Category AIRCRAFT STORIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

three possibilities. Arborescences 165

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stories about procurement methods. Now back to strategy.

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

And what of GOR 339?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ministry of Defence: Hear, hear!

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

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

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

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

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

A plane in the hand is worth two. . .

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

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

(Short silence)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the empirical.

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

Now look at this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘‘Was O. R.343 a Valid Concept?’’

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

‘‘Was a Sophisticated TSR Aircraft Necessary?’’

‘‘Was the Cancellation Justified?’’

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

‘‘Was the Aircraft Industry too Large?’’

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

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

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

Some more citations from the same source:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intersections

The following citations come respectively from my summary story,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.

There’s a genre of early-modern painting called the vanitas, a paint­erly meditation on the ephemeral character of the things of this world. Art historian Svetlana Alpers (1989,103-9), talking about the crafted nature of Dutch painting, describes one such painting: a self-portrait by David Bailly. This particular representation, painted late in the art­ist’s life, shows Bailly as a young man holding a painting of himself as an old man, surrounded by a series of objects that represent the achievements of his life: visits to Italy, artists’ materials, and all the rest. These objects are, however, contextualized by others that insist upon the momentary and passing character of the artist’s life. So there is a skull, there are flowers which are starting to wilt and drop, and there are floating soap bubbles, beautiful but indeed ephemeral. And, to be sure, there is the juxtaposition of the portraits, young man, old man.

The vanitas subsists in a space of tension between the changing person and that which is unchanging and eternal. It plays tricks on, 42 Subjects or within, that tension. In depicting it, the painting also performs it in

its own specific way, specific, that is, to the artistic conventions of the seventeenth century. But if its modality is specific, the divide is not. In one version or another it criss-crosses Western representational forms, this division between, on the one hand, whatever is ‘‘personal’’ and, on the other, that which does not change. For we live with and perform it now, finding it for instance in many forms in our science and social-science writing. It is built into anthropological ethnog­raphy, which divides the scholarly monograph from the field notes or the poetry of the anthropologist.6 It is embedded in the conven­tions of scientific writing, where literary forms expunge the contin­gencies and construct a truth that emerges from somewhere outside the specific locations of its production.7 And it is performed outside the academy, in the division between the artist’s personal struggles or circumstances and the eternal character of his insights.8

How many times have you heard in conversation between social scientists that to write about oneself is self-indulgent? For, or so they say, it isn’t the person who goes and looks, the ethnographer, who is interesting. She may have quirks, and no doubt the fieldwork was messy and embodied, full of problems, hurts, illnesses, and failed love affairs. We all know this, but it isn’t important. Rather, it is what is seen, has been observed, that is important. What she reports on ‘‘out there,’’ to do with Japanese physics, the organization of a biochemical laboratory, or the performance of witchcraft, this is what matters. If we choose to write about ourselves and write ‘‘self-reflexive’’ ethnog­raphy, then at best we are getting in the way of what we should be reporting about, introducing noise. And at worst we are engaging in the self-indulgent practice called ‘‘vanity ethnography.”9

The social construction of vanity: that is the distribution being per­formed in such talk, which turns those who practice self-reflexivity into sites of self-indulgence and presses them to the margins. It is also a method, a performance, no doubt only one of many, that tends to return us to the modern singularity of the god-trick. Indeed, it tends to enact the god-trick and, as a part of this, constructs ‘‘the problem of the personal’’ in academic writing, performing the absence of the body from the representation of truth. One might also note, recalling the semiotics of the last chapter, that it rebuilds an ontology of sub­ject versus object, an object out there, prior, something that we may, if we are lucky, come to know.

Here is my sense. Sometimes, perhaps even often, this sneering at the personal is right because the complaints catch something that often doesn’t quite work when the personal is introduced into aca­demic writing, when the text starts toward ‘‘self-revelation.’’ But the complaint works, or so I suggest, because some versions of self-reflex – ivity precisely construct themselves as ‘‘self-revelations.’’ That is, they play on and further perform the divide between the personal and whatever it is that counts epistemologically, the reports about what­ever is said to be ‘‘out there.”

