The Architectures of Heterogeneity

I’ve been arguing that the formalisms of design are like other singu – larities—they are heterogeneous in character. That is, they work in the form of an oscillation between absence and presence, an oscilla­tion that is one of the conditions of their possibility. This means that from the point of view of the center, the attempt to make singularity, the process is always ambivalent and incomplete. Viewed ‘‘techni­cally,’’ this ambivalence means there is always more to be done. The job is never finished; it is always an approximation. Looked at in that way, like the social theories of reflexive modernity, a formalism is,
so to speak, a rule of thumb, something that might work for the time being—with any luck—but might need revising in the light of new events.

But that is, indeed, the ‘‘technical’’ way of looking at it, a way of imagining that attaches itself to the achievement of singularity while recognizing its necessary imperfections. Whereas if we embrace the logic of oscillation then formalism becomes something else. We need to say that it embodies, is the expression of, a set of tensions between what is present and what is absent but also present. Simplicity, ma­teriality, Otherness, non/coherence, and deferral: these are some of the tensions and ambivalences enacted within the presence of a for­malism. No doubt there are others.12 And no doubt they are heteroge­neous too, these distributions.

In this chapter I want to recover the ontological heterogeneity of this term, heterogeneity. I want to understand the tensions that are made in the processes of centering, in the desire to draw things to­gether. This is difficult, itself a process full of tension. For when we talk of heterogeneity we also risk losing its oscillatory and unassimi­lable character: ‘‘I am arguing… that the stability and form of artifacts should be seen as a function of the interaction of heterogeneous ele­ments as these are shaped and assimilated into a network’’ (Law 1987, 113).

This comes from an article that I wrote in which heterogeneity had to do with what I am now calling heterogeneity/materiality. My con­cern then was with system-building: the manipulation of all kinds of materials, technical and human. This is fine so far as it goes—though interestingly it re-echoes the desires of the anonymous authors of the 1955 government White Paper about weapons systems cited earlier. But by now it is clear that it needs to be nuanced or approached in another way. We need, or so I am suggesting, to avoid the flattening effect of imagining that there is, on the one hand, a great designer, a heterogeneous engineer, and on the other, a set of materially hetero­geneous bits and pieces. Instead we need to hold onto the idea that the agent—the ‘‘actor’’ or the ‘‘actor-network’’—is an agent, a center, a planner, a designer, only to the extent that matters are also decen – tered, unplanned, undesigned. To put it more strongly, we need to understand that to make a center is to generate and to be generated by a noncenter, a distribution of the conditions of possibility that is both present and not present.13

To efface this oscillation between singularity and multiplicity, to imagine heterogeneity simply from a control or engineering point of view is, then, another example of what I referred to in chapter 4 as cultural bias. For the notion of “heterogeneous engineering” may be understood in two ways. It may be treated as a way of thinking about oscillation, absence/presence, uncertainty, and the necessary Other­ness that comes with the project of narrative centering. Alternatively, it maybe used to describe and perform an architecture of modernism (Bauman 1989). No doubt there are different versions of this ‘‘modern project.’’ No doubt they do different things. But, to put it too briefly, perhaps we might say that modernism is a way of being that seeks to improve the world, to engineer it, to build a better society. It does so by knowing, by gathering knowledge together, and then by deploying it in the attempt to order relations in the best possible way. It seeks to impose a specific and optimum distribution on its materials, human and otherwise.

The second version of “heterogeneous engineering” resonates with the benevolent and centering intention of this modernism. It catches something important about each of the ‘‘modernist’’ quotations cited earlier: the historical talk of the aircraft design and its ‘‘merits’’; the ‘‘best combination of variables’’ cited in the English Electric state­ment of design philosophy; Vickers’s systems talk with its trade-offs between cost and lethality; and the ‘‘combination’’ of elements men­tioned in the government statement about weapons systems. In each it catches the utopian need to deal in different kinds of materials, technical and social, to center them, to handle them, to manage them. It does so with the characteristic modernist lack of concern with things in themselves—with, for instance, the distinction between hu­man and nonhuman—for the perfect society involves both human and technical innovation (as we saw in the Vickers Armstrong design discussed in chapter 4). In each the second version of heterogeneous engineering catches the concern with simplification; with bringing materials together to optimize the outcome. It catches, that is, the need, the desire, to combine them together at a privileged place, that of the designer. In each it also catches the ‘‘semiotic’’ impulse that underpins the combination of somewhat pliable bits and pieces: the idea that components are a more or less malleable effect of a set of relations of difference; a set of relations that can be engineered to pro­duce a better world. Perhaps, too, it also recognizes in each of these citations an acknowledgment of deferral, the deferral implied in the process of experiment, the trial and error, the iteration toward utopia.

