Category AIRCRAFT STORIES

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”

So this is a world of cultural and historical discontinuities in the form of “revolutionary proposals.’’ But take a look at this:

Work was well advanced, and if it had been selected there is little doubt that the P17A could have been flying as a prototype by 1963….It had another potential advantage in that it would have met the broad operational requirement, powered by a modified standard Bristol Siddeley Olympus engine. (Hastings 1966, 30)

This is Conservative MP Stephen Hastings, who wrote a book on the project. It’s true that he’s picking over the entrails after the event. He’s reflecting on the fact that in the end the choice was for a ‘‘weapons system’’ aircraft of the kind preferred by Vickers Armstrong. And he’s exploring the fact that for a variety of reasons (his book considers these in some depth) this aircraft ultimately came to a sticky end—his is a story that resonates in particular with those who worked for En­glish Electric and their ‘‘evolutionary’’ P.17A. Most interesting here, however, is the way in which the polarities have been reversed. Here value is being distributed across the boundary the other way round, for the ‘‘weapons system revolution’’ is being performed as an obstacle rather than as a great leap forward. Continuity, accretion, descent, these would have been better. This is the lesson that we are being asked to draw.

So the distributive polarities may change. Differences between the present and the past maybe desirable or they may not. In some stories about what came before, the past may fall from favor. In others it does

But this is only half of the story.

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)

The citation is from a government document, a statement of offi­cial policy that appeared in 1955. But now that I have cited it, it starts to make a difference to the ordering of the narrative. In particular, it makes a difference to the story told by Gardner, the story of revolu­tion and discontinuity. Suddenly it looks as if Vickers’s revolutionary proposal isn’t so revolutionary after all. Another story is, or could be, performed—a story of continuity. This is a story of a different kind of continuity, one that tells of the links between government arms procurement policy and the 571 proposal made by Vickers, which in this new cultural context isn’t revolutionary any more. Indeed, it isn’t even entirely new.

So it is that we find ourselves back in a world of continuity, gene­alogy, and descent—albeit a continuity different in kind from that celebrated by English Electric.12 And if I wanted to strengthen that narrative of descent I could tell stories, too, about the reasons for the government policy statement, about why the government came to favor a weapons-system approach. These stories would have to do with procurement policies in the United States and with certain un­fortunate British projects which created aircraft that flew satisfacto­rily by themselves but when mounted with weapons turned out to have aerodynamic problems if they were fired.13 Back to a world of continuity.

Here’s a proposition. Culture in all its forms—talk, technics, skill— is about making and distributing similarities and differences, about allocating them and re-allocating them. It is about trying to stabilize them or undermine them. It is about ‘‘the strategies [we] recognize and use and invent for making sense’’ (I’m citing Sharon Traweek again). But (this is the proposition) when we perform these alloca­tions we also reflect, perform, instantiate, and form narratives that reflect and embody forms of cultural bias.14

Which we? That’s a good question.15 Let’s just say for the moment, we who are the narrators, the cultural bricoleurs, the performers, the engineers or managers who write brochures, the historians who write company histories, the sociologists and technoscience students who tell stories about social interests and the social shaping of tech­nology. We, all of us, have a bias in favor of continuity, narrative con – tinuity—for instance (though not necessarily) in the form of descent or genealogy. This is one of the features of the tendency to perform singularity and the concomitant tendency to marginalize multiplicity. Which means that, at the same time, we tend to have a bias against discontinuity, against revolutions and step changes, and especially against multiplicity and that which cannot be assimilated.

So here is the suggestion: we tend to assume that if we cannot as­similate something, trace lines of similarity, explication, then some­how or other we have failed. Even if the events present themselves as discontinuous. Broken up. Or multiple.

I’ve been arguing that the formalisms of design are like other singu – larities—they are heterogeneous in character. That is, they work in the form of an oscillation between absence and presence, an oscilla­tion that is one of the conditions of their possibility. This means that from the point of view of the center, the attempt to make singularity, the process is always ambivalent and incomplete. Viewed ‘‘techni­cally,’’ this ambivalence means there is always more to be done. The job is never finished; it is always an approximation. Looked at in that way, like the social theories of reflexive modernity, a formalism is,
so to speak, a rule of thumb, something that might work for the time being—with any luck—but might need revising in the light of new events.

But that is, indeed, the ‘‘technical’’ way of looking at it, a way of imagining that attaches itself to the achievement of singularity while recognizing its necessary imperfections. Whereas if we embrace the logic of oscillation then formalism becomes something else. We need to say that it embodies, is the expression of, a set of tensions between what is present and what is absent but also present. Simplicity, ma­teriality, Otherness, non/coherence, and deferral: these are some of the tensions and ambivalences enacted within the presence of a for­malism. No doubt there are others.12 And no doubt they are heteroge­neous too, these distributions.

In this chapter I want to recover the ontological heterogeneity of this term, heterogeneity. I want to understand the tensions that are made in the processes of centering, in the desire to draw things to­gether. This is difficult, itself a process full of tension. For when we talk of heterogeneity we also risk losing its oscillatory and unassimi­lable character: ‘‘I am arguing… that the stability and form of artifacts should be seen as a function of the interaction of heterogeneous ele­ments as these are shaped and assimilated into a network’’ (Law 1987, 113).