This poses a problem, or better a task, for those of us who imagine, following Haraway’s suggestion, that objectivity (if such there be) is situated and embodied. It poses us the problem of trying to find prac­tices of knowledge-relevant embodiment that don’t perform them­selves as ‘‘self-revelations.”

So what have we learned about the cultural distributions of military technoscience? We have learned that there is a bias against multi­plicity or discontinuity, though not necessarily against difference when this can be subsumed within continuity. And we have learned that this performs itself in three great distributive forms, three varia­tions in cultural strategy.

First, there is genealogy, which is a form of culture, of narrative, that makes its similarities and differences through time by perform­ing lineages, lines of descent, generational or chronological origin stories. If we were to invent a social history of genealogy, perhaps we might say that this is an aristocratic form of storytelling belonging to and performing, in the first instance, the premodern.

Second, there is system, which effaces history and generates a syn­chronic and homogeneous space in which everything conceivable starts off by being similar in kind before being quantitatively distin­guished and distributed. Thus, differences no longer exist in the gen­erational order of things (as in genealogy) but are rather to be under­stood as the distributive consequences of contingent calculations. In an invented history of culture perhaps this would belong to the bour­geois era, being modern both in its incarnations as liberal polity and as market economy.28

Third, there is interest. Or, more generally, there is a cultural strat­egy that discerns realities (such as interests) that are hidden behind superficialities. It works by distributing entities into levels that are Cultures 85

performed as qualitatively different. As a specificity, it may distrib­ute narratives into two classes: the class of those narratives that are real (of which it is one) because they describe that place called reality which may be hidden from the common view; and the class of those narratives that are not real because they tell stories of realities that do not exist and even tend to mask reality. In a history of culture perhaps we’d want to locate this in critique and so, in critical modernity, as the antithesis of system.29

So there are three distributive forms, three ways of making connec­tions that build worlds embodying different conditions of possibility, different ontological spaces. But though there are important differ­ences between the three cultural strategies, there is also a similarity: a propensity to perform consistency, smoothness, and connection. As I noted earlier of genealogy, but now the point may be made more gen­erally, each embodies a cultural bias in favor of continuity. Genealogy slips through generations. System, no doubt more radically, homoge­nizes everything that is, everything that could be told. And even inter­est or depth, which like genealogy makes differences in kind, does so within a tellable set of similarities.

Continuity over discontinuity, connection over disconnection, the effacing of multiplicity-such is the cultural bias of technoscience distributions and, no doubt, many other contemporary performances. Perhaps, one might venture, it is a feature of social science and technoscience, a modern grand narrative, a grand narrative that no doubt includes our own narratives, the distributions made by soci­ologists and technoscience students.30 Narratives that, taken together, tend to perform themselves into being in other, nonverbal, material forms and therefore tend to make the narrative smoothnesses of technoscience, of modernity. And, to be sure, the smoothly centered subjects to which they correspond. Cultural bias works in favor of singularity, even though it also makes difference.

This effacement of multiplicity suggests that it might be useful to find ways of making culture that emphasize and perform disconti­nuity in addition to continuity; that are rough as well as smooth, stutter rather than, or as well as, speaking fluently; that perform patchworks alongside homogeneities and multiplicities alongside singularities; that imagine technoscience practice as a set of partial 86 Cultures connections rather than as synoptic visions,31 and run interference on

small narratives. This neoliberalism, or so it is said, is best understood as a form of neoconservatism, a new strategy for preserving existing distributions, an expression of the cultural logic of late capitalism.

No doubt there is something in such a complaint. Divide and rule was always an effective strategy of power. But the story can also be told quite differently. Is it the case that dominant groups are under threat? Is it the case that a strategy of partial connection amounts to the same thing as liberalism, neo – or otherwise?

