Dis/continuities

So this is a world of cultural and historical discontinuities in the form of “revolutionary proposals.’’ But take a look at this:

Work was well advanced, and if it had been selected there is little doubt that the P17A could have been flying as a prototype by 1963….It had another potential advantage in that it would have met the broad operational requirement, powered by a modified standard Bristol Siddeley Olympus engine. (Hastings 1966, 30)

This is Conservative MP Stephen Hastings, who wrote a book on the project. It’s true that he’s picking over the entrails after the event. He’s reflecting on the fact that in the end the choice was for a ‘‘weapons system’’ aircraft of the kind preferred by Vickers Armstrong. And he’s exploring the fact that for a variety of reasons (his book considers these in some depth) this aircraft ultimately came to a sticky end—his is a story that resonates in particular with those who worked for En­glish Electric and their ‘‘evolutionary’’ P.17A. Most interesting here, however, is the way in which the polarities have been reversed. Here value is being distributed across the boundary the other way round, for the ‘‘weapons system revolution’’ is being performed as an obstacle rather than as a great leap forward. Continuity, accretion, descent, these would have been better. This is the lesson that we are being asked to draw.

So the distributive polarities may change. Differences between the present and the past maybe desirable or they may not. In some stories about what came before, the past may fall from favor. In others it does

But this is only half of the story.

An aircraft must be treated not merely as a flying machine but as a complete ‘‘weapons system’’. This phrase means the combi­nation of airframe and engine, the armament needed to enable the aircraft to strike at its target, the radio by which the pilot is guided to action or home to base, the radar with which he locates his target and aims his weapons, and all the oxygen, cooling and other equipment which ensure the safety and efficiency of the crew. Since the failure of any one link could make a weapons sys­tem ineffective, the ideal would be that complete responsibility for co-ordinating the various components of the system should rest with one individual, the designer of the aircraft. Experience has shown that this is not completely attainable, but it is the in­tention to move in this direction as far as practical considerations allow. (HMSO 1955, 9)

The citation is from a government document, a statement of offi­cial policy that appeared in 1955. But now that I have cited it, it starts to make a difference to the ordering of the narrative. In particular, it makes a difference to the story told by Gardner, the story of revolu­tion and discontinuity. Suddenly it looks as if Vickers’s revolutionary proposal isn’t so revolutionary after all. Another story is, or could be, performed—a story of continuity. This is a story of a different kind of continuity, one that tells of the links between government arms procurement policy and the 571 proposal made by Vickers, which in this new cultural context isn’t revolutionary any more. Indeed, it isn’t even entirely new.

So it is that we find ourselves back in a world of continuity, gene­alogy, and descent—albeit a continuity different in kind from that celebrated by English Electric.12 And if I wanted to strengthen that narrative of descent I could tell stories, too, about the reasons for the government policy statement, about why the government came to favor a weapons-system approach. These stories would have to do with procurement policies in the United States and with certain un­fortunate British projects which created aircraft that flew satisfacto­rily by themselves but when mounted with weapons turned out to have aerodynamic problems if they were fired.13 Back to a world of continuity.

Here’s a proposition. Culture in all its forms—talk, technics, skill— is about making and distributing similarities and differences, about allocating them and re-allocating them. It is about trying to stabilize them or undermine them. It is about ‘‘the strategies [we] recognize and use and invent for making sense’’ (I’m citing Sharon Traweek again). But (this is the proposition) when we perform these alloca­tions we also reflect, perform, instantiate, and form narratives that reflect and embody forms of cultural bias.14

Which we? That’s a good question.15 Let’s just say for the moment, we who are the narrators, the cultural bricoleurs, the performers, the engineers or managers who write brochures, the historians who write company histories, the sociologists and technoscience students who tell stories about social interests and the social shaping of tech­nology. We, all of us, have a bias in favor of continuity, narrative con – tinuity—for instance (though not necessarily) in the form of descent or genealogy. This is one of the features of the tendency to perform singularity and the concomitant tendency to marginalize multiplicity. Which means that, at the same time, we tend to have a bias against discontinuity, against revolutions and step changes, and especially against multiplicity and that which cannot be assimilated.

So here is the suggestion: we tend to assume that if we cannot as­similate something, trace lines of similarity, explication, then some­how or other we have failed. Even if the events present themselves as discontinuous. Broken up. Or multiple.