ARAMIS

THE LOVE OF ~ECHNOLOGY

ARAMIS or

THE LOVE OF TECHNOLOG

Bruno Latour

TRANSLATED BY CATHERINE PORTER

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

1996

Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England

Copyright © 1996 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

This book was originally published as Aramis, 011 l'amour des techniques, by Editions La Decouverte, copyright (g 1993 by Editions La Decouverte, Paris.

Publication of this book has been aided by

a grant from the French Ministry of Culture.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Latour, Bruno.

[Aramis. English]

Aramis, or the love of technology I Bruno Latour : translated by Catherine Porter.

p. ell.

ISBN 0- 674---04322- 7 (alk. paper)

ISBN 0 674-04323 5 (paperback: alk. paper)

1. Local transit- France-Paris Metropolitan Area. 2. Personal rapid transit-France-Paris Metropolitan Area. I. Title. HE4769.P3L3813 1996

388.4'0944'361-dc20

/

CONTENTS

7

Preface IX

Prologue: Who Killed Aramis?

1 An Exciting Innovation 1 2

2 Is Aramis Feasible? 51

3 Shilly-Shallying in the Seventies 84

4 Interphase: Three Years of Grace J 24

5 The 1984 Decision: Aramis Exists for Real 159

6 Aramis at the eET Stage: Will It Keep Its Promises? 203

7 Aramis Is Ready to Go (Away) 251

Epilogue: Aramis Unloved 289

Glossary 303

Photographs follow page 158

TO SIMON SCHAFFER

7

/

/

PREFACE

/

Can we unravel the tortuous historv of a state-of-the-art technol-

J

ogy from beginning to end, as a lesson to the engineers, decisionmakers, and users whose daily lives, for better or for worse, depend on such technology? Can we make the human sciences capable of comprehending the machines they view as inhuman, and thus reconcile the educated public with bodies it deems foreign to the social realm? Finally, can we turn a technological object into the central character of a narrative, restoring to literature the vast territories it should never have given up-namely, science and technology?

Three questions, a single case study in scientifiction.

Samuel Butler tells the story of a stranger passing through the land of Erewhon who is thrown into prison because he owns a watch. Outraged at the verdict, he gradually discovers that draconian measures forbid the introduction of machinery. According to the inhabitants of Erewhon, a cataclysmic process of Darwinian evolution might allow a simple timepiece to give birth to monsters that would rule over humans. The inhabitants are not technologically backward; but they have voluntarily destroyed all advanced machines and have kept none but the simplest tools, the only ones compatible with the purity of their mores.

Butler's Nowhere world is not a utopia. It is our own intellectual universe, from which we have in effect eradicated all technology. In this universe, people who are interested in the souls of machines are severely punished by being isolated in their own separate world, the world of engineers, technicians, and technocrats.

By publishing this hook, I would like to try to bring that isolation to an end.

I have sought to after humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural objects worthy of their attention and respect. They1l find that if they add interpretation of machines to interpretation of texts, their culture will not fall to pieces; instead, it will take on added density. I have sought to show technicians that they cannot even conceive of a technological object without taking into account the mass of human beings with all their passions and politics and pitiful calculations, and that by becoming good sociologists and good humanists they can become better engineers and betterinformed decisionmakers. An object that is merely technological is a utopia, as remote as the world of Erewhon. Finally, I have sought to show researchers in the social sciences that sociology is not the science of human beings alone-that it can welcome crowds of nonhumans with open arms, just as it welcomed the working masses in the nineteenth century. Our collecti ve is woven together out of speaking subjects, perhaps, but subjects to which poor objects, our inferior brothers, are attached at all points. By opening up to include objects, the social bond would become less mysterious.

What genre could I choose to bring about this fusion of two so clearly separated universes, that of culture and that of technology, as well as the fusion of three entirely distinct literary genres-the novel,

" '

the bureaucratic dossier, and sociological commentary? Science fiction

is inadequate, since such writing usually draws upon technology for setting rather than plot. Evcn fiction is superfluous, for the engineers who dream up unheard-of systems always go further, as we shall see, than the best-woven plots. Realism would be misleading, for it would construct plausible settings for its narratives on the basis of specific states of science and technology, whereas what I want to show is how those states are generated. Everything in this book is true, but nothing in it will seem plausible, for the science and technology it relies upon remain controversial, open-ended. A journalistic approach might have sufficed, but journalism itself is split by the great divide, the one I'm

seeking to eliminate, between popularizing technology and denouncing its politics. Adopting the discourse of the human sciences as a master discourse was not an option, clearly, for it would scarcely be fitting to call the hard sciences into question only in order to start taking the soft ones as dogma.

Was I obliged to leave reality behind in order to inject a bit of emotion and poetry into austere subjects? On the contrary, I wanted to come close enough to reality so that scientific worlds could become once again what they had been: possible worlds in conflict that move and shape one another. Did I have to take certain liberties with reality? None whatsoever. But I had to restore freedom to all the realities involved before anyone of them could succeed in unifying the others. The hybrid genre I have devised for a hybrid task is what I call scietuiiiction,

For such a work, I needed a topic worthy of the task. Thanks to the Regie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP), I was able to learn the story of the automated train system known as Aramis. Aramis was not only technologically superb but also politically impeccable. There was no "Aramis affair," no scandal in the newspapers. Better still, during the same period the very same companies, the same engineers and administrators, succeeded in developing the VAL automated subway systems whose background forms a perfect counterweight to the complex history of Aramis. Even though I had not gone looking for it at the outset, the principle of symmetry hit home: How can people be condemned for failing when those very same people are succeeding elsewhere?

I could have done nothing without the openness and sophistication, new to me, of the world of guided transportation (that is, transportation that functions on rails). The few engineers and decisionmakers in this field, who have been renewing the framework of French urban life through spectacular innovations in public transportation over the last twenty years, were nevertheless willing to cooperate in the autopsy of a failure. It is owing to their openmindedness, with special thanks to the RATP, the Institut National de Recherche sur les Transports (INRETS), and Matra Transport, that Aramis can be presented to us all as an

PRFfI'lCl:

exemplary meditation on the difficulties of innovation. So Aramis will not have died in vain.

This book, despite its strange experimental style, draws more heavily than the footnotes might suggest on the collective work of the new sociologists of technology. Particularly relevant has been the work of Madeleine Akrich, Wiebe Bijker, Geoffrey Bowker, Alberto Cambrosio, Michel Callon, John Law, and Donald MacKenzie. Unfortunately, the book was published too soon for me to use the treasure trove of narrative resources developed by Richard Powers, the master of scientifiction and author of Galatea 2.2, whose Helen is Aramis' unexpected cousin.

Here is one more cue for readers:

In this book, a young engineer is describing his research project and his sociotechnological initiation. His professor offers a running commentary. The (invisible) author adds verbatim accounts of real-life interviews along with genuine documents, gathered in a field study carried out from December 1987 to January 1989. Mysterious voices also chime in and, drawing from time to time on the privileges of prosopopoeia, allow Aramis to speak. These discursive modes have to be kept separate if the scientifiction is to be maintained; they are distinguished by typography. The text composed in this way ofTers as a whole, I hope, hoth a little more and a little less than a story.

____ P~R':ct-'-f~A--=CC":t __ -------------------

"IT'S TRULY A NOVEL, THAT STORY ABOUT ARAMIS .

"NO, IT'S A NOVEL THAT'S TRUE, A

REPORT, A NOVEL, A NOVEL-REPORT."

"WHAT, A FAKE LOVE STORY2"

"NO, A REAL TECHNOLOGY STORY." "NONSENSE! LOVE IN TECHNOLOGY?!"

PROLOGUE: WHO KILLED ARAMIS?

The first thing I saw when I went into Norbert H.'s office was the new RATP poster on the wall [see Photo 1]:

[DOCUMENT: TEXT OF THE RATP'S ADVERTISEMENT LAUNCHING THE R-312 BUS]

Darwin was right!

RATP means the evolution and adaptation of buses in an urban environment.

In 1859 Darwin proposed his theory of evolution, maintaining that the struggle for life and natural selection should be seen as the basic mechanisms of evolution.

The latest product of this evolution is the R-312 bus, which is about to begin service on Line 38. For the occasion, today's buses and their predecessors will join in a big parade in honor of the R-312.

The theory of evolution has its advantages. Thanks to Darwin, you can ride our buses around the Luxembourg Garden for free on Wednesday, June 1.

"Chausson begat Renault, Renault begat Schneider, Schneider begat the R-312 ... Darwin's theory has its downside," said my future mentor solemnly when hc saw me reading the poster. "There are people

who want to study the transformation of technological objects without worrying about the engineers, institutions, economies, or populations involved in their development. The theory of evolution can take such people for a ride! If you leave your engineering school to come study innovation, my friend, you'll have to drop all that third-rate biology. This may disappoint you, but-unless I'm completely incompetent in such matters-a bus does not have sex organs. Never mind the poster: the R-312 doesn't descend from the Chausson APU 53 the way humans descend from apes. You can climb aboard a bus, but you can't climb back to the Schneider H that was all over Paris in 1916. Frankenstein's monster with his big dick and his lopsided face? Such things exist only in novels. You'd have quite a crowd of people parading around the Luxembourg Garden if you really wanted to honor all of the new bus's progenitors."

I hadn't yet done any in-depth studies of technological projects.

I'd just emerged from a telecommunications school where I'd taken only physics and math; I'd never seen a motor, or a chip, or even the inside of a telephone. That's why I wanted to spend a year at the Ecole des Mines, in sociology. There at least, or so I'd been told, ambitious young people could learn the engineering trade and study real projects in the field. I didn't find it at all reassuring to be abandoning the peace ami quiet of technological certainties only to apprentice myself to a laboratory Sherlock who'd just been entrusted by the RATP with the investigation of a recent murder: "Who killed Aramis?" I'd read The Three Musketeers, but I didn't know Aramis and wasn't aware he was dead. In the beginning, I really thought I'd landed in a whodunnit, especially since Norbert, the inspector to whom I'd been assigned, was a fellow at least forty years old with a Columbo-style raincoat.

"Here's the beast," my professor said [see Photos 11-141. "It's a new transportation system, apparently a brilliant design. A combination of private cars and public transportation. The ideal, you might say. In any case, it's not like the R-312; there wasn't any parade in Aramis' honor, and there certainly weren't any Darwinian posters. Just a slightly sad farewell party on the boulevard Victor, at the site of the Center for Technological Experimentation (CET) three weeks ago, in early De-

1IIIII~ __ ~P~R~O~l~O~G~U~E __

cember 1987. A promising, seductive, dazzling line of technology has been buried without fanfare. The site will be an empty lot for a while, until it's developed as part of the renovation of the quai de Javel. You should have seen how mournful the engineers were. According to what they told me, the project was really admirable. They'll never have another chance to build, from the ground up, an entirely automatic and entirely revolutionary system of guided transportation-a system running on rails. But Aramis fell out of favor. 'They dropped us'-that's what the engineers say. 'They' who? The Nature of Things? Technological Evolution? The Parisian Jungle? That's what we've been asked to find out, my friend, because we don't belong to the transportation world. Some people claim that Aramis wouldn't have kept its promises. But others, apparently, say that it was the State that didn't keep its promises. It's up to us to sort all this out, and we can't rely on Darwin or on sexual metaphors. And it won't be easy."

Personally, I didn't see the problem. I replied confidently that all we had to do was take a close look to see whether the project was technologically feasible and economically viable.

"That's all?" asked my mentor.

j

"What? Oh, no, of course not; it also has to be socially accept-

able."

Since my professor was a sociologist, I thought I was on the right track. But he grinned sardonically and showed me his first interview notes.

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]

"It doesn't make any sense. Six months ago, everybody thought it was the eighth wonder of the world. Then all of a sudden everything fell apart. Nobody supported it any longer. It happened so fast that no one can figure it out. The head of the company can't figure it out either. Can you do something? Soy something? .

"It hod been going on for twenty years; the time hod come to call it quits.

It'll be a fine case for you muckrakers from the Ecole des Mines. Why did they keep that monstrosity going so long on intravenous feedings, until somebody finally hod the balls to yank out the tubes? .

PROLOGUE

•

"It's Iypically French. You have a system that's supposedly brilliant, but nobody wonts it. It's a white elephant. You go on and on indefinitely. The scientists have a high old time ..

"That's France for you. You get a good thing going, for export; it's at the cutting edge technologically; people pour money into it for fifteen years; it revolutionizes public transportation. And then what happens2 The Right comes to power and everything comes to a screeching halt, with no warning, iust when there's finally going to be a payoff. It would really help if you could do something about it. Why did they drop a promising project like this after supporting it for so long? ..

"The industrial developer let it go. They got their studies done at our expense; then it was 'Thank you' and 'Goodbye' .

"The operoting agency couldn't accept on innovation that was the least bit radical. Corporate culture is the problem. Resistance to change. Reiection of a transplant.

"The public authorities are losing interest in public transportation. It's another ploy by the Finance Ministry, business as usual.

"It's on economic problem. It was beautiful, but it cost too much. So there was no choice.

"It's old-fashioned. It's backward-looking. It's the sixties. In 1987 it's no good, it won't fly.

"In ten years-no, five-it'll be back, toke my word for it. It'll have a new name; but the some needs create the same technologies. And then people will really kick themselves for abandoning it [ust when everybody would hove wanted it.

"But what's the real answer?" I asked with a naivete that I regretted at once.

"If there were one, they wouldn't pay us to find it, chum. In fact, they don't know what killed Aramis. They really don't know. Obviously, if by 'real answer' you mean the official version-then, yes, such versions exist. Here's one."

__ PROLOGUE

[DOCUMENT: EXCERPTS FROM AN ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN ENTRE LES LlGNES, THE RATP HOUSE ORGAN, JANUARY 1988]

Four questions for M. Maire, head of research and development.

Do transportation systems like Aramis really fill a niche, from the user's point of view?

The idea of little automated cabs that provide service on demand is seductive a priori, but hard to bring off economically. Furthermore, the creation of a new mode of transportation is a tricky business in a city where billions of francs have been invested in the infrastructures of other

transportation systems that do the job perfectly well. In new cities or in cities that don't have their own "on-site"

transportation, a system like Aramis can offer an interesting solution. The project designed for the city of Montpellier would be a good example, except that there, too, implementation had to be postponed for financial reasons.

People talk about the failure of the Aramis project. But

can't it be seen as a success, q i ven that the experimental card was played and appropriate conclusions were drawn?

It's not a f a i.Lu r e : on the corit r a r y , it's a tecr~nological success. The CET has demonstrated that the Aramis principles were v a Li d and that the system could work. We did play the card of experimentation, there's no doubt abou t. it. But the evolution of needs and f i na nc.i a.; resources doesn't allow for the implementation of such a system to be included among the current priorities for mass transportation in

Paris. Why would you want us to keep on trying to perfect a transportation system that we see no real use for in the short run, or even in the medium run?

The Aramis CET was the first phase of a project that was intended to serve the southern part of the Petite Ceinture in Paris. The problem of providing this service still hasn' L been resolved. Aren't there some risks involved in c oup li riq a research project like this with a project for upgrading the transportation network?

The important thing now is to protect the existing track

PROIClGIIF

-

system of the Pet.ite Ceinture so as to avoid mortgaging the construction of a future public transportation line. Anyway, some market studies will have to be redone, perhaps

wi th an eye toward liaison wi th an automated mini -metro. As for the notion of risk, I don't agree. If we don't try

things, we'll never accomplish anything new. Generally speaking, it stimulates research if you have concrete objectives. It also makes it easier to mobilize decisionmakers

around a project-even if there's some risk in doing so!

Aramis comes across as a technological gamble. Do the studies that have been carried out give Matra Transport and the RATP a head start in the realm of automated urban trans-

portation?

Even if the Aramis project wasn't initially intended to be a melting pot for new urban transportation technologies, it ended up playing that role. There will be a lot of spill-

over. Besides, research has shown how important it was to

take a global approach in thinking about the transportation of tomorrow. The key to success is as much in the overall vision of the system as in mastery of the various technological components.

I wasn't used to making subtle distinctions between technical feasibility and "official versions" of what is feasible or not. I'd been trained as an engineer. I didn't really see how we were going to go about finding the key to the enigma.

"By going to see everybody who's being criticized and blamed.

Nothing could be simpler."

My boss had his own peculiar way of going about these things. In the evening, after the interviews, he would organize "meetings and confrontations" (as he called them) in his file-cluttered office. What he actually did was arrange our interview transcripts in little bundles.

"That's the big difference between sociology and justice. They don't come to us; we go to them. They answer only if they feel like it, and they say only what they want to say."

1IIIII~ __ ~P~R~O~lO~G~U~E~ _

"You see," he went on during one of these daily "confrontations," "there have been hardly any questions about the proximate causes of Aramis' death. It all happened in three months."

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]

The scene is the RATP premises on the boulevard Victor, in December 1987, three hundred yards from the workshop where the five Aramis prototype cars sit motionless. The otoiect engineers are talking heatedly:

"While a meeting was under way in February 1987, M. Etienne [of Matra] secretly distributed a 'provisional verbal note' (it was in writing, all the same) saying 'Stop everything.' Frankly, we didn't understand what was going on." [no. 2]*

M. Girard, in a temporary office downtown.

"The end didn't surprise me. The Finance Ministry was all it took ... We had a colossus with feet of clay. Its whole support structure had disappeared in the meantime.

"It hardly matters who was responsible for piling on the last straw; that was just the proximate cause. In any event, the point is that all it took was one last straw. It doesn't matter who killed the project. As for the proximate couse, I don't know."

"But you know the remote couse?"

"Yes, of course. Actually, when I realized that Aramis had been called off, it didn't surprise me. For me, it was built right into the nature of things." [no. 18]

M. Desciees, in an elegant suburban office of the Institut National de Recherche sur les Transports (INRETS):

"There's one thing I don't want to see glossed over in your study ... There was a very important political change after 1986. t Soulas, the new RATP president, had been general inspector of finances, whereas Ouin's experience

*The numbers refer to the original interviews. Certain protagonists were interviewed several times. Some interviews were conducted in a group setting. Certain data come from sessions devoted to summing up the investigation for the benefit of the client; these sessions arc called "restitutions."

tThe legislative election brought the Right to office for a two-year period of power sharing between President Francois Mitterand and Prime Minister Jacques Chirac.

-

was in marketing and public relations. The new president wanted to bring all superfluous research to a halt. After a few months I went to see him; he told me to 'cut all that out.' I said, 'When you've already spent 95 percent of your budget, maybe it's best to keep gOing.'

"Soul os got the endgame under way when he told Etienne that the construction of the line would not be included in the next Five-Year Plan; this was in late 1986 or early 1987.

So the RATP people may tell you that they 'don't understand what happened: but the first blow came from within their own ranks." [no. 1 1 J

M. Fteoue, one of Matra's directors, speaking at Matra headquarters:

"By late 19861'd become convinced that it had to stop ... Our conclusions were increasingly negative. Production costs were going up, with harmful results for us because the State's participation was constant whereas ours was variable.

"So as early as the twenty-seventh month we were going in a different direction from the protocol. The others were saying, 'Finish your product and do what you can with it. Later on, we'll see about bUilding the line.'

"Read the protocol: by the twenty-seventh month we were supposed to be in production! In my first report, this was clearly spelled out; later on, they glossed over it.

"That was it, for me. I'd faith in this thing. We came to an agreement. The testing team worked on November 1 1, a legal holiday, and I'm very proud of that. When the ship is going down, you stay at your post until the last minute-that's something I believe in." [no. 6]

Matra headquarters again. M. Etienne, the president is speaking:

"What changed everything was the change of president [of the RATP). He came in June; I met him in October 1986. He said, 'Give me time.' I took him to Lille on October 26 to see VAL. I remember I sent him a note. 'Here's what we think: we don't have any major applications; the system has to be simplified; the network isn't complicated enough to justify a complicated system.'

