Review: Aramis, or the Love of Technology by Bruno Latour
Book Review: Latour, Bruno. Aramis, or the Love of Technology. Trans. Catherine Porter. Boston: Harvard University Press. 1996 [first French edition 1993]. 314 pp. ISBN: 0-674-05322-7
Review of Aramis, or The Love of Technology
This particular text from Latour comes under the curious label of “scientifiction”, which Latour describes as “a hybrid genre… for a hybrid task”. This theme of hybridity is central to Aramis, or The Love of Technology; part detective story, part sociological treatise, Latour’s work follows a half-car, half- train, and variably notional French public transportation system called Aramis as it wends it from its inception as an innovative inevitability to its eventual end as a disavowed boondoggle. The clever sociological novelization that forms the narrative core of the work centers on a young engineer and his trenchant professor as they travel around Paris interviewing engineers, bureaucrats, and politicians in order to address the central question of Latour’s study: Who killed Aramis? Or rather, what were the failures in the socio-technical network that surrounded the concept of Aramis? The exploration of these questions gives Latour ample time to bring his rhetorical resources to bear on his thesis regarding the inclusion of non-human elements such as motors, chips, and PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) systems into his theoretical sociological network as quasi-agential actors in their own right. While the sociological elements of the text may at times be difficult to holistically extract from the multiple perspectives of the research narrative, this inextricability can be generously interpreted as another nod to the complex nature of technological projects. This unorthodox offering of Latour’s is an excellent prototype for contemporary sociology that accurately conveys the complexity of analyzing large technical projects and convincingly persuades the reader that the approaches of Actor Network Theory can provide considerable sociological insight, albeit in a rather ambiguous and interpretive manner.
Though ostensibly a case study, Latour’s depiction of Aramis engages with the historical and social aspects of the project as well as the technical. In the early 1960’s the Personal Rapid Transit systems seemed poised to dethrone the automobile as the future of transportation. These systems purportedly combined the efficiency of an automated train with the convenience of a personal; simply walk into a car, enter your destination, and walk out a few minutes later. For Aramis, this was to be accomplished by programming the individual cars to autonomously link up in trains when traveling in a group, and then split off onto branching paths as per the rider’s destination. The concept of Aramis is enticing, even seductive, but its execution proved to be rather complex. After fifteen years, millions of francs, and the participation of dozens of governmental and private institutions the project was abandoned as a failure. As Latour, in the literary guise of the young engineer and his professor, follows the trail of actors involved with Aramis, he comes to conclude that though Aramis never lived, it also was not murdered. Rather, the individuals involved in the conception and creation of Aramis failed to “love” it; or in other words, they failed to engage with concept of Aramis in a fashion that would make it a dynamic and adaptable actor within the network that surrounded it.
The scientifictional approach that Latour introduces and utilizes in this text differs from the conventional sociological monograph in a number of ways that can be seen as confounding or obscure. The invisibility of the author combined with the atypical bezeling of the research within a dramatic narrative that uses humans and machines interchangeably does not allow for the principles of Actor Network Theory to be presented or expounded on in any formal manner. Rather, Latour has opted instead to present his sociological theorizations in an immersive and experiential literary style. This innovative approach towards the monograph is not purely a rhetorical flourish, as it encourages and constrains the reader to “follow the players”, a methodological conceit that Latour applies to both the execution and the presentation of his research. This focus on actants, human or not, allows for the story of Aramis to remain coherent as the scope of the narrative broadens to accommodate the increasingly complex network of humans and machines that nearly created Aramis. This insistence on characterizing the actors in the network does mean that the analysis is rife with anthropomorphism and technomorphism, but these elements are not included uncritically; the agential attribution of voice to such things as motors or sensors is an attempt to reinforce Latour’s thesis that nonhumans have the capacity to act in a network. In the epilogue Latour drops his scientifictional stylings and once again addresses the reader directly, but at no point does he explicitly present the tenants of Actor Network Theory; rather the components of his theory (and to a similar extent his methodology) are embedded throughout the narrative in a manner that does not privilege the theory over the narrative, or the human over the non-human.
The book begins with a simple question: “Who killed Aramis?” Glossing over the biological metaphor, an answer to this question does not seem out of reach if “all we have to do is take a close look and see whether the project was technologically feasible and economically viable.” Fortunately for us, the tale of how a technology fails to become a technological reality is much more complicated than a mere technical whodunit. Latour draws out this complexity through a number of rhetorical, theoretical, and typographical elements that gesture towards the multiple viewpoints of the actors under analysis. This multiplicity of viewpoints on what Aramis is/was/should be forms the crux of Aramis’s difficulties; as an object it may have been able to unify these diverse points into a consensus, but as a concept or prototype it was at the mercy of its makers. These makers were themselves a diverse group, ranging from industrial kinematicians and satellite engineers to sympathetic bureaucrats and the Mayor of Paris. As such, their views as to what killed Aramis are accordingly various and run the gamut from fundamental technical failures to cynical political maneuvering. Here Latour makes the methodological choice to follow the blame; each time an interviewee pointed to another individual or establishment as the technological triggerman, Latour took it as opportunity to make contact with another informant. While this approach does not lead Latour to a definitive answer as to “Who killed Aramis?”, it does allow the reader to fully grasp the sheer complexity of techno-social networks.
Of course, Latour never meant to uncover Aramis’s murderer; while the narrative of the detective story may be (scienti)fictional, the sociological work done in the pursuit of this mythical murderer is deathly serious. For example, Latour’s protagonists and their technically-inclined interviewees make much of the use of non-material couplings in Aramis’s design. These non-material couplings are what allow Aramis to operate as both a train; rather than being physically attached in the manner of a conventional train, Aramis used long-range ultrasound as well as on-board and centralized calculations to ensure that each car remained the appropriate distance from each other, regardless of confounding factors. This process is an excellent metaphor for Latour’s actor-network in that the semiotic (calculations) and material (sensors) are required to ensure that the entire train remains functional, yet Latour never explicitly makes the connection, rather relying on the reader’s familiarity with the precepts of Actor Network Theory to draw these correlations out. Sly references of this sort abound in the text, as the generalized symmetry attributed to the various human and nonhuman voices attests. This insistence on treating all actors and interpretations as mutually or relatively valid elements of the network is a core concept in Actor Network Theory, but it does little to prune the multiply-sited complexities already present within the narrative. Latour takes his time to carefully lay out the theoretical and methodological components of Actor Network Theory, but ironically enough these components are often only accessible to those who possess a working knowledge of said theory.
Latour’s Aramis, or The Love of Technology is not a typical sociological monograph; like Aramis itself, it is prototypical in that it is too strange for broad application but too precious to be overlooked. The presentation of the text is engrossing and enlightening as a narrative assemblage of disparate genres, but the sheer complexity of following the networked interconnections makes the exercise of teasing out the theoretical elements of Latour’s though all the more difficult. While this rhetorical complexity is ostensibly a reflection of the actual complexities inherent in technological projects, it does require that reader approach the text with a certain care. It is all too easy to interpret this text as a technological case study or mechanistic mystery rather than a treatise on the sociological melange that forms the methodological thrust of Actor Network Theory. Concerns of accessibility and interpretation aside, this text does such excellent job of ushering the reader through the interviews, debates, and archival work that makes up the day-to-day work of a social scientist that the sociological conclusions reached seem inevitable, or at least as inevitable as Aramis once seemed.