A program in the form of a tribute to Bruno Latour, who passed away on October 9, and who devoted a book to the sociology of failure, Aramis or the Love of Technology (1992). Guillaume Erner interviews Jérôme Denis, Professor at the Centre de sociologie de l’innovation (I3 CNRS – Mines Paris-PSL) about this rather little-known book.
Aramis is an automatic mini-metro project launched by the RATP (Paris Public Transport System) in 1970, which was supposed to revolutionize the world of transportation. Jérôme Denis looks back on this innovation: “It was a sort of hybrid between a personal mode and a collective mode without a driver (…). It was a fairly revolutionary mode of transportation.” However, after years of research, this project never saw the light of day. In 1987, the RATP commissioned sociologist Bruno Latour to conduct an audit of Aramis, in order to analyze the reasons for the failure: “This book reads like an investigative novel, almost like a detective story, which asks what killed Aramis, from a certain point of view,” explains Jérôme Denis.
Broadcast on France Culture Sunday, November 27, 2022 (in French, duration 13 mn).