The Aramis Lectures

The Aramis Lectures

I thought it might be helpful to go through Aramis and write out all the first lines of the professor’s lectures—to see if we might glean something from them in terms of shape of the methodology, or at least, to help with the Wikipedia entry:

“How to frame a technological investigation? By sticking to the framework and the limits indicated by the interviewees themselves” (p. 18)

“By definition, a technological project is a fiction, since at the outset, it does not exist, and there is no way it can exist yet because it is in the project phase” (p. 23)

“The difference between dreams and reality is variable” (p.28)

“No technological project is technological first and foremost” (32).

“Justice and young engineers are hard on projects that fail” (35).

“The market forces of the private sector are actors like the others” (41)

“The actors come in varying sizes; this is the whole problem with innovation” (44).

“To translate is to betray: ambiguity is part of translation” (48).

“Innovations have to interest people and things at the same time; that’s really the challenge” (56).

“Men and things exchange properties and replace one another; this is what gives technological properties their full savor” (61)

“The reality, feasibility, and representativeness of a project are progressive concepts, but they are also controversial; that’s why it’s so hard to get a clear idea about the technologies involved.” (66).

“We are never so numerous as we think; this is precisely what makes technological projects so difficult” (71).

“About technological projects, one can only be subjective. Only those projects that turn into objects, institutions, allow for objectivity” (75)

“No on can study a technological project without maintaining the symmetry of explanations” (78).

“To study a technological project, one must move constantly from signs to things, and vice versa” (80).

“A technological project is neither realistic or unrealistic; it takes on reality, or losesit, by degrees” (85).
He time frame for innovations depends on the geometry of the actors, not on the calendar” (88).

“Projects drift; that’s why they’re called research projects” (91)

“The only way to increase a project’s reality is to compromise, to accept sociotechnical compromises” (99).

A project isn’t one project. It’s taken as a whole or as a set of disconnected parts, depending on whether circumstances are favorable or unfavorable” (106).

“The topology of technological projects is as peculiar as their arithmetic” (108).

“What counts in a technological project, is deciding what has to be negotiated, and deciding on an official doctrine that will make it possible to proceed with any negotiation at all” (112).

“There are two models for studying innovations: the linear model and the whirlwind model. Or, if you prefer, the diffusion model and the translation model” (118)

“the more a technological project progresses, the more the role of technology decreases, in relative terms: such is the paradox of development” (126)

“A technological project is not in a context; it gives itself a context, or sometimes does not give itself one” (133).

“The work of contextualizing makes the connection between a context and a project completely unforeseeable” (137).

“Technological projects become reversible or irreversible in relation to the work of contextualization” (142).

“The shortest path between a technological project and its completion might be the crookedest one” (149).

“During a given period, the form, scope, and power of the context change for every techno project” (154).

“The actors don’t have a strategy; they get their battle plans, contradictory ones, form other actors” (162).

“The actors create both their society and their sociology, their language and their meta language” (167).

“TO study technological projects you have to move from as classical sociology—which has fixed frames of reference—to a relativistic sociology—which has fluctuating referents” (169)

“Technological projects are deployed in a variable-ontology world; that’s the result of the interdefinition of actors” (173).

“To survive in a variable-ontology world, the promoters of a technological project have to imagine little bridges that let them temporarily ensure their stability” (175).

“The actors themselves are working to solve the problem raised by the relativist sociology in which they’ve situated one another” ( 179).

“Economics is not the reality principle of technology; technology has to be realized gradually, like the rest of the mechanism for which it paves the way ‘(183).

“Consumer demand and consumer interest are negotiable like everything else, and shaping them constitutes an integral part of the project” (187).

“The interpretation offered by the relativist actors are performatives” (194).

“There are two major sociologies; one is classical, the other relativist (or rather relational)”(199).

“Mechanisms cope wit the contradictions of humans” (206).

“A technological project always gets more complicated because the engineers want to reinscribe in it what threatens to interrupt its course” (209).

“Every technology may be a project, an object, or an exchanger” (212).

“It is in the detours that we recognize a technological act; this has been true since the dawn of time” (215).

“The work of folding in technological mechanisms can go from complication to complexity” (219).

Thanks to computers, we now know that there are only differences of degree between matter and texts” (222).

“Technological mechanisms are not anthromorphs any more than humans are technologists” (225).


Hmmmmm.