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

Instead of that, my professor insisted -and with such arrogance!-thatone had to live with variable degrees of objectivity! And wasn't itUnreason pure and simple that he was teaching me in his school? I hada name for his variable-geometry reality: I called it playing the sociologicalaccordion!No one can study a technological project without maintaining thesymmetry of explanations.If we say that a successful project existed from the beginning becauseit was well conceived and that a failed project went aground because itwas badly conceived, we are saying nothing. We are only repeating thewords "success" and "failure," while placing the cause of both at thebeginning of the project, at its conception. We might just as well say thatNobel Prize winners are born geniuses. This tautology is feasible only atthe end of the road, when we've settled down by the fire, after history hasdistinguished successes from failures. A comfortable position-but only inappearance, for as time passes the positions may be reversed: Aramis maybecome, in Chicago is going to become, the transportation system of thetwenty-first century, and an obsolete VAL may be wiped out by the economicdownturn in the Lille region. What does the pipe smoker say in such acase? Don't think for a minute that he's deflated: "Aramis was well thoughtout, you could see that right away. All you had to do was look at VAL tosee that it was old hat." The incorrigible know-it-alls! They're always right;they always have reason on their side. But their reason is the most cowardlyand servile of all: it's the one that flatters the victors of the day. De Gaulleafter Petain; Queuille after de Gaulle; de Gaulle after Coty. And it's thefine word "reason" that they distort for bootlicking purposes. Vae victis,yes, and tough luck for the vanquished!No, honor and good luck to the vanquished. Failure and successhave to be treated symmetrically. They may gain or lose in degrees ofreality; one may become a utopian project and the other an object. Thisdoes not modify their conception, or their birth, or day 3, or day n. Allprojects are stillborn at the outset. Existence has to be added to themcontinuously, so they can take on body, can impose their growing coherenceon those who argue about them or oppose them. No project is bornprofitable, effective, or brilliant, any more than the Amazon at its sourceIS ARAMIS FEASIBlE 2