Category AIRCRAFT STORIES

We have seen that the cover of the brochure is perspectival and that it is also about motion. It tells—or shows—that the TSR2 is capable of high-speed, low-altitude flight. Performed within a technical nar­rative, it is important to demonstrate this capability because it is a way of avoiding antiaircraft missiles. But, as I noted in chapter 2, this isn’t the primary argument that’s being made on the front cover, for here we are not in the world of technics. Instead, it presents a combi­nation of perspectivalism, the Albertian apparatus of depth with the convention that we are looking through a window onto the world,10 and a somewhat separate set of conventions about motion. Together they generate a fast-moving window and a series of contrasts that are relevant to, indeed perform, the distribution of agency. Let’s look at that distribution a little more carefully. I want to suggest that it comes in three forms.

(1) Active versus passive agency. The eye moves. It moves toward the horizon, whereas the world stays in place. This much we have established. But this sense of motion is both strengthened and ren­dered more complex by other ‘‘details.’’ Look at the ground. On the left there are trees, perhaps stylized cypresses or poplars. Then, in the middle we see what may be fields, which also seem to be a little like a passage, a passage that has opened up across the surface of the earth between the aircraft and that embracing vanishing point. And in the center at the bottom, and on the right, there are three or four buildings—houses or perhaps some of them are barns or light indus­trial buildings. We barely get to see any of this; instead what we see are outlines.

At this point the practical thought intrudes itself: that is simply how it is. For if you fly at 550 or 600 miles an hour at only two hundred feet above the ground then indeed you barely see what passes beneath

you. This was no doubt part of the thinking of the artist, but the pic­ture could have been drawn otherwise. For instance, we might, as in the television depictions of exemplary cruise-missile attacks in the Gulf War, have looked right into the windows of the buildings. But we don’t, and we don’t because to do so and to see such ‘‘detail’’ would undermine the dominant distribution that is here being performed: the division between the dynamics of the aircraft and the statics of the world.

We established that much in chapter 2. But if agents act, then they act because the capacity or propensity for action has been distributed in their direction. They have been constituted in that way. This was the claim with which I started. On the cover of the brochure we see the performance of such a distribution. The plane is being performed as an actor possessed of certain attributes, and in particular one capable of rapid and powerful movement, in the air. But that sense of move­ment and power is built in contrast for it cannot be separated from the buildings, the trees, and the fields. And the contrast works most strongly because of their pictured physical proximity, viewpoint, and ground. The relative motion is made visible by performing them as near and yet as almost infinitely far. Their physical proximity pre­cisely marks a powerful boundary that performs them as static agents, agents made inert, close and yet Other, a division that is thereby re­inforced by ‘‘the details.’’

Look again. Trees? Fields? Houses? To put it mildly, the combina­tion is striking. What more conventional depictions of nature and cul­ture could one ever hope to find? And if the buildings do not take the form of interiors (or even exteriors) by Johannes Vermeer, then this hardly matters because we already know that gardens, barns, and orchards are places of domestication, domesticity. That they are slow and soft, in some important senses passive. We know this, and the pic­ture rests in part on this knowledge. But it also recursively performs it, performs them as passive, precisely because they are made to stand in contradistinction to the power of the aircraft, an aircraft made to inhabit a theater of activity, the theatre of work and war.11 We are deal­ing not simply with a division between the aircraft and the houses; instead we are witnessing the (further) performance of a distribution between two great worlds: the world of the active and the world of 122 Aesthetics the passive. A distribution that implies their mutual dependence.

(2) Transcendence versus mundanity. Now move to the horizon.

No, to beyond the horizon. The ability to make this move again works by combining Albertian perspectivalism and its promise of bound­less (but not yet visible) volume—what Rotman (1987) calls a ‘‘zero point’’—with the depiction of motion within that volume. The com­bination operates to generate a second contrast between that which is here, present, and that which is not. As with the formalism in the pre­vious chapter, one might argue that the aircraft is both here and not here. It is present but also absent. It is here, for a split second, above these buildings. But it is also, already, for all intents and purposes, beyond the horizon at the dominant vanishing point.

So this is another version of absence/presence, of heterogeneity.

But what lies beyond the horizon? Most obviously, the enemy Other (which is almost always implicit rather than explicit in this brochure).

Perhaps, then, the contrast plays on the distinction discussed earlier, between activity and passivity, or domesticity and war, in which case the aircraft is shielding the home fires against the threat from beyond the horizon.12 Such would be an iconographic distribution wholly consistent with the many strategic and technical narratives about the character of ‘‘the threat.’’

But there is something else as well, for we fly at the speed of sound toward the bright place of the vanishing point that is also the focal point of the picture. There is nothing much to detain us. We are pulled toward this point of attraction down the lines of movement. So it is a central place, the zero point, but it is also a bright place that seems to shine in our eyes like the rays of the setting sun.13 And the symbol­ism is strong, for if it is the heart of the matter, a place to which we move, to which we are attracted, then it is also a place that holds out promise, the promise of illumination.

But what is the character of that illuminating promise? It might, of course, be the blinding ‘‘atomic flash’’ of nuclear detonation. But this is only one possibility. For if the aircraft is heading toward the enemy, then it is also heading toward the place where it will fulfill its mis­sion, which means that it is hurrying to a dangerous place and a future that requires great courage. This need for courage generates a rever­sal, one in which invulnerability has given way to vulnerability, but a vulnerability that is now combined with skill in combat, the com­bat of machines and men, but also with bravery (for bravery is not Aesthetics 123

possible without vulnerability). This combination makes that distant place extraordinary, a place of destiny, of desire, of consummation. For this, after all, is what the machine is all about: it is a machine to go and look, and then a machine to go and destroy.

