Category AIRCRAFT STORIES

Exhibit 7.1 is a record, one of several, of the cabinet meeting that led to the cancellation of the TSR2. It is drawn from the diaries of one of the participants, Cabinet Minister Richard Crossman (1975). Crossman was Minister for Housing in the government at the time of the deci­sion to cancel—though perhaps in saying this I have already given too much away But never mind. Let’s attend to Crossman and what he writes. So what should we make of this?

No doubt there are many possibilities, but first I want to note that this is another distribution. We know the semiotic version of this argument: objects are being made, realities brought putatively into being. It is a performance and not simply a description. So Crossman generates, inter alia, four locations, places, or possibilities, each with its own specific attributes. He achieves this in various ways, but most straightforwardly, he does so by simply arraying them in the form of a list. This maneuver tends, as I shall shortly argue, to perform their equivalence for certain purposes.

What, then, of the specifics of Crossman’s list? It is very impor­tant to say that his array is not idiosyncratic, some kind of invention unique to its author. For if narratives are indeed performative, then it is important to ask how much, to what extent, where, and how, the distributions that they entail are being performed, which implies a series of questions about interference that demand empirically com­plex answers. These answers will have us both attending to the dif­ferences between distributions just as much as their similarities and 144 Decisions referring to material forms quite other than talk.11 shall touch on both

of these issues in what follows. But in the present context we can simply say that Crossman’s division performs, or at any rate assists in the performance of, a version of a distribution that is also being enacted in a wide variety of other locations—and indeed, by a wide variety of participants and observers. It is, in other words, not some strange aberration.

Let me give some examples of other related lists or arrays.

—Though, since it comes from the same source, this is not the strongest form of evidence, a little later in Crossman’s own narra­tive we come across another, similar, distribution (exhibit 7.2).2 —Harold Wilson, who was Prime Minister and chaired the cabinet meeting, performs his own array that roughly coincides with the first two (exhibit 7.3).

—Though exhibit 7.4 does not reproduce the list in full, observers close to Denis Healey, the Defence Minister, describe a choice that maps on to those performed by Wilson and Crossman (exhibit 7.4). —An extract from a Ministry of Defence press statement released on the day the TSR2 cancellation was announced generates a fur­ther distribution that can, again, be related to Crossman’s (exhibit 7.5).

So it is important that these lists perform themselves in ways that tend to overlap—though we will need to attend carefully to the ways

EXHIBIT 7.2 ”In the end, after another confusing discussion, Harold Wilson summed up: there were three possi bilities. Possi bi lity 1 was to cancel TSR2 with­out taking up the American option. Possibility 2 was to cancel while taking up the option. And possibility 3 was to keep TSR2 for the time being and make our final decision after we had finished the strategic reappraisal.” (Crossman 1975, 191)

EXHIBIT 7.3 ”But we had to have a decision, and the Cabinet was called again for 10.00 p. m. By midnight I had to resolve a difficult. . . decision. The Cabi­net was split three ways; some favoured continuing with TSR 2; some favoured its outright cancellation; and the third group supported the Defence Secretary’s view that TSR 2 should go but that its military role should be taken over by an order for American Phantoms, together with one for a number of F 111As.” (Wilson 1971, 89-90)

EXHIBIT 7.4 ”The conclusion that TSR-2 was expendable was made possible be­cause a low-cost substitute exi sted in the high performance multi -mi ssion F-111, which the American government was prepared to sell to Britain. Had this aircraft not been available then TSR-2 might have been saved. One of Healey’s top plan­ners admitted that ‘the F-111 made cancellation of TSR-2 possible.”’ (Reed and Williams 1971, 183)

EXHIBIT 7.5 ”It will not be possible to define. . . [operational] tasks precisely until the defence review is completed later this year. This review may show that the number of aircraft required with TSR.2 performance characteristics may be substantially below the existing TSR.2 programme. On certain hypotheses about long term commitments it might even be possible to re-shape our defences in such a way as to dispense with this type of aircraft altogether. We shall make every effort to see how far existing or planned British aircraft. . . will meet the whole or part of the requirement. In order to ensure that our Services have appropri­ate aircraft in sufficient numbers H. M.G. have secured an option from the United States Government on the F.111A aircraft at a price per aircraft which even on a full scale programme would represent less than half the estimated total TSR.2 research, development and production cost.” (Defence 1965, para. 5) they fail to overlap in due course. It is also important that they over­lap, or don’t, in a number of different locations—though here, to be sure, I have considered only linguistic distributions while the perfor­mance (or otherwise) of dispersal across space and time in alternative materials is equally relevant.

