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

defensive about playing "amusing mental games" or making "sterile critiques."He's a sociologist as well as a technician. let's say that he's asociotechnician, and that he relies on a particular form of ingenuity, heterogeneousengineering, which leads him to blend together major socialquestions concerning the spirit of the age or the century and "properly"technological questions in a single discourse.How does this blend come about? Not by chance, but by a preciseoperation of translation. Urban transportation systems are being asphyxiated,Bardet says; this asphyxiation, as he sees it, is contrary to the spiritof the age. This intolerable situation has to end. How can we put a stop toit? Kinematics deals with continuous transportation of bottles, cartridges,or jam jars. And who controls kinematics? Bardet and his company. Betweenthe asphyxiated society of automobiles and transfer machines infactories, there is no connection whatever. Bardet, approached by Petit, isgoing to make this connection. The price to pay is an innovation: thediscontinuous transportation of people, which no one knows how to improve,has to be viewed as a particular case of the continuous transportationof things, which Bardet knows how to improve. The result? A chain oftranslation: there is no solution to the problems of the city without innovationsin transportation, no innovation in transportation without kinematics,no kinematics without Automatisme et Technique; and, of course, no Automatismeet Technique without Bardet.People always wonder how a laboratory, or a science, can have anyimpact at all on society, or how an innovation arises in the mind of itsinventors. The answer is always to be found in the chains of translation thattransform a global problem (the city, the century) into a local problem(kinematics, continuous transportation) through a series of intermediariesthat are not "logical" in the formal sense of the term, but that oblige those,like DATAR, who are interested in the global problem to become interested,through almost imperceptible shifts, in the local solution. The innovation,as Bardet says, will make it possible to "translate" and to "reconcile"contraries in order to establish chains of translation and to situate Bardet':>expertise as the obligatory passage point that will resolve the great prob.lems of the age. The work of generating interest consists in constructingthese long chains of reasons that are irresistible, even though their logica Iform may be debatable. if you want to save the city, save Bardet. Thisimplication is not logically correct, but it is socio-Iogically accurate.AN EXCITING INNOVATION