This comes from an article that I wrote in which heterogeneity had to do with what I am now calling heterogeneity/materiality. My con­cern then was with system-building: the manipulation of all kinds of materials, technical and human. This is fine so far as it goes—though interestingly it re-echoes the desires of the anonymous authors of the 1955 government White Paper about weapons systems cited earlier. But by now it is clear that it needs to be nuanced or approached in another way. We need, or so I am suggesting, to avoid the flattening effect of imagining that there is, on the one hand, a great designer, a heterogeneous engineer, and on the other, a set of materially hetero­geneous bits and pieces. Instead we need to hold onto the idea that the agent—the ‘‘actor’’ or the ‘‘actor-network’’—is an agent, a center, a planner, a designer, only to the extent that matters are also decen – tered, unplanned, undesigned. To put it more strongly, we need to understand that to make a center is to generate and to be generated by a noncenter, a distribution of the conditions of possibility that is both present and not present.13

To efface this oscillation between singularity and multiplicity, to imagine heterogeneity simply from a control or engineering point of view is, then, another example of what I referred to in chapter 4 as cultural bias. For the notion of “heterogeneous engineering” may be understood in two ways. It may be treated as a way of thinking about oscillation, absence/presence, uncertainty, and the necessary Other­ness that comes with the project of narrative centering. Alternatively, it maybe used to describe and perform an architecture of modernism (Bauman 1989). No doubt there are different versions of this ‘‘modern project.’’ No doubt they do different things. But, to put it too briefly, perhaps we might say that modernism is a way of being that seeks to improve the world, to engineer it, to build a better society. It does so by knowing, by gathering knowledge together, and then by deploying it in the attempt to order relations in the best possible way. It seeks to impose a specific and optimum distribution on its materials, human and otherwise.

The second version of “heterogeneous engineering” resonates with the benevolent and centering intention of this modernism. It catches something important about each of the ‘‘modernist’’ quotations cited earlier: the historical talk of the aircraft design and its ‘‘merits’’; the ‘‘best combination of variables’’ cited in the English Electric state­ment of design philosophy; Vickers’s systems talk with its trade-offs between cost and lethality; and the ‘‘combination’’ of elements men­tioned in the government statement about weapons systems. In each it catches the utopian need to deal in different kinds of materials, technical and social, to center them, to handle them, to manage them. It does so with the characteristic modernist lack of concern with things in themselves—with, for instance, the distinction between hu­man and nonhuman—for the perfect society involves both human and technical innovation (as we saw in the Vickers Armstrong design discussed in chapter 4). In each the second version of heterogeneous engineering catches the concern with simplification; with bringing materials together to optimize the outcome. It catches, that is, the need, the desire, to combine them together at a privileged place, that of the designer. In each it also catches the ‘‘semiotic’’ impulse that underpins the combination of somewhat pliable bits and pieces: the idea that components are a more or less malleable effect of a set of relations of difference; a set of relations that can be engineered to pro­duce a better world. Perhaps, too, it also recognizes in each of these citations an acknowledgment of deferral, the deferral implied in the process of experiment, the trial and error, the iteration toward utopia.

The modernist version of heterogeneous engineering plays on all these notions. It resonates with them. But it misses the heterogene­ities, those places that don’t fit so well with the control impulse, that have forgotten that even the control impulse, the possibility of cen­tering, is made by distribution into heterogeneity. Which means that it doesn’t catch the heterogeneities of multiplicity. The ‘‘mess.’’ The fact that things don’t add up. The oscillations that make the mirage of the perfect center.

It would be good to reclaim heterogeneous distribution and its in­terferences from the flattening that comes with the modern project and to detach it from its utopianism. It would also be good to remove it from the concern to center, the concern to privilege a single place, the design/control place, the place of homogeneity, the place where whatever does not conform becomes a technical matter, an irritant, something to be managed, limited, and controlled. When it is recog­nized at all.

And instead? Well, instead it would be interesting to work with the idea that the conditions of possibility are lumpy and different, that they oscillate between singularity and multiplicity, taking fractional form and that heterogeneity is, indeed, heterogeneous. It would be interesting to imagine that absence/presence comes in indefinitely many forms and to investigate those forms. But most of all it would be good to imagine what might happen if the ambivalence of ab – sence/presence were no longer a trouble, as something to be com­manded and constrained, as distributions deserving of control from a single center. But instead to imagine their alterity as something to be welcomed and embraced.14

AH media are mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous; there are no "purely" visual or verbal arts, though the impulse to purify media is one of the central utopian gestures of modernism.—W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory

The preceding chapters attend in one way or another to centers and how it is that the simplicities of centers are made. Objects, subjects, cultural continuities and formalisms—all are made smooth and cen­tered, and in that making, all include, deny, and defer alterity, that which is not assimilable. The argument I am making, then, is that sin­gularity arises out of that which is multiple. Or, more precisely, ob­jects, subjects, and all the rest are never simple and singular but are also complex and multiple. Note that: are also complex and multiple. For the contrast between simplicity and complexity, between singu­larity and multiplicity, is not simply an either/or. Rather it is both a both/and and an either/or. Both single and multiple, the modernist logics of coherence (seek to) bury their noncoherences as they oscil­late between one and many in the process described by Jacques Der­rida as differance. For this process does not displace simplicity into a happy pluralism in which anything goes.1 Rather, it is an attempt to come to terms with forms that perform themselves in ways that push us beyond what is easily told—beyond the limits set by the pre­dominant conditions of possibility. Recognizing this oscillation en­ables us to come to terms with forms that are fractional—subjects and objects—more than one and less than many.

