Heterogeneity/Otherness

This chain of distributive differences is complex, but we don’t need to look into all of its ramifications. Retracing one line will do, one set of dis/connections.

Gust response, G, was fixed. It was fixed in a relation of materiality, material heterogeneity, the absence/presence of the sweating pilots. And Mach number, M, it turned out, was also fixed—because OR 339 said so. And why did OR 339 say so? In order to minimize the effect of enemy defenses. And the final set of dis/connections? The enemy turned out to be ‘‘the Russians’’ and the defenses ‘‘an efficient low level surface to air guided weapon.’’ Which means that ‘‘fear’’ and ‘‘the Russians’’ are not simply outside the formalism but also within it.

None of this is empirically extraordinary. In tracing this chain we’re not learning anything startling about the design of the P.17A. But we have learned something more about heterogeneity. We’ve learned that the enemy is within, that it is within the design, within the formal­ism. And the chain spells out one of the ways in which the enemy has been incorporated and assimilated.

This is another form of heterogeneity, another oscillation in differ­ences that are both absent and present. For the enemy and its surface – to-air guided weapons are a part of the formalism, a part of the wing design, rigorously present. At the same time, like the extended for­malism and the bodies of the pilots, they are just as rigorously absent. So this is a third form of heterogeneity, the heterogeneity of tellable Otherness. The enemy excluded, the foe that is necessary, necessarily included, necessarily a part of the center, necessarily Other.

“The Other”: this is a threat. The air force officers who write opera­tional requirements talk in just those terms. In their work they speak of “the threat.” “The Russians and their surface to air guided weapons” are like Edward Said’s Orientals (1991). They are necessary to the West, to its making of itself because they are dangerous, different, and antithetical. They play a similarly ambivalent role. For they are indeed a threat, a danger, something apart and something to be kept apart.

signed, or said.8 Fear is distributed as an absent presence in the center, in the formalism.