Nevertheless, it is significant that various aircraft—the TSR2 itself, the F111, the F111A, the Phantom, and (here unnamed) British war – planes—keep on reappearing. It’s going to be significant because what we usually think of as decision making—and here Political decision making—may be understood as the performance of certain forms of overlapping distribution. These distributions resemble one another or may at any rate (and the nuance is vital) be made to resemble one another. Though multiple, they share, at least in some measure, cer­tain strategic features, features that help to render them also as sin – gular.3

So what, then, are those strategic features? What are the ‘‘technolo – 146 Decisions gies’’ of decisions, or Political decisions—that make themselves im-

portant? What kinds of distributions do these attempt? These are the questions that I now want to tackle.

The first distribution is more than a distribution. It is another of these great dualisms, the performance of a great divide between reality and fantasy. None of the exhibits actually says anything about this, pre­sumably because there is no need to. But look, nonetheless, at the way this is done. For instance, all the exhibits take it for granted that the possibilities on offer are mutually exclusive, that they are in­deed just that, “options’’—which means that decision makers need to make a choice between possible scenarios, with the possibility of one, but only one, future reality. Thus the need for ‘‘hard choices’’ is per­formed for, and by, the British cabinet,4 and the possibility of what the poststructuralists sometimes call ‘‘undecidability’’ disappears. Or, if it doesn’t disappear, it is at least severely circumscribed and treated as a ‘‘technical’’ matter to be dealt with by (temporary) postponement, in the form of deferral that I have already discussed.5 Pursuing more than one option is thus performed as a fantasy.

But even before the four ‘‘options’’ are brought into being, a distri­bution has already taken place, one that frames the list, reduces it.

This is a distribution between that which is possible, and that which is not. For it is perfectly possible to imagine other possibilities, in principle. One might imagine, for instance, keeping TSR2 and buy­ing an American aircraft, or doing away with the whole lot, TSR2 and any of its alternatives, or abandoning NATO, joining the Warsaw Pact and buying Russian aircraft, or, for that matter, abandoning any form of military defense at all. Such options are not inconceivable. But by the time the decision is being considered, these and any other op­tions have been removed from the universe of possibilities or, perhaps more likely, were never conceived as options in the first place. They have thus been performed as imaginary rather than real.6

Fantasy and reality. They say of politics that it is the art of the pos­sible, a place where ‘‘hard decisions’’ are made. But this itself is a per­formative distribution. It is performed in each of the exhibits cited earlier. It is an interference, an overlap. Or it is a coordination. If I were being aggressive I would add that it is also self-serving because Decisions 147

it works to distinguish between so-called “dreamers” and ‘‘realists’’ — in favor of the latter, to be sure, who are thus built up as hard-headed heroes. Perhaps, however, it would be better to say more evenhand- edly that a commitment to the importance of taking ‘‘hard decisions’’ —in Politics as elsewhere—is the art of enforcing the very distinction between reality and fantasy and of insisting on the division as one of the foundations of things. This division, for instance, confines fan­tasy to fairy tales or the dreamier realms of the academy and reality to the world, and then, to be sure, allocates specific possible futures between these two classes.7

So this is an ontological performance—the particular definition of the conditions of possibility that frames and also enacts decision making. For even in performances that make quite different specific allocations to reality and fantasy, that disagree about the reality or otherwise of the possibilities being debated, the great division be­tween reality and fantasy is being performed and sustained—col – laboratively, so to speak.

Debate in High Politics, this performance of the art of the possible, thus turns around boundary disputes: about what might be classed as real and what might not, but never about the existence of the bound­ary itself, or, indeed, the existence of these two great regions.8 So this is the first great distribution, the first coordination, the first great technology of decision making. It is the abolition of the space that exists between fantasy and reality and the abolition of the possibility of living in that space.9

The second overlapping distribution effaces certain forms of being, and then, more importantly, effaces the fact that they have been ef­faced. This, to be sure, is something that has concerned all those who ever wrote about ideology or the one-dimensionality of the political. But the difference is this: I have no particular notion about what is being effaced and I want to make the argument empirically. This jour­ney will take us first into an inquiry about what is not being effaced and how it is distributed. So how does this work?

The answer is that it varies. It may come in discursive, mathemati­cal, tabular, or pictorial form: any of these may generate one form 148 Decisions or another of a list. But if we stick for now with the discursive, then

in the present case each of the exhibits performs relations between a series of options. Each performs relations that distribute these op­tions within the class of realities, distribute them as more or less desirable. It may do so directly as, for instance, in exhibit 7.5, or in­directly and by implication, as in exhibit 7.6.

