Apple Technology Review, Fall 1997: Book Review

Aramis, or the Love of Technology, page 2

The investigation of Aramis follows a similar approach. The charters and political standings of the various organizations involved, political changes such as the election of Mitterand in 1981 and the departure of Communist ministers from the government in 1984, and the plans for and demise of the World's Fair in 1982-83 are all candidates for crucial roles in Aramis's life. On a lower level of granularity, the various understandings of Aramis on the part of the engineers involved, government figures, and industry participants are critical to Latour's story of the project's birth, brief flourish, and death. The fictional sociologist, Norbert, dismisses from the start the hypothesis that Aramis was a flawed idea from its conception and therefore doomed to fail. Rather, he believes, Aramis is to be thought of as a living being, whose interactions with its environment determine its viability.

This belief is a recurring theme throughout the book. The intern engineer is not quick to accept Norbert's insistence that a technological project be understood as a living thing. It isn't that he disputes the claim but rather that he finds it a difficult principle to keep in his grasp. From time to time, he relapses, finding a project engineer's doubts or a transit manager's response to an interviewer's question to suddenly reveal the telling clue in the mystery that, despite it all, Aramis never could have worked--it is too complicated, depends on too many innovative technologies, cannot provide passenger security, or can never offer true failsafe mechanisms to prevent the independent cars from smashing into one another.

Many of the book's discussions, including interviews with engineers, managers, sponsors of the project, and so on, turn on the viability of the project. Was this a technology that could be implemented and used? By the book's end, we are led to see that that is never the real question, because that question presumes that there is an Aramis whose viability can be judged. In fact, Aramis, since it never became real, was more properly an object of conversation than something you could sit down in and ride to your destination. Test prototypes were built, and individual technologies were demonstrated and tested,but no one ever saw the thing that Aramis was intended to be.

Thus, like many research projects, what Aramis was depended on who you asked (or, from its promoters' stand points, who you were talking to). For some, it was to be a widely used transit system to serve all of Paris and other major cities. For others, it was a prototype from which to draw lessons for the design of more practical systems. For yet others, it was a way to show that French industry and government were forward looking and innovative or that their particular political faction was forward looking or was looking out for the interests of the working commuter. For some, it was to be an exhibit at the upcoming World's Fair.

To seasoned researchers, this may sound all too familiar and frustrating. Aramis's originators failed to manage expectations. Everyone had different expectations, and not all could be met consistently. Support seems to be a fragile coalition of agencies and interests that will hang together only so long as the parties representing them never talk to each other. At each stage of development, each party has to be satisfied that, although the current prototype or plan does not match their expectations, this is only a preliminary stage of development and later work will fully address their concerns. Keeping the project alive is an indefinite game of delay tactics. Keep support alive by camouflaging the real design with more marketable rhetoric. Never tell the truth. If you do, they'll cancel your project for sure. And it will all come crashing down when the concerned parties learn what you really intend to do.

But the story isn't quite so straightforward, and Latour's thinking about research and technology isn't so simplistic and cynical. The mystery of Aramis's death continues even though the investigators are told over and over why it died. The nonmaterial couplings could never be made to work. No one wanted to ride such a thing in the first place. A leading contractor on the project, the technology company Matra, was never really interested in Aramis but only in using the political and financial support behind Aramis to develop technologies for VAL, a less radical automated system (VAL, or derivatives of VAL, are today employed in several sites, including the Chicago and Atlanta airports). But Norbert insists that none of these is the real cause of death. These are all explanations drawn after the fact now that we know Aramis died, with the wisdom but also the freedom of hindsight. In hindsight, many explanations gain plausibility simply because they support a conclusion that we know to be true, that Aramis died. But, as Norbert insists, the investigation still has not uncovered the "hidden staircase" by which the murderer has entered and left the scene undetected.

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