Category AIRCRAFT STORIES

The Politics of Decisions 5. Effacing Difference

Earlier I made an assumption about the overlaps between difference 156 Decisions narratives or performances. I assumed that the various ‘‘options’’ per-

Decisions

Ex. 7.1

Ex. 7.2

Ex. 7.3

Ex. 7.4

Ex. 7.5

Cancel outright

3

3

3

3

Cancel and order F111A

Cancel and take option on F111A

Cancel and order F111A and Phantom

3

3

3

3

3

Cancel and order a British aircraft

3

3

Make no decision until strategic review Continue with TSR2

3

3

3

3

formed in the early exhibits may be mapped onto one another, that they are indeed sufficiently similar that their differences may be ig­nored. But now I want to ask whether this is right. And then I want to pose a much more interesting question that follows from this: If we ignore or, alternatively, attend to the differences between the narra­tives, then what exactly are we doing? This matter takes us to a theme that has recurred in a number of guises: to the politics of difference and their relationship to similarity.21

Table 7.1 performs a similarity by displaying the various options performed by the cabinet in the period March to April 1965 — exhibits 7.1 to 7.5. I shall inquire into the basis of the similarity performed by the table shortly, into what is being done or effaced, in making this list. But first I want to look at the differences that it performs—differ – ences that I earlier more or less elided.

Perhaps there are two ways of treating the divergence between that earlier listing and this table. One is as a question of method. We might argue that the shorter listing was flawed because it ran together im­portant differences between options. Or, as against this, we might ar­gue that the table is unnecessarily fussy. For instance we might insist that some of the distinctions that it draws rest on an unduly literal reading of the various exhibits. Thus we might say that Crossman’s description (exhibit 7.1) of Healey’s position on the F111A is really consistent with that of taking an option on the F111A—and if this is the case then we can collapse these two options together.

The fact is that there is no right answer: any possibility is defeasible in principle.22 Nevertheless, the disagreement maybe understood in two broad ways. On the one hand, we may imagine trying to create a better narrative, one that more closely accords with the events as Decisions 157

these actually took place. In this case we treat it, so to speak, as an issue of method or epistemology, which is what I have been doing in the preceding paragraph. On the other, we may ask what would hap­pen if we abandoned the idea that the exhibits describe a single set of options and instead stick with the idea that they are performing different distributions.

The first approach distinguishes between realities and representa­tions, so it treats the various exhibits, in the way I described earlier, as perspectives: perspectives on a particular event or process, the cabi­net meeting that examined the options, or the options themselves, distributions as they actually were. Historians work in this way daily, and so do detectives, journalists, sociologists, and students of techno­science. We all do so, for different perspectives are to be expected. But why would there be different perspectives? A number of responses suggest themselves—and are commonly deployed:

1. People may forget what happened—for instance, that it was an option on the F111A that was being sought by the government rather than an outright purchase.

2. They may perform differences as unimportant or irrelevant— again the difference between option and purchase. This would fit with a theory of social interests, one which says that knowledge is shaped by social concerns. Looked at in this way some mat­ters, some differences, are simply uninteresting from a given stand­point.

3. They may not know fully what was going, being located, for in­stance, in the public domain rather than in the domain of confiden­tiality. Perhaps Healey’s biographers are in this position.

4. They may deliberately obscure the facts. Exhibit 7.5, the press release, certainly does not say everything that it might have said about the background for cancellation. (Such an explanation would again be consistent with an account in terms of social interests.)

5. And finally, circumstances change so what appears to be contra­diction may simply represent change. Indeed the difference be­tween exhibit 7.9 on the one hand and exhibits 7.1 and 7.2 on the other may be understood in this way (exhibit 7.9 dates from Janu­ary 17,1965 and the others from April 1).

These moves explain difference by assuming that behind difference there is in fact a unity—for instance, in the form of a single cabi­net meeting, a single set of options, a single distribution. They as­sume and perform the perspectivalism discussed earlier; that is, they assume that more or less adequate perspectives can be obtained on events and objects that are out there and independent of their descrip­tions. We are thus in the realm of epistemology and of method. We are in the business of assessing which description or combination of de­scriptions is most satisfactory and is most likely to accord with what really went on.

All of this is standard in the social sciences, not to mention life. But now we might note this: these perspectival, methodological, or epistemological moves would work equally well precisely to conceal lack of unity, to conceal the possibility that there is difference (as one might say) all the way down—and to efface the prospect that there is nothing out there that is independent of the methods through which it is described. Which, to be sure, makes the move toward ontology and performativity developed in chapter 2—while explaining why it is that matters appear to have to do with epistemology, perspective, and method.

In this way of thinking the world, the worlds, are being made in interference between performances and narratives. They are being made, in part, in coordinations or resonances between performances and narratives. And this is what we have witnessed here—for simi­lar distributions make themselves through the various exhibits that I have discussed. Listing, generating discretion, distinguishing be­tween reality and fantasy, effacing that which is turned into ‘‘detail,’’ and then effacing the fact that there is effacing—all of these are per­formed in the more specific narratives and allocations of the cancel­lation decision. And the differences between these narratives, real though they are, tend to distract attention from their commonali­ties: from their tendency to enact similar ontological work—that of making a discretionary center.

But there is something more to be said. The hypothesis would be that places of discretion, decision-making centers, exist because, in the kind of oscillatory motion I have explored in earlier chapters, they are able to enact a distribution between the performance of narra-

tive coherence and simplicity on the one hand and noncoherence and multiplicity on the other. This argument comes in two parts. First, such centers (appear to) make firm decisions because they (appear to) draw things together in a coherent manner—and indeed they do so, because that is what any particular performance enacts. Richard Crossman is clear enough about the options and so too is Harold Wil­son, which suggests that firm decisions are indeed being made. It is just that their lists do not coincide. But this is the second point— they are able to make firm decisions at all because they are, indeed, per­forming many different decisions. All at the same time, and in paral­lel, decisions that are then coordinated and performed as if they were the same, as if they were a singularity.23

I am being cautious. I am not saying that what is being coordi­nated—all these different decisions or lists of options—is incoherent. To say so would be to make a move within the distributions of cen­tered decision making. Rather I am saying that it is noncoherent, that it is complex, and that part of the politics of centered decision making rests on this by now familiar double trick of managing the simulta­neous performance of singularity and multiplicity, of, so to speak, being singular while performing multiplicity, or (it works equally well the other way round) of being multiple while performing singu­larity. So I am suggesting that here there is a kind of double play, a double looseness, another form of heterogeneity, another version of absence/presence, the simultaneous performance of solidity and flu­idity.24 At any rate, the possibility of ‘‘decision making’’ and, indeed, of High Politics rests in an interference, an overlap, where the perfor­mance of similarity depends on difference, and the performance of difference depends on the enactment of similarity.

Such, then, is one strategy of coordination or (it amounts to the same thing) one mode of interference. An interference that makes a fractional object, a decision, that is more than one but less than many.

End Words

In this chapter I have described some of the politics of decision mak­ing, and in particular of High Political decision making. In doing so I have set ‘‘politics’’ with a small p against ‘‘Politics’’ with a capital P. I have argued that big important decision making may be understood 160 Decisions as a somewhat overlapping set of strategically and asymmetrically

ordered performances that enacts a distribution about what is to be acted as political and what is not. It thus legislates most of what (after Michel Foucault) we think of as the textures or the microphysics of the political out ofPolitics. And it also effaces the fact that it is doing so, thereby rendering other possible versions of politics, other kinds of relations, fantastic, unpolitical, irrelevant, unimportant, or inco­herent and hence, unperformable; they are not in the right place at the right time because they do not perform themselves within the great cockpits of debate and contest, those special places of disagreement made within organizations of all kinds, including Politics.

Can we escape the asymmetries performed by the bias to the cen­ter? Let’s admit that this is difficult, for these are real effects, these asymmetries. They are real effects that perform themselves in many places and in many different and interfering modalities. They do so in words, but also in concrete, steel, titanium, in the actions of police­men and students of economics, sociology, politics, and techno­science. They do so in a range of different genres. So they are real enough, and they cannot be wished away. They have, instead, to be performed away. So I repeat the question. Can we escape the asym­metries of the distributions performed by the bias to the center? Might we perform them away? For if we were to do so, we would discover other political worlds to be thought and made, thought and lived.

I believe that the answer is yes, but with difficulty. In the places where noncoherence butts up against coherence, in those places where it can be turned against coherence, slowly the tools are being made, the tools that begin to erode the clean and simple asymmetries of the distribution to the center and detect and decode the erasures that generate centering. These tools will restore difference, multi­plicity, and—most important and most difficult—the oscillations of fractionality. We can tell stories of precursors, in which case I would choose to tell the story of Michel Foucault who discovered or created the contemporary episteme. But we can also tell stories that are closer to home, for in technoscience studies we too are making forms of dis­tribution that begin to escape the methods of centering, alternative ways of knowing that are also alternative forms of politics. And these politics or orderings come, as one might expect, in the form of nar­ratives that only partly overlap, as distributions that (per)form only partial connections.

These forms of politics, these forms of ordering? They acknowledge rather than repress the noncoherence of multiplicity and difference — as in the work of Annemarie Mol. They perform monstrous and par­tially connected beings into new kinds of realities—as in the cyborgs and coyotes of Donna Haraway, the fractional and holographic per­sons of Marilyn Strathern, or the quasi-objects, neither human nor nonhuman, of Bruno Latour. They play in the places between fantasy and reality by translating the epistemic imaginaries of the Australian aborigines—as in the work Helen Verran. They exist in decentered indigenous knowledge traditions—as explored by David Turnbull. They oscillate through ambivalences and cohesions in the health initiatives explored by Vicky Singleton, Anni Dugdale, and Ingunn Moser. Or they dance with great effort—as in the body ontologies de­cried by Charis Cussins.25

So there are spaces, diverse places for performing distributed and interconnected relations. Relations that do not collude with the cen­ters made by or for decision making in or outside High Politics. Alter­native politics that put aside the tired questions of epistemology and begin to imagine worlds where knowing and being recognize the com­plexities of the ways in which they overlap and interfere, celebrate their performativity, and take responsibility for the fact that they are also ontological.

