Category AIRCRAFT STORIES

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

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

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

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

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.

If agency is a matter of multiple distributions, and those distributions are effected in many different coordinations and contrasts, then to understand the character of agency it becomes necessary to explore the character of these interferences. It becomes important to explore the ways in which they overlap or don’t. And it also becomes impor­tant to explore the Others that are generated in the course of setting up those contrasts—which means, predominantly, the distributions of passivity and their corresponding interferences.

The specific conclusion I want to draw in this chapter is that the performance of technological agency is complex. Perhaps technolo­gies are indeed predominantly characterized by their capacity for action in a series of partially related contrasts. In the present case we have come across a series of pairs: activity and passivity, invulner­ability and vulnerability, transcendence and mundanity, resource­using and constitution as a resource, containment and contained threat, rapist and victim, technical controller and technical outcome, man and woman, and woman and man. All of these are different (in some cases considerably so), but they all tend to perform the tech­nology as an active and controlling agent and to distribute those con­trasts in a way that simultaneously performs the passivity and vul­nerability of (aspects of) nature and culture.

140 Aesthetics I am arguing, then, that the distribution being built by the brochure

is strong precisely because of its complexity. It is a complex of inter­ferences between different and partially connected strategies for dis­tributing agency and passivity. For if the distributions are different, indeed so different that in places they appear to be in direct contra­diction, those contradictions are problematic only if they are brought together. But this does not happen. Often they work to reinforce one another, but because they are distributed, kept apart, even their in­consistencies are not necessarily troubling. In a multiple or a frac­tional world constituted from partial connections,37 there is no great premium on “overall” consistency—for there is no overall viewpoint, no god-eye view. Thus the division between the ‘‘purified’’ realms of the aesthetic and the ‘‘strictly technical’’ is precisely a source of poten­tial power. For if these are said to have nothing to do with one another, then they can work in quite contrary ways to generate mutually sup­porting distributions or singularities. This helps to explain why the aesthetic might be so deeply removed from and subordinated to the technical in modernism and yet also remain so important to it. For the aesthetic entertains contrasts that are impossible within the tech­nical or the pragmatic, contrasts that are discursively inconsistent or outrageous but that often enough work with those of the technical to produce singularity.

So agency, including technical agency, is performed in both techni­cal and aesthetic distributions. But if these strategies for coordination have their specificities (and of course it is consistent with the argu­ment that this is the case) we need to study both.38 It becomes impor­tant to avoid treating the aesthetic as ‘‘merely illustrative’’ while at­tending to what is taken to be ‘‘serious,’’ for to do so is to set draconian and quite unnecessary restrictions on our understanding of the dis­tributions made by technical agency and its Others. But the converse is also true: we also need to attend to that which calls itself‘‘techni – cal.’’ It is important to avoid restrictions that perform purity while, all around us, we are being distributed by impurities in ways that simply pretend to purity.

In short, once again, we are witnesses to the operation of an oscil­lation between singularity and multiplicity, an oscillation that juxta­poses multiplicities in a pattern of interferences that are the neces­sary condition for the strength of singularity thereby generated.

Soyez realiste! Demandez I’impossiblel—Text of French student poster at the time of the 1968 French evenements

S’il y a une tradition quinous singularise, c’est, me semble-t-il, celle quia nom ”politique.” La question de savoir ce qu’est la cite, quiluiappartient, quels droits, quelles responsabilites traduisent cette appartenance, et les mouvements de lutte, inventant des exigences, des obligations et des identi – tes nouvelles, transformant les modes de’appartenance, sont ce quisingular – ise d’abord notre histoire.—Isabelle Stenders, ”Le Medecin et le Charlatan,” in Tobie Nathan and Isabelle Stengers, Medecins et Sorciers

Introduction

So there are multiplicities, multiple subjects and multiple objects. There are interacting performances. And there are many distribu­tions between subjects and objects. Or simply between different ob­jects. And then there are overlaps, resonances, alignments, coordina­tions, and interferences. Performances, multiplicities, distributions, and interferences come together as a package: it is not possible to talk about one without, at least by implication, talking of the others. And the singularities of ‘‘the modern project’’ arise from the interfer­ences between multiplicities produced in that characteristic oscilla­tion between one and many. Singularities arise even if the interfer­ences and the multiplicities are effaced in deferral—are rarely visible, except perhaps as a technical problem to be addressed and resolved in the next bout of problem solving, the next attempt to render ‘‘truly singular.’’

