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

"According to the notes," I said, "among the 'actors' we ought tointerview is Cohen, who's a graduate of Supacro; he's a satellitespecialist hired by Matra as production head. His classmate Freque wasselected to keep tabs on VAL. What's VA L?""It's the automated metro in Lille. Everybody keeps bringing itup when we talk about Aramis; we 're going to have to look into it, too.Especially because Matra built it. It was begun around the same time,and the same engineers worked on both projects."I sighed when I thought of all the interviews we had to do.Funny-I'd chosen sociology thinking it would be less work than theEcole's other internships, like man-machine interactions or signal analy­SIS."Then there's Lamoureux, fresh out of the Ecole Poly techniqueand Telecom-just like me, if I may say so-with no preconceivednotions about the world of public transportation, again just like me.The RATP picked him to work on the project. Matra hired M. Guyot,one of Bardet's engineers-he's a specialist in machine transfers- tohead its future transportation branch.""What about Bardet?""Apparently he kept one foot in the project as technical adviser.Not one of those engineers had any background in transportation. AsI understand it, they all said to themselves: 'If we can build satellites,we can surely build a subway. " ,"But that's an advantage, too. They were ready to reinvent thewheel if they had to. Now comes the tricky part, my friend. We needto move on from easy sociology to hard sociology. It's our turn toreinvent the wheel. And there's only one way to go about it: we haveto dig into the documents."[OOCUMENT: INRETS REPORT, APRIL 13, 1972]Article 2; Composi tion of the PrototypeThe prototype will consist of :-a segment of track 800 to 1, 000 meters long, a fixed statonrepresented by a platform, and a movable s tation thatwill facilitate inexpensive simulations of various uses : aEASIBlf2-------- ---