The oscillations between singularity and multiplicity set up their patterns of interference, patterns that take many forms. We have seen forms of interference that wrestle with the problem of multiplicity to produce relative singularity—the aircraft generated in the brochure discussed in chapter 2 was of that form.2 We have seen interferences that produce immobility—such was the experience of multiple inter­pellation described in chapter 3, though that immobility turns out, or so I argue, to offer a valuable methodological lesson. We have seen the ways in which discontinuities in the social are effaced or deferred in the commitments to continuity embodied in the cultural bias de­scribed in chapter 4. And we have seen the various alterities that are

both implied and displaced by the would-be self-present formalism described in chapter 5.

In this chapter I extend the study of oscillatory interference by re­visiting the brochure. Again my concern is with the coherence of non­coherence. I explore the both/and and the either/or character of that brochure with respect to the complex interferences between its tex­tual and pictorial contents. At the same time, I explore some of the ways complex gender distributions may be performed in a manner that extends both the object itself—the aircraft—and the performance of gender divisions themselves.3

Perhaps, then, there are many objects and many subjects. This is the origin of the problem of difference, the problem of multiplicity. If it sometimes appears that there are singular objects and singular subjects then, somehow or other, object positions and subject posi­tions have overlapped and been linked. This is the problem of coordi­nation, the problem of coherence. Multiplicity and coordination: the two come together. But how do subject positions cohere? How are knowing subject positions constituted and chained? And what hap­pens if it doesn’t work? What happens if we end up with broken sub­jects?

Here is another.

I’ve been puzzling for some time about this: the problem of the pub­lic and the private, or the role of the personal in ethnography or his­tory. Let’s put ‘‘the personal’’ into quotes. I’ve been puzzling for some time about the problem of ‘‘the personal’’ in writing in science and in social-science writing: how it works; what it does. My puzzle refracts itself in my own writing on technoscience. The question is whether I should rigorously try to keep the ‘‘personal’’ out. Such would surely be the dominant response. But supposing I were to let it in, then what should I do about it? How might I handle it? What kind of job should it be doing there? These are the issues that I investigate in this chapter.

I have learned much about stories from the anthropologist of sci­ence, Sharon Traweek (1988a, 1992,1995a, 1995b, 1999). One of the things I have learned is that when we tell stories—including those that do not appear to come to the point—they are performative. So there are two points here, one to do with performativity, and the other to do with what we might think of as “indirection,” that is, the absence

of a visible focus, a place within the story that says in as many words what it is ‘‘really about.’’

On the question of performativity the argument is quite simple. As I suggested in the introduction, stories are performative because they also make a difference, or at any rate might make a difference or hope to make a difference. The question of indirection is trickier. Like Sharon Traweek, however, I am committed to indirection. I want to imagine alternative versions of what it is to theorize; versions that avoid the hierarchical distributions between theory and data, or theory and practice; versions that instead perform multiplicities and interferences; versions that come to terms, in the way they perform themselves, with the postmodern possibility that it is not possible to draw everything together into a simple and singular account; versions of theorizing that, in other words, are allegorical rather than literal in form.1

I will return to both performativity and indirection in later chap­ters. Here, however, I introduce the terms explicitly—yes, in as many words—because this chapter is composed of performative but largely indirected stories that have to do with the ‘‘personal.’’ I do this be­cause I want to make a difference in the way we imagine what we now think of as the ‘‘personal,’’ the “analytical,” and indeed the ‘‘political.’’ I think that if we do it right, it turns out that the ‘‘personal’’ is not really personal any longer.2 Instead it is an analytical and political tool, one among many that might allow us to defuse some of the bombs of the established disorder.

1965

I will start with a story about politics and an aircraft, an aircraft as seen by a young man. The young man was called John Law. But the past is at least in part a foreign country, and because they do things differently there I will recount it in the third person.

The air was heady. A senile Conservative government had been de­feated at the polls. It was a pity that it hadn’t been overturned by a larger margin. But the country had a Labour government, a govern­ment that was going to undo the harm done by ‘‘thirteen wasted years’’ of Tory rule. It was going to abolish medical prescription charges, re­nationalize the steel industry, and (most important in the present con­text) cut out waste on ‘‘Tory prestige projects.’’ Such was the promise.

On election night one of his lecturers told that young man in an all-night cafe for transport drivers and railwaymen in the center of Cardiff, ‘‘We’ve got the bastards now.’’ And that is what he believed.

That was in October 1964. Seven months and a number of disap­pointments later there was an announcement: the government was going to cancel one of the much-hated ‘‘Tory prestige projects,’’ a mili­tary aircraft called the TSR2.1 don’t think the young man knew very much about the TSR2, but he knew some things. Perhaps he knew, or at least sensed, three things.

First, he believed that this project was a monstrous waste of money, that it was vastly over budget and that it was behind schedule. Such, at any rate, was what the government said, and he had no particular reason to doubt that it was true.

