Tracing My Steps
I decided to read Aramis for this study as my second selection (following We Have Never Been Modern) for two reasons; first, because I recalled a conversation in which a professor of mine recommended it to me as a way to help me understand my topic of study for my MA Thesis. Regrettably, I never got around to reading it. The second and more compelling reason that I chose this book right after WHNBM is because after reading the first piece, my head was spinning with all the of Latour’s via negativa definitions of his ideal philosophical disposition. Latour makes very cogent and convincing arguments denouncing Modernism, Postmodernism, Social Constructivism, Science (with a capital “S”), and even the concept of linear Time itself! But about midway through the book, I began to ponder the following question: “What would a ‘Latourian’ academic research project look like?” Anyone who has read Latour’s dialogue with a graduate student in Reassembling the Social gets the impression that a project guided by Latour would be equal parts fascinating and frustrating, and it would certain stray from the typical path of academic research. Anyway, I wanted to see Latour himself try his hand at dodging all the philosophical/anthropological/ ideological pitfalls that he outlined in Never Been Modern. I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised and impressed! Aramis is, and I say this sincerely, one of the most interesting pieces of academic scholarship I have read in graduate school.
I am curious to know from any readers making their way through Latour for the first time what it would be like to start with Aramis. Since I had read WHNBM, and Science in Action and Reassembling the Social, I felt like I understood what Latour was doing in this book, but I couldn’t help wondering what someone would think about this book if they had never read any Latour at all. Perhaps she would be confused, perhaps fascinated, perhaps both. Also, I’m fairly confident that reading Aramis first would set someone on a different trajectory through Latour’s books than the one I followed. I can’t imagine what text they would want to read next, but of course, that’s part of what I want this blog to do—help people decide what to read next. Anyway, it seems to me that choosing Aramis first would ultimately lead someone to a slightly different, or maybe completely different, understanding of Latour’s work. I invite you to give it a try, follow any trajectory that comes naturally to you, and let me know what the experience was like.
A Note on Explanations
As a gesture of respect for Latour, I will do my best to try and avoid explaining Aramis; instead, I will focus all my energy toward describing it. Part of the point of Latour’s project (Here I am, explaining already in the second sentence!) is to show that there can never be one, single, satisfactory, all-encompassing explanation for anything. Explanations, for Latour, seem to be what scholars insert into their studies when there are gaps in the evidence that they can’t fill. As soon as a scholar/ researcher presumes to be able to find “THE” explanation, he has doomed himself from the outset, because the desire to establish a single explanation will necessarily skew the manner in which the research is conducted. Essentially, the “explanatory approach” will prevent a researcher from being able to follow the actors wherever they lead him (or her) and from allowing these actors to “speak for themselves” as Latour puts it in Reassembling the Social.
It will be inevitable, however, that I use such phrases as “Latour means” and “According to Latour” (as I have already done) in my description of this book. In a certain sense this is explanation, but it is not the kind of explanation that Latour is constantly discrediting and trying to avoid. Latour acknowledges that one must inevitably make declarative statements about what one sees, and to do that, one must invariably resort to using words like “is” and “means”. The sin against true “Latourian” description only occurs when one steps outside of the text, or the situation being described, and attempt to explain it on terms that are not its own. I think at this point, an analogy would be helpful. Picture a mouse in a maze (or an ant if you like the ANT pun). There’s the mouse, the maze, and the person looking down who is staring at both, who sees the whole thing. Actor Network Theory encourages the inquirer to be the mouse, not the person standing above it, making the “critical” or “scholarly” gesture of explaining the whole picture. The mouse can only describe that which is presented before it, and can only at best make connections to other points in the maze. To use a different analogy, one that might explain the name for this blog, it might be helpful to think of working through a network like tracing the path of Ariadne’s thread. You can’t step outside of the network and “explain” it, or reduce its meaning down to a factor that you insert from the outside. All you can do is describe what you see and trace the connections. So, having said this, what I will try to do is stick to describing Aramis and describing my experience as an ANT making his way through Latour.
