Large Blocks

Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser have something in common other than their radical politics and their semiotic interest in rela­tions. Both tend to imagine that the logics of discourse, of semiotics, come in very large chunks. Althusser, talking of the multiplicity of and differences between ideological state apparatuses (ISAs), writes: ‘‘If the ISAs ‘function’ massively and predominantly by ideology, what unifies their diversity is precisely this functioning, insofar as the ide­ology by which they function is always in fact unified, despite its diversity and its contradictions, beneath the ruling ideology, which is the ideology of the ‘ruling class’’’ (Althusser 1971, 139). And Fou­cault? ‘‘In the last years of the eighteenth century, European culture outlined a structure that has not yet been unravelled; we are only just beginning to disentangle a few of the threads, which are still so un­known to us that we immediately assume them to be either marvel­lously new or absolutely archaic, whereas for two hundred years (not less, yet not much more) they have constituted the dark but firm web of our experience” (Foucault 1976,199).

‘‘Is always in fact unified.’’ ‘‘The dark but firm web of our experi­ence.” So the metaphors and the theories are different, but they have this much in common. Despite the cracks and the strains, most of the space—the space made by ideology for Althusser and the episteme for 52 Subjects Foucault20—most of the space we have for knowing and being, living

and building is structured by a single set of ontological strategies or distributions. These distributions (this is the crucial point) displace others to the margins, to the places that Foucault, with his exquisite sense of spatiality, sometimes calls the heterotopic.21 They are dis­placed to a few places of resistance. Althusser again: ‘‘I ask the pardon of those teachers who, in dreadful conditions, attempt to turn the few weapons they can find in the history and learning they ‘teach’ against the ideology, the system and the practices in which they are trapped’’ (Althusser 1971,148).

This is okay intellectually if not politically. Perhaps it is really like that. Perhaps, to use Donna Haraway’s very different words, we live in a world dominated by narrative metaphors that perform ‘‘militar­ism, capitalism, colonialism and male supremacy.’’ Perhaps we live in a world in which the narratives that perform one another tend to support one another despite some discordances and thereby produce such obnoxious singularities. Perhaps we live in a world in which the ‘‘personal’’ subject positions into which we are interpellated are, in­deed, more or less consistent, performed as reasonably coherent and well coordinated locations within a single great episteme. Perhaps we live in a world that presses toward singularity rather than multi­plicity, a world that is modern rather than postmodern in character.22 If it is like that, or largely like that, then an inquiry into our interpel­lations as knowing subjects seems necessary, indeed vital. That is, if (like Althusser’s teachers) we can manage ‘‘to turn the few weapons [we] can find. . . against. . . the practices in which [we] are trapped’’ and so make different stories and narratives, narratives that explore the ways in which our constitution as subjects has generated objects and knowledge relations that perform their obviousness under what­ever sign ‘‘science’’ and ‘‘reality’’ now sail.

Perhaps. But I am just a little more optimistic than that because I take it that the established disorders are multiple as well as singu­lar. Notwithstanding the coordinations of the many strategies for co­ordination, the strains toward singularity are counterbalanced by the heterogeneity of multiplicity, and the interferences and overlaps do not necessarily ensure that the fields of ontological force are aligned. I am more optimistic because I take it that the conditions of possibility do not necessarily come in large blocks.23

1985-1989

Between 1985 and 1989 I studied the TSR2.1 sought to develop actor- network theory by adding the TSR2 to the long list of technoscience case studies: bicycles, electric lighting, electric vehicles, electricity power systems, imperialist ships, turbojets, Pasteurizations, aqua­cultures, domestic heating, technology transfers. I was specially con­cerned with the social and the technical. The social, or so I sought to show, was as malleable as the technical. Its shape was not given in the order of things but rather emerged in the course of “heterogeneous engineering.” To show this I told stories to do with the trajectory of the TSR2 project, its rise, its development, and its fall. I also told stories of particular specificities in this trajectory, particular incidents. I was quite pleased with some of these project stories. In the space created for this new sociology of technology they seemed to work reason­ably well.24 But things started to go wrong. This showed itself in a number of ways. In particular, however, I started to become uneasy about my relationship with this aircraft, and especially, with its high – status spokespersons. These were people who were often impressive, thoughtful, successful, and attractive. But as I talked to them, I gradu­ally found that these conversations seemed to be laying a charge on me: I was being constituted as the person who would document this project “definitively” It was, or so some of them said quite explicitly, the right time to document the project. Far removed from those sad days in 1965 when the aircraft was canceled, people could now look back calmly and reflect upon what had happened. By now mostly in retirement, enough of them were still alive to make the study possible.

And then this. I wanted to write an actor-network story, a narra­tive exploring the malleability of the technical and the social. But my interviewees knew nothing of actor-network theory Instead, they treated any empirical description as an admittedly crucial prelude to the more important task of making balanced judgments—and two such judgments in particular. First, whether it was indeed right to have canceled the TSR2. And second, and more generally, what might be learned from this sorry story that could be applied to other military aircraft projects.

I had written most of a book on the TSR2 project. But toward the end of 1989 I put that manuscript in a box, put the box on a shelf, and

went to work on a quite different project. And that manuscript is still in its box.