"He told me, 'There'll be practically nothing in the Tenth Plan for the RATP-not for Aramis at any rate, not for construction of the line.' I thanked him for his frankness. Now that I've gotten to know him, he's very straightforward. 'Nothing will happen for the next seven years .

. . The RATP was accepting the cutbacks, very quietlv. We were wondering how far they were going to allow this thing to go .

• _~-,-P-,-R-,O:_::_L O~G-,U,-,E,---

"But during that period I found out for certain that neither the Dn nor the finance minister intended to contribute a thing. Soulas was right.

"This is where my February 1987 note come from. Nothing was going to happen for seven years. 'Matra wants to pullout early'-that's what the RATP people were saying.

"What we were saying here was: 'Let's refocus Aramis, make it more efficient.' We wanted to renegotiate. 'When we start up again seven years from now, we'll at least have something to start with.'

"They sulked. 'Since you want to pullout, we'll shut the whole thing down.' That wasn't what we wanted. But the State and the public authorities didn't have any more money.

"With patience, Soulas got the reforms he was after. He got Aramis shut down; he was totally honest." [no. 21]

M. Moire, one of the directors in charge of the RATP's research and development, speaking at the agency's headquarters

"Etienne showed VAL to Soulas, and Soul as saw his chance to ask: 'What about Aramis?' 'It won't get a cent.' 'I get the picture,' Etienne replied."

"So the final decision really did come from the RATP?"

M. Etienne: "No, no, not at all. Soulas was the mouthpiece for the Finance Ministry. For them, any innovation is a drain on resources. It certainly wasn't a question of Soules' being won over by the RATP, or by our people, our engineers." [no. 22]

M. Soulas, president of the PATp, in his plush second-floor office overlooking the Seine:

"Aramis died all by itself, Professor H. I didn't intervene. I can soy this quite freely, because I'm an interventionist president and I'd tell you if I'd stepped in. I didn't understand what was happening. It hod been on track for fifteen years.

"It was a seductive ideo, Aramis-really quite ingenious. It wasn't a line like c subway, but more like a bloodstream: it was supposed to irrigate, like veins and arteries. Obviously the idea doesn't make sense if the system becomes a linear circuit+tho! is, if it ceases to be a network.

"But this good idea never found a geographic footing. It was abstract. In its linear form, it tended to get transformed into a little metro; as a system, it become increasingly hybrid and complicated. Many people admired it. It became more and more technical, less and less comprehensible to the uninitiated, and a source of anxiety for the Finonce Ministry. I wotched it die. I didn't intervene in its death; I didn't have to."

PRO c)"IIF

-

"But you pushed a little, didn't you?"

"No, I didn't need to push. I found out one day that Aramis was being jettisoned. Matra had decided, or the RATP technicians. . I'd be interested to know whose decision it was, actually. My feeling is that Matra made the fatal move. In any event, the top priority now is adding a line that will parallel line A of the RER. Before, we could afford to experiment with Aramis; now we can't even manage a night on the town, as it were."

[Settling back more comfortably in his armchair.] "It's extraordinary that they've asked you to do this study! You know what it reminds me of? Oedipus' asking the soothsayer why the plague has come to Thebes! ... You have the answer in the question itself They wear blinders. Oh, there's not an ounce of ill will among the lot of them, but I've never seen such unpolitical people. 'How could it happen?' they must be wondering. 'How could we make something that works, and then it all goes belly-up?' It's touching, really-shows an extraordinary lock of awareness. Their own case intrigues them, because they like sociology ... Aramis is such on intricate mess, incredibly intricate." [no. 19]

"You see, my friend, how precise and sophisticated our informants are," Norbert commented as he reorganized his notecards. "They talk about Oedipus and about proximate causes ... They know everything. They're doing our SOCiology for us, and doing it better than we can; it's not worth the trouble to do more. You see? Our job is a cinch. We just follow the players. They all agree, in the end, about the death of Aramis. They blame each other, of course, but they speak with one voice: the proximate cause of death is of no interest-it's just a final blow, a last straw, a ripe fruit, a mere consequence. As M. Girard said so magnificently, 'It was built right into the nature of things.' There's no point in deciding who finally killed Aramis. It was a collective assassination. An abandonment, rather. It's useless to get bogged down concentrating on the final phase. What we have to do is see who built those 'things' in, and into what 'natures.' We're going to have to go back to the beginning of the project, to the remote causes. And remember, this business went on for seventeen years."

"There's one small problem," I said timidly. "I don't know a thing about transportation."

"Neither do I," replied mv boss serenelv. "That's whv 1 was

/ / /

chosen. In a year, you can learn about any subject in the world. There's

work ahead, but it will be good for your education. You're going to lose your innocence about the sexuality of technology, Mister Young Engineer. And I'm going to take advantage of the opportunity by writing a little commentary, a little sociology manual to make your work easier. You're to read it in addition to the books on this list; they're all in the school library."

He put on his old raincoat and disappeared in the drizzle, heading down the boulevard Saint-Michel.

Left to my own devices, 1 looked at the list. It included eighty-six titles, two-thirds of them in English. Tell an engineer to read books? It was quite a shock. As for the commentary, I was certainly going to need it, because there was a further complication: the laboratory where I was doing my internship used the word "sociology" in a way that absolutely no one else did.

-

AN EXCITING INNOVATION

"A . "N b t Id ",. t 1 f

s It turns out, or ert 0 me, we re gomg to ge a ot 0

help from a retrospective study done by the RATP. Here's a chronological chart that sums up the project's phases starting in 1970. Each phase is defined by its code name, by the money spent (in constant francs), and by its time frame. The horizontal axis shows annual expenditures. You can see they hesitated a lot. And the point at which they were spending the most money is the point at which everything ground to a halt, in 1987."

"It stopped before 1981, you'd have to say. And after Mitterand's election it started up again. Then, after Chirac's government came in, it fell off again . . ."

"That's right, my friend, elections do count in technology. You didn't suspect that?"

"Uh, well, yes," I responded prudently. "So we're beginning with the preliminary phase?"

"Yes, this one, right before Phase 0."

PROJECT CHRONOLOGY

1969: DATAR enlists Bardet's company Automatismc ct Technique, for a study of various Personal Rapid Transit systcms.

1970: Matra buys patents from Automatisme et Technique.

1973: Test site at Orly; three-vehicle train; demerging; merging; regrouping; four seats; off-line stations; passenger-selected destination; Transport Expo exhibit in Washington.

1974, February: Final report on Phase 0; creation of the Aramis development committee.

1974, May Beginning of Phase 1; site analyses for the South Linc; eleven sites studied; six scats; concept of point-to-point service abandoned; end of wholesale use of off-line stations. Giscard d'Estaing elected president; Bertin's acrotrain abandoned; tramway competition initiated.

1975: Variable-reluctance motor.

1976: Final report on Phase 1; Aramis simplified for economic reasons.

1977 Beginning of Phase 2A; Aramis simplified; ten seats; site analyses in Marnc-la-Vallee; VAL marketed in Lille.

1978: Final report on Phase 2A; beginning of Phase 3A; test of the system's main components; testing grounds established; site analyses at La Defense and Saint-Denis, on the Petite Ceinture, and elsewhere.

1980: Final report on Phase 3A.

1981: Teams disbanded; no activity. Mitterand elected president; Fiterman named transportation minister; Quin becomes president of the RATP

1982: Team reconstituted from VAL teams; site analyses in Dijon, Montpcllier, Nice, and Toulon, and on the Petite Ceinture; Araval proposal, Aramis greatly simplified; initiation of SAC EM project. Phase 3B: two-car units, twenty passengers; new test runs at Orly; initiation of the project for the World's Fair.

1983: Favorable final report on Phase 3B; VAL put into service; World's Fair project abandoned (June); site analyses in Montpellier for an Aramis using the VAL automation svstem.

-

1984, July: Protocol for construction of CET signed; Fiter-

man and Communist ministers leave the administration.

M,j EX iTING INNOVAT'ON

1970

1971

1973

Millions of francs per year

10

20

40

30

Preliminary Phase

Oriy Site

Motor, South Line

Aramis simplified

1 978 ~=====-=_-=-=-.-=--=--=-~-'_~.,

1981
Interphase
1982
1983
1985
1986
1987
1988
10 Installation

of components

Two-car unit (doublet), CMD, microprocessors

CET

20

30

40

Millions of francs per year

Figure I. Total and annual expenses by phase, in 1992 francs. After Phase 3A, the amounts no longer include either the RATP's internal expenses or Matra's cost overruns. (Official contracts, January 1, 1988.)

AN EXCITING INNOVATION

1985: Scale model of two-car Aramis presented. 1986:

First two-car unit delivered; two-tiered Aramis proposed; studies of potential ridership; Chirac named prime minister; Quin leaves the RATP.

1987: Termination of project announced; fifth two-car unit delivered; three weeks of contradictory test runs; project halted; postmortem study begun.

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]

M. lievin, INRETS engineer:

"Aramis is the last of the PRT systems, you know." "PRT?"

"It was fashionable at the time-Personal Rapid Transit, PRT. Everybody was excited about it."

"When was this?"

"Oh. around the sixties. The Kennedy era. Private cars were on the way out-that's what everyone was saying. But at the same time the advantages of cars had to be maintained; we couldn't keep moving in the direction of mass transportation." [no. 15]

M. Etienne, at Matra:

"In 1972 the Transport Expo took place in Washington. That exhibit was critical for PRTs. Everybody in the world came. There were Boeing systems, there were Bendix systems. People were beginning to recognize the potential of computers. It seemed logical to control vehicles from a central computer." [no. 21]

M. Cohen, speaking at Matra's Besanr;:on oFFice:

"All the major manufacturers plunged into PRTs: Boeing, Otis, we did the same thing at Matra. There were at least ten different systems. None of them worked. Aramis is the one that lasted the longest; it was the most credible, finally. We wouldn't do it the same way today; we wouldn't tell ourselves that, well, we know how to make planes and satellites, great, mass transportation must be a cinch. It's not true; it's not that easy. A train may well be more complicated than a satellite, technologically speaking." [no. 45]

Mr. Britten, on American private consultant in Paris:

"With PRTs, what doesn't work is the P. P means people, not personal. We knew from the beginning that that part didn't have a chance. In 1975-1 have

AN EXCITIN INNOVATION

the report right here, you can look at it-we said that the only thing that made a difference was government support. * Either the project gets continuous government support, or else the whole family of Aramis-type PRTs collapses. It's that simple."

Summary of European PRJ Project. (From ECOPLAN, Innovational Guide-
way Systems and Techn%BY in Europe [Paris: Transport Research Group, January
1975J.)
Year of Government Present
Project name origin backing Status in 1 971 ~ 72 status
ARAMlS 1967 Yes Advanced R&D Active
CABINENTAXI 1969 Yes Hardware Active
development
CABTRACK 1965 Yes Advanced R&D Abandoned
Coup 1969 None Concept only Abandoned
ELAN SIG 1970 None System design Under study
Heidt 1971 None Concept only Abandoned
Automatischehahn
Schienentaxi 1975 None Concept only Abandoned
Spar taxi 1969 None PRT site study Set aside
TRP (Otis TTl) 1968 Some Active
TRANSURBAN 1969 None Preliminary Abandoned
NONSTOP design "Here's an innovation with a niche that's easy to understand, for once," sighed my boss as he elbowed people aside so we could exit from the subway car. "If I take my car, I'm stuck for hours in traffic jams. If I walk, I breathe carbon dioxide and get lead poisoning. If I take my bike, I get knocked down. And if I take the subway, I get crushed by three hundred people. Here, for once, we have no problem understanding the engineers. They've come up with a system that allows us to be all by ourselves in a quiet little car, and at the same time we're

*See also Catherine G. Burke, Innovation and Public Policy: The Case if Personal Rapid Transit (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1979).

~1_XClrING INNOVATION

in a mass transit network, with no worries and no traffic jams. That would be the ideal. I for one would welcome PRTs like the Messiah."

"Isn't it always that way?" I asked.

"You've got to be kidding! The last study I read was on inertial guidance systems for intercontinental missiles. * Those things are not greeted like the Messiah."

"You're right," I said, edging back into the cloud of smoke on the quai des Grands-Augustins.

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]

M. Parlat, speaking in the now-empty prefabricated bUilding on the boulevard Victor that had been the Aramis pro;ect site:

"Aramis, the heart of Aramis, is nonmaterial coupling. That's the whole key.

The cars don't touch each other phYSically. Their connection is simply calculated."

"Forgive my ignorance, but there's something I don't understand. Why don't they attach the cars together mechanically2 I mean, I don't know, with magnetic couplings, and then uncouple them automatically? They really don't know how to do it?"

"No, it's out of the question. Eveything has been tried. We know how to do automatic couplings and uncouplings on stationary cars. We don't know how to couple and uncouple moving vehicles mechanically. Think about it: cars that are several meters long, going 30 kilometers an hour, coming up to a switch. Okay, this one takes the siding, that one keeps on going and links up with the car ahead. Mechanically, it's impossible. No, it can only be calcu lated, and even that isn't as simple as it sounds." [no. 3]

M. Lievin, speaking at INRETS:

"If you take trains made up of elements that can each go in a different direction, it's impossible to use mechanical couplings. Besides, there's a simple problem. Mechanical coupling transmits the force of all the other cars during braking and start-up. So each car has to be solid enough to stand up against the entire train. PRTs are lightweight vehicles-automobiles, nutshells. They can be light because they never touch each other, because they're connected

*D. MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology if Nuclear Missile Guidance Systems (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).

AN EXCITING INNOVATION

electronically but not physically. That's the Aramis revolution: a mojor weight reduction. We've gone from railroads to automobiles, thanks to nonmaterial coupling." [no. 15]

M. Chalvan, at Aisthom.

"You never talk about mechanical uncoupling as a solution?"

"No, it doesn't exist. It's impossible. In any case, not if speed is a factor It's not even an option. It just doesn't come up." [no. 46]

How to frame a technological investigation? By sticking to the framework and the limits indicated by the interviewees themselves.

They all say the same thing: "At the time, the world was dreaming of PRTs; mechanical uncoupling was impossible." For our informants, PRTs are no longer the invention of an isolated engineer, traceable through projects, contracts, and memoranda; rather, they're a collective dream. The technological impossibility of uncoupling is not a decision or the opinion of a handful of researchers. It's self-evident, obvious to everybody. Goes without saying. Doesn't generate the slightest controversy. It would take a Martian landing in the world of guided transportation to open up that question. Our interviewees no longer even manage to recall who might have come up with the dream of PRT. They can't tell you what institutions were behind its development. They can't come up with the names of the dozen or so engineers, journalists, middlemen, and public officials that would allow the investigator to replace the term "everybody" with a lobby, a school, a network. In 1988 the Sixties are remote. The origin of the project (1968, 1969) quickly gets lost in the mists of time, and like every narrative of origins it takes on the mythical characteristics of all Mists of Time: "Once upon a time; Everybody; No one can resist; Impossible." Of course, a historian of technology ought to work back toward that origin and replace it with groups, interests, intentions, events, opinions. She would go to America, to Germany, to Japan. She would visit the SNCF; she would work out the entire history of couplings and uncouplings. She would rummage through the archives. She would sketch the enormous fresco of guided transportation. She would reposition Aramis "in its historical framework"; she would determine its place in the entire history of guided-transportation systems. She would go further and further back in time. But then we would lose sight of Aramis, that particular event, that fiction seeking to

EXCITING INNOVATION

come true. Since every study has to limit its scope, why not encompass it within the boundaries proposed by the interviewees themselves? None of them goes back further than 1965. For all of them, PRTs are beyond discussion: everyone wanted them; they had to be developed. There is no disagreement on this point. No engineer leaves open the possibility of mechanical uncoupling of cars. It's out of the question.

The investigator does not have to take the discussion any further. He will enjoy reading the historian, enjoy crossing the mythical boundaries of PRTs, enjoy perusing the history of the technological requirements of coupling. But since his informants do not question the power of these things, in his own analysis PRTs and couplings will play the role of what is "in the air." Everybody breathes it in equal proportions. It creates no distinctions. None of the small bifurcations that will turn out to explain the project can be dependent on that vast background common to all projects. The infrastructure, even in the final instance, does not explain the fragile superstructure of the Aramis vehicles. If that indifference to the general "framework" is shocking, let's say that our sociology prefers a local history whose framework is defined by the actors and not by the investigator. Our local history will talk about Aramis, not about guided transportation, mechanical couplings, or monopolistic state capitalism. On the other hand, it will let the actors add whatever they choose to the framework; it will let them take it as far as they care to go.

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]

Slill speaking wilh M. Par/at, on the boulevard Victor:

HI still don 'I undersland very well. Why not make cars that stay for enough aport? There'd be no need for nonmaterial couplings."

"Because then you wouldn't be able to handle enough passengers. Each vehicle is small, all passengers are seated. If you wait between cars, it's all over-you'll be processing iust a few passengers per hour. You need trains. That's the constraint you start with, from the beginning of PRTs." [no. 3]

Senate hearings, Washington, D.C., around 1965:

Senator Don MacKenzie: "But Professor, before you do away with private cars with a stroke of your pen, can you show us how you expect

AN EXCITING INNOVATION

To downtown

o

Train

Branchings

o

Separated modules

o

Figure 2. Principle of PRT systems.

to service the suburbs with your PRTs? In the inner city, okay. But just think: What about Los Angeles?"

Jim Johnson, engineer: "On the contrary, Sir, it's the ideal system for serving large, thinly populated suburbs. What's most expensive in guided transportation, whether you're talking about tramways, subways, or something else? The infrastructure, of course, first and foremost. But then what? The trains, the empty trains that never seem to get calibrated. If you introduce a branch line, either you double the number of trains so as to maintain a constant frequency-and that's expensive-or else you cut the frequency in half. If there's just one branch line, you can do it. But what if there are four, or eight, or sixteen? At the outer edges of the network, there'll be just one train a day-it'll be like the Great Plains in the nineteenth century! And suburbanites will buy a second car. It's inevitable. What you have to do is cut the branching trains into the smallest possible units. Just look at the diagram [Figure 2}:

When some old lady-a housewife, let's say-wants to go downtown, she fiddles with her keyboard. The computer calculates the best route. It says, 'I'll be there in two minutes'; it's like a taxi. But it's a collective taxi, with no driver, and it's guided by computer. When it arrives, the old lady finds it's carrying a few of her cronies whom the computer has decided to put in the same cab. There's no need for a second car. There's less pollution. And we're still talking about the suburbs, without a heavy infrastructure. It's just like a car."

Senator Tom "Network" Hughes: "But what do you do about the

AN l XCI TI N GIN NOVA .1,-,1-,(:...:) N-'-- ~ _

load factor, Professor? Your isolated train cars, operating far apart, are fine at the end of the line where few people live, but when you get closer to downtown they're going to clog up. It'll be much too slow."

Jim Johnson: "Right, right, that's exactly the idea of the train. We put cars together, like a real train, with independent cars, and that way we take care of the passenger load."

Senator Howarth: "You're hardly going to couple and uncouple them by hand a hundred times a day!"

Jim Johnson: "No, Sir, no, that would be too slow; we're looking for a practical way of coupling. By computer. But we haven't quite perfected it yet, I have to admit. "

Senator Wallace: "If I may say so, there's something else that hasn't been perfected in this business. What if instead of finding her 'cronies,' as you put it, in this closed car with no driver, your housewife runs into a couple of thugs? (I didn't say 'blacks'-be sure to get that straight.) Then what does she do? What happens to her then?"