EXHIBIT 7.6 ”The decision has been taken after a thorough review of all the infor – mati on that can be made available. The basic facts are that the TSR.2 i s too expen­sive and has got to be stopped. The planned programme for the TSR.2 would have cost about £750m. for research, development and production.” (Defence 1965, para. 2)

So such discursive moves operate to rank options. But this is just the beginning, for we are not dealing with a single discourse, a single mode of distribution. Rather, options are being mounted, performed, and ranked in several ways and in several discourses: indeed, within a multidiscursive space. For instance, the last part of exhibit 7.5, and exhibit 7.6 (again taken from the Ministry of Defence press re­lease) both talk of costs. They say that the F111A is cheaper than the TSR2. But the earlier part of exhibit 7.5 argues on quite different, strategic grounds—hinting that under certain circumstances both the TSR2 and the F111A might compare unfavorably with alternative British aircraft10 (a possibility obliquely picked up by Crossman in exhibit 7.7).

EXHIBIT 7.7 ”We are cutting back the British aircraft industry in order to concen­trate on maintaining our imperial position East of Suez. And we are doing that not because we need these bases ourselves but because the Americans can’t defend the Far East on their own and need us there.” (Crossman 1975, 156)

And there are further kinds of discursive distributions, for instance, to do with the viability of the British aircraft industry or the national balance of payments (see exhibit 7.1), but since I am concerned with the similarities and the interferences, we do not need to go into these here. For if each is mobilized to perform difference, to construct and distribute aircraft options, and to rank those options, then this all de – pendsonthevery possibility of comparison. Each difference depends

on making judgments, judgments between options, judgments that depend on their similarity. It thus involves the performance of a series of homogenizing moves. This may sound odd, given that we are deal­ing with one of the most controversial decisions in British defense policy since the Second World War—or, indeed, that we are dealing with a multidiscursive or at least a fractionally discursive rather than a monodiscursive space (a point to which I shall return). Nonetheless, the performance of these differences is framed within the possibility of accountability. It depends on, it could never be mustered without, the performance of a framing of similarity, of singularity.11

Two points.

(1) Decision making tends to perform itself as the cockpit of differ­ence. It is where, as it were, different options are brought together and focused. Nowhere is this clearer than in High Politics, where the dif­ferences that are said to be important are worked out in debate. But though all of this is right, it is right only to the most limited degree be­cause the performance of discursive difference precisely depends on the performance of discursive similarity. The making of difference, the kind of difference performed in decision making, thus demands and rests upon, the possibility of accountable similarity. That which cannot be said, or at any rate cannot be said in the right place, re­moves itself from the place of the Political becoming something quite Other.12

(2) This follows from the first point. If decision making tends to perform itself as the cockpit of important difference, then it performs not only a distribution between what may be said in important places where big decisions are made and what may not, but it also denies that anything ‘‘important’’ (or, for instance, politically serious) has been effaced. In other words, it performs most of the relations in the world as Unspeakable because they are ‘‘technical,’’ a matter of ‘‘detail,’’ or ‘‘aesthetic,’’ or ‘‘personal,’’ or because they belong to the realm of‘‘fic – tion’’ or whatever.

And this is the second great technology of important decision mak­ing, another product of interference and collaborative overlap be­tween different performances. It is one that we have come across in other guises—for instance, in the form of delegation of the pictorial into the ‘‘merely illustrative.” But now we can see that it increases its 150 Decisions size by effacing the fact that it effaces almost everything that might in

another world be counted as important.13 Or, to put it a little differ­ently, in the context of big important Politics it deletes almost all of what we might call ‘‘the political’’ when this is understood as a tex­ture of distributions and distributive possibilities performed in and through all relations.

Real decision makers are (made) powerful. For instance, they com­mand obedience and, then again, they make ‘‘decisions.’’ Both of these traits imply the performance of further distributions that have to do with agency. For real decision makers are made as agents. They act, and, in the extreme case, they are not acted upon. This may sound obvious but should not be taken for granted—for there are other con­texts in which, for instance, the TSR2 is endowed with the power to act. We have seen circumstances and locations in which the tech­nology, the machine, is performed as mobile, active, virile. We have seen how virility is built by distributing to passivity features of cul­ture such as other agents (the enemy or the home) or parts of nature (such as landmarks or clearings in the woods), which (since the effect is one of contrast) means that these wait, wait to be acted upon by the aircraft.

But this is not what is happening here. The distribution is quite the other way round. It is people, specific people or particular collectivi­ties of people, who are being performed as active. So we have cabinet ministers, these are made to be active. And then we have the cabinet itself, which is certainly being performed as an entity with the power to act. At the same time various aircraft, and in particular the TSR2 (but no doubt such other actors as the F111A) are being rendered pas­sive as they wait for the decisions of cabinet ministers and the cabinet.

