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

if by magic. An electronic calculation attaches them together moresolidly than any cable. This is what the project engineers call "nonmaterialcoupling. " Sometimes a slight jolt, a little bump, is felt when twocars come into contact. The most violent shock is psychological-theone that awaits visitors at branching points. Their car pulls away fromthe train! While one group of riders is transported to one part of thefa ir, the rest of the train reconstitutes itself and goes on toward anotherarea. No one needs to change trains! No more transfers between lines!Matra and the RATP have invented the transportation system of thetwenty-first century, as intimate and personalized as a taxi, as secureand inexpensive as collective transportation. The automobile becomescommunal property. Several years before the Japanese and the Americans,while we are still at the stage of trying to make our own Cabinentaxiswork, France has been able to get a toehold in a promising marketthanks to the World's Fair. People in the transportation industry aresimply wondering how much this little marvel must have cost. There istalk of two billion francs! After the Concorde, La Villette, the Rafale,and the nuclear power program, we are well aware that French engineersdo not worry about the price tag. True, the fair makes it possibletojustify any extravagance. The revolution (of public transportation)within the Revolution (the French one) is beyond price . ..By definition, a technological project is a fiction, since at the outsetit does not exist, and there is no way it can exist yet because it is in theproject phase.This tautology frees the analysis of technologies from the burden thatweighs on analysis of the sciences. As accustomed as we have become tothe idea of a science that "constructs," "fashions," or "produces" its objects,the fact still remains that, after all the controversies, the sciences seem tohave discovered a world that came into being without men and withoutsciences. Galileo may have constructed the phases of Ve nus, but once thatconstruction was complete her phases appeared to have been "alwaysalready present." The fabricated fact has become the accomplished fact,the fait accompli. Diesel did not construct his engine any more than Galileobuilt his planet. Some will contend that the engine is out of Diesel's controlas much as Venus was out of Galileo's; even so, no one would dare assertthat the Diesel engine "was always already there, even before it wasdiscovered." No one is a Platonist where technology is concerned-except- AN EXCITING INN OVA T ON