Category AIRCRAFT STORIES

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

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.

As a final example of the working of the strategies of coordination in the brochure, I want to touch briefly on the issue of speed.

Like exhibit 2.2, exhibit 2.15 deploys syntactical and discursive conventions to create an object that is capable of flying both fast and low. Exhibit 2.16 uses graphing conventions that are somewhat re­lated to those of cartography, both to identify an aircraft that is capable of the long-range missions identified by more direct cartographic means in exhibit 2.11 and again to offer a message about speed. But the making of an object that is singularly fast uses many more con­ventions, and some of them are much less direct in character. For in­stance, exhibit 2.1 depicts an aircraft (which we may now agree is the TSR2) from behind and below. Though this is not given in its per – spectivalism, a competent reader will also note the undercarriage is retracted. This means that in the depiction the aircraft is being made to fly, made to move, though it is true that we are given no clues as to how fast it might be moving. But this is not the case for the front cover (exhibit 2.7). Like exhibit 2.1 this is again in part produced by the technologies of perspectivalism. At first sight it might seem that the viewpoint is that of the pilot. But this isn’t quite right because the pilot, confined to his cockpit behind the heavy canopy that protects him, would not enjoy a spectacular all-round view of the kind on offer here. In which case the representation may not so much be what the pilot sees but rather what the aircraft itself can see. Perhaps, then, it is a representation of the view the aircraft would enjoy as it flew at two hundred feet.

I have mentioned perspective, but there is another visual strategy at work here, one that is crucial for performing a distinction between

EXHIBIT 2.15 ”TSR2 is designed to operate at 200 ft. above ground level with automatic terrain following, at speeds of up to Mach 1.1. It is capable of Mach 2 plus at medium altitudes.” (British Aircraft Corporation 1962, 4)

_____________________________________________________________ Objects 29

EXHIBIT 2.16 Sorties (British Aircraft Corporation 1962, 10;

© Brooklands Museum)

stasis and movement—and which also tells us the direction of that movement. It works, as is obvious, by blurring many of the lines and surfaces in the visual depiction. The principle is straightforward: as in a cartoon strip all those lines not parallel to the direction of travel are blurred. If the viewpoint itself is traveling, then static objects are blurred. Seen from a static position it is, of course, the other way

round. However, it is the first of these alternatives that is being mo­bilized here. And since the convention is indeed superimposed on a version of perspectivalism, those lines that are not blurred converge to a vanishing point: the place into which the aircraft will shortly dis­appear.

As is obvious, there is a connection between all of these exhibits.

All embody strategies for making speed, albeit by different means.

Through these different texts and depictions the TSR2 is being turned into a very fast aircraft. But in exhibit 2.7 something else is going on too. Here speed is being made a relative matter, turned into a ques­tion of contrast. A division between movement and statis is being per­formed. This is implicit in the technology of blurring superimposed onto perspectivalism. This exhibit suggests that the aircraft is only present for a split second. Right now it is, to be sure, above the build­ings that are dimly discernible below. But in half a second they will be gone. They will have disappeared as the aircraft itself disappears into the vanishing point.

And what is the significance of this? I offer the following sugges­tion: we are witnessing not only speed but also a depiction that helps to reflect and perform a particular version of male agency. Thus I take it that the front cover is telling, in a way that the textual and graph­ing conventions of exhibits 2.15 and 2.16 do not, that this is not just a fast aircraft and one that flies low. We are also being told that it is an exciting aircraft to fly. That it is a thrill to fly. That it is, in short, a pilot’s aircraft.

The creation of speed is not, to be sure, itself a strategy of coordi­nation. Rather, it is an effect of a series of such strategies. It is cru­cial, however, for all sorts of reasons. Some of these are ‘‘technical’’ in character (to use a term of contrast that I will try to undermine in chapter 6). There are, indeed, technical or strategic reasons for the aircraft to fly very fast and very low. But others are not. Thus I suggest that speed is the raw material on which another effect builds itself: the depiction and performance of heroic agency. In this way it helps to make a particular kind of reader—not simply a ‘‘technical’’ sub­ject who responds to the technical attributes of the TSR2, one who wants to know how far it can fly, whether it can defend the Australian Northern Territory from the Indonesians or the communist Chinese, Objects 31

or whether it can fly under the enemy radar screen. It also helps (and here is the other half of that dangerous contrast) to make a subject that is aesthetic, indeed erotic, one that enjoys fast and even danger­ous flying. Thrills and spills: there are coordinating strategies for link­ing these together. And unless we can generate a reader of this kind from the specificities of the materials of the brochure, then we are, indeed, missing out on something very important about the effects of the strategies for coordinating those different object specificities.13