Such, at any rate, is one of the distributions being performed in all the early exhibits. Indeed, so thoroughly and pervasively is it being performed (in this world who could imagine an aircraft making a de­cision?) that it is never said in as many words, but simply taken for granted.14

So to talk of‘‘decisions’’ is to perform ‘‘decision makers’—here poli – ticians—as agents. They act, but they also act in the right place at the right time; for otherwise their acts are ineffectual or they are not Decisions 151

“important decisions.’’ And here, to be sure, the right place at the right time means ‘‘the cabinet’’ or (to make similarities out of differ­ences) ‘‘the government” (or ‘‘Her Majesty’s Government”). To borrow a phrase from actor-network theory, these are the obligatory points of passage fashioned to be the center of the political universe, the places through which everything is made to pass.15

This is all very straightforward. Indeed it is obvious to the point of banality. The problem is that its very banality tends to deaden our critical faculties. So we need to remind ourselves that ‘‘the right place’’ and the ‘‘right time’’ are not given in the order of things, but that they are rather conditions of possibility made within sets of rela­tions, generated in difference.16 So, like the other differences we have discussed, powerful places are to be understood as the effects of the interferences between distributive performances, even (or perhaps one might add especially) in the divisions performed by those who do not like what they hear about the decisions emanating from those times and places.

Look, for instance, at the distribution performed in exhibit 7.8, which is a parliamentary motion from the Conservative opposition

EXHIBIT 7.8 ”[I beg to move] that this house deplores the action of Her Majesty’s Government in cancelling the TSR2 project.” (Crossman 1975, 132) party. It objects to the cancellation of the TSR2, which means that indeed it makes a difference. It makes a difference between govern­ment and opposition. But, at the same time, it performs ‘‘Her Maj­esty’s Government” in a way that would excite no dissent from Her Majesty’s Government’s most partisan supporter. So ‘‘Her Majesty’s Government” is being made as an obligatory point of passage, the rele­vant obligatory point of passage. In this way of telling, nowhere else is it right to perform the cancellation of the TSR2: the government is made, assumed, to be the place where it is possible to perform that cancellation, where it is appropriate so to do. And all this is being done in a performance made by the ‘‘loyal opposition.’’

This, then, is the third great interference or overlap that produces important decision making and thus the decisions of High Politics. It 152 Decisions is a performance of place, of sociotechnical location. The effect is to

produce a distribution between center and periphery, and to efface the possibility that there are other locations that might escape the gravitational pull of that center—or, indeed, the possibility that the world might perform itself without the need of special centers. But such a thought is, as they say, a fantasy.

Now I encounter a methodological problem. This is because I want to make an argument about discretion. I want to argue that the big places where ‘‘decisions’’ are taken, make themselves, are made, discretion­ary.17 As a part of this I also want to suggest that such places are per­formed as seeing further, that they are turned into places where mat­ters are centered or (to use Bruno Latour’s phrase) ‘‘drawn together’’ (Latour 1990). Or at any rate, I want to say that they are performed as having the capacity to act in a far-seeing discretionary manner, even if they are sometimes said to get it wrong, which is what the Con­servative opposition was claiming about the decision to cancel the TSR2. To use a jargon, they are created as centers of translation or calculation.

Discretion and its performance: look again at exhibits 7.9 and 7.10 (the two form a pair). Crossman’s complaint is that he is a cabinet

EXHIBIT 7.9 ”The papers are full of reports about the TSR2 and discussion of whether we are going to cancel it or not. Day after day I read this in my morning paper but as a member of the Cabinet I know absolutely nothing about it. Even on Thursday when we had Cabinet the issue wasn’t discussed. I read in the papers that it was being discussed in Chequers this weekend, with George Wigg and his pals present and people like me completely excluded.” (Crossman 1975, 132)

EXHIBIT 7.10 ”Actually, I am not against what is going on and I shan’t complain; but it is true that when the issue comes up to Cabinet for final decision, those of us who are not departmentally concerned will be unable to form any opinion at all.” (Crossman 1975, 132) minister and that no doubt he will have to vote about the TSR2 one way or another, but that he is not where the action is (which is a ver­sion of the point made earlier about central places). In particular, he

is complaining that he is not where the necessary information is to be found, which means that he is not being performed as a proper, dis­cretionary, decision maker, someone who can take an overview and weigh up the merits of the options. He will not (he says somewhat in­consistently, having just expressed a quite specific view) be able to form ‘‘any opinion at all.’’

So Crossman describes something about the proper performance of discretion and its location, and performs himself in a different, nondiscretionary place. But once again these performances overlap, for there are endless examples allocating discretion to the cabinet, to government. For instance in exhibit 7.8, the censure of the opposi­tion assumes that the government could have acted otherwise and re­tained the TSR2. So, though the difference between government and opposition is real enough, it rests upon the performance of a shared assumption: that the government indeed has discretion in this matter.

