Which story should we tell about John Law and his thorough deconstruction of the development of the TSR2, Aircraft Stories? Or should we even tell a story? Why not rather make a pinboard?
The thing is, pinboards are stories too. Just like Taussig asserted, that not-fetishizing is not yet within our capacity, not-storytelling isn't yet possible. As soon as we begin to think in words and concepts, I would argue, we have begun the simplifying, systematizing, homogenizing, etc., that Law works against. The logos is built into our grammar. A pinboard is not noncoherent, but merely a looser form of coherence than a tree. Any framing, bounding, or hermeneutic circling begins to shape the manifold heterogeneity of existence. We are always homogenizing, because absolute flux would be absolutely incomprehensible. On the other hand, we have never been homogeneous, because the "modern" ordering is multiplicity itself, many projects with many agents in many times and places interacting with "pre" and "post" and "other" etc. The question is, why is John Law forging this particular intervention, that not only argues for multiplicity, but assumes (and thereby helps create) a singular "big other" to be overthrown? I'm all for complexity; I thought that was the way things were.
Law’s book was very challenging for me. Though it might be the effects of the end of the semester, I had a hard time concentrating while reading it. Perhaps this is his intention or “project”. To destabilize or decenter the reader. Once decentered, we are uneasy and off kilter. On the edge, on the verge of meltdown of our “Euro-American” epistemological framework, perhaps, new epistemologies can develop. Much of what we have read this semester has tried to do this to us (Mol and Serres come to mind first). Clearly, Law, like Serres and Mol, has attempted this move in two ways: in his method/style/way of writing and his theoretical discussions. Aesthetically, style and theory converge to such an extent in this piece that I am not entirely sure that I was comfortable with it. I should add that I was much more comfortable with Law and Mol. The difference, I believe, is that Law adds the technical to the mix of style and theory.
In any event, Law attends to all three of these intentions for writing through his concept of “fractional coherence”, of “drawing things together without centering them” (2). The pin board does this, yes. But I would agree with Roy, pin boards still tell stories/are stories. Our line of sight still sees one thing at a time (on that pin board). And then, of course, we can’t forget that “Vision is always from somewhere” (41). It (the very troublesome eye) starts to weed, sift, comb and screen. The academy always seems to turn the mess on the pin board into a story (198). Law then poses the question, what if we refuse? I seriously wonder if this is possible, to refuse the eye and the sorting mind. Law turns to methodology and, since we are not at all ready for a complete pin board way of thinking (we don’t have independent eyes that can see different things independently), this is an interesting preparatory move. Just as when we peer into a camera and watch as all the mechanisms adjust and something in the background goes from being unfocused to focused (and the image in the foreground does the opposite), Law seems to want us to fine tune our practice of focusing on the pin board and the individual post-its. We must not “miss out on the oscillation between the singularity and multiplicity, on fractionality” (201).
In the reading, Airplane Stories becomes not about airplanes, specifically the TSR2, but about stories. These are stories that are written through bodies (a plane, a bird, the author), performed, and thus change the object itself. (66) The multiple TSR2’s are distributed through the book, through the pamphlet, through its political enactments.
Drawing heavily on Mol and Deleuze among others, Law tries his best to situate the discomforted reader among the distribution and coordination of the airplane though his subtitles and meticulous lists. (66) Through the five discursive forms of stories (55-58), three forms of cultural strategy (85-86), three forms of distribution (121-125), types of decisions (147-160) Law provides points for the reader to latch on to, in a hyper-conscious organization of themselves and indeed the object that is the airplane. Lists, charts, graphs, grand narratives and exhibits offer space (virtual or otherwise) to “build a sense of “the project as a whole out of a set of bits and pieces…”” (175) But, his project is not to build an entire airplane – an object arsenal- rather it is to focus on the performance of the discontinuity that must be added to continuity (86)- the fractals that add to the singular - in an admirable attempt to extend storytelling into a mimesis of being.