In this chapter I explore the coordinating interferences of politi­cal decision making. I’m interested in capital P Politics, the kind of politics that calls itself‘‘Politics,’’ that makes itself big and important, the methods by which it assures its distributions. And at the same time I am concerned with the overlaps and interferences implied in a notion like ‘‘decision making.’’ My case is the 1965 cancellation of the TSR2 project. Behind schedule and much more expensive than an­ticipated, cancellation, long debated, became a real possibility with the election of a Labour government in late 1964—a government that replaced thirteen years of Conservative administration.

EXHIBIT 7.1”The discussion showed there had been a certain divergence amongst those concerned. James Callaghan, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, wanted to can­cel the plane altogether for purely financial reasons. Ranged against him were (a) Denis Healey, who wanted to cancel the TSR2 and to substitute the American F-111-A, which would mean a certain saving of money but an enormous increase of outlay in dollars; and (b) Roy Jenkins, who wanted to cancel the TSR2 and re­place it with a British plane—which was roughly George Brown’s view as well; and (c) George Wigg, who held the view that we might have to cancel both but we musn’t make any decision until we had finished the strategic reappraisal which would show what kind of plane was required.” (Crossman 1975, 190-91)

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.

The second strategy is almost equally humble. This is the physical structure, not of the aircraft, but of the brochure. As I’ve said, the latter is sixty-odd pages long. More important, these pages are num­bered and bound, together with a cover, a title page, and a table of contents. I shall have more to say about the table of contents shortly. For the moment let me just observe that the cover (exhibit 2.7) maybe understood as a mechanism that glosses whatever it is that will fol­low within the pages of the brochure. Announcing itself in bold type, ‘‘TSR2,’’ and then adding in a smaller cursive typeface, ‘‘Weapons Sys­tem,’’ the cover frames or coordinates the contents of the brochure. Presumptively, then, and as a result of this, everything within the bro – chure—and that includes the above exhibits—will have ‘‘something to do’’ with the TSR2. Physical structure, then, is a second strategy for coordinating disparate objects or object positions.

In order to make sense of all this I now want to tell a rather formal story. I want to imagine that we are concerned with five discourses, five separate discursive forms, five distributions, five modes of in­terpellation. Putting it in this formal way means that the differences that I make are too discrete, too clear, too abrupt. In practice, mat­ters would always be more subtle, less clear. But I do so in order to make a simplicity that will help in the process of exploring a logic of interference.

The discursive forms.

Let me call this first form history, plain history. It is a story, a form of storytelling, that starts at the beginning and moves to the end. A follows B follows C. It is a story that charts the inception, the concep­tion, the development of a project, its growth, and its decline. Perhaps it charts its cancellation. At any rate, it is a story that tells of the tra­jectory of a technoscience project. This small example of the genre comes from a book by a well-known military aviation journalist and commentator, Derek Wood.

By mid 1957 the RAF had formulated its basic requirement under the title of General Operational Requirement No. 339 and it was passed to the Ministry of Supply for action. The Controller Air­craft, Sir Claude Pelly, sent out a letter to industry on GOR.339 on September 9th. (Wood 1975,153)

There is obviously no such thing as ‘‘plain history.’’ All history, ‘‘plain’’ or otherwise, is a narration and a performance. It makes, distrib­utes, and links things together, bringing them into being and assert­ing their significance (or otherwise) by chaining them into possibly chronological sequences. I’ll talk more about the properties of such ‘‘arborescent’’ arrangements in chapter 8. For the moment just let me observe that it performs them too, constituting some kind of truth regime and, no doubt, effecting some consequences. This little ex­cerpt is just that, an excerpt. It makes one or two links in a narrative that would be much longer if we were to spend more time on it. But

in the present context this does not matter, for my point is that in many stories of social science-including those that have to do with technology—there is this sense of something like a lowest common denominator: the making of a series of linked dates and events. This, then this, then this. The effect is the production of something, a set of specificities, specific object positions, which will often subsequently come to act as the ‘‘raw material’’ for other forms of storytelling, other discourses. And at the same time, a set of more or less centered sub­ject positions or a reader/author is produced that makes, that appre­ciates, that is interpellated, by ‘‘the facts as they are’’—the facts, for instance, about a project, an aircraft project.25

I’ll call the second discursive mode policy narrative. This mode tells a story that has something to do with the first narrative, that of plain history, but in policy narrative the specificities are distrib­uted into chains that are energized and achieve value by being given some kind of pragmatic policy relevance. That is, the specificities that might have been built in ‘‘plain history’’ are now awarded the poten­tial for judgment or for contributing to a judgment. This, then, is a normative form of narrative, one that chains itself together by dis­tributing praise, blame, and responsibility. It is energized with polari­ties, with pluses and minuses. And it creates a series of engaged, nor­mative, and more or less centered subject positions. Here is a small example of the genre.