You set about opposing the rhizome to trees. And trees are not a metaphor at all, but an image of thought, a functioning, a whole apparatus that is planted in thought in order to make it go in a straight line and produce the famous correct ideas. There are all sorts of characteristics in the tree: there is a point of origin, seed, or centre; it is a binary machine or principle of dichotomy, with its perpetually divided and reproducing branchings, its points of arbo – rescence; it is an axis of rotation which organizes things in a circle, and the circles round the centre; it is a structure, a system of points and positions which fix all of the possible [sic] within a grid, a hierarchical system or trans­mission of orders with a central instance and recapitulative memory; it has a future and a past, roots and a peak, a whole history, an evolution, a de­velopment; it can be cut up by cuts which are said to be significant in so far as they follow its arborescences, its branchings, its concentricities, its mo­ments of development. Now, there is no doubt that trees are planted in our heads: the tree of life, the tree of knowledge, etc. The whole world demands roots. Poweris always arborescent. — Claire Parnetin Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues

Подпись:Подпись: ARBORESCENCESThe narratives and enactments of decision making perform, and at the same time presuppose, conditions of possibility. They distinguish between—and demand the distinction between—reality and fantasy. They efface what, after Foucault, we have come to think of as the “microphysics” of power, while simultaneously presupposing its operation. They enact and presuppose that there are special and privi­leged Political places. They distribute between what is henceforth to be imagined as important and what is relegated to the supporting role of mere detail. And they presuppose—and indeed require—the sin­gularity of decision making while effacing what they equally require for singularity, namely its simultaneous multiplicity.

Behind this, then, there are two related suggestions. The first is a version of the argument I have made throughout and concerns the co­herence of the oscillation between singularity and multiplicity and

the interferences that it entails. This, then, is the trick of modern/ postmodern alternation and slippage. But the second has to do with what one might think of as the “collusive” character of the interfer­ences between multiplicities: how they efface the ontological work that they perform, and how they conceal the way in which they re­enact the conditions of singular possibility. “Collusion” is a strong word, and I need to be clear that I am not accusing those who tell stories of bad faith. Instead I am interested in the ways narrative fram­ings enact and reenact themselves—and this is the issue that I attend to, in particular, in this chapter. I argue that (apparently) singular nar­ratives collude to produce a (seemingly) singular world with certain attributes such as chronology and scale, a world populated by (osten­sibly) singular sets of objects, and that these conditions of possibility are made rather than given in the order of things. As a part of this ar­gument, I explore the performative character of both academic and nonacademic storytelling more systematically and use the distinction between arborescences (which are grand narratives), and rhizomes (which look more like a tissue of little narratives). First, then, a grand narrative.1

A Grand Narrative

There’s a section of the RAF called the Operational Requirements Branch. We’ve come across it from time to time along the way.

It isn’t very large. Or at any rate, in 1954, it wasn’t very large. The job of the officers seconded to the Operational Requirements Branch was to think long term, to think about the needs of the RAF ten or more years ahead, and to try to imagine the form that ‘‘the threat’’ might take geopolitically—which as we know at that time meant the Russians and their allies in the Warsaw Pact, together with the possible aspirations of new powers in what is now called the ‘‘Third World.’’ They also thought technologi- cally—in terms, that is, of the likely innovations that would be made, in particular by the most advanced of these threats, the Soviet Union.

There was talk throughout the RAF. But papers defining a change in the threat started to emerge from the OR Branch be­tween 1953 and 1955, and what they said is this: the life of the 164 Arborescences British nuclear bomber force is limited.

At this point, to make the narrative work perhaps I need to offer some background, to make some context, some scenery.

Britain was in the process of becoming a nuclear power. It was working toward atomic weapons and was also planning hydro­gen weapons. These were free-fall bombs, weapons designed, in the first instance, to play a strategic role, though they would later be developed for tactical use, to be carried by Canberras. The idea was deterrence. An enemy could be held back by threatening to drop bombs on major cities. These bombs were to be carried by aircraft, by the so-called V-bomber force. We have come across the V-bombers. These were subsonic, medium-altitude aircraft that would fly from bases in the UK or Germany to the Soviet Union. Their existence, together with the nuclear weapons them­selves, provided the British nuclear deterrent.

The life of the British nuclear bomber force was limited. Why?

This is something else I have discussed. The OR Branch feared the advent of surface-to-air, radar-guided missiles. These would, or so it imagined it, be located around major targets such as Mos­cow. And as the technology developed, Britain’s V-bomber forces would become increasingly vulnerable. The Soviet Union was developing surface-to-air missiles, but the technology would take some time to mature and even longer before such missiles were deployed in numbers sufficiently large to make any sub­stantial difference. Nevertheless, the writing was on the wall. By the mid 1960s, ten or more years off, the V-bombers would have become obsolete and Britain would no longer have a nuclear de­terrent—unless something was done.

This, then, is one of the possible branches. Perhaps it isn’t the most immediate for the aircraft project that was to become the TSR2—the aircraft project first called General Operational Requirement (GOR)

339 and subsequently by the more specific Operational Requirement (OR) 343. But it’s important even so.

Unless something was done—but what? If the UK wanted to re­tain its nuclear deterrent (and this was never in doubt, at least in the Royal Air Force and government) then perhaps there were

three possibilities. Arborescences 165

First, it might develop ballistic missiles. Launched from the UK or Germany, or in some versions from aircraft based in these countries, such missiles would be targeted on the great cities of the Soviet Union. And, because of their speed, like the Nazi V2 missiles they would be quite immune to counterattack by surface-to-air missiles.

Second, it might develop a very high-speed, manned bomber. This aircraft, which would also fly at high altitude, would be too fast for surface-to-air counterattack. And, like the first option, would (or so it was suggested) outfly any likely fighter aircraft that were sent up to intercept it.

Third, it might develop an aircraft that would fly very low. So what was the rationale? Such an aircraft would be difficult to spot. If the surface-to-air missiles, or for that matter the intercep­tor fighters, were being guided by radar then the radar needed to be able to ‘‘see’’ the incoming attack aircraft. But radar could only see long distances at medium or high altitudes. Because it worked only along direct lines of sight, and the curvature of the earth, together with unevenness in the terrain, meant that an air­craft flying very low would not be detected until the last moment.

Each of these possibilities was to be explored. Each was, to some extent, to be developed. But the project that embodied the second option was canceled at a very early stage, which left the first and the third—and the third was to turn into GOR 339.

With some modifications. For instance, there isn’t any need to fly low all the way from Germany to the Soviet Union. A radar around Moscow can’t see into Germany and, in any case, it also uses a lot of fuel to fly at two hundred feet. So the proposal be­came this: the aircraft should cruise subsonically and economi­cally at medium altitude while far from its target; then it should fly very high and very fast (Mach 2), before descending to low- altitude subsonic or transonic flight for the approach to the target.

How much detail do we need? How long is a story? How long is a piece of string? How much context is necessary, organizational, stra­tegic, or technical? I’ve told something of each of these. Now here’s another branch to the story. It has to do with ‘‘procurement.’’ As I 166 Arborescences noted in an earlier chapter, procurement is the word they use to talk

about procedures for conceiving, designing, and in particular acquir­ing military aircraft.

In 1945 Britain was still a great power. It had been exhausted by years of war, but it still had a global role, global colonial posses­sions, and global military responsibilities and ambitions. Only with benefit of hindsight was the established wisdom to become that the world was changing, that the economic dominance nec­essary to sustain Empire was no longer a reality, and that geopoli­tics were shifting in favor of the Soviet Union and especially the United States.

So there was a combination of factors: there was the need for global military reach; the years of a war economy that gave the highest priority to procurement; the relative cheapness of Sec­ond World War aviation technology, at least compared with what was to follow; the existence of many aircraft manufacturers in the UK, again built up and sustained by urgent need in the Sec­ond World War. This combination led to a particular pattern of aircraft procurement. The government would order prototypes from several companies expecting that they would be tested and improved. Then, the most satisfactory—or in some cases several of the most satisfactory—would be put into production. This is one of the reasons that there were three quite different types of V-bombers, not just one.

In 1945 the government guessed that a major military threat was at least a decade off, which meant that there was plenty of time to undertake major projects, slowly. They called this the ‘‘long step’’ approach: big technological advances and long time horizons. But then, in 1951 came the Korean War and with it the fear of another global war. This concern led temporarily to a large increase in the numbers of aircraft ordered. Prototypes were rushed into production with sometimes troublesome re­sults. For instance, large numbers of at least one type, the Swift, were never properly put into service at all because the technical problems were not resolved. It was also discovered that although aircraft flew satisfactorily without equipment, they encountered difficulties when armaments were installed or fired. The Hawker Hunter was a case in point.

What was the diagnosis? What was the character of the pro­curement problem—apart, that is, from the rush to rearm brought on by the Korean War? The answer to these questions led in 1955 to two policy decisions about the procurement of mili­tary aircraft. We have encountered the first of these already: that aircraft should be treated as ‘‘weapons systems.’’ They should be designed and built as an integrated system, including weapons, equipment, and airframe, rather than as a ‘‘weapons platform’’ for carrying weapons that were to be bolted on, as it were, afterward —at which point experience suggested that insuperable difficul­ties might emerge. The second was that the development and the production processes should be integrated. A large ‘‘develop­ment batch’’ of aircraft would allow problems to be identified and resolved more quickly, thereby eliminating the bottleneck caused by a limited number of prototypes, and the development aircraft could then be brought up to standard and introduced into service.

Stories about procurement methods. Now back to strategy.

In 1957 the Minister of Defence was Duncan Sandys, a man we have already encountered. Sandys wasn’t much admired by most people in the RAF. They talked, behind his back, of the “shift­ing, whispering Sandys,’’ and we have already seen the reason for this—it was that he was committed to missiles. These, he be­lieved, were the technology of the future. Because the United States and the Soviet Union were developing them, it was appro­priate that Britain should do so too. So he issued a government policy statement, a ‘‘White Paper,’’ in which he boldly announced that the government would no longer develop most forms of mili­tary aircraft. There was certainly no room for manned bombers because the UK would henceforth commit itself to ballistic mis­siles in order to secure its nuclear deterrent.

And what of GOR 339?

Now I need to provide some more context. I need to go into the question of tactical warfare, into a line of storytelling that will dis­place the arguments about nuclear deterrence and procurement. I 168 Arborescences need to describe how GOR 339 really had more to do with tacti-

cal strike and reconnaissance aircraft than with the grand strategic themes I’ve mentioned so far. Tactical strike and reconnaissance: hence the acronym TSR.

