Product Description

Bruno Latour has written a unique and wonderful tale of a technological dream gone wrong. As the young engineer and professor follow Aramis' trail--conducting interviews, analyzing documents, assessing the evidence--perspectives keep shifting: the truth is revealed as multilayered, unascertainable, comprising an array of possibilities worthy of Rashomon. The reader is eventually led to see the project from the point of view of Aramis, and along the way gains insight into the relationship between human beings and their technological creations. This charming and profound book, part novel and part sociological study, is Latour at his thought-provoking best.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #237447 in Books
• Published on: 1996-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Amazon.com Review
Packet switching works well for moving data -- why not use it for moving humans? In a nutshell, the French Aramis transit project proposed packet switching as a solution to human transport problems (though, so far as I can tell, neither the author nor any reviews I have yet read have made this connection).

With all the brouhaha about moving bytes around on the information superhighways, moving people around real cities has become less glamorous -- after all, the current mythology is that telecommuting will render the automobile obsolete, right? With the prevailing American tendency to think in terms of technological manifest destiny, stories about superior technologies failing miserably are usually glossed over in an obsession with teleology (history is an inevitable march toward greater perfection).

In contrast, this book describes an extraordinarily well-designed and highly superior semi-personal robotic transit system developed by the French government -- and then squashed by the French government. It is written in a style that only a Gallic scientist could conceive (for example, in a passage about project complexity, Latour writes: ...The monkey is readily identified as a creature of desire...). Because of such stylistic excrescences, I personally I found this book somewhat difficult to read at times, but I recommend it very highly to anyone interested in the history of technology, cross-cultural studies, telecommunications -- or the burgeoning application of packet switching principles to mass transit.

Review
This quirky book tells the unusual story of an effort by the French government from 1969 to 1987 develop a robotic transit system in Paris. Some 500 million francs were spent in research on the system, which was proposed to take passengers to virtually any stop without going through a transfer. One of its ideas was that the transit car was to split in the middle, carrying passengers on one side of the car to one destination and those on the other side to another. Strange? Yes, but altogether true, and this book tells the story in a manner befitting the experiment. -- Another Amazon.com review:

Review
It is [the] world of machines that Latour sets out to rehabilitate in his clever new work...an eminently readable book--even on occasions a ripping good yarn. This time round, the author of such seminal sociology of science texts as We Have Never Been Modern has set out to do something daring: create a new genre, what he calls 'scientifiction'...The result is a hypertext, weaving real and fictional characters together against the backdrop of an actual project carried out by RATP, the public transport authority for Paris...[A] feisty sociotechnological whodunit.
--Margaret Wertheim (New Scientist )

Relationalists have to insist that made-found is as dubious as the value-fact and subject-object distinctions. This claim is not easy to make plausible, but Latour is very good at doing so. He is perhaps the best contemporary exponent of the philosophy of interchanges, of continuous passages across traditional dualisms and traditional disciplinary borders. This is because he combines philosophical sophistication with genuine delight in empirical fieldwork, a fluent and flexible style, an amazingly wide range of reference, and wit. Aramis is often hilarious. In Catherine Porter's splendidly vigorous and idiomatic translation, it is a good read, a well-paced narrative of instructive events. Any policy maker who contemplates spending public money on technological innovation should read it before signing his or her first contractual agreement. It should also be read by anybody looking for some genuinely fresh philosophical ideas.
--Richard Rorty (Voice Literary Supplement )

Mr. Latour, a French sociologist of science, is quite serious...about what he is creating--a new genre of fiction and reality that tells a larger truth...[The Aramis project] may have been a wild goose chase, but some honkers end up in the oven. Aramis, or the Love of Technology, in this translation by Catherine Porter, comes out the way a game bird should, au point, juicy and delicious.
--M. R. Montgomery (New York Times Book Review )

Aramis shows with wonderful clarity the many different stories which were told about all aspects of Aramis.
--David Edgerton (Times Literary Supplement )

On the basis of a detailed empirical study, [Latour] has written three books in one: a detective novel, in which a young sociology professor and a young engineer play the parts of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson; a scholarly treatise introducing the modern sociology of technology; and a reproduction of original archival documents...Latour's book...offer[s] important insights into the sociotechnical domain and engineering practices that transcend the Aramis case. It also provides, mainly in the form of methodological discussions, the groundwork for a theory of technology and society...I think [this] is Latour's best book so far.
--Wiebe E. Bijker (Nature )

Aramis...uncovers the limits of sociology in its failure to recognize our essentially social relationship with technical artifacts. Its critical force comes from using ethnography to enable technology to speak, or rather, by allowing us to hear the voice of technology speaking indirectly through administrative documents, political rhetoric, engineering specifications, business plans, fiction, and philosophy.
--Peter Lyman (Contemporary Sociology )

Aramis is a case study, a sociological investigation, and, yes, a detective novel unlike any ever written--a carefully constructed, non-fictional narrative of the negotiated fictions that underwrite our mechanical inventions. Latour, one of the most supple and rewarding practitioners of any science, shows that the construction of technological society is at base a human drama and must be told in a commensurate manner. Here at last is science studies that avoids self-exemption and partakes, with humor and emotion, of the very processes it depicts. Aramis is a strange but deep book that comes to counterintuitive, urgent conclusions, pleading for more successful parlay between technology and humanism, animate and inanimate, body and soul. This story has much to say about the world we want to build, the world we think we are building, and the worlds we have failed to pull off.
--Richard Powers, author of Galatea 2.2

Immediately after the project ended, Bruno Latour was asked by the RATP to investigate what went wrong. On the basis of a detailed empirical study, he has written three books in one: a detective novel, in which a sociology professor and a young engineer play the parts of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson; a scholarly treatise introducing the modern sociology of technology; and a reproduction of original archival documents. As the book develops, we hear the voice of technology itself, with Frankenstein's "humachine" and Aramis himself as spokespersons…Latour's book does offer important insights into the sociotechnical domain and engineering practices that transcend the Aramis case. It also provides, mainly in the form of methodological discussions, the groundwork for a theory of technology and society. This important asset, of what I think is Latour's best book so far.
--Wiebe E. Bijker (Nature )

Customer Reviews

A Hi-tech novel of Social Adoption of Technology

This is a very disturbing but at the same time very thought-provoking book on the adoption of a hypermodern new means of public transportation. Aramis was a small car version of the driverless subway which is now commonly known because of applications in Lille (France) and Orlando (USA)
Latour disguises as a student of engineering sciences and writes a kind of whodunnit on the final question: 'who killed Aramis"? Because he lends his voice to the engineer, to his professor of Sociology,
to the Aramis system itself and to himself as an author, the book shows different views on the same reality.
Highly documented with texts that would be dynamite if they had been published during the development of the Aramis train system itself.
Latour shows why Conservative governments never would adopt really revolutionary developments in public transportation.

At times a difficult book, but hilarious too, and a reader for every technology-minded post-structuralist and post-marxist thinker...

Stefaan Van Ryssen

All about the intersection
This is an amazing book about the intersection of social and technical systems and how it works, or doesn't. Latour is an outstanding thinker and a writer of equal capability. A glass of brandy and listening to Hayden while reading this work helps to make sense of it.

Cool!
Well, like it or not - you have to read it. Clear books are boring propaganda. Insightful thoughts are never quite clear. For the clear read your bank statement.