If we opt for the discontinuities of stutter or the fractionalities of partiality, we will no doubt have to debate how dominances, asymme­tries, and the uses of power might come to look that way. Both/and. Multiplicity/singularity. But this is precisely thepoint. One does not have to go all the way back to Louis Althusser to imagine that multiple cultural performances enact overlapping similarities and differences. One does not have to imagine that all the instruments are playing a single score to imagine that the conditions of possibility may shape themselves into asymmetries. One does not have to be able to tell the whole story from a single place to imagine that there may be asym­metries which perform themselves—yes—in distributed ways.

Perhaps, then, it is time to imagine multiplicity, fractionality, and partiality as alternative cultural strategies. And perhaps it is the mo­ment to imagine the tools for apprehending distribution after homo­geneity.

You don’t have a map in your head, as a child. Later, you have the globe— the seas and the shapes—and you can’t ever get back to that emptiness, that mystery. Knowing that there are other places, but not knowing where they are, or how to get there. — Penelope Lively, City of the Mind

Mimesis fuses brilliantly with alterity to achieve the connection necessary for magical effect, … a kind of electricity, an ac/dc pattern of rapid oscillations of difference. It is the artful combination, the playing with the combinatorial perplexity, that is necessary; a magnificent excessiveness over and beyond the fact that mimesis implies alterity as its flip-side. The full effect occurs when the necessary impossibility is attained, when mimesis becomes alterity. Then and only then can spirit and matter, history and nature, flow into each others’ otherness. — Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses

The ground figure that emerges from the stories in the previous chap­ters is one of oscillation or displacement. On the one hand there is the normative simplicity of the modern project, which seeks to enact the god-eye and presupposes the ontological singularity of the world that it desires to know and make. This simplicity is sustained by the theory of perspectivalism that allows, indeed requires, different viewers to see different things when they look at an object. The hope, however, or the expectation, is that a single story may be told of an object that is equally singular. And on the other hand, there is the multiplicity of the so-called postmodern world, with its renunciation of grand nar­rative and its preference for an aesthetics of little stories. Modernist singularity and postmodernist multiplicity, the two stand in tension with one another.

This much is standard fare in the social sciences. Indeed, it is the customary terrain within which much of social-theory debate oper – ates—and within which it is usual to stake out a position. To find, for instance, that ‘‘modernism’’ fails because it denies the lack of foun­dations that has precisely been generated by the restless machine of modernity as it dissolves all that is solid into air. Or because it leads to

the barbarism of what Zygmunt Bauman calls “gardening” (Bauman 1989). Or, conversely, to find that “postmodernism” is a repudiation of intellectual and moral responsibility, and to assert that it is indeed possible to make claims about the world even if they turn out to be relatively provisional (see Giddens 1990).

But I am suggesting that there is a much more interesting way of looking at this oscillation, this tension between singularity and multi – plicity—or between modernism and postmodernism. It is to note that the two imply one another. That for instance (to take the case dis­cussed in the previous chapter) singularity precisely sustains itself by shifting endlessly between different stories—stories that are, them­selves, singularities. But at the same time this means, as is obvious, that the fact of different singularities together also performs multi­plicity. Together they are performing a more or less self-denying or self-effacing multiplicity—a deferral indeed of that which does not tell itself as singular in order to secure singularity.1

Looked at in this way, the reason the debates about ‘‘modernism’’ and “postmodernism” take the form that they do becomes clear. There is endless room for “postmodern” debunking of grand narrative — of forms of storytelling that announce themselves to be both com­prehensive and (necessary concomitant) singular. Such debunking is easy because incompleteness and incoherence can always be found. And, conversely, there is endless scope for complaining precisely about that debunking because it denies the possibility of (real enough) singularity and the intellectual and moral commitment implied in taking a stand.

What I’m suggesting, however, is that it is much more interesting and productive to explore oscillation between certainties than it is to take a position in the debate. For that is what I am attempting to do: to explore metaphors for the processes of incompleteness that do not force us to one pole or the other and that do not, therefore, insist upon the fundamental character of (what has been turned into) a dualism. To echo Bruno Latour, the strategy I seek to articulate is neither “mod­ernist” nor “postmodernist” in form—though unlike Latour I take it that the both/and logic applies not simply to humans and nonhumans on the one hand and hybrids on the other, but more generally to any entities (objects or subjects) that live in oscillation, which means,
no doubt, all entities. So this is “nonmodernist” perhaps, though the term strikes me as unhappy because it also implies commitment to some kind of secular chronological ordering that it would be better to avoid.2 And if there is room for postmodernism at all, this is only because it provides an attitude, or a set of techniques, that are ini­tially helpful: in short because its skepticism secures the possibility that everything does not hold together, as is imagined in modernism, in singularity.