Jim Johnson (at a loss for words): "Uh ... "

Senator Wallace: "Well, I'll tell you what happens, she gets raped!

And the rapist has all the time in the world, in this automated shell of yours with no doors and no windows. You know what you've invented? You've invented the rape wagon!"

[Shouting, commotion]

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]

Lievin, ot INRETS: "Aramis~ It was the World's Fair. Without that, you can't understand a thing about the project. It certainly wouldn't have started up again in 1981, 1982 "[no. 15]

Etienne, ot Moira: "And then there was the World's Fair project. That's what got it going again." [no. 21]

Girord: "What explains my 'conversion: if you like, was the project for the 1989 World's Fair. Every World's Fair presupposes a new form of transportation. Within the range of projects presented, Aramis was truly innovative:

France wos really going to be able to present something that symbolized French technology at the end of the 1980s. That's what made me change my mind." [no. 18, p. 6]

AN EXCITING INNOVATION

"If Aramis had been ready in time for the World's Fair, would it

have gotten everyone's attention?" I asked.

"Yes, everyone's-it was really a compelling idea." "But there was no World's Fair, as it turned out."

"Well, no, Chirac didn't want one; he didn't want to upset Parisians with reminders of the Revolution."*

Reuters, September 1 0, 1989, from our special correspondent Bernard Joerges. Every World's Fair refurbishes the image of public transportation to some extent. The one that marked the bicentennial of the French Revolution in banner-bedecked Paris, the one that has just closed its doors after a grand ceremony on the Champ-de-Mats, was no exception to the rule. From this standpoint, one of the key features of the fair was unquestionably the completely automated and completely modular transportation system called Aramis. More than motorboats on the Seine, more than moving sidewalks, Aramis is a revolutionary transportation system conceived and constructed by the Matra Transport company, which has demonstrated its technological superiority once again. Specialists in space technology and sophisticated weaponry, the Matra people are shaking up the field of urban transportation, which has been mired in tradition for so long. The Regie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP), responsible for implementing Aramis, has leapfrogged into the twenty-first century thanks to this astonishing display. A train arrives at the station. Of course, as in the VAL system that operates in Lille, or Morgantown's small system in the United States, or Atlanta's, there is no conductor. Elegant little cabs, as cozy and comfortable as a Renault Espace, hold up to twenty visitors each. But here is the surprise: each car is separate. Nothing visible links it to the ones behind: no coupling, no cable, no wire, no linkage of any sort. And yet the cars form a train; they approach one another and merge ever so gently. They stay together as

*Jacques Chirac, in addition to serving as prime minister from 1986 to 1988, was the mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995. World '5 Fairs have been held many times in Paris from 1889 to 1937 and have shaped a number of its landmarks, including the [iffd Tower. For the new socialist government, hosting a World's Fair in Paris in 1989 seemed a natural way to celebrate the hicentennial of the French Revolution. Obviously, however, the mayor of Paris-who was also the leader of the opposition-would have had to agree.

if by magic. An electronic calculation attaches them together more solidly than any cable. This is what the project engineers call "nonmaterial coupling." Sometimes a slight jolt, a little bump, is felt when two cars come into contact. The most violent shock is psychological-the one that awaits visitors at branching points. Their car pulls away from the train! While one group of riders is transported to one part of the fair, the rest of the train reconstitutes itself and goes on toward another area. No one needs to change trains! No more transfers between lines! Matra and the RATP have invented the transportation system of the twenty-first century, as intimate and personalized as a taxi, as secure and inexpensive as collective transportation. The automobile becomes communal property. Several years before the Japanese and the Americans, while we are still at the stage of trying to make our own Cabinentaxis work, France has been able to get a toehold in a promising market thanks to the World's Fair. People in the transportation industry are simply wondering how much this little marvel must have cost. There is talk of two billion francs! After the Concorde, La Villette, the Rafale, and the nuclear power program, we are well aware that French engineers do not worry about the price tag. True, the fair makes it possibleto justify any extravagance. The revolution (of public transportation) within the Revolution (the French one) is beyond price ...

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.

This tautology frees the analysis of technologies from the burden that weighs on analysis of the sciences. As accustomed as we have become to the idea of a science that "constructs," "fashions," or "produces" its objects, the fact still remains that, after all the controversies, the sciences seem to have discovered a world that came into being without men and without sciences. Galileo may have constructed the phases of Venus, but once that construction was complete her phases appeared to have been "always already present." The fabricated fact has become the accomplished fact, the fait accompli. Diesel did not construct his engine any more than Galileo built his planet. Some will contend that the engine is out of Diesel's control as much as Venus was out of Galileo's; even so, no one would dare assert that the Diesel engine "was always already there, even before it was discovered." No one is a Platonist where technology is concerned-except

-

AN EXCITING INNOVAT ON

for very primitive, basic gestures like the ones Leroi-Gourhan calls "technological trends."

This rejection of Platonism gives greater freedom to the observer of machines than to the observer of facts. The big problems of realism and relativism do not bother him. He is free to study engineers who are creating fictions, since fiction, the projection of a state of technology from five or fifty years in the future to a time T, is part of their job. They invent a means of transportation that does not exist, paper passengers, opportunities that have to be created, places to be designed (often from scratch), component industries, technological revolutions. They're novelists. With just one difference: their project-which is at first indistinguishable from a novel-will gradually veer in one direction or another. Either it will remain a project in the file drawers (and its text is often less amusing to read than that of a novel) or else it will be transformed into an object.

In the beginning, there is no distinction between projects and objects.

The two circulate from office to office in the form of paper, plans, departmental memos, speeches, scale models, and occasional synopses. Here we're in the realm of signs, language, texts. In the end, people, after they leave their offices, are the ones who circulate inside the object. A Copernican revolution. A gulf opens up between the world of signs and the world of things. The R-312 is no longer a novel that carries me away in transports of delight; it's a bus that transports me away from the boulevard SaintMichel. The observer of technologies has to be very careful not to differentiate too hastily between signs and things, between projects and objects, between fiction and reality, between a novel about feelings and what is inscribed in the nature of things. In fact, the engineers the observer is studying pass progressively from one of these sets to another. The R-312 was a text; now it's a thing. Once a carcass, it will eventually revert to the carcass state. Aramis was a text; it came close to becoming, it nearly became, it might have become, an object, an institution, a means of transportation in Paris. In the archives, it turns back into a text, a technological fiction. The capacity of a text to weigh itself down with reality, or, on the contrary, to lighten its load of reality, is what endows fictional technologies with a beauty that the novel we've inherited from the nineteenth century has difficulty manifesting nowadays. Only a fiction that gains or loses reality can do justice to the engineers, those great despised figures of culture and history. A fiction with "variable geometry": this is what needs

.1- _ ____cA_:_N,-,-,,-E '-'-x ~C_:_I T~I_:_N_:_G=---:_:_I N~Nc_:O::_Vc_:A__:_T:...:I--=O::_N_c' _

to be invented, if we are to track the variations of a technological project that has the potential to become an object.

"Personal Rapid Transit systems, nonmaterial couplings, the composition of trains-all this is beginning to take shape," Norbert told me. "Now let's try to see whether we can pin down the archaeology of the project, the earliest ideas, the creative spark. Often the initial idea doesn't count for much in a project, but my hunch is that this time it must have played a role."

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]

At the Conseil General des Pants et Chaussees, M. Petit sits in a large office.

He is speaking very rapidly, obliged by our questions to return to a post he finds very remote.

"Ah, Aramis. In the beginning it wasn't Aramis, we didn't even have cars, we had programmed seats. Yes, that's how we started. I was with DATAR at the time. DATAR was a powerhouse then; they had a lot of money, and all the ministries had to pay attention to them. DATAR, you know, was Olivier GUichard, under de Gaulle; it was 'joint development of the Sahara regions.' Our bad luck: we lost the Sahara when we pulled out of Algeria. We got medals embossed with camels and palm trees. Guichard didn't give up. H!3 created DATAR; it was his idea. Directly attached to the prime minister. Development in the Sahara, in France-it's pretty much the same thing.

"Well, the highway system was a mess, split up among several ministries.

So we produced an overall highway management plan. Okay, we said, no point in France should be more than two hours away from any other point. Whatever means of transportation is used. Railways, iron on iron, you know, it's not that great. As soon as you go fast, you lose your contact. In fifty years there won't be any more trains. We needed something in the range of 300, 400 kilometers an hour.

"Bertin came to see us. 'The future is in the air cushion.' Yes, the aerotrainthat was us. We built a line in Orleans. You can still see it. Well, it didn't catch on. We gave it to the SNCF, which shut it down in a hurry. But for what amounted then to 50 million francs, I shook up the SNCF It was a gift. The

AN EXCITING INNOVATION

high-speed train ITGVI is the bastard child of the oerotrain. They turned their 12,000 engineers 100s8 so the aerotrain would never happen, and they came up with the TGV!

"Okay, but there was another hole in public transportation-the metro There's nothing you can do; you can't go beyond 1 8 kilometers an hour, assuming you have stations every 400 meters and a maximum acceleration of 1.2 m/sec2. Beyond that, it musses your hairdo; it shakes people up. But wait, we said, maybe there's something better than the metro. With moving sidewalks, you can't accelerate faster than 3 m/sec2 If folks are walking on the sidewalk at 6 kilometers per hour, when they come to the end they're catapulted. That doesn't work.

"You know, when you invent an urban transportation system, you always get into trouble with the little old blind lady with a heart condition who gets her umbrella stuck. You always have to take her into account.

"Then I had kind of a crazy idea. I said to myself that there were people in factories who made transfer machines. You know, machines that take anything-say, bottles-and zap, give them infinite acceleration, from 0 to 20 kilometers an hour, instantly. Whether you're talking about fragile bottles or little old ladies, it's the same sort of problem. I thought about munitions factories. You can't let the cartridges explode, yet people have to be able to pick them up and put them down

"I asked the army. They said: 'That's kinematics, and kinematics is Bordet.' Gerard Bordet was synonymous with the cornpo-iv he had founded, Automatisme et Technique. The only one in France, the only one in Europe I think. He had just won a competition for Winchester cartridges. He was filling them with powder, with 600 leads and all that, at 25 cartridges a second. I called him up.

"A very appealing guy. He'd had a hard life, lots of upheavals. He set up his society as a cooperative so as to give it to his employees. You don't see that very often.

"Okay, so I asked him the question. How do you transport big loads, oround 100,000 passengers an hour? He said: 'Let's go see what our mad inventors have in their back yards.'

"You've no idea! The word got around 'If DATAR is helping scientists, that's great!' I had all sorts of mad inventors trooping through my office. One of my buddies from the Ecole Poly technique even dragged me to his house. There wasn't a stick of furniture lelt. On the ceiling, there was a vacuum cleaner on rails. 'Bertin gets down on the floor and blows,' he explained 'I get on the

..

A. f\J EX CIT IN G I ('-oJ N 0 V_A_cT_I-'CO_N ~ _

Transporter

l,......-Z~·; .: -,.,-,-: ~

Time To Charger Iii

l Plotform i :,1

Time T,

~mIDCCCJI.I,.:.I'il. ; Platform ~L...J.· ••• .:.=:.....w,!r~

Time T3

II :1 Platf~rm

Figure 3. The AT-2000 train.

ceiling and breathe in. The inverse of an invention is still an invention. Does that interest you?'

"Bardet said, 'This isn't getting us anywhere. Let's make an invention matrix.' Nine boxes by nine. He put in every form of transportation you can think of. A chart worthy of Mendeleev. We invented terrific subway systems. In one box of the matrix we noticed, for example, that what's dumb about subway trains is that they stop at stations. On the other hand, a subway that doesn't stop.

"So what can we do? Well, a transfer machine. You cut the subway train in half, lengthwise. You always have one branch of it at the station. Another branch charges into the tunnel without stopping. Near a station, those who want to get off move into the corridor. The doors close, it's uncoupled, it slows down. Meanwhile, the people who want to get on have gotten into the corridor-branch that was in the station. They speed up and rejoin the branch that didn't stop. [He draws a hasty sketch on a notepad-see Figure 3.]

"And we went on like that. We got up to incredible volumes, 100,000 to 200,000 passengers an hour. The mockup we did cost DATAR 30 million francs.

"The computer was full-scale. The mockup was in all the fairs It was called the AT-2000. I was even on television with Alexandre Tarta; the tape must still be around somewhere."

'And what about Aramis, M. Petit2"

AN EX CIT Ii'-. GIN NOV A~T~I---,O:.._i'-. __ ---1 •

"Well, Aramis was the eighty-first box of the invention matrix, the niftiest of all, it was the programmed metro seat. The traveler merely goes to the station. He sits down, punches in the program, and opens up his newspaper. When the thing stops, he looks up, puts away his paper, and there he is, where he wanted to go. It's poi nl-to-poi nt, with no connections, no stops at intermediate stations. The eighty-first box was the most seductive of all for a with-it technocrat eager to impress a client.

"Meanwhile, Matra had a whole lot of ideas. They wanted to diversify.

They were involved in military business, which let lcqordere make a good show. They hit it off with Bardet. [no. 40]

The difference between dreams and reality is variable.

The guy who spray-paints his innermost feelings on the white walls of the Pigalle metro station may be rebelling against the drab reality of the stations, the cars, the tracks, and the surveillance cameras. His dreams seem to him to be infinitely remote from the harsh truth of the stations, and that's why he signs his name in rage on the white ceramic tiles. The chief engineer who dreams of a speedier metro likewise crosses out plans according to his moods. But if the AT-2000 had been developed, his dream would have become the other's world. The spray-painting hoodlum would then be living partly within the other's dream brought to life, just as he is living in the waking dream of Fulgence Bienvenue. In Paris, a war of the worlds is raging, a war of dreams, a war quite different from the opposition between states of feeling and states of affairs, between soft subjects and hard technologies. Dreams seeking to be realized are shaping Paris, working through its subterranean spaces and stations. They touch and try one another. The subway is too slow; it can be redone. The engineer Bardet is no less impatient than the hoodlum. He, too, wants to change the metro, to change life. Let's be careful not to oppose cold calculators to hot agitators. Neither is more spontaneous than the other. Petit is influenced by the Americans' PRT, which is hardly surprising; then again-and this is much harder to believe-the illiterate hoodlum does his tagging spontaneously in English and in the graphic style of the New York City gangs!

As for Bardet, he's dreaming too. For where, if not in a dream, could one compare a 130-pound grandmother headed for the Score-Coeur station with a 100-gram cartridge that a transfer machine picks up on an

.I--_...:_A...:_> r.2--J _:E::...:.X,-,C::_Ic.:.T_:_1 Nc.:_.::G,--,-,1 N,-,>_:_N.:...:O~V A_.:_T.:...:I_:cO:_cN-,--~ __ ~_~>

assembly line? You said "transfer"? Well, well! Could the unconscious be full of machines as well as affects? The entire Paris metro system-in fact, all the transportation systems of the world-find themselves brought together in an eighty-one-box chart on DATAR's table. Dreams change the scale of phenomena, as we know: they allow new combinations and they mix up properties. So: an engineer's dream?

"Well, my dear Watson, what do you think? It is all perfectly clear?"

"Certainly," 1 said, a bit uneasy to be feeling so sure of myself.

"Of course, 1 don't know much about it, but Aramis is an engineer's toy, one of those far-fetched ideas that didn't grow out of a needs analysis. That much is obvious right away."

"Wrong, as usual," Norbert replied amiably. "On the contrary, it was to avoid far-fetched inventions like those the Lepine competition produces that Petit and Bardet drew up their matrix. I questioned the director of SOFRETU, and he confirmed Petit's account point for point."

From a grimy little notebook, Norbert extracted his interview notes.

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]

The director of SOFRETU:

"I'm not starting with inventions or components; no more brilliant and unworkable ideas. I'm starting with passengers, with their real needs, with uses. The ideal, for passengers, is what? It's not to think, not to slow down, not to stop, not to transfer, and to arrive at their destination nevertheless. That's point·ta·paint transportation. That's Aramis." [no. 18]

"I even came across a document by Bardet from 1969 or 1970.

You know what he says?" ~

AN FXCITING INNOVATION

[OOCUMENT: FROM AUTOMATISME ET TECHNIQUE, REPORT ENTITLED "LES TRANSPORTS URBAINS," TECHNICAL NOTE; EMPHASIS ADDEO]

Continuous transportation is the possibili ty of adapting later to any evolution, no matter how unpredictable, of technology or of urban planning; in other words, it amounts to respect for the indeterminacy of the future. This safeguarding of the future has to be envisaged both on the technological level and from the standpoint of serving constantly evolving metropoli tan populations. On the technological level, it is important to stress that no hypothesis was made at the outset regarding the technologies to be used ..• Systems of continuous transportation are essentially based on a kinematic principle and will always be able to incorporate future technological projects.

"You see," my professor continued, "it's more complicated than you think ... It's the opposite of an engineer's idea: it's a system-idea, open to the unpredictable. No, no, we're off to a good start. A textbook case, my friend, a real textbook case. 'Respect for indeterminacy,' that's what we teach our students; to start from principles, needs, systems and not from technology. It's really rotten luck." Then, looking at his watch, he added: "We're going to be late for our meeting on the quai des Grands-Augustins."

We got off the bus, which was stuck in a traffic jam, and we studied the subway map, trying to calculate which route would involve the fewest transfers.

"Aramis ought to be making this calculation," I said.

"Exactly, and we wouldn't have to transfer at Chatelet. You see, my friend, Aramis really is an idea for consumers, not an engineer's idea. It's the one time they were actually thinking about us-and it didn't work."

"You mean, 'The one tirn e they were thinking about our not having to think about anything,'" was my clever riposte.

"Engineers dream, but they're not crazy," my mentor replied

•

AN EXCITING INNOV.ATION _

primly, without acknowledging my cleverness. "What does Bardet produce, Mister Oh-So-Reasonable Young Engineer? A critique of the urban society of his time. Well? Does it surprise you that a kinematician should get involved in making a whole movie script out of cars, happiness, and the future of civilization?"

[DOCUMENT: REPORT BY AUTOMATISME ET TECHNIQUE, 1969 OR 1970]

To summarize, without getting bogged down in a purely sterile critique, let US note [in 1970] that the situation is triply paradoxical:

-While the automobile still seems to be the fastest (though costliest) solution for urban transportation in the short run, its very proliferation will increasingly cut down on its speed, which will soon become unacceptably slow; at the same time, automobiles will increase to dangerous levels the atmospheric pollution that they inevitably produce. This is the paradox of the scientific organization of total asphyxia-in the broadest sense of the term.

-At a time when efficiency has the status of dogma, we are all subject to its discipline, and in our stressed-out state, before and after work, we all have to put up with physically exhausting compressions in uncomfortable spaces and annoying waiting periods owing to breakdowns in the traffic flow. This is the paradox of antisocial behavior in a society that would like to see itself as social.

-Finally and in more general terms, isn't it unreasonable that in this speeded-up century the time it takes us to cover the distance between home and the airport hasn't changed, coming or going? This is the paradox of "constant time," whatever the distance covered.

In the face of these observations, which are not just ploys in some amusing mental game but have social repercussions whose economic consequences weigh heavily on us, is

technology powerless [po 7]?

Automatisme et Technique doesn't think so. For the past three years, with the cooperation of public agencies that

AN EXCITING INNOVATION

are especially concerned-the RATP on the one hand, DATAR on the other-we have been working on theoretical research projects and technological developments leading to new solutions characterized as much by their performance as by their variety and adaptive flexibility. [p . 8]

The key to this innovation is a kinematic principle. Public transportation has to be considered a particular case of continuous transportation.

The application of "continuous kinematics" to transportation problems makes it possible, above and beyond the possibilities of classic transportation systems, to reconcile research aimed at greatly increased speeds and heightened comfort with concern for maximizing fine-tuned service.

