they didn't put enough ener
Page 294 and 295: Phase 1: Concept development5phose
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Page 300 and 301: 7. Aramis has been perfected as a m
Page 302 and 303: of a network, to the extent that th
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Page 306 and 307: "But then why not say it was resear
Page 308 and 309: when we talked about it. The electe
Page 310 and 311: "No, no, not enough love! Love and
Page 312 and 313: ahout each other in strict confiden
Page 314 and 315: "Yet in spite of its fragility, its
Page 316 and 317: to be a line. What more could I ask
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Page 322 and 323: " Prometheus. ""Prometheus! The 'sm
Page 324 and 325: GLOSSARYA-320 An airplane built by
Page 326 and 327: BertinBienvenueBus DivisionCabinent
Page 328 and 329: tems to be controlled in the car (d
Page 330 and 331: E:'2the ministry's technical dossie
Page 332 and 333: Porno 2000PrometheusPRTQuinRofoleRa
Page 334 and 335: sniffer planeSOFRESSOFRETUSouth lin
Page 336: BIUND /ATOUI , 01"""of SOOoIogy, £
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