Ethnography of High Tech: About the Aramis Case  --  Bruno Latour

Full Citation
Latour, Bruno. `Ethnography of High Tech: About the Aramis Case'. Technological Choices: Transformations in Material Culture since the Neolithic. London ; New York: Routledge, 1993. 372 - 398. Print. Material Cultures.


Notes
Prologue: a culture shock (pp. 1-2)
- The need to visit the places and times where high-tech cases are produced when doing an ethnography of them; the power of culture shock for estrangement (pp. 1)
- Outlines the pertinent techniques of the train system "Aramis" which will later be focused (pp. 1)
- To get the trains to run, skills and decisions needed to be shifted from people to technologies, objects needed to be "endowed with thought" and given senses; the system has a theology (pp. 1)
- An approach which looks to do away with anthropomorphic humans all together and rather approach "members of a cast" [memrba disjecta] that stand in for specific actions (pp. 2)

A meeting with timid and not-so-timid ethnographers of machines (pp. 2-5)
- Big three that have caused problems for ethnographers of modern science and tech: Truth, Efficiency, Profitability (pp. 2)
- Truth: studies since 1979 have inverted normative epistemology to make truth the outcome of stabilized scientific controversy (rather than the cause) (pp. 2)
- No clear split between ethnographers of "Modern" and "extramodern" worlds since both contexts assemble the same kinds of objects (pp. 2)
- Truth does not limit the anthropology of techniques (pp. 2)
- Efficiency (for "traditional" techniques)/Profitability (for Modern techniques): these cause issues since social studies of techniques usually apply a "not only [efficiency/profitability] but also [symbolic, social, cultural, etc.] as well" model on them (pp. 2)
- Study of techniques as a cocktail of factors, the issue of this is that we can't know whether our definitions of these factors are accurate and whether one thing or other falls into any given factor; the issue of mixers of pure forms (pp. 3)
- Critique of the ethnosciences: that the assume efficiency as baseline with everything else as supplement; the assumption built into this that culture is autonomous from everything else (pp. 3)
- Studies since 1985 which push back against this view: looking at how many actors all on the same level as each other make monstrous hybrids rather than how pure forms are mixed (pp. 3)
- Actors are already in asymmetrical relations with each other, so the researcher does not need to impose their own external asymmetry on a condition (pp. 4)
- So, two research programs: 
- 1) dualist program starts from list of factors and weighs their influence, there's a substratum of material world on which the social leaves its mark, social is embedded in a material world
-  2) a "monist" program that starts from a specific setting and watches how categories are allocated, watches how a setting has its own science of technology, sociology of technics, and epistemology, you cannot impose categories from outside the world under examination, there is no substratum and everything is on the same level, (pp. 4) any embedding in a material world includes a full historicization of all sciences including its own, reflexivity! (pp. 5)

A symmetrical anthropology of techniques (pp. 5-7)
- Second research program is supposed to get rid of the antagonism between materialist and culturalist accounts; since the first research program tends to obscure what's going on by splitting elements from each other (pp. 5)
- In the monist research program, the ground is no longer a background but one of many positions; extraction is but one of an additive collection, a single body of literature that deals with everything including the researcher themself, and the whole collection of institutions, methods etc. (pp. 6)
- Our world as only relatively different from any other, our world as not Modern since its no longer absolutely different (pp. 6) 
- Numerous small divides between worlds rather than one great divide between Modern and everything else (pp. 7) 
- A single anthropology of science and technology which deals with pre-modern and "non-modern" worlds at once; studies the distribution of the diversity of worlds but also attempts to institutionalize, classify, unify, limit, and purify their meanings (pp. 7)