Description of the Text
Latour’s goal for this project, as stated in the Preface, is to offer technicians and humanists alike a “more realistic” account of technological innovations, one that does justice to the complexity of the situation and to the agency of the human and nonhuman actors involved. He seeks to provide an account (not quite a narrative, or a report, or an explanation) of a “failed” experiment in technological innovation, and in this account he seeks to demonstrate how humans and nonhumans both play an integral role in shaping the contours, the trajectories, and ultimately the destiny of a technological project. To take an exclusively “human” approach to such a study (by examining it through the lens of Sociology or Politics), or to take an exclusively “scientific” approach (by examining only the technological objects), would fail to sufficiently grasp the full “reality” of the situation for two reasons; first, if we recall from WHNBM, Latour does not endorse the traditional Subject/Object, or Society/Nature split inherent in the Modern Constitution, so any project sketched along those lines would inevitably be unsatisfactory: second, in cases like Aramis, there are really no technological objects per se, because Aramis never really existed, not completely, not as a physical manifestation that worked its way through the streets of Paris. One can only see what is a “real” technological object after it has been made, so in cases where the process of innovation and implementation is being examined, it is impossible to distinguish between the human and the nonhuman, the “real” and the “unreal” as we think of these words in the traditional sense. It is precisely the ways in which Aramis was, at various points, made more real and unreal that Latour is describing.
What is Aramis?
Aramis, the technological project, was an idea for a PRT (personal rapid transit) system that was originally intended (though the intentions for it fluctuate) to be the signature groundbreaking transportation innovation for the latter half of the twentieth century. The French RATP (essentially, the Department of Transportation), in conjunction with the Matra engineering company, started working on the idea in the late 1970s, and various stages of implementation were carried on until 1987, when the project was abandoned. Aramis was first conceived as a solution to the various problems of urban transportation, and as a technology, it was supposed to combine all the benefits of the most common transportation technologies (cars, buses, and subways) while eliminating the disadvantages of each. Cars offer the advantage of point-to-point contact, but the population density of most major cities often makes traveling by automobile the slowest means of transportation available. Subways are a faster way to move about a city, but they are heavily crowded, and they do not offer point-to-point transportation (they are restricted to their single line of “stops”). Traveling by bus, while ostensibly offering the advantages of both, ends up, just as often, combining the problems of both. So, Aramis was conceived as a solution. It would be a completely automated, yet passenger directed, above-ground railway system that would send single cars to pick up passengers at or very near their homes. Then the cars, as they approached the inner city, would link up together via magnetic “non-material” couplings, and function much like an elevated train (for the purposes of speed and efficiency). And finally, when the “train” approached the passengers’ various destination, the cars would again break apart and drop the passengers off where they wanted to go. Point-to-point and mass transportation.
The problem with Aramis, despite the relatively successful development of the technology, is that the project never actually became a reality, at least not in the physical, material sense (There is no Aramis system in Paris today). Latour’s ultimate project for this book is to figure out why it didn’t happen. All of the typical ingredients one would think necessary to the implementation of such a project were there. The technology seemed to be coming along, the government was at one point pouring millions of francs into the project, and the logistics for where it would be tested and built were developing “normally”. In 1987, the year before the project was abandoned, everything seemed to going fine. What happened? This is precisely what Latour is trying to find out, but it becomes clear very early on in the inquiry that the answer is going to be far from “precise.”
So, what then, is Aramis (the book)?
Aramis is Latour’s via positiva (so to speak) demonstration of what he thinks genuine Actor-Network research should look like, especially research into the realm of technological innovations and failures. As a proponent of Actor-Network Theory, Latour wants to follow networks wherever they lead, and he wants to allow actors to speak for themselves. It’s important to remember here that, for Latour, “actors” include humans and nonhumans; so, following actors means that one should examine documents, interviews, political speeches, machines, scholarly essays (they too have their place), etc. One should follow these actors, trying to retrace the links that bind them together. Latour argues that if one follows the network of actors, there will emerge a voice from them, a voice that is not the author’s. All the author has to do is take the actors at their word (so to speak), and not insert his own explanations, interpretations, or opinions as if he is occupying a position outside the network and can see the whole picture. In other words, all he has to do is describe. He does not have to explain.