Tactical support. This meant bombing bridges, roads, railways, factories, ports, columns of tanks, and airfields. Now we need to distinguish between two forms of tactical support, one on or over the battlefield and the other in the form (to use the jargon) of ‘‘deep interdiction,” which involved bombing targets such as those I’ve just listed, which are miles, even hundreds of miles, behind the battlefield. We have seen that there was an aircraft in service that played this role. This was the Canberra. But it couldn’t fly terribly low and it was subsonic, which meant that many of the same arguments about the vulnerability of nuclear bombers also applied to it. Hence there was need for a ‘‘Canberra replacement,” the GOR 339 aircraft, to play the role of deep inter­diction.

Another branch in the story is reconnaissance. There was need, or so they said in the OR Branch, for an aircraft that could recon – noiter, look and see, and detect military movements and concen­trations, again, miles behind the front line. In an ideal world with limitless resources this would be another project, a different air­craft altogether. But how about combining this requirement with deep interdiction? This was the OR Branch proposal.

Now there is yet another branch in the story, one that I earlier left in the air. This has to do with what we now call the Third World.

Much of the Third World was, at the time, part of the British Em­pire or its client states. We have come across this role, this need to fly, this responsibility for acting ‘‘East of Suez,’’ in countries such as Malaya or Aden. But there wasn’t any need for nuclear deterrence in the ‘‘colonial theater.’’ Third World countries did not yet have nuclear weapons. There was plenty of room, how­ever, for aircraft that could attack tactical targets and undertake reconnaissance in so-called ‘‘brush fire’’ wars. This, at any rate, was the argument of the OR Branch as it reflected on the length­ening shelf life of the aircraft that were currently playing that role.

Now we can rejoin the main narrative. Deterrence and ballistic mis­siles, tactical strike, reconnaissance, procurement and organization: as we have seen, the stories start to come together.

April 1957. This is a crisis point for the RAF in general and for GOR 339 in particular. The Minister of Defence, Duncan Sandys, has announced the cancellation of all new bombers and fighters for the RAF. They will be replaced by ballistic missiles. One or two aircraft types have crept through. One, designed to fly from aircraft carriers, a machine we met in chapter 4 and will en­counter again, is called the NA 39 or the Buccaneer. But what is the future for GOR 339? This is an aircraft that at this stage isn’t even properly on, let alone off, the drawing board.

If you look at the official papers for 1957, they reveal a flurry of correspondence between, for instance, the Minister for Air (who was in charge of the RAF) and the Minister of Defence (who was responsible for all the armed forces). When he promulgated his policy about missiles, the Minister of Defence thought he was canceling all RAF combat aircraft. The Minister for Air thought that the reconnaissance GOR 339 was to be saved—though as with the cancellation decision discussed in the previous chapter, the fact that they were not taking the same decision was not clear at the time. After a flurry of official paperwork and a good deal of sweat, the Minister of Defence ended up by saying, I can be reluc­tantly persuaded that missiles can’t act in a reconnaissance and tactical strike role. But why do we need a new type of aircraft for this role? Why do we need a new type of aircraft when the Royal Navy already has its Buccaneer under development and indeed, this is at quite an advanced stage? Would this not do for the air force as well?

So this is another actor, another branch in the story. That of the Buccaneer. But how much do we need to know? In the present con­text, perhaps not so much. Let’s just say that what followed, the nego­tiations that took place in the corridors of the government machine (negotiations which included aircraft manufacturers and the pro­curement branch of the government, confusingly called the Ministry of Supply and later the Ministry of Aviation) fits the kind of pattern

imagined by those who study bureaucratic politics. Moves that catch the flavor of the 1957 debates would look like this.

Navy: You ought to use our aircraft, the Buccaneer.

Air Force: No. It’s too small, vulnerable, and it’s underpowered. It can’t fly far enough. And it doesn’t have the precision electronics we need.

Treasury: But it would be much cheaper to have one aircraft rather than two.

Ministry of Defence: Hear, hear!

Air Force (to Navy): All right. That makes sense. So how about both of us having GOR 339?

Navy: No way: Your aircraft is years off. Ours is already being made. In any case, yours is far too big to fit in an aircraft carrier. Air Force: If you say so. But there is no way your small, slow air­craft will ever meet our specification. Two engines are essential for safety and reliability. We must have our own aircraft.

Vickers Armstrong: But we can make a small version of GOR 339 that would be just as good as the big one, and it would fit in air­craft carriers too!

Air Force: Certainly not! We’ve already said that our plane needs two engines!

Navy: Let’s be serious. Your small GOR 339 won’t see service for goodness knows how long while our Buccaneer is nearly ready.

A plane in the hand is worth two. . .

Ministry of Aviation: Excuse me, but there’s something else going on here. While you’re bickering about the aircraft you want, we also need to be thinking about the future of the aircraft industry.

It needs pruning, sure, but we shouldn’t go too far. . . we need some orders.

(Short silence)

Ministry of Defence: All right. I don’t like this disagreement be­tween the Navy and the Air Force. Not at all. One aircraft would be much better than two. But if you absolutely insist you need a large aircraft for the Air Force then I suppose I’ve got no choice. I’m very unhappy about this, but reluctantly I’ll let you build your GOR 339.

Ministry of Aviation: And it will be built by a consortium. This will allow us to rationalize the aircraft industry.

Treasury (aside): But we’ll do our best to stop it along the way if we can, by putting up obstacles.

Parts of the Navy: And we’ll do everything we can to put a spoke in the wheel too. The whole idea of another aircraft is a nonsense when we’ve got the Buccaneer.2

So in the autumn of 1957 the aircraft manufacturers were told that they should prepare outline designs for GOR 339. But they had to do so in collaboration with one another. Individual pro­posals were not allowed.

In January 1958 these designs were submitted. Toward the end of 1958, after close study and a great deal of further bureaucratic infighting, some of which I discussed in chapter 4, it was an­nounced that a contract to design and manufacture a GOR 339 weapons system would be awarded to a consortium of two com­panies, English Electric and Vickers Armstrong. Subsequently, the relevant parts of these two companies were to merge to form the British Aircraft Corporation (later British Aerospace). It was indicated that Vickers would be the dominant partner in the GOR 339 project, both because it had more systems expertise and be­cause it was believed that it had stronger management. And the expectation was that, at a subsequent point, a development batch would be ordered.

That is a narrative of the conception and design of the TSR2, some of the various branches that led to the decision to build. Subsequently the project, as they say, “progressed’’—and a narrative of that progress might run as follows:

The doctrine of missile dependence did not long survive Duncan Sandys’s quite brief incumbency at the Ministry of Defence. Brit­ain abandoned its own attempt to build long-range ballistic mis­siles and after various vicissitudes, bought American Polaris mis­siles to carry British nuclear warheads and install in submarines built in the UK. At the same time the TSR2 began to play an in­creasingly strategic role in the minds of defense planners. In part, 172 Arborescences this was because the distinction between tactical and strategic

nuclear weapons was becoming increasingly fuzzy in the 1960s as smaller nuclear weapons were becoming available.

The first TSR2 aircraft flew in September 1964, well over a year behind schedule and very substantially over budget. In the mean­while it had become clear that no foreign government would buy the aircraft, and we know, of course, that in April 1965, after a change of government, the aircraft was canceled. An option was taken on an American aircraft with some similar properties, the General Dynamics F111A. This option was abandoned in 1967 as a result of a sterling currency crisis. In the end the RAF obtained a number of kinds of aircraft, none of which fully matched the specifications of the TSR2. These included a developed version of that original naval aircraft, the Buccaneer, which saw active service in the 1991 Gulf War, nearly forty years after it was first conceived.

Arborescence

This is the story that I haven’t told you. It is the story that I have avoided as I have taken empirical cuts through the project in earlier chapters. On the other hand, it is the kind of story that I might have told had I wanted to write a ‘‘plain history,’’ a social history, or a version of the social shaping of the TSR2 project. Though it catches something to call this story a grand narrative, this would no doubt be unfair, both to the story itself and to Jean-Frangois Lyotard (1984b).

So perhaps it would be better to find a way of pinning down some­thing about its specificity. To do that we might use the language of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and call it an arborescence. In other words, it is a form of storytelling that is treelike in structure. ‘‘The first type of book,’’ they write, ‘‘is the root-book. The tree is already the image of the world, or the root the image of the world-tree. This is the classical book, as noble, signifying, and subjective organic in – teriority (the strata of the book). The book imitates the world, as art imitates nature’’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 5).

Deleuze and Guattari are playing on more registers than I want to handle here. But if the TSR2 story isn’t a book—it isn’t long enough for a start—then it is certainly arborescent. It is a root narrative that seeks to imitate the world. For as the story strings itself out across

the lines and pages, it builds ‘‘a whole apparatus that is planted in Arborescences 173

thought in order to make it go in a straight line’’ and ‘‘a hierarchical system or transmission of orders.’’ Things, events, and considerations are made to stand in relation to one another, asymmetrically, within a structure of branching points. Events govern other events. More dis­tant branches come together to form a story and make a conclusion in the shape of, that shapes, the aircraft. Organization, strategy, tech­nology, procurement, geopolitics, tactics, colonialism, bureaucratic politics—on this count there are at least eight major branches leading to ‘‘the decision’’ to build the TSR2 and then to build it in the particu­lar shape that it had.

So like the tree of Jesse, the tree is hierarchical: one set of things, events, factors, is related to another. Layer is laid upon layer. But there is something else. This technoscience arborescence also reflects and maps the passage of time: ‘‘it has a future, a past, roots and a peak, a whole history, an evolution, a development.” To say this is to note that it works by describing (some version of) cause and effect; that it tells what precedes what. True, there is also space. Simultaneity, different events, different branches or roots of the tree, the processes that make these up occur at the same time. The diachronic and the synchronic, they are both assumed in the story. So the arborescent narrative grows in, presupposes and creates, the kind of three – or four-dimensional Euclidean time/space container imagined in chapter 4. Like a bon­sai tree, it’s a smaller version, it tells a smaller version, of what there is already, out there. It grows continuities and coordinations in the form of roots, branches, and relations, but it also performs what these presuppose, the conditions of its possibility: on the one hand, thepas – sage of time, the greatest hierarchy, the greatest asymmetry of them all; and, on the other, the machinations that spread themselves across space.

