Technics and Aesthetics

The brochure I started to explore in chapter 2 was published in 1962 by the British Aircraft Corporation and was intended for potential purchasers: that is, for a highly select group of military top brass, senior civil servants, and a few politicians in the UK, Australia, and one or two other possible purchasing countries. So it is already a spe­cial form of publication—a sales document. And, within that cate­gory, it is a special kind of sales document aimed at a small and more or less sophisticated readership. The cover and other pictorial ma-

EXHIBIT 6.1 Brochure Cover (British Aircraft Corporation 1962; © Brooklands Museum)

terial suggest that the brochure is also made to look “pretty,” but only in some measure. So, to use a pair of terms that I hope I can in due course render more problematic, it exists in a place where what we tend to think of as the technical butts up against and interferes with what is often called the aesthetic.

So what might we make of this front cover? Some description and a brief recapitulation.

Most obviously it announces the title in big letters: ‘‘TSR2,’’ and then, just below, in a smaller cursive typeface, it adds the words ‘‘Weapons System.’’ In addition, toward the bottom, the name of the manufacturer, ‘‘British Aircraft Corporation,” is highlighted in a sans serif type set against a darker background. And all this printing has, as a background, a perspectival but highly stylized depiction that may be understood as a view from the TSR2. For the reader of this bro­chure knows enough about the aircraft to know that one of its most important features is the ability to fly very fast at a height of only two hundred feet—and the view appears to be from two hundred feet.

So that is a description. But let me ask again: What should we make of this cover?4

Perhaps the most obvious response is to look at it briefly, to read the title, and then to turn the page. After all, it is just that, a cover, and as we know, covers announce what will follow. They attract us to the interesting and important contents—in this instance to the sixty pages of the brochure. And they frame it as separate, apart from that which follows, that which is not so set apart. So, even if we don’t in­stantly move to the contents we might linger for no more than a mo­ment on the design of the cover and say or think ‘‘very pretty,’’ or ‘‘very stylized,’’ or ‘‘very 1960s,’’ or ‘‘I wonder what the air vice marshals thought of that?’’

But to ask such questions is to hint at the possibility of treating it seriously as an object in its own right, as I started to do in chapter 2. In particular, I need to ask why on earth one would bother to spend time on something, yes a ‘‘detail,’’ as seemingly unimportant as the front cover of a document when one might instead be studying its contents.

I offered an implicit answer to this question in chapter 2. There I talked about perspectivalism as a strategy for coordinating, a way of pasting together different object positions by assuming that they are complementary aspects of a singular object. Now, however, I want to Aesthetics 117

118 Aesthetics

explore this notion somewhat differently by restating a methodologi­cal prejudice. It may be that I am getting overly suspicious, but when something is said to be a ‘‘detail,’’ I hear the performance of a fierce form of distribution (Law 2000c). More specifically, I hear the perfor­mance of a hierarchical distribution that (sometimes intentionally) demotes whole sets of phenomena to the subordinate class of minu­tiae, that which does not have to be taken seriously.5 Which is what I suggest is happening here.6 So what of the aesthetic? What happens if we start to take it seri­ously? To put it briefly, as I earlier noted it is a trope of modernism to make purity, for instance, between the social and the technical, or be­tween the textual (or even more specifically narrative) and the picto­rial (or more specifically illustrative).7 Though there are many reasons for supposing that the distinction does not work in this simple way, it is often suggested (at any rate by those who prefer text) that text is in­deed prior and that it is narrative that counts, whereas illustration is just that, a supplement that ‘‘illustrates’’ what has already been told. A version of this reasoning may, however, be applied to the some­what different distinction between the technical and the aesthetic. In this case the aesthetic is turned into an add-on, the packaging, so to speak, that covers, conceals, and misrepresents the real works hid­den inside. It performs, that is, a version of the depth hermeneutics considered in chapter 4. Not surprisingly, the values attaching to this division are contested. Thus the history of art, at least since Cezanne, may in part be under­stood as an attempt to create a space, a purely aesthetic space, that is valued precisely because it is removed from and rejects the func­tional.8 Again, the ‘‘designers’’ of consumer technologies stormed into prominence in the early 1960s, inventing themselves by insisting that objects can be both functional and aesthetically appealing—or, in­deed, that aesthetics is precisely an aspect of good design. But the existence of such struggles does not undermine the importance at­tached to performing a distribution between the functional and the aesthetic. On the contrary, it simply emphasizes its strength and per- sistence.9 So the character of the aesthetic is a site of struggle. But the TSR2 aircraft was not a consumer technology. It existed in that place, more or less foreign to the market, where the state liked, still likes, to pre-

To talk of rationalization is to play with ambiguity, a double entendre.

