Category AIRCRAFT STORIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two points.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

container.19 Decisions 155

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perspectivalism is only one projective strategy for visual coordina­tion; there are many more. For instance, art historian Svetlana Alpers writes: ‘‘the Ptolemaic grid, indeed cartographic grids in general, must be distinguished from, not confused with, the perspectival grid. The projection is, one might say, viewed from nowhere. Nor is it to be looked through. It assumes a flat working surface’’ (Alpers 1989, 138).

Thus cartography is another strategy—or better, a series of strate – gies—for coordinating disparate specificities.7 We have already come across one of these in exhibit 2.6. Exhibit 2.11 is somewhat similar. Both are maps drawn, like all maps, to a particular projective con-

vention that (at any rate here) ‘‘flattens’’ a world which (as with per – spectivalism) is taken to occupy a three-dimensional volume. Spe­cifically, it unwraps what is taken to be the surface of a spheroid (in the case of exhibit 2.11, a part of that surface) and to flatten it onto a two-dimensional surface. In doing this, it locates, juxtaposes, and interrelates geographical features to generate what, as Alpers notes, is a view from nowhere—nowhere, that is, in the kind of Euclidean perspectival space generated in exhibit 2.1. This is because the eye (and the projection as a whole) is located outside Euclidean space, even though it is generated by transforming that space.

The view from nowhere is thus made in a way that sees things that could never be seen within perspectivalism. Or, to put it a little differ­ently, it makes a centered viewpoint, a centered subject, using a flat­tened working surface that coordinates objects taken to be out there. It is like the table except that the relations performed by the two work­ing surfaces, the contents and the map, are different.8 In the former case we were dealing with objects that were being related together into a hierarchy, whereas here we are dealing with the performance of spatial relations.

But we’re interested in the aircraft. So where is the TSR2 in these projections? The answer is that it is located on the working surface of the map—but also that it is invisible. Quite simply, if it were de­picted in terms of the scaling conventions used in these projections, it would be submicroscopic in size. So the aircraft is there: it is as­sumed that it is indeed located on the surface of the map, which is also the surface of the globe. But because we cannot see it, we need to mobilize further conventions or strategies if the maps are to do useful coordinating work.

Let’s say first that the two maps are multiply connected. As I have indicated above, they represent the operation of similar cartographic conventions. Second, they appear in the brochure, so for physical rea­sons they both presumptively have to do with the TSR2. Third, that presumption is strengthened by the fact that they are bound together on facing pages. But we need more than this. In particular, we need to make the TSR2 visible. So how does this work? The answer is that the two maps mobilize different conventions.

24 Objects Exhibit 2.6 works because there is an understanding that mobile

objects traversing geographical space may leave huge cartographic traces in their wake, traces that here take the form of thick lines and arrows. These traces disrupt the scaling conventions, being in those terms several hundred kilometers wide. However, this disparity is no problem for the informed reader. This combination of conventions, which applies just as well to the movement of buses in a public trans­port system, makes it possible for the viewer from nowhere to ‘‘see’’ movement on a cartographic surface. Specifically, what the viewer sees or learns here is that the TSR2 is a global traveler. Or, to put it differently, that the same object may move around and be found in the United Kingdom and Australia.

Exhibit 2.11 undoes the invisibility of the aircraft in another way. Again the surface of the map is covered with lines that must, in terms of cartographic understanding, be fifty kilometers wide. However, this time convention tells us that these have nothing to do with imagi­nary traces left behind by flying aircraft. Instead they represent the boundaries of areas—areas, as is obvious, that may be overflown by the TSR2 in its sorties if it is based at one or other of the locations named on the map.

In all this we are unearthing a series of cartographic and carto­graphically relevant strategies for depicting the geographically rele­vant attributes of objects. But we are also learning something more about the ways in which these intersect and coordinate with one another to produce a singular object with particular properties. Thus, though the naive reader was denied this knowledge, I started this essay by noting that the brochure was aimed, perhaps in particu­lar, at the senior members of the Royal Australian Air Force. Now it becomes clear that in their juxtaposition and their mobilization of several different cartographically relevant conventions, these maps bring together two features of the TSR2 of great potential importance to Australian strategists: first, its ferry range, and second, its opera­tional range. The aircraft that can fly round the world is coordinated with the aircraft that can undertake very long-range missions into communist China. The triangulation between the conventions of car­tographic projection, the traces left by moving objects, and the depic­tions of areas interact to ensure that we are here dealing with one and the same machine.

English Electric: in the 1940s and 1950s this was a proudly indepen­dent company based in and near Preston, a large town north of Man­chester in Lancashire in the UK.

