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Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 406-412



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Essay Review

On Attempting to Construct Alternative Narratives

John Law, Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience


In the 1980s, John Law built bridges between theory and history. He was a key member of the group of innovative scholars who linked recent developments in the sociology of scientific knowledge to the history of technology. He participated in the seminal 1984 conference on the social construction of technology held at University of Twente, and he contributed a chapter to the volume that emerged from this conference. He has published theoretically rich articles and essays in this journal, one of which won the Society for the History of Technology's Usher Prize.1

In this book, however, Law burns more bridges than he builds, not out of malice but rather out of indifference to the scholarly practices of the history of technology. Ostensibly, Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), is about a failed British military aircraft project, the TSR2, a supersonic, nuclear-capable, multi-role attack airplane that was canceled in 1964. In reality, what the reader will find is an extended exercise in postmodern theory, one that problematizes modern concepts like airplane-ness, project-ness, and what it means to construct historical narratives. Such questioning of fundamental [End Page 406] categories can be quite valuable, particularly when conducted in dialogue with the existing scholarship of a discipline. Yet, despite Law's grand claims, Aircraft Stories has very little to say to historians of technology.

I'll start with what the book is not about. There is marvelously little in it about any specific technology at all. Law cites only a handful of primary and secondary sources on the TSR2 itself. He makes no attempt to come to grips with matters that historians of technology would expect to find in a book about a specific airplane project, telling the reader nothing about the airplane as a material thing, almost nothing about the context of military aviation in cold war Britain, and very little about the British aircraft industry. The book is not even a theoretical work about technology, one that might reflect on, for example, the nature of material artifacts and the processes that bring them into being.

In fact, Law explicitly refuses to construct a coherent narrative about the TSR2. Instead, he attempts to construct an alternative to such narratives. Law takes as his starting point Lyotard's definition of the postmodern as "incredulity toward metanarratives," which in practice means a rejection of narrative in general, except for snippets of stories (petits récits).2 Law also seeks to complement the postmodern attack on the unity of the subject by similarly questioning the unity of the object. He argues that objects are simultaneously coherent and incoherent, single and multiple, characterized by what he terms "fractional coherence": the state of being more than one but less than many, in the same way that Mandelbrot's fractals exist in more than one dimension but less that two. Through this idea of fractional coherence, Law claims to avoid the choice between modernism and postmodernism, between singular coherence and multiple incoherence. He also claims to avoid the performative contradiction of postmodernism that arises when postmodernists construct narratives about the inadequacy of narrative. In place of narrative, Law purports to follow the metaphor of the pinboard ("bulletin board" for Americans), which juxtaposes snippets of text and pictures without implying coherence or "singularity." Law's book, however, makes a very orderly pinboard, with an introductory chapter summarizing the book's themes and chapters, as well as a concluding chapter recapitulating these themes and reviewing earlier chapters. These narrative conventions do give the book some coherence, but they also show that Law remains trapped within the performative contradiction of postmodernism.

The book has eight substantive chapters, each with an abstract, single-word title. The first, "Objects," develops Law's concept of fractional coherence through an extended meditation on an early sales brochure for the TSR2, produced two years before the airplane's inaugural...

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