So this is the second contrast: the performance of a distinction be­tween what is here and what is not. A play around the heterogeneity of absence/presence that is also the performance of a division between the mundane and the everyday, between the rhopographic and the prosaic on the one hand, and the extraordinary, beautiful, megalo – graphic and transcendental on the other.14 The burst of light is there­fore both literal and figurative. It is the light that takes the active agent and links him with the destiny of the hero. And the passive agent? Well, she has no place there, no place beyond. It is not for her to com­mune with the light, to test her skills in danger.

(3) Invulnerability versus vulnerability. I have mentioned vulnera­bility but I want to take this a little further by looking again at the relationship between the text of the front cover and the perspectival picture. If this is ambiguous, then perhaps there are two possibilities.

First, the picture may be read as background to the letters in the foreground. This would mean that the letters did not belong to the picture and its perspectivalism at all but rather hang in front of it like a flat screen or perhaps—like the glass at the top of an observa­tion tower—a barrier that lets us see what is beyond without actually belonging to it. It also adds the warning that it is, indeed, a screen (for it is precisely the letters that make visible the otherwise invisible screen). If this is correct, the sense of proximate detachment is over­whelming. We (the aircraft? the reader?) are there, but we are also quite apart, in which case the cover performs a distinction between the invulnerable as against the vulnerability of the world.

Second, we may take the letters off the flat screen and insert them back into the picture. If we do this they turn themselves into an icon for the object that they also tell and can be located in two ways within that picture.15 First, it may be that they are floating with their mid­point just above the line of the horizon, in which case (and contrary to my suggestion above) the picture is no longer ‘‘taken’’ from the aircraft but from immediately behind and below it at the split second that it flew past to meet its destiny at the vanishing point beyond the hori – 124 Aesthetics zon. Second, it maybe that the letters are instead written in giant pro-

portions across the horizon, like the credits at the end of a Hollywood movie.16 If this is right then the aircraft has been turned into a huge wall between us and the enemy, an invulnerable wall, which shields the vulnerable world that shelters behind it. Even so the trope is the same: invulnerability/vulnerability, invulnerability/dependence, it is another way of performing the same distribution of agency.17

Invulnerability/vulnerability. So this is a third distribution, indeed, a version of the classic distribution in which the domestic is shielded from (but provides for) work and war, which is also a distribution between the invulnerable eye and the vulnerable ground, a ground made all the more vulnerable by the way in which it has been frozen into stasis and made so that it could never touch the aircraft18— whereas, to be sure, the aircraft could touch the ground.19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the speed of sound, and so on.

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

— W is the weight of the aircraft.

— S is the wing area.

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

through vertical gusts of wind.

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

Donna Haraway has already done it in one way. In talking of situ­ated knowledges, and locating objectivity precisely in the specifici­ties of embodiment, she has offered a particular account of the truth regimes that perform the disembodiment that is normatively required in the modern project. These knowledges belong to what she calls ‘‘unmarked subjects,’’ unmarked subjects that turn out to be predomi­nantly wealthy, white, and male. But there are other ways of doing it, other deconstructive stories to tell, not to contradict those of Har – away, but rather to thicken the textures of alternative modes of story­telling, alternative understandings of the specificities of embodiment.

So here is another story from social theory or social history.

When I think of the construction of ‘‘the personal,’’ I think immedi­ately of Norbert Elias’s work on ‘‘the civilizing process’’ (1978,1983). It may be that the term itself is not well chosen and that he overgeneral­izes, for certainly at times his history seems, well, somewhat mythic. It may also be that he underestimates the horrors produced by ‘‘civili­zation.’’12 But does this matter? The answer right now is no, it doesn’t. This is because Elias’s position is generally deconstructive. It anato­mizes the personal and that is what is important here.

Elias says that as the centuries unfold in Western Europe from the late Middle Ages onward, the barrier between the inside and the out­side, between the ‘‘personal’’ and the ‘‘public’’ grows. Table manners, bodily functions, the expression of emotions: in the Middle Ages none of these were particularly restrained by comparison with what was to come later. Gradually, he argues, the body and its emotions were concealed behind a wall of politeness, civility, restraint, and repression, and that which was previously visible became private, invisible, inappropriate, unwise. Turned into a matter of no public interest the body became, as we say, ‘‘personal.’’

Elias has a story about how this came about: he says that in times of uncertainty and famine people make the most of the moment. There isn’t much point, as I say to my students, in studying for a degree if you know you’re going to die of starvation before the end of the year. But this situation prevailed in most, perhaps all, contexts dur­ing much of the European Middle Ages. On the other hand, if life is a little more stable—if you think you know where the next meal and the meal after that are coming from—then thinking strategically starts to make sense: thinking and acting long term and not on the spur of the moment. Which means that there is need for repression, calculation, and concealment of one kind or another. This is the point at which di­viding the public from the private starts to make sense, for strategy— or so it can be argued—is impossible without concealment.

Elias moves almost imperceptibly between the ‘‘social’’ and the ‘‘personal,’’ for in his way of thinking the distinction doesn’t make much sense. If people are more calculative because the world is not quite so unpredictable, then this has consequences. It tends to in­crease the level of predictability yet again, which sets up a virtuous cycle. Stable social life and long-term calculation tend to reinforce one another. This virtuous cycle expresses itself through a range of materialities: the body and its concealments; individual interaction; but also the organization of economic life (a surplus is more likely if social life is calm, but the existence of surplus itself renders social life more predictable); and the organization of the state (which secures a monopoly over the unpredictability performed by violence and there­fore, perhaps, secures peace). This is Elias’s argument: European his­tory from the Middle Ages onward may be understood, overall, as a virtuous cycle.