Second, he was told that this aircraft was a part of Britain’s ‘‘inde­pendent nuclear deterrent.’’ This was in itself a reason for canceling it because he was a supporter of CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Dis­armament. This was a largely left-wing pressure group that wished Britain to give up its nuclear weapons unilaterally. Again, he didn’t know too much about the detail of these arguments, but he knew what he thought. And he also knew that the new Labour government, in its first seven months, hadn’t canceled its Polaris submarines. Indeed, it had reaffirmed the importance of this central part of the British nuclear force and had scrapped only one of the projected subma – rines.3 This was one of the larger disappointments. So, like other CND supporters he’d felt betrayed by a Labour Party that had toyed with unilateralism. This meant that the TSR2, though small beer by com­parison, was at least a gesture in the right direction.

Third, when he learned of the cancellation, at the same time he also felt a sense of disappointment. But why? The specifics of this dissatis­faction are, shall we say, a little obscure. I hope that some of them will become clearer in what follows. But for the moment let’s just observe that he’d seen pictures of this aircraft on television and in the news­papers. It was in the early stages of its flight-proving program and the manufacturers had released film footage of it. There it was, taking off, flying around, and landing. And, though I don’t think he said this to anyone, the aircraft appealed to him. It appealed to him how? Let’s say that it appealed aesthetically as powerful, masterful, sleek. To wit­ness it in flight was obscurely or not so obscurely thrilling.

The gendering tropes are obvious enough: the business of men and their machines, control, force, and power.4 But the fact that they are cliched makes them no less real. So, though I don’t think that the can­cellation of the TSR2 was that big a deal one way or the other, he was nevertheless somewhat ambivalent when he heard the news.

To be sure, the cultural strategies of continuity come in various forms. Vickers Armstrong’s way of making similarities and building connec­tions wasn’t like that of English Electric, not, at any rate, in certain important respects:

Whilst unit cost has very considerable significance the really sig­nificant parameter is made up of cost/size/lethality. The aero­plane is designed to do a certain job—primarily strike—there – fore the financial outlay per successful strike is the important thing, or in other words the cost of a given degree of lethality. The achieved lethality is bound up closely with vulnerability and vul­nerability is closely bound up with size. Cost per pound of all up

weight is of no direct significance. It might, for instance, be pos­sible to show that an aircraft of 45,000 a. u.w. had a higher cost £/lb. than an aircraft of 65,000 lb., but if they had the same range and speed characteristics, and navigation bombing systems of exactly equal capacity, the small aircraft would have greater le­thality because it is less vulnerable due to its smaller size.

Therefore even if the unit cost of the two aircraft were the same (and in fact the smaller aircraft would be less) the small aero­plane is still cheaper because it offers more lethality per £ ster­ling. (Vickers Armstrong 1958b, 2-3)

This is a full-blown expression of the ‘‘weapons systems’’ approach, a performance thereof. It is one of the strategies of coordination of which I spoke in chapter 2. But this is an approach to cultural distri­bution that constitutes its objects by making connections not through time but across space. Let’s call this virtual space, virtual because it is conceptual and contains such entities as cost, size, lethality and “le­thality per £ sterling.’’ Such is the storytelling mode preferred by Vick­ers. It connects with government policy statements but then performs conceptual worlds and novel connections even though the company would also be able to recount perfectly plausible narratives about de­scent and genealogy.

The brochure I started to explore in chapter 2 was published in 1962 by the British Aircraft Corporation and was intended for potential purchasers: that is, for a highly select group of military top brass, senior civil servants, and a few politicians in the UK, Australia, and one or two other possible purchasing countries. So it is already a spe­cial form of publication—a sales document. And, within that cate­gory, it is a special kind of sales document aimed at a small and more or less sophisticated readership. The cover and other pictorial ma-

EXHIBIT 6.1 Brochure Cover (British Aircraft Corporation 1962; © Brooklands Museum)

terial suggest that the brochure is also made to look “pretty,” but only in some measure. So, to use a pair of terms that I hope I can in due course render more problematic, it exists in a place where what we tend to think of as the technical butts up against and interferes with what is often called the aesthetic.

So what might we make of this front cover? Some description and a brief recapitulation.

Most obviously it announces the title in big letters: ‘‘TSR2,’’ and then, just below, in a smaller cursive typeface, it adds the words ‘‘Weapons System.’’ In addition, toward the bottom, the name of the manufacturer, ‘‘British Aircraft Corporation,” is highlighted in a sans serif type set against a darker background. And all this printing has, as a background, a perspectival but highly stylized depiction that may be understood as a view from the TSR2. For the reader of this bro­chure knows enough about the aircraft to know that one of its most important features is the ability to fly very fast at a height of only two hundred feet—and the view appears to be from two hundred feet.

So that is a description. But let me ask again: What should we make of this cover?4

Perhaps the most obvious response is to look at it briefly, to read the title, and then to turn the page. After all, it is just that, a cover, and as we know, covers announce what will follow. They attract us to the interesting and important contents—in this instance to the sixty pages of the brochure. And they frame it as separate, apart from that which follows, that which is not so set apart. So, even if we don’t in­stantly move to the contents we might linger for no more than a mo­ment on the design of the cover and say or think ‘‘very pretty,’’ or ‘‘very stylized,’’ or ‘‘very 1960s,’’ or ‘‘I wonder what the air vice marshals thought of that?’’