A brief history of English Electric? The company was a success­ful Second World War aircraft manufacturer. It worked by taking the designs of other companies and producing them under license effi­ciently and on time. This was fine for wartime because the United Kingdom needed all the aircraft it could get, and it needed manufac­turers even if they didn’t design their own aircraft. But at the end of the war, the directors could see that if the company was to survive as an aircraft manufacturer, it would henceforth need to create its own aircraft from scratch. So in 1945 it created its own design team.

The new team knew that they only had one chance. If they got it wrong, English Electric would have to make do with manufacturing industrial machinery or domestic appliances. So it needed to design an aircraft that would be attractive and would sell. This meant, in par­ticular, that it should be cheap, flexible, reliable, and simple. So, bor­rowing the technology of the defeated Germans, the company built a light bomber and reconnaissance aircraft. Straightforward, subsonic, but immensely versatile, it was code-named the Canberra and turned out to be a world-beater. It sold in thousands, both to the Royal Air Force and overseas, and was manufactured under license in large numbers abroad.

The gamble had paid off. English Electric was successfully estab­lished as a front-rank aircraft manufacturer. But what should follow?

At this point there was a disagreement between the English Electric designers and the Whitehall civil servants who were responsible for British military aircraft procurement policy. The mandarins thought 66 Cultures that supersonic technology was risky, that it wouldn’t pay off, so they

continued to order subsonic aircraft. At English Electric they thought differently, and putting their money behind their ideas, they designed and built a prototype supersonic fighter aircraft, code-named the P1.

In some ways this was a tricky machine. It wasn’t easy to service, its move into production was beset by delays, and it carried little fuel so its range was very limited. But in other ways it was extremely suc­cessful. In particular, it flew brilliantly. In the end Whitehall came around and bought a developed version of the P1, called the Light­ning, for the Royal Air Force. And, though it didn’t match the extraor­dinary success of the Canberra, the P1 also went on to sell very well overseas.3

Two out of two: the Canberra followed by the P1 Lightning. English Electric had become a very successful aircraft company. But what would follow the P1?

We have reached 1955 now and find that the Royal Air Force was thinking hard about its future aircraft. Here’s an excerpt from a con­fidential government memo:

The Canberras, with the ability to deliver the tactical atomic bomb and trained to operate at low level, must continue to pro­vide our tactical strike and reconnaissance force for some time to come. It is difficult to say how long they can continue to be re­garded as an effective tactical force. However, operated strictly at low level, they might perhaps continue to do so until the enemy can develop an effective low level surface to air guided weapon.

At best this might be until 1963. (AIR8/2014 1955)

So there was a gap, a space for a Canberra replacement. It was a space defined by the threat to subsonic, medium-altitude bombers flying over Russia posed by antiaircraft missiles which might shoot them down. And it was a space that gradually took shape between 1955 and 1957 when it was specified in a document called General Operational Requirement (GOR) 339. This is what English Electric was after: the contract to design and build the GOR 339 aircraft, the Canberra re­placement.

It’s possible to tell a story about the evolution of that design, the steps the English Electric designers went through.4 By 1957 this de­sign had stabilized in a particular proposal code-named the P.17A.

This design was described and justified in a long brochure written Cultures 67

in response to the Whitehall requests for designs for a GOR 339 air­craft. Most of the brochure is given over to technical description of one point or another. But it also contains a history or perhaps it would be better to say a genealogy of the P.17A, which was, so to speak, a description of its antecedents.

The value of the Canberra experience cannot be over-estimated.

It is the only modern tactical strike and reconnaissance aircraft in service with the R. A.F. and many other Air Forces. More Can­berra aircraft are in service with foreign countries than the Vis­count, which holds the record for British civil aircraft. This is due to the flexibility of the Canberra in its operational roles and per­formance, and is a factor which has been kept in mind through­out the P.17A design development.5

In this excerpt from the brochure we’re not only being reminded of the history that I have just recounted but also (in a version of the policy genre discussed in chapter 3) of its relevance. For the Canberra, or so the document is going to tell us, is an excellent test bed for all the tactical equipment needed for the new aircraft—the radars, the bombing equipment, and all the rest. The Canberra also has the virtue that it does some of the same jobs that the GOR 339 plane will do: ‘‘the Canberra is being used for low level strikes with delivery of tactical atomic stores by L. A.B. S. manoeuvres” (English Electric/Short Bros. 1958, 1.S.3). LABS is an acronym. It stands for Low Altitude Bomb­ing System, which is a term that describes the maneuvers the plane goes through in order to avoid destroying itself as a result of delivering ‘‘tactical atomic stores.’’

So the Canberra was some kind of progenitor. But in many systems of kinship, offspring have two parents and the P.17A was no excep­tion. So we move to more history, or more context.

Meanwhile the P1.B is the only aircraft under operational de­velopment having high supersonic experience and appropriate auto-pilot and instrument systems. Moreover, it is the first air­craft under development as an integrated weapon system with all-weather equipment and a reasonable degree of automaticity.

