Category AIRCRAFT STORIES

I will shortly take this story one step further, but it is time to pause for a moment and reflect. Let’s start by saying that this history as told by the brochure writers at English Electric is perfectly plausible. No doubt as an expression of the coordinating potential of what in the previous chapter I described as ‘‘plain history,’’ it might be incorpo­rated into an account offered by any historian of the English Elec­tric company, and I suggest, its general style feels comfortable in the context of technoscience studies. So what is the nature of this plau­sibility?

The answer lies in the fact that one thing leads discursively to another. Somehow or other, events go together, distributed onto a line, a time line, a line ofinfluence, the teleological means-ends line that is the guiding thread of a project. It is, to be sure, an interested history. It would be easy to tell a debunking story about the concerns of those who wrote the brochure, noting that they sought to make as Cultures 69

much as possible of the readily available cultural materials. And it would be equally easy to tell a story that did not debunk but merely noted the operation of social interests as well as the existence and ma­nipulation of a prior set of resources in the form of skills, materials (such as wind tunnels and machine tools), and texts.

I’ll discuss interest narratives in a later section of this chapter. But such ironicizing or contextualizing doesn’t necessarily reduce the plausibility of the story about English Electric. Note, for instance, that it conforms, at least in broad shape, to the form of much narration in technoscience studies, sociology, or anthropology. It does so, in par­ticular, because it is an example of an origin story.7 The narratives re­tell how one (cultural) thing leads to another, influencing it and shap­ing it, as one passes through time. So it is a narrative in a plausible form, in one or more of the versions of that form (‘‘plain history’’ and ‘‘policy narrative’’) — or their closely related if more esoteric cousin, the social shaping of technology. It makes a reader who knows how to handle and assess it, who knows the strategic moves. In addition, that reader knows the kinds of issues that might be highlighted if one wanted to set about undermining it: ‘‘We need more detail’’ or ‘‘No, the similarities between the P1.B and the P.17A are overstated if we look at this other material.’’ And so on.

So, let’s say that this form of narrative is a coordinating strategy, a method for the cultural ordering of what might otherwise be discon­nected objects. It takes the form of a plausible historical narrative, a plausible origin story. It makes a culture (we perhaps should remind ourselves again) that ramifies into and is performed through material objects and procedures such as genes, skills, jigs, and power presses, a culture that somehow or other may be said to shape the events that it contains, in this case historically.

So what about this term, culture? It would, to be sure, be possible to write a book about this. Indeed a library. Several have been written. I want, however, to approach the term in a particular way by linking it to specific lines of writing in technoscience studies. With this in mind, it is helpful to cite Sharon Traweek, who tells us that ‘‘a com­munity is a group of people with a shared past, with ways of recogniz­ing and displaying their differences from other groups, and expecta­tions for a shared future. Their culture is the ways, the strategies they 70 Cultures recognize and use and invent for making sense’’ (Traweek 1992, 437-

38). So we have strategies for arranging, for making sense and (to add to her definition) creating similarities and differences, including the similarities and differences that constitute community.

But how are similarity and difference made? As I suggested in chap­ter 2, there are various strategies, methods for distributing or order­ing such continuities and ruptures. And here we are dealing with another: that of chronology or genealogy, the tracing of descent, the insistence on commonality through the generations. This strategy comprises at least one of the tropes used by those who wrote or (we might add) performed the English Electric brochure; by those who worked in the test facilities and factories of English Electric in the north of England at Warton and Preston; by the material embodiments of English Electric, precisely in the form of those facilities and fac­tories; by the story, by the lineage, that I built for the company at the beginning of this chapter; and by technoscience students as they seek to make sense of the way in which things follow things to produce what we might think of as shaped continuity. For this is one of the great distributive tropes, methods, or mechanisms of culture. It is not surprising that we should find it in our materials. It is not surprising that we should use it ourselves in our technoscience studies: the nar­rative of the world as genealogy and chronology. More time lines. A project doesn’t need to be made in this way. No doubt it cannot ex­clusively be made in this way. But surely this is one of the elementary mechanisms of project making.

So there are two sets of relations: the link between planform, the shape of the wing, and CLf; and the link between planform and aero­dynamic center. The delta wing is better-better, that is, in the wind tunnel.

The wind tunnel is another instance of heterogeneity/materiality, of distribution between absence and presence. On the one hand, there are the flat surfaces of the drawing office that work to pull every­thing together, to center it; and on the other, there are the three­dimensional models, materials, and measurements of the wind tun­nel. So the wind tunnel is absent from the formalisms of the design office and yet they are present too. But there is something more subtle

about the differences that emerge in that distribution. This is the fact that they are produced in movement, in a continuing process of dis­placement between materials and sites.

Perhaps one way of saying this is that it isn’t possible to ‘‘sum up’’ the wing in the design office. The representation that appears in the design office, sets of formalisms, drawings, is incomplete, unfinished. It is not centered, it is not drawn together, because it needs the wind tunnel. It needs the differences that will be generated in the move to the wind tunnel. But the version of the wing that appears here is also incomplete and needs further attention, further attention by the de­sign office, by stress engineers, machinists, metallurgists, and later by maintenance engineers and mechanics.

This is another oscillation of absence/presence. For the wing is present, all there, drawn out. But those lines also embody absence, the absent/presence of differences that are deferred and relations that are still to come. So the distributions here, the absent/presences are differences in movement. They involve displacement, displace­ment through time, in what Jacques Derrida calls difference. They involve an oscillatory distribution between the present/now and the absent/future. Or the absent/now and the present/future. In the het­erogeneous interferences of time. In heterogeneity/deferral.11

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________________ Objects 29

EXHIBIT 2.16 Sorties (British Aircraft Corporation 1962, 10;

© Brooklands Museum)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Representation never exhausts the possibilities. There are always others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.