Gordon Fyfe suggests that Norbert Elias combines Sigmund Freud with Max Weber, repression with rationalization. This sounds right. What Elias tells us is, to be sure, only a story. Other stories might be and indeed are told. But if our concern is with the archaeology of the personal then it is an interesting story because it tells how what we call the ‘‘personal’’ might have been brought into being and tells, or at any rate implies, that it could be otherwise. And, most of all, Elias’s story is interesting because it insists that if we want to understand social life, then we need to attend both to the personal and to the social. Or no: that gives too much away. It suggests that the distinction between the personal and the social is analytically irrelevant.

So what I have told about the events at RAF Cosford in 1985 is a personal story because it is located and makes no particular attempt to perform itself outside time and space, in the eternity depicted by David Bailly in his vanitas. I have, I hope, neither pulled any particu­lar god-trick nor tried to perform myself as an unmarked subject. But that story also makes me uneasy. No, better, therefore it also makes me uneasy. I think this is because I (and no doubt in some measure many readers) perform the distinction between truth and person, be­tween outside and inside. For most Euro-Americans are the children of Elias’s “civilizing process,’’ which means that if we write about ‘‘ourselves’’ then we are sailing close to that divide, the divide that is breached by vanity ethnography or plain, downright self-indulgence. Which is, I think, one of the objections to ‘‘reflexive sociology’’—one of the reasons that it has not achieved the attention that it no doubt deserves.

Perhaps, then, you are tempted to say: ‘‘That’s enough of John Law. Enough of the ethnographer. Let’s get to the facts! What about the aircraft?’’ Well, surely this is the issue that we need to confront and deconstruct.

The concern is with heterogeneity and its distributions, in centering and singularity, and the ways in which this is achieved in slippage. It is about overlap, difference, deferral, and singularity. It is about co­ordination and interference. The tools derive once again from semi­otics. And indeed it is easy to apply semiotics to a formalism such as equation 1, for this is the distribution of a visible set of relations, a set of differences. And it is a set of differences that helps to deter­mine the significance or role of the terms that are linked together. For instance, it establishes the difference between gust response and ve­locity. There are, as they say, ‘‘variables’’ that intervene between these, such as lift slope and wing loading. If everything else were equal, if these variables were not to intervene, then gust response and velocity would vary together—but they don’t because it is rare for everything to be equal.

But is everything there? To pose the question is to suggest the an­swer. Something is missing. Indeed, much is missing. This is obvious. For the distributions made by formalisms don’t stand alone. But what is missing?

Which story will I tell about Michel Foucault?

Discourses, semiotics, and arrangements of materials of all kinds. Note that: arrangements of materials of all kinds.

Talk, forms of storytelling, classical and modern (Foucault 1970, 1972). Systems of knowledge that are embodied in collections, cabi­nets of curiosities, museums, state records, statistics, doctors’ sur­geries (Foucault 1976). Buildings, including the shapes of prisons, real and imaginary (Foucault 1979), arcades for visual display, for the gaze,13 and the Boulevards of Haussman, which cut their clean and ordered way through the pullulating quarters of old Paris. Not to men­tion the new towns of Morocco.14

And then bodies. Yes, for notwithstanding the suggestion that he ignores the specificities of embodiment, the logics of the body itself, there is nevertheless little doubt that Foucault is particularly inter­ested in bodies, bodies and souls. He is interested in how to sepa­rate them, how to keep them together, how they are overseen, how they are marked, how they are broken down into little components and then reassembled, pressed into disciplinary forms. How bodies are made in the process of loading a musket in twenty easy steps, walking in formation steady under fire, without the need for further discipline or further orders. And then how pleasures, sexualities, are constructed, pleasures that will normalize themselves and thereby perform disciplinary effects because such are the ways in which the soul, the body, the possibilities of pleasure, have been constructed.15

Bodies and souls, and then the other materials: talk, buildings, texts, statistics, maps, plans. Techniques for constituting materials and relating them. For Foucault is a semiotician, and in his archae­ology he attempts to decode the logics of relations, the spaces made available by those logics, the spaces, or at any rate the hints of the spaces, denied and made Other by such logics, discourses, or epis – temes.

Of course, yes ‘‘of course,’’ the distinction between the personal and the rest is of no analytical significance. For the person is, accord­ing to Foucault, a subject position constituted in the ruthless logic of a discourse, for instance a disciplinary discourse, while whatever is outside the person is, well, another set of positions that stands in relation to and performs that person, that subject position: for in­stance knowledge, what is known, or better “knowledges.” So the dis­tinctions “public/private” or ‘‘knowledge/personal’’ are made, consti­tuted in the enabling logics of discourse that run through, permeate, and perform the materials of the social. They go everywhere, into our bodies, our practices, our texts, our knowledges, our town plans, our buildings, and all the rest.16

Foucault’s method is quite different from Elias’s, but for certain purposes the result is similar. If the truth has nothing to do with the personal and the ephemeral, then that is an effect. It is an effect that fails to notice that the divide is being made continuously through time and through different materials—because the continuities, the logics, the discourses, run through the materials, human and non­human alike.

What happens if we magnify the formalism? It depends on what we choose to magnify and where we look. I’ll magnify it in various ways in the course of this chapter, but let me start with the term left hang­ing earlier, that of lift slope. We already know something about lift slope. We know that it is related to, but different from, gust response and the other terms in the formalism. But outside the formalism, the term is idle. It is a short cut. It doesn’t tell us anything. So what do we discover if we magnify it?