Law’s book is about more than one thing, “but less than many.” In contrast to Mol’s body multiple, in which arteriosclerosis is shown to be enacted in multiple but finite ways, Law explores the multiple stories that surround the TSR2 military aircraft, attacking several fronts alongside: the modernist-postmodernist contrast, fractional coherence and how to write about it, and its consequential political options. He is into storytelling, as Benjamin was, but with a different tone. Despite his pinboard-style performance (actually, I prefer the image of a collage or a pastiche than a pinboard) Law strongly emphasizes a single but crucial argument: singularity is just a façade; it is always produced out of multiplicity, thus things only cohere fractionally. There is no center or creator from which multiplicity gets organized.
Law is not only concerned with the multiplicity of the artifact, aiming to decenter it, but also suggests that there are many subjects or subject positions. He points to the relation, or distribution as he calls it (I was confused by the use of this term through out the text), between the knowing subject and the subject that is known. In the same direction of Mol’s contribution in effacing the subject-object duality, Law rescues the “interpellation” and interference between objects and subjects. He asks, “what are we making of our objects of study? Or, perhaps better, what are they making of us?” (64) Object and subject perform each other. I think that this relation of interference can also be applied to the relation between the reader and the text. In my experience reading Law’s Aircraft Stories, I became aware of my own bias in the reading of his stories; I held little interest in the subject. I felt less excitement for the TSR2 as compared to the microbes, insects, stones, diseases, etc. of the past weeks.
Singularity and continuity, inside and outside, knower and known – those “realities” that we assume, or so Law tells us – are not “given in the order of things”, but performed, made, enacted, the effects of “cultural bias”, of the strategies of genealogies, systems and interests. Neither is the TSR2 a “given”; that is, neither is his “object” an “object”, as such. We need alternative strategies, says Law, “it is time to imagine multiplicity, fractionality, and partiality” (88). And the “logic of the pinboard” is where we end up. With the assertion “there is no innocent knowing”, that the content is in the form, that form is method, and that method is crucial.
I wish he had made the pinboard, I might have come away clearer. Law claims to reject the singularity of academic knowledge, and the call to empiricism is, it seems, an ethical insistence on the rhizomatic, non-hierarchical, nature of being and of knowing. And yet I don’t think he escapes a hierarchical schema, though his may be of another kind, or indeed leaves us really knowing where or how to look, what to do next, in a world in which making coherent, making sense, is a bias, a performance, an illusion. Perhaps this is just a reaction to style? He employs a somewhat demanding tone, which somehow doesn’t do justice to the limits to knowing that he is at the same time professing. Maybe, it is something in his object (objects) of study, and the kind of analysis that technology allows for and precludes. There was something very important in the fact that in Mol, Helmreich and Raffles – the other texts we have read which called for a kind of multiplicity, a different way of thinking ontologically – theory was made out of ethnography. That in insisting on the fact that what we write “makes” the world, there was also a profound sense, in the making, the interaction, the intimacy, the process of writing, of also being personally, emotionally, intellectually and physically made by it.
Pinning paper up onto a board implies moving straight to the end product, to the form, without moving through a process. Without first walking though a one-way street, being immersed in the ocean or diving for gold, watching crickets fight, talking to patients in the hospital. Engaging in ethnography, from which comes the method and the form of the ethnographic, and which enacts a different way of being.
I would agree with Roy that pin boards tell a story. However, it is not a linear narrative. There is something kind of cool about the-way-in-which a reading of a pin board might tell a story, and that is how that story can take on the form of a “random-walk”: otherwise known as Brownian motion. For me this is really quite tight as it relates to the notion of “fractional coherence” that Law lays out because Brownian motion is fractal in nature. And moreover, Brownian motion has been exhibited in many different contexts to understand phenomena: for instance, how an index on the stock market behaves. In other words, when economists talk about the market being “efficient” they are referring to the Brownian qualities of it. Researchers have tried numerous times to show that the market was alternatively “inefficient” (i.e. if you followed a stock price long enough you could discern some underlying computational pattern dictating its movements, and consequently capitalize upon the accompanying predictive knowledge gained). But, they have always failed.