But to ask such questions is to hint at the possibility of treating it seriously as an object in its own right, as I started to do in chapter 2. In particular, I need to ask why on earth one would bother to spend time on something, yes a ‘‘detail,’’ as seemingly unimportant as the front cover of a document when one might instead be studying its contents.

I offered an implicit answer to this question in chapter 2. There I talked about perspectivalism as a strategy for coordinating, a way of pasting together different object positions by assuming that they are complementary aspects of a singular object. Now, however, I want to Aesthetics 117

To talk of rationalization is to play with ambiguity, a double entendre.

Perhaps it is to talk of the way in which social life is rendered, has been rendered, more rational. Then again, perhaps it is to talk of jus­tification, referring instead to something that is pasted on after the event.

Adrian Forty, a design historian, describes the way in which ”London Transport” came into being in the 1920s and the 1930s. This organiza­tion grouped together the services of dozens of companies that previ­ously ran the bus, tram, trolley-bus, and train services of the British capital (see Forty 1985, 222-38).

In the 1930s London Transport developed a distinctively modernist style for its new buses, trains, and underground stations. As a part of this, it also created a new typeface and a symbol—what is now called a logo—together with ”uniforms” for its staff. The style of the buses and tube trains is particularly interesting. It took the form of flat and rounded surfaces. Like the cultural biases discussed earlier, these forms tended toward the smooth and avoided discontinuity. Little by little the London bus took on the characteristic appearance that it still in some measure has today. The angularities of the engineering of early twentieth-century coachwork were lost.

This design effort sought to create a new identity that would dis­place the identities and rivalries—as well as the dispersion—of the previous companies. But among the questions we might ask are the following. How deep did the design go? How far below the surface was it at work in its uniformity? Did it perform a new distinction between surface and depth? And what were the effects of replacing the visibly distributed stuttering that preceded it?

tend that it is playing market games while other logics are (also?) performing themselves. For here we are in the early 1960s, in the con­text of military technology. The readers of this brochure are power­ful people with serious matters in hand to do with the defense of the realm, and they are required to make decisions about how to spend hundreds of millions of pounds. Which means (indeed this is a pos­sible definition of “seriousness”) that it is the pragmatics or the tech­nics that matter through and through, whereas how things appear is quite another matter. It doesn’t matter how the airplane looks, for in this logic looks are properly derived from function, and it matters even less how something like a brochure looks. The Military Sales Division of the British Aircraft Corporation does not share this view, however, or it would not have filled its brochure with pictures of the aircraft in various poses and commissioned this front cover, which is certainly noticeable, if not startling. All of which places the brochure itself in an interesting position, that of adding the aesthetic to a func­tional field where the distributions perform themselves rigorously, deeply, and without great apparent struggle.

So the question repeats itself: why attend to something as appar­ently secondary as the front cover of a military aircraft brochure? This question derives from the skepticism of a form of distribution be­tween seriousness and lack thereof. It is performed, or so I’m suggest­ing, by the technologists and the decision makers and it also tends to perform itself, though possibly decreasingly, in many parts of social science. The aesthetic sometimes smuggles itself in a second-order way into our work, primarily if it is important to ‘‘the actors.’’

To be sure, it all depends on what we mean by “aesthetics,” but here I want to press my methodological point. If we try to imagine our­selves back into the shoes of the air vice marshals of the 1960s and per­form their distributions then (or so I guess) we’ll notice the pretty or not-so-pretty pictures, but we will pass them by as we turn the pages with a small quantum of appreciation or perhaps a snort of irritation. In short, we will delegate them into the middle of next week and pro­ceed to the serious business of reading the brochure, attending to its contents, attending to the narrative about the important matter of the military potential of the aircraft. We will thus tend to reproduce the divisions made by those readers; that is, we will reproduce the dis-

tinction between the technical and the aesthetic while effacing any of the questions that might have been asked if we had chosen to explore questions of “aesthetics.” This, then, is one way of setting up the alter­natives. The choice is whether or not to take seriously that which is ‘‘merely illustrative.” Whether, in short, to go along with the demotion that little term ‘‘merely’’ implies.

Donna Haraway has written one of the more influential papers in re­cent feminist writing on technoscience. It’s on situated knowledges. It does many things, this paper, but one of them is to investigate the optics of knowing, an optics performed in the natural—and no doubt in many of the social—sciences. This optics seeks to perform itself as disembodied, as removed from the body, indeed as having nothing to do with the body: ‘‘The eyes have been used,’’ writes Haraway, ‘‘to sig­nify a perverse capacity—honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism and male supremacy—to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power’’ (Haraway 1991d, 189).

Vision has been disembodied in what she calls the god-trick, ‘‘the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere’’ (Haraway 1991d, 189). But, she says, vision is never from nowhere. I talked about this in the last chapter: vision is always from somewhere, even if that some­where takes the form of a cartography that projects itself from no­where Euclidean in particular. To put it a little differently, vision always embodies specific optics, optics that vary from place to place and, for that matter, from species to species. Which suggests that (1) any reflective—or even pragmatic—optics that claims to stand back and see it all from a distance is a form of mythology; (2) to the extent it is built into a particular mammalian visual system, such an optics is in any case one that is highly specific; and (3) the notion, an alternative notion, of objectivity may be rescued if the body is, as it were, put back into the process of seeing. Donna Haraway again: ‘‘ob­jectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment, and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility. The moral is simple: only partial per­spective promises objective vision. This is an objective vision that ini­tiates, rather than closes off, the problem of responsibility for the gen – erativity of all visual practices’’ (Haraway 1991d, 190).