But what is the methodological problem? The methods by which cabinet ministers or cabinets are generated as discretionary centers of calculation is difficult to uncover and would require a study unlike the one I’m attempting here. The two points are somewhat related, but I will deal with the second first.

The problem may be succinctly stated. We are here located in the public domain and are watching the performance of a more or less public Politics. To be sure, the boundary between what is ‘‘public’’ and what is “confidential” is a construction (I explored a closely re­lated distinction in chapter 2) and is, even when built, always blurred and subject to renegotiation (Crossman’s diaries record and repro­duce discussions that are scarcely ‘‘public’’). Nevertheless, what I am not doing here is offering the ethnographic or historical material that would be needed to show how the space of discretion—the various aircraft options—is built. I’m not exploring how the discursive ar­guments that rank them are constructed as an effect of the distribu­tions recursively performed within the networks of the administra­tive apparatus. Instead, I am simply reproducing a very small portion of that apparatus, which, let it be noted, in some measure reproduces the position in which the discretionary cabinet ministers find them­selves as they wade through their briefs (see exhibit 7.11 which is by the Ministry of Defence Chief Scientific Advisor).

154 Decisions This, then, is the first version of the methodological problem. I am

EXHIBIT 7.11 ”A few weeks after. .. [Denis Healey] took over, he asked me. . . for a personal appreciation of the TSR2 project, of which, when in opposition, he had been highly critical. As a basis, I used the report that I had prepared for Watkin – son [an earlier Minister of Defence], amending it in accordance with what I had learned in the three years that had followed, and consulting only my own files. Healey went over the report line by line, with me at his side, and in my mind’s eye I can still see him underlining passages.” (Zuckerman 1988, 219) neither in the right place nor undertaking the right kind of study if I want to tell stories about the administrative performance of the cabi­net as a center of translation or explore the performative character of what is sometimes referred to as ‘‘governmentality.’’18

But there is a second and more interesting way of conceiving of the difficulty. This is to say that I am running aground on another distri­bution that is relevant to the performance of decision making—and in particular the decision making of High Politics. Indeed, the traces of such a difficulty are not hard to find in what I have been talking about. For instance, I mention ‘‘the public domain’’ and contrast this with what is “confidential”; and then I talk of the need for a ‘‘detailed’’ ethnographic or historical study; and finally I refer to the ‘‘adminis­trative apparatus.’’ But these are distributive tropes that come straight out of the discourses that perform a centered version of High Politics.

And, like the other instances we have looked at, they perform their distributions asymmetrically in at least two different ways.

First, the division between the public and the confidential operates to (try to) conceal almost everything that might be said about the basis of government and, in particular, about the way in which High Politi­cal discretion is generated. True, as mentioned earlier, the boundary between the public and what is ‘‘properly’’ confidential is permeable.

Crossman’s diaries breach the divide (though they did not do so at the time the events were taking place). And, more generally, the talk of ‘‘leaks’’ bears witness to the frequency with which the divide is breached. But this very way of talking strengthens my point because it also performs the division between that which should be public and that which should not. For (as is obvious) a leak is matter out of place, a displacement of secret fluid that should have stayed in its

container.19 Decisions 155

Second, the division between political decision making and ad­ministration operates, in a hierarchical manner, to distinguish be­tween that which is Politically important in terms of Big Decisions, and that which is not. “Operations,” “administration,” “accountancy,” “technology,” these are terms of contrast. They stand in contrast with ‘‘Political decision making,’’ and this is a contrast that works in at least two ways. First, it works to efface the politically distributive character of technology, administration, and all the rest by implying that these are essentially nonpolitical. This reproduces another version of one of the distributions discussed earlier—the performance of a narrow and specific version of the political, one that indeed limits itself to High Politics. And second (which perhaps amounts to much the same thing) it relegates that which is not told as important decision making to a ghetto, a ghetto that is henceforth called ‘‘detail.’’ We have en­countered this before in several different forms, for instance, in the division between technics and aesthetics and in the organization of the brochure. But this time the divide is posed, at least in part, in terms of interest. It is posed in terms of what counts as interesting and what does not. This argument tells of and performs the command­ing heights of Political decision making while relegating to the distant foothills of detail such routine matters as administration, technology, or illustration.

Discretion and discretionary places are created in a ramifying net­work of representational distributions. They do not exist in and of themselves. But the way in which such representational distributions perform discretion is in large measure concealed, performed as non­political, and imagined as essentially uninteresting technical ‘‘detail.’’ So this is the fourth distribution of decision making, another place of overlap and interference. It is the performance of a distinction be­tween means and ends that graces important decisions, including those of High Politics, with a special place at the top of the greasy pole where the big and important decisions are taken, while effacing all the routines, the politics, that make this distribution possible in the first place.20

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

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.