Performativity

How does telling stories make a difference? Having made an arbor­escent narrative that is also a description of the TSR2 project, this is the next question I want to explore.

In one way we already know the answer. It is built into the semi­otics that subjects perform objects and objects perform subjects. It is built into the structure of the book. Telling always makes a difference 174 Arborescences of one kind or another. But if some stories make more of a difference

Cultural Bias

 

Reading an earlier version of this book, Bruno Latour suggested the following thought experiment.

Would it be possible, he wondered, to build a sense of ”the project as a whole” out of a set of bits and pieces, little stories that had to do with this or that project-related matter? Would it be possible to build the present book in this way by offering a series of small stories and then, at the end, to have generated a chronological time-space story of”the project as a whole”?3

Until this last story I’ve largely resisted the arborescence of project narrative. So a possible question is whether you, the reader, have built a chronologically and spatially ordered narrative out of the bits and narratives that have composed the earlier chapters: whether you have supplied your own project-relevant arborescence.

If you have indeed done so then we have learned a little about the distributions of narrative, about the relations between what Deleuze and Guattari call the arborescent and the rhizomatic. Or, to put it in another language, we have learned something about the character of cultural bias: about a tendency to find smoothness and coherence, and the possible character that coherence might take. About our aversion to noncontinuity. Or noncoherence. Or to sensing the oscillations be­tween continuity and discontinuity, the interferences that make sin­gularity out of multiplicity in a movement that is continually deferred. Perhaps, then, we have learned something about the current perfor­mance of the conditions of possibility.

 

176 Arborescences

than others, then we need to think harder about interferences and the conditions of possibility. And if we start to ask questions of this kind—and in particular about interferences—then we blunder into a place inhabited by linguistic philosophers, and in particular a place that is occupied by the words ‘‘I do.’’

Philosopher J. L. Austin (1966; 1970, 235) argued that if these par­ticular words are uttered at the right moment and in the right place, under what he called “felicitous” circumstances, then they are also actions and not just words. But what is the ‘‘right place’’? In this con­text, it is a properly constituted marriage ceremony where, for in­stance, neither of the prospective partners is already married. Under these circumstances if I say ‘‘I do’’ at just the ‘‘right moment,’’ I end up married. Such is his definition of the performative: it is a word or a set of words that is also an action.

Let’s displace the example a little. Staying with the humanist theme of romance, if I say ‘‘I love you’’ to a person in ‘‘real life’’ (to be sure, the definition of what should count as real life is precisely one of the issues at stake), then this has another kind of effect. In Austin’s terms it would be a constative; that is, it states something. It is a descrip­tion, which means, at least in the paradigm case, that it is either true or false. But it is also in some sense performative, and this is what’s important here. The question is, what is it performing? If it were said in good faith and all the rest, it would be a performance of love. But it might also (and here the uncertainties crowd in) be the start of a love affair, or (no doubt equally uncertain) its reaffirmation. Or, if it were said in the ‘‘wrong way’’ or under the ‘‘wrong circumstances,’’ it might be the end of a love affair or a friendship.

So what do we learn? The answer is that to say ‘‘I love you’’ is prob­ably performative too. Like ‘‘I do’’ it also makes a difference. It enacts something and it has force. But at the same time it is also clear that the focus of attention has started to shift from a relatively clear set of conditions that secure a specific form of performativity (‘‘I do’’), a specific outcome, to a whole lot of uncertainties both in degree and in quality—which uncertainties are interesting, indeed crucial, if we are concerned to make a difference and think about the kind of dif­ferences that are made when stories overlap.

Let’s displace the example once more, or better, replace it with something entirely different. If I say, ‘‘The government has fallen,’’

then this is different again, isn’t it? If I’ve just heard it from the BBC news (as opposed to a novel by Anthony Trollope), then something else is happening. Commonsensically, we could say that I’m report­ing on a state of affairs or the affairs of state. This means that it is a constative and not a performative at all. Thus we could also add that what I say doesn’t make much difference, indeed perhaps no differ­ence at all, not, at any rate, to the government. This is because the toppling of the government has happened, as it were, ‘‘out there,’’ and my words simply report on something. They are not (how to say this?) a part of the action. They perform, instead, a kind of perspectivalism and belong to epistemology instead of ontology.

Let’s make one further displacement, again on the political theme to do with the falling of governments. If I say ‘‘the government will fall tomorrow,’’ then here we have something different yet again. Once more it sounds a little like a report, a perspective taken on something that is out there—or will be out there. This sounds like the world of the constative, but the difference between ‘‘is out there’’ and ‘‘will be out there’’ is crucial, for now we are starting to move back toward the earlier declarations of love. The prospects are uncertain, and, as a part of that, the declaration itself may turn out to be performative—as it was when, for instance, tens of thousands of brave people stood and clinked their keys in Wenceslas Square in Prague on what turned out to be the eve of the Velvet Revolution. ‘‘Your time is up,’’ they clinked.

And the clinking (it turned out) performed the departure of that sad and vicious government. ‘‘The government will fall tomorrow’’: these words have become, albeit uncertainly, a part of the action. Consta­tive and performative both, they are constative precisely because they are performative.

I don’t much care for such armchair examples. Michel Foucault’s work teaches us that philosophy is better pursued by empirical means, which is why I have written this book in the way that I have, as a book ‘‘about’’ an aircraft. But before we move on, look at what happens if we put the four ‘‘philosophers’ examples’’ that I’ve created side by side (table 8.1).

This helps to make the story that I’m trying to tell clear, or so I hope. Sometimes words, stories, and no doubt pictures are also ac­tions. That is, they make the worlds that they describe. And some­times they aren’t, and they don’t. And then again (a somewhat differ – Arborescences 177

”I do” ”I love you” ”The government ”The government will fall tomorrow” has fallen”

Action

3

3

3

(performative)

Report

3

3

(constative)

ent but equally important distinction), sometimes words and stories act in clear and unambiguous ways, and sometimes they don’t. Such is the space that I would like us to investigate, the performativity of narrative, as overlap and interference with other narratives.

Back to the empirical.

Little Narratives

Perhaps we could agree, for the moment, that the arborescent project narrative isn’t an action and say that it’s simply a report.

Now look at this:

Sir Cyril, emphasising that he spoke with the full authority of the absent Minister, got straight to the point which was that only one military aircraft project had (so far) survived the 1957 White Paper, and that was OR 339—the Canberra replacement. There was no certainty of further military aircraft projects and, assum­ing OR 339 went ahead, the contract would only be placed with a group of firms, or with two or three firms acting in co-ordination and with one designated as the leader. The Government hoped for eventual rationalisation and amalgamations. . . . How the in­dustry so grouped itself was its affair, but group itself it must.

The reaction of the heads of industry to this ultimatum was strong and virtually unanimous. For the industry to remain viable at all in any form, there had to be an on-going military pro­gramme, not just the rather dubious carrot of a possible Can­berra replacement. Further, the airframe industry could not (re­peat) not possibly exist on civil work alone. Sir Cyril said that there was certainly no hope on the military side unless there were major amalgamations or rationalisation on the lines he had 178 Arborescences sketched out as a condition for submissions for OR 339. He could

only repeat that it was, therefore, up to the industry to arrange their own affairs and pick their own partners if they wished to put in a submission. (Gardner 1981, 23-24)

So here we have another aircraft story, a smaller narrative. It is a narrative that interacts with the arborescent story with which I started this chapter. It describes, as they say, ‘‘in more detail,’’ the mo­ment when the government told the aircraft industry that it should rationalize.4 One of the branching points. So it’s another report, an­other constative.

But shift focus. Attend instead to the story told to the industrialists by the big-shot civil servant, Cyril Musgrave, for this too is a story, a narrative. ‘‘It will,’’ he was saying, ‘‘be like this. My story, the Musgrave story, is that this is how it will unfold, the future history of the British aircraft industry.’’ These are constative words, but they are words that are also actions. They are words that will make and distribute, indeed redistribute social, economic, and industrial relations.

So there is a difference between my story and Gardner’s on the one hand, and Musgrave’s on the other. To say it briefly, Musgrave’s story makes a difference, it’s performative, whereas mine doesn’t and isn’t, and neither does (or is) Gardner’s. They don’t (as is sometimes said)

‘‘belong to the real world’’ but rather seek to describe it (though what we mean by the ‘‘real world,’’ what counts as ‘‘reality,’’ is precisely what is at stake).5

Well, perhaps Musgrave’s story makes a difference, but only per­haps. Because the passage continues so: ‘‘After the meeting had ended, Denis Haviland, who was present as Under Secretary (Air),

Ministry of Supply, recalls that Sir Cyril Musgrave turned to him and said two words, ‘We’ve won’’’ (Gardner 1981, 24).

Interesting, isn’t it? Musgrave watched the big-shot industrialists leave and then turned to his sidekick and said ‘‘We’ve won.’’ This tells us, as is obvious, that he wasn’t sure he was going to win and that things might have been different, that Musgrave’s story might not have been performative in the way he intended. His story might not have redistributed the world, it might have had no effect or indeed had some other unintended consequence. We’re discovering that at the time he gave it, his little speech didn’t necessarily fall into the ‘‘I do’’ category but rather into the class of‘‘I love yous,’’ into the class Arborescences 179

of the ‘‘I love yous’’ that aspire to be turned into ‘‘I dos.’’ Or the class of‘‘the government will fall tomorrows’’ that hope to turn themselves into ‘‘the government has fallens.’’ This is an aspiration that, as his­tory (or the narratives that make history) tells us, was achieved by Musgrave. But this wasn’t clear, not beforehand, not at the time.6

Making a Difference

Musgrave’s story made a difference. It helped to bring what it de­scribed into being. If we want to pick through the entrails and ask how it achieved this, we could use various theoretical vocabularies for talking of interference effects. We might talk of intertextuality— for here, certainly, we have one form of talking that interacted with others, those, for instance, of the industrialists, to produce the effect of reordering the aircraft industry. Again, we might talk, like the actor – network theorists or Donna Haraway, of the performance of materio – semiotic relations,7 and then we might remind ourselves that narra­tives work themselves through a range of materials. So we’d note that it certainly wasn’t the honeyed power of Musgrave’s voice that per­formed the industrialists into submission, that made the difference by reordering the distributions of British industry. He might just as well have croaked like a frog, and the outcome would still, might still, have been the same.