There’s a nasty dig in the English Electric brochure that I mentioned only in passing. This has to do with the Viscount aircraft, which hasn’t sold as well, or so the brochure claims, as the Canberra. It is a nasty dig because it is a way of making a difference between English Elec­tric and one of its rivals, perhaps its major rival, the manufacturer of the Viscount aircraft, a firm called Vickers Armstrong.

For English Electric was not alone in hoping to win the GOR 339 contract. A host of other companies were jostling for a piece of the action,8 and one of these was Vickers Armstrong. It was really two firms. One was based at Weybridge in the southern suburbs of Lon­don. The Weybridge firm was in the process of digesting another based in Hampshire, in the south of England, called Supermarine. I’ll Cultures 71

Meanwhile, Vickers Supermarine had been working on a num­ber of alternative designs, the vulnerability of which had been carefully tested against the ideas of Vickers Guided Weapons Division. Their experience was limited to transonic aircraft. . . . The various designs were submitted to a cost-effect examina­tion against GOR 339, and as a result Vickers tendered first for a small single-engined plane suitable for both the Air Force and the Navy. The design was in the Supermarine Spitfire Tradition. (Hastings 1966, 30)

So here we see another historical story, the construction of a series of similarities, descents, that take us back across time to what is per­haps the best-known British aircraft ever built, the Second World War Spitfire fighter. And these too are links that tell of an integrated, cutting edge, and militarily outstanding descent from the past to the present. Other such genealogical stories are also possible, for in­stance, tracing lineage to the civil aircraft mentioned earlier, the Vis­count. Here the link takes another form, pointing out that this aircraft had been built efficiently and to cost, and emphasizing that Vickers had a ‘‘track record of production management and on-time deliver­ies” (Gardner 1981, 31). And then again, reminding the reader that the Viscount had been designed, like all good civil aircraft, for ease of servicing and quick turnaround. Both points can also be read as an unkind cut, however, for in reading between the lines you are meant to understand that Vickers builds reliable and matter-of-fact aircraft and completes its projects to time, whereas English Electric does not. So this is the production of more genealogical similarities, similari­ties that make intercompany differences.

Small, versatile, easily serviced on a modular basis, deriving from the Spitfire and the Viscount, this is not a bad origin story. But con­sider this:

The 571 was a revolutionary proposal in that it offered the re­quired blind terrain-following, nav-attack and weapons system as a fully integrated package—the complete opposite of the ‘‘add­on’’ afterwards school of thought. The argument was that the sys­tems were the heart of the airplane and a high performance flying platform should be built around them. (Gardner 1981, 30)

‘‘A revolutionary proposal.’’ This is the historian of the British Air­craft Corporation, Charles Gardner, talking. My reason for drawing attention to this passage is that it makes another kind of cut, a divi­sion between the past and the present, between what are now being distinguished as ‘‘the ‘add-on’ afterwards school of thought’’ and the ‘‘fully integrated package.’’ Gardner implies that we are witnessing a historical step change—and then he distributes value across that boundary in favor of whatever comes later and is thereby in touch with the present. It is the performance of a past where things were both different and not as good.11

In English Electric’s summary brochure there is a section at the be­ginning called ‘‘History.’’ Here’s part of the first paragraph: ‘‘Several widely-differing designs for a Canberra replacement aircraft were studied at Warton towards the end of 1956, and, by early 1957, calcu­lations and wind tunnel tests had shown the optimum design to be an aircraft resembling the P.17 configuration. The merits of this con­figuration were confirmed by further tests, and the design was found to meet G. O.R. 339 requirements as these became known’’ (English Electric 1959). This paragraph is accompanied by three drawings of the P.17A that give an overall view of its geometry (see figure 5.10).