The answer is that it decomposes. It turns from a single term into a relation between two further terms. So this is another difference, another specified difference. And the new terms? These are lift and angle of attack.

Some definitions.

—Lift is the lifting force of a wing as it moves through the air. In engineering this is usually written CL.

—Angle of attack, written a, is (roughly) the angle between the wing and the air through which it is traveling (figure 5.1).

—And lift slope? This is the slope of the curve that links lift and speed for a given wing if they are laid out as the two coordinates of a graph (see figure 5.2).

All of this means that if lift slope is low then as the angle of attack alters, lift doesn’t change much and the curve is flattish; if lift slope is high then lift changes more and the curve is steeper.

Heterogeneity/Simplicity

If we magnify the term ‘‘lift slope’’ in this way then we introduce a further set of differences. We might write them into equation (1) to produce something like this:

velocity x (change in lift coefficient/

change in angle of attack) M-(dCL/da)

aircraft weight/wing area W/S

We might work at this formalism to rearrange its terms and sim­plify it a little, but let’s make another point. This new formalism is more complicated than the old one though it’s not unmanageable, at least not yet. But if we were to expand the other terms—for instance unpacking the calculations that lead to Mach number, M—it would grow still further. And it could be expanded in other directions too.

What might we make of this? One answer is that design is all about distributing relations, relations of difference, but that only some of those relations are relations of presence. Only some of them crop up together on the page. And the corollary? This formalism performs many other relations. It also makes relations of absence. In one way or

another, and for one reason or another, there are limits to the relations made present.

So what might the character of these absences be? The answer, or so I want to suggest, is that there are several logics of absence or alterity. I will point to some of these shortly. But, looking at the formalism above, don’t we see a straightforward and immediate version of the logic of absence? This is the fact that it is easier to handle formalisms with fewer terms than those with more (though the same logic ap­plies just as well to nonformalisms). So this, perhaps, is a basic design principle, a basic feature of the character of making simplicities—that present complexity is self-limiting (see Strathern 1991).

Perhaps we might call this heterogeneity/simplicity. Put the “het­erogeneity” on one side for the moment: I’ll come back to this shortly. By ‘‘simplicity’’ I mean, straightforwardly, that there is not enough room for everything. That not everything can crowd into a single place. That implosion, or perhaps better condensation, is impracti­cable. Not possible. Perhaps this is a general principle. But, linked to a concern with centering and singularity, it’s what the actor-network theorists point to when they tell of ‘‘punctualization.’’4 Complicated things come in simple packages; they are ‘‘black boxed’’ by such terms as lift slope, which can be used to make sense.

The list of persons and organizations who have contributed to this work is too long to include in full. But I would particularly like to mention and thank the following: British Aerospace plc and Rolls Royce plc offered access to material relevant to the TSR2. I am deeply grateful to them for their generous help and assistance without which it would have been impossible to write the present book. This sup­port has come in many forms over a number of years, and has gone far beyond the routine. Accordingly, I thank both organizations for their systematic support and assistance while noting that what I have written is my own responsibility, and does not necessarily reflect the views of either company.

It is also my particular pleasure to thank the Brooklands Museum at Weybridge, Surrey, British Aerospace North West Heritage Group at Warton, Lancashire, and the Rolls Royce Heritage Trust at Filton, Avon. These are organizations, largely staffed by volunteers, that are responsible for collecting and collating the historical records of the two companies. Their work is indispensable to any student of the his­tory of aviation in the United Kingdom and has been crucial in many ways to the present study. I am deeply grateful to them and in par­ticular to the many individuals who, in serving the historical record in this way, have also generously facilitated the study and helped to ease my way at every turn.

I would also like to thank the numerous employees of British Aero­space and Rolls Royce plc and their predecessor companies, and a number of related companies with whom I corresponded. In many cases these people also agreed to be interviewed, and I am particu­larly grateful to them for generously giving up their time to delve into a project that left distressing memories for many. The same is also true for the politicians, civil servants, and Royal Air Force officers who also unsparingly gave of their time. Since some of them prefer to re­main anonymous, I will not here mention any of these kind people by name. In many cases, however, they offered crucial insights into the TSR2 project, the character of military procurement, the nature of de­fense thinking, and the management of large technological projects.

I am most grateful to the Nuffield Foundation, Keele University, and the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Paris for financial, material, and practical support for the research. The Nuffield Foun­dation generously offered grant aid to support the original research.

Keele University kindly offered sabbatical and other research leave that made it possible to undertake a sustained period of writing. The Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Paris, and in particular the Centre de Sociologie, offered material support and encouragement throughout. And the Sociology Program of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University offered fellow­ship support that provided the blessed respite from the usual com­mitments that enabled me to complete the manuscript. The research and this book would most certainly not have been completed without the assistance of these four institutions.

I am very grateful to participants in a number of seminars where I was invited to present earlier versions of parts of this text. These seminars took place at Wetenschaps en Technologiedynamica of the Universiteit van Amsterdam, the Netherlands, CRICT at Brunel Uni­versity, UK, the Department of Social Anthropology at the Univer­sity of Cambridge, UK, the Department of Sociology at Copenhagen University, Denmark, le Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Paris, France, the Centre for Social Theory and Technology at Keele University, UK, the Depart­ment of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK, Tema T at Linkoping University, Sweden, the Department of History and Philosophy of Sci­ence at Melbourne University, Australia, and the Area de Innovacao Tecnologica Organizacao Industrial (ITOI), Programa de Engenharia de Producao, COPPE, of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Bra­sil. The encouragement, support, and critical comments offered at these seminars have been vital to the process of thinking through the arguments that I make here—though I remain conscious of the fact that I have not succeeded in responding to many of the important points raised.