There are various components in this turnaround, this attempt to recolonize the notion of “objectivity” for something that is local and situated. Let’s mention just two. One is the recommendation-cer – tainly not Haraway’s alone-that a commitment to specificity implies a willingness to accept a kind of fractured vision. But putting it this way isn’t quite right because the term ‘‘fractured’’ implies the failed possibility of a whole. It is a discursive maneuver that firmly be­longs to the downside of the god-trick, to assumptions about the right and proper character of centered knowing and being, to the modern project and its desire for wholeness. So let’s say instead that it im­plies a commitment to sets of partialities, partial connections, and with this, viewpoints of the Other.5 Another component is the sug- gestion-indeed the urgent need-that we acknowledge and come to terms, somehow or other, with the specificity of our own knowl­edges, our situations. Or, to put this in the language of the last chapter, it requires that we explore our own more or less precarious coordi­nation (or otherwise) as knowing subjects. Which returns us to the place from where we started. The issue of the ‘‘personal’’ in academic writing.

The culture of Vickers, or Vickers-Supermarine, is quite unlike that of English Electric. That would be a way of putting it, a good way of telling of the difference. We have here two design cultures that em­body quite different traditions, very different skills, substantially dif­ferent understandings about what goes with what, and quite differ­ent approaches to building and solving puzzles. Or, to put it in one of the languages used in the study of technoscience, we are dealing two different technological frames.16 For the similarities made by En­glish Electric take us to past exemplary achievements, while those of Vickers take us into. .. into what? Into ‘‘weapons systems.’’ But what does this mean?

Connections not through time, but across a virtual space. In prac­tice this becomes in part the question of the physical size of the air­craft. This is the issue at stake in the previous citation. But imagine

that physical size is simply some kind of intermediary between kill­ing and cost. If we think of it this way, then the narrative connections made by Vickers are more radical, more ‘‘abstract,’’17 than those of the government-radical or ‘‘abstract,’’ that is, in the sense that the frame of the story no longer has to do with the aircraft or even with its spe­cific components. For there has been a transmutation, and the aircraft has been turned into a part of the system, a role or even a set of roles that may be narrated together in one way or another, a role or set of roles that can be distributed and redistributed. So the story no longer has to do primarily with aircraft that have become a means to an end. Instead the narrative stabilities, the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, these have to do with killing and cost, with the links between killing and cost and the most efficient way of making those links.

This is a logic, a mode of distributing and making that we have dis­cussed before. But let me also observe the following: there is a shift from diachronic to synchronic. Narrative similarities and differences trace themselves in a synchronic space rather than down lines of de­scent. The object is dissolved in this synchronic syntax for telling stories and making connections. I’ve also noted this too. For the focus is no longer the aircraft but rather the system, and the aircraft is being imagined as a product of that system or rather as a set of characteris­tics or as an expression of that system: size, number of engines, and (if one goes into it more carefully) radar cross-sections and training accidents. So what used to be an aircraft is turned into a set of places, roles, and features while the ‘‘aircraft itself,’’ the form one sees when one looks at it, is shaped by these relations. Like the transmutation from work into text,18 it is an object of variable geometry until the system stabilizes itself, an effect, an outcome. It is nothing in and of itself.19

Context. This suffers a distributional fate like that of the aircraft. For it too is desegregated and colonized. That is to say, to the extent it is important, it is brought within the syntax of the system as a set of places that may be told as having certain effects. This means that like the aircraft it isn’t given, or if it is given then it is also malleable. Ob­jects appear, but they take new forms: ‘‘lethality’’ instead of targets or people and their destruction. All of which is a feature of technology 78 Cultures including, perhaps especially, war technology. Here ‘‘users’’ are being

connected with the system, “configured” or shaped,20 which means that inside and outside are not given in the order of things. For the sys­tem goes everywhere that is functionally relevant, and those objects that do exist are permeable, revisable.21

Finally this story forms a calculable space, a homogeneous space, within which to contain specific narrative threads. For there is no difference in kind between money and lethality. The two are inter­changeable. Instead the issue is simply that of calculating the best ex­change rate. Vickers has a technology for making these calculations and for drawing distinctions, distinctions, for instance, between large aircraft and small or between those companies that are able to make those calculations and those that are not.

If culture is a set of forms for distributing connections and discon­nections that perform similarity and difference, for making narrative coordinations, then to work in terms of systems is to perform another cultural technology, a technology in addition to and distinct from that of genealogy. It is to perform a technology for making and distribut­ing connections in which everything important is connected to every­thing else. It is to deploy a form of storytelling that tells of its univer­sality, the generality of its calculus. In which everything important may be constituted, connected, and performed that way. And such is the genius of Vickers’s proposal: it homogenizes, making all the story elements malleable, a function of everything else, a universal grammar.