Earlier I suggested exhibit 2.1 is perspectival in character. But so too are exhibits 2.9 and 2.10. It is clear to all but the naive reader that these are pictures of the same object. In other words, we are justified in de­tecting the operation of yet another strategy for coordinating possibly different objects—that of perspectivalism.

I shall have more to say about this later, so let me just note for the moment that perspectivalism assumes a world that is Euclidean in character; that is, it assumes that the world is built as a three­dimensional volume occupied by objects. These objects, which in – Objects 21

elude a variety of positions for viewing, have locations and (at any rate in the case of objects) themselves occupy three-dimensional vol­umes.

This is why when we look at individual perspectival drawings of the kind in exhibits 2.9 and 2.10, we tend to see a three-dimensional object, for instance an aircraft, rather than some lines on a sheet of paper. The theory of linear perspective holds that we project the lines that appear on the paper in such a drawing back into a Euclidean vol­ume of space. That volume is occupied by a three-dimensional object that would, had it been located in such a space, have traced itself onto a two-dimensional surface in a way that corresponds with the lines on the sheet of paper. Thus in linear perspective a viewer or subject position is made that ‘‘sees’’ an ‘‘object,’’ the aircraft, even though it sees only a sheet of paper. Or, to put it differently, what is on the sheet of paper tends to produce the sense of an object because it helps to reproduce a Euclidean version of reality.

Furthermore, and an important part of this strategy, different per- spectival sketches are easily coordinated within the system. There is a formal projective geometry for saying this, but let me put it infor­mally. One of the Euclidean assumptions of perspectivalism is that a single three-dimensional object can generate multiple two-dimen­
sional perspectival depictions. Objects, the same objects, simply look different if we look at them from different standpoints. And this is what is happening here. The coordinating assumption is that there is an aircraft, the TSR2, and that it is fixed in shape. That singular fixity will generate all sorts of possible two-dimensional perspectival configurations. So long as the depictions conform to these configu­rations and do not demand an impossible three-dimensional object, then we tend to see the same three-dimensional object when we look at different perspectival drawings, as we do here.

I started this chapter with two beginnings. One had to do with multi­plicity, indirection, and the coherence of subject positions. The other concerned the reflexive problem of the personal. Now it is possible to say that they overlap and interfere with one another.

Some observations.

I want to assert, against the purifying tropes of modernism, that whatever is personal is also social. Always. Whatever we conceal, we think is shameful, inappropriate, self-indulgent, uninteresting, what­ever we conceal is also social. Elias tells us this.

It may, of course, also be shameful, inappropriate, self-indulgent, or plain, downright uninteresting at the same time as being as social.

All of these are real possibilities which we watch being performed every day. They are, indeed, performed in one way by Elias and Fou­cault in their writing—if only because they choose never to talk about their own “repressions,” their own subjectivities. But if we assume, as I have in this chapter, that narratives perform subject positions and object positions, then there is, at least in principle, the possibility that subject positions, those positions that constitute us as knowing sub­jects, are relevant if we want to understand the performativity of nar­ratives, to understand how distributions are being made, if we want to understand what is being said and what is not.

So that is a first possibility. There is continuity between subjects Subjects 61

and objects, and we are lodged in, made by multiple and overlap­ping distributions, which shuffle that which is made ‘‘personal’’ and that which is rendered ‘‘eternal’’ into two heaps. And that process of shuffling is worthy of deconstructing in a contemporary version of the vanitas because it performs obviousnesses. And in particular be­cause it performs obviousnesses.

This is where, having journeyed almost all the way with the semi­otics of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, I finally part company from them. This is a methodological point. For I would argue that the body is a particularly sensitive instrument in part precisely because the semiotics of subject-object relations don’t come in big blocks like ideologies, discourses, or epistemes. Let me be more cautious. They may come in big blocks in certain respects. Perhaps the conditions of possibility are, indeed, in some ways uniform, singular. But they aren’t that way all the time. For smaller blocks, narratives, semiotic logics, distributions—these are multiples that are also capable of in­terfering with and eroding one another. At any rate they are capable of doing so under certain circumstances, in particular places or insti­tutions. They can produce multiplicities that do not effortlessly coa­lesce to make singularities. In, for instance, the practices within a building, the intertextualities that pass through the body, the hetero­topic space within that makes us, interpellates us and our materials in multiple ways.32

Lighten our darkness. Deliver us this day from the obviousness of our simplicities.

