System Continuities

The culture of Vickers, or Vickers-Supermarine, is quite unlike that of English Electric. That would be a way of putting it, a good way of telling of the difference. We have here two design cultures that em­body quite different traditions, very different skills, substantially dif­ferent understandings about what goes with what, and quite differ­ent approaches to building and solving puzzles. Or, to put it in one of the languages used in the study of technoscience, we are dealing two different technological frames.16 For the similarities made by En­glish Electric take us to past exemplary achievements, while those of Vickers take us into. .. into what? Into ‘‘weapons systems.’’ But what does this mean?

Connections not through time, but across a virtual space. In prac­tice this becomes in part the question of the physical size of the air­craft. This is the issue at stake in the previous citation. But imagine

that physical size is simply some kind of intermediary between kill­ing and cost. If we think of it this way, then the narrative connections made by Vickers are more radical, more ‘‘abstract,’’17 than those of the government-radical or ‘‘abstract,’’ that is, in the sense that the frame of the story no longer has to do with the aircraft or even with its spe­cific components. For there has been a transmutation, and the aircraft has been turned into a part of the system, a role or even a set of roles that may be narrated together in one way or another, a role or set of roles that can be distributed and redistributed. So the story no longer has to do primarily with aircraft that have become a means to an end. Instead the narrative stabilities, the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, these have to do with killing and cost, with the links between killing and cost and the most efficient way of making those links.

This is a logic, a mode of distributing and making that we have dis­cussed before. But let me also observe the following: there is a shift from diachronic to synchronic. Narrative similarities and differences trace themselves in a synchronic space rather than down lines of de­scent. The object is dissolved in this synchronic syntax for telling stories and making connections. I’ve also noted this too. For the focus is no longer the aircraft but rather the system, and the aircraft is being imagined as a product of that system or rather as a set of characteris­tics or as an expression of that system: size, number of engines, and (if one goes into it more carefully) radar cross-sections and training accidents. So what used to be an aircraft is turned into a set of places, roles, and features while the ‘‘aircraft itself,’’ the form one sees when one looks at it, is shaped by these relations. Like the transmutation from work into text,18 it is an object of variable geometry until the system stabilizes itself, an effect, an outcome. It is nothing in and of itself.19

Context. This suffers a distributional fate like that of the aircraft. For it too is desegregated and colonized. That is to say, to the extent it is important, it is brought within the syntax of the system as a set of places that may be told as having certain effects. This means that like the aircraft it isn’t given, or if it is given then it is also malleable. Ob­jects appear, but they take new forms: ‘‘lethality’’ instead of targets or people and their destruction. All of which is a feature of technology 78 Cultures including, perhaps especially, war technology. Here ‘‘users’’ are being

connected with the system, “configured” or shaped,20 which means that inside and outside are not given in the order of things. For the sys­tem goes everywhere that is functionally relevant, and those objects that do exist are permeable, revisable.21

Finally this story forms a calculable space, a homogeneous space, within which to contain specific narrative threads. For there is no difference in kind between money and lethality. The two are inter­changeable. Instead the issue is simply that of calculating the best ex­change rate. Vickers has a technology for making these calculations and for drawing distinctions, distinctions, for instance, between large aircraft and small or between those companies that are able to make those calculations and those that are not.

If culture is a set of forms for distributing connections and discon­nections that perform similarity and difference, for making narrative coordinations, then to work in terms of systems is to perform another cultural technology, a technology in addition to and distinct from that of genealogy. It is to perform a technology for making and distribut­ing connections in which everything important is connected to every­thing else. It is to deploy a form of storytelling that tells of its univer­sality, the generality of its calculus. In which everything important may be constituted, connected, and performed that way. And such is the genius of Vickers’s proposal: it homogenizes, making all the story elements malleable, a function of everything else, a universal grammar.

It is no surprise that such an attractive cultural strategy for making similarity and difference should have found a ready place in the dis­tributions of social science and in technoscience stories, this system of universal continuity.22 It is not surprising that this strategy should narrate the differences between the human and the nonhuman as less than important—that they arise, as it were, after the event, as a func­tion of the operation of the narrative distribution. It is also not surpris­ing that such stories should reveal colonizing tendencies, unwilling­nesses, or inabilities to deal with that which may not be assimilated.23

Size

Here is another story.

On the one hand, the Whitehall mandarins liked the English Elec­tric design, the P.17A. It was aerodynamically excellent. But they Cultures 79

weren’t so sure about the capacity of English Electric to manage the project. On the other hand, the Vickers’s 571 proposal was also good, especially in its commitment to systems thinking. And the manage­ment record of the firm was outstanding. Their conclusion was that ‘‘the right thing to do is . . . to give the task to the Vickers/English Electric combination, provided that the leadership is in the hands of Vickers and indeed in the person of Sir George Edwards’’ (AIR8/2196 1958a).

