Interferences

So we are dealing in multiplicity. Multiple forms for object positions.

Multiple styles of subject positions, interpellations. Donna Haraway (1994, 62) observes: ‘‘Optical metaphors are unavoidable in figuring technoscience.’’ And a few sentences later notes that ‘‘my favourite optical metaphor is diffraction—the noninnocent, complexly erotic practice of making a difference in the world, rather than displacing the same elsewhere’’ (Haraway 1994, 63).

Here I have made five forms of narrative, suggested five styles for making the interpellations of subject positions and object positions, five modes of distributing. These are the story forms that I have iden­tified: plain history, policy, ethics, the esoteric, and the aesthetic. I have, to be sure, made them unrealistically discrete. I wouldn’t pro­pose for one moment that they are fixed, unbridgeable, or primitive.

And even if one sticks with the labels, clearly they don’t represent in­variant and unchanging modes of interpellation. They are products of particular material-semiotic circumstances. But in the present con­text I have set the narratives up in this way, as discrete and separate, because I am interested in the ways in which they interfere with one another. In particular, this makes it easier to see that though they may individually make more or less coherent subject positions, something different starts to happen when several of them are juxtaposed. For when they start to interact with one another to generate complex pat­terns of interference, they also start to make subjects, readers, and au­thors that may be places of illumination when the wave patterns are coherent, but which may be places of darkness when they are not— when the wave patterns cancel one another out.

It is, of course, possible to make the argument in many ways. But here I want to link it to the formation of subjectivity. To the formation or the performance of what I hope we are no longer so disposed to think of as ‘‘the personal.”

So the story runs thus. In 1989 these patterns of narrative coalesced in a particular way to interfere with one another and make a place of darkness. They overlapped to produce a series of mutually destruc­tive interpellations, conflicting subject positions, a place where there was no possibility of writing, reading, or knowing.

I was writing history. This was the first interpellation. But it wasn’t ‘‘just history,’’ not in the way I imagined it. For plain history was never Subjects 59

the strongest form of interpellation for an author made as a sociolo­gist or a student of technoscience rather than a historian. So it was a prelude to what? I thought I was writing history as a prelude to a particular academic narrative, a story about human and nonhuman agents. So that was the second interpellation, the recognition or con­struction of a subject by an esoteric discourse: in this case the narra­tive of actor-network theory. But my high-status interviewees imag­ined that I was writing history, making my inquiries as a prelude to something quite different: a judgment of policy, a judgment about the worthiness of the project. So they thought I was going to write about whether or not it was well managed, what had gone wrong, why it had been canceled and, perhaps most important, whether or not it should have been canceled. This was a third interpellation and it was one that was powerful. It was an effect of what is sometimes called ‘‘studying up’’ and felt like a form of colonization.

So there were three simultaneous interpellations—but two of them were interfering with one another. The writer constituted as esoteric specialist and the writer as policymaker; in this context the two did not fit.29 So that was the first interference pattern. A place of dark­ness. But it was not the only one. There was also a resistance deriving from another story form, a long-ago story form, a story to do with the waste of military spending. This was a form of being that reflected and embodied a horror of nuclear weapons. Perhaps it was an ethical discourse that had been almost buried, long ago cleansed from other narrative forms, from those to do with either the esoteric or matters of policy. So what form did the interference take? I found I could not perform policy. I could not, that is, perform the kind of policy that judged the TSR2 in terms of its (how to say it?) efficacy with respect to military strategy or procurement policy. This was the point at which I stopped. I could not make that final move. Interpellation as a policy narrator interfered, though in different ways, with both esoteric and ethical subject positions.

Interpellation, diffraction, and interference, a moment of darkness, destructive—or at least immobilizing—subject multiplicity.30

Can we imagine this as “inauthenticity”? I don’t know, for certainly in a world of multiplicity there is no ‘‘core,’’ no last instance, no soul, no ultimately centered subject. Which means that authenticity, if that is what it is, rather has to do with the relations between narratives,

of the relations between different forms of obviousness, between the obviousnesses performed in different but related subject positions.

And what of the question of aesthetics? This was another form of interference, I think, for there is a pleasure in aircraft.

No. Let me be careful. Some of us, some of the time, some subject positions, are constituted to find various kinds of pleasure in rela­tion to machines, flying machines, and even killing machines. That is a whole other set of narratives, ways of talking and being that are pressed, or so I’d want to suggest, to the margins, in the narrative forms that I’ve mentioned above. My conclusion is that some version or other of machinic pleasure was what interpellated me one day, in RAF Cosford, in 1985, and then hid itself again. Which is some kind of answer as to why I ‘‘chose’’ to study TSR2 when I might have chosen to study so many other technologies.31