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

"Well, Aramis was the eighty-first box of the invention matrix, the niftiest ofall, it was the programmed metro seat. The traveler merely goes to the station.He sits down, punches in the program, and opens up his newspaper. Whenthe thing stops, he looks up, puts away his paper, and there he is, where hewanted to go. It's poi nt-to-poi nt, with no connections, no stops at intermediatestations. The eighty-first box was the most seductive of all for a with-it technocrateager to impress a client."Meanwhile, Matra had a whole lot of ideas. They wanted to diversify.They were involved in military business, which let Lagardere make a goodshow. They hit it off with Bardet. [no. 40]The difference between dreams and reality is variable.The guy who spray-paints his innermost feelings on the white wallsof the Pigalle metro station may be rebelling against the drab reality of thestations, the cars, the tracks, and the surveillance cameras. His dreamsseem to him to be infinitely remote from the harsh truth of the stations, andthat's why he signs his name in rage on the white ceramic tiles. The chiefengineer who dreams of a speedier metro likewise crosses out plansaccording to his moods. But if the AT-2000 had been developed, his dreamwould have become the other's world. The spray-painting hoodlum wouldthen be living partly within the other's dream brought to life, just as he isliving in the waking dream of Fulgence Bienvenue. In Paris, a war of theworlds is raging, a war of dreams, a war quite different from the oppositionbetween states of feeling and states of affairs, between soft subjects andhard technologies. Dreams seeking to be realized are shaping Paris, workingthrough its subterranean spaces and stations. They touch and try oneanother. The subway is too slow; it can be redone. The engineer Bardet isno less impatient than the hoodlum. He, too, wants to change the metro,to change life. Let's be careful not to oppose cold calculators to hotagitators. Neither is more spontaneous than the other. Petit is influencedby the Americans' PRT, which is hardly surprising; then again-and this ismuch harder to believe-the illiterate hoodlum does his tagging spontaneouslyin English and in the graphic style of the New York City gangs!As for Bardet, he's dreaming too. For where, if not in a dream, couldone compare a 130-pound grandmother headed for the 5acn3-Coeur stationwith a 100-gram cartridge that a transfer machine picks up on an