But this is simply a preface to the story I now want to make, a story to do with size, the size of the aircraft:

It is desirable both from the point of view of development time and cost, that a proposed aircraft to any given specification should be as small as possible. For any project study the opti­mum size of aircraft is obtained by iteration during the initial design stages. The size of aircraft which emerges from this itera­tion process is a function of many variables. Wing area is deter­mined by performance and aerodynamic requirements. Fuselage size is a function of engine size and the type of installation, vol­ume of equipment, fuel and payload, aerodynamic stability re­quirements and the assumed percentage of the internal volume ofthe aircraft which can be utilised. (English Electric/Short Bros. 1958, 3.1.1)

These words from English Electric tell a story about the relationship between time, connection, and disconnection. But would another manufacturer have told a very different story? It seems unlikely:

From the very beginning of our study of the G. O.R. we believed that if this project was to move forward into the realm of reality —or perhaps more aptly the realm of practical politics—it was essential that the cost of the whole project should be kept down to a minimum whilst fully meeting the requirement. This led us towards the small aircraft which, by concentrating the develop­ment effort on the equipment offers the most economic solution as well as showing advantages from a purely technical stand­point. (Vickers Armstrong 1958b, 2)

So these words from Vickers arrive at essentially the same conclu – 80 Cultures sion, the conclusion that it is desirable to have a small aircraft. But

though they both want small aircraft, the two companies are going to end up in very different places, at least for a time. Here is English Electric again:

Abandonment of twin engines would be the only other way of achieving a smaller aircraft and this also involves a large reduc­tion in the sortie pattern. This arrangement has not however been considered, due to the overwhelming pilot preference for a twin – engined arrangement even in the P.1B. (English Electric/Short Bros. 1958,1.S.6)

This is unlike Vickers’s preferred 571 proposal which was, as we have seen, for an aircraft with only one engine—and was, as a result, much smaller than the P.17A. So what was the difference? How did it come about? I have mentioned part of Vickers’s reasoning, the equa­tion of size, cost, and lethality that was related in the brochure to other interlinked stories about equipment miniaturization, integra­tion, and space saving. But what of English Electric? Two engines, or so it reasoned, were better:

This is because of the very high accident rate of supersonic air­craft following total engine failure, due to their very high rate of descent and the limitations of emergency power control systems.

The argument for two engines in the present case is reinforced by the need to operate several times further from base than the P.1B and for a substantial time at low altitude where the glide capability would be much reduced. (English Electric/Short Bros.

1958, 1.S.6)

In other words, they are saying that a supersonic plane flies quite badly when it loses power—which is something that doesn’t have much to recommend it. So it was that with two engines, the P.17A ended up with a design weight of 66,000 lbs. (English Electric/Short Bros. 1958,1.1.4; Ransom and Fairclough 1987, 298).

It is possible, indeed easy, to link the difference in sizes to the stories about cultural difference discussed earlier. English Electric is telling a story about pilots, the experience of pilots who try to fly powerless planes. It is, to be sure, distinguishing between humans and nonhumans. So English Electric uses cultural genealogy to offer a reason for choosing two engines rather than one. Against this Vickers Cultures 81

is making other similarities and differences, synchronic connections, systems connections that dissolve the distinction between human and nonhuman and lead to its own very different fixed points, those of cost and lethality So these are narratives of social and technical shaping both, but they are made very differently.

It would be easy to do this, but I want to go somewhere else. I want to think about the mandarin response to this difference. For remem­ber, by now we have the civil servants agreeing that they want the two firms to collaborate on an aircraft. There are going to be many prob­lems, but one is quite simply that one of the designs is half as large as the other.

To jump forward, in the end the government will go for a larger ver­sion: ‘‘a study on the single versus twin engined aircraft was received 16th July, 1958. It showed fairly conclusively that the twin engined configuration is the less costly in accidents’’ (AIR8/2196 1958b). Vick­ers’s calculations, their version of the relationship between cost, size, and lethality, these have been worn down, overturned, by alterna­tive calculations made in government. That is a possible story. No doubt it was one that was performed in the corridors of Whitehall. But there are other possible connections too, other narratives. For in­stance, here’s a second excerpt from the same document, referring to events that took place very slightly earlier, in June 1958: ‘‘The matter of a joint requirement for the Navy and Air Force still loomed large and Vickers Armstrong’s submission to G. O.R.339 included a very promising single engine solution…it was decided inter alia that the Air Ministry would initiate a study to determine the economics and wisdom of having a single engine version of the aircraft’’ (AIR8/2196 1958b). This also tells about size, economics, and wisdom, but there are other actors too, new actors. Most notably, there is the navy. But what has the navy got to do with it? The story runs something like this:

The Navy has its own aircraft under development. Known as the NA 39 and later the Buccaneer, this is a small aircraft. It has to be small because it’s intended to fly from aircraft carriers. But the NA 39 is also much slower than the GOR 339 aircraft and its range is much shorter. Though it is designed to drop nuclear weapons, its electronics and avionics are much less sophisticated than those being proposed for 82 Cultures GOR 339.

