Cultural Bias

So what have we learned about the cultural distributions of military technoscience? We have learned that there is a bias against multi­plicity or discontinuity, though not necessarily against difference when this can be subsumed within continuity. And we have learned that this performs itself in three great distributive forms, three varia­tions in cultural strategy.

First, there is genealogy, which is a form of culture, of narrative, that makes its similarities and differences through time by perform­ing lineages, lines of descent, generational or chronological origin stories. If we were to invent a social history of genealogy, perhaps we might say that this is an aristocratic form of storytelling belonging to and performing, in the first instance, the premodern.

Second, there is system, which effaces history and generates a syn­chronic and homogeneous space in which everything conceivable starts off by being similar in kind before being quantitatively distin­guished and distributed. Thus, differences no longer exist in the gen­erational order of things (as in genealogy) but are rather to be under­stood as the distributive consequences of contingent calculations. In an invented history of culture perhaps this would belong to the bour­geois era, being modern both in its incarnations as liberal polity and as market economy.28

Third, there is interest. Or, more generally, there is a cultural strat­egy that discerns realities (such as interests) that are hidden behind superficialities. It works by distributing entities into levels that are Cultures 85

performed as qualitatively different. As a specificity, it may distrib­ute narratives into two classes: the class of those narratives that are real (of which it is one) because they describe that place called reality which may be hidden from the common view; and the class of those narratives that are not real because they tell stories of realities that do not exist and even tend to mask reality. In a history of culture perhaps we’d want to locate this in critique and so, in critical modernity, as the antithesis of system.29

So there are three distributive forms, three ways of making connec­tions that build worlds embodying different conditions of possibility, different ontological spaces. But though there are important differ­ences between the three cultural strategies, there is also a similarity: a propensity to perform consistency, smoothness, and connection. As I noted earlier of genealogy, but now the point may be made more gen­erally, each embodies a cultural bias in favor of continuity. Genealogy slips through generations. System, no doubt more radically, homoge­nizes everything that is, everything that could be told. And even inter­est or depth, which like genealogy makes differences in kind, does so within a tellable set of similarities.

Continuity over discontinuity, connection over disconnection, the effacing of multiplicity-such is the cultural bias of technoscience distributions and, no doubt, many other contemporary performances. Perhaps, one might venture, it is a feature of social science and technoscience, a modern grand narrative, a grand narrative that no doubt includes our own narratives, the distributions made by soci­ologists and technoscience students.30 Narratives that, taken together, tend to perform themselves into being in other, nonverbal, material forms and therefore tend to make the narrative smoothnesses of technoscience, of modernity. And, to be sure, the smoothly centered subjects to which they correspond. Cultural bias works in favor of singularity, even though it also makes difference.

This effacement of multiplicity suggests that it might be useful to find ways of making culture that emphasize and perform disconti­nuity in addition to continuity; that are rough as well as smooth, stutter rather than, or as well as, speaking fluently; that perform patchworks alongside homogeneities and multiplicities alongside singularities; that imagine technoscience practice as a set of partial 86 Cultures connections rather than as synoptic visions,31 and run interference on

The Project

A project is a "plan, scheme; planned undertaking, especially by stu­dents) for presentation of results at a specified time” (Concise Oxford Dictionary). The term derives from the Latin pro (in front of, for, on behalf of, instead of, on account of) and jacere (to throw) (ibid.). Perhaps, then, ”the project” is the performance of a cultural bias in favor of continuity. Perhaps ”the project” is a performance of the three cultural order­ings of continuity: genealogy, system, and interest or depth. Perhaps it is possible because these three orderings, individually discovering their limits, are able to pass the baton of continuity to one another. In which case singularity is secured in a process of continual narrative shuffling that forever defers the interruptions and disconti­nuities. And the problem of multiplicity is effaced. Effaced, but at the same time performed. —The TSR2 project ”itself.” —The project to study the TSR2. —The project of technoscience studies. —The project of technoscience. —The modern project.

its grand narratives by refusing to come to the point. That perform another and different form of cultural bias.32 Postscript It is sometimes said that to give up grand narrative is to embrace political conservatism. This is one of the criticisms made of postmod­ernism: it is simply about playing. It is not a coincidence, according to this argument, that at a moment in history when dominant groups find that they are under threat they suddenly discover the virtues of

Cultures 87

small narratives. This neoliberalism, or so it is said, is best understood as a form of neoconservatism, a new strategy for preserving existing distributions, an expression of the cultural logic of late capitalism.

No doubt there is something in such a complaint. Divide and rule was always an effective strategy of power. But the story can also be told quite differently. Is it the case that dominant groups are under threat? Is it the case that a strategy of partial connection amounts to the same thing as liberalism, neo – or otherwise?

