Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience

Science and Cultural Theory

by John Law

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.

Genres: Technology

264 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2002

Reviews

[Alexander O. Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

At times, this book will lose you. This book performs a lot of mystery at the level of modeling and textual goals. The end game, it seems is to destroy the notion of story in favor of the idea of a more modular or systemic way of thinking about stories which includes both the qualitative performances and the quantitative simplicities that this book offers us as a way to frame the many stories of aircrafts developed by British engineers of the 1950s.

By way of doing this, it offers us a suggestion of humble thought. A way of disorienting our ideas of what the "central" object of study is. Law offers a way in which even the pilot is involved in the decision processes of considering objects of interest such as "wind gust". Such a variable is a constant of engineering consideration. But in this context, he deconstructs it to be what he deems an "oscillation" between the constant state and the dynamics of one's idea of a pilot.

That being said, this book at times is not clear at all. There are times when conclusions are more obvious than the author presumes, he abuses mathematical language for rhetorical interests, and creates linguistic distinctions which are not so nuanced as he might presume the reader will believe. Although a very interesting read on a methodology of deconstructing documents and the interpretations possible, there are many questions here that are not quite so answerable or useful to further study. This doesn't really pave a way for more useful empirical study. In some ways this was an exercise in academic methods enabled by a continental tradition that the author was privileged to be trained in. However, his prior credibility in such a method does not mean that my reading it will change how I understand future methods. In fact, it largely is a piecemeal effort. One can only digest parts of this in practical methods. One can't pedagogically consider this book as a whole and still write articles. These articles are destined to fail. The stability this book suggests hides things will continue to exist in practice. The dynamics suggested by postmodern methodologies will continue to be incommensurable to the modern paradigm. In the end, it's questionable that this book offers a solution to the dualism of these methodologies. What it does, instead, is suggest that we don't understand the stories we study because of absence. It just breeds a real confusion for the trained academic. It isn't that one understood, and now one doesn't. It just shows that we never really understood, and creates ground to be humble in the methods that already were being used.

The pedagogy must be changed, but the methods and theory will not be changed.

[Sharad Pandian · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is less a book about Aircraft Stories, and more one on Aircraft Stories - instead of providing an account of the eventualy scuttled British plane the TSR2, Law uses a few documents related to the TSR2 to riff cleverly about narrative constructions.

I'll admit that unlike some reviews by historians (for example, David Edgerton's and Eric Schatzberg's), I don't want to dismiss this book as entirely useless. Law does draw attention to somethings famililar that aren't usually noticed explicitly - for example, even a single brochure does conjure quite disparate versions of the "same" flight, all of which are strung together without too much explicit effort. Asking how this is accomplished isn't a terrible idea. Similarly, pointing to how excluded details like a pilot's anxiety and assumptions about future enemy plans make it into equations could be a fascinating endeavour.

But Law's delivery on what sometimes seem like interesting goals is pathethic - with very little empirical content, too-brief engagement with theory, and overenthusiastic readings of material (readings which we have no reason to suspect are similar to the interpretations of actual agents) all work together to make this a mess.

To make matters (somehow) even worse, there's a big assumption at the core of the book that's unconvincing - he asssumes that narrative-form necessarily means smoothening, while his own "pinboard" approach allows for the emergence of the "fractional" nature of things. Except, the use of narratives can reveal discontinuity, while his pinboard might very well generate impressions of completeness. Without arguing for this, even the little original theory work he produces might be unsalvageable.

To illustrate: In the spirit of offering pinboards instead of a single narratives, here's a negative excerpt from from sociologist Cyrus Mody’s review that while not standing in total continuity to my own review, still intersects it in many interesting ways:

For readers, though, Law’s book may come across as less than one and more than many. He offers many glimpses of the TSR2, and sketches several “aircraft stories,” but these are fleeting glances. This is, indeed, one of Law’s points. He eschews the grand narratives that he sees in both modernist and postmodern social theory, likening his technique instead to a pinboard—a motley juxtaposition of myriad photographs, menus, notes, scraps, scribblings, and so on. The effect, however, is like inspecting someone else’s pinboard, without knowing who they are or letting them explain what all these documents and ephemera might mean. In earlier articles, some with Michel Callon, Law laid out his empirical research on the TSR2, framed in an actor-network theory idiom. This book, on the other hand, offers virtually no ethnographic detail and very little documentary evidence. Readers are never really acquainted with the groups and social settings that intersected with and (de)constructed the TSR2. Instead, Law heavily mines a very small set of documents for stray examples in support of his eminently plausible but rather acontextual observations about various aspects of technoscience—aesthetics, gender, politics, semiotics, narrative, and so on. (117)

Notice how this pinboard taken together still congeals into one monolithic message: don't bother with this book.