Anyways, as we can imagine, there are a lot of stories to be told about the technoscience of the market; and in this respect, I can see how the metaphor of the pin board and fractional coherence might be an effective model for understanding the various linkages between these stories. However, as much as Law draws upon D&G to construct his text do we really need D&G to help us understand the different way of story telling that Law is trying to “perform” here? I do not really think there is anything terribly stellar about the idea of the rhizome. Personally, I think that the arboreal, tree-like structure is a perfectly legit way of representation if we recognize that a tree is just one of many, in a forest, a grove, maybe a park. And those forests change in many ways. Going back to what I said about the market. The market may be inefficient but various technological innovations that have been increasingly employed in it are deeply rooted in the arboreal model of knowledge representation. So, it seems to me while maybe what Law is doing works here, it *might not transplant well to relating other stories that speak, in part, to arboreal system of relations.
With that, I must say that there are times when I am slightly annoyed by they way he creates certain interference patterns. For instance he might use a term in one place in an apparently slightly different way than somewhere else, and consequently make the connotations of that word kind of blurry. And consequently, any self-similar that might exist in the objects that get made up out of those words get blurred. It annoys me because he explicitly allows for that to happen with his method of writing. In other words, I am wondering how much of the interference in this work is *more deliberate than inherent* to its objects. I hope that makes some sense.
In sum, I am intrigued by his “ontological politics” (198), but I am still not settled about “how texts relate to the world”? (6)
Writing about the stones one cares for, collects, and caresses is quite a different task than writing about a controversial military aircraft about which one feels ambivalent. The point seems obvious enough, almost too obvious, but I am left wondering what to do with the unsettling idea that we do care about certain objects and beings more than we care about other objects and beings; or, as Law would point out, that we care about just one or another of the versions of a being or an object that is multiple. That is, perhaps we resent the aircraft that is a weapons systems and the aircraft that represents heroic male power and domination - but we also like the aircraft that stretches our imagination, the aircraft that allows us thrillingly to fly, the aircraft that Law's son sees. These may be tired tropes, but "the fact that they are cliched makes them no less real" (41). He urges us not to think of these ambivalences as contradictions - which would be the typical way of thinking about the modernist project and its failures - but as fractional coherences that partially connect, that do and do not fit into an arborescent or a dialectical order.
As we circle back with Law to Mol's empirical philosophy, with all the other texts we have read in mind, I must agree with Alice - there is something about the lack of the ethnographic that makes this text feel a bit cold, a little bit less generous in its relations to things. And partly this is the way he pays strict attention to how we actively write and read; sometimes I felt that I was being handled and manipulated in Law's palm, like he was stretching and pulling at me in order to make me into different kinds of readers. And my discomfort at this isn't necessarily a criticism. Maybe this feeling is also because of the manufacturedness of the technoscience object. With our discussion of Scarry, we didn't get a chance to talk about how the objects she discusses are conjectured as purely human creations; she does not take into account the ways in which objects are hybrid. What happens to our relationship to gold when it becomes, say, a gold necklace, or stone when it is carved into a bench that we sit on? Does it maintain its gravitas as a stone, or does the human labor that goes into its carving complicate things - interfere with its coherence - multiply its ontological possibilities - and our relationships to it?
Throughout the course we have been challenged to imagine different ways of being, to imagine a world by, as Law writes, taking “difference seriously,” (p. 32). Law’s notion of fractal I believe is a repositioning of approaching how we know, what we know and how a certain ‘knowing’ matters. This is the definition of fractal from Wikipedia: “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole," (from Mandelbrot, B.B. (1982). The Fractal Geometry of Nature. W.H. Freeman and Company.) By turning to fractal, Law is able to point out multiplicities of what we assume to be singular as it re-scales our approach to an object. (This also reminded me of nanotechnology.) By not assuming a singularity and seeing multiplicities, different ‘juxtaposition’ and ‘coordination’ become possible. I believe his performance of “an academic pinboard” does more than create another grand narrative. What gets placed (pinned) on the pinboard is not fixed. It thus opens up a space in which different narratives become possible.