This is why I am more optimistic than Louis Althusser. There is mileage to be gained by attending to interferences that make multi­plicities. And it is also why the body is so important. For it is a de­tector, a finely tuned detector of narrative diffraction patterns. It is an exquisite and finely honed instrument that both performs and detects patterns of interference, those places where the peaks come together and there is extra light. And those, such as the place I found myself in the summer of 1989, where there is dark, where there is some­thing wrong, where the energies cancel one another out. Where multi­plicity is not reduced.

This suggests that there is a place for the body, not only as the flesh and narrative blood that walks in what we used to call ‘‘the field’’ 62 Subjects bringing back reports, reports of how it is ‘‘out there,’’ but also that

there is room for the body, for the personal, in the narratives that are later performed, that perform themselves through us as we tell of nar­rative diffractions and interferences. For the personal, when we come to sense it in this way, is no longer ‘‘personal.’’ It is no longer nec­essarily personal, however it may be constructed by the modernist – inclined heirs to the civilizing process. It may be understood and performed rather as a location, one particular location, of narrative overlap. A place of multiplicity, of patterns, of patterns of narrative interference. And of irreduction.

Whether we tell stories about ourselves as we perform our situated knowledges will depend on what we are trying to achieve and on the context in which we are seeking to achieve it. The performance of re – flexivity and diffraction does not necessarily demand the immediate visibility of a narrator. But the issues are situated, specific, rhetorical, and political in character rather than great issues of principle. For it is itself wrong, a confusion, a self-indulgence, to forget that the body is a site, an important site, where subjectivities and interpellations produce effects that are strange and beautiful—indeed sometimes ter­rible. And these are effects that might make a difference if were able to attend to their intertextualities.

For instance, there are moments—I lived through one that I have already described—when the possibility of performing coordination between narratives is lost and it is no longer possible to link subject positions together in this way or that, to make a single story; when it is no longer possible to create, perform, and be performed by an ob­ject that is turned into a singularity; when it is no longer possible to work, as it were, perspectivally. In such moments, the interferences and overlaps perform themselves into ‘‘a’’ subject that is broken, frag­mented, and decentered; a subject that is therefore interpellated by— and interpellates—a multiplicity of different objects and thereby sud­denly apprehends that the failure to center is not simply a failure but also a way of becoming sensitive to the multiplicities of the world. At that moment, failure to center is also a way of learning that objects are made, and that there are many of them. It is a way of learning that objects are decentered—aset of different object positions—and a way of attending to the indirections of interference. It is also a way of ap­prehending that knowing is as much about making, about ontology, about what there is, as it ever was about epistemology. Subjects 63

A final question. Could I have done all this without introducing the personal?

The answer is no. Perhaps I could have made arguments like these and told it otherwise in some version or other of the god-trick. But this is not how the method of bodily interference produced its effects. So I’ll finish with another question. If we are constituted as know­ing subjects, interpellated, in ways that we do not tell, then what are we doing? What are we telling? What are we making of our objects of study? Or, perhaps better, what are they making of us?

The question is real, isn’t it? At any rate it’s real from where I stand. For finally, in a study of the TSR2, it turns itself into something spe­cific that is also not specific. If those of us who study military tech – nologies—and those who dream of them, design them, fly them—do not reflect on the aesthetics of our interpellations then we are not at­tending to a way of living stories that runs through us. A way of living stories that is arousing, in some ways dangerously so, that effaces the ontological in favor of the perspectival, and that makes a difference and continues to strain toward the singularities of military and tech­nological discourse.33 This is the power of a reflexive technoscience studies: it can attend to, and learn from, dangerous arousal.

Multilingualism is not merely the property of several systems each of which would be homogeneous in itself: it is primarily the line of flight or of varia­tion which affects each system by stopping it from being homogeneous. —Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues

So there are multiplicities. There are multiple distributions of sub­jects and multiple distributions of objects. And these distributions overlap. Sometimes the overlaps work to make patterns of light, somewhat singular narratives. Sometimes they consolidate them­selves to make coherences, simplicities. And sometimes they do not —and then we find that we are left in the dark places, turned into a fragmented set of subject positions confronted by an equally unco­ordinated set of object positions.

No doubt this is uncomfortable. But, if we can work it right, per­haps in those dark moments it is easiest to learn about the making of objects and the making of subjects because in those moments it is easiest to attend to the work of distribution and coordination. And, in particular, those are the moments when it is easiest to avoid being dazzled by problems of epistemological authority and deal, instead, with ontology: with the making of what there is or there could be, with the conditions of possibility. With the performances that other­wise tend to reenact singularity. This, then, is the interest in interfer­ences, that they allow us both to rethink and survey the character of distribution—with how it is that matters are made and arranged in the world.