In order to translate this objective, Automatisme et Technique has spelled out two rules that apply to the traffic flow:

-Passengers must be able to pass through the intermediate stations on their itinerary without stepping.

-An increase in the number of stations along a connecting line must not affect either the speed or the volume of service on the line.

The first consequence of these rules is that they lead to dissociation of the "transportation" function as such from the function of "access" to the transport mechanism, whereas in classic transportation systems these functions are taken care of by a single mechanism. [p , 13] .

No technological project is technological first and foremost. "What's that engineer poking his nose into?" you may well ask.

"Why is he criticizing society, pursuing his own politics, his own urban planning? An engineer answers questions, he doesn't ask them." This is the image of engineers held by people who think technology is neutral, or (it comes down to the same thing) that technology is purely a means to an end, or (and this still amounts to the same thing) that the only goal of technology is technology itself and its own further development. Bardet, as we have seen, defines his goals and questions for himself, even if he is

IIIII~ __ ~A~N~E~X~C~I~T_I~N~G~I~N~N~O~V~A~T_IO~N~ ___

defensive about playing "amusing mental games" or making "sterile critiques." He's a sociologist as well as a technician. let's say that he's a sociotechnician, and that he relies on a particular form of ingenuity, heterogeneous engineering, which leads him to blend together major social questions concerning the spirit of the age or the century and "properly" technological questions in a single discourse.

How does this blend come about? Not by chance, but by a precise operation of translation. Urban transportation systems are being asphyxiated, Bardet says; this asphyxiation, as he sees it, is contrary to the spirit of the age. This intolerable situation has to end. How can we put a stop to it? Kinematics deals with continuous transportation of bottles, cartridges, or jam jars. And who controls kinematics? Bardet and his company. Between the asphyxiated society of automobiles and transfer machines in factories, there is no connection whatever. Bardet, approached by Petit, is going to make this connection. The price to pay is an innovation: the discontinuous transportation of people, which no one knows how to improve, has to be viewed as a particular case of the continuous transportation of things, which Bardet knows how to improve. The result? A chain af translation: there is no solution to the problems of the city without innovations in transportation, no innovation in transportation without kinematics, no kinematics without Automatisme et Technique; and, of course, no Automatisme et Technique without Bardet.

People always wonder how a laboratory, or a science, can have any impact at all on society, or how an innovation arises in the mind of its inventors. The answer is always to be found in the chains of translation that transform a global problem (the city, the century) into a local problem (kinematics, continuous transportation) through a series of intermediaries that are not "logical" in the formal sense of the term, but that oblige those, like DATAR, who are interested in the global problem to become interested, through almost imperceptible shifts, in the local solution. The innovation, as Bardet says, will make it possible to "translate" and to "reconcile" contraries in order to establish chains of translation and to situate Bordet's expertise as the obligatory passage point that will resolve the great problems of the age. The work of generating interest consists in constructing these long chains of reasons that are irresistible, even though their logica I form may be debatable. if you want to save the city, save Bardet. This implication is not logically correct, but it is socio-Iogically accurate.

AN EXCITING INNOVATION

I was outraged by what my professor, with a certain satisfaction, was calling "chains of translation." He seemed to take great pleasure in seeing huge interests drift off toward little laboratories. For my part, I was deeply shocked by that sordid, self-interested vision of the

, ,

engineer's work.

"It's just a way of talking about priming the pump, if I understand correctly," I said with more feeling than my professor usually permitted (it was never a good idea to let him think one was naive). "Bardet is making money by making silk purses out of sows' ears. He's a cynic. But what would a real engineer have done in his place?"

"My dear young friend, I forbid you to speak, or even to think, ill of Bardet. He's a great engineer, a real one. You're always jumping from one extreme to another. You show up here convinced that technology is neutral and beyond question. You get your nose rubbed in a project-for your own good-and you conclude that it's all a matter of pork barrels and white elephants. You move too fast. You really do have a lot to learn. An engineer has to stimulate interest: that's the long and the short of it. And he also has to convince; that's the Law and the Gospel. You can't put any real engineer 'in Bardet's place' (as you term it) except a bad one, some imbecile who doesn't interest and doesn't convince and whose kinematics has never gotten beyond the end of its transfer function.

"In contrast, look at the beauty of Aramis and PRTs. It's a fantastic invention. To discourage residents from taking their cars, you merge cars with public transportation. There's only one wav vou Can do that:

, , ,

you have to get people to see public transportation the way they do automobiles, so they'll take public transportation instead of their own cars. It's a matter of mimicry, just like in the jungle. The worn-down citydweller stops distinguishing between his private car and his Aramis car. He literally takes one for the other! Let's give collective transportation some of the automobile's most interesting features---point-topoint service, no transfers, comfort, intimacy-plus all the advantages of public transportation: speed, train service that copes with the traffic flow, low cost (to the user), lack of responsibility (again, for the user). No one will want to do without it. Just look at these great interest

M-J EXCIIING INNOVATION

curves: DATAR, the RATP, Paris, before you know it the whole world. Yet it's still contemporary twenty years later! The diagnostic hasn't budged: everything has only gotten worse, in cities. And in the center, in what has become the center, resting at the heart of the mechanism: kinematics, continuous transportation. A peaceful revolution desired by all. And you'll never again have to change trains or wash your car. Cars for everybody. No, the importance of Bardet's innovations can't be overestimated. I don't like the word, but Bardet is a genius. Unfortunately, we can't interview him. I've talked to his wife: he's very old, and too ill to answer any questions."

"Still, he blew it," I thought. But I kept my opinion to myself.

Justice and young engineers with no memory are hard on projects that fail.

The ultimate defect of projects-they die-takes us back to their beginnings: they were condemned from the start because some crazy engineers had mistaken dreams for reality. The verdict is clear: Personal Rapid Transport systems died because they were not viable. But biological metaphors are as dangerous for technological organizations as they are for living organisms. You can't say that PRTs died because they weren't viable, any more than you can say that dinosaurs, after surviving for millions of years, died out because they were doomed or ill-conceived. Aramis died-in 1 987-and its accusers claim that it was nonviable from the beginning, from 1970. No: Aramis was terminated in 1970, and the explanation makers were kicking a dead horse when they claimed that it hadn't been feasible from the start and that they themselves had been saying so all along. Blessed are the lesson givers, for they will always be right-afterward ... Don't ask them for immediate opinions on the Concorde, or the future of computers, or aerotrains, or superconductivity, or telephones. You'll get the answers only ten or twenty years later, and they'll say they knew all along that the project was not viable. No, Aramis is feasible, at least as feasible as dinosaurs, for life is a state of uncertainty and risk, of fragile adaptation to a past and present environment that the future cannot judge.

The innovations produced by people like Bardet, Petit, Boeing, Otis,

AN EXCITING INNOVATION

and Daimler-Benz are real, important, and exciting. What is at stake, owing to the fusion between the worlds of continous kinematics and public transportation, is a compromise. Innovation always comes from a blending or redistribution of properties that previously had been dispersed. Prior to the fusion of kinematics and public transportation, no one had noticed that the transport function could be separated from the access function. This distinction is what allows the technological compromise to emerge: let's invent a system that never slows down and that nevertheless allows for personalized access. Aramis is a textbook case. No one in his or her right mind can be opposed to a PRT that marries, fuses, blends the private car with public transportation, a project that saves us from asphyxiation. No one can criticize the management of a project that leaves the future open, that does not make premature judgments about the technological components. Neither wicked capitalists nor purveyors of useless gadgets are the driving force behind this effort. No, it is a matter of real inventions designed to meet real needs proposed by real public servants and supported by real scientists. A dream, yes, a dream. In any case, it is paved with good intentions.

"Always assume that people are right, even if you have to stretch the point a bit. A simple rule, my dear pupil, when you're studying a project. You put yourself at the peak of enthusiasm, at the apex, the point when the thing is irresistible, when what you really want, yourself,

is to take out your checkbook so you can, I don't know "

"Buy a share in the Chunnel?"

"That's it, or even shares in the Concorde." "Even in La Villette?"

"Which one, the first scandal or the second?" "The second."

"Oh, the La Villette museum. I don't know; it's a disaster, but after all, why not, it had to be tried. Never say it's stupid. Say: If I were in their shoes, I'd have done the same thing."

"Even in that business of the sniffer planes?"

"Of course, silly boy, you would have bought into it, and not because you're naive; on the contrary, precisely because you're a clever

AN EXCITING INNOVATION

fellow. It's like the Galileo affair. You have to get inside it until you're sure: that one is gUilty; he should be exiled, and even, yes, even fried a little, the tips of his toes at least. Otherwise, if you think differently, you're a little snot. You play the sly one at the expense of history. You play the wise old owl."

"The one that always arrives at nightfall, like the cavalry?"

"Ah, I see they do teach you something, after all, in Telecommunications. Yes, you have to reread your Hegel because, you know, technological reality isn't rational, and it's no good rationalizing it after the fact."

In the list of books to read, Hegel came after F, for Favret-Saada, and G, for Garfunkel or Garfinkel, like the singer but not so easy to set to music.

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]

At RATP headquarters, on the second floor where the directors have their plush lairs, M. Maire is sitting in his office.

"Bordet was a really nice guy. I remember in 1968 or '69 he invited us for lunch in a little bistrot-Girard, Antoine, and me. He'd invented the AT-2000. He told us he was worried, he didn't understand why people were skeptical about the AT. 'Why aren't you supporting the AT-2000?' We told him we didn't think it was very reliable. I don't remember whose idea it was, during lunch, to try slicing the trains in the other direction, crosswise. That's it right therethat's where Aramis came from. He applied for the patent on it a few days later.

"He'd also invented the modular train. [Sketching on a scrap of paper-see Figure 4.) That wasn't stupid, because it did away with the need for side stations. Part of the train [modules c and d] didn't stop, and hooked up with the front section [modules x and y], which had moved out of the station. Before reaching the station, that section shed its rear compartment [modules a and b). So there were always cars at the center of the train that didn't stop. The problem was that passengers had to move to the rear cars, which were the only ones that stopped at stations. If there were a lot of stations, there would have been quite a lot of movement.

"So Bardet applied for a patent on trains consisting of small programmed vehicles. 'Small vehicles,' since they were to be comfortable and intimate, all

