Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience (Science and Cultural Theory) - Hardcover

Law, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822328127 ISBN 13: 9780822328124

Verlag: DUKE UNIV PR, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

In Aircraft Stories noted sociologist of technoscience John Law tells "stories" about a British attempt to build a military aircraft--the TSR2. The intertwining of these stories demonstrates the ways in which particular technological projects can be understood in a world of complex contexts.
Law works to upset the binary between the modernist concept of knowledge, subjects, and objects as having centered and concrete essences and the postmodernist notion that all is fragmented and centerless. The structure and content of Aircraft Stories reflect Law's contention that knowledge, subjects, and--particularly-- objects are "fractionally coherent" that is, they are drawn together without necessarily being centered. In studying the process of this particular aircraft's design, construction, and eventual cancellation, Law develops a range of metaphors to describe both its fractional character and the ways its various aspects interact with each other. Offering numerous insights into the way we theorize the working of systems, he explores the overlaps between singularity and multiplicity and reveals rich new meaning in such concepts as oscillation, interference, fractionality, and rhizomatic networks.
The methodology and insights of Aircraft Stories will be invaluable to students in science and technology studies and will engage others who are interested in the ways that contemporary paradigms have limited our ability to see objects in their true complexity.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Law is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for Science Studies at Lancaster University in England. He is the author and editor of many books and articles, including Organizing Modernity and Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"What is a military aircraft? John Law shows in his beautiful analysis that it is a constant oscillation between multiplicity and singularity. It (sometimes) flies, it (possibly) drops nuclear bombs, it (certainly) reproduces a very conservative social order, it interpellates and entices young men, and yet it still remains a military aircraft. John Law invents what could be a monadology in which there is no longer preestablished harmony."--Michel Callon, CSI Ecole des mines de Paris

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AIRCRAFT STORIES

Decentering the Object in TechnoscienceBy JOHN LAW

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2002 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-2812-4

Contents

Acknowledgments........................vii1. Introduction........................12. Objects.............................123. Subjects............................384. Cultures............................655. Heterogeneities.....................896. Aesthetics..........................1157. Decisions...........................1438. Arborescences.......................1639. Pinboards...........................188Notes..................................205References.............................225Index..................................241

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus.-Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

No doubt Deleuze and Guattari have got the right idea. Matters grow from the middle, and from many places. But one also has to start somewhere.

With the aircraft? This is a book about specific episodes in a British attempt to build a military aircraft, a tactical strike and reconnaissance warplane, called the TSR2. The project to build this aircraft started in the 1950s and ended in 1965 when it was canceled by a newly elected Labour government. In one way or another, all the stories in this book have to do with the TSR2.

But the aircraft is not the only possible place to start. For though all the stories in this book are indeed about the TSR2, the book is really about something much more general. It is about modernism and its child, postmodernism-and about how we might think past the limits that these set to our ways of thinking. For the book is about a world, the contemporary Euro-American world, in which many have lost their faith in big theories or "grand narratives," as Jean-Franois Lyotard calls them (1984b). And, at least to some extent, it is about a world in which many have also lost confidence in the grand projects and plans that tend to go with those grand narratives. Nuclear power, medical practices, food safety, the environment, everywhere, or so the story runs, experts are doubted, and people are skeptical of the claims made by authorities. Including academic authorities.

Of course there are various ways of responding to this. One can wave aside the skepticism of postmodernism and insist that experts-including academic experts-still know best: that it is, indeed, possible to tell grand narratives. One can, in short, remain a modernist. Alternatively, one can insist that expert knowledges are limited in scope, but then go on to say that it is still possible to tell consistent stories so long as one understands that these have only a limited validity and that they will in due course require revision. No doubt this is the dominant response in many of the social sciences, for instance underpinning the theory of reflexive modernity. It is a response that says warrantable knowledge is still possible so long as it is suitably set about with health warnings and it is not used after its sell-by date.

But there is another possibility that I want to explore in this book. This is to take the skepticism of the so-called postmodern condition seriously, which means accepting that "modernism" is flawed even in its more supple versions. It is to accept that modernism never achieved the smoothnesses it sought, that its foundations were illusory, and that when it intervened to try to put things right and make a better world it often-as Zygmunt Bauman has so eloquently shown -wreaked havoc. But then it recognizes, and this is crucial, that the pluralist diaspora apparently favored by postmodernism raises problems that are just as difficult. Not only is it clear that we don't live in a pluralist world in which everyone happily does their own thing, but it is also apparent that the broken fragments celebrated in postmodernism are just as much a product of modernism as its own streamlined coherences ever were. Postmodernism is, so to speak, the mirror image of modernism-and postmodernism's response has simply been to break the smoothness and shatter that mirror. The argument, then, is that modernism and postmodernism exist together. They are each other's creatures. And as they confront one another they tend to press us to make a choice between the homogeneities of centered storytelling on the one hand, and pluralism of fragmentation on the other. This, then, is a second version of what the book is about. It is an attempt to evade that choice.

But to make the argument I need to be more specific. So a third and more concise way of talking about the stories assembled in this book is to say that they are about fractional coherence. Fractional coherence, I will say, is about drawing things together without centering them.

Knowing subjects, or so we've learned since the 1960s, are not coherent wholes. Instead they are multiple, assemblages. This has been said about subjects of action, of emotion, and of desire in many ways, and is often, to be sure, a poststructuralist claim. But I argue in this book that the same holds for objects too. An aircraft, yes, is an object. But it also reveals multiplicity-for instance in wing shape, speed, military roles, and political attributes. I am saying, then, that an object such as an aircraft-an "individual" and "specific" aircraft-comes in different versions. It has no single center. It is multiple. And yet these various versions also interfere with one another and shuffle themselves together to make a single aircraft. They make what I will call singularities, or singular objects out of their multiplicity. In short, they make objects that cohere.

But how do they do this? This is the major question that I tackle in this book. A question that, while speaking to the general issue raised by the so-called postmodern predicament, at the same time much more concisely refuses the pluralism implied by Lyotard's multiple language games.

How, then, to think about this? I deploy a range of metaphors for thinking about the overlaps that produce singularity out of multiplicity. Many of these have grown up in the discipline of STS-of science, technology, and society. Interference, oscillation, Donna Haraway's notions of "the established disorder" or the cyborg-these terms catch something important about the relations between singularity and multiplicity. But let me mention a further possibility here, that of fractionality. In mathematics fractals are lines that occupy more than one dimension but less than two. If we take this as a metaphor without worrying too much about the mathematics, then we may imagine that fractal coherences are coherences that cannot be caught within or reduced to a single dimension. But neither do they exist as coherences in two or three separate and independent dimensions. In this way of thinking, a fractionally coherent subject or object is one that balances between plurality and singularity. It is more than one, but less than many.

I want to suggest that Euro-American culture doesn't really have the language that it needs to imagine possibilities of this kind. Its conditions of possibility more or less preclude the fractional. Indeed this is one of the reasons why the postmodern reaction-though it diagnoses some of the problems of modernism well enough-still finds itself trapped within a version of the modern predicament. For if...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: DUKE UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822328127
• ISBN 13: 9780822328124
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland