Apple Technology Review, Fall 1997: Book Review

Aramis, or the Love of Technology, page 3

As the investigation proceeds into increasingly technical areas, Norbert vanishes, leaving the intern engineer to carry on. Through the narration of the engineer, we are led to think that this is because Norbert is out of his element and frustrated with his incompetence in the area to which the investigation has led. In fact, it is not a technical insight that leads to what is apparently the solution to the mystery. The engineer reads a report by Matra from 1987 called "The Basic Principles of the Aramis System" and realizes that Aramis is still described in 1987 in exactly the same way, the same words, as it was described near its conception in 1970. As he says:

Aramis had not incorporated any of the transformations of its environment. It had remained purely an object, a pure object. Remote from the social arena, remote from history; intact. This was surely it, the hidden staircase Norbert was looking for. Its soul and its body, as he would say, never merged.

This discovery echoes an analogy made earlier in the book between designing a new technology and playing a game of Scrabble. If the Scrabble player holds onto her letters, hoping to make her dream word, her opponent will rack up points while she is waiting and waiting for the perfect opportunity to deploy her masterpiece. The successful player negotiates and deploys her pieces in a long-term, evolving strategy in partnership with what is happening on the board. Likewise, a successful designer negotiates, hesitates, and adjusts. Aramis's designers never adjusted Aramis to meet its changing environment. This is less true of its technical design (for example, one compromise to the original conception was to make the basic unit a set of two cars with an articulated coupling rather than a single car, thereby solving a problem involving how tight a curve the train could negotiate); it is more true of its social design, its perceived purpose and value. Despite the various and dynamic expectations placed on Aramis, as a project it remained "pure," uncompromised in what it offered and was intended to deliver.

This leads Latour, through his two investigators, to a discussion close to many of our hearts. How is research distinguished from production or development? Was Aramis a research project, or was it a development project? Its promoters certainly promised it to be a solution to commuting problems--personal and express routing, less time spent on the commute, with all of the attendant social benefits of increased use of public transportation. And it was to be a real system, not just an exhibit or a demonstration. They certainly talked about it as if it were something that would exist.

At the same time, Latour suggests, Aramis needed to be a research project. It did require innovations on many fronts. It was "hyperrefined," as he puts it. So many innovations and tight tolerances made its design fragile. It required a learning period, with failed approaches, compromises, and new designs. But, he says, "They didn't make Aramis a research project."

Why not? I am not satisfied that Latour furnishes an unambiguous answer or, for that matter, that he means to. Two answers stand out. The first is explicitly stated by both Norbert and by Aramis itself. As a research project, and given its scale, Aramis would not have been funded adequately. It could only gather the support of the politicians, ministers, and the public if it appeared to be something that would really happen. Aramis, in one of its final soliloquies, says,

A pretext-object. One of those plans that gets passed around for years so long as they don't really exist. No, no, you didn't love me. You loved me as an idea. You loved me as long as I was vague.

The tone of the passage is meant to mimic Frankenstein's monster's in the final scenes of Frankenstein. To love technology is to nourish it and to prepare it properly for the world, especially the social world. Instead, Aramis's designers kept it "pure," at the cost of its ever becoming real. So, later in the same passage, Aramis says,

You [Aramis's creators] hate us; you hate technologies. . . A local elected official knows more about research, about uncertainty, about negotiation, than all you so-called technicians do.

Continue