I am searching, then, for metaphors for thinking the oscillation be­tween multiplicity and singularity, and for ways of reworking the nar­rative conditions of possibility performed in modern and postmod­ern storytelling. I also want to find ways of re-creating subjectivities that do not draw everything together but are not, conversely, simply fragmented and to explore the ways in which those oscillations per­form themselves, their modalities, their modes of interference. That is the point of this chapter, in which I consider the slippages and de­ferrals that ground (without ever finally grounding) an aerodynamic formalism and seek to reinterpret the notion of “heterogeneity.”

I was looking for a subject for study, a case study in the social analysis of technology. I’d done some work in an actor-network tradition on a fifteenth-century technology (Portuguese shipbuilding and naviga­tion) but the sources were poor, and even worse for a nonhistorian, the details of design had been irretrievably lost for the Portuguese ves­sels in the fourteenth century, no doubt when the craft traditions of the Iberian shipyards in which they were built died out.10 So I wanted to study a more or less contemporary project and tease out the net­work of relations, the character of heterogeneous engineering and the malleability of the social. I wanted to explore an approach that in­sisted the human was no different in kind from the nonhuman. Or, more exactly, that if this were true then it was an effect rather than something given in the order of things. So I was looking for an object of study, but I didn’t know what.

One day I took my then five-year-old son for a day out to an aero­space museum called RAF (Royal Air Force) Cosford, which isn’t far from where I live in Shropshire. The two of us walked round inside the hangars, looking at the aircraft. Some were civil airliners. Most, however, seemed to be military, ranging from First World War bi­planes, through Battle of Britain Spitfires, to examples of some of the more elderly types still in service. The child was pleased with what he saw, and wanted to know how fast each aircraft flew and

craft well from twenty years earlier. I remembered it because it was controversial for a whole lot of reasons, including its cancellation. So I looked at this aircraft carcass and I thought, ‘‘Good God, have they got one of those here? Crikey, I didn’t know that any of them had sur­vived.” And, in the same instant I thought, ‘‘That’s what I’ll study! That’s what I’ll look at! The TSR2 project.’’

It was to be 84 feet long, 23 feet high, and 35 feet from wing tip to wing tip. And we have met it already. It was called the P.17A, and it was designed by English Electric in 1958 to replace the Canberra.

I will talk about the design of its wings. Like a paper dart, these were to be delta-shaped, their leading edge swept back at 50 degrees. They were to be thin, their thickness only 2.5 percent of their breadth at the tip. They were to be short and broad; their aspect ratio (the span from wing tip to wing tip divided by gross surface area) was to be 2.77. And their gross surface area was to be 597.3 square feet.3

So why were they to have this shape? An answer will take us to design, and to the heterogeneity of design, its distributions. To the patterns in its overlaps and interferences.

Look at the following. It comes from the English Electric brochure on the P.17A (English Electric/Short Bros. 1958, 2.1.9):

Let’s define the terms, for these are terms that can be linked to the words that appear in the less formal part of the expression.

—M is Mach number, the speed of sound, so M =2 would be twice

the speed of sound, and so on.

— at is transonic lift slope; more about that in a moment.

— W is the weight of the aircraft.

— S is the wing area.

—And G is a measure of the response of the aircraft as it flies

through vertical gusts of wind.

So the equation expresses what aerodynamicists call ‘‘gust re­sponse.” It quantifies the susceptibility of an aircraft to vertical buf­feting. The aircraft, or so the expression tells us, will be buffeted less if it weighs more, and it will be buffeted more if it flies faster, if it has a larger wing, and if its lift slope is higher.