Both Jon Law and Marilyn Strathern use fractals as metaphors to illustrate their theoretical points. Both of them attend to the same feature of the fractal of which Strathern cites James Gleick to explain: “[a simple, Euclidean] one-dimensional line fills no space at all. But the outline of the Koch curve, with infinite length crowding into finite area, does fill space. It is more than a line, yet less than a plane. It is greater than one-dimensional, yet less than two-dimensional form” (Gleick, cited in Strathern 2004: xxi). Law uses this property to demonstrate his concept of 'fractal coherence,' that is, how things are drawn together without centering them. His interest in the fractal is in how its more than one dimension and yet less than two mirrors his concern with multiple story telling and coordinated singularities. But the comparison seems to end there. Strathern, on the other hand, uses the figure of the fractal to elucidate problems of scale and magnitudes of information. She finds herself fascinated by the “whorls and involutions of these self-similar shapes that repeat motifs through any scale of magnification” (xx), which cause us to “think of the amount of irregularity as an amount of detail” (xxi). Continuing, she writes, “despite an increase in the magnitude of detail, the quantity of information an anthropologist derives from what s/he is observing may remain the same. Observation thus remains a kind of constant background to the proliferation of forms” (xxi).
Strathern, like Law, is interested in this betwixt and between of the dimensionality of the fractal. However, she differs in her consideration of the “repeat[ed] motifs” which appear throughout any degree magnification. This interest in repeated form, “self-similar shapes,” and “motifs” cause one to wonder about the ways in which multiple stories share certain similarities. It is all to easy to read Mol and Law, tracing their understanding of 'single multiple objects,' and leave with the impression that there is nothing that coheres these multiple enactments or stories to an “object” except practices of coordination. The figure of the fractal seems to suggest that there might be something which is in some manner patterning these “repeating motifs” in an “object's” various enactments. I wonder how this suggestion might mesh with the theoretical stances of Mol and Law.
“The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of play “ – Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play”
In Aircraft Stories, John Law attempts to trouble the ‘choice’ that has emerged between the absolute singularity of modernity and the absolute fragmentation of postmodernity. Drawing on allegorical forms of knowing, which juxtapose rather than represent, Law, like Mol, argues that singularity is an effect, an achievement of coordination. While the decentering of the subject has been celebrated in social research for several decades, Law argues that the object has not received similar treatment. In other words, it is taken for granted that a person may occupy multiple subject positions, while an object is assumed to be always and everywhere the same (this is why we can endlessly debate whether ‘the object’ ‘has’ agency). There is a play here that seems to oscillate between distributing the subject/object binary as person/ thing and as actor/acted upon (as in parts of speech – the subject of the sentence which acts on the object, likewise, the doer of the research and his or her object, or topic, of study). At the same time, there is a play on the notion of the center: on the one hand, it seems to refer to the center as the logic around which a system coheres which is simultaneously effaced, the immobile and reassuring certitude to which Derrida refers. On the other hand, there seems to be a simpler version of centrality at play, which has to do with the primary status of the object in technoscience studies. These multiple registers have everything to do with the fractional coherence that Law urges us to consider. Why on earth, he asks us, do we stubbornly insist on singularity, performing that singularity, when we are constantly participating in world-forming coordinating work?
[Sorry this so late! I've been in a hurry today...]
Well, Law essentially provides the theoretical wrapping up of our readings, nicely bringing together the concepts we have explored to some extent or another. Perhaps the most broad statement to be read from Law, is that an object, an aircraft perhaps, does not exist as a singular article, but as a composition of interconnected construction, mechanical and social. There is the aesthetic of technology (form), its politics (use), its science (aerodynamics). As Law says, the more we look at a singular object, the more it appears as an "effect." It is changeable, uncertain, and steeped in the discourses over its identity. "More than one, less than many." This is our lesson, that all things exist not because they are solid, or made by us, but because we can conceive of them, and thus they exist both physically and conceptually, without a singular foundation. Law's problem appears then to be linguistic--we may conceive of the fractional object, but we must develop a vocabulary through which to discuss and explore the cncepty without engage in a process of fragmentation, creating binaries or a sense of fracture.
Which story should we tell about John Law and his thorough deconstruction of the development of the TSR2, Aircraft Stories? Or should we even tell a story? Why not rather make a pinboard?