AN EXCITING INNOVATION I

a

b

c

d

x

y

abc c:=:=r-c==~ .. H

d .. ~, -----c><:- H J

I' Platform

abc d x y

~~~!-.-----I

PI~tf~rTJ

a

b

c

d

x

Figure 4.

going in the same direction and easy to insert in cities without heavy infrastructures. 'Trains,' because moving together train-fashion is the only way to ensure adequate flow 'Programmed,' so passengers would only have to punch in their destination on the dashboard and the vehicle would head straight to the desired destination. Then Matra bought Barders patents [he sketches Aramis-see Figure 5]. [no. 22]

"Since the witness has moved from DATAR to Matra, we have to move from the public to the private sphere as well, to gather our testimony. See, it's not that hard, As soon as somebody's name is mentioned, you call him up, you make an appointment, and you go see him,"

"D ltd tion?"

o you a ways ge a goo recep IOn.

"Always, and the more important the people are, the less they keep you waiting."

-

AN >eXCITING INNOVATION

Time To -

1 2 3 4 5

CJIII ~

II I I I I I I

TimeT11 -4

237 -CJh~~~ __ --~~~~----

5 II I I I I II

~.

II I I I I I

---- ---- ----

Figure 5. Train consisting of small programmed vehicles.

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]

The scene is Matra Transport's suburban headquarters, in a building decorated in the inevitable postmodern white tiles. At the end of the slick, white main hall, you can see the splendid white casing of Aramis. The director,

M. Etienne, is speaking:

"lcqordere had put Pierre Quetard in charge of diversifying Matra in the civilian sector. He took a good look all around. There were some pluses, and some mistakes. That was normal.

"Anyway, Quetard was on the lookout. He had been to see more or less everybody, offering Matra's services, insisting on their advanced technological competence, and also on the logic of the complex systems that were among their specialities ... Petit sought out Matra-or Quetard sought out Petit, I don't remember now. Anyway, Petit said: 'We're onto something terrific here; I'm ready to put money into it. There's this little company that's in over its head. You've got to work with them.'

"He'd even come to see me at the DTI (the bureau of ground transportation), but I don't think I gave him any money at that point. You have to remember that DATAR in those days wasn't what it is now. it was a powerhouse. it had been set up so it could really do something. For the ministries, a nyet from DATAR was a real catastrophe, at the time.

"Well, DATAR was obsessed with the growth of the Paris region, and it was trying to support public transportation. It was interested in creating a new

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intermediate urban network. So new farms of public transportation were enormously intriguing. In the long run, their proactive approach accomplished some things, too; that was what was behind the new cities. They're still here. That was also the force that called a halt to the growth of Paris.

"In any event, Matra came to an understanding with Borde!. Matra didn't really 'purchase' Bordet's patents. Or at least it was more complicated than a purchase. The contract is hord to analyze. In fact, except for a core of essential ideas that stayed pretty much the same, all the rest was Matra's doinq, rather than Automatisme et Technique's. Even the name is ours." [no. 21]

"So we finally know why it's called Aramis?"

"Yes, Matra gave Bardet's little programmed vehicles the bizarre name Agencement en Rames Automatisces de Modules Independants dans les Stations, meaning 'arrangement in automated trains of independent modules in stations.' Aramis, for short. It has a nice ring to it, 'Aramis.'"

"The name is different, but when you get right down to it, if you read the documents from that period, Matra is making the same arguments as Petit and Bardet."

[DOCUMENT: FROM "ENGINS MATRA," A REPORT ON ARAMIS, UNDATED BUT PROBABLY FROM 1971]

The automobile marks our generation. Weekend gridlock and urban pollution are upsetting, but they don't stop its development. The quality of service it offers-speed, availability, suitability for door-to-door transportation-is incomparable, and accounts for its appeal. Aramis, a system of urban and suburban on-site t.r an s po r t.e t i or; , offers an alternative to the automobile, whose very proliferation cuts down significantly on its performance [po 1] .. _ Aramis does not stand in competition with the automobile, but as a complement to it. By offering users a free choice between two equally attractive methods, it gives the automobile's "prisoners" their freedom back. By pulling part of the traf-

IIII-. __ ~A~N~E~X~C~I~T~IN~G~I~N~N~O~V~A~T~IO~N:~ _

fic off the roads, it improves traffic conditions ... Aramis' users constitute a clientele that appreciates the advantages of the automobile, while rejecting its disadvantages. For Aramis is like the automobile: it offers comfort, availability, * the absence of interruptions. But in addi-

t ion, it offers speed (50 km/h) , safety, punctuality. An electric-powered system on pneumatic wheels, Aramis also protects the environment (no atmospheric pollution, no noise) [p. 13] ... To choose Aramis today is to win the wager already, the one our children will make tomorrow in order to live in cities that have a human face.

"The style is better than Bardets."

"Yes, and you'll also notice that they cast a wider net. A lot more people are interested, or might become interested. It's no longer just the State that is presumed to be interested in Aramis for the purpose of improving the infrastructure or serving the public. Now it's drivers themselves, 'prisoners' freed from their chains, who are achieving their goals-by way of Aramis. Not bad! Notice that for the first time the market is making its appearance in the form (a somewhat curious form, I admit) of the consumers' desire to buy cars but to use Aramis as well, so as to cut down on automobile traffic. You sec, it was a good idea to move from the public to the private sphere. It's always crucial to get hold of the original documents."

The "market forces" of the private sector are actors like the others. The analysis of technological projects often runs aground because the observers are intimidated by the economic forces that, like the technological determinism we saw earlier, are assumed to go up and down the

*In the industrial world, availabilitv is not a moral virtue comparable to charitv; it is a practical virtue which indicates that the machine or the means of transportation in question has not broken down, that it is available. It is usuallv calculated as a ratio

that should be above 0.96, at least for a metro line. ~

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boulevard Saint-Michel with the power of an R-312 bus. Yet consumers are seduced by Aramis just as DATAR is. Consumers, too, are invented, displaced, translated, through fine chains of interest. Bardet and Petit ask DATAR: "You want to save the city? limit the growth of Paris? Then from now on you have to be interested in kinematics, in transfer machines, and in the AT-2000." "You really want to profit from the advantages of the automobile?" Matra's people ask prospective consumers. "Then you have to climb into a cabin that is almost the same, but guided, called Aramis." In each case you have to make a tiny shift, a nearly imperceptible detour.

Is this process of translation "false," "misleading," "rhetorical," or "illogical"? Does Aramis really meet a need? We don't yet know. It all depends. On what? On what happens next, and on how much you trust the spokespersons of all those needs and interests. Bardet, Petit, and loqordere are self-designated representatives who speak in the nome of the city, the future, pollution, and what consumers really want. At this stage there is no difference between Petit, a highly placed government official who speaks in the name of all urban Frenchmen, and the industrialist lcqordere, who speaks in the name of all consumers. Rather than focusing on the artificial difference between State and industry, the public sector and the private sector, let's choose the more refi ned notion of spokesperson, and find out, next, whether the constituent groups turn out to be well represented by those to whom they have given their mandate. The spokespersons assert that automobiles must be supplemented, complemented, by Aramis. They are the ones, too, who claim that all their constituents would say, would think, or would mean the same thing eventually, if only people would go to the trouble of questioning them directly. The representatives surround themselves with unanimity. To hear them, the conclusion seems obvious, irresistible: Aramis has to exist, Aramis can exist, and Matra is the company best positioned to bring it into being. Drivers cannot not want to give up their cars. It isn't a question of bad faith here, or cheating, or engineers getting carried away with themselves. Are they mistaken? We cannot know until they have explored the world and verified whether the city, cars, the powers that be, pollution, the epoch are following them or not. In preference to cumbersome notions such as market forces or the irresistible thrust of technology, let's choose assemblies of spokespersons who bring together, during a single meeting, around a single table, different worlds. The highly placed official speaks in the name of developing the French infrastructure and supports the project of the transportation minis-

A.N EXCIIINC; INNOVATION

ter-who speaks in the name of the government, which speaks in the name of the voters. The transportation minister supports Matra's project, and Matra speaks in the name of captive drivers, who support the project of the engineer, who speaks in the name of cutting-edge technology. It is because these people translate all the divergent interests of their constituents, and because they meet together nevertheless, that the Aramis project can gain enough certainty, enough confidence, enough enthusiasm to be transformed from paper to prototype.

[DOCUMENT]

Matra's primary vocation is systems development for military and space applications. Its success stories in cuttingedge industries are well known. In pursuit of its objectives, it benefits from homogeneous multidisciplinary

teams like the ones currently applying a tested methodology to new transportation systems. Hatra is the very model of an industrial company whose size ar.d dynamic decisionmaking structures are perfectly suited to succeed with a project like the Aramis system. [p , 2]

"And here's one more competence, right in the middle, that serves as an obligatory crossing point," I said with the satisfaction of a pupil who has learned his lesson well.

"Very good; but notice that what's at center stage isn't Bardet's competence any more, it isn't kinematics. It's the high-tech capability of a company that's getting a foothold in public transportation. We're shifting from a specific know-how to a general savoir-faire: system building. Things are beginning to shape up. Two very important new actors are backing Aramis now: a business and a market. No matter that the company is a newcomer and that the consumers in question exist only on paper. Somebody who has the prestige of sophisticated military contracts bchind him and who exprcsses the will of millions of 'captive' car owners can't fail to get everyone's attention, especially

AN =X.CTING I'iNOVAI.ON

the ones who hold the purse strings. Yes, Aramis is too beautiful not to come into being. If it didn't exist, somebody would have to invent it."

"Well, they did invent it. Look at this document."

[DOCUMENT]

On April 13, 1972, Michel Frybourg, director of the Institute for Transportation Research (INRETS), and Jean-Luc Lagardere, president of the Matra Motor Corporation, signed

an agreement to construct an Aramis prototype in Orly at a cost of around 5 million [1973] francs.

The actors come in varying sizes; this is the whole problem with innovation.

Before a revolutionary transportation system can be inscribed into the nature of things, the transports of enthusiasm shared by all these revolutionaries, industrialists, scientists, and high officials have to be inscribed on paper. Verba volent. The agreement signed on April 13, 1972, by spokespersons for the minister and Matra was intended to establish the financial participation of each party, to define the prototype, to describe the development phases, to specify who would control the results, to decide who would possess Aramis' patents and licenses if it were to come into existence, to agree on how each party would pay its share, and finally, in the case of failure, to determine how each one would bow out with dignity, without trials or litigation. But who are Messieurs Petit and Lagardere? They do not have an essence that has been fixed once and for all. They can speak in everyone's name, or no one's; it all depends. Petit may speak for all French people, or for DATAR, or for one of DATAR's departments, or for a member of one of its departments, or in his own name, either as a transportation specialist or as a private individual. He may speak solely in the name of his own imagination. Someone else, or his own unconscious, may even speak for him. Depending on his relative size, he may capture everyone's attention for ten years, or that of just one person for a mere instant. He may be called Mr. Large or Mr. Small. Here we have an essence so elastic that a single sentence, "Mr. Petit is interested in the project," may be translated into a whole gamut of sentences, from "50 million Frenchmen

AN EXCITING INNOVATION

are solemnly and eternally committed to Aramis," to "His imagination is running away with him, but in a couple of minutes he'll have forgotten the whole thing." Now, this variation in the relative size, in the representativeness of the actors, is not limited to Mr. Petit; it characterizes all members of a technological project. Mr. loqordere supports the project, to be sure, but who can say whether his stockholders will follow? He, too, varies in relative size. Let him be reduced to minority status by his board, and the enormous actor who had millions of francs to contribute is reduced to the simple opinion of a private person whose interest in Aramis commits only himself and his dog. In a project's history, the suspense derives from the swelling or shrinking of the relative size of the actors.

Although this variability can never be eliminated, its scope can nevertheless be limited. Here is where law comes into its own. No technology without rules, without signatures, without bureaucracies and stamps. Law itself is no different from the world of technologies: it is the set of the modest technologies of writing, registering, verifying, authenticating that makes it possible to line up people and statements. It is a world of flexible technologies coming to the aid of even more flexible technologies of interest in order to allow slightly more solid technologies to harden a bit. A signature on a contract, an endorsement, an agreement stabilizes the relative size of the actors by lending to the provisional definition of alliances the assistance of the law, a law whose weight is enormous because it is entirely formal and because it applies equally to everyone. Mr. loqordere may vary in size, the ministry will change hands ten times-it would be unwise to count on stability there; but the signatures and stamps remain, offering the alliances a relative durability. Scripta manent. That will never be enough, for signed documents can turn back into scraps of paper. Yet if, at the same time, the interlocking of interests is actively maintained, then the law offers, as it were, a recall effect. After it is signed, a project becomes weightier, like a little sailboat whose hull has been ballasted with some heavy metal. It can still be overturned, but one would have to work a little harder to prevent it from righting itself, from returning to its former position. In the area of technologies, you cannot ask for more. Nothing is very solid in this area; nothing offers much resistance. * But by accumulating little solidities, little durabilities, little resistances, the project ends up gradu-

*See W. Bijker and]. Law, eds., Shaping TechnoloflY~Building Society: Studies in SOciotechnical Change (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), especially the introduction.

AN EXCITING INNOVArION

ally becoming somewhat more real. Aramis is still on paper, but the paper of the plans has been supplemented by that of the patents-a plan protected by law-and now by that of the signed agreements. The courts are behind Aramis from this point on, not to say what it has to become, but to make it more difficult for those who have committed themselves to it to change their minds, to hold onto their money, or to back out of the project if the going gets rough. Yet "make it more difficult" does not mean "make it impossible." Woe betide those who trust the law alone to shelter their projects from random hazards.

"Apparently," Norbert said, "they all seem to be clinging to the idea that in guided transportation a mobile system that doesn't have a site isn't worth much. So we have to go to Orly, just as Aramis did. What is an 'exclusive guideway,' anyway?"

I was beginning to worry about this long line of "actors." If we had to go into the suburbs, we were going to lose a huge amount of time, or else spend a fortune on taxis.

"Keep the receipts for your expenses, my boy. I'll reimburse you; the client is paying. Ah, if only you were an ethnologist, you could stay in your village and draw nice neat maps. Whereas we sociologists have to drag ourselves around everywhere. Our terrains aren't territories. They have weird borders. They're networks, rhizomes."

"What?"

"Rhizomes, Deleuze and Guattari, a thousand plateaus."

The word "rhizome" wasn't in the dictionary. I learned later that Mille Plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus) was the name of a book and not one of Captain Haddock's swear words.

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]

M. Henne, head of the bureau of technological studies of Aeroport de Paris, speaking in one of a group of prefabricated bUildings on the far side of the Orly runways. Through the Window, the darker form of a test loop was identifiable in an otherwise empty lot.

"Yes, that's the place, Aramis was there Why did we get interested2 For

AN EXCITING INNOVATION

me, Aramis isn't a PRT Iype of transportation, it's a short-distance transportation system 'Hectometric,' we call it. When the Charles de Gaulle Airport at Roissy was being designed, we looked everywhere for a transportation system suitable for short distances. We even set up a company for moving sidewalks. We looked at everything.

"Then we got a new director. We gave up the project, we sold off our research-and-development markets and liquidated our subsidiary.

"But since we had been the driving force behind short-distance transportation, we had become experts of sorts. That's where the Aramis product comes

in."

"For you, Aramis belongs to hectometric transportation?"

"Oh, yes, completely. Anyway, it's in the some sphere. Matra sought us out.

We had a meeting in loqordere's office. You have to admit he does a fine [ob of selling his products. He told us: 'That type of transportation is what we're good at. In Lille, it's working like a charm; moving sidewalks will never make it. You've invested a lot in short-distance transportation. You can't pullout now.'

"So we put a million into the deal. We paid in kind: the site, first of all, and the logistical support. I was head of the department of general studies for Aeroport de Paris. I was the one who followed the thing. They convinced us, but we weren't a vector. I myself was supportive, but it wasn't an immediate investment, only something to check out, second-hand.

"You know, I never believed in Aramis outside of airports. As soon as you enter the Paris region, you have to run the gauntlet of dozens of administrative offices. You never get anywhere. Anyway, after the oil crisis, all the short-distance systems fizzled out like balloons. Before, they were springing up allover. Remember the FNAC? There were a hundred such systems at the time. Then, in 1975, everything ground to a holt. People were looking for simplicily. They come up with Orly Roil, Roissy Roil. They'll be satisfied with that.'

"And I have to tell you something else. From that point on, all the contractors were going through a real ponic over security issues, I mean passenger securily. With Aramis, the issue came up over and over. I heard it dozens of times. What do you do in a car with some guy who looks suspicious? The demand [ust caved in.

"Before 1975, there was a period of innovation-new cities, all sorts of wild gimmicks. After 1975, it was allover; securily was the only thing that counted Besides, obviously, Aramis had to be done. Was it doable? I really don't know.

"But you know, I still tell myself that if somebody come up with the idea of

AN EXCITING INNOVATION

the automobile today and had to go before a safety commission and explain, I don't know, let's say, how to get started on a hill ! Just think how complicated it is: shifting gears, using the hand broke, and so on. He wouldn't stand a chancel He'd be told: 'It can't be done.' Well, everybody knows how to start on a hill! It's the some with Aromis. We hadn't gotten all the kinks out, but yes, I think it was doable." [no. 23J

To translate is to betray: ambiguity is part of translation.

For Aeroport de Paris, Aramis is not going to replace automobiles, remodel our cities, or protect our children's future. It is "in the same sphere as," in the neighborhood of, a much more modest means of transportation that involves a Few hundred meters in airports, parking lots, or the FNAC on the rue de Rennes. It is limited to closed sites where one can innovate without competing with the heavyweights, with subways or trains. Moreover, for Aeroport de Paris, Aramis is not irresistible. Their people do not commit themselves one hundred percent; for them, it is not a matter of life and death. They took up second-line positions, to see what would happen. Is this the same Aramis as Matra's, or Barde!'s? No, and this is precisely how a project can hope to come into existence. There is no such thing as the essence of a project. Only finished products have an essence. For technology, too, "existence precedes essence." If all the actors had to agree unambiguously on the definition of what was to be done, then the probability of carrying out a project would be very slight indeed, for reality remains polymorphous for a very long time, especially when a principle of transportation is involved. It is only at the end of the road, and locally, that the project will acquire its essence and that all the interviewees will define it in the same terms, differing only in viewpoint. In the beginning, on the contrary, it is appropriate for different groups with divergent interests to conspire with a certain amount of vagueness on a project that they take to be a common one, a project that then constitutes a good "agency of trans/ation,"* a good swap shop for goals. "Yes, for a million francs in kind, that's not bad. Why not go along? After all, it can't hurt." Thor's what

*See M. CalIon, "On Interests and Their Transformation: Enrolment and Counter-Enrolment," SOClQl Suulies if Science 12, no. 4, (1982): 615-626; and M. CalIon, J. Law, et al., eds., Mapping the Dynamics (!f Science and TechnoloBJ (London:

Macmillan, 1986).

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Aeroporr de Paris said. IF you map out all the interests involved in a project, the vague or even reticent interests of those who are pursuing some other Aramis have to be counted as well. They are allies. Obviously, such allies are neither very convinced nor very convincing. As M. Henne says, they are not "vectors," and so they can drop the ball when things go badly. But if you had to have only associates who would stand up under any test, you would never stand up under any test.

"A concept, an innovation, patents, public authorities, an industrialist, an on-site installation at Orly- our Aramis is taking on consistency," Norbert exclaimed enthusiastically.

"They say they didn't have a user." "No, they had an operator." "What's an operator?"

"I suppose it's an operating agency, a business that really transports people, that's comfortable with mass transportation and can guarantee that the thing isn't dangerous. In France, there aren't many; it's got to be the SNCF or the RATP."

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]

At SOFRETU, a research arm of the RATP the director is speaking.

"They needed an operator. The RATP said, 'Why not?' It was translated by financial participation.

"Obviously, the way cars connected made the Rail Division's hair stand on end, you can imagine-we nearly had a collision! But finally, for the operator, it was seductive. Operators don't like branchings. For operators, lines are ideal: you go from one end to the other and back, pendulum fashion. But you have to have branches to service the suburbs. Aramis solved all that. For us it was a terrific idea, since it solved the problem of fine-tuning the adjustment of supply to demand.

"It was really an innovation at the system level; it didn't have to do with the thing itself, with components. Besides, Matra had said, 'We'll take components that already exist on the market.' The invention was the operating system; the

AN EXCITING INNOVATION

idea was that the technology would follow. It was really the passengers who were targeted, passenger comfort, and also the operator." [no. 17, p. 6J

"So things are shaping up pretty well," said Norbert. "We know we don't have to go back before the 1970s, since everybody all over the world was making PRTs at that time. We know the chain of interests that connects DATAR, Bardet, INRETS, and Aramis. We can even reconstitute- and this is unusual-the little intellectual shift that gave birth to the innovation: it was the merger of transfer machines and public transportation, then the eighty-one-box matrix, then the crosswise division of the AT-2000. We understand why Matra took up the banner--it was attempting to diversify, it was getting into VAL, and it had a better base than Bardct. Furthermore, we have no trouble getting enthusiastic ourselves, even fifteen years later, over a radical innovation, since we suffer from its absence every single day in Paris, as we go about our investigation! We have no trouble understanding why the people at Aeroport de Paris got their feet wet and even contributed some land without having a whole lot of faith in the project. And to top it all off, we know why the RATP had to be involved."

"It's not always as neat and tidy as this?"

"No, no, most of the time the origins are too obscure. And you have to go to an enormous amount of trouble to imagine what could have been behind such crazy inventions. In our lab we often study incredible cases of technological pathology. Here it's just the opposite: we don't understand why the thing doesn't exist."

"Yet it really is a corpse, and we've actually been asked to determine the cause of death."

"Precisely, my dear Watson, but we already know that the fatal cause won't be found at the very beginning of the project any more than at its very end. In 1973, if you'd had five million francs, you would have put them up!"

"Maybe not," I replied cautiously. "I probably would have bought myself an apartment first."

"Listen to that! Real estate! That's why everything is going to pot in this country. And he's an engineer!"

AN EXCITING INNOVATIOrN

IS ARAMIS FEASIBLE?

"Now we can go on to Phase Zero, since that's where they are.

Where's your diagram? Okay! Here's where we are, in black and white" [see Figure 1 in Chapter 1 J.

"If I' . k" t ". f

m not mista en, my men or went on, our engmeers rom

