Heterogeneity/Materiality

Let’s talk first of absence—for here we have a second form of absence.

This isn’t a matter of simplicity, or if it is, then it is a new form of simplicity. For this is material absence. Removed from the flat space occupied by the formalism, we find ourselves in the sweating world of the aircrew. We discover pilots who flew their creaking aircraft too low, who worried about whether the wings would break off, who were thrown about their cockpits, and who climbed shaking from their air­craft at the end of these flights.

If we are imaginative enough then perhaps we can smell the fear, feel the sweat on the bodies, taste the vomit. For this is another set of presences, another set of relations, another syntax. It is another set of differences—different presences that are absent from the space of

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Nausea

The corporeal or, if we include the aircraft, the corporeal with the technological—these are absent from the space of the page, from the formalism about G, gust response. This is the absence of materiality. For, in the way they write the P.17A brochure, there is no room for vomit. It does not fit. There is no room for sweat in formalisms. In the documents that are sent to the government ministries, there isn’t enough space for the test aircraft they used, such as the Meteor air­craft. So they are removed, and not simply because there isn’t enough room, but also because they are materials that do not perform them­selves in the differences of the page, within a logic performed in alge­braic difference.

And yet, these are absences that are also present. For G is there on the page. Gust response is fixed. It is fixed not by the other parame­ters that occur in the formalism (though these are fixed in their re­lations with one another). Rather, it is fixed in a set of relations, re­lations of absence/presence, to do with the suffering of the aircrew. ‘‘By comparing several aircraft, of known characteristics, which have been flown in low altitude turbulence,” (I quote the sentence again) ‘‘it is possible to decide a maximum value for this parameter which will ensure a comfortable flight.’’ A parameter to do with comfort, the comfort of a particular aircrew. Comfort that will allow them to per­form the task of piloting the aircraft efficiently, properly.

Absence/presence, the absence of materiality that is also a pres­ence—no doubt this is what those who write actor-network studies intend when they talk of ‘‘translation’’ and ‘‘chains of translation.’’ (See, e. g., Latour 1993.) And this is a second oscillation in the dis­tributions of heterogeneity: the absent presence of materiality, the Otherness of materials that don’t fit in. But do.