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

IS ARAMIS FEASIBLE?"Now we can go on to Phase Zero, since that's where they are.Where's your diagram? Okay! Here's where we are, in black and white"[see Figure 1 in Chapter 1 J.."If I' m not mlsta . k en, " my men t or went on, " our engmeers f romMatra, Automatisme et Technique, and Aeroport de Paris have been outin the beet fields hy the Orly runways since 1973, asking three Kantianquestions: 'What can we know about Aramis? What can we hope to getout of it? What is it supposed to do?' Oh, they're great philosophers!Nothing exists as yet except beets and a principle of continuouskinematics. A rather speculative principle, but the time is right and thearguments are good, so it stirs up some interest. The last step in thisprogressive slippage of interest is to translate it into cold hard cash,sixteen million francs at the time. * The beet field still has to be turnedinto a transportation system, which is roughly equivalent to turning apumpkin into a coach. Who are the mice and the fairies? Who are theactors?"I had worked with the professor for a while, so I was no longersurprised to hear sociologists throw theatrical terms around.*The equivalent of 64 million francs in 1988. DATAR (representing theinterests, properly understood, of the French in need of improvements) contributed3.4 million, Aeroport de Paris and Air France (representing a mitigated interest inshortdistance transportation systems) invested 1 million, the DTT (representing theTransportation Ministry) chipped in 1 million, the Ile-dc-France region (here issomeone representing local users at last) contrihuted 0.5 million, the RATP (representingtechnology) 0.362 million, and Matra (committing the properly understoodinterests of its stockholders to diversification in all directions) invested the largestamount: 10 million francs.