If we opt for the discontinuities of stutter or the fractionalities of partiality, we will no doubt have to debate how dominances, asymme­tries, and the uses of power might come to look that way. Both/and. Multiplicity/singularity. But this is precisely thepoint. One does not have to go all the way back to Louis Althusser to imagine that multiple cultural performances enact overlapping similarities and differences. One does not have to imagine that all the instruments are playing a single score to imagine that the conditions of possibility may shape themselves into asymmetries. One does not have to be able to tell the whole story from a single place to imagine that there may be asym­metries which perform themselves—yes—in distributed ways.

Perhaps, then, it is time to imagine multiplicity, fractionality, and partiality as alternative cultural strategies. And perhaps it is the mo­ment to imagine the tools for apprehending distribution after homo­geneity.

You don’t have a map in your head, as a child. Later, you have the globe— the seas and the shapes—and you can’t ever get back to that emptiness, that mystery. Knowing that there are other places, but not knowing where they are, or how to get there. — Penelope Lively, City of the Mind

Mimesis fuses brilliantly with alterity to achieve the connection necessary for magical effect, … a kind of electricity, an ac/dc pattern of rapid oscillations of difference. It is the artful combination, the playing with the combinatorial perplexity, that is necessary; a magnificent excessiveness over and beyond the fact that mimesis implies alterity as its flip-side. The full effect occurs when the necessary impossibility is attained, when mimesis becomes alterity. Then and only then can spirit and matter, history and nature, flow into each others’ otherness. — Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses

The ground figure that emerges from the stories in the previous chap­ters is one of oscillation or displacement. On the one hand there is the normative simplicity of the modern project, which seeks to enact the god-eye and presupposes the ontological singularity of the world that it desires to know and make. This simplicity is sustained by the theory of perspectivalism that allows, indeed requires, different viewers to see different things when they look at an object. The hope, however, or the expectation, is that a single story may be told of an object that is equally singular. And on the other hand, there is the multiplicity of the so-called postmodern world, with its renunciation of grand nar­rative and its preference for an aesthetics of little stories. Modernist singularity and postmodernist multiplicity, the two stand in tension with one another.

This much is standard fare in the social sciences. Indeed, it is the customary terrain within which much of social-theory debate oper – ates—and within which it is usual to stake out a position. To find, for instance, that ‘‘modernism’’ fails because it denies the lack of foun­dations that has precisely been generated by the restless machine of modernity as it dissolves all that is solid into air. Or because it leads to

the barbarism of what Zygmunt Bauman calls “gardening” (Bauman 1989). Or, conversely, to find that “postmodernism” is a repudiation of intellectual and moral responsibility, and to assert that it is indeed possible to make claims about the world even if they turn out to be relatively provisional (see Giddens 1990).

But I am suggesting that there is a much more interesting way of looking at this oscillation, this tension between singularity and multi – plicity—or between modernism and postmodernism. It is to note that the two imply one another. That for instance (to take the case dis­cussed in the previous chapter) singularity precisely sustains itself by shifting endlessly between different stories—stories that are, them­selves, singularities. But at the same time this means, as is obvious, that the fact of different singularities together also performs multi­plicity. Together they are performing a more or less self-denying or self-effacing multiplicity—a deferral indeed of that which does not tell itself as singular in order to secure singularity.1

Looked at in this way, the reason the debates about ‘‘modernism’’ and “postmodernism” take the form that they do becomes clear. There is endless room for “postmodern” debunking of grand narrative — of forms of storytelling that announce themselves to be both com­prehensive and (necessary concomitant) singular. Such debunking is easy because incompleteness and incoherence can always be found. And, conversely, there is endless scope for complaining precisely about that debunking because it denies the possibility of (real enough) singularity and the intellectual and moral commitment implied in taking a stand.

What I’m suggesting, however, is that it is much more interesting and productive to explore oscillation between certainties than it is to take a position in the debate. For that is what I am attempting to do: to explore metaphors for the processes of incompleteness that do not force us to one pole or the other and that do not, therefore, insist upon the fundamental character of (what has been turned into) a dualism. To echo Bruno Latour, the strategy I seek to articulate is neither “mod­ernist” nor “postmodernist” in form—though unlike Latour I take it that the both/and logic applies not simply to humans and nonhumans on the one hand and hybrids on the other, but more generally to any entities (objects or subjects) that live in oscillation, which means,
no doubt, all entities. So this is “nonmodernist” perhaps, though the term strikes me as unhappy because it also implies commitment to some kind of secular chronological ordering that it would be better to avoid.2 And if there is room for postmodernism at all, this is only because it provides an attitude, or a set of techniques, that are ini­tially helpful: in short because its skepticism secures the possibility that everything does not hold together, as is imagined in modernism, in singularity.

I am searching, then, for metaphors for thinking the oscillation be­tween multiplicity and singularity, and for ways of reworking the nar­rative conditions of possibility performed in modern and postmod­ern storytelling. I also want to find ways of re-creating subjectivities that do not draw everything together but are not, conversely, simply fragmented and to explore the ways in which those oscillations per­form themselves, their modalities, their modes of interference. That is the point of this chapter, in which I consider the slippages and de­ferrals that ground (without ever finally grounding) an aerodynamic formalism and seek to reinterpret the notion of “heterogeneity.”