Continuity and Culture

I will shortly take this story one step further, but it is time to pause for a moment and reflect. Let’s start by saying that this history as told by the brochure writers at English Electric is perfectly plausible. No doubt as an expression of the coordinating potential of what in the previous chapter I described as ‘‘plain history,’’ it might be incorpo­rated into an account offered by any historian of the English Elec­tric company, and I suggest, its general style feels comfortable in the context of technoscience studies. So what is the nature of this plau­sibility?

The answer lies in the fact that one thing leads discursively to another. Somehow or other, events go together, distributed onto a line, a time line, a line ofinfluence, the teleological means-ends line that is the guiding thread of a project. It is, to be sure, an interested history. It would be easy to tell a debunking story about the concerns of those who wrote the brochure, noting that they sought to make as Cultures 69

much as possible of the readily available cultural materials. And it would be equally easy to tell a story that did not debunk but merely noted the operation of social interests as well as the existence and ma­nipulation of a prior set of resources in the form of skills, materials (such as wind tunnels and machine tools), and texts.

I’ll discuss interest narratives in a later section of this chapter. But such ironicizing or contextualizing doesn’t necessarily reduce the plausibility of the story about English Electric. Note, for instance, that it conforms, at least in broad shape, to the form of much narration in technoscience studies, sociology, or anthropology. It does so, in par­ticular, because it is an example of an origin story.7 The narratives re­tell how one (cultural) thing leads to another, influencing it and shap­ing it, as one passes through time. So it is a narrative in a plausible form, in one or more of the versions of that form (‘‘plain history’’ and ‘‘policy narrative’’) — or their closely related if more esoteric cousin, the social shaping of technology. It makes a reader who knows how to handle and assess it, who knows the strategic moves. In addition, that reader knows the kinds of issues that might be highlighted if one wanted to set about undermining it: ‘‘We need more detail’’ or ‘‘No, the similarities between the P1.B and the P.17A are overstated if we look at this other material.’’ And so on.

So, let’s say that this form of narrative is a coordinating strategy, a method for the cultural ordering of what might otherwise be discon­nected objects. It takes the form of a plausible historical narrative, a plausible origin story. It makes a culture (we perhaps should remind ourselves again) that ramifies into and is performed through material objects and procedures such as genes, skills, jigs, and power presses, a culture that somehow or other may be said to shape the events that it contains, in this case historically.

So what about this term, culture? It would, to be sure, be possible to write a book about this. Indeed a library. Several have been written. I want, however, to approach the term in a particular way by linking it to specific lines of writing in technoscience studies. With this in mind, it is helpful to cite Sharon Traweek, who tells us that ‘‘a com­munity is a group of people with a shared past, with ways of recogniz­ing and displaying their differences from other groups, and expecta­tions for a shared future. Their culture is the ways, the strategies they 70 Cultures recognize and use and invent for making sense’’ (Traweek 1992, 437-

38). So we have strategies for arranging, for making sense and (to add to her definition) creating similarities and differences, including the similarities and differences that constitute community.

But how are similarity and difference made? As I suggested in chap­ter 2, there are various strategies, methods for distributing or order­ing such continuities and ruptures. And here we are dealing with another: that of chronology or genealogy, the tracing of descent, the insistence on commonality through the generations. This strategy comprises at least one of the tropes used by those who wrote or (we might add) performed the English Electric brochure; by those who worked in the test facilities and factories of English Electric in the north of England at Warton and Preston; by the material embodiments of English Electric, precisely in the form of those facilities and fac­tories; by the story, by the lineage, that I built for the company at the beginning of this chapter; and by technoscience students as they seek to make sense of the way in which things follow things to produce what we might think of as shaped continuity. For this is one of the great distributive tropes, methods, or mechanisms of culture. It is not surprising that we should find it in our materials. It is not surprising that we should use it ourselves in our technoscience studies: the nar­rative of the world as genealogy and chronology. More time lines. A project doesn’t need to be made in this way. No doubt it cannot ex­clusively be made in this way. But surely this is one of the elementary mechanisms of project making.