Sixth, and probably the greatest single cause of increased costs, was the repeated delay in getting official decisions, and the per­manent uncertainty which so grievously effected the rhythm of production and from time to time the morale of design and pro­duction teams. (Hastings 1966, 60)

So this is an instance of policy narrative, a story about TSR2, written by a historically minded policy practitioner, Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Stephen Hastings. And the subject made in this form of writing is that of the judge, a location or a role in which the pros and cons, the lessons, may be weighed up.

Narrative style number three is somewhat like number two. It is about judgment, right and wrong. In particular, it is a way of talk­ing and living that is ethical in character. Perhaps, then, the distinc – 56 Subjects tion is like that made by Max Weber between instrumental and value –

rational action. (See Weber 1978, 24.) Here, at any rate, is Labour MP Tam Dalyell in a parliamentary debate that took place immediately after the cancellation of the TSR2, a censure debate:

It is a sombre fact that as the twentieth century rolls on more and more science-based developments have evolved from arma­ments. The right hon. Gentleman is, tragically, historically accu­rate when he says that armaments have been the life-blood of industry, but the fact that he is historically right casts a pretty damning reflection on contemporary capitalism. . . . One of the reasons why I became a Socialist was my belief that in a Social­ist set-up at least one had a chance of creating conditions in which technical progress could be freed from the armaments race. (Hansard 1964-65)

Wertrationalitat rather than Zweckrationalitat. Here the links that provide for the performance of the narrative are normative—but also ethical. The subject positions are interpellated and linked together by means of a particular sense of right and wrong. Interpellation—and relative subject coherence—are achieved by moral means.

Narrative number four is different again. This I will call esoteric narrative (though perhaps all narrative styles are more or less eso – teric—or at least more or less specific). This is because I want to find a way of talking about forms of storytelling that are both local and self­professedly analytical—as, for instance, is the case for most versions of academic storytelling. There are, to be sure, innumerable variants here, just as there are innumerable variants of policy storytelling and, for that matter, of historiography, plain history But sometimes, per­haps often, academia is a place that makes stories, but stories where the links, and so the reader positions, are indeed esoteric in quality: interpellative for a specialist reader, and drawing on but not very di­rectly feeding back into other forms of narration. And it is this sense of removal, of strictly local relevance, that I want to catch by talking in this way So the story I am telling right now (though it performs ar­rangements that will in some measure interfere with other genres) is no doubt a version of esoteric narrative. But so too is this:

At this point, then, the project came properly into being. The

managers had been granted an area of relative autonomy by ac – Subjects 57

tors in the global network; they had been granted what we will call a negotiation space in order to build a local network. (Law and Callon 1988, 289)

This is Michel Callon and John Law working with actor-network theory, making arguments that operate in a more or less local space. And again, as is obvious, there is a relationship between this narra­tive and that of plain history. The one is, in some sense, parasitic on the other.26

And number five? This is rather different: let’s call it aesthetic. It is a form of narrative that has to do with distributing and perform­ing pleasure, with what is beautiful. It makes, in short, a particular form of (no doubt gendered) aesthetic subject.27 This is an issue that I will look at more closely in chapter 6. For now, however, consider the following:

The cockpit felt almost detached from reality. There was no vibra­tion; the only noise a subdued hum from the big turbo jets, the seat comfort as luxurious as an airliner’s and the air condition­ing warm, fresh and comfortable. The instrument panels showed steady readings of flight conditions, engine and systems perfor­mance with no malfunctions; the radio for once silent.

Outside an unbroken cloud sheet stretching below to the pale northern horizon, varied in colour only here and there by long streaks of shadow laid by the low winter sun from behind strato cumulus domes.28

The excerpt is from a book by the test pilot Roland Beamont, and much could be said of it. For instance, like David Bailly’s vanitas it artfully bridges the distinction between public and private, but at the same time it also performs it. The pilot, or so we learn, is a cool technician (‘‘the instrumental panels showed steady readings,’’ and he recognizes ‘‘strato cumulus domes’’). But there is also poetry here, poetry, pleasure, and no doubt sadness too, the sadness of a loss that will come, as the TSR2 is grounded and destroyed. This, then, is a performance of a particular form of aesthetic narrative — another in- terpellative logic, the production of another subject position.

Before we go on with this story of what is absent—about the absence, for instance, of fear—we need to go back to the formalism to under­stand what is happening to G and to forget, for the moment, the crew:

‘‘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.’’ What is happening here? Let’s deal with formalism first.

