Decentering the Object

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”