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

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]M, Parlat, proiect head, speaking at RATP headquarters,"Before anything else, Aramis is a series of stop-and-go movements, Thatfact has played a major role, If you look at the history of the project, you seecontinual starting up and shutting down, Matra broke up its teams several times,How can you hope to get any continuity under these conditions?" [no, 2]M, Etienne, director of Matra, responding to questions:"Did this shilly-shallying make things hard for you?""No, we'd come to terms with the slow pace; the internal reason, too, whichcan now be revealed, was that we were supposed to keep the costs down,As early as 75 or 76, VAL had priority for us, Notebart had his shoulder tothe wheel; we didn't have the same sort of pressure with Aramis-except fromFiterman, and that was later and didn't last very long,"We didn't give up on Aramis, but Notebart kept after us, We handled theslowdowns without too much trouble, but it's true that in 1977 we almostentirely dismantled the Aramis team," [no, 21]Messrs, Brehier and Marey, speaking at the RATP bureau of economicstudies:"At Lille there was a real contracting authority, Here SACEM has one aswell, But Aramis never had one, For SAC EM, we have a need and we'refiguring out how to meet it; for Aramis, we had an object and were trying tosee where to put it, just as we've done with TRACS, But Aramis finally gotfinished,""Finished off, you might say!" [laughter]"There was a lot of fiddling around, a series of stops and starts thatcomplicated things,"At first, we thought we'd use the Bus Division, so it wouldn't get too heavy,like the metro (Aramis was supposed to be light, like automobiles), Then theysaid no, it was going to be in the Subway Division, since it was really toughwork from the technological standpoint."The operating agency within the RATP was consulted only marginally, Theoperators didn't get involved in the project until the end, and in my opinion itwas too late,"The feedback loops between utilization constraints and technological constraintswere relatively slow for the first ten years, At the same time, with a dealS H I LL Y - S H AL L Y IN G I N HI E SE V E N T IE S