It is no surprise that such an attractive cultural strategy for making similarity and difference should have found a ready place in the dis­tributions of social science and in technoscience stories, this system of universal continuity.22 It is not surprising that this strategy should narrate the differences between the human and the nonhuman as less than important—that they arise, as it were, after the event, as a func­tion of the operation of the narrative distribution. It is also not surpris­ing that such stories should reveal colonizing tendencies, unwilling­nesses, or inabilities to deal with that which may not be assimilated.23

Size

Here is another story.

On the one hand, the Whitehall mandarins liked the English Elec­tric design, the P.17A. It was aerodynamically excellent. But they Cultures 79

weren’t so sure about the capacity of English Electric to manage the project. On the other hand, the Vickers’s 571 proposal was also good, especially in its commitment to systems thinking. And the manage­ment record of the firm was outstanding. Their conclusion was that ‘‘the right thing to do is . . . to give the task to the Vickers/English Electric combination, provided that the leadership is in the hands of Vickers and indeed in the person of Sir George Edwards’’ (AIR8/2196 1958a).

But this is simply a preface to the story I now want to make, a story to do with size, the size of the aircraft:

It is desirable both from the point of view of development time and cost, that a proposed aircraft to any given specification should be as small as possible. For any project study the opti­mum size of aircraft is obtained by iteration during the initial design stages. The size of aircraft which emerges from this itera­tion process is a function of many variables. Wing area is deter­mined by performance and aerodynamic requirements. Fuselage size is a function of engine size and the type of installation, vol­ume of equipment, fuel and payload, aerodynamic stability re­quirements and the assumed percentage of the internal volume ofthe aircraft which can be utilised. (English Electric/Short Bros. 1958, 3.1.1)

These words from English Electric tell a story about the relationship between time, connection, and disconnection. But would another manufacturer have told a very different story? It seems unlikely:

From the very beginning of our study of the G. O.R. we believed that if this project was to move forward into the realm of reality —or perhaps more aptly the realm of practical politics—it was essential that the cost of the whole project should be kept down to a minimum whilst fully meeting the requirement. This led us towards the small aircraft which, by concentrating the develop­ment effort on the equipment offers the most economic solution as well as showing advantages from a purely technical stand­point. (Vickers Armstrong 1958b, 2)

So these words from Vickers arrive at essentially the same conclu – 80 Cultures sion, the conclusion that it is desirable to have a small aircraft. But

though they both want small aircraft, the two companies are going to end up in very different places, at least for a time. Here is English Electric again:

Abandonment of twin engines would be the only other way of achieving a smaller aircraft and this also involves a large reduc­tion in the sortie pattern. This arrangement has not however been considered, due to the overwhelming pilot preference for a twin – engined arrangement even in the P.1B. (English Electric/Short Bros. 1958,1.S.6)

This is unlike Vickers’s preferred 571 proposal which was, as we have seen, for an aircraft with only one engine—and was, as a result, much smaller than the P.17A. So what was the difference? How did it come about? I have mentioned part of Vickers’s reasoning, the equa­tion of size, cost, and lethality that was related in the brochure to other interlinked stories about equipment miniaturization, integra­tion, and space saving. But what of English Electric? Two engines, or so it reasoned, were better:

This is because of the very high accident rate of supersonic air­craft following total engine failure, due to their very high rate of descent and the limitations of emergency power control systems.

The argument for two engines in the present case is reinforced by the need to operate several times further from base than the P.1B and for a substantial time at low altitude where the glide capability would be much reduced. (English Electric/Short Bros.

1958, 1.S.6)

In other words, they are saying that a supersonic plane flies quite badly when it loses power—which is something that doesn’t have much to recommend it. So it was that with two engines, the P.17A ended up with a design weight of 66,000 lbs. (English Electric/Short Bros. 1958,1.1.4; Ransom and Fairclough 1987, 298).

It is possible, indeed easy, to link the difference in sizes to the stories about cultural difference discussed earlier. English Electric is telling a story about pilots, the experience of pilots who try to fly powerless planes. It is, to be sure, distinguishing between humans and nonhumans. So English Electric uses cultural genealogy to offer a reason for choosing two engines rather than one. Against this Vickers Cultures 81

is making other similarities and differences, synchronic connections, systems connections that dissolve the distinction between human and nonhuman and lead to its own very different fixed points, those of cost and lethality So these are narratives of social and technical shaping both, but they are made very differently.

It would be easy to do this, but I want to go somewhere else. I want to think about the mandarin response to this difference. For remem­ber, by now we have the civil servants agreeing that they want the two firms to collaborate on an aircraft. There are going to be many prob­lems, but one is quite simply that one of the designs is half as large as the other.

