Preface Prologue: Who Killed Aramis? 1. An Exciting Innovation 2. Is Aramis Feasible? 3. Shilly-Shallying in the Seventies 4. Interphase: Three Years of Grace 5. The 1984 Decision: Aramis Exists for Real 6. Aramis at the CET Stage: Will It Keep Its Promises? 7. Aramis Is Ready to Go (Away) Epilogue: Aramis Unloved Glossary
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
Bruno Latour was Professor Emeritus at Sciences Po Paris. He was the 2021 Kyoto Prize Laureate in Arts and Philosophy and was awarded the 2013 Holberg International Memorial Prize.
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.
*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.
*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.
*New York Times Book Review*
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 [is an] important asset, of what I
think is Latour’s best book so far.
*Nature*
Aramis shows with wonderful clarity the many different stories
which were told about all aspects of Aramis.
*Times Literary Supplement*
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.
*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*
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