The full brochure offers a more abstract account: ‘‘The design pro­cess of a modern aircraft, especially a versatile one, could be summa­rised as obtaining the best combination of a large number of variables each one of which reacts on many of the others. The final product 110 Heterogeneities must meet each of its requirements roughly in proportion to the em-

phasis placed on the relevant role” (English Electric/Short Bros. 1958, 2.1.8). This sentiment echoes those of the government White Paper on procurement that we have already come across:

An aircraft must be treated not merely as a flying machine but as a complete ‘‘weapons system’’. This phrase means the combi­nation of airframe and engine, the armament needed to enable the aircraft to strike at its target, the radio by which the pilot is guided to action or home to base, the radar with which he locates his target and aims his weapons, and all the oxygen, cooling and other equipment which ensure the safety and efficiency of the crew. Since the failure of any one link could make a weapons sys­tem ineffective, the ideal would be that complete responsibility for co-ordinating the various components of the system should rest with one individual, the designer of the aircraft. Experience has shown that this is not completely attainable, but it is the in­tention to move in this direction as far as practical considerations allow. (HMSO 1955, 9)

This was quoted in the previous chapter, but I’m citing it again now because I want to insert it into a different context.

The naive reader does not exist, except perhaps as a methodological fiction. But the creation of the naive reader throws the problem of dif­ference into relief. This is because it generates many objects or object positions and many subjects or subject positions. It brings a flock of aircraft into being, together with a library full of different and dispa­rate readers. And so it generates an inquiry, the inquiry into coordi­nation, the inquiry into how the various subject and object positions are aligned with one another, and the inquiry into the strategies for such coordination. The inquiry, then, is into how singular subjects and singular objects are made.

But wait a moment. Now the alarm bells start to ring. Ever since Lacan (or is it Freud?) there have been questions and doubts about the centered subject. Ids, egos, superegos, and their endless descendants, we have become habituated to the idea that the self is divided, the subject a set of more or less unsatisfactorily related subject positions. So the idea of the decentered subject is scarcely new—though, to be sure, it has taken on new life in recent work in cultural studies, where the possibility that noncoherence between different subject positions might also be desirable has taken root.14 But if the idea of the decen – tered subject is not new, then what of the decentered object? What of the object that does not hang together? Or holds together only par­tially?

Here the arguments have not been properly made or explored. But such is the prospect that we face if we take the problem of difference seriously. And it is the problem that we all face if, as I have in this chapter, we start to wash away the assumption of singularity, the pre – 32 Objects supposition that, whatever we might study and whatever we might

interact with is indeed a single, coherent, and centered object that is out there. A single object that we may come to know in this way or in that. A single object over which we may have different perspectives. But, nonetheless, a single object.

So that is the abstract version of the story. But what if we return to the TSR2 and ask, was this a single object? Was it an aircraft?

The answer to this question is, at least in part, an empirical mat­ter.15 It is conceivable that the strategies for coordinating the various TSR2s, for making them singular, indeed dovetailed together to gen­erate a unity. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much. And this is not pri­marily because the TSR2 project encountered a series of difficulties that became the topic of endless debate in the policy and procure­ment literature. It is rather because, once we look at things in this plural way, any singular object immediately becomes an effect—and a more or less precarious effect. Yes, arteriosclerosis. Yes, alcoholic liver disease. Yes, a water pump. Yes, a program of medical screen­ing or health advice. Yes, a pregnancy.16 And yes, an aircraft. All of these are more or less singular but also more or less plural. And if the well-publicized difficulties of the TSR2 project are relevant here, it is simply because they make it easier for us to see some of the non­coherences.

For this business of multiplicity and coordination is not a clever game dreamed up by poststructuralist philosophers or students of postmodern social science. Or if it is a game, then it is one that is also real enough. Indeed it is one that is deadly serious. Exhibit 2.17 tells of the inability to coordinate the development of the subsystems of the aircraft to produce a desired coherence in the form of a single and coherent object. It thereby discursively undoes the work of coherence performed by many of the earlier exhibits.17

EXHIBIT 2.17 . . it proved intrinsically impossible to co-ordinate the airframe,

electronics and engine work.” (Williams, Gregory, and Simpson 1969, 53)

Exhibit 2.18, posed in the language of policy, tells of the inability to make a single aircraft in ‘‘reality’’ that would fit the ‘‘concept’’ of such a weapons system.18 This too undoes the coordinating work of