What is an object? A quasi-object. The case of VAL (pp. 7-10)
- High-tech (in the monistic framework) = a shifting network of actions continually redistributing performances and capacities between humans and non-humans to produce more durable associations and resist any other acts/interpretations which seek to dissolve it (pp. 7)
- Techniques and social relations are inseparable; we cannot think social relations as durable enough on their own, when we're faced with a durable social link, we have technologies which have been delegated specific programs of action (pp. 7)
- The need to study high tech examples while they're still projects as a means of watching the social relations form (pp. 8)
- Presents the example of the VAL regional rail system which started as a prototype and morphed into an everyday form of commuter transport (pp. 8-10)
- The fact that the transport system started as talk; the argument in support gets moved to larger and larger groups of people as a "token" or "quasiobject"; the main question of STS is what happened to the original token? Did it succeed? Did it fail? Did it become transformed into something else and how? (pp. 8)
- "It is the same task to define the artefact tying together the various groups or the groups tying together one artefact." (pp. 9) 
- Complication of the quasiobject/argument/token, its taking on of more "folds" as a means of enlisting more participants; translation is the act of attaching specific capacities in the project to specific outcomes for each participant (pp. 9) 
- VAL never became an object, for any technology there is no becoming an object since the technology is always in active relation with others (pp. 9-10)
- In the case of VAL it transformed from quasiobject into a whole institution (pp. 9)

The essence of Aramis (pp. 10-13)
- Presents the case of another public transport system, Aramis, one which failed; to fulfill the symmetry of the examination and show that the monistic position can deal with success and failure (pp. 10) 
- General details of Aramis: it was supposed to be the best of car and train (see like Cedric Price's potteries thinkbelt project) where cars can autonomously connect and disconnect from trains to route themselves wherever the rider wants to go (pp. 11)
- Driving (car) is taken over by the train cabin while the work of cleaning, owning, distributing, maintaining is taken over by the public (pp. 11)
- Thinking is moved around: first the engineers think hard which allows thinking to be offloaded to the train car itself (pp. 12)
- The essence of Aramis: to gather all people concerned with urban life together around one project which is supposed to deal with all of their concerns (pp. 13)

Agreeing on an object (pp. 13-15)
- Notes the multiplicity of interpretations for why Aramis failed, the fact that failure cannot be reduced to questions of cost, efficiency, or interests (pp. 13-14)
- No clear distinction between the technological object and its interpretations; the slow demise of a project that remains a quasiobject, circulating amongst fewer and fewer people (pp. 15)

"Dialectics" of technical objects (pp. 15-18)
- Necessity to be more precise than dialecticians who cite general movements from one pole to another without specifying what that movement consists of: the need to "render [the movement] fully accountable" (pp. 15) 
- Following translations of human and non-human "competencies" as a means of engaging humans and non-humans on the same terrain, as dynamic entities (pp. 15)
- The example of the Paris mayor and how his support is not behind Aramis as such, but behind a hybrid of competencies that Aramis is supposed to fulfil (pp. 16)
- Feedback loop of presentation-negotiation-redesign as a means of absorbing contradictions of project supporters, assimilating them to the project (pp. 16)
- Use of the word "translation" since technologies (eg. chips) are not reducible simply to social ties and social ties are not reducible to things; we have new social ties produced which are supposed to tame the "fuzziness", indeterminacy, and contradiction of humans (pp. 17)
- Failure of Aramis is in isolating the core technical aspect from all the other components in its network; success of VAL, through converting itself into a technical institution, in making no clear distinctions between its components, allowing the various interests to intersect rather than be separated (pp. 18)
- The two-way movement ("dialectic") is translating interests modifying the project
- Locus of inquiry is then at the centre point where "exchanges" happen between non-humans (delegated competencies) and human (interests), where the interests are translated into competencies (pp. 18)

Conclusion: an anthropology of objectivity (pp. 18-23)
- General critique of dualism: that it ignored science and technology as object of study, applying the Durkheimian approach to everything BUT those too (pp. 18-19)
- Pulls out the major contradiction in the position: society becomes this figure that is simultaneously so strong as to cause religion, art, etc. but so weak as to be easily modified by science and technology without them ever having to actually make any facts as such (pp. 21) 
- The solution to the contradiction is to simply treat science and tech like all the rest: religion, art, etc. (pp. 21); but this leaves nothing for society to stand on bringing the whole project down (pp. 22) 
- The monistic position gets around the whole thing by refusing to treat technology and society as poles which are presented against each other (pp. 22) 
- Society as sum of all interactions within all institutions; technology as the means of executing the interactions (pp. 23) 
- The locus of inquiry is in the institutionalized "transactions" where society and is made with technology (pp. 23)
- In VAL, the transactions are maintained, holding society and technology very close together; in Aramis, society an technology ae turned into poles through lack of transactions which become irreconcilable (pp. 23)
- High-Technology exists ONLY within the institutionalized interactions (pp. 23)