If G (gust response), M (speed), and W (weight) are fixed, then the only terms that still have freedom to move are at and S. It’s easier to see what’s going on if we rewrite the first expression

M-at G = –

W/S

naissance operations in limited war using nuclear and conventional weapons. Such an aircraft will enable the Royal Air Force to continue to make an effective contribution to the strength of SACEUR’s shield forces, as well as to our other regional pacts.’’ SACEUR is an acro­nym for Supreme Allied Commander Europe, which tells us, as if we didn’t already know, that we have encountered another looming absence/presence: ‘‘We shall wish to consider whether there is a re­quirement for a low level weapon, either manned or unmanned, in case the Russian defences become effective against high flying air­craft and ballistic missiles’’ (AIR8/2167 1957). Here it is at last, made present not in OR 339 but in the correspondence of government min­isters.

And the defenses of the Russian enemy? A background document to OR 339, referring to the earlier Canberra, states that ‘‘the Canberras, operated strictly at a low level, may continue to be effective until the enemy develops an efficient low level surface to air guided weapon’’ (AIR8/2014 1956). A defensive, surface-to-air, guided weapon. If the attacking plane is to evade such a weapon, it must fly at high speed and low altitude.

Look now at exhibit 2.8, which reproduces the table of contents of the brochure. This makes more links, coordinates further versions of the TSR2. But how does it produce its coordinating effects?

Michel Foucault offers us the classic response. A table constitutes and juxtaposes components in a two-dimensional array. It generates 18 Objects new forms of visibility, new visual relations, which means that it cre-

ates a subject position that escapes the linearity and the syntax of text by virtue of its construction as an overall vantage point. This means, to use another metaphor, that a table draws things together. It draws them together by juxtaposing them spatially and by assuming, in that juxtaposition and ordering, that they are in some way linked. It thus performs the assumption that the different elements listed are simi-

lar in kind. And in the present instance, if one makes the link back to the framing of the brochure, that they concern the TSR2 in one way or another.

So the table implies and performs a form of coordination. When nouns and the different specific object positions appear in a list or a table, they are being made to go together. But this is simply a first step. For in the present instance at least, these relations of visual simulta­neity also perform relations of hierarchy. Components of the table, its elements, are being coordinated in ways that assure their asymmetry. Thus, it is not simply that what become the more important features of the object tend to come in the earlier pages of the brochure (though this is certainly one of the effects being achieved, both in the table of contents and in the overall structure of the publication). It is also that the elements in the table are ranked into three different levels. There are the three main sections, on “Performance,” “Operations,” and “Engineering”; a number of subsections, such as ‘‘Aircraft Perfor­mance,” ‘‘Radii of Action,’’ and ‘‘Ground Equipment’’; and then there are subsections to those subsections, which have to do with objects such as ‘‘fire protection’’ or ‘‘system test equipment.’’

So the table of contents, by virtue of its visible organization, not only homogenizes, not only proposes that everything in the table somehow or other goes together, but also makes a hierarchy in three levels. This means that the table of contents is like an organizational chart or an arborescence:5 the various elements are being defined, performed, and indeed guaranteed. Smaller parts are being ‘‘in­cluded” in the larger sections. They become specific ‘‘aspects” of larger unities—and, no doubt, of the TSR2 aircraft as a whole. Thus the reader is readily able to see that what has now become ‘‘the top” depends on, or is composed by, the links between a series of more specific components that have their role to play in the system ‘‘as a whole.”

In short, the table is a third strategy for coordinating disparate ob­jects and relating them together to form a unity. And the particular alchemy of the table is the way in which it returns, constantly, to that which is made central—ultimately, though here implicitly, the TSR2 — and performs what, echoing Jacques Derrida’s concern with necessary slippage (1978), one might think of as strategic deferral, for 20 Objects that which is left out is performed as ‘‘detail,’’ as ‘‘technical detail.’’

Note that the logic of strategic deferral—and the way in which it produces subject and object centering—extends beyond the covers of the brochure. For if this is only sixty pages long, then much must be excluded from its pages and deferred because it is ‘‘less impor­tant” or ‘‘relevant’’ than what is mentioned. Nevertheless (and here is the assumption of this strategy for coordinating, which is also a guarantee), it might be unpacked if the curious chose to look at “sup­plementary documentation” in some ‘‘technical manual’’ for reasons that are made to be good because, for a complex object such as an air­craft, it is important to perform links that are many layers down the hierarchical-technical system.

To summarize: the table, its structure, and its deferrals produce a hierarchy that generates a subject that has focus but also a coordi­nated object, one that hangs together because it has been constituted as a set of hierarchically related parts or aspects that combine to pro­duce a unitary whole.6