To jump forward, in the end the government will go for a larger ver­sion: ‘‘a study on the single versus twin engined aircraft was received 16th July, 1958. It showed fairly conclusively that the twin engined configuration is the less costly in accidents’’ (AIR8/2196 1958b). Vick­ers’s calculations, their version of the relationship between cost, size, and lethality, these have been worn down, overturned, by alterna­tive calculations made in government. That is a possible story. No doubt it was one that was performed in the corridors of Whitehall. But there are other possible connections too, other narratives. For in­stance, here’s a second excerpt from the same document, referring to events that took place very slightly earlier, in June 1958: ‘‘The matter of a joint requirement for the Navy and Air Force still loomed large and Vickers Armstrong’s submission to G. O.R.339 included a very promising single engine solution…it was decided inter alia that the Air Ministry would initiate a study to determine the economics and wisdom of having a single engine version of the aircraft’’ (AIR8/2196 1958b). This also tells about size, economics, and wisdom, but there are other actors too, new actors. Most notably, there is the navy. But what has the navy got to do with it? The story runs something like this:

The Navy has its own aircraft under development. Known as the NA 39 and later the Buccaneer, this is a small aircraft. It has to be small because it’s intended to fly from aircraft carriers. But the NA 39 is also much slower than the GOR 339 aircraft and its range is much shorter. Though it is designed to drop nuclear weapons, its electronics and avionics are much less sophisticated than those being proposed for 82 Cultures GOR 339.

Since March 1957 it has been government policy to press ahead with the development of ballistic missiles because Minister of De­fence Duncan Sandys thinks that the age of the manned warplane is over. The future, or so he says, belongs to missiles, ballistic missiles that will drop hydrogen bombs on Moscow. And, sometime in the future, there will be antiballistic missiles that will meet and destroy the missiles that will rain down on London.

The Royal Air Force isn’t persuaded by Sandys’s vision. Indeed, most officers think that it is little more than science fiction, and even those who take strategic ballistic missiles seriously think that antibal­listic missiles are a pipe dream. In addition, everyone believes that a whole lot of fighting isn’t going to be possible with missiles of any kind. This is GOR 339 kind of work—for instance, surveillance, or tactical strikes on railways, factories, bridges, and armies. These are the kinds of bombing raids that would be needed if a war against the Russians didn’t go nuclear, or at any rate strategically nuclear, in the first four minutes.

It has taken most of 1957 to persuade the minister of defence that this story might be the case and then to persuade him that, despite its apparent similarities, the Naval NA 39 is really quite different from the GOR 339 aircraft in speed, precision, and range. It has therefore taken most of 1957 to persuade him that it isn’t a cheap option to stop the GOR 339 aircraft and simply to order the NA 39 for the air force as well as the navy.

By this point the outlines of a possible explanatory story have be­come clear, haven’t they? Let’s list the three main actors in this drama.

(1) Vickers wants a small GOR 339 aircraft for various reasons, but one is certainly that it thinks it will sell better.

(2) The Royal Air Force might, just might, be persuaded by Vick­ers’s synchronic systems-derived arguments. But this is going to be uphill work, partly because pilots don’t care for unpowered super­sonic aircraft but also because if they accept the small plane, then this puts the air force position in jeopardy. This is because one of the differences between the NA 39 and GOR 339 falls, that of size.

But if this happens then the Minister of Defence or the Treasury might force the RAF to buy an ‘‘improved’’ version of the NA 39.

(3) The navy doesn’t want a small GOR 339, however desirable such Cultures 83

an aircraft might be in the abstract. This is quite simply because a plane in the hand is worth much more than two in the indetermi­nate future.

Interests

So this is a nice story, indeed a classic, built as it is around social inter­ests, around the narrative trope that hidden, or more or less hidden, social interests shape decisions and outcomes.

They do it. That is, the people we study in social science tell their stories so. Often enough they distribute their realities that way. And we do it too, in our own social-science studies, in one form or another. We do it in analyses of the class – or gender-shaped character of tech­nological change,24 in social-interest theory, as elaborated by the ‘‘Edinburgh School,’’25 and in the studies of bureaucratic politics that come from political theory.26 And then, though perhaps in a less struc­tural form, we do it in the theory of interessement or translation found in actor-network theory.27

None of this is very surprising: there is no particular reason to imag­ine that our forms of cultural bias, the ways in which we make con­nections, would differ from those round about us. For this is simply another narrative strategy for creating, shuffling through, and assem­bling assorted bits and pieces, material, verbal, human; another way of finding connections and making similarities and differences, of finding connections that give some shape to the distribution and re­distribution of specificities. This is a resource for storytelling avail­able to anyone who is willing—and who is not?—to adopt the position that they see further, or better, deeper than those round about them.

The strategy of depth, of seeing deeper, may be related either to genealogy or to the synchronicity of system building. Interests may shape evolution, or they may be reflected in the structure of systems. There isn’t too much to be said about this, one way or the other, ex­cept perhaps that interest stories aren’t just smooth stories—though, like systems and genealogies, they certainly count as that. They aren’t just smooth stories because they are also stories that manage to bring together oppositions—or, more precisely, they are stories that manage to bring together apparent inconsistencies. The strategy of seeing into the depths looks past dissimilarities, even clashes, by treating 84 Cultures them as symptoms or superficialities and going beneath the surface to fundamental and coherent places that are said to be more real.

That is, it welds what have been turned into superficialities into a single, more comprehensive narrative. Multiple cultures, conflicting cultures, similarities and differences, all may be subsumed to the potential of the narratives of depth, the strategies of storytelling in depth.

I said earlier that systems stories are totalizing and that they colo­nize. But now we find that the same is true for interest stories: these too are totalizing and colonizing. For opposition is understood and incorporated into the interest structure, the deep interest structure, that underlies and underpins appearances. Similarity is achieved in yet another guise-while multiplicity is displaced.