Apple Technology Review, Fall 1997: Book Review

Aramis, or the Love of Technology

by Bruno Latour

By Mike Graves, Learning Communities Group

Aramis, or the Love of Technology is an investigation into the nature of technology research and the success or failure of innovation. The book's author, Bruno Latour, is a French sociologist and philosopher of science and technology. But instead of an academic treatise about technology, he chose to write a novel in which a new technology is the main character.

Aramis was a radically innovative "personal rapid transit" project investigated, promulgated, prototyped, and tested in France in the 1970s and 1980s. The idea behind Aramis is something commuters dream about: a combination of the automation of a contemporary rapid transit system and the direct service of a taxicab or personal car. Aramis was to be a train system whose cars could be separately directed depending upon their passengers' destinations. Passengers, on boarding the train, would inform their car's automatic systems of their destinations, and the car would direct itself automatically, switching tracks and bypassing or visiting stations as needed. The cars themselves would not be physically coupled as in a conventional train. They would be joined by "nonmaterial coupling," a system requiring each individual automated car to precisely monitor its speed and distances from other cars and to make intricate, ad hoc speed adjustments.

The project never succeeded, in the sense that there is today no Aramis public transport system in France or any where else. Investigation began on the project in 1969; reached test site stage in 1973; and continued until 1981, when the project teams were disbanded. The project restarted in 1984 and then finally died its final death in 1987.

Aramis, or the Love of Technology is akin to a detective story. It is a novel in which the events are true but set into a dramatic autonomy that straightforward reporting could not capture. Latour terms the book's genre as "scientifiction," which signifies, paraphrasing his preface to the book, taking no liberties with reality but restoring freedom to the realities involved. Thus, for example, Aramis itself is given a voice from time to time, presenting soliloquies in the fashion of Frankenstein's monster in Mary Shelley's book. Without attempting to explain what Latour means by his new genre, I'll just say that the book is set up like a detective story, an investigation of the death of Aramis. The book's two principal human characters (Aramis is the main but nonhuman character) are a sociologist, Norbert, and his intern, a naive intern engineer, who is the first-person narrator of much of the book. The book's course takes us simultaneously through the investigation of Aramis' death, the chronology of the project itself, and the mentoring relationship between Norbert and his intern engineer.

Bruno Latour's earlier book, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), made a unique, innovative, and controversial contribution to the philosophy of science. Earlier work by Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend had debunked traditional theories of continuous progress in scientific method through adherence to a canonical method. Latour went further, particularly in the areas of the influence of contemporary academic institutions on the success and acceptance of theories. Science in Action presents a much more social theory of the generation of scientific facts and scientific truth, resting on the participation of such institutions as publications and conferences as mechanisms. A recurring theme in the book is a two-sided, Janus-like representation of science as, on one hand, "ready made," and, on the other, "in the making." Science, as "ready made," discovers facts. Science, as "in the making," generates facts through social processes, publication, citation, acclaim, and just plain explicit agreement, to set out a few.

Continue