All the student and the professor know is that Aramis isn’t here anymore and nobody can agree on why.
This is due in part to the fact that through their numerous interviews, site visits, and archival research they still can’t seem to find a definitive answer to “what killed Aramis?” Was it faulty technology? Was it budget cuts? Was it the shifting priorities of French conglomerates? Was it petty municipal politics? Was it the public transit union? The answer, which at first seemed so simple (Aramis was an idea straight out of science fiction! It could never have worked!) gets murky. Through the course of the book the student oscillates between thinking of Norbert as a genius or an old crank. That “ruthless critique of all that exists” doesn’t actually tell us how the world works when all one would ostensibly do is say how tarnished everything is. Latour would say that these people are too hard on science and scientists. Whenever I read Latour this is who I see him as being interested in really convincing, even though I could be the other writer he’s also arguing against: the social scientist whose critique that “everything is politics” goes too far to the other side. The scientist that hardly questions the conditions of their own knowledge production The scientist who doesn’t think too much about philosophy or epistemology, about politics and such. The student is the embodiment of the skeptical scientist or engineer, the reader that Latour most frequently seems to be in dialogue with. The professor is teaching the student about the complexities of science and engineering - telling him how it is never so easy as simply asking a question and accepting the first answer one sees. The professor is really the embodiment of Latour himself, even though he is often derided by the student in his own confidential notes (nobody would ever say that Latour has no sense of humour about himself). At the same time professor (named Norbert) constantly harasses the student in the tone of ‘You’re the engineer, after all! You tell me!’ The student is exasperated that the sociologist demands that in their research he must read Hegel and Deleuze. The relationship is one of paternalistic education. The professor has been tasked with finding out what “killed” Aramis, the strangely beautiful, but failed, personal rapid-transit system (think, little personal rail cars that would take you anywhere you wanted to go but were still public transit) in the south of Paris. It is between a young student of engineering, on field placement with an old sociology professor. There is an important dialectic that Bruno Latour sets up in his book, Aramis, or The Love of Technology. On Darius Kazemi’s Jagged Alliance 2 a Book About Jagged Alliance 2
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