Matra, Automatisme et Technique, and Aeroport de Paris have been out in the beet fields hy the Orly runways since 1973, asking three Kantian questions: 'What can we know about Aramis? What can we hope to get out of it? What is it supposed to do?' Oh, they're great philosophers! Nothing exists as yet except beets and a principle of continuous kinematics. A rather speculative principle, but the time is right and the arguments are good, so it stirs up some interest. The last step in this progressive slippage of interest is to translate it into cold hard cash, sixteen million francs at the time. * The beet field still has to be turned into a transportation system, which is roughly equivalent to turning a pumpkin into a coach. Who are the mice and the fairies? Who are the actors?"

I had worked with the professor for a while, so I was no longer surprised to hear sociologists throw theatrical terms around.

*The equivalent of 64 million francs in 1988. DATAR (representing the interests, properly understood, of the French in need of improvements) contributed 3.4 million, Aeroport de Paris and Air France (representing a mitigated interest in short~distance transportation systems) invested 1 million, the DTT (representing the Transportation Ministry) chipped in 1 million, the Ilc-de-Francc region (here is someone representing local users at last) contributed 0.5 million, the RATP (representing technology) 0.362 million, and Matra (committing the properly understood interests of its stockholders to diversification in all directions) invested the largest amount: 10 million francs.

"According to the notes," I said, "among the 'actors' we ought to interview is Cohen, who's a graduate of Supaoro; he's a satellite specialist hired by Matra as production head. His classmate Freque was selected to keep tabs on VAL. What's VAL?"

"It's the automated metro in Lille. Everybody keeps bringing it up when we talk about Aramis; we're going to have to look into it, too. Especially because Matra built it. It was begun around the same time, and the same engineers worked on both projects."

I sighed when I thought of all the interviews we had to do.

Funny-I'd chosen sociology thinking it would be less work than the Ecole's other internships, like man-machine interactions or signal analySIS.

"Then there's Lamoureux, fresh out of the Ecole Poly technique and 'Ielecom-s-just like me, if I may say so-with no preconceived notions about the world of public transportation, again just like me. The RATP picked him to work on the project. Matra hired M. Guyot, one of Bardet's engineers-he's a specialist in machine transfers-to head its future transportation branch."

"What about Bardet?"

"Apparently he kept one foot in the project as technical adviser.

Not one of those engineers had any background in transportation. As I understand it, they all said to themselves: 'If we can build satellites, we can surely build a subway. ",

"But that's an advantage, too. They were ready to reinvent the wheel if they had to. Now comes the tricky part, my friend. We need to move on from easy sociology to hard sociology. It's our turn to reinvent the wheel. And there's only one way to go about it: we have to dig into the documents."

[OOCUMENT: INRETS REPORT, APRIL 13, 1972]

Article 2; Composition of the Prototype The prototype will consist of:

-a segment of track 800 to 1,000 meters long, a fixed stat i on represented by a platform, and a movable station that will facilitate inexpensive simulations of various uses: a

workshop, a control post, a reception building, and a parking lot;

-five full-scale cars: two for passenger use, three reserved for measuring instruments.

This prototype will illustrate one of the possible ways the Aramis system can work and will demonstrate its adaptability ro various real-life circumstances.

All the original components of the prototype, both the material elements (hardware) and the working processes and programs (software), will be designed in such a way that

they can be transposed to later installations intended for actual operation.

Commercial operation of the system should thus be possible as soon as the anticipated development work has been completed as specified in the initial agreement and its codicil, without further delay or addi tional development

programs.

The present codicil also applies to the trials and experiments carried out with the prototype, in conformity with Appendix 1 of the initial agreement.

The initial agreement is a continuation of agreement number 71-01-136-00-21275-01, between the prime minister and the Societe des Engins Matra.

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]

M. Lamoureux, the RATP engineer heading the ptoiec! at the time, recalls with feeling.'

"We had never been through anything like that. We'll never see anything like it again. In six months, we went from paper to a prototype. We did everything: the site, the track, the cars-we invented it all.

"We tried everything. We were a gang of kids, applying what we'd learned in school-it was fantastic. We'd work till three or four in the morning.

"We weren't just pencil pushers like they were later on. We were really into it. We had to solve all the problems as we went along.

"The track was a concrete-and-steel sandwich: as soon as it got damp, the

________________________________________ ~I~S~A~R~A~M~I~S~F~E~A~S~I~B~LE~2~. __ ~""III

bolts popped out like rockets and landed 15 meters away. When the committee members came by, we were terrified they'd be hit." [no. 4]

M. Cohen, Matra's project head at the time, speaking in his spacious, lorge-Windowed office in Besanr;on:

"It's also a question of the times, you know. I have trouble imogining an industrialist today who'd say, 'We don't have a medium-distance ultrasound link-up? Okay, let's go for it-we'll invent one. There's no motor on the market2 Never mind, we'll develop one.' And it was all like that. Today, everybody sticks to his own job. People don't take so many risks.

"You have to realize that in six months we did the entire feasibility model.

It wasn't a prototype; in fact, it was a full-scale model." [no. 45]

M. Berger, former RATP engineer who was acquainted with the project at the time, responding to questions:

"So, Aramis at Oriy-what is it, exactly?"

"It's a 1 ,200-meter track with a shunting station, with three little yellow cars-user-friendly computers-running around it in dry weather [see Photos

3-5].

"Each little car is equipped with an arm that lets it push on the left or right gUide-rail, at branching points, so it can turn."

"Switching isn't done on the ground, then?"

"No, it's done on board. The big challenge with Aramis is that the cars are autonomous; they don't touch each other, yet they work together as if they were part of a train. They have nonmaterial couplings-nothing but calculations. So you can imagine how autonomous they are.

"Every car has to know who it is. It has to receive instructions about speed-'Here you can speed up; here you have to slow down.' It has to monitor itself constantly, but it also has to know what cor it's lollowinq. so it has to be able to see, or at least feel, what's in front of it, the way a bat does. It olso has to know what's coming along behind.

"To see at a distance, we chose a long-distance ultrcsound sensor; for short distances, a rotating laser bundle reflecting onto two catadiopters. If the car in front is too close, according to the ultrasound sensor, and the cor behind gets the message 'Form a train,' it has to approach the lead car without bumping into it.

"They're in constant dialogue, since the ultrasound sensor in front and the uhrosound responder in the rear are both active.

"Then, when they've joined up in a train, the car controls itself by means of

:S ARAMIS FEASIBLE2

the optical sensor so it will maintain a constant speed without jerky movements that would shake up the passengers. When it opproaches the station it has been ossigned to, ot the precise moment 01 coupling it has to put its arm out to the right or the left-powl-while uncoupling from its colleagues ot the some time [he makes the gesture by turning in his chair]. The cars behind have to close ronks [he rolls his chair closer to his desk). If the first car in the train is the one that turns, the next one becomes first in line and gets its orders. The central computer keeps track 01 the flow in terms of passenger demand.

"So you see, it's not that eosy. Each car has to calculate its own speed and position; it has to know where it's going; it has to be able to be leader or follower; it has to know when to stop at a station, open its doors, and keep track of passenger destinations. And take off again. If it's on its own, it can go full speed ahead. As soon as it sees a car in front, it has to be ready to meet and link up. All this, of course, at 25 kilometers per hour, even in rain or snow, all doy, 011 night, thousands of times, without breoking down."

'And besides, what you are describing involves only three cars. A real system would need hundreds of brains like this. "

"Yes, and what's more, the whole system has to be failsafe."

"I find your characters one-dimensional. They seem flat. They're just ideas, words on paper. They need to be animated; you have to make them move, give them depth and consistency. More than anything, they have to be autonomous; that's the whole secret. And instead they're so rigid! They'd pass for puppets. Look at that one: he has no personality, he doesn't know where he is, or what time it is, or where he's supposed to go, or whom he's supposed to meet. You have to tell him everything: 'Go forward, go back, come closer, turn right, turn left, open the door, go ahead, watch out.' Your characters are just sacks of potatoes. Give them a little breathing space, a little autonomy. Make them cars with minds of their own. You don't know a thing about art: it's not enough just to treat characters as vehicles for your projects. It's not worth it, being the best in the world in robotics, automation, mechanics, computer science, if you don't take the trouble to breathe some life into your anemic paper figures. Good literature isn't made with noble sentiments, Gentlemen, and good transportation isn't made with ideas. either. It has to have a life of its own: that's your top priority."

.. But what if they start moving around on their own, taking their lives in their own hands? Maybe they'll get ahead of us!"

_____________________ ~~S:.._:..:A:..:.:R.:_A.:_M::..:.'_:I S,---,-F-=E-,--A~S.:_I.::cB_,:_L=_E:-:_2 _ __j_

"And what are you getting paid for, may I ask, if it's not to come up with a transportation system that has a life of its own and can get along without us? If we always have to keep after it and tell it everything, if we can't ever hand a system over to our clients, keys and all, so that they'll only have to take care of upkeep and maintenance, we'll never make a cent. We're doing business, you know, not writing novels; we're supposed to outfit Jacksonville, Taipei, O'Hare, Bordeaux ... These characters have to live on their own, do you hear me? They have to. You figure it out."

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]

M. Lamoureux:

"We had as much fun as a barrel of monkeys. We'd hold a catadiopter out in front of a car, on a stick, and we'd say: 'Heel, Fido,' and the car would come right up to the catadiopter and stop on a dime. When we moved ahead, it would follow.

"We even did a public demonstration. It was on May 3, 1973-1'11 always remember that dote-with lcqordere and a bunch of journalists. Everything had gone smoothly up till then. Of course, the day of the demonstration-it always happens-the thing didn't work. We'd wonted to do it all just right, all automatically, no tricks; but nothing worked.

"Impossible to get the system going. lcqcrdere was hysterical. 'I never should have organized this,' he said. 'Now the technicians will have to lick the bureaucrats' boots.' It's true that up to then we'd been doing whatever we wanted. Aher that, we had to work with fixed objectives.

"Naturally, just as you'd expect, a few minutes later we found the problem: everything worked fine. We wanted to call the journalists back, but lcqordere wouldn't hear of it." [no. 4, p. 6]

Innovations have to interest people and things at the same time; that's really the challenge.

The general director is interested; he has no trouble getting journalists interested, with the prospect of a scoop and some tasty hors d'oeuvres. Everybody gathers in the beet field that has been transformed into a

IS ARAMIS FEA IBlE?

revolutionary system of transportation for the year 2000. Just the moment for a mishap to occur, as so often happens in projects, although not so often in fairy tales: in no time at all, the coach turns back into a pumpkin, hesitates, turns into a coach again, then a pumpkin, and when it finally turns back into a coach again it's too late. The Big Interests gathered round

are always in a hurry; they're tired of waiting, they disappear The hors

d' oeuvres are still there; as for the transportation system, sorry .

The problem is, the innovator has to count on assemblages of things that often have the same uncertain nature as groups of people. To get Aramis past the paper phase into the prototype phase, you have to get a whole list of things interested in the proiect: a motor, an ultrasound sensor, assorted software, electric currents, concrete-and-steel sandwiches, switching arms. Some of these actors and actuators, are docile, loyal, disciplined old servants; they don't cause any trouble. "I say 'come: and here they are; I say 'go: and they leave." This is the case with electric-power supplies, buildings, and tracks, even if the bolts do have an unfortunate tendency to pop out. But other elements have to be recruited, seduced, modified, transformed, developed, brought on board. The same sort of involvement that has to be solicited from DATAR, RATP, Aeroport de Paris, and Matra now has to be solicited from motors, activators, doors, cabins, software, and sensors. They, too, have their conditions; they allow or forbid other alliances. They require; they constrain; they provide. For example, in creating the cab, we can't follow the usual patterns of mass transit: the chassis would be enormous, and too heavy. We have to go see the manufacturer from Matra's automotive branch. But those people have never built a car on rails, or a car without a driver. So we have to get them interested, start from scratch: we keep the door, and add an in-transit switching mechanism to the cab. The motors, sensors, chips, and of course the software-none of these things is available commercially. We have to tie them in with Aramis: that's right, recruit them, sign them up, bring them on board. I may as well say it: we have to negotiate with them.

Nothing says that an ordinary electric motor, for example, was predestined to be used by Aramis, just as nothing says that Aeroport de Paris was predestined to use Aramis. Of course, standard electric motors can activate wheels, but not always under the very special constraints of nonmaterial coupling. Of course, Aeroport de Paris needs small-scale means of transportation, but not necessarily those particular means. These

IS ARAMIS FEASIBLE?

two actors, human and nonhuman, both have to be pampered and adapted so they can be put together in the project. It's the same task of involvement in both cases. The ordinary rhythms of these two actors turn out to be uneven, variable, interrupted. But that's where the danger lies. If they're seduced, convinced, transformed, pushed too far off their customary tracks, they may also become traitors and deserters. The motor won't work any more, and another one will have to be developed for the purpose. As for Aeroport de Paris, it will "stall." Everybody will lose interest, will pull away from the project. "Say, Aeroport de Paris, are you still going along with the project?" "Oh no, not if you get too far away from short-distance transportation systems! There's where I bow out!" "But hey, won't a good old motor work well enough for the project?" "Not a chance! Just a few tenths of a millimeter off, and it stops working!" The effort to generate interest has failed. The human and nonhuman actors have once again become admirably disinterested.

The full difficulty of innovation becomes apparent when we recognize that it brings together, in one place, on a joint undertaking, a number of interested people, a good half of whom are prepared to jump ship, and an array of things, most of which are about to break down. These aren't two parallel series that could each be evaluated independently, but two mixed series: if the "onboard logical systems" fizzle out at the crucial moment, then the journalists won't see a thing, won't write any articles, won't interest consumers, and no money or support will get to the Orly site to allow the engineers to rethink the onboard logical systems. The human allies will scatter like a flock of sparrows and they'll go back to their old targets-consumers to their cars, the RATP to its subway, Matra to its space business, and Aeroport de Paris to its Orly Rail systems. As for the nonhuman resources, they'll all return to their old niches-the ultrasound sensors will go back to the labs, the classic motors will go back into classic electric cars, the doors and windows will be beautifully adapted to the automobiles they should have stuck with all along. So if you don't want the transportation system to turn back into a beet field, you have to add to the task of interesting humans the task of interesting and attaching nonhumans. To the sociogram, which charts human interests and translations, you have to add the technogram, which charts the interests and attachments of non humans.

IS ARAMIS FEASIBLE?

"For my part," the motor declares, "I won't put up with nonmaterial coupling. Never, do you hear me? Never willI allow acceleration and deceleration to be regulated down to the millisecond!"

"Well, as for me," says the chip, "I bug the CEO and his journalists.

As soon as they want to break me in, I break down and keep them from getting started. Ah! it's a beautiful sight, watching their faces fall, and poor Lamoureux in a rage ... "

"That's pretty good," says the chassis. "Me, on the contrary, I let them move me around with one finger. I glide right over the tracks, since I'm so light, and 1 actually even let myself be bumped a bit."

"Oh, stop pretending you're an automobile!"

"Hah! A chassis like that, you really have to wonder what she's doing in guided transportation ... "

"Leave her alone, she's a bootlicker!"

"She's right," says the optical sensor, "1 help the car, too, and it's even thanks to me that the motor can be put to work. "

'''Thanks to me'-listen to him! As soon as the laser angle is too obtuse, he loses his bearings! And he talks about putting me to work!"

"You're the one who's obtuse-you can't do anything but break down. At least 1 authorize linkups," says the central control panel, "and furthermore I'm Compatible .: ,.,

"T'm Compatible'! Well, I guess I'd rather hear that than be deaf," says the base computer. "But all the software had to be rewritten just for him."

I was horrified by the mixed metaphors; my boss loved them. He seemed to like watching the engineers think about mixing humans and things.

"It's a confusion of genres," I said, forgetting my place. "Chips don't talk any more than Chanticleer's hens do. People make them talk-we do, we're the real engineers. They're just puppets. Just ordinary things in our hands."

"Then you've never talked to puppeteers. Here, read this and you11 see that I'm not the one getting carried away with metaphors. Anyway, do you really know what 'metaphor' means? Transportation. MOVing. The word metaphoros, my friend, is written on all the moving vans in Greece."

________________________________________ ~I~S~A~R~A~~~~~IS~F~[~A~S~I~B~lE~2~.--~""tII

[DOCUMENT: MATRA REPORT BY M. LAMOUREUX, END OF PHASE 0, JUNE 1973; EMPHASIS ADDED]

In order to be able to ensure the basic functioning of the Aramis principle, an Aramis car must be able to:

-follow a speed profile provided while it is moving independently or as part of a train ("proceeding in a train"); -take the turnoff to its target station ("removal of a car from the train");

-stop in a station individually or as part of a train

(" station stop") ;

-connect with a car that has just left a station

(" linkup") ;

-approach a car within a train after an intervening car has been pulled out, in order to close the gap ("merger") . *

[po 7J

Every car thus has to supervise itself: the subsystems include controls that go into "onboard security software," which has responsibility for detecting any abnormal functioning of the car and for ordering an "emergency stop." The emergency-stop order is transmitted by a security transmission to the neighboring cars and to the "ground security software," which informs the central calculator of the emer-

gency stop.

Paralleling these controls at the level of the cars, the calculator supervises the normal progression of the selected program and can also transmit an emergency-stop order to the ground security software.

All the cars in a train receive instructions about their

speed, which are forwarded by the central calculator. The "functional onboard software" transmits these instructions

to the automatic guidance system:

-if the car is at the head of the train, the automatic guidance system brings the real speed of that car into line w i: th the assigned speed;

*"Linkups are different from mergers; in mergers, both cars are actually moving at the same speed when the operation begins. There are fewer constraints on mergers, but the same equipment brings them about." [po 7 note]

IS ARA/V\IS FEASIBLE?

-otherwise, it instructs the car to follow the one ahead at a distance of thirty centimeters. The "automatic pilot" of the car behind knows the distance that separates it from the car ahead, because it has a short-distance sensor (opti-

cal) .

The "functional onboard software" (FOS) of each car has

in memory an authorization for linkup or merging that is

sent to it by the central calculator. If merging is authorized, any detection of a car at less than forty meters entails a merger behind that car. Every car has a "long-distance sensor" (ultrasound) with a scope of one to forty meters that supplies information about distances for the piloting system. A "short-distance sensor" (optical) is used instead for distances of one meter or less. [po 9]

Certain orders intimately tied to security are determined "by majority vote." The FOS carries out a majority

vote on the basis of five consecutive receptions when it recognizes such an order; these are orders commanding the switching arms to operate or prohibitingmergers. [p , 21]

Men and things exchange properties and replace one another; this is what gives technological projects their full savor.

"Subordinate," "authorize," "supervise," "allow," "notify," "possess," "order," "vote," "be able": let's not jump too quickly to conclusions as to whether these terms are metaphorical, exaggerated, anthropomorphic, or technical. The people interested and the machines recruited don't just get together on a joint project so they can bring it from the paper stage to reality. Some of them still have to be substituted for others. Aramis, for example, can't be controlled by a driver as if it were a bus or a subway, because each car is individualized; in the initial stage of the project, each had only four seats. You can't even think of putting a driver-a union member to boot-in every car; you might as well go ahead and offer every Parisian a Rolls. So something has to take the place of a unionized driver. Will the choice be an automatic pilot, with its "functional onboard software," or a central computer with its omniscience and its omnipotence? In moving from humans to non humans, we do not move from social relations

IS ARAMIS FEASIBlE?

to cold technology. for some features of human drivers have to come along and stay on board, or else they have to come from the center. We won't keep the humans' physical presence, their caps, their uniforms, or their outspokenness; but we'll keep some of their knowledge, their abilities, their knowhow. Cold qualities? No, on the contrary, warm and controversial, like subordination and control, authorizations and orders. Because the automatic pilot is demanding as well-not about retirement and Social Security, but about distance sensors, orders, and counterorders, if we decide to put it on board; about transmission, road markers, information, and speed, if we set it up at the command center. When our engineers cross the qualities of drivers with the qualities of automatic pilots and central computers, they're embarking on the definition of a character. An autonomous being or an omniscient system? What minimum number of human qualities does that character have to bring along? What characteristics have to be delegated to it? What sensations does it have to be capable of experiencing? Yes, we're actually dealing with metaphysics, and the anthropomorphic expressions must be taken not figuratively but literally: it really is a matter of defining the human (anthropos) form (morphos) of a nonhuman, and deciding on the limits to its freedom.

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]

M. Berger, reading the above document aloud: "Ah, that's what I was looking for: 'Aramis is an automated transportation system that includes a maximum number of onboard controls; as a result, transmissions have been cut down to a minimum. The vehicles have been made completely automatic, and the calculator addresses all the vehicles present on a functional transmission segment' [p 24). Yes, I have to admit that our discussions sometimes took on theological dimensions."

"There, Father, you can see in the ground controls a precise model of God's relations with his creatures."

"But isn't it rather impious, my son, to represent God as the constant repairer of his creatures' mistakes? The world you propose is hardly perfect, since, according to you, the Supreme Intelligence has

IS ARAMIS FEASIBlE?

not only determined the laws according to which the world works but is also required to correct them constantly. For my part, I'd prefer a system more in conformity with that of Mr. Leibniz, one in which God's creatures would contain the complete recapitulation of all possible actions. It would suffice to enter all predicates in the software. So, for example, if the creature Julius Caesar' were opened up, an infinite intelligence could read everything he will necessarily do-from his birth and adoption to the Rubicon and the Ides of March. In the same way, by opening up the prototype creature, you could deduce all degrees of speed, all bridge crossings, and all station stops. The prototypes, like true monads, would have no doors or windows. "

"A serious drawback for the passengers, don't you agree, Father?" "There is the problem of the passengers, of course [he chuckles monkishly] ... But then, wouldn't a project like that be more worthy of God's greatness and perfection than your Malebranchean universe, which achieves harmony only through constant repair? Whereas I would achieve it through perfect calculations, and all the prototypes would go their own ways because of the preestablished harmony in their software; they wouldn't have to see or know each other. Don't you agree, my son, that this world would correspond more closely to the picture that piety should draw of God?"

"Of God, no doubt, Father, but how about Matra? Even an inertial platform couldn't keep its fixed point without being reinitialized from time to time. You're asking too much of human beings."

"And you, my son, are not asking enough of God."

"But what do you do about freedom, Father? Why not allow the vehicles enough knowledge to take care of harmonizing the laws of the universe-fixed by God-with the little adjustments that human imperfection and sin have put in Matra, in the chips as well as in the tiniest little fleas? Why not open up our monads? Let's give Aramis more autonomy, as befits a divine creature, after all; for won't God's work be judged all the more beautiful to the extent that His creatures are more free? Instead of making them automatons, as you do, I'd make them living creatures. They'll know how to repair themselves, and they'll get their bearings from one another. Instead of communicating abstractly with their Creator, as you propose, they'll find a new harmony owing to their freedom. Yes, Father, they'll be connected by a vinculum substantiale. Nothing material will link them together to keep them on the right path. They'll have to make independent decisions, check themselves, connect and disconnect, in conformity with the laws

IS ARAMIS FEASIBLE?

of the world system to be sure, but freely, without touching each other and without being the slaves of any automated mechanisms. Oh, what a beautiful construct! How much worthier of inspiring piety in the atheist's hardened heart than the fatum mahometanum, the predestined world you depict!"

"You're getting pretty hot under the collar, my son. I detect very little piety in the culpable passion that makes you want to create living creatures yourself. "

"Forgive me, Father, I did get carried away, but the questions of

freedom and predestination are ones I care deeply about. " "Where is this chapter on the preaffectation of stations?" "Oh-sorry, Lamoureux, I was thinking about grace. " "Grace?"

"I mean that you can't let passengers decide for themselves where they're going. The central system has to decide for them."

"There's still a problem, though," I said as we left Berger's office.

"Obviously, the Orly track is only t ,200 meters long, and the bolts do come loose, but still, the three vehicles really exist, and they get their bearings from each other by means of optical sensors, and the couplings are calculated. Why doesn't the story end at Orly," I asked, mystified, "since Aramis is feasible? Why do we have to raise the question of its existence fourteen years after the fact, if it was already completed in t 973? What's more, some of our interviewees didn't even mention Orlv.

J

For them, the story started in 1984!"

"That part doesn't bother me too much. The body of a technological object is made up of envelopes, layers, successive strips. A project never stops becoming real. It's normal for people just coming on board to be ignorant or scornful of the past. What bothers me the most, you're right, is the impression that we're losing in terms of reality. Things happened at Orly that no longer look feasible fifteen years later. The old guys like Lamoureux and Cohen were ahead of the technicians like Freque and Parlat, who came later. That's much less common."

IS ARAMIS FEASIBLE?

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]

M. Lamoureux, responding to questions in his office overlooking the Seine: 'At the end of 1987, when Aramis was rolling, it seemed very hard to get three cars to move together for more than a few seconds. There was a pumping effect, and they bumped into each other; the train tended to come apart. Do you remember seeing three cars working at Orly in 1 973? Weren't there only two?"

"No, the three were there. let's see ... Now that you raise the question,

I'm suddenly having doubts, but I still see us with the three Wait a minute,

I'm going to ask [he phones a former Matra colleague] She remembers

the three cars quite well; she says there must even be a videotape.

"How do you account for the fact that things could be done in 1973 that still seemed borderline possibilities last year?"

"Listen, I want to tell you something. I'd rather you didn't write this down, but we were doing better in 1973 than in 1987, fourteen years later, and with primitive electronics." [no. 4]

Berger:

"There's no comparison between Orly and what had to be done afterward, because Orly was not failsafe. If you take away the guarantees, you can make any idea work, as long as you're always on hand to make repairs and start it up again. In fact, when there are ten engineers for three cars, it's not really what you'd call automation! But 'failsafe' means being in regular use, like the Paris metro, day and night, with passengers who break everything, and [ust regular maintenance. To compare a prototype like the one at Orly with a real transportation system is meaningless." [no. 14]

In M. Cohen's office:

"People often say that Orly wasn't representative because Aramis wasn't failsafe. "

"That doesn't mean anything. In any case, it depends on what you mean by failsafe. If it means intrinSically failsafe, then there's no question: Aramis can't work at all as an intrinSically failsafe system; it couldn't fifteen years ago, it can't now, it can't twenty years from now. If it's probabilistic safety you're talking about, then yes, we were failsafe at Orly. We showed that it worked." [no. 45]

IS ARA IS FEA.SIBlE?

In M. Etienne's office at Matra.

"Weren't you already doing all that in I 973-operating the cars in train formation, merging them, pulling one out, and for more than iust a few seconds?"

"At Orly, we did a functional demonstration, but not under failsafe conditions. I myself wasn't aware that it wasn't failsafe in 1974. I wont to be very frank about this; I learned it later. Had the engineers concealed the fact that it wasn't failsafe, or had I just not seen it? I don't know. In any case, I wasn't aware of it. Matra hod already spent 10 million francs on it. Everybody was very proud; we had shown that Aramis was feasible." [no. 21]

M. Parlat:

"Orly didn't prove a thing. But it's true, people thought that Orly proved Arcmis' feasibility once and for all, that there would be no need to go back over that ground." [no. 2]

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.

"Aramis is feasible; Oriy proves it." "Orly doesn't prove a thing.

Aramis isn't feasible." Depending on whom you talk to, Oriy gets lost in the mists of time and takes on the position of a simple idea, as brilliant but as unreal as Bardet's eighty-one-box matrix, or else it provides such thorough proof of Aramis' feasibility that all that's left to do is find a few billion francs in order to carry millions of passengers in the system-assuming a few minor improvements can be made.

No one sees a project through from beginning to end. So the tasks have to be divided up. Let's suppose Bordet says, "The bulk of the work is behind us. I've got a patent on Aramis." Statements like this would make Matra laugh, since both Gayot and Cohen start by abandoning Matra's solutions. They start from scratch, and in six months they do the bulk of their work: they make a life-size model. Let's suppose that they declare in turn, "Aramis exists; the hardest part is behind us. All we need to do now is settle a few minor issues and fine-tune the whole thing." We can hear the guffaws in the RATP's railway division: "Fine-tuning? But Aramis doesn't exist, because it isn't failsafe. What you have there is no more than an idea that is possibly not unworkable." And indeed, if the project continues,

IS ARAMI FEASIBIE8

they have to change the motor, multiply the redundancies, redo all the software, redesign all the chips. But the laughter may keep on coming. Let's imagine that all the aforementioned engineers are congratulating themselves on their success and breaking out the champagne to toast Aramis. Others, at the RATP, will be laughing up their sleeves: "A transportation system isn't just a moving object, no matter how brilliant; it's an infrastructure and an operating system. They're toasting Aramis, but they don't have a single passenger on board! A prototype doesn't count. What counts is a system for production and implementation, an assembly line; and there, more often than not, you have to start allover again." Still others, instead of laughing, will get upset and pound their fists on the table: "A transportation system exists only when it begins to make a profit and when it has lasted without a major breakdown for at least two years."

The frontier between "the bulk of the work" and "fine-tuning the details" remains in flux for a long time; its position is the object of intense negotiation. To simplify its task, every group tends to think that its own role is most important, and that the next group in the chain just needs to concern itself with the technical details, or to apply the principles that the first group has defined. Moreover, this way of looking at things is integrated into project management: by going from what is less real to what is more real, you often divide up projects into so-called phases: the conceptual phase, the feasibility phase, the scale-model phase, the full-system site study phase, the commercial-demonstration phase, the acceptance phase, the phases of qualification, manufacturing, and homologation.

If Aramis fit into this grid, there would at least be a regular progression. Unfortunately, not only are the phases ill-defined, but they may not come in order at all. People who are studying a project may indeed disagree about the sequence. Does Orly prove that Aramis is feasible? Yes, if you believe those who define Aramis as a moving object endowed with original properties. No, if you believe those who define it as a transportation system that can be set up in a specific place that meets certain use constraints. You can even argue over whether more was being done in 1973 than in 1987. So it is possible to imagine that you lose in terms of the project's degree of reality over time. Consensus about the length, importance, and order of phases is not the general case. It is a special case-that of projects that work well. With difficult projects, it is impossible to rely on phases and their neat arrangements, since, depending on the informant and the period, the project may shift from idea to reality or from

IS ARAMIS FEASIBLE?

reality to idea ... This is something Plato didn't anticipate. Depending on events, the same project goes back into the heaven of ideas or takes on more and more down-to-earth reality. Aramis (since it failed, as we know) has become an idea again-a brilliant one---after nearly becoming a means of transportation in the region south of Paris. There is obviously no way to contrast the world of technology, which is real and cold, efficient and profitable, with the world of the imagination, which is unreal and hot, fantastic and free, since the engineers, manufacturers, and operators all squabble over the definitions of degrees of reality, feasibility, efficiency, and profitability of projects.

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]

At RATP headquarters, M. Lamoureux is still responding to questions in his office overlooking the barges:

"/s Aramis feasible? Presumably,' some reply, 'since it worked at Orly. ' 'Not at all,' soy the others, 'since it isn't failsafe.' Forgive my ignorance, but / don't understand the way you're using the term 'failsafe.' Why does it make such a difference?"

"I can explain it to you very simply. We undertook a thoroughgoing analysis of the causes of breakdown in the standard metro system. That had never been done before in a serious way. At the time, that information was completely confidential.

"Well, when we did our tallies, we found that system breakdowns were very rare: 3 percent. I still have the figures. Next comes trouble with the passengers; that accounts for roughly 20 percent. All the rest of the breakdowns are caused by interactions between passengers and the system; that accounts for 77 percent, and of those breakdowns half are due to problems with the doors.

"This is for the part of the Paris metro system that runs on automatic pilot, but there's still a driver who takes over when something goes wrong. Okay, now look at what happens if you go completely automated. Obviously, it's out of the question for an automated system to do less well than the metro. On VAL, with smaller trains, availability has to be increased by d factor of 100 if there are to be no more breakdowns. That's hard, but it's doable.

"If we were to go on to Aramis, which at the time carried four people per car, availability would have to be increased by a factor of 5,000! In addition,

IS ARAMIS FEASIBlE2

there would be a lot of new functions to take care of: the linkups, as well as the motor, which was new.

"And even though microprocessors were becoming more common, they weren't reliable. I said so at the time: we don't know how to do it, we're running up against technological limitations. We could have built in redundancies; but if you do that, the costs get out of hand .

"The rest of the story is a series of steps backward by the decisionmakers, who were hiding behind economic studies. In the development of a system, especially one like Aramis, there's a huge component of speculation. Economic studies have their place, but you shouldn't do too many of them at the beginning. To start with, all you should have to do is stay within some limits.

"In any event, Giraudet went around the table and I said that Aramis wasn't generalizable in the absence of a technological mini-revolution. It wasn't worth doing economic studies, since the thing was technologically unworkable." [no. 4, pp. 9-1 OJ

M. Berger:

"You have to understand intrinsic security. That's the underlying philosophy of the SNCF and the RATP. What it means is that, as soon as there is any sort of problem, the system goes into its most stable configuration. It shuts down. Broadly speaking, if you see the subway trains running, it's because they're authorized not to stop! That's all there is to it: they're always in a status of reprieve.

"As soon as this authorization stops coming through, the trains stop running.

The emergency brake comes on, and everything shuts down. So everything has to be designed from A to Z-everything, the signals, the electric cables, the electronic circuits-with every possible type of breakdown in mind."

"That's why they call it intrinsic: it's built into the materials themselves. For example, the relays are specially designed so they'll never freeze up in a contact situation. If there's a problem, they drop back into the low position; their own weight pulls them down and they disconnect. The power of gravity is one thing you can always count on. That's the basic philosophy.

"Even if you're dealing with electronics, you have to be absolutely sure, not just relatively sure, that all possible breakdowns have been identified, in the hardware and software both. And here's where it's tricky, because we don't know how to check software-ii's too complicated.

"We've been checking switches and electric signals for a hundred years.

There are procedures, committees, an incredibly precise methodology. Even

I S A R Alv'\ I S F E A SIB L E ?

so, every year we still find mistakes. So you can imagine, in softvvare that has thousands of instructions and that is cobbled together as fast as possible by consultants .. [" [no. 14J

M. Cohen, at Matra headquarters in Besanc;:on

"There was no hope for Aramis if you had to bring in the principles of intrinsic security. Not a chance."

"! thought that was the basic philosophy in transportation."

"Not at all. An airplane doesn't have intrinsic security. Just imagine what would happen in an airplane if everything came to a holt whenever there was a minor incident! Well, people take planes, they accept the risk; this is probabilistic security. It was the same with Aramis.

"And let me tell you something: the RATP was ready to take the risk. They were much more open than people have said; they were ready to change their philosophy.

"I can write the equation for you [he takes out a piece of paper and writes}:

Probabilistic security = Aramis is possible; Intrinsic security = Aramis is impossible.

"It's as simple as that. But I've finally concluded that in transportation, the only philosophy that allows a decisionmaker to make a decision is intrinsic security. Not for technological reasons. When you say 'intrinsic,' it means that, if there's an accident, people can say: 'Everyone involved did everything humanly possible to provide a response for all the possible breakdowns they were able to imagine.' This way the decisionmakers are covered. They can't be blamed for anything.

"In probability theory, you say simply: 'If event x happens, and if event y then occurs, there is a risk of z in 1,000 of a fatal occident.' And this is accepted, because the probability is slight. This approach is unacceptable for a decisionmaker in the field of public transportation."* [no. 45, p. 2J

M. Chalvon, managing director of Alsthom at the time of the Aramis project:

"Of course, I had my technical services study Aramis at the beginning. You always hove to check whether your competitors aren't about to get ahead of you. I remember the technical report.

*The small number of deaths per year that can be blamed on public transportation all make headlines. The 12,000 annual fatalities in France that can be blamed on automobiles a transportation system whose security is probabilistic or even random!-don't make headlines. Henee the obsession with security characteristic of gUided transportation systems.

IS ARAMIS fEASIBlE2

"The idea was that it was seductive, but impossible given the constraints that characterize mass transportation. In some other civilization perhaps, but not at the end of this particular century.

"Matra didn't realize at the time what was involved in the world of public transportation. They had their apprenticeship with VAL. At Aisthom, we've been involved in qulded-tronsportotion systems for a long time. There are far more constraints on them than on satellites.

"We're used to factoring in the sort of constraints that are brought to bear on a system by millions of fed-up passengers. Not only do you have to protect yourself against impulsive acts, but the vandalism is unbelievable. You have to be able to defend yourself against it.

"Cars belong to individuals; everyone looks out for them. But Aramis would have been collective property. The first time anything went wrong, people would hove blown the whole thing up." [no. 46]

We are never as numerous as we think; this is precisely what makes technological projects so difficult.

Not only do the actors vary in size, so that they may represent fewer allies than they claim to stand for, but they may also bring into play for more actors than anticipated. If there are fewer of them, the project loses reality, since its reality stems from the set of robust ties that can be established among its actors; if there are too many of them, the project may well be swamped by the erratic intentions of multiple actors who are pursuing their own goals. For a project to materialize, it must at once recruit new allies and at the same time make sure that their recruitment is assured. Unfortunately, discipline isn't the strong point of Parisians, programmers, decisionmakers, or chips. There are breakdowns, there are damages, there are impulsive acts, there are dead bodies; there are trials, decisionmakers on the stand, articles in the newspapers. "We hadn't anticipated this," say the operators. "You should have," replies the angry crowd. "We hadn't taken all these problems into account," say the people behind Aramis. "You have no choice but to take them into account," say the people in charge of security, implementation, siting.

A transportation system is no better than its smallest link. If it is at the mercy of a vandal or a programmer or a parasitic spark, it isn't a transportation system-it's an idea for a transportation system. To the task of

IS ARAMIS FEASIBLE2

generating interest, which linked up a crowd with a project, is now added the task of protection; this consists in rendering harmless the behavior of a different crowd, made up of intruders, bugs, troublemakers who've shown up uninvited. The system has to be made idiot-proof. This applies to relations among human beings-you have to prevent passengers from coming to blows. It also applies to relations among humans and nonhumans-you have to prevent people from getting caught in doors, and from being able to jam the doors. It applies as well to relations among non humans-you have to prevent bugs in the chips from continually setting off the emergency brake. It applies to a completed transportation system that is actually working full scale, and it applies to a project for developing a transportation system that is designed to work full scale. The difference between the two is precisely the taking into account of an infinite number of unanticipated details that have to be mastered or done away with one by one. This is the beginning of a new set of negotiations whose success or failure will make it possible to modify the relative size of the project over time.

Human error is everywhere; so is diabolical wickedness; and imbecility is common. As for software programs, they go right on making mistakes without anyone's being able to identify the bugs that have infested them. Here is the difference between a project that is not very innovative and one that is highly innovative. A project is called innovative if the number of actors that have to be taken into account is not a given from the outset. If that number is known in advance, in contrast, the project can follow quite orderly, hierarchical phases; it can go from office to office, and every office will add the concerns of the actors for which it is responsible. As you proceed along the corridor, the size or degree of reality grows by regular increments. Research projects, on the other hand, do not have such an elegant order: the crowds that were thought to be behind the project disappear without a word; or, conversely, unexpected allies turn up and demand to be taken into account. It's like a reception where the invited guests have failed to show; in their place, a bunch of unruly louts turn up and ruin everything. In this sense, Aramis is unquestionably a research project.

The innovator's work is very complicated. Not only does she have to fight on those two fronts, dealing with supports that are removed and parasites that are added; not only does she have to weave humans and nonhumans together by imposing the politest possible behavior on both; not only does she have to attach nonhumans together; but she also has to

IS ARAMI FEASIBLE?

know who, among the engineers, executives, and manufacturers speaks for the good actors that need to be taken into account. Should the managing director order a market study-which would speak in the name of consumers-when his technical department is declaring that the project is not technologically feasible without a revolution in microprocessors? Whom should he believe? His safety division, which is claiming that you can't make a transportation system without intrinsic security, or his commercial developers, for whom vandalism rules out sophisticated systems? Of course you have to "take into account" all the elements, as people say ndively, but only the not very innovative projects know in advance which accountant to believe and which accounting system to choose. We use the term "innovative" precisely for a project that requires choosing the right accountant and the right accounting method, in order to decide which actors are important and which ones are dangerous. By this measure, yes, Aramis is decidedly an innovative project.

"But we have the same problem," I said, rather discouraged, after reading his commentary in the train that was taking us to Lille to visit the VAL system. "Who arc we supposed to take seriously? Lamoureux places a lot of stress on the failure of the demonstration with Lagardere at the Orly site. The others tell us that that had nothing to do with it. Not until the forty-fifth interview, the one with Cohen, do we hear that the connection between probabilistic security and Aramis is an absolutely crucial link that explains the whole project. Other people are telling us that 'in any event, in the Paris region, you can never introduce radical innovations in public transportation.' 'In any event,' others say, 'it's not a transportation problem; you can never innovate across the board, and Aramis involves innovations across the board, in everything: components, functions, manufacturing, applications. And the other guy, Chalvon, is telling us that you can't do anything about vandalism. It's really kind of discouraging. How can you claim to explain an innovation by taking into account the determining elements if there are as many lists and hierarchies and ways of accounting for these elements as there are interviewees?"

"We are de-sorcerers, my friend, not accusers. We deal in white

IS AR

IS FEASIBlE8

magic, not black. Each of these accusers is pointing a finger and blaming someone or something. Our job is to take all these sorcerers into account. If the project had succeeded, they'd have more to agree about. Look at VAL: everybody is rushing to shore up its success, and everybody agrees about the reasons for it, even if they divide up the credit differently. It's only because the project failed that blame is flying in all directions. No, these discrepancies don't bother me. We aren't going to settle our accounts in their place. What we have to understand is why the fate of the project didn't allow them to come to an agreement even on the same accounting system. Why isn't there any object which they can see eye-to-eye on?"

"Wait a minute, do you mean you're not going to tell us after all who killed Aramis? You're not going to find the guilty party? But that was the deal! You're cheating! Columbo always figures it out; he gets all the suspects together and points his accusing finger at the one who's guilty. He holds up his end of the bargain."

"Fine, but in the first place Columbo is a fictional creation, and in the second place he deals with human corpses and their murderers, whereas our job is to look for dismemberers of assemblages of humans and nonhumans. Nobody has ever done that before. Except in a couple of nineteenth-century masterpieces-which you have to read, by the wav. One is bv Mary Shellev ... "

.I .).. J

"Mary Shelley? Isn't she the one whose imagination ran away with her? The one who succumbed to her own fictional creatures?"

"Yes, she was the daughter of the first great feminist, the wife of the poet, the mother of Frankenstein."

"And the other one?"

"Butler's treatise. In Erewhon they got rid of all the machines because, like all good Darwinians, they were afraid that machines would take over. Erewhon, my friend, is Paris and its intelligentsia. They've wiped out all technologies, large and small; intellectuals never give them a thought. And it works out perfectly: our finest minds, our most exquisite souls really do live in Erewhon."

We arrived at the train station in Lille. All day we had the pleasure

__ IS ARA.MIS FEASIBLE2

of admiring the architecture, the slow, steady glide of driverless trains, the remote guidance from the command post [see Photo 7].

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]

"I'm giving you my own personal version ... " [no. 32]

"I'll try to reconstruct what I thought at the time. "[no. 29]

"It's hard to be objective. Here's what I could see from my window. [no. 20]

"I'm not speaking from Mars; I hope you don't expect anything more from me. This is just my own point of view, that of a minor local representative. [no 44]

"What I have to soy is very subjective. I'll iust tell you everything all jumbled together, and you'll have to sort it out ... " [no. 12]

"With hindsight, that's what I'd say, but the president doesn't see things the same way." [no 42]

"I'm not here to tell you the truth, [ust how we felt about things at the time." [no. 37]

"You know, in a case like this, you [ust have to speak for yourself, since our own higher-ups don't agree. Bill and I are in the same department; we see things more or less the same way. You have to get right down to individual opinions." [no. 30]

About technological ptoiecis, one can only be subjective. Only those projects that turn into objects, institutions, allow for objectivity.

Is the Aramis story already over, or has it not yet begun? The interviewees can't settle this issue. After all, we can step aboard VAL, in lille; we can't step aboard Aramis, in Paris. Hundreds of thousands of lille residents head for VAL every morning: they go to its stations, follow its signs, learn how to pay, wait on the platforms in front of closed doors, sense the train gliding past the glass windows in a white blur; they see doors opening, climb into the train, listen to announcements made by a synthetic voice, and look at the doors that close before they are carried off into dark tunnels. Actually, that's not true; they see nothing, feel nothing,

IS ,\RAMIS FE.ASIBLH

hear nothing. Only tourists are still surprised to see a simple placard in place of a driver and are a little shaken up by the station stops required by the intrinsic security system. Lille residents have come to take VAL so much for granted that they no longer think about it, no longer mention it when they want to go from one place in the region to another. VAL goes without saying. "M. Ferbeck? M. Ficheur?" No, those names mean nothing to them. Yet those are the names of VAL's creators, its developers, its stage managers! "No, really, we don't know a thing about them." More fortunate than Parisians, Lille residents don't even have to recall the existence of humans on strike days, since the automatic pilots aren't unionized. Only on those rare occasions when the system is down do Lille residents remember that "they" exist and that "they" are about to come and fix things.

No one takes Aramis in the thirteenth arrondissement in Paris, or the fourteenth or the fifteenth, or in Nice, or in Montpellier, or even at Orly in the middle of a beet field. Few people think about Aramis-not because it has become so obvious that it no longer counts, but because it has become so inconspicuous that it no longer counts. In 1988 Aramis exists as a thorn in the side of the RATP, Matra, the Transportation Ministry, and the Budget Office, which is still wondering how the adventure ended up costing nearly half a billion francs. Aramis becomes a textbook case for the Ecole des Mines. It tugs painfully at the memory of some thirty engineers who have given it the best years of their lives. Dispersed among thousands of gestures, myriad reflexes, and immense know-how on the part of Matra and RATP engineers, it survives, but in a state that leaves it unrecognizable. People say, "Let's take the Aramis case." They don't say, "Let's take Aramis to the boulevard Victor."

VAL, for the people of Lille, marks one extreme of reality: it has become invisible by virtue of its existence. Aramis, for Parisians, marks the other extreme: it has become invisible by virtue of its nonexistence. The VAL project, full of sound and fury, arguments and battles, has become the VAL object, the institution, a means of transportation, so reliable, silent, and automatic that Lille residents are unaware of it. The Aramis project, full of sound and fury, arguments and battles, has remained a project, and becomes more and more so; soon it will be nothing more than a painful memory in the history of guided transportation.

The VAL object gathers to itself so many elements that it ends up existing independently of our opinion of it. Of course, the descriptions by the Lille residents, by Notebart (who is its father), by the supervisors in the

IS ARAMIS H:ASIBlE2

control room, by Ferbeck (who is also its father), by lnqordere (who is also its father), by the RATP (which claims to be its father), by Aisthom (which also claims to be its father)-all these descriptions are going to vary, and especially on the question of paternity! There are as many points of view as there are heads. But these points of view are all focused on a common object, as if, while walking around a statue, each person were offering a different description that was nevertheless compatible with the others. Except for the point of view, the description is the same. VAL, because it exists, unifies points of view. It transforms people's opinions of it into "simple" points of view about an object that remains independent of them. With Aramis there is nothing of the sort. Since it does not exist, it cannot unify points of view. There are as many possible Aramises as there are minds and points of view. Matra's point of view and the RATP's and the ministry's are irreconcilable; within the RATP, within Matra, within the ministry, individual opinions are equally irreconcilable; the same Matra engineer, from one interview to another, or the same ministry official, between the beginning of an interview and the end, will also have irreconcilable viewpoints. They really don't know. Their opinions can't agree, since for want of agreement among them the object has failed to exist independently of them.

Schooled by my professors in the culture of objectivity (Norbert called my school the College of Unreason, in an allusion to Butler's book), I had trouble getting used to the idea that the Aramis actors were all telling us stories. At Orly, however, they had tried to tell a story that held together. To do so, they had gone ahead and developed bits and pieces in their workshop. They had gone to hangars, to catalogues, to manufacturers looking for electric motors, auto bodies, laser and ultrasound receptors, chips, concrete-and-steel sandwiches, feeder rails, electric circuits, emergency brakes, doors, and-to make it all work-activators with little electric motors. They really did try to bind all the different elements together. But Aramis didn't hold up. It turned back into a heap of disconnected scrap metal.

I had my own private interpretation, but I no longer dared express it to Norbert. Aramis didn't hold up because it was untenable. Period. From the very beginning, it was a fiction, a utopia, a two-headed calf.

IS ARAlVlIS FEASIBLE2

Instead of that, my professor insisted-and with such arrogance!-that one had to live with variable degrees of objectivity! And wasn't it Unreason pure and simple that he was teaching me in his school? I had a name for his variable-geometry reality: I called it playing the sociological accordion!

No one can study a technological project without maintaining the symmetry of explanations.

If we say that a successful project existed from the beginning because it was well conceived and that a failed project went aground because it was badly conceived, we are saying nothing. We are only repeating the words "success" and "failure," while placing the cause of both at the beginning of the project, at its conception. We might just as well say that Nobel Prize winners are born geniuses. This tautology is feasible only at the end of the road, when we've settled down by the fire, after history has distinguished successes from failures. A comfortable position-but only in appearance, for as time passes the positions may be reversed: Aramis may become, in Chicago is going to become, the transportation system of the twenty-first century, and an obsolete VAL may be wiped out by the economic downturn in the Lille region. What does the pipe smoker say in such a case? Don't think for a minute that he's deflated: "Aramis was well thought out, you could see that right away. All you had to do was look at VAL to see that it was old hat." The incorrigible know-it-alls! They're always right; they always have reason on their side. But their reason is the most cowardly and servile of all: it's the one that flatters the victors of the day. De Gaulle after Petain; Queuille after de Gaulle; de Gaulle after Coty. And it's the fine word "reason" that they distort for bootlicking purposes. Vae victis, yes, and tough luck for the vanquished!

No, honor and good luck to the vanquished. Failure and success have to be treated symmetrically. They may gain or lose in degrees of reality; one may become a utopian project and the other an object. This does not modify their conception, or their birth, or day 3, or day n. All projects are stillborn at the outset. Existence has to be added to them continuously, so they can take on body, can impose their growing coherence on those who argue about them or oppose them. No project is born profitable, effective, or brilliant, any more than the Amazon at its source

IS ARAMIS FEASIBlE2

has the massive dimensions it takes on at its mouth. Without modifying the explanatory principles, one has to follow projects lovingly through their entire duration, from the time they're just crazy little ideas in the heads of engineers to the time they become automatic trains that people take automatically, without thinking about them. Conversely, one has to stick with them while the automatic trains (on paper) that passengers (on paper) take as a matter of course turn back into wild ideas that float around, that have floated, in the heads of engineers. Yes, from the extreme of objectivity to the extreme of subjectivity and vice versa, we have to be capable of traveling without fear and without blame.

Let's not make a vertical separation between what exists and what does not exist. If we reestablish symmetry, then there is again transverse continuity between what exists and what does not exist, between VAL and Aramis. The project that does not exist is both easier and harder to explain than the one that does. To study VAL, classical relativism suffices-everyone has his or her own point of view on the thing; it's a question of perspective, of interpretation. To study Aramis, we also have to explain how certain points of view, certain perspectives, certain interpretations, have not had the means to impose themselves so as to become objects on which others have a simple point of view. So we have to pass from relativism to relationism. The war of interpretations is over for VAL; it no longer shapes the object; VAL's paternity, profitability, scope, maintenance, and appearance are no longer at issue. The war of interpretations continues for Aramis; there are only perspectives, but these are not brought to bear on anything stable, since no perspective has been able to stabilize the state of things to its own profit. Aramis is thus easier to follow, since the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity is not made-no "real" Aramis is the sum of the virtual Aramises-but it is also harder to follow, precisely since it is never possible to give things, as we say, their due. Everyone, even today, still tells us stories about it.

[DOCUMENT: TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION BY MATRA OF THE ARAMIS PROTOTYPE AT ORlY, JUNE 1973; EMPHASIS ADDED)

Report on the end of phase o.

The Orly Aramis prototype: technical description.

The following pages are the outcome of a synthesis of the

IS ARAMIS fEASIBL[?

reports and numerous explanations provided by Matra engineers during the Orly trials.

They should not be read as the description of a transportation system, but rather as that of a prototype of a transportation system-that is, of a coherent but essentially changeable set of solutions, often quite original ones, to the problems raised.

This "technical description" thus emphasizes the project's original features and neglects other more classical sets which have nevertheless been used and even sought after in the effort to avoid a "race toward gadgetry."

To study a technological project, one must constantly move from signs to things, and vice versa.

Aramis was an exciting discourse. It became a site at Orly. And now it has become discourse again: text, reports, explanations. What would Aramis' story be if it held together on its own? It would be a story that would work; it would carry away, would transport, without breakdown, those who gave themselves over to it. The door closes, the passenger punches in her destination, and the vehicle, without a hitch, without stopping at intervening stations, at 50 kilometers an hour, watched over from on high, delivers the traveler to her destination and opens the door. A whole program! But in 1973 Aramis is a narrative program, a story that is told to the decision makers, to stockholders, to local officials, to future possengers to "bring them on board," but it is also a work program, a flow chart, and a distribution of tasks, so that Matra can be an enterprise that works well. These programs are translated in turn by a computer program in 18-bit series: "111, give the number of the car; 0111, check the message; 01, open the door; 10, release the emergency brake; 00, display the number of the target station; 11, parity." Finally, all these mingled programs, all these trials, all these attempts produce a real story, written down: a ponderous text, the report on the end of phase o. With Bardet, we were still at the point of daydreaming on paper, scribbling calculations on the back of on envelope; then we moved on to more serious writing, to patents. Next came protocols, signed agreements. Then we went on to hardware, to Orly, to grease and sparks and cement mixers and printed circuits. Now we've

IS ARMv'IS FEASIBLE?

come back to print. The whole passage through hardware helps make the written history a little more credible. Bardet's affair was a tenuous dream: we weren't going along with it, it didn't work, they're pulling our leg. lamoureux's story and Cohen's and Gayot's is a story that works: people believe in it, Orly is behind it-yes, unquestionably it all holds together.

The account of a fiction is generally easy to follow; you never depart from its textual form and subject matter. Wherever you look in the narrative of The Three Musketeers, Porthos, Athos, and Aramis always remain figments of the text itself. The account of a fabrication is somewhat more difficult, since anyone of the figures may move from text to object or object to text while passing through every imaginable ontological stage. In order to follow a technological project, we have to follow simultaneously both the narrative program and the degree of "realization" of each of the actions. For example, the rendezvous of Aramis' platoons is an action programmed at the time of Bardet's earliest ideas, but its degree of realization varies according to whether we go from the earliest discussions with Petit to the patents, to Matra's plans, to the Orly site, to the imprinting of the chips, to the reports on the experiments, or to the report on the end of Phase o. Depending on the point at which we look into the action, the "meeting of the branches," we will have ideas, drawings, lines in a program, trains running before our eyes, statistics, seductive stories, memories of trains running before the eyes of our interlocutors, photos, plans again, chips again. For the engineer substitutes for the signs he writes the things that he has mobilized; he attaches them to each other so they'll hold up; then he withdraws a little, delegating to another self, in the form of a chip, a sensor, or an automatic device, the task of watching over the connection. And this delegating allows him to withdraw even further-as if there were an object. If only we always went from signs to things! But we also go in the other direction; and we soon find ourselves not in a subway train but in a conference room, once again among signs speaking to humans-as if there were subjects!

Alas, VAL speaks well for itself, holds up all by itself Why can't I?

Oh, why did you never come to an understanding that would have endowed me with the same depth, the same weight, the same breadth as VAL? Why did you argue about me instead of agreeing on a unique object? Why was 1 words, and never the same ones, on your lips? Why

IS ARM,,\IS FEASIBLE?

can't I put identical words into your mouths? Proceed in a train! Move ahead! Split up! Behave! Go! Stop! Merge! Haven't I carried out all these orders? What more do you want? Do you want me to become embodied, to take on flesh? Action? That I am. Program? That I am. Verb I am as well. Why, oh why have you abandoned me, people? What do I have to do with prosopopoeia? Will you ever console me for remaining a phantom destined for a work of fiction when I wanted to be-when you wanted me to be-the sweet reality of twenty-firstcentury urban transportation? Why didn't you give me my part, the object's part? Why did Lamoureux, Gayot, and Cohen treat me as cruelly, as ungratefully, as Victor Frankenstein?

"It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, f collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

"How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!-Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips ... He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped, and rushed down stairs. I took refuge in the courtyard belonging to the house which I inhabited; where I remained during the rest of the night, walking up and down in the greatest agitation, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life." [From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus 1

"Do you comprehend the crime, the unpardonable crime?" Norbert asked me indignantly. "Victor abandons his own creature, horrified by what hc has done. Popular opinion has got it right, because it has rightly given his name to the monster, who didn't have one in the novel. Frankenstein, all stitched together, full of hubris and remorse, hideous to behold. The monster is none other than Victor himself."

IS ARA!0,IS FEASIBlE8

SHI LLY-SHALLYI NG

IN THE SEVENTIES

"We're making progress, my friend-we're crossing suspects ofT our list one after another. The cause of death can't be located in the final months; that much we've known all along. According to all the witnesses, it was inscribed in the nature of things. We know it can't be found in the initial idea, which everybody was excited about. We also know that it can't be found in the Orly phase, which went pretty well, all things considered, since it didn't commit the project to go in one particular direction or another. So let's move on to the other suspect phases."

"There's at least one point on which everybody agrees," I said, consulting the files. "After Orly, there was a period of shilly-shallying "stop and go," they called it in Frenglish. You can see it in the chart of annual expenditures. Here: this goes from 1972 to 1987. I've marked where we are in black" [see Figure 1 in Chapter I].

"You should have added the cost of our postmortem study in 1988."

"It's such a trivial amount, in comparison; it'd be invisible-a thin line at best."

"Yes, but if we'd done it five years earlier, they would have saved a small fortune!"

We have to overlook my boss's weakness for thinking he's useful and efficient, even though he himself of course criticizes other people's notions of usefulness and efficiency . . .

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS)

At Matra headquarters M. Etienne is speaking.

"Aramis never had an engine. That was the real problem, the congenital defect, all those years"

'An engine?"

"I mean a local engine, a driving force: a politician, an elected oliiciol, somebody with pull who would have made it his cause, who would have put his shoulder to the grindstone, somebody devoted enough, stubborn enough . Somebody like Notebart, who supported VAL in lille.

"Every public transportation system is so expensive that it needs a local political engine, a local base, to make it payoff over the years.

"But Aromis never had that. The godforsaken mess wondered from one end of France to the other and ended up in PariS, where, as it happens, there's nobody in charge of urban transportation. In Paris, it's the worst of solutions, and furthermore it had to fall under the thumb of the RATP, which is an enormous machine."

A technological project is neither realistic nor unrealistic; it takes on reality, or loses it, by degrees.

After the Orly phase, called Phase 0, Aramis is merely "realizable"; it is not yet "reel." You can't use the word "real" for a nonfailsafe 1.S-kilometer test track that transports engineers from one beet field to another. For this "engineers' dream" to continue to be realized, other elements have to be added. So can we say that nothing is really real? No. But anything can become more real or less real, depending on the continuous chains of translation. It's essential to continue to generate interest, to seduce, to translate interests. You can't ever stop becoming more real. After the Orly phase, nothing is over, nothing is settled. It's still possible to get along without Aramis. The whole world is still getting along without Aramis.

The translation must be continued. What has to be done now is to recruit a "local engine" for this automated transportation system. And this engine in turn will attract local users, who will have to give up their cars and their buses in favor of Aramis. In order to oblige them, seduce them, compel them, Aramis will have to go exactly where they are headed; it will

SHILLY·SHALLYiNG IN TH:: SEVENTIES ___

have to help them get there faster and more comfortably. Each one of us, by taking Aramis to reach our regular destinations, will contribute a bit of reality to this transportation system.

Obviously, Aramis won't find itself "up and running," ready to translate my crosstown itineraries, unless the local officials, after many others, become excited about its prototype and decide that Aramis translates their deepest desires. The task of making Aramis interesting never ends. For technology, there's no such thing as inertia. Here's proof: even an ordinary user can make Aramis less real by refusing to get into one of its cars; or, if she's a local official, by refusing to get excited about it; or, if he's a mechanic or a driver, by refusing to work for it. No matter how old and powerful, no matter how irreversible and indispensable, thus no matter how real a transportation system may be, it can always be made a little less real. Today, for example, the Paris metro is on strike for the third week in a row. Millions of Parisians are learning to get along without it, by taking their cars or walking. A few hundred shop technicians have stopped doing their regular maintenance work on the system, and a few dozen engineers who've benefited from the Aramis experiment are plotting to make the next metro completely automatic, entirely free of drivers and strikers, thanks to the Meteor project. You see? These enormous hundred-year-old technological monsters are no more real than the four-year-old Aramis is unreal: they all need allies, friends, long chains of translators. There's no inertia, no irreversibility; there's no autonomy to keep them alive. Behind these three words from the philosophy of technologies, words inspired by sheer cowardice, there is the ongoing work of coupling and uncoupling engines and cars, the work of local officials and engineers, strikers and customers.

So is there never any respite? Can't the work of creating interest ever be suspended? Can't things be allowed just to go along on their own? Isn't there a day of rest, after all, for innovators? No: for technologies, every day is a working day. You can forget the work of the others, but you can't manage if there's no one left working to maintain the technologies that are up and running. People who talk about autonomy, irreversibility, and inertia in technology are criminals-never mind the purity of their motives. May the ashes of Chernobyl, the dust of the Challenger, the rust of the Lorraine steel mills fallon their heads and those of their children!

SHlllYSHALlYING IN THE SEVENTIES

[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]

M, Potlot, pioiect head, speaking at RATP headquarters,

"Before anything else, Aramis is a series of stop-and-go movements, That fact has played a major role, If you look at the history of the project, you see continual starting up and shutting down, Matra broke up its teams several times, How can you hope to get any continuity under these conditions?" [no, 2]

M, Etienne, director of Matra, responding to questions:

"Did this shilly-shallying make things hard for you?"

"No, we'd come to terms with the slow pace; the internal reason, too, which can now be revealed, was that we were supposed to keep the costs down, As early as 75 or 76, VAL had priority for us, Notebart had his shoulder to the wheel; we didn't have the same sort of pressure with Aramis-except from Fiterman, and that was later and didn't last very long,

"We didn't give up on Aramis, but Notebart kept after us, We handled the slowdowns without too much trouble, but it's true that in 1977 we almost entirely dismantled the Aramis team," [no, 21]

Messrs, Brehier and Morey, speaking at the RATP bureau of economic studies:

"At Lille there was a real contracting authority, Here SACEM has one as well, But Aramis never had one, For SAC EM, we have a need and we're figuring out how to meet it; for Aramis, we had an object and were trying to see where to put it, just as we've done with TRACS, But Aramis finally got finished,"

"Finished off, you might soy!" [laughter]

"There was a lot of fiddling around, a series of stops and starts that complicated things,

"At first, we thought we'd use the Bus Division, so it wouldn't get too heavy, like the metro (Aramis was supposed to be light, like automobiles), Then they said no, it was going to be in the Subway Division, since it was really tough work from the technological standpoint.

"The operating agency within the RATP was consulted only marginally, The operators didn't get involved in the project until the end, and in my opinion it was too late,

"The feedback loops between utilization constraints and technological constraints were relatively slow for the first ten years, At the same time, with a deal

S H ILL Y - S HAL L YIN GIN HI ESE V E N TIE S

as innovative as this one, you can't let yourself be derailed by people who aren't used to it and who panic." [no. 30J

The time frame for innovations depends on the geometry of the actors, not on the calendar.

The history of Aramis spreads out over eighteen years. Is that a long time, or a short one? Is it too long, or not long enough? That depends. On what? On the work of alliance and translation. Eighteen years is awfully short for a radical innovation that has to modify the behavior of the RATP, Matra, chips, passengers, local officials, variable-reluctance motors-what an appropriate name! Eighteen years is awfully long if the project is dropped every three or four years, if Matra periodically loses interest, if the RATP only believes in it sporadically, if officials don't get excited about it, if microprocessors get involved only at arm's length, if the variable-reluctance motor is reluctant to push the cars. Time really drags. What happens is that actors get involved and back out, blend together or set themselves apart, take or lose interest.

Is VAL's time the same as Aramis'? No, even though 1975, 1976, 1977, 1979, and 1980 are critical years for both. It's no good taking out a chronometer or a diary so you can measure the passage of time and blame the first project for going too quickly and the second one for going too slowly. The time of the first depends on local sites, on Notebart's role as engine, on Ferbeck, and on Matra, just as the time of the second depends on the absence of sites, on hesitation over components, on the motor's fits and starts. All you have to do is reconstruct the chain of permissions and refusals, alliances and losses, to understand that a project may not budge for a hundred years or that it may transform itself completely in four minutes flat. The obsession with calendar time makes historians sprinkle technologies with agricultural metaphors referring to maturation, slowness, obsolescence or germination, or else mechanical metaphors having to do with acceleration and braking. In fact, time does not count. Time is what is counted. It is not an explanatory variable; it is a dependent variable that needs to be explained. It doesn't offer a framework for explanation, since it is an effect that has to be accounted for among many other, more interesting ones. Grab calendar time and you'll find yourself

HALlYING IN THE SEVENTIES