Aramis' mysterious demise

The 336-pages book “Aramis, or the love of Technology” is written by Bruno Latour, the prestigious French sociologist and philosopher of Science and Technology. In 1996 the English version was published by Harvard University Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England. Thanks to the great translation efforts from Catherine Porter, I am able to read it because my French vocabulary unfortunately stays at “bonjour” and “C'est la vie”, as many westerners just can speak “Ni Hao” in Chinese.

In this interesting book, a failed technology, Aramis, was put on a “surgery desk” for investigation and discussion. Aramis was described as a very high tech automated subway that was developed in France during the 80s. It was aimed to be designed as one hybrid of cabs and other public transportation system which was spoken highly of everywhere several years ago but all of a sudden it just went dead. The two investigators, Norbert, who was the fictional sociologist, and his intern or apprentice, who was just a normal engineer, walked readers through their investigation process with loads of interviews and field work materials around the mysterious causes that led to the demise of Aramis. What made the whodunit even more attractive is that many of these real-life interviews involved the engineers and managers, the same people who had been succeeding developing the VAL automated subway systems but somehow failed at developing this project. In the end, readers probably can chew over more missing pieces of the puzzles that are responsible for the Aramis’ death through the investigation, which are not only about cooperate culture, resistance to change, interest from public authorities, financial support, and technical feasibility due to the complexity of the system, since the actor-network theory was gradually delineated throughout the whole story.

In the Actor-Network Theory, machine is no longer a machine but to be thought as a living being. So is Aramis. In the network, it is not what the “node” is that matters. It can be a living being, can be a human, can be a machine, can be the abstract concept, or even something that doesn’t exist at all, like Aramis. Aramis existed only in the mind of the originators and designers, and it was always intact to be “pure” no matter what contextual change had been made. The theme throughout the book is the answer to the question – who kills Aramis. In the beginning, the initiation of this investigation is very ironically stated as ”people want to study the transformation of technology objects without worrying about engineers, institutions, economies, or populations involved in the development”. But the fact is that the investigation cannot dig out the root causes without linking the objects to their surrounding environment, what resources that they used to be assigned, how political policies influence it, how the society recognizes it, and what adaptation or negotiation efforts that they have made to keep it viable and used in reality. It is important to realize that it is interaction among nodes in a dynamic situation that really matters when we come to discuss the viability and survivability of a system. To be more specific about such interactions, Latour argues that it is the negotiation and adaption capabilities in the network. In the story of Aramis’ death, no one is the standalone killer of such a failed technology, but every one is the sinner to sustain the system through the compromise and constant adaptation to social circumstance that is changing and evolving all the time. From the beginning, Aramis failed to adapt herself to the environment as a whole. In its separate pieces Aramis was feasible and engineers were happy about it but eventually it was a technological invention abandoned by the politicians. Environment as a whole is a very complex and dynamic networkThis is actually very similar to the essence of resilience engineering that failures are not referring to malfunctioning of system functions but “present the converse of the adaptation necessary to cope with the real world complexity” . Although resilience engineering is used to represent a new vision about safety issues, couldn’t this more perfectly illustrate what happened to Aramis after 20 more years of the demise?

In terms of the forms of this book, or novel, it is a scientifiction which Latour describes as “a hybrid genre for a hybrid task”, which is a combination of novel, culture and technology. Latour successfully uses the young engineer as the first-person narrator of much of the book and his fictional professor Norbert to disseminate the actor network theory. But it is a true story! The interaction pattern between these two investigators is somehow similar to the comic dialogue or the art of crosstalk. In the end, you will discover that you are learning as the student did in this novel. It is a very interesting process to go through.

One more interesting fact is that I found this Aramis and Unmanned Ship’s development work that I am involving doing have some common traits. They have not become to reality but they are supposed to be designed for use in in reality. Complex ad hoc technologies are heavily applied. Engineers are needed, the governmental support is needed, and the social acceptance is needed. Although it is too early to draw any conclusion about the automated ships and it is indeed in the very preliminary stage, all designers, engineers, decision makers shall be careful about the concept of unmanned ship and the strategy to develop it in terms of the sustainability in case it’ll end up with some sort of white elephant. It is a good book with a new view about “actors” or “stakeholders” thus I would recommend it to all researchers or practitioners that are trying to influence the industry with their shining technological products or fancy methodologies – Success comes from the constant adaptation with the environment, goal adaption, expectation adaption, approaches adaption, and so on. Actors tell us sociology, not the other way around.

NKer,
Lindholmen, Göteborg
2015.01.29