Perhaps it is to talk of the way in which social life is rendered, has been rendered, more rational. Then again, perhaps it is to talk of jus­tification, referring instead to something that is pasted on after the event.

Adrian Forty, a design historian, describes the way in which ”London Transport” came into being in the 1920s and the 1930s. This organiza­tion grouped together the services of dozens of companies that previ­ously ran the bus, tram, trolley-bus, and train services of the British capital (see Forty 1985, 222-38).

In the 1930s London Transport developed a distinctively modernist style for its new buses, trains, and underground stations. As a part of this, it also created a new typeface and a symbol—what is now called a logo—together with ”uniforms” for its staff. The style of the buses and tube trains is particularly interesting. It took the form of flat and rounded surfaces. Like the cultural biases discussed earlier, these forms tended toward the smooth and avoided discontinuity. Little by little the London bus took on the characteristic appearance that it still in some measure has today. The angularities of the engineering of early twentieth-century coachwork were lost.

This design effort sought to create a new identity that would dis­place the identities and rivalries—as well as the dispersion—of the previous companies. But among the questions we might ask are the following. How deep did the design go? How far below the surface was it at work in its uniformity? Did it perform a new distinction between surface and depth? And what were the effects of replacing the visibly distributed stuttering that preceded it?

tend that it is playing market games while other logics are (also?) performing themselves. For here we are in the early 1960s, in the con­text of military technology. The readers of this brochure are power­ful people with serious matters in hand to do with the defense of the realm, and they are required to make decisions about how to spend hundreds of millions of pounds. Which means (indeed this is a pos­sible definition of “seriousness”) that it is the pragmatics or the tech­nics that matter through and through, whereas how things appear is quite another matter. It doesn’t matter how the airplane looks, for in this logic looks are properly derived from function, and it matters even less how something like a brochure looks. The Military Sales Division of the British Aircraft Corporation does not share this view, however, or it would not have filled its brochure with pictures of the aircraft in various poses and commissioned this front cover, which is certainly noticeable, if not startling. All of which places the brochure itself in an interesting position, that of adding the aesthetic to a func­tional field where the distributions perform themselves rigorously, deeply, and without great apparent struggle.

So the question repeats itself: why attend to something as appar­ently secondary as the front cover of a military aircraft brochure? This question derives from the skepticism of a form of distribution be­tween seriousness and lack thereof. It is performed, or so I’m suggest­ing, by the technologists and the decision makers and it also tends to perform itself, though possibly decreasingly, in many parts of social science. The aesthetic sometimes smuggles itself in a second-order way into our work, primarily if it is important to ‘‘the actors.’’

To be sure, it all depends on what we mean by “aesthetics,” but here I want to press my methodological point. If we try to imagine our­selves back into the shoes of the air vice marshals of the 1960s and per­form their distributions then (or so I guess) we’ll notice the pretty or not-so-pretty pictures, but we will pass them by as we turn the pages with a small quantum of appreciation or perhaps a snort of irritation. In short, we will delegate them into the middle of next week and pro­ceed to the serious business of reading the brochure, attending to its contents, attending to the narrative about the important matter of the military potential of the aircraft. We will thus tend to reproduce the divisions made by those readers; that is, we will reproduce the dis-

tinction between the technical and the aesthetic while effacing any of the questions that might have been asked if we had chosen to explore questions of “aesthetics.” This, then, is one way of setting up the alter­natives. The choice is whether or not to take seriously that which is ‘‘merely illustrative.” Whether, in short, to go along with the demotion that little term ‘‘merely’’ implies.