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, pinboards are stories too. Just like Taussig asserted, that not-fetishizing is not yet within our capacity, not-storytelling isn't yet possible. As soon as we begin to think in words and concepts, I would argue, we have begun the simplifying, systematizing, homogenizing, etc., that Law works against. The logos is built into our grammar. A pinboard is not noncoherent, but merely a looser form of coherence than a tree. Any framing, bounding, or hermeneutic circling begins to shape the manifold heterogeneity of existence. We are always homogenizing, because absolute flux would be absolutely incomprehensible. On the other hand, we have never been homogeneous, because the "modern" ordering is multiplicity itself, many projects with many agents in many times and places interacting with "pre" and "post" and "other" etc. The question is, why is John Law forging this particular intervention, that not only argues for multiplicity, but assumes (and thereby helps create) a singular "big other" to be overthrown? I'm all for complexity; I thought that was the way things were.
Law’s book was very challenging for me. Though it might be the effects of the end of the semester, I had a hard time concentrating while reading it. Perhaps this is his intention or “project”. To destabilize or decenter the reader. Once decentered, we are uneasy and off kilter. On the edge, on the verge of meltdown of our “Euro-American” epistemological framework, perhaps, new epistemologies can develop. Much of what we have read this semester has tried to do this to us (Mol and Serres come to mind first). Clearly, Law, like Serres and Mol, has attempted this move in two ways: in his method/style/way of writing and his theoretical discussions. Aesthetically, style and theory converge to such an extent in this piece that I am not entirely sure that I was comfortable with it. I should add that I was much more comfortable with Law and Mol. The difference, I believe, is that Law adds the technical to the mix of style and theory.
ReplyDeleteIn any event, Law attends to all three of these intentions for writing through his concept of “fractional coherence”, of “drawing things together without centering them” (2). The pin board does this, yes. But I would agree with Roy, pin boards still tell stories/are stories. Our line of sight still sees one thing at a time (on that pin board). And then, of course, we can’t forget that “Vision is always from somewhere” (41). It (the very troublesome eye) starts to weed, sift, comb and screen. The academy always seems to turn the mess on the pin board into a story (198). Law then poses the question, what if we refuse? I seriously wonder if this is possible, to refuse the eye and the sorting mind. Law turns to methodology and, since we are not at all ready for a complete pin board way of thinking (we don’t have independent eyes that can see different things independently), this is an interesting preparatory move. Just as when we peer into a camera and watch as all the mechanisms adjust and something in the background goes from being unfocused to focused (and the image in the foreground does the opposite), Law seems to want us to fine tune our practice of focusing on the pin board and the individual post-its. We must not “miss out on the oscillation between the singularity and multiplicity, on fractionality” (201).
In the reading, Airplane Stories becomes not about airplanes, specifically the TSR2, but about stories. These are stories that are written through bodies (a plane, a bird, the author), performed, and thus change the object itself. (66) The multiple TSR2’s are distributed through the book, through the pamphlet, through its political enactments.
ReplyDeleteDrawing heavily on Mol and Deleuze among others, Law tries his best to situate the discomforted reader among the distribution and coordination of the airplane though his subtitles and meticulous lists. (66) Through the five discursive forms of stories (55-58), three forms of cultural strategy (85-86), three forms of distribution (121-125), types of decisions (147-160) Law provides points for the reader to latch on to, in a hyper-conscious organization of themselves and indeed the object that is the airplane. Lists, charts, graphs, grand narratives and exhibits offer space (virtual or otherwise) to “build a sense of “the project as a whole out of a set of bits and pieces…”” (175) But, his project is not to build an entire airplane – an object arsenal- rather it is to focus on the performance of the discontinuity that must be added to continuity (86)- the fractals that add to the singular - in an admirable attempt to extend storytelling into a mimesis of being.