So, with this Actor Network approach in mind, Latour sets out to describe the Aramis affair, but not to explain it. But he immediately runs into a stumbling block. What form would such a descriptive report take? One certainly could not write it like a typical scholarly monograph; there’s too much explanation in these works. He explains that it can’t take the form of a novel because the trajectory of technological projects is too complicated to follow a plotline, and he explains that his book can’t take the form of science fiction because this genre “usually draws upon technology for setting rather than plot”. And it can’t take the form of journalistic reporting because such writing often endorses and operates out of, at least implicitly, the great divide between facts and fiction, subjects and objects, Technology and Culture. So, what Latour has done in this book is blend all of these genres together in a hybrid genre he calls scientifiction. In his scientifiction writing, Latour follows actors through the Aramis network; intersperses scholarly commentary along the way; includes verbatim reports from real interviews with government officials, engineers, and project managers; reprints maps, charts, and graphs; creates a semi-fictional detective story of two researchers studying the death of Aramis; and he even tries to give voice to Aramis as a character. In short, he is trying to use as many methods of communication as possible to make his account of Aramis’ death more truthful, more real. In defense of his techniques, he writes, “I had to restore freedom to all the realities involved before any one of them could succeed in unifying the others” (p. ix). Perhaps it should be noted here that Aramis is not just a fiction, or an historical fiction episode made up by Latour to prove his points. This book is the product of real research conducted by Latour on this topic. All the charts, diagrams, and maps really exist, and all the interviews are real interviews. All the documents are real documents. Of course, Norbert is not a real person (he more or less represents Latour, I would argue), nor is his Watson character, the engineer. Latour has fictionalized plenty of this book, but that’s where the blending part, the scientifiction, comes in. The narrative/ fictional elements of this book serve to highlight the dynamic, dramatic nature of technological projects. The narratives highlight the human side of the investigation.
If you haven’t read Aramis, or if you’ve only flipped quickly through its pages, this whole "scientifiction" thing might seem, and certainly look, a bit odd and confusing. But in my opinion, Latour really pulled it off. First of all, the various types of reports, commentary, and narration are all clearly distinguished by style and typographic features (the interviews are in a different font from the Latour’s commentary, which in turn is in a different font from the detective narrative). Like I said before, I really enjoyed reading this book. It was the only academic text that I would ever describe as a page-tuner. For me, the scientifiction element made me keep guessing, anticipating, and yeah I’ll say it, yearning for what was going to be on the next page. I wanted to see how the next interview was going to complicate all the issues discussed in the last one. I wanted to see what Norbert and his engineer (the characters in the detective narrative) would argue about next. I wanted to hear what Latour wants me to take away from all of this. And, of course, I wanted to hear what Aramis had to say as a character. The anticipation was enhanced by what I think is some clever strategic editing on Latour’s part. None of these sections is too long (I think the longest Latour sticks to one type of writing is five pages or so), so no “voice” ends up dominating the story.
When I finally put the book down, I remember thinking, “Wow, accounting for technological projects is a fascinating but complicated endeavor!” Before reading Aramis, I always thought of technological development as linear, progressive, and driven only by scientific factors, which in hindsight seems so naïve. I would have said something like this tautological statement: “The technology became real because it worked.” Latour shows us in this book that a technological object is not actually an object at all until the very end, when it’s already developed and finished. Before that, it’s a project, and as such, it’s level of reality or unreality, along with the technological features that make it what it is, is in a constant state of flux and negotiation. A whole network of actors, human and nonhuman, must cooperate in order to bring a technological project into being, and the more real the project becomes, the closer it becomes to becoming an actual object, the more actors need to be enrolled. But this necessary proliferation of necessary actors means that more opinions have to count, more controversies will ensue, more nonhumans will have to work together, and more negotiation will be necessary. Of course, all of this inclusion increases the risk of failure for the project. Thus, Aramis, throughout the eighteen-year history of the project, become more and less real at different times, depending on the actors involved. I remember thinking, “It’s not amazing that Aramis died. It’s amazing that any technological object ever comes into existence at all!” Aramis shows us all the ways in which a project can die, making us appreciate (hopefully) how incredible our technologies are, not because of what they do, but because of what they are, a whole complicated universe of cooperating human and nonhuman actors who come together to hide their own existence in the object, which, by the time it becomes real, appears simple (for more on how technologies hide their trajectories and networks to appear smooth and simple, see Chapter 8 of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence).