I am deeply grateful to many friends and scholars who have helped, in some cases unknowingly, but more often in the course of exten­sive and generous discussion, to create the intellectual and political space that has led to this book. I would like in particular to mention Madeleine Akrich; Malcolm Ashmore; RuthBenschop; OlafBoettger; Brita Brenna; Michel Callon; Claudia Castaneda; Bob Cooper; Anni Dugdale; Mark Elam; Martin Gibbs; Donna Haraway; Antoine Hen – nion; Kevin Hetherington; Karin Knorr-Cetina; Bruno Latour; Nick viii Acknowledgments Lee; Celia Lury; Mike Lynch; Ivan da Costa Marques; Maureen Mc-

Neil; Cecile Meadel; Ingunn Moser; Bernike Pasveer; Peter Peters; Andy Pickering; Vololona Rabeharisoa; Paul Rabinow; Vicky Single­ton; Leigh Star; John Staudenmaier sj; Marilyn Strathern; Sharon Tra – week; David Turnbull; Helen Verran; Steve Woolgar; Brian Wynne; and two anonymous readers for Duke University Press.

To all of these friends and colleagues I am deeply grateful in more ways than can be told. Many of them have been close intellectual friends for many years—and without them the book would never have been written. I would, however, particularly like to mention two people in this list. I am profoundly grateful first to Michel Callon for his many years of acute intellectual friendship, encouragement, and support, and for his conviction that the book is about distribution; and second, to Annemarie Mol for her strong intellectual friendship, the collaborative work that has gone into earlier versions of this book, and her conviction that knowing maybe performed as partially connected ontology. I thank them both.

As I write these lines I realize that all these friends share a com­mon indifference to the bounds of disciplinary knowledge and a will­ingness to take inter – or nondisciplinary intellectual risks. Such risks seem at least as great in the current climate of unremitting academic audit as they ever have in the past, and I am all the more grateful to them for resisting regional restrictions to the character of intellectual inquiry.

Finally I would like to thank Sheila Halsall, Duncan Law, and An­gus Law who have lived with and contributed to this book in one form or another for more than ten years.

A version of chapter 6 has been published in Configurations, vol. 8, no. 1 (winter 2000). I am grateful to the publisher for allowing it to be included in this volume.

A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome 1

is made of plateaus.—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus:

Capitalism and Schizophrenia

No doubt Deleuze and Guattari have got the right idea. Matters grow from the middle, and from many places. But one also has to start somewhere.

With the aircraft? This is a book aboutspecific episodes in a British attempt to build a military aircraft, a tactical strike and reconnais­sance warplane, called the TSR2. The project to build this aircraft started in the 1950s and ended in 1965 when it was canceled by a newly elected Labour government. In one way or another, all the stories in this book have to do with the TSR2.

But the aircraft is not the only possible place to start. For though all the stories in this book are indeed about the TSR2, the book is really about something much more general. It is about modernism and its child, postmodernism — and about how we might think past the limits that these set to our ways of thinking. For the book is about a world, the contemporary Euro-American world, in which many have lost their faith in big theories or ‘‘grand narratives,” as Jean-Frangois Lyotard calls them (1984b). And, at least to some extent, it is about a world in which many have also lost confidence in the grand projects and plans that tend to go with those grand narratives. Nuclear power, medical practices, food safety, the environment, everywhere, or so the story runs, experts are doubted, and people are skeptical of the claims made by authorities. Including academic authorities.

Of course there are various ways of responding to this. One can wave aside the skepticism of postmodernism and insist that experts— including academic experts—still know best: that it is, indeed, pos­sible to tell grand narratives. One can, in short, remain a modern­ist. Alternatively, one can insist that expert knowledges are limited in scope, but then go on to say that it is still possible to tell consis­tent stories so long as one understands that these have only a lim­ited validity and that they will in due course require revision. No doubt this is the dominant response in many of the social sciences, for instance underpinning the theory of reflexive modernity.1 It is a response that says warrantable knowledge is still possible so long as

it is suitably set about with health warnings and it is not used after its sell-by date.

But there is another possibility that I want to explore in this book. This is to take the skepticism of the so-called postmodern condi­tion seriously, which means accepting that ‘‘modernism’’ is flawed even in its more supple versions. It is to accept that modernism never achieved the smoothnesses it sought, that its foundations were illu­sory, and that when it intervened to try to put things right and make a better world it often—as Zygmunt Bauman has so eloquently shown —wreaked havoc.2 But then it recognizes, and this is crucial, that the pluralist diaspora apparently favored by postmodernism raises prob­lems that are just as difficult. Not only is it clear that we don’t live in a pluralist world in which everyone happily does their own thing, but it is also apparent that the broken fragments celebrated in postmod­ernism are just as much a product of modernism as its own stream­lined coherences ever were. Postmodernism is, so to speak, the mir­ror image of modernism—and postmodernism’s response has simply been to break the smoothness and shatter that mirror. The argument, then, is that modernism and postmodernism exist together. They are each other’s creatures. And as they confront one another they tend to press us to make a choice between the homogeneities of centered storytelling on the one hand, and pluralism of fragmentation on the other. This, then, is a second version of what the book is about. It is an attempt to evade that choice.

But to make the argument I need to be more specific. So a third and more concise way of talking about the stories assembled in this book is to say that they are about fractional coherence. Fractional coher­ence, I will say, is about drawing things together without centering them.