Law’s book is about more than one thing, “but less than many.” In contrast to Mol’s body multiple, in which arteriosclerosis is shown to be enacted in multiple but finite ways, Law explores the multiple stories that surround the TSR2 military aircraft, attacking several fronts alongside: the modernist-postmodernist contrast, fractional coherence and how to write about it, and its consequential political options. He is into storytelling, as Benjamin was, but with a different tone. Despite his pinboard-style performance (actually, I prefer the image of a collage or a pastiche than a pinboard) Law strongly emphasizes a single but crucial argument: singularity is just a façade; it is always produced out of multiplicity, thus things only cohere fractionally. There is no center or creator from which multiplicity gets organized.
ReplyDeleteLaw is not only concerned with the multiplicity of the artifact, aiming to decenter it, but also suggests that there are many subjects or subject positions. He points to the relation, or distribution as he calls it (I was confused by the use of this term through out the text), between the knowing subject and the subject that is known. In the same direction of Mol’s contribution in effacing the subject-object duality, Law rescues the “interpellation” and interference between objects and subjects. He asks, “what are we making of our objects of study? Or, perhaps better, what are they making of us?” (64) Object and subject perform each other. I think that this relation of interference can also be applied to the relation between the reader and the text. In my experience reading Law’s Aircraft Stories, I became aware of my own bias in the reading of his stories; I held little interest in the subject. I felt less excitement for the TSR2 as compared to the microbes, insects, stones, diseases, etc. of the past weeks.
Singularity and continuity, inside and outside, knower and known – those “realities” that we assume, or so Law tells us – are not “given in the order of things”, but performed, made, enacted, the effects of “cultural bias”, of the strategies of genealogies, systems and interests. Neither is the TSR2 a “given”; that is, neither is his “object” an “object”, as such. We need alternative strategies, says Law, “it is time to imagine multiplicity, fractionality, and partiality” (88). And the “logic of the pinboard” is where we end up. With the assertion “there is no innocent knowing”, that the content is in the form, that form is method, and that method is crucial.
ReplyDeleteI wish he had made the pinboard, I might have come away clearer. Law claims to reject the singularity of academic knowledge, and the call to empiricism is, it seems, an ethical insistence on the rhizomatic, non-hierarchical, nature of being and of knowing. And yet I don’t think he escapes a hierarchical schema, though his may be of another kind, or indeed leaves us really knowing where or how to look, what to do next, in a world in which making coherent, making sense, is a bias, a performance, an illusion. Perhaps this is just a reaction to style? He employs a somewhat demanding tone, which somehow doesn’t do justice to the limits to knowing that he is at the same time professing. Maybe, it is something in his object (objects) of study, and the kind of analysis that technology allows for and precludes. There was something very important in the fact that in Mol, Helmreich and Raffles – the other texts we have read which called for a kind of multiplicity, a different way of thinking ontologically – theory was made out of ethnography. That in insisting on the fact that what we write “makes” the world, there was also a profound sense, in the making, the interaction, the intimacy, the process of writing, of also being personally, emotionally, intellectually and physically made by it.
Pinning paper up onto a board implies moving straight to the end product, to the form, without moving through a process. Without first walking though a one-way street, being immersed in the ocean or diving for gold, watching crickets fight, talking to patients in the hospital. Engaging in ethnography, from which comes the method and the form of the ethnographic, and which enacts a different way of being.
I would agree with Roy that pin boards tell a story. However, it is not a linear narrative. There is something kind of cool about the-way-in-which a reading of a pin board might tell a story, and that is how that story can take on the form of a “random-walk”: otherwise known as Brownian motion. For me this is really quite tight as it relates to the notion of “fractional coherence” that Law lays out because Brownian motion is fractal in nature. And moreover, Brownian motion has been exhibited in many different contexts to understand phenomena: for instance, how an index on the stock market behaves. In other words, when economists talk about the market being “efficient” they are referring to the Brownian qualities of it. Researchers have tried numerous times to show that the market was alternatively “inefficient” (i.e. if you followed a stock price long enough you could discern some underlying computational pattern dictating its movements, and consequently capitalize upon the accompanying predictive knowledge gained). But, they have always failed.