EXHIBIT 2.18 ”The TSR-2 weapon system was an extremely advanced concept, combining several roles in one aircraft, attempting to achieve compatibility in performance which had not previously been attempted, and projecti ng ai r power requirements well into the ’70s. Here, perhaps, is the basic weakness of the TSR-2 concept, the attempt to meet too many new and complex specifications at the same time.” (Williams, Gregory, and Simpson 1969, 20-21)

the brochure and in particular that of exhibit 2.2, which insists on the necessary integration of a single weapons system. In exhibit 2.19 we learn the need for separate battlefield and deep-strike aircraft: the ex­pense of the latter made it impossible to imagine that it could ever be the same as the former. Again, then, this is a performance of disaggre­gation. While in exhibits 2.20 and 2.21 we learn that in this version of similarity and difference, deep-strike aircraft could never be conven­tional: the idea that a deep-strike aircraft would be both conventional

ment it implies a reduction of the world that might be seen from many viewpoints to what may be depicted from a single viewpoint. There is always the possibility of other reductions from different viewpoints.

Representation never exhausts the possibilities. There are always others.

—It rests upon and performs a family of related ontologies: that is, assumptions about the nature of existence or being, about what there is. In particular, it assumes that there is a more or less stable world ”out there” that may be depicted from one perspective or another.

There is a relation between epistemology and ontology here. An ontological assumption is performed in tackling an epistemological question. Or, to put it in a more pointed manner, the possibility that an ontology is being created or performed is concealed by the focus of attention on epistemology.

Distinctions between perspectivalism and an approach based on semiotics such as that used here, include the following:

— Perspectivalism trades in epistemology and effaces ontology, whereas semiotics trades in ontology: it is a method for exploring the simultaneous creation of objects and subjects.

— Perspectivalism describes what is. Semiotics tells about the making as well as the knowing of things.

— Perspectivalism solves the problem of multiplicity or difference by reconciling or explaining different views or perspectives because it says that they are looking at a single object from several points of view. Semiotics says that different objects are being produced, and then asks how, if at all, they are connected together in order to create a single object.

and nuclear was, in effect, not just a noncoherence but a contradic­tion.19

EXHIBIT 2.19 "Logically what was needed were two weapons systems, one for carrying out, economically, conventional operations in the battlefield areas, and a second for deep penetration nuclear strike operations. .. TSR-2 was too expensive to risk in th[e former] role in anything other than very bad weather.” (Williams, Gregory, and Simpson 1969, 42)

To be sure, these exhibits take the form of belated wisdom. It is easy to be wise after the event. But that is not the point of citing them. It is not that they are right and the brochure is wrong. I have no desire to take sides. It is rather to show that the work of object coordination and object disaggregation goes on—and on. It is to suggest that the singu­larity of an object is precarious, uncertain, and revisable.20 And thus it is to suggest that the issue of what there is and what there could be, whether the objects in the world are centered or decentered, singu­lar or multiple, whether they are both, or whether somehow or other they are fractional, this is not simply a question of playing postmod­ern games. For if we start with a naive reader, this is not to celebrate naivete but rather to lead us to questions of similarity and difference. And these are questions that are real enough. They have to do with

EXHIBIT 2.20 ”Another point that worried me [about TSR2] was that a super­sonic aircraft was not likely to be used for close-support of troops fighting on the ground. Were a war to erupt on the European mainland, I could hardly imag­ine that the Russians would wait to find out whether aircraft making deep strikes on targets within their territory were carrying conventional bombs, leaflets or nuclear weapons. If we and the Russians meant what we were saying, the response would most likely be nuclear.” (Zuckerman 1988, 214-15)

EXHIBIT 2.21 ”But above all I could not see any strategic sense in the notion that the TSR2 could be operated as a fighter-bomber armed with nuclear bombs for use on a European battlefield. The idea of nuclear field-war was nonsense.” (Zuckerman 1988, 215)

coordination. They have to do with the strategies that secure coordi­nation and the ways in which such strategies intersect to build up or break down similarities and differences. They have to do with what there is, and what, in a fractional world of coherence and noncoher­ence, there might be. They have, in short, to do with ontology.

The distinction between the public and the private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law. — Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

Critical theory is not finally about reflexivity, except as a means to defuse the bombs of the established disorder and its self-invisible subjects and cate­gories. — Donna Haraway, ”A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies”