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

for very primitive, basic gestures like the ones Leroi-Gourhan calls "technological trends."This rejection of Platonism gives greater freedom to the observer ofmachines than to the observer of facts. The big problems of realism andrelativism do not bother him. He is free to study engineers who are creatingfictions, since fiction, the projection of a state of technology from five orfifty years in the future to a time T, is part of their job. They invent a meansof transportation that does not exist, paper passengers, opportunities thathave to be created, places to be designed (often from scratch), componentindustries, technological revolutions. They're novelists. With just one difference:their project-which is at first indistinguishable from a novel-willgradually veer in one direction or another. Either it will remain a project inthe file drawers (and its text is often less amusing to read than that of anovel) or else it will be transformed into an object.In the beginning, there is no distinction between projects and objects.The two circulate from office to office in the form of paper, plans, departmentalmemos, speeches, scale models, and occasional synopses. Herewe're in the realm of signs, language, texts. In the end, people, after theyleave their offices, are the ones who circulate inside the object. A Copernicanrevolution. A gulf opens up between the world of signs and the worldof things. The R-3 12 is no longer a novel that carries me away in transportsof delight; it's a bus that transports me away from the boulevard Saint­Michel. The observer of technologies has to be very careful not to differentiatetoo hastily between signs and things, between projects and objects,between fiction and reality, between a novel about feelings and what isinscribed in the nature of things. In fact, the engineers the observer isstudying pass progressively from one of these sets to another. The R-3 12was a text; now it's a thing. Once a carcass, it will eventually revert to thecarcass state. Aramis was a text; it came close to becoming, it nearlybecame, it might have become, an object, an institution, a means oftransportation in Paris. In the archives, it turns back into a text, a technologicalfiction. The capacity of a text to weigh itself down with reality, or,on the contrary, to lighten its load of reality, is what endows fictionaltechnologies with a beauty that the novel we've inherited from the nineteenthcentury has difficulty manifesting nowadays. Only a fiction that gainsor loses reality can do justice to the engineers, those great despised figuresof culture and history. A fiction with "variable geometry": this is what needs.I-_A-,-N,-,-,,-E ,-,-XC-,-I TI-,-N-,--G=---,-,-INN,-,O==--VA--'.T:...:I--=O==--N ' ________________