ReplyDeleteAnyways, as we can imagine, there are a lot of stories to be told about the technoscience of the market; and in this respect, I can see how the metaphor of the pin board and fractional coherence might be an effective model for understanding the various linkages between these stories. However, as much as Law draws upon D&G to construct his text do we really need D&G to help us understand the different way of story telling that Law is trying to “perform” here? I do not really think there is anything terribly stellar about the idea of the rhizome. Personally, I think that the arboreal, tree-like structure is a perfectly legit way of representation if we recognize that a tree is just one of many, in a forest, a grove, maybe a park. And those forests change in many ways. Going back to what I said about the market. The market may be inefficient but various technological innovations that have been increasingly employed in it are deeply rooted in the arboreal model of knowledge representation. So, it seems to me while maybe what Law is doing works here, it *might not transplant well to relating other stories that speak, in part, to arboreal system of relations.
With that, I must say that there are times when I am slightly annoyed by they way he creates certain interference patterns. For instance he might use a term in one place in an apparently slightly different way than somewhere else, and consequently make the connotations of that word kind of blurry. And consequently, any self-similar that might exist in the objects that get made up out of those words get blurred. It annoys me because he explicitly allows for that to happen with his method of writing. In other words, I am wondering how much of the interference in this work is *more deliberate than inherent* to its objects. I hope that makes some sense.
In sum, I am intrigued by his “ontological politics” (198), but I am still not settled about “how texts relate to the world”? (6)
Writing about the stones one cares for, collects, and caresses is quite a different task than writing about a controversial military aircraft about which one feels ambivalent. The point seems obvious enough, almost too obvious, but I am left wondering what to do with the unsettling idea that we do care about certain objects and beings more than we care about other objects and beings; or, as Law would point out, that we care about just one or another of the versions of a being or an object that is multiple. That is, perhaps we resent the aircraft that is a weapons systems and the aircraft that represents heroic male power and domination - but we also like the aircraft that stretches our imagination, the aircraft that allows us thrillingly to fly, the aircraft that Law's son sees. These may be tired tropes, but "the fact that they are cliched makes them no less real" (41). He urges us not to think of these ambivalences as contradictions - which would be the typical way of thinking about the modernist project and its failures - but as fractional coherences that partially connect, that do and do not fit into an arborescent or a dialectical order.
ReplyDeleteAs we circle back with Law to Mol's empirical philosophy, with all the other texts we have read in mind, I must agree with Alice - there is something about the lack of the ethnographic that makes this text feel a bit cold, a little bit less generous in its relations to things. And partly this is the way he pays strict attention to how we actively write and read; sometimes I felt that I was being handled and manipulated in Law's palm, like he was stretching and pulling at me in order to make me into different kinds of readers. And my discomfort at this isn't necessarily a criticism. Maybe this feeling is also because of the manufacturedness of the technoscience object. With our discussion of Scarry, we didn't get a chance to talk about how the objects she discusses are conjectured as purely human creations; she does not take into account the ways in which objects are hybrid. What happens to our relationship to gold when it becomes, say, a gold necklace, or stone when it is carved into a bench that we sit on? Does it maintain its gravitas as a stone, or does the human labor that goes into its carving complicate things - interfere with its coherence - multiply its ontological possibilities - and our relationships to it?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThroughout the course we have been challenged to imagine different ways of being, to imagine a world by, as Law writes, taking “difference seriously,” (p. 32). Law’s notion of fractal I believe is a repositioning of approaching how we know, what we know and how a certain ‘knowing’ matters. This is the definition of fractal from Wikipedia: “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole," (from Mandelbrot, B.B. (1982). The Fractal Geometry of Nature. W.H. Freeman and Company.) By turning to fractal, Law is able to point out multiplicities of what we assume to be singular as it re-scales our approach to an object. (This also reminded me of nanotechnology.) By not assuming a singularity and seeing multiplicities, different ‘juxtaposition’ and ‘coordination’ become possible. I believe his performance of “an academic pinboard” does more than create another grand narrative. What gets placed (pinned) on the pinboard is not fixed. It thus opens up a space in which different narratives become possible.
ReplyDeleteA Brief Reflection on Fractals.
ReplyDeleteBoth Jon Law and Marilyn Strathern use fractals as metaphors to illustrate their theoretical points. Both of them attend to the same feature of the fractal of which Strathern cites James Gleick to explain: “[a simple, Euclidean] one-dimensional line fills no space at all. But the outline of the Koch curve, with infinite length crowding into finite area, does fill space. It is more than a line, yet less than a plane. It is greater than one-dimensional, yet less than two-dimensional form” (Gleick, cited in Strathern 2004: xxi). Law uses this property to demonstrate his concept of 'fractal coherence,' that is, how things are drawn together without centering them. His interest in the fractal is in how its more than one dimension and yet less than two mirrors his concern with multiple story telling and coordinated singularities. But the comparison seems to end there. Strathern, on the other hand, uses the figure of the fractal to elucidate problems of scale and magnitudes of information. She finds herself fascinated by the “whorls and involutions of these self-similar shapes that repeat motifs through any scale of magnification” (xx), which cause us to “think of the amount of irregularity as an amount of detail” (xxi). Continuing, she writes, “despite an increase in the magnitude of detail, the quantity of information an anthropologist derives from what s/he is observing may remain the same. Observation thus remains a kind of constant background to the proliferation of forms” (xxi).
Strathern, like Law, is interested in this betwixt and between of the dimensionality of the fractal. However, she differs in her consideration of the “repeat[ed] motifs” which appear throughout any degree magnification. This interest in repeated form, “self-similar shapes,” and “motifs” cause one to wonder about the ways in which multiple stories share certain similarities. It is all to easy to read Mol and Law, tracing their understanding of 'single multiple objects,' and leave with the impression that there is nothing that coheres these multiple enactments or stories to an “object” except practices of coordination. The figure of the fractal seems to suggest that there might be something which is in some manner patterning these “repeating motifs” in an “object's” various enactments. I wonder how this suggestion might mesh with the theoretical stances of Mol and Law.
“The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of play “ – Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play”
ReplyDeleteIn Aircraft Stories, John Law attempts to trouble the ‘choice’ that has emerged between the absolute singularity of modernity and the absolute fragmentation of postmodernity. Drawing on allegorical forms of knowing, which juxtapose rather than represent, Law, like Mol, argues that singularity is an effect, an achievement of coordination. While the decentering of the subject has been celebrated in social research for several decades, Law argues that the object has not received similar treatment. In other words, it is taken for granted that a person may occupy multiple subject positions, while an object is assumed to be always and everywhere the same (this is why we can endlessly debate whether ‘the object’ ‘has’ agency). There is a play here that seems to oscillate between distributing the subject/object binary as person/ thing and as actor/acted upon (as in parts of speech – the subject of the sentence which acts on the object, likewise, the doer of the research and his or her object, or topic, of study). At the same time, there is a play on the notion of the center: on the one hand, it seems to refer to the center as the logic around which a system coheres which is simultaneously effaced, the immobile and reassuring certitude to which Derrida refers. On the other hand, there seems to be a simpler version of centrality at play, which has to do with the primary status of the object in technoscience studies. These multiple registers have everything to do with the fractional coherence that Law urges us to consider. Why on earth, he asks us, do we stubbornly insist on singularity, performing that singularity, when we are constantly participating in world-forming coordinating work?
[Sorry this so late! I've been in a hurry today...]
ReplyDeleteWell, Law essentially provides the theoretical wrapping up of our readings, nicely bringing together the concepts we have explored to some extent or another. Perhaps the most broad statement to be read from Law, is that an object, an aircraft perhaps, does not exist as a singular article, but as a composition of interconnected construction, mechanical and social. There is the aesthetic of technology (form), its politics (use), its science (aerodynamics). As Law says, the more we look at a singular object, the more it appears as an "effect." It is changeable, uncertain, and steeped in the discourses over its identity. "More than one, less than many." This is our lesson, that all things exist not because they are solid, or made by us, but because we can conceive of them, and thus they exist both physically and conceptually, without a singular foundation. Law's problem appears then to be linguistic--we may conceive of the fractional object, but we must develop a vocabulary through which to discuss and explore the cncepty without engage in a process of fragmentation, creating binaries or a sense of fracture.