What’s in Aramis?
I don’t want to offer the reader a page-by-page summary of Aramis. Honestly, for this book, I think that would kill the fun. Also, there’s a sense in which such a summary would run counter to the whole point of scientifiction in Aramis. If Latour didn’t think one could understand what happened to Aramis by reading traditional academic writing, then it seems somehow inappropriate for me to try it. Of course, I realize that my goal is not quite the same as his—he is writing about Aramis, while I am writing about Aramis. What would really have been a faithful creative gesture is a scientifiction account reading Aramis. But alas, I did not have the time, resources, or creativity to pull off such a project. So what I have done below is provide a little more specific information regarding the contents and arguments about this book, just in case what I have written above seems a little too vague. What I really want is for readers to have enough information to decide whether they will read this book, or if they are doing a Latour sequence, to decide where they will place Aramis in their order of operations, so to speak.
Creating Actors to Follow the Actors: Latour’s Method of Investigation and the Detective Narrative
Latour argues in this book, and elsewhere, that in order to determine the scope and contours of an investigation, one should simply listen to the actors and go where the actors tell them to go. Trust the actors. At first glance this seems like this could take someone on an impossibly complicated wild-goose chase with a too many actors to follow. In a certain sense, I think, this could happen, depending on how deep someone wanted to go into their investigation. But Latour argues (and more interestingly, shows) in this book that the actors will only bring up a finite number of topics and other actors. The project will begin to take on the contours that the actors have given it. For example, all the interviewees in the book only bring up a relatively circumscribed number of issues: nonmaterial couplings, the Economy, the government, VAL, etc., so the study actors are not impossible to trace, especially since most of these actors/ networks have spokespersons ascribed to them that speak for the whole. Latour points out that the Economy did not kill Aramis. The economy is too big for that. A few spokespersons who represent the economy did specific things that contributed to the negotiations and eventual death of Aramis. Latour basically asks, “Why not go interview those spokespersons?” And that’s exactly what he does.
Yet he doesn’t present himself giving the interviews in the text (although we are supposed to understand that he really did give them). For the purposes of his report (i.e. the book Aramis), he creates two fictional characters who are trying to solve the whodunit mystery of Aramis’ death. One of these characters is Norbert, an experienced Sociologist and disciple of Actor-Network Theory. He’s the Sherlock Holmes of this story. His side-kick is the narrator, the young engineer who must be disabused of all his naïve beliefs about technology and culture. He’s the Watson. The narrative part of the book follows Norbert and his engineer as they follow the actors. I think it was a wise and interesting choice for Latour to “narrativize”, to “characterize”, to “dramatize” this aspect of the investigation because it brings to life all the arguments, conflicts, and decisions that must go into figuring out how to retrace a network. Also, the dramatization makes it easier for Latour to perform some apologetics for his method by putting the typical objections to Science Studies and ANT into the mouth of the young engineer. After almost every interview, this Sherlock and Watson duo argue about what it all means, where they should go next, and most importantly, about who killed Aramis. The engineer serves as a great foil in these conversations. He always asks the right wrong questions. He always makes the right wrong declarations, so that Norbert can step in and share his wisdom.