So be it. Such is the character of interference: it comes in many forms and operates in many ways. It may be told of too, performed, in many ways. But what about my arborescent narrative? What about the stories of the technoscience student? Or those of Gardner, the com­pany historian? How are they working? And how do they intersect?

We agreed pro tem to lodge these narratives in the ‘‘report’’ pigeon hole, the place where we put ‘‘the government has fallen.’’ This place is inhabited by constatives in the realm of epistemology. The reason is that, notwithstanding all the strictures about subjects and objects that make themselves together, these stories don’t seem to be making any difference. They aren’t acting upon, or better, within whatever they report.

But this distinction doesn’t really work, does it?

‘‘Was O. R.343 a Valid Concept?’’

180 Arborescences ‘‘Should a Short-Step Aircraft have been Produced?’’

‘‘Was a Sophisticated TSR Aircraft Necessary?’’

‘‘Was the Cancellation Justified?’’

‘‘Was a TSR-2 Aircraft Necessary in 1965?’’

‘‘Was the Aircraft Industry too Large?’’

‘‘Had TSR-2 to be Cancelled to Further European Airspace Collabo­ration?’’

These are chapter and section headings taken from a small book called Crisis in Procurement: A Case Study of the TSR-2, which I’ve already cited several times (Williams, Gregory, and Simpson 1969).

This publication appeared in 1969, four years after the cancellation, but the headings give the game away. They tell us that it is not simply a report. It is rather a document that’s trying to answer policy ques­tions.

Some more citations from the same source:

By quantifying the quantifiable, therefore, the 1965 TSR-2 deci­sion can be shown to be correct, though the gains from its can­cellation were so small that a slight alteration of estimates could easily have produced a contrary argument. However, when the unquantifiable elements are added, the issue becomes an even more open one, so much so that it is difficult to arrive at a clear – cut answer by rational analysis. . . .

However, had the normal accounting conventions been altered in the way that has been suggested, and greater account taken of the increased reliability and availability of TSR-2 as a weapons system, it would have been valid to argue that the TSR-2 ought not to have been cancelled for the F111K. It is interesting to spec­ulate, however, how far these detailed arguments were presented to the decision-makers concerned in terms of a dispassionate analysis of the alternative assumptions involved, and the related probable outcomes. If they were not, no truly informed deci­sion was possible, and the decision taken would automatically be a bad one in decision-making terms. (Williams, Gregory, and Simpson 1969, 66)

So this is another recommendation about the distributions proper to centered decision making. Which is another way of saying that it is also a policy report: ‘‘In the preceding chapters the difficulties which Arborescences 181

beset the TSR-2 project have been analysed. . . . An attempt will now be made… to relate these difficulties to the production of future British weapons systems’’ (Williams, Gregory, and Simpson 1969,67). It is a policy report that, no doubt, aims to make a difference. It is an ‘‘I do,’’ or at the very least a version of ‘‘I love you’’ or ‘‘the govern­ment will fall.’’ So it is all about performativity. It is about making. Like Musgrave, it’s about uncertain performativity, a description of how it was, how it is, how it should be, how it might be. It’s about the performative uncertainties that arise when (as is almost always the case) the character of the interferences between different stories is uncertain.

Williams and his friends are thus different from Musgrave. We want to say, don’t we, that Musgrave was ‘‘more deeply involved,’’ more of a participant than Williams and Co.? On the other hand, we’re also learning, or so it appears, that overlap and participation is a grada­tion. Or better, we’re learning that whether or not the author of a narrative—or perhaps better a narrative itself—participates in what is being narrated depends on how the line is drawn between inside and outside, which is perhaps a way of talking about how the over­laps between performances are built and rebuilt.8 We might want to say, for instance, that Williams and his friends were outsiders to the TSR2 project, but not to the ‘‘defense policy community’’—ex – cept, of course, we’d also need to add that such a distinction is itself performed, an effect. It is a patterning of narrative distributions that makes similarity and difference in the slippery place between ‘‘I do’’ and ‘‘I love you,’’ between ‘‘the government will. . .’’ and ‘‘the govern­ment has…,’’ between the descriptions of simple epistemology and the world making of ontology. Which is, no doubt, where we all are, where all stories are to be found, multiply distributed in the fractional interferences between telling and doing.

So there are four narratives in play: the arborescent story of the social shaping of technology with which I opened this chapter; Charles Gardner’s narrative, the story of the British Aircraft Corpo­ration as written by the historian; Cyril Musgrave’s story, the account offered by, or on behalf of, the senior civil servant; and there are the recommendations of the policy analysts, Williams and his friends. At which point the density of these intersections begins to become some – 182 Arborescences what overwhelming. But that is how it is.

Intersections

The following citations come respectively from my summary story,

Gardner’s story about Musgrave, and Williams’s account written with his friends.

So he issued a government policy statement, a ‘‘White Paper,’’ in which he boldly announced that the government would no longer develop most forms of military aircraft.

The Government hoped for eventual rationalisation and amal­gamations. . . . How the industry so grouped itself was its affair, but group itself it must.

By quantifying the quantifiable, therefore, the 1965 TSR-2 deci­sion can be shown to be correct.

We’ve established some of the differences between these. ‘‘Plain his­tory,” participation, policy, certainly they perform differences, and if they are performative then they perform different TSR2 projects.

Multiplicities. But then the question we’ve been wrestling with all along recurs: Do they not also interact together in ways that tend to create a single object, a single project?

The question is rhetorical. The answer I want is that they indeed intersect. They intersect in terms of specificities. They coordinate themselves by talking of ‘‘the same’’ events, or ‘‘the same’’ project, but as they frame and perform these specificities they also make ‘‘the same’’ conditions of ontological possibility-singular conditions. I said that my narrative is arborescent in character, that it is like a bon­sai tree, existing in and making a literal and metaphorical Euclidean space-time box. But if it is a little version of a large tree, an arbo – rescence, then it also makes roots and branches. It performs places where different lines come together, junctions that are more or less important, closer to or more distant from the trunk. It makes bifurca­tions and confluences to create this developing project-plant.

In the way that I have told the story, I have attended most of all to the place where the decision was made to build the aircraft and to build it in a particular form. To a smaller extent I have also described the decision to cancel. The tree makes, most of all, a project beginning and a project end. The story that I told organized itself around these:

the joining of the twigs into branches achieved their status, their sa – Arborescences 183

184 Arborescences

lience, their hierarchical import, in relation to the beginning and the end.

The smaller narratives, however, are also built to the same pattern. It is possible to be more precise. They are all about the decision points that appeared in my narrative, important bifurcations. They all per­form ‘‘aspects’’ of those decision points. They tell us, ‘‘in more detail’’ about places where particular twigs came together to form branches, or particular branches came together to form the trunk. They explain why the decisions took the form that they did, why the tree grew in this way rather than that. So no doubt it is possible to read them in other ways, but within the project-relevant, bonsai, space-time box of my arborescent narrative, these smaller narratives perform the same pattern. It is just that they do so at a higher level of magnification. In­crease the magnification and what do we get? The same bifurcations at greater length. Or an expanding pattern of further bifurcations and sub-bifurcations that go toward making the larger branching point. Branchings and more branchings—the interferences between the dif­ferent narratives are treelike in form. They make a stable pattern of interference as they overlap because they are self-similar. Branches go on appearing as magnification increases: in their structure they are scale independent.9

So time and space are arborescent effects. But so, too, is scale. In­deed, space, time, and scale are made together. To make a space­time box is to imagine the possibility of looking at the contents of the box ‘‘as a whole.’’ As singular. In this way the notion of ‘‘the whole’’ achieves some sort of possibility. But to make wholes is also to make parts. It is to allow—indeed to call for—magnification. Better, it is to imagine magnification as a possibility that gives it some sort of sense. This is what makes it possible to say that Cyril Musgrave’s narrative is a ‘‘detail’’ of the ‘‘larger’’ narrative with which I started this chapter. This would make it possible to locate Musgrave’s narrative, from the point of view of ‘‘the whole story,’’ in a footnote. To put it in a black box. Like the subsections of the brochure in the table of contents, it makes it possible to say that his story is a ‘‘detail.’’ But which also, and in the same movement, makes performative the distributions of size. Including the performance of my ‘‘larger’’ narrative as, indeed, ‘‘the story as a whole.’’

Arborescence is a hierarchical structure, a system of points and

positions, an axis—I am simply using Claire Parnet’s metaphors— that domesticates particulars by locating them, without potential limit, in a salient and scaled space-time grid. It is a location that performs Haraway’s god-eye trick, which makes a four-dimensional view from nowhere. It defines and performs the conditions of pos­sibility for particular stories. And it is this potential to locate that shapes the nature of interferences between specifics. It also defines two great questions: the epistemological question, which asks whether this story is real, and the occluded ontological question, which asks about performativity as a function of interference, defer­ral, and the structures of possibility.

The tree is one of the great metaphors for disciplining interfer­ences. ‘‘The whole world demands roots.’’ I take it, however, that there are other relations and overlaps. That it is possible to perform other interferences.

Politics

If the pinboard makes complexity in a way that narrative does not, then this book makes complexity in a way that a historical or techno­science ‘‘story of a technology” would not. That’s it. It makes com­plexity. For though the complexity of the pinboard was always there alongside the linear travel of storytelling, and the purificatory narra­tives of modernity were always both dangerous and dangerously mis­leading, to narrate and to juxtapose have an effect. Narration is not separate from what it narrates. And neither is the pinboard. Both are performative. So making something like a pinboard helps to perform pinboard objects into being. More or less. It talks down the eliding performances of consistent narrative. More or less. It performs ob­jects, more overtly, as collages or pastiches, as multiplicities or frac – tionalities that escape the possibilities of singular narrative.6 In short, it makes a difference to that mirror-image pair, modernism and post­modernism, and the dualist politics that they imply—the choice be­tween a smooth ordering or a set of disconnected fragments. Making a pinboard escapes those binarisms and practices something that might be imagined as an ontological politics—a politics about what there is in the world (Mol 1999 and Law 1996b). What there might be in the world. An interference in the conditions of possibility for the kinds of things that might exist in the world. Between the singular and the plural. Homage, then, to Michel Foucault for teaching us that there is no innocent knowing. For to know is to perform, to participate. To make a difference, one way or another.

