Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing 6: 396–399, 1997. 396

Book Review

Aramis or The Love of Technology, Bruno Latour, Harvard University Press, Cam-bridge, MA and London.

Bruno Latour examines the invention of a technologically sophisticated urbantransport system in his book “Aramis or the love of technology”. This book hasmuch to offer those who have any sort of stake in the development and use of tech-nological systems. However this book is no ordinary sociological and historicalstudy of the relationship between people and technologies. Its content systemati-cally challenges taken for granted boundaries between people and things, scienceand art, technology and culture, rationality and passion.

To achieve such challenges Latour creates a hybrid text which he describes asa work of “scientification”. Not the most elegant neologism but certainly one thataptly describes this multi-layered presentation of a technological system’s societalentrance and exit. Latour explores interdependencies of individual and collectiveaction in both the development and demise of technologies. In doing this he posesthree initial questions. Is it possible to “unravel the tortuous history of a state ofthe art technology” in order to provide insight to those who both invent and usetechnologies; is it possible to incorporate the analysis of technology into the oeuvreof human sciences; can technological objects be made the central character of anarrative?

In approaching these questions Latour plays the boundaries of science andhumanities and constructs an innovative text concerning the development anddemise of a ‘new’ technology. His main concern are the interdependencies oftechnological inventiveness, scientific reputations, political careers, ideologicalopportunisms, nationalist hubris, single minded devotion to engineered solutionsand collective aspirations in the proposal, realisation and demise of a personalrapid transportation system intended for Paris in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. Codenamed ARAMIS (Arrangement in Automated trains of Independent Modules inStation) it combined the effectiveness of underground networks with the personalflexibility of the car. The key to such a system was in the way vehicles could beaggregated and marshalled through the network whilst offering the flexibility ofstarts and finishes individual users wished to determine. To create such bunching oftransport vehicles the concept of “non material coupling” was invented. Vehicles

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would flow along in train but not in direct contact so as to achieve the flexibility ofPRT “personal rapid transport” with the flow patterns of a train system. This enabledvehicles to disengage from the flow without any physical intervention or disruptionof that flow. That the technology was possible and indeed underwent successfulprototyping was not sufficient to see it through to a final realisation as a transportsystem. Latour provides us with an account for why this technology failed to liveup to its potential. This is presented not as some dispassionate technical analysisbut as multi-layered narrative presented through the voices of those that played outtheir careers and professional lives in the development and subsequent post hocanalysis of this enterprise. Latour presents his mission as one of humanising therealm of technology whilst at the same time making technologies a critical featureof cultural analysis.

Latour admits that his material could well have been written as a piece ofhistorical sociology, marshalling documentary evidence, and interview material,linking it together in producing a train of argument cataloguing, ordering, andconcluding why this techynological enterprise ultimately failed to materialise as atransportation system. The indeterminacy of the contemporary events surroundingthe engineering of ideas and material would have been ordered in the historicalanalytic account. We might thus profit from such hindsight in the evaluation of anyfuture projects in equivalent spheres of activity. What Latour achieves is a verydifferent form of accounting. His material is certainly ordered but not in a waythat produces a grand narrative imposing any train of thought on the reader. Heproduces a montage of evidence: documents, interviews with politicians, engineers,dialogues of fictionalised encounters between sociologists engaged in producingaccounts of the circumstances that surrounded this enterprise, even the ‘voice’ ofthe ultimately doomed ARAMIS as it moved from an inventive conceptual solutionto urban transport needs, to material demonstrator project, back to a text of whatmight have been.

Does the construction of such a textual format achieve anything more thanbeing a novel challenge to the reader? Are we able to make better sense of inter-dependencies between the relevance of science and technology as individual andcollective concerns? Initially, I was somewhat frustrated in my attempts to readLatour’s text. Why should I struggle to get to grips with what appeared to bearbitrarily ordered sequences of interviews, apparent dialogues between a Holmesand Watson styled sociologist and engineer, transcripts of original documentaryevidence, even fictionalised conversations between the components that materi-alised the system? Why not a straightforward account of the evidence concerningwhat had happened to ARAMIS? However, as my effort gathered pace so I wasdrawn into the false starts, the dead ends, flashes of insight, political intrigue, thepossibilities of what might of have been. I found myself on a journey of discoverythat took me into areas that I had not thought to have looked at before. I was quick-ly hooked on wanting to know more about the capricious events that surroundedARAMIS’s technological, economic and political ‘derailment’. Latour’s montage

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assembles provocative and engaging resources for analysing indeterminacies andinterdependencies of individual and collective action.

We are not presented with 20/20 hindsight of what became a technologicalfolly but with how juxtapositions of ideas, people, place and opportunity make upthe networks of possibility and actuality in the resourcing of human activity ascultural. Latour does not provide any historical unravelling, rather he assembles aresource that animates the events, people and material of technological inventionas a human enterprise. He presents us with a ‘folly’. But a folly in the grand sense,as constructed as something with the possibility of being something other than it is.As a place to consider plausibilities of improbable interconnections and imaginedsolutions to the complexities of urban transport. Just as follies propose and imposeimagined possibilities in the way we view landscapes and structure, so Latour’sre-presentation of ARAMIS explores the interplay between what can be imaginedand what came to pass. In the continual recontextualisation of textual material heprovides a basis for subverting the taken for granted boundaries between scienceand the humanities.

The text is more than a presentation of an argument concerning the inventionand use of technologies. It is a resource establishing why such issues matter andhow their consideration contributes to fundamental interdependencies of science insociety. Latour more than justifies his deconstruction of narrative histories of sci-ence and technology. He amply demonstrates the value of his mode of presentation.Technological objects do indeed become the central characters of a narrative, butthey do more than become a literary device animating inanimate objects. Latoursucceeds in demonstrating how objects are only technological in so far as theyare peopled in their invention, use and disuse. They become instantiated, givenform and substantiveness (material, political and cultural) as part of argumentativedialogues that take as their topic the very uncertainties and indeterminacies ofinventiveness and realisation.

Latour demonstrates that it not possible to provide any definitive account forwhy the enterprise in ARAMIS ultimately failed to become incorporated intothe fabric of urban existence. However, his presentation of textual material asnarrative animated by both people and things, provides the imaginary space forunderstanding that there is no necessary connection between invention and use. Indoing this he can claim to have answered the questions he posed at the beginningof his book. He does provide us with the means of understanding technologiesas ineluctably cultural, where technological systems are imbued with agency andpossibilities of being. As with the unicorn in Rilke’s celebrated Sonnets to Orpheus,such technologies are fed and draw strength from the way people confer on themthe possibility of being. Even when they become a form of material reality asARAMIS did, as more than mere technological imagination, withdraw imaginedpossibilities that fire scientific, political and economic enthusiasm and they returnto fable. A story to tell of possible journeys that might have been taken on such asystem.

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Latour provides the resources for a journey that is well worth taking. We areprovided with an insightful presentation of the way uncertainty resources humanaction. I was also left wanting the journey to continue. But that is no problem. Itwill repay my rereading. Take the trip you will not regret it. A thriller of a read.

David Middleton, Developmental Studies Group, Loughborough University, UKe-mail:d.j.middleton@lboro.ac.uk

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