Aramis, Or, The Love Of Technology

By Bruno Latour

Book Overview

Bruno Latour has written a unique and wonderful tale of a technological dream gone wrong. As the young engineer and professor follow Aramis' trail--conducting interviews, analyzing documents, assessing the evidence--perspectives keep shifting: the truth is revealed as multilayered, unascertainable, comprising an array of possibilities worthy of Rashomon . The reader is eventually led to see the project from the point of view of Aramis, and along the way gains insight into the relationship between human beings and their technological creations. This charming and profound book, part novel and part sociological study, is Latour at his thought-provoking best.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674043235
• ISBN13: 9780674043237
• Release Date: April 1996
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Cool!

Well, like it or not - you have to read it. Clear books are boring propaganda. Insightful thoughts are never quite clear. For the clear read your bank statement.

A Hi-tech novel of Social Adoption of Technology

This is a very disturbing but at the same time very thought-provoking book on the adoption of a hypermodern new means of public transportation. Aramis was a small car version of the driverless subway which is now commonly known because of applications in Lille (France) and Orlando (USA) Latour disguises as a student of engineering sciences and writes a kind of whodunnit on the final question: 'who killed Aramis"? Because he lends his voice to the engineer, to his professor of Sociology, to the Aramis system itself and to himself as an author, the book shows different views on the same reality. Highly documented with texts that would be dynamite if they had been published during the development of the Aramis train system itself. Latour shows why Conservative governments never would adopt really revolutionary developments in public transportation. At times a difficult book, but hilarious too, and a reader for every technology-minded post-structuralist and post-marxist thinker... Stefaan Van Ryssen