Category AIRCRAFT STORIES

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

Here is another.

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

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

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

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

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

1965

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Size

Here is another story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1958, 1.S.6)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.