So far, so good. But now I want to deal with the question of politi­cal responsibility and irresponsibility. What is the character of this problem? It is sometimes said that to work with something like the logic of the pinboard is to simply to play at being ‘‘postmodern.’’ It is to refuse to take matters seriously. No doubt the argument comes in various forms. There are questions to do with rigor, methodological questions. There are issues arising in theory to do with what method­ology looks like if simple narratives and conclusions are not possible.

198 Pinboards And then there are ethical or political questions. For the suggestion—

Подпись: It is a trope of the poststructuralists to talk of "play." ''Just gaming" (Lyotard and Thebaud 1985). How to think about this? As an Other to that which is serious? Per-haps. But then remember that to talk of play, for instance in an engi-neering structure, is to refer to looseness, capacity to shift, in what may otherwise appear to be a rigid structure. In which case ''too much" play may be undesirable. But insufficient play is likely to be disastrous. This suggests that a single structure is made possible because it is, at the same time, not a single structure but an assemblage of partially connected pieces. More than one and less than many.

no doubt it is sometimes an accusation—is that this kind of exercise is a form of politically irresponsible play. Or, again, that it merely in­dulges in a form of aesthetics. To make pastiches may feel good. It may even look good. But it is not really serious. And, in particular, it doesn’t engage with the real political problems of the world.

To specify, the criticism is that if we don’t tell powerful stories about the great distributions—for instance ethnicity, gender, or class —then we stand precious little chance of making a difference to those distributions. Instead we are simply playing from a privileged posi­tion.

No doubt there is something in all this. Pinboards don’t work in the same way as stories, and politics is no doubt often well pursued through essentialisms—strategic essentialisms?—made in, and help­ing to make, larger stories. But there is an alternative view. It is that large stories, with their requirement for overall coherence, miss out on important features of the world. They miss out on the oscillation between singularity and multiplicity, on fractionality, which I have already discussed. But they also miss out on distribution.

Perhaps an analogy will help. In 1980 three sociologists, Nick Aber­crombie, Stephen Hill, and Bryan Turner published a book called The Dominant Ideology Thesis (1980) in which they explored the Marxist use of the term ideology. They argued that society in its various an­tagonistic modes was not, as many Marxists believed, held together Pinboards 199

by a dominant ideology. If there were a dominant ideology, it was rarely important in keeping working people in order; at most it tended to help hold dominant groups together by securing certain attitudes to property—though even this was uncertain, at least in modern times.

If Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner were wrestling with the domi­nant ideology thesis, then perhaps what we are wrestling with here is something that is even more powerful. Perhaps we are running up against what we might think of as the dominant narrative thesis. I’ve already made this argument in other terms: the dominant narrative thesis proposes that behind appearances is a narratable unity. It also supposes—in its political or ethical forms—that unless we narrate that unity we are simply playing games while the powerless continue to suffer. But while there is no doubt game playing, the accusation of moral or political indifference is wrong. Indeed, it is dangerously wrong because the great distributions are sustained as much in the complex and fractional logics of pastiche as they are in the coher­ent narrations and processes of inequalities. And if this is indeed the case, then it is vital to explore the logic of the pinboard if we want to understand even quite conventional political inequalities instead of colluding with them by performing them again in their splendid singularity.

The great stories about distribution and inequality narrate coher­ences, for instance, in the forms of global capitalism, patriarchy, and ethnicity. Indeed it is precisely their capacity to relate deep coher­ences that turns them into great stories. But in the last twenty years we have also learned to be cautious. Zygmunt Bauman (1989) has taught us that the grand narratives of what we call ‘‘modernity’’ are ambivalent: to garden is also to make ‘‘weeds.’’ But now we need to imagine something more, something yet more difficult. This is the possibility that inequalities may be sustained in the play of non­coherent interferences. In what I want to call obdurate incoherences.

And this is a third scandal, which after the substantive and the methodological scandals, we might think of as the political scandal: many inequalities and distributions are fractional effects of noncoher­ence. Because of this they cannot be addressed and captured in single stories but can only be addressed through a series of different stories that don’t add up very well. Or, if they do, they do so indirectly, as 200 Pinboards it were allegorically, through the logic of the pinboard. And here is

What is it to make a political decision?

In chapter 7 I deconstructed the decision to cancel the TSR2. It would be better to use quotes: I deconstructed ”the decision” to can­cel the TSR2. For it turns out that this decision was several different decisions. Each of the relevant cabinet ministers was making his own decision. While each at the same time believed that he was making a single, collective decision. In putting it this way, I am refusing the ”dominant narrative thesis” which would insist that there was indeed a single decision—and then a set of misunderstandings or different perspectives. Two points about this.

First, the dominant narrative thesis is performative. The commit­ment by cabinet ministers—and everyone else—to the idea that they were making a single decision meant that they were, indeed, able to take ”a decision.”

Second, and more important in the context of the politics of inter­ference, it is the differences between the decisions, the fact that it takes (at the very least) some effort to order them into a dominant narrative, that secures the strength of”the decision”in the first place. This is what I mean if I talk about”obdurate interference." If it had all been narratable as consistent, then the cabinet ministers would never have been able to make their ”decision” in the first place.

 

where I want to end this account, to stop the juxtapositions that I have made on my version of the uncomfortable pinboard.

What I believe is something like this. TSR2 was an immensely ob­durate object, a huge modern military project, one that employed tens or hundreds of thousands of people. It was, as we know, even­tually destabilized—and the consequence was a conventional politi­cal scandal of considerable proportions. I’ve noted that as I worked my way into the project and collected material I was charged, in one way or another, with the responsibility of narrating the project and Pinboards 201

 

Подпись: In Irreductions Bruno Latour tells a story about colonialism. The merchants hated the bureaucrats. The soldiers were contemptuous of the cartographers. The priests despised the hacienda owners and the engineers. But this noncoherence made colonialism stronger rather than weaker. Atheism, the collapse of the markets, the failure of the bureaucracy, no particular breakdown necessarily played itself through to undermine colonialism ''as a whole.''There was no Leninist''weakest link.'' Instead there were partial connections which operated to perform an established disorder in an oscillation between singularity and m ultipli city.

its downfall. ‘‘Why,’’ I was being asked, ‘‘did it go wrong? And what can we learn?’’ This was uncomfortable. But I now believe that it was uncomfortable not only for the obvious political reasons but also be­cause it implied the need for a single narrative, a dominant narration.

If we turn the question around and ask, rather, how it was that the project managed to hang together for as long as it did, then the answer cannot be narrated in a single story at all. Yes, there are stories, many stories about how it held together. Mostly top-down, managerialist stories, stories about control, ordering. I don’t doubt that those stories tell us something important. There was plenty of narratable control and ordering. But neither do I doubt that they miss something. They don’t, or so I am arguing, simply miss out because they are incom – plete—though no doubt this is always the case. They also miss out because the project was held together by interferences between the narratives that cannot be properly narrated within those narratives themselves.

This is the point of talking about ‘‘obdurate interferences’’ or ‘‘ob­durate incoherences” and why it is important to mobilize a metaphor like that of the pinboard. For it is the case, or so I am asserting, that the distributions of the social world—project distributions, political distributions, but also the more classic distributions of ethnicity, gen­der, or class—are sustained as much in narrative incoherence as they 202 Pinboards are in narrative coherence. Are sustained as much in interference be-

tween multiplicities as they are in successful and singular enactment. Thus the need—the great need—is to create sensibilities and toolkits that will allow us to sense, to work upon, and to interfere with those distributions once they escape the possibilities of single stories and enter the logic of oscillation.

There are, of course, many straws in the wind. Old stories about the ways in which reeds bend before the hurricane that destroys mighty oaks. Newer stories about the fluidities of successful social and tech­nical forms, the ways in which these change themselves, never stand­ing still long enough to draw their boundaries or narrate themselves into a single structure. There are the metaphors of fractionality, of partial connection and Donna Haraway’s accounts of the current dis­order. So there are many straws in the wind. And this is, indeed, en­couraging. For this is where I stop this particular story. In the firm belief that a concern with noncoherence, the logic of the pinboard, the play of the fractional, which is more than one but less than many, is not some irrelevant aberration. It is not simply a game invented by intellectuals to make their discourses yet more complicated and inac­cessible. Rather, it is the invention—or the reaffirmation—of ways of knowing that are simultaneously modest and complex, ways of know­ing that are necessary if we are to imagine and interfere successfully in the workings of the current disorder. To imagine ways between the singularities and multiplicities of modernism and postmodernism.

The era of the pinboard is upon us. Our simplicities will no longer serve.

1.

Technical Struggle

I am suggesting that the front cover performs and distributes agency in three distinct and overlapping sets of contrasts. The overlap de­rives from the way in which they share the common propensity of distributing active agency in favor of the aircraft and away from fea­tures of its ‘‘context’’—that is, from nature and culture. And the differ­ences derive from the specificities of the various contrasts performed.

Nature and culture are being made passive. They are being rendered mundane. And finally, they are being made vulnerable. By contrast, technology is by turns being made active, powerful, skillful, heroic, vulnerable, and invulnerable. No doubt there are various connections between these distributions; indeed the way in which the distribu­tions interfere with one another is probably crucial. But it is also im­portant that they are distinct. As we have seen, the possibility of dif­ferent, somewhat incompatible, and coexisting distributions is not necessarily a problem at all. Rather their interferences may repre­sent a source of strength rather than of weakness: where one dis­tribution seems uncertain, there is tension, ambivalence, and dis­placement into another: singularity thereby grows out of noncoherent multiplicity.20

So there are three overlapping distributions. But if we now open the brochure and attend to its contents, we will find many more. Nature appears in exhibit 6.2, but this time the contrast between the techno­logical and the natural is different: if the aircraft is still endowed with Aesthetics 125

Technical Struggle

EXHIBIT 6.2 ”The flightplan is initially defined in terms of fixing landmarks and the latitude and longitude of all turni ng points and objectives so that specific tracks are flown.” (British Aircraft Corporation 1962, 26) agency, then this has started to change in character. Now it is “practi­cal” or ‘‘technical,’’ a performance or a distribution as a skill holder or perhaps as a puzzle solver, while nature has been distributed beyond the boundary of skill, into the realm of utilizable resources—which, to be sure, indexes and reproduces a large set of themes in Western and, in particular, Enlightenment thought.22

Here, then, we have removed ourselves from the realm of the “aes­thetic” and been inserted back into the world of the ‘‘technical.’’ For the surrounding passages explain how this ‘‘fixing’’ is done, albeit only in limited ‘‘detail’’ (remember that this is a sales brochure, not a technical manual). So there is difference but also similarity, one con­sistent similarity in which the narrative echoes the message of the front cover. The aircraft remains active, while nature is being ren­dered passive. For instance, in exhibit 6.3 the work, the intricate and

EXHIBIT 6.3 ”The digital computer continuously calculates instantaneous posi­tion using ground speed and drift from the Doppler, and heading and velocity from the inertia platform.” (British Aircraft Corporation 1962, 26) skillful work of the TSR2 is detailed. It acts in this way and that, while nature does nothing. Indeed, nature does so little that in this particu­lar passage it has been effectively effaced. There is no need to detail the way in which landmarks don’t move or how the features of the ter­rain reliably reflect the Doppler radar signals. The inactivity of nature, its stolid persistence, takes the form of routine, of a kind of brute dura­bility, such that in the theater of aircraft action it is simple scenery.

