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

idea was that the technology would follow. It was really the passengers whowere targeted, passenger comfort, and also the operator." [no. 17, p. 6J"So things are shaping up pretty well," said Norbert. "We knowwe don't have to go back before the 1970s, since everybody all overthe world was making PRTs at that time. We know the chain of intereststhat connects DATAR, Bardet, INRETS, and Aramis. We can evenreconstitute- and this is unusual-the little intellectual shift that gavebirth to the innovation: it was the merger of transfer machines andpublic transportation, then the eighty-one-box matrix, then the crosswisedivision of the AT-2000 . We understand why Matra took up thebanner--it was attempting to diversify, it was getting into VAL, and ithad a better base than Bardet. Furthermore, we have no trouble gettingenthusiastic ourselves, even fifteen years later, over a radical innovation,since we suffer from its absence every single day in Paris, as we goabout our investigation! We have no trouble understanding why thepeople at Aeroport de Paris got their feet wet and even contributedsome land without having a whole lot of faith in the project. And totop it all off, we know why the RATP had to be involved.""It's not always as neat and tidy as this?""No, no, most of the time the origins are too obscure. And youhave to go to an enormous amount of trouble to imagine what couldhave been behind such crazy inventions. In our lab we often studyincredible cases of technological pathology. Here it's just the opposite:we don't understand why the thing doesn't exist.""Yet it really is a corpse, and we 've actually been asked todetermine the cause of death.""Precisely, my dear Watson, but we already know that the fatalcause won't be found at the very beginning of the project any morethan at its very end. In 1973, if you'd had five million francs, you wouldhave put them up !""Maybe not," I replied cautiously. "I probably would have boughtmyself an apartment first.""Listen to that! Real estate! That's why everything is going to potin this country. And he's an engineer!"AN EXCITING INNOVA TIOrN