The modernist version of heterogeneous engineering plays on all these notions. It resonates with them. But it misses the heterogene­ities, those places that don’t fit so well with the control impulse, that have forgotten that even the control impulse, the possibility of cen­tering, is made by distribution into heterogeneity. Which means that it doesn’t catch the heterogeneities of multiplicity. The ‘‘mess.’’ The fact that things don’t add up. The oscillations that make the mirage of the perfect center.

It would be good to reclaim heterogeneous distribution and its in­terferences from the flattening that comes with the modern project and to detach it from its utopianism. It would also be good to remove it from the concern to center, the concern to privilege a single place, the design/control place, the place of homogeneity, the place where whatever does not conform becomes a technical matter, an irritant, something to be managed, limited, and controlled. When it is recog­nized at all.

And instead? Well, instead it would be interesting to work with the idea that the conditions of possibility are lumpy and different, that they oscillate between singularity and multiplicity, taking fractional form and that heterogeneity is, indeed, heterogeneous. It would be interesting to imagine that absence/presence comes in indefinitely many forms and to investigate those forms. But most of all it would be good to imagine what might happen if the ambivalence of ab – sence/presence were no longer a trouble, as something to be com­manded and constrained, as distributions deserving of control from a single center. But instead to imagine their alterity as something to be welcomed and embraced.14

AH media are mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous; there are no "purely" visual or verbal arts, though the impulse to purify media is one of the central utopian gestures of modernism.—W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory

The preceding chapters attend in one way or another to centers and how it is that the simplicities of centers are made. Objects, subjects, cultural continuities and formalisms—all are made smooth and cen­tered, and in that making, all include, deny, and defer alterity, that which is not assimilable. The argument I am making, then, is that sin­gularity arises out of that which is multiple. Or, more precisely, ob­jects, subjects, and all the rest are never simple and singular but are also complex and multiple. Note that: are also complex and multiple. For the contrast between simplicity and complexity, between singu­larity and multiplicity, is not simply an either/or. Rather it is both a both/and and an either/or. Both single and multiple, the modernist logics of coherence (seek to) bury their noncoherences as they oscil­late between one and many in the process described by Jacques Der­rida as differance. For this process does not displace simplicity into a happy pluralism in which anything goes.1 Rather, it is an attempt to come to terms with forms that perform themselves in ways that push us beyond what is easily told—beyond the limits set by the pre­dominant conditions of possibility. Recognizing this oscillation en­ables us to come to terms with forms that are fractional—subjects and objects—more than one and less than many.

The oscillations between singularity and multiplicity set up their patterns of interference, patterns that take many forms. We have seen forms of interference that wrestle with the problem of multiplicity to produce relative singularity—the aircraft generated in the brochure discussed in chapter 2 was of that form.2 We have seen interferences that produce immobility—such was the experience of multiple inter­pellation described in chapter 3, though that immobility turns out, or so I argue, to offer a valuable methodological lesson. We have seen the ways in which discontinuities in the social are effaced or deferred in the commitments to continuity embodied in the cultural bias de­scribed in chapter 4. And we have seen the various alterities that are

both implied and displaced by the would-be self-present formalism described in chapter 5.

In this chapter I extend the study of oscillatory interference by re­visiting the brochure. Again my concern is with the coherence of non­coherence. I explore the both/and and the either/or character of that brochure with respect to the complex interferences between its tex­tual and pictorial contents. At the same time, I explore some of the ways complex gender distributions may be performed in a manner that extends both the object itself—the aircraft—and the performance of gender divisions themselves.3