Or, to put it a little differently, the distribution rests on, presupposes, and reproduces realism.23

Activity/passivity: this similarity strengthens my original method­ological conviction that it makes sense to treat the aesthetic and the technical symmetrically. For though the specifics of their distribu­tions are different, they overlap and coordinate in ways that interfere Aesthetics 127

with one another, and if we don’t look at the distributions performed by nontechnical means, then we hobble ourselves. It is as if we were trying to reconstruct the sound of Mozart’s Requiem while denying ourselves any knowledge of the woodwind.

But what of the differences between the contrasts? Much might be said of the distributions performed in exhibit 6.4. For instance, it

EXHIBIT 6.4 ”The forward screen provides for head up display projection and with­stands the hot air blast used for wi ndscreen clearance, i n additi on to havi ng ade­quate strength to withstand impact of a 1 lb. bird at transonic speeds.” (British Aircraft Corporation 1962, 34) simultaneously locates the proposed performance of the windscreen of the aircraft with respect to human, technical, and natural actors.24 But perhaps it is the nonhuman actor—the intrusive presence of the bird—that is most interesting here, for the bird maybe understood as an expression of nature. This means we’re watching a further rework­ing of contrast between machine and nature; for, like the landmark, the bird is scarcely being performed as a resource. And if it is being made vulnerable, then this is not because it deserves protection like some endangered species. Instead the distribution is the other way round. The vulnerability of the bird is of no interest at all; it is rather an implicit threat, for no pilot, we understand, wants a bird hitting him in the face at high speed: shades of fear and sweating bodies. This suggests, all of a sudden, that nature is capable of action: the birds are fighting back.

In fact it is more complicated, though interestingly so. Two points. First, if the distribution of agency has shifted from aircraft to bird, then this is because of the extreme speed of the aircraft. In other words, it is precisely the performance of technological action that has also endowed nature with the capacity to act.25 And second, it is the role of the windscreen to protect the aircraft and its pilot from the ac­tivity of these newly empowered birds, a distribution that is indeed effected in the text. So we are witnessing a process in which tech­nology passes out agency with one hand while taking it away with the other, a trope, perhaps, of domestication. It allows the possibility of 128 Aesthetics nontechnological action but only within the constraints of the tech-

EXHIBIT 6.5 ”The results of vibration and other rig tests on human subjects showed that with the aerodynamic design of T. S.R.2 for minimum gust response, no special seating provisions are required.” (British Aircraft Corporation 1962, 38) nical and thereby sustains the active/passive distribution and, in par­ticular, the performance of aircraft invulnerability.

This distributive mechanism recurs. For instance, in exhibit 6.5 nature (in the form of gusts) is again being performed as a potential threat by virtue of the actions of the aircraft (for the gusts would be no problem if one were standing still). But, in the same move, they are domesticated into a form of unproblematic passivity.

But what would happen if the bird weighed two pounds, a kilo? Or the gusts became extreme? Wouldn’t this imply a redistribution of agency? This question is always elided in the brochure, though it is, to be sure, endlessly implied. Indeed, given both its contents and what we know of air-force thinking and practice in the early 1960s, one way, a very important and relevant way, of reading the brochure is precisely as an exercise in threat containment. For why else would the distributions endlessly perform the mastery, the agency, and the invulnerability of the aircraft? The answer is straightforward: this in­vulnerability is quite uncertain and the methods that it performs to secure whatever invulnerability it has achieved are (as they say) at or beyond the cutting edge of technology, which is another way of say­ing that they are iffy, open to doubt, and might break down, rendering the aircraft vulnerable.26

But if the vulnerability is not admitted directly, if it is distributed to nature—or to culture in the form of the enemy-then how is it ad­mitted indirectly? The treatment of the birds and the gusts establishes the paradigm procedure. Vulnerability is admitted indirectly by per­forming the agency of the Other only if it can be countermanded and agency can be redistributed back to the aircraft. This is visible in ex­hibits 6.6, 6.7, and 6.8. The potency of agents other than the aircraft

EXHIBIT 6.6 ”Although provision is made for medium altitude bombing, in attack­ing a defended target it is desirable to remain at low altitude in the target area.” (British Aircraft Corporation 1962, 12)

Technical Struggle

EXHIBIT 6.7 "Typical Loft Manoeuvre” (British Aircraft Corporation 1962, 13;

© Brooklands Museum)

 

is implied in exhibits 6.6 and 6.7 without being explicitly performed. Exhibit 6.6—and certainly this would have been understood by any likely reader of the brochure in 1962 — implies that at medium alti­tudes the aircraft is vulnerable to surface-to-air, radar-guided mis­siles but that this isn’t the case at low altitudes (at which point the desired distribution of agency is reaffirmed). And, as we know, the aircraft flies low, which means that invulnerability is performed yet again.

But there is a tension, for if exhibit 6.6 performs invulnerability, then exhibit 6.7 depicts a typical method for nuclear bombing, a ‘‘loft manoeuvre.’’ In this maneuver the bomb is lobbed in an arc from some distance away onto the target so that the aircraft can escape destruc­tion in the subsequent explosion. To do this the aircraft is flown up­ward at a predetermined speed and angle and the bomb is released at a precisely calculated moment. The picture, exhibit 6.7, shows this. The maneuver is tricky, but it works to distribute potency in favor of the aircraft and vulnerability to the target. Such is the effect of exhibit 6.7, in which we observe a conventional depiction of a large explo­sion in a factory—while the aircraft has turned away and is already making good its escape.

So there is a distribution that makes aircraft invulnerability and tar­get vulnerability. On the other hand, the loft maneuver contains and domesticates one possible self-induced vulnerability (here, nuclear

EXHIBIT 6.8 ”The serious exposure of the aircraft to ground fire which occurs when release angles of more than 90 degrees are used can be avoided by using a ‘but­ton hook’ manoeuvre. In this attack the pilot flies over the target and returns to conduct a shallow loft attack from another direction. Vulnerability studies indi­cate that this is preferable to the use of over-the-shoulder loft attacks.” (British Aircraft Corporation 1962, 13)

self-destruction) but induces a second,27 for when we look at exhibit 6.7 we discover that at only two miles from the target the aircraft reaches an altitude of four thousand feet. This may not be a ‘‘medium altitude,’’ but is certainly more than the recommended two hundred feet and so reorganizes the vulnerability/invulnerability equation yet again such that both the aircraft and its target are destroyed. This cer­tainly poses a serious problem for the economy of vulnerability, and the problem is treated overtly in exhibit 6.8, one of the few passages in the brochure that distributes military vulnerability quite explicitly back to the aircraft. But (here is my proposition) it does so because the risk of vulnerability can be contained and defused. For in this pas­sage the ‘‘button hook’’ maneuver plays the role of windscreen and the distribution accordingly, once again, contains the threat.

Leakages, Redistributions

Technics is about that which is “serious.” This is the first characteriza­tion, the first distribution, that has allowed us to distinguish between that which is performed as technical and that which is performed as merely aesthetic. But my argument has been that the struggling dis­tributions of technics need all the help they can get, especially in the context of a state-of-the-art military technology. Technics are greatly assisted by the mobilization of aesthetic reinforcements and their fur­ther distributions of agency and passivity in favor of technology. One might add that the border disputes between the social and the tech­nical (for instance, among sociologists of science and technology) are precisely about the distribution of seriousness.28

So technics is about “seriousness.” But (and here we revisit a form of heterogeneity we have already discussed) technics is also about deferral. Such would be a second possible characterization of tech­nology. Not, of course, deferral ‘‘in general,’’ for this is a chronic con­dition, but rather deferral away from technical agency. For within technology the sky, as they say, is the limit. Anything is possible. Any­thing should be possible. Within the pragmatics of technology; limits are acknowledged only if they can be immediately redistributed back to the Other, the Other of nature or the Other of culture. Or, perhaps most of all in the optimism of the Enlightenment, to the Other of the future (see exhibit 6.9) in the form of the projectile that throws itself ahead, ordering the present by turning it into the means of the future. Aesthetics 131

EXHIBIT 6.9 ”Provision is made for carriage of the guided and stand-off nuclear weapons under development. Use of these weapons will improve the accuracy of delivery, decrease the likelihood of the aircraft being damaged by defence fire, and will provide air-burst of the weapon without any increase in aircraft altitude above terrain following height.” (British Aircraft Corporation 1962, 13)

This is what we’ve seen for the TSR2, though this movement, one might observe, is the general form of deferral within which the re­search and development industry has created its profitable niche.

Seriousness, the deferral of limits, and the denial of agency—this brochure distributes active agency away from nature and culture in multiple ways. For instance, there is one moment (I think only one) when the distribution seems redolent of rape (exhibit 6.10).29 Much

EXHIBIT 6.10 ”It is capable of penetrating to target at high subsonic speed.” (British Aircraft Corporation 1962, 8) more common is the use of the anodyne, a smooth and matter-of – fact language of practicality or impersonality. For instance, the term ‘‘delivery’’ (exhibit 6.11) seems to connect as much with the routines

EXHIBIT 6.11 ”This flexibility is enhanced by the wide range of delivery ma­noeuvres available to the pilot, each fully automatic if required, and which may be selected to give optimum weapon performance.” (British Aircraft Corporation 1962, 13) of the postal service as with the broken bodies of warfare.30 Again, phrases such as ‘‘optimum weapon performance” work to locate bombing within the realm of the balance sheet, the calculation of costs and benefits. And finally, its various drawings and sketches visualize the depicted explosions as destroying toylike buildings or vehicles in which, one might add, people do not appear (see exhibit 6.12).