Perhaps most important of all, it is the only aircraft in the world known to have flown with satisfactory controllability up to a

Mach number of 1 at very low altitudes in very rough air. (English Electric/Short Bros. 1958,1.S.3)

So the argument was that the P1.B already flew like the OR 339 aircraft, very low and very fast, and it did so well. The promise was there. The experience of the P1.B would be built into the P.17A. More lines of descent. And what this particular passage doesn’t mention (though it crops up in the narrative elsewhere) is that many of the techniques used to design the P1.B were also being used for the P.17A.

The P1.B stress calculations, for instance, were run on a big com­puter, the DEUCE, which was purchased for the P1.B project. Now the same computer was being used to design the P.17A, not to mention the high-speed wind tunnels and all the accumulated design office experience.

The brochure adds the following:

It will be seen that the P.17A represents a completely straight­forward application of our design experience, as of 1957, just as the Canberra was a conventional application of aerodynamic and structural design knowledge in 1945. This is for the same reason; to guarantee that the R. A.F. have a practical aircraft in service as near as possible to the desired time scale.6

Gust response, speed, weight, these are fixed. We are left with at, lift slope, the slope of the curve that tracks variations in lift against changes in angle of attack. We are left with this and the hope that its slope will be flat. But there is more. For instance, the stories are about transonic flight: How will the wing behave at roughly the speed of sound? And there are other questions; for example, how will it act at low speeds? So here’s another complexity, one that I earlier chose to ignore. This is the quote again, from the English Electric brochure: ‘‘The essential design compromise implied by O. R.339 is between high speed flight at low level, and operation from short airfields. The intermediate choice between a high-wing loading with a low aspect ratio to minimise gust response, and a large wing area assisted by high lift devices to provide plenty of lift at low speeds, must be resolved’’ (English Electric/Short Bros. 1958, 2.1.8). So gust response is impor­tant, but so too is take-off—which requires plenty of lift at low speeds. The brochure says:

Another convenient parameter is one which gives an indica­tion of the relative response to gusts while achieving a given take­off distance. This may be expressed as P say, where

P =

lf

where CLf is the maximum trimmed CL, flaps down, in touch­down attitude. P must be a minimum for good design. (English Electric/Short Bros. 1958, 2.1.9)

We’ve met these terms before. A reminder:

— CL is lift coefficient, roughly the lifting force of a wing: here, the lifting force of the wing as the plane comes into land with its flaps down.

—And at is lift curve slope, change in lift against change in angle of attack.

P therefore quantifies a hybrid relationship, the hope that it is pos­sible to find a wing with low transonic gust response and high lift at landing.

But how to find a wing of the right shape? Of the right planform. This is a technical term and it is one of some importance. The bro­chure continues: ‘‘In the absence of comprehensive data on the effects of flaps on low aspect ratio wings, a comparison replacing CLf by CLmax indicated that delta wings were superior to trapezoidal and swept wings’’ (English Electric/Short Bros. 1958, 2.1.9). The terms here?

— CLmax is the aerodynamicist’s way of designating maximum lift. —Low aspect ratio wings (a reminder) are wings that are short in relation to their area.

—Delta wings are triangular, like those of a paper dart.

—And a trapezoidal wing is shaped like a trapezium. That is, though the wing tip is parallel to the root of the wing, the leading and trailing edges converge toward that tip.

The paragraph then discusses planform:

Since it was thought possible that by using leading edge flaps on trapezoidal wings, higher values of CLf might be obtained

than those from delta wings, wind tunnel tests were carried out using a trapezoidal wing-body combination. In the event, these tests confirmed that the delta gave higher values of CLf. The delta planform was also expected to have better transonic char­acteristics, and again high speed tests in our 18" tunnel on a family of aspect ratio = 2 planforms confirmed the unsatisfactory characteristics of trapezoidal wings, with sudden large aerody­namic centre movements at transonic speeds. This confirmed the choice of the delta planform. (English Electric/Short Bros. 1958, 2.1.9)

A further explanation. This time about aerodynamic center. As it moves through the air a wing lifts, but it does so by differing amounts in different parts of the wing. It’s useful to simplify, however, and sum the effect of all these separate parts to create something called the aerodynamic center. Roughly, this is the place in the wing where the

FIGURE 5.7 Trapezoidal Wings

changes in overall lift occur as it flies faster or slower or its angle of attack changes. Above stalling speed the aerodynamic center doesn’t shift much. At subsonic speeds it’s about one quarter back from the leading edge for most wings. But at around the speed of sound the aerodynamic center tends to move backward. This isn’t a disaster un­less it moves quickly and jerkily, in which case the aircraft can be difficult to control—which would take us back to pilot sweat and fear.