Knowing subjects, or so we’ve learned since the 1960s, are not co­herent wholes. Instead they are multiple, assemblages. This has been said about subjects of action, of emotion, and of desire in many ways, and is often, to be sure, a poststructuralist claim. But I argue in this book that the same holds for objects too. An aircraft, yes, is an object. But it also reveals multiplicity—for instance in wing shape, speed, military roles, and political attributes. I am saying, then, that an object such as an aircraft—an “individual” and ‘‘specific’’ aircraft—comes in different versions. It has no single center. It is multiple. And yet these

various versions also interfere with one another and shuffle them­selves together to make a single aircraft. They make what I will call singularities, or singular objects out of their multiplicity.3 In short, they make objects that cohere.

But how do they do this? This is the major question that I tackle in this book. A question that, while speaking to the general issue raised by the so-called postmodern predicament, at the same time much more concisely refuses the pluralism implied by Lyotard’s multiple language games.

How, then, to think about this? I deploy a range of metaphors for thinking about the overlaps that produce singularity out of multi­plicity. Many of these have grown up in the discipline of STS—of sci­ence, technology, and society. Interference, oscillation, Donna Har – away’s notions of ‘‘the established disorder’’ or the cyborg—these terms catch something important about the relations between singu­larity and multiplicity. But let me mention a further possibility here, that of fractionality. In mathematics fractals are lines that occupy more than one dimension but less than two.4 If we take this as a meta­phor without worrying too much about the mathematics, then we may imagine that fractal coherences are coherences that cannot be caught within or reduced to a single dimension. But neither do they exist as coherences in two or three separate and independent dimen­sions. In this way of thinking, a fractionally coherent subject or object is one that balances between plurality and singularity. It is more than one, but less than many.

I want to suggest that Euro-American culture doesn’t really have the language that it needs to imagine possibilities of this kind. Its conditions of possibility more or less preclude the fractional. Indeed this is one of the reasons why the postmodern reaction—though it diagnoses some of the problems of modernism well enough—still finds itself trapped within a version of the modern predicament. For if things don’t cohere together to form a consistent whole, then it is usually assumed that they don’t cohere at all. So in common sense (as well as much academic and political discourse) the options tend to take the form of the binarism mentioned earlier: between, on the one hand, something that is a singularity because it holds together coher­ently; and, on the other, something that is broken and scattered, as in some kind of pluralism in which anything goes.5 Or between order Introduction 3

and its antithesis, chaos. Thus our languages tend to force us to choose between centers or dislocated fragments. Between the poles of‘‘draw­ing things together’’ and ‘‘the decentering of the subject.’’6 Or be­tween single containers, such as ‘‘society,’’ and plural elements, such as ‘‘individuals,’’ that are contained within society. Fractionality, then, is one of the possible metaphors for trying to avoid such dualisms. For trying to wrestle with the idea that objects, subjects, and societies are both singular and multiple, both one and many. Both/and.

This, then, is the hope: that after the dualist contraries of centering and decentering, after the alternates of singularity and multiplicity, we might find ways of imagining fractionality. This, to be sure, is the hope of a number of scholars and is certainly one of the lessons that we learn from parts of poststructuralism.7 But the program, it seems to me, has not yet found good ways of performing itself—and least of all of doing so empirically. This leads to the fourth significance for the stories that I tell in the book. A fourth way of beginning.

This starts with a question: How should we write? How might we write about multiplicity in a way that also produces the effects of sin­gularity? Or about singularity in a way that does not efface the perfor­mances of multiplicity? In this book I do not respond to this question by offering a single recipe or a formula. Instead I choose to proceed less directly and more allegorically. Or, more precisely, I try to make something, to create it rather than simply telling about it. For this book explores complexity, heterogeneity, and interference not simply by talking about them, but also, and maybe more importantly, by try­ing to perform them.

I believe that if we have not managed to attend very well to the frac­tional coherences of multiple objects and subjects, this is not simply because we have not properly faced the facts. It also has to do with how we investigate our subjects and objects and, in particular, with the ways in which we tell about them. It has, in short, to do with the character of social-science writing. Notwithstanding work in several social-science traditions, we are, to use a phrase, insufficiently self­reflexive aboutthe way in which we write.8 And aboutwhatis implied when we write in one way rather than another. So my hypothesis is that we have not yet recognized and allowed the difficult subjectivi­ties that are needed for fractional knowing. In this book I also help to

bring such less direct ways of knowing into being. The book, then, is an intervention, a performance of fractional ways of knowing.

Perhaps it would have been possible to make a grand narrative about decentered and yet coherent objects. I take it that this is one of the features of Andrew Pickering’s work on the ‘‘mangle of practice,’’ a metaphor that otherwise does work which has much in common with what is attempted in this book: an inquiry into ontology, into what is made, rather than what is represented.9 And the thought of working in terms of a single metaphor is attractive because it offers a key to complexity. And such keys, once in place, are easily expressed and applied. Telling directly about what they tell, they are rendered easily transportable. To say it quickly, such is the dream of modernism in its search for foundational (or now postfoundational) grounds, and it is certainly the project of much contemporary social theory, to which the possibilities of allegory are foreign.10 But here I explore a less di­rect alternative by growing different stories alongside one another. Smaller narratives—a lot of smaller keys. Working in this way has a cost: we do indeed lose the possibility of an overall vision. But at the same time we also create something that was not there before: we cre­ate and make visible interferences between the stories. We bring new and unpredictable effects into being, effects which cannot be pre­dicted or foretold from a single location. New forms of subjectivity.

To do this is to alter the character of knowing and writing. It is to render them multiple, decentered, or partially centered, in this place that refuses both modernism and postmodernism. If single ac­counts offering single keys make arborescences—treelike structures with beginnings, middles, and ends where everything important is held together in a centrally coordinated way—then multiple storytell­ing makes rhizomatic networks that spread in every direction. They make elaborations and interactions that hold together, fractionally, like a tissue of fibers.11 This results in texts that are uncentered, texts that are not singular. And yet, if the bet is right, it produces texts that have intersections, that hold together. That cohere.