Well, this is standard albeit lethally important stuff. Most of those who criticize the industry of modern warfare complain of the de – 132 Aesthetics humanizing character of military talk. And, to be sure, the enemy is

EXHIBIT 6.12 H. E. Weapon Accuracy (British Aircraft Corporation 1962, 15;

© Brooklands Museum)

 

Leakages, Redistributions

indeed being technicized here, that is, constituted as set of practical sources of possible resistance that can be overcome or contained— like the birds hitting the windscreen. (Human) agency is therefore being distributed away from the enemy, which is turned into a set of objects; indeed the role of human agency throughout is being mini­mized. So the enemy has no capacity for successful or important action in general, and the effects of the “punishment” it receives are impersonal rather than personal.

Posed in this particular way this argument is theoretically human­ist, but the argument that I want to make doesn’t draw on the well – springs of humanist orderings. I am keen to avoid assuming that cer­tain distributions—for instance between humans and nonhumans —are given in the order of things.31 The distributions that we’re wit­nessing are more complicated and ambivalent, with contrasts that shift, human and nonhuman, object and subject, with complex rela­tions and occasional reversals of polarities. Thus if human beings are complex and heterogeneous, it turns out that technologies are simi­larly complex distributive effects, complex and heterogeneous. They are made technical, made technical in a variety of different ways, but they also overlap, leak across the boundaries, and end up being per­formed, albeit in less obvious ways, as partaking of nature or culture, as heroic or childlike.

Heroism we have seen. This was performed by the front cover of the brochure. But exhibits 6.13 and 6.14 are pictures of the aircraft on the ground and they accompany text that describes how the TSR2 may be

Leakages, Redistributions
Подпись: The austere view insists that it is proper to stay close to the ma-terial: that there is, as it were, no quality control when interpretations multiply in this way—a position that was forcibly expressed to me on a number of occasions. An alternative view is that something interesting is going on. This is that (cultural) products are complex and multiple in their effects, and that this—and the interferences that go with it— is a phenomenon in its own right. It may be, then, that this divergence is a feature of the performance of the ''established (dis)order,'' of the chronic oscillation between multiplicity and singularity. We have come across the latter view at a number of points in the earlier chapters of this book. Here it is, expressed again: ''The pos-sibility of different, somewhat incompatible, and coexisting distribu-tions should not necessarily be seen as a problem. Rather their inter-ferences may represent a source of strength rather than of weakness: where one distribution seems uncertain, there is displacement into another.''

flown from dispersed airstrips. So the narrative distribution is again about vulnerability and invulnerability. Though it is not explored in the brochure, the narrative implies that in the event of nuclear war, large air bases will be destroyed in the first few minutes of conflict.

Thus one of the virtues of the TSR2 is that it can operate indepen­dently of such bases for considerable periods of time, taking off from short runways or rough airstrips. And, with some specially designed additional equipment (including the vehicle that is also featured in exhibits 6.13 and 6.14), it can refuel and maintain itself.

This, then, is the point of these two drawings. They illustrate an ar­gument about independence, a version of the colonization described in chapter 2, and therefore, like the front cover and much of the text, they help to perform the machine as invulnerable. But the drawings perform that invulnerability in an interesting way, by juxtaposing the aircraft with nature in a manner quite unlike that of the front cover. Aesthetics 135

Leakages, Redistributions

EXHIBIT 6.13 Rapid Reaction Standby (British Aircraft Corporation 1962, 21;

© Brooklands Museum)

 

The drawings do this partly because the static/dynamic distinction has disappeared. The aircraft is at rest; indeed, it is inactive. And (this is the point) it has made itself invulnerable precisely by virtue of this inactivity. So it hides in the bushes that therefore act to conceal it. Nature is no longer reduced to frozen immobility but has been turned into an active agent in its own right. It is acting as a shield in a manner not unlike the TSR2 in the iconography of the front cover. A reversal has occurred.

This, then, is a ‘‘technical’’ way of narrating the redistribution. But other things are also happening. In particular, iconographically and distributively, the contrast with earlier narrative and other pictorial representations in the brochure could hardly be more striking. (Com­pare exhibit 6.15.) For, yes, the movement, the power, these have dis­appeared. But what should we make of those bushes? Of the contrast between the bucolic scenes surrounding the aircraft and the aircraft itself? And of the pipes and people that populate the scene?

One answer is that in their conventional naturalism they offer a realist guarantee to an argument, the pragmatic argument, being made in the text. For these depictions are quite unlike the front cover in style. Though certainly conventional, they represent a range of everyday objects: trees, bushes, meadows, a lowering—perhaps men­acing-sky. These are recognizable representations, representations that juxtapose themselves (perhaps rather startlingly, but no doubt that is the point) with the aircraft and its apparatus. But the juxtaposi­tion, and in particular the pictorial realism of the depiction of nature, suggests that it is entirely realistic to imagine what might otherwise

Leakages, Redistributions

be unimaginable: the aircraft under such bucolic circumstances. The drawings may therefore be imagined as a kind of guarantee, a further warranty for the possibility of dispersal. The promise of refueling in the backwoods—this is a promise that can be fulfilled.32

But there is something else. The front cover performed contrasts between the active and the passive, the transcendental and the mun­dane, and between the invulnerable and the vulnerable. In each case the ground, nature, and culture, were distributed into the latter half of these pairs. But now there seems to have been a radical change. In the new drawings the technological, the aircraft, starts to partake of the features of nature and culture, to partake of passivity, mundanity, and vulnerability as opposed to excitement, heroism, and action in the air.

So it is that we see a surround of soft meadows, trees, and bushes. For by drawing a gentle landscape it becomes a place of rest and nur­ture, with all the tropes that this carries. For instance, there is hus­bandry. What is it, one might ask, that grows in this particular gar­den? What fruits does it bear? Is it dragons’ teeth? For what grows is a weapon, a weapon of war or, more abstractly, a potential, a potential for action. Thus the aircraft is something that grows, grows quietly in potential and (it is understood) its quiescence is merely a stage, a mo- ment—as will be revealed when it leaves the garden and that potential is unleashed.

So husbandry is one possibility but domesticity is another, perhaps related, gender trope. For on the front cover the aircraft was removed from the domestic. Indeed, we never saw it pictorially represented at all. But here, now, it returns for a time when there is need (as the tech­nicians might put it) for resupply. But this distribution, which may indeed be proposed in technical terms, butts up against and interferes with the tropes of domesticity that both complement and escape it— tropes that have, for instance, to do with nurturing. We thus appreci­ate, without it having been said in as many words, that any man (or is it boy? or is it technology?) needs to return home at the end of a hard day’s work and war to be sheltered, enveloped, protected. To be cared for, at any rate, by a putatively female figure.

Except that there are further complexities. Look at the human fig­ures in exhibit 6.13. Those that we see appear to be men, men with pipes and equipment. Yes, we can tell that they are technicians. That is the story that the practical narratives of the technical will recount. But other contrasts and divisions are also being made, divisions that have to do with the distribution of gender. For, or so it appears, (parts of?) nature are being rendered male.33 Or, perhaps better, nature is being displaced yet again, as if, for instance, instead of going home at the end of the day’s work, the aircraft were rather being sent to the garage. Or, more pointedly, to the intensive care unit with its array of monitors, cables, bags of fluids, and drips as it enacts an intense and interventionary agency—that treats the body precisely as a (failing) system.34

But there is yet another possibility that has to do with gendering. This says that in certain instances patriarchal culture endows that 138 Aesthetics which is female with potency. One of these—and one of the most

visible—is in the performance of bodies. It may be found, for instance, in those distributions which constitute woman as a dangerous form of sexuality, dangerous that is, to man, for instance as the femme fatale, the source of forbidden knowledge, of forbidden power, a danger. In the iconography, this is a source of power constituted alongside and uncertainly held at bay by that other great patriarchal myth, woman as innocent, gentle, innocuous. All in all, as a source of virtue, either bland and passive, or active but in the form of nurturing.35 In exhibit 6.13 we are not dealing with gendered or sexualized human bodies. But even so, it seems that something similar is going on; that is, we see an analogous alternation between innocence and blandness on the one hand, and dangerous physical potency on the other. An alter­nation in which blandness and one-dimensionality seek, with only partial success, to efface the dangers of materiality.

Blandness we have seen. It is everywhere in the bowdlerized and anodyne language of the technical. But it is also in the language of systems that permeates the brochure as well as other aspects of the project. We have seen that this is a colonizing language that says everything is normal, everything is under control, and everything is being monitored, calculated, and corrected. So there is the ubiquitous performance of the anodyne. But not very far away, albeit partially effaced, there is also the performance of danger. For the aircraft is a dangerous tool. It is, to be sure, a danger to the enemy. It is danger­ous to those who fly it, testing as it does the limits of their heroism and skill. And finally it is dangerous to us all since its nuclear use would no doubt lead to consequences that would extinguish every­one. So these pictures show it sitting on the ground hiding from the threat, but they also show it embodying a risk to those who surround it, to those homelands it is precisely intended to shield. For this is a machine with potential, the potential for destruction, not only of the enemy but also of the power that wields it.

In which case the distributive dynamics become explicable. For now it appears that the superficial blandness is no longer simply a technical matter. Rather it is a device that, to a most limited degree, hides the knowledge of the dangerous and self-destructive potency of a weapon that would, if ever used, wreak havoc not only on its in­tended targets but also on those who deployed it. This hidden knowl­edge is what makes it possible to argue that this aircraft is also per-

formed as if it were a woman, a dangerous mistress, in a distribution that connects through complexity with some of the performances of patriarchal sexual difference.36

Perhaps, then, the aircraft is ambivalent in terms of gendering, or even in terms of sexuality. Perhaps it is gendered or sexed, sometimes performed as one thing, sometimes as another. If this is right then the distribution of potency, of agency, is sustained in part by such abrupt redistributions of gendering. By their interferences with one another. And so it is that the ‘‘aesthetic,’’ out of place in the ‘‘techni­cal,’’ reappears. It reappears in the form of the ‘‘illustrations’’ that, by demoting themselves to the status of‘‘illustrations,’’ are precisely able to propose distributions that strengthen the shifting performance of the aircraft as agent. But they are able to do so in a way that excites no comment, by other and technically outrageous means.