Since March 1957 it has been government policy to press ahead with the development of ballistic missiles because Minister of De­fence Duncan Sandys thinks that the age of the manned warplane is over. The future, or so he says, belongs to missiles, ballistic missiles that will drop hydrogen bombs on Moscow. And, sometime in the future, there will be antiballistic missiles that will meet and destroy the missiles that will rain down on London.

The Royal Air Force isn’t persuaded by Sandys’s vision. Indeed, most officers think that it is little more than science fiction, and even those who take strategic ballistic missiles seriously think that antibal­listic missiles are a pipe dream. In addition, everyone believes that a whole lot of fighting isn’t going to be possible with missiles of any kind. This is GOR 339 kind of work—for instance, surveillance, or tactical strikes on railways, factories, bridges, and armies. These are the kinds of bombing raids that would be needed if a war against the Russians didn’t go nuclear, or at any rate strategically nuclear, in the first four minutes.

It has taken most of 1957 to persuade the minister of defence that this story might be the case and then to persuade him that, despite its apparent similarities, the Naval NA 39 is really quite different from the GOR 339 aircraft in speed, precision, and range. It has therefore taken most of 1957 to persuade him that it isn’t a cheap option to stop the GOR 339 aircraft and simply to order the NA 39 for the air force as well as the navy.

By this point the outlines of a possible explanatory story have be­come clear, haven’t they? Let’s list the three main actors in this drama.

(1) Vickers wants a small GOR 339 aircraft for various reasons, but one is certainly that it thinks it will sell better.

(2) The Royal Air Force might, just might, be persuaded by Vick­ers’s synchronic systems-derived arguments. But this is going to be uphill work, partly because pilots don’t care for unpowered super­sonic aircraft but also because if they accept the small plane, then this puts the air force position in jeopardy. This is because one of the differences between the NA 39 and GOR 339 falls, that of size.

But if this happens then the Minister of Defence or the Treasury might force the RAF to buy an ‘‘improved’’ version of the NA 39.

(3) The navy doesn’t want a small GOR 339, however desirable such Cultures 83

an aircraft might be in the abstract. This is quite simply because a plane in the hand is worth much more than two in the indetermi­nate future.

Interests

So this is a nice story, indeed a classic, built as it is around social inter­ests, around the narrative trope that hidden, or more or less hidden, social interests shape decisions and outcomes.

They do it. That is, the people we study in social science tell their stories so. Often enough they distribute their realities that way. And we do it too, in our own social-science studies, in one form or another. We do it in analyses of the class – or gender-shaped character of tech­nological change,24 in social-interest theory, as elaborated by the ‘‘Edinburgh School,’’25 and in the studies of bureaucratic politics that come from political theory.26 And then, though perhaps in a less struc­tural form, we do it in the theory of interessement or translation found in actor-network theory.27

None of this is very surprising: there is no particular reason to imag­ine that our forms of cultural bias, the ways in which we make con­nections, would differ from those round about us. For this is simply another narrative strategy for creating, shuffling through, and assem­bling assorted bits and pieces, material, verbal, human; another way of finding connections and making similarities and differences, of finding connections that give some shape to the distribution and re­distribution of specificities. This is a resource for storytelling avail­able to anyone who is willing—and who is not?—to adopt the position that they see further, or better, deeper than those round about them.

The strategy of depth, of seeing deeper, may be related either to genealogy or to the synchronicity of system building. Interests may shape evolution, or they may be reflected in the structure of systems. There isn’t too much to be said about this, one way or the other, ex­cept perhaps that interest stories aren’t just smooth stories—though, like systems and genealogies, they certainly count as that. They aren’t just smooth stories because they are also stories that manage to bring together oppositions—or, more precisely, they are stories that manage to bring together apparent inconsistencies. The strategy of seeing into the depths looks past dissimilarities, even clashes, by treating 84 Cultures them as symptoms or superficialities and going beneath the surface to fundamental and coherent places that are said to be more real.

That is, it welds what have been turned into superficialities into a single, more comprehensive narrative. Multiple cultures, conflicting cultures, similarities and differences, all may be subsumed to the potential of the narratives of depth, the strategies of storytelling in depth.

I said earlier that systems stories are totalizing and that they colo­nize. But now we find that the same is true for interest stories: these too are totalizing and colonizing. For opposition is understood and incorporated into the interest structure, the deep interest structure, that underlies and underpins appearances. Similarity is achieved in yet another guise-while multiplicity is displaced.