So what does all this mean in practice? The answer is that the essays in this book tell specific stories about specific events. In doing so, they play upon recurrent themes to do with partiality, fractionality, inter­ference, and collusion, while doing so in a manner that resists the

simplicities of an overall beginning, middle, and end. The book as a whole, then, is not treelike in structure. It is not an arborescence. In­stead it takes the form of a rhizomatic network. It makes overlaps and juxtapositions, and it makes interference effects as a result of making these overlaps. So that is the fourth way of introducing the book. It is about writing fractionally.

But this suggests a fifth way of talking about the stories of the book, which has to do with how texts relate to the world. Perhaps, to be simple, we might speak of two possibilities. First, we may imagine that they tell about and thus represent a version of reality. If we think of writing in this way, then we distinguish between texts on the one hand, and what they represent on the other. The latter become some­thing separate, out there, prior, removed. This means that we may stand outside and describe the world, and that when we do so we do not get our hands dirty. We are not in the world.

The alternative is to imagine, reflexively, that telling stories about the world also helps to perform that world. This means that in a (writ­ing) performance reality is staged. And such a staging ensures that, everything else being equal, what is being performed is thereby ren­dered more obdurate, more solid, more real than it might otherwise have been. It becomes an element of the present that may be carried into the future.

So what do we perform when we write? There are various by now familiar possibilities. We may perform the world as a treelike struc­ture: such is the desire of modernism as it seeks to perform its cen­tered consistency into being. We may make fragments, which is, to be sure, the postmodern response. Or we may enact it rhizomatically, which is the allegorical or poststructural alternative that I am recom­mending.

In this alternative approach, no matter how stories are told about this aircraft, the TSR2, they do not simply describe something that happened once upon a time. They are rather, or also, away of helping to perform the aircraft. The stories participate in the aircraft. They add to the crowd of forms in which it was already among us, inter­fering with and diffracting earlier versions and thereby altering these forms. Perhaps slightly and locally. Perhaps unpredictably. But never­theless altering them, and making a difference.

So the performativity of writing is a fifth way of introducing the

book, of describing the significance of its stories. But this in turn sug­gests a sixth possibility: that the book is about what it is to criticize, analytically and politically. Its fractional object is, as I have noted, a military aircraft. Why this should have been so is something that I explore in chapter 3. As is obvious, there is much to worry about in military aviation. Had the TSR2 ever been used in its nuclear role, the world would have stumbled into Armageddon. And, leaving aside the horrors of destruction, in the stories that follow we’ll come across ways in which the TSR2, even if it never killed, indeed performed social distributions—for instance those of gender or ethnicity.12 So yes, there is much to worry about here. But there is a problem if we start to criticize from what is supposed to be the outside because doing so ignores the performative character of storytelling that I have just been describing. In particular it ignores the fact that we are all mixed up in what we are describing. That, indeed, in one way or another we are helping to bring it into being. The fact that we are col­luding with what we are describing, colluding to enact it into being.

The conclusion is that in a fractional and reflexive world the luxury of standing outside, criticizing, and correcting is no longer available.

Partly inside, partly outside, we are at least partially connected with our objects of study And if we seek to criticize then it also becomes important to reflect on the character of that involvement. We need to ask whether, and if so how, we share in what we do not like with those whom we do not like. And whether, and if so how, they share some of our own most valued ways of being.

This should not be misunderstood as a plea for political quietism.

Indeed, quite to the contrary. Thus if our writings perform reality, then they also alter it. Every time we act or tell, we also, at least puta­tively, make a difference. We always act politically. The only question is how do we do it?

This book interferes in a variety of ways, but in particular, or so I hope, it interferes with what we might think of as ‘‘project-ness.’’

This is the idea (which is also a performance) that many technologies and other social arrangements are properly narrated and organized as ‘‘projects,’’ ‘‘programs,’’ ‘‘operations’’ or other closely related terms such as “organization,” ‘‘system,’’ ‘‘network,’’ or even the ‘‘reflexive person.’’ These are objects that are somewhat linear, chronologically chained, and more or less centrally and teleologically ordered, and Introduction 7

that are also shaped in one way or another by their circumstances. Think of the TSR2 project. Or the Manhattan Project. Or the mission statements of organizations. Or indeed ‘‘the modern project.’’ Think of large technical systems, or actor-networks. This kind of telling and performing is a standard narrative trope in late modernity. And it is, of course, performative of that modernity, tending as it is told and en­acted to order social relations in an image of projectness. It is one of the aims of this book to interfere with this trope, to erode the assump – tions performed in projectness, or at least to explore what is involved in their enactment. Thus, the sixth argument of the book in effect sug­gests to social scientists that, insofar as they frame what they tell in the form of stories about projects, they too are colluding in reproduc­ing the conditions of projectness as an appropriate narrative form. No doubt this is not all bad. There are moments for this collusion. But if the arguments I am making carry any weight, then that performance tends to efface not only other possibilities but also the fractional con­ditions of the performance of singularity. And, to be sure, set limits to the conditions of possibility.

So there are at least six possible introductions, six ways of telling what the book is about: it is about an aircraft; it is about refusing the space provided by the division between modernism and postmod­ernism; it is about fractional coherence; it is about the reflexive forms of academic subjectivities needed to apprehend the fractional; it is about the performativity of writing; and it is about the collusions that necessarily follow from that performativity. Such are the themes that recur and interfere with one another throughout the book.