So the English Electric engineers were looking at two things. One was aerodynamic center. Here the trapezoidal wing was a problem because the movement was ‘‘sudden’’ and ‘‘large.’’ The delta wing was better. The second was CLmax (max, here, means maximum lift). Here

there was a surprise: the delta wing was better again. On both counts the trapezoidal wing came off worse.

Exhibit 2.12 takes us to the navigation system and to an example of another strategy for coordinating object positions: discursive (and, as we shall shortly see, pictorial) monitoring and self-correction.

How does this work? The strategy coordinates object positions in a way that suggests monitoring and self-correction will put each other right, indeed perhaps rebuild one another, should the links between them or the positions concerned start to weaken. Such is the point of the term “correction” in exhibit 2.12 and the rationale for talking of a ‘‘weapons system’’ in exhibits 2.2 and 2.13.

These terms and this strategy are both less hierarchical than those built in the table of contents. On the other hand, they echo a substan­tial literature on large technical systems in technoscience studies, a literature that lays stress on the interconnected and interlocking char­acter of technical innovation.9 The argument is that large technical systems—and here TSR2 is being treated as an exemplar-look at and talk to themselves reflexively.10 That is, they bring themselves into being and sustain themselves because they build, or take the form of, feedback systems.

Exhibit 2.13 generates components—let’s say object positions— that are coordinated to perform and stabilize the ‘‘complete TSR2 weapons system.’’ ‘‘In-built test facilities, pre-checked packages for armament, etc.,’’ such are specific objects that work together in this discursive strategy to secure the stability and continuity of the TSR2 object through a series of different positions.

The strategy takes different forms in different places. For instance, exhibit 2.13 works by colonizing alternatives, by simply obliterating them, or by rendering them irrelevant. This is the point of the talk

EXHIBIT 2.12 ”Fixing consists of comparing the computed position of the fix point with the actual positi on of the poi nt as shown by radar. Both these positi ons are shown on the navigator’s radar display and his action in comparing these pro­duces a signal proportional to the displacement between them. This signal is fed to the digital computer where it is used to correct the computed dead reckoning position and may be used to feed an azimuth correction to the inertia platform if necessary.” (British Aircraft Corporation 1962, 26)

EXHIBIT 2.13 ”The complete T. S.R.2 weapons system is designed for mobility and flexi bi lity i n operation, reversi ng previous trends towards reliance on major base facilities. It can be deployed rapidly throughout the world with nominal support and is then ready for immediate operational use to an extent depending on the level of support. In-built test facilities, pre-checked packages for armament, etc., and an auxiliary power plant for operating aircraft electrics, cooling and other systems, are used during the turn round, thereby avoiding reliance upon complex support equipment. All support equipment is air-transportable.” (British Aircraft Corporation 1962, 5)

The looplike and self-sustaining character of this strategy of co­ordination is visible in exhibit 2.14. This (or so the caption tells us) is to be understood as a diagram of ‘‘turn round at dispersed or primitive airstrips.’’ In this depiction the loop starts (and ends) with landing and take-off, moves through icons that depict towing, replen­ishment, rearming, and standby, using (as the text observes) “self – contained facilities [which] can be used for normal operations.” Many coordinating conventions are being deployed here, textual and icono – graphic. But in the present context it is the arrows that are most sig­nificant. The conventions for reading these generate a viewer who is not naive but understands that the five icons for the aircraft stand not for five different aircraft but rather for one: a singular aircraft that is being displaced through time, and perhaps (though this is less clear) through space. A singular aircraft is being made that will be returned to the sky even though it is far removed from major base facilities.

A version of the same systems singularity is also deployed in one of the maps discussed earlier—the ferry-range map of exhibit 2.6. We have discussed the cartographic practices mobilized here, and also the conventions for tracing the movement of small objects onto mapped surfaces. But the latter with its lines and arrows also per­forms a further version of systems coordination. As in exhibit 2.14, this takes the form of lines and arrows which go round, in loops. The particular rhetoric of TSR2 singularity here thus not only performs an aircraft that can fly long distances once it is fueled up, but also per­forms a TSR2 that can go out, for instance from the UK, but that can also come back. This, it should be added, is not the trivial matter that it might seem, given prevailing headwinds and the need to plan for adverse conditions when seeking to land on tiny islands in the middle of the ocean.

Each of the exhibits I’ve touched on in this section contains loops. Each performs loops. And the strategy for coordination depends on the successful manufacture of loops. For, in a systems world, the world of cybernetic self-maintenance, properly built loops are re­assuring. They correct themselves. They secure an environment in which coherences may sustain themselves and that does not distort what is passed round the loop. So it is that such loops, or the connec – 28 Objects tions that afford such loops, generate what Bruno Latour (1987) calls

immutable mobiles. Objects remain ‘‘the same’’ even as they move and displace themselves.