Here is one beginning

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.