In this chapter I follow Sharon Traweek and tell more stories while looking for the distributions that they make. I also follow Annemarie Mol by attending to the ways stories describe and make links: con­nections and disconnections or similarities and differences—that is, by attending to their interferences.11 argue that to tell stories is to per­form ‘‘cultural tasks.’’ It is to distribute, to say what exists or does not. And it is to coordinate, to saywhat goes with or does not go with, what else. This means that I’m assuming, as I have above, that storytelling is performative: it makes or may make a difference in the multilingual world mentioned by Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet. Talk may, as it were, talk itself into being, and the stories told may shift their ma-

terial form, may perform their logic from texts or voiced words into bodies and architectures, into other forms of flesh, and into stone. So the echoes here are also with that material version of semiotics called actor-network theory and with the understandings in cultural anthropology or cultural studies of the ways in which, for instance, communities may be imagined and told into being as different stories overlap.2

Let’s go back to the fixing of parameters. Remember: ‘‘If the gust re­sponse parameter, G, is fixed to give a certain response level, and the operational Mach number and the aircraft weight are also fixed, then from (1) it is clear that at-S becomes constant.’’ So G and Mare fixed.

Now let’s turn to W So why or how has weight been fixed? This is another paper chase. It takes us to a document that we have come across before:

It is desirable both from the point of view of development time and cost, that a proposed aircraft to any given specification should be as small as possible. For any project study the opti­mum size of aircraft is obtained by iteration during the initial

design stages. The size of aircraft which emerges from this itera­tion process is a function of many variables. Wing area is deter­mined by performance and aerodynamic requirements. Fuselage size is a function of engine size and the type of installation, vol­ume of equipment, fuel and payload, aerodynamic stability re­quirements and the assumed percentages of the internal volume ofthe aircraft which can be utilised. (English Electric/Short Bros. 1958, 2.1.8)

So there are many variables, too many for us to magnify. Let’s stick with engines. For aircraft size (and therefore weight) is not simply a matter of the ‘‘size and type of installation.” It’s also, and even more immediately, a function of the number of engines. Here is OR 339 again: ‘‘The Air Staff require the aircraft design to incorporate two en­gines’’ (Air Ministry 1958, para. 9). Two engines. But why? Well, we already know the answer because we looked at the English Electric brochure in the previous chapter. Pilots don’t like flying supersonic aircraft with only one engine when that engine fails.9 So the pilots are back again. This time they are not being frightened by oscillation or nauseated, but they are worrying about something else. Another dif­ference that is absent but present: the worry is that supersonic aircraft are more likely to crash, and the OR 339 aircraft has to travel a long way from home.

But there are other possible differences. We know that Vickers Arm­strong wanted a single-engine aircraft: ‘‘From the very beginning of our study of the G. O.R. we believed that if this project was to move forward into the realm of reality—or perhaps more aptly the realm of practical politics—it was essential that the cost of the whole project should be kept down to a minimum whilst fully meeting the require­ment. This led us towards the small aircraft which, by concentrating the development effort on the equipment, offers the most economical solution as well as showing advantages from a purely technical stand­point.’’10 And these were the arguments: it would sell better; it would be more lethal per pound spent; and it could interest the Royal Navy because they might use it on their aircraft carriers (Vickers Armstrong 1958c, 2-3).

Present/ Absent
FIGURE 5.6
Weight

Heterogeneity/Noncoherence

Aircraft safety, pilot worry, the need to fly far from base. This set of considerations tends to fix W at a higher value and thus make the air­craft heavier. Cost, cost-effective lethality, naval use, practical poli­tics, sales, this second set of considerations tends to fix W at a lower value and thus make the aircraft lighter.

So there are two sets of connections, two sets of relations of differ­ence. This is old territory for those who study technoscience. It’s a controversy. As we know, the Air Ministry is going to disagree with Vickers and stick with its large, twin-engine aircraft: ‘‘The reply by D. F.S. to D. O.R.(A)’s request for a study on the single versus twin en­gined aircraft was received 16th July. It showed fairly conclusively that the twin engined configuration is the less costly in accidents’’ (AIR8/2196 1958b, para. 43).

But if it is a controversy, it is something else too. It is another form of absence/presence. For controversy and disagreement are absent from W. They are absent from the formalism. There is no room for con­troversy in formalisms. Trade-offs, reciprocal relations, all kinds of subtle differences and distributions yes, but controversies no. And noncoherences not at all.

For, if the arguments about the size of the aircraft, about W, about the number of engines it should carry, are a form of controversy, they are also an expression of noncoherence, dispersal, and lack of con­nection. For the Air Ministry is talking about one thing while Vickers