Each of the eight chapters that form the body of this book tells its own story and mobilizes its own resources, drawing variously on cultural studies, technoscience studies, feminist theory, philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology, art theory and history, and semi­otics.

Chapter 2 concerns the problem of multiplicity. It uses a version of semiotics to analyze how an aircraft sales brochure generates first a range of object positions and then coordinates them into a single aircraft. This analysis implies that coherent and single objects are effects or products. It also implies a shift from epistemology to on­tology. This is because inconsistency between different performances

reflects failing coordination between different object positions rather than differences between external perspectives on the same object.

These, then, are two ofthe implications ifwe start to imagine thatnar – ratives are not about self-evidently singular objects but rather have to do with the enactment of fractional relations.

Chapter 3 deals with subjectivity, interpellation, and collusion. It describes how I was multiply interpellated by the TSR2, which im­plies that there is no such thing as a centered subject: like objects, subjects of knowledge are multiple or fractionally coherent. It also suggests that the interferences between these different subject posi­tions are a valuable source of data. This means that if it is properly used, ‘‘the personal’’ is not confessional but analytical in character.

It also, however, means that when subjects are interpellated by ob­jects, they are liable to find themselves colluding in the performance of certain narrative forms. Such was certainly so in the case of the TSR2.

Chapter 4 is about bias in favor of narrative continuity, and the ways in which discontinuities are effaced or deferred. In this chap­ter I identify three versions of narrative continuity: the chronology of genealogy and descent; the synchronicity of systematic connec­tion; and depth hermeneutics, for instance in the form of background factors such as social interests that then shape more superficial phe­nomena. Despite their differences (and these, of course, have been rehearsed in extenso in social theory), each version performs a bias in favor of continuity and connection, while discontinuities are de­ferred into slippages between the different narrative forms and so tend to be effaced. This analysis implies that the difference between insider and outsider cannot be sustained: social scientists and partici­pants alike tell their stories in terms of these narrative possibilities.

They collaborate to perform projectness and its conditions of possi­bility, which include a homogeneous space-time box with its own set of coordinates in the form of chronology and scale.

Chapter 5 concerns oscillation between singular presence and mul­tiple absence. It considers an aerodynamic formalism that seeks to draw things together in an explicit and homogeneous manner. This formalism operates by simplifying and excluding almost everything —including other realities that are represented in algebraic form but cannot possibly appear on a sheet of paper. The formalism is thus Introduction 9

Thus the stories all join in the performance of a single TSR2 and its projectness—and the work of building the kind of homogeneous space-time box described in chapter 4. This analysis suggests, once again, that that the distinction between insider and outsider doesn’t really work; that all accounts are performative (there is a discussion of Austin’s performatives and constatives); and that all collude in the reproduction of the conditions of possibility, which include a singular world and a singular object in which the oscillation with multiplicity is effaced. The hands of the storyteller are never clean.

Chapter 9 considers what comes after centering—for, given the gravitational pull of centered storytelling within the narrative tradi­tions of modernism, escaping from singularity is difficult. Indeed, to talk of ‘‘escape’’ is not the right metaphor because it implies a post­modern fragmentation with the binarisms from which we need to es­cape. In this chapter I first consider the metaphor of the pinboard, the relationship between narratives or other performative depictions juxtaposed on a notice board. I suggest that this metaphor may help us to handle the performative character of our own ways of know­ing in a manner that does not conceal their multiplicity. I then re­turn to the question of the political. The question is, does an insis­tence on fractionality rather than the singularity of social structure imply political quietism? I argue that this is far from the case. Even leaving aside the often-collusive performativity of singular narrative, I suggest that the great social distributions familiar to sociologists and political commentators are all the more obdurate precisely because they are not singular but rather fractional in character. There is no ‘‘weak link’’ in an otherwise coherent structure. Rather there are par­tial and supple connections between distributions that help to secure dominance and reproduce the established disorder.

All of which—and this is the concluding thought—also demand fractional ways of knowing; skepticism about viewpoints that try to perform themselves as simply centered; and an ability to live and know in tension. This is one version of what a rigorous and politically interventionary social science that seeks to avoid both modernism and postmodernism might look like.

It was a sales brochure. About sixty pages long, it was published in 1962 by the British Aircraft Corporation. And it was trying to sell an aircraft, the TSR2, to its readers. But what was the TSR2? And who were the readers of the brochure?

There are historical responses to both these questions. TSR2 was a tactical strike and reconnaissance warplane being designed and built by the major UK aerospace manufacturer, the British Aircraft Corpo­ration. And the brochure was intended for an elite readership: senior air force officers in the UK or in certain ‘‘friendly’’ countries, most notably Australia; senior civil servants, again in these selected coun­tries; and no doubt a number of well-placed politicians. For the bro­chure was part of an effort to sell the aircraft, both in Britain but more particularly (since the Royal Air Force was already committed to its purchase) to possible overseas buyers.

Those, then, are brief versions of the historical answers. I offer them at the outset because I do not want to be accused of playing games, of withholding context, or of denying the obvious. But the direction in which I wish to move is different. For reasons that will become ap­parent I do not want to frame what I write in terms of the conventions of narrative history. Though this strategy, of course, brings its costs, I want instead to create a naive reader—a naive reader who knows nothing about the TSR2 or the potential readers of the brochure. And I want to use this fiction in order to learn something about how the bro­chure works. So the thought experiment is this: that we read excerpts from the brochure without making too many assumptions about its character, about what it is telling us, or about its likely readers. Some­thing that is not possible if we arrive with the competences and the concerns of the historian.

So what happens if we do this?