Description
Book SynopsisTells "stories" about a British attempt to build a military aircraft - the TSR2. Offering numerous insights into the way we theorise the working of systems, this title explores the overlaps between singularity and multiplicity and reveals rich new meaning in such concepts as oscillation, interference, fractionality, and rhizomatic networks.
Trade Review“Through this lively text, John Law guides us on a tour of the TSR2 that will be a rich resource for anyone interested in the question of how new artifacts come into being. Writers, readers, engineers, and aircraft are inseparable components of the project, which involves simultaneously achieving the singularities and recovering the multiplicities of stories and things. Crafting together a complex architecture of subject/object relations,
Aircraft Stories offers a prototype for a new form of technoscience storytelling.”—Lucy Suchman, author of
Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication“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
"[Law] writes well, sometimes almost poetically, with few of the tortured sentences of much cultural theory. Many readers may disagree with his theses, but few will fail to be stimulated by this brave, challenging book." -- Donald MacKenzie * American Journal of Sociology *
"Law's illustration of the singularity/multiplicity of artifacts (especially in the context of the many strands of social theory on which he draws) lends depth to any understanding of the social character of technology. His readers are invited, I think, to pull some of the more valuable jottings from his pinboard and interweave them in their own montages." -- Cyrus C. M. Mody * Contemporary Sociology *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Objects
3. Subjects
4. Cultures
5. Heterogeneities
6. Aesthetics
7. Decisions
8. Arborescences
9. Pinboards
Notes
References
Index
