Aramis, or The Love of Technology [Paperback]

Bruno Latour has written a unique and wonderful tale of a technological dream gone wrong. The story of the birth and death of Aramisthe guided-transportation system intended for Parisis told in this thought-provoking and fictional account by several different parties: an engineer and his professor; company executives and elected officials; a sociologist; and finally Aramis itself, who delivers a passionate plea on behalf of technological innovations that risk being abandoned by their makers. As the young engineer and professor follow Aramiss trailconducting interviews, analyzing documents, assessing the evidenceperspectives keep shifting: the truth is revealed as multilayered, unascertainable, comprising an array of possibilities worthy of Rashomon. This charming and profound book, part novel and part sociological study, is Latour at his thought-provoking best.It is [the] world of machines that Latour sets out to rehabilitate in his clever new work&an eminently readable bookeven 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.Relationalists have to insist that madefound is as dubious as the valuefact and subjectobject 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 hilario