The Scholarly Voice
I don’t want to give the impression that Latour is completely absent from his book. He frequently intersperses commentary in between interviews, document transcriptions, and detective dialogues. It’s never explicitly stated who is speaking in these sections, and the commentary lines up with everything else I’ve ever read from Latour, so I can only assume that it is Latour speaking. In these sections Latour houses his explicit arguments for the book, and in a sense, he tells the reader what he/she should be making of this jumble of actors speaking for themselves. I really appreciated this commentary, and I’d like to share a theory or two concerning why Latour might have included it. I think it’s designed to keep the reader moving through the network in the right interpretive key. It seems to serve as a helpful anchor. If there were no commentary from Latour, I’m not sure I would know how to understand the actors in the investigation, whether they are fictional or nonfictional, human or nonhuman. But maybe that’s part of the point Latour is making. Understanding actors depends on how they are mediated, translated, and connected. I’m not sure anyone could understand actors in a book where they’re all just placed side by side with nothing in between them. I read the commentary as Latour’s way of saying that there is still a place for sociological commentary, so long as it doesn’t violate any of his nonmodernist principles. Latour as commentator is one of the actors in the network because the fact that he has written this commentary, and this book, changes the meaning and nature of all the other actors. Even Aramis is now a little bit different. Because of Latour’s book, it is now a project that someone has written a book about, something that a wider audience can learn lessons from. And Latour is different too, and so on.
Some Key Arguments
I’ll just briefly outline a few of the key arguments that Latour makes in these commentaries. These arguments should be familiar to anyone who has read…well, pretty much any of Latour’s other books. This book doesn’t really contain much argumentative content that his other books don’t. The great thing about Aramis is that in it he tells you and shows you what he only tells you in his other books. Anyway, let’s move on to some of the main arguments. It seems to me that the most significant argument in Aramis, an argument that informs the entire way the study is conducted and presented, is that one ultimate, over-arching explanation can adequately capture the reason why a technological project never becomes an object. When studying the wild and unpredictable paths of technological objects, you can’t say it failed because of the Economy, or Politics, or Culture. You can’t even blame technology by saying things like, “the technology just wasn’t there.” These explanations, if I understand Latour correctly, have three inherent weaknesses. First, they are too broad/ large/ ethereal/ abstract to be in connection in any specific events of technology. Second, saying Aramis failed because of Politics implies that Aramis was an object with a fixed ontology, when in fact its very reality as a project/object became more and less real at various stages. Third, talking about Politics or Economics as an over-arching explanation takes away agency from all the myriad actors in the network. Now, of course Latour would acknowledge that economics plays a part in the fate of technological projects. But he would be more inclined to say that a particular spokesperson representing the interests of industrialists had ideas for what Aramis would be that were incompatible with other actors, human and nonhuman, and these ideas about the project could not be effectively negotiated (although at the end we’ll see that even negotiation is an insufficient word).
Another argument, related to the first, is that we must avoid using words like “failed” when talking about Aramis, because failure implies that technological projects have clear aims and goals from the outset, and that they follow those aims and goals through to a completion point at which the final object is built. One of the key purposes of this book is to show that the goals and aims of a technological project shift always, as the inclusion of more actors demands more compromise. In fact, compromise is the only thing that will allow a technological project to become real, to become an object in the world. Making technological objects requires that one interests just the right set of actors who are compatible. Here’s a great quote from the book that illustrates this argument perfectly: “The only thing a technological project cannot do is implement itself without placing itself in a broader context. If it refuses to contextualize itself, it may remain technologically perfect, but unreal. Technological projects that remain purely technological are like moralists; their hands are clean, but they don’t have hands” (p. 127). Of course, I am leaving out several more arguments, but this should be enough to let someone know if they’re interested in reading Aramis or not.
Again, what is Aramis?
Last but not least, I would be remiss if I did not give some sort of treatment to the character Aramis itself! The Aramis sections are surprisingly poignant, giving voice to a creation, like Frankenstein’s monster (Latour’s analogy, not mine), who was not loved enough to be fully created. Aramis (the character) has a sullen, mournful, slightly bitter tone. It is mourning its own non-existence. It is angry at the engineers, politicians, city planners, industrialists, journalists, motors, computer chips, who did not love it enough to compromise it into existence. This is all I should say about this book. I'll just leave you with this image from Young Frankenstein, which I think is actually quite fitting for Aramis (the project, the book, and the character).
...happy reading, and please leave comments.
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