Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Content - 0.13 star.
As a superb example of idle, pointless, academic inanity - 5 stars. So, 3 stars.

The "professional" reviews were seductive. So I bought it. And read it -- groaning most of the way through. Happily, it's a short book, with the text taking up only about 200 pages. Six stories in all, one of them self-consciously devoted to the problem of the author's own "reflexivity" -- that is, how the writer's subjectivity affects and intereferes, for better or worse, the subject of study. How very considerate and so... Stuart Smalley of you.

No doubt, this book has much to offer, especially to those people who might think that thinking about, and living in, a universe in which 'x' can "oscillate" into other states of identity -- 'y' and/or 'z' -- is so "radical." However, so much of what is said in the name of postmodernity and "Other" is said with so much parochial ignorance of others (that is, other cultures' far more exhaustive work on this topic -- Hello! Buddhism?), and received with enthusiasm as if there is something genuinely new here.

In this book, if you remove all the tedious academic jargon ("singular multiplicity," "coherence without a center," "oscillation," etc), the argument boils down to something very obvious -- and (I'll be generous here) highly 'mediocre' in insight value -- that has not only received more thorough treatment in various philosophical traditions, but also available to plain common sense: Namely, that no thing has a fixed identity in and of itself.

Forget the technobabble: Really, is it so damn hard to say that a large "table" can also be used as a "bed" or as a small "stage"? Or, that 'John Doe' can be simultaneously a soldier, husband, brother, father, etc? Where is the "Johnniness" in John? Well, there isn't any, since even John is a composite of flesh, nerves, bones, water, memory, desires, etc. Same for an aircraft: sometimes it excites young men, sometimes it flies, sometimes it drops bombs, sometimes it's called by other names --like a 'weapons system'... 'Nuf said.

Law's style of prose is at once flaccid, flatulent, and fastidious. And the content piggy-back rides on the names of some famous people (like Deleuze) and their concepts (like rhizome) without getting anywhere.

Despite my own disappointment with this book, I think the author wrote it in good faith. I think Professor Law really believes that he has something new and interesting to say. Well, he might, but I think only for three types of readers:

One: Undergrads who need to be told, and learn how to say obvious things in respectable academese (convoluted prose).

Two: Assistant profs looking to secure tenure someday in the so-called burgeoning field of Technoscience Studies -- as they have to incestuously quote (and praise) one another's work. (Scientists could not give a rat's arse about what these people have to say about their work.)

Three: People who cannot figure out why an "aircraft" cannot just remain an "aircraft"; and cannot understand that the name a thing goes by is NOT the thing "itself" as no thing has a specific, absolutely determined "selfhood."

Now, I will take that vote of "Not Helpful" for having said Not Nice things about your friend or colleague's book.

While at no point downspeaking to its reader, this book poses a large number of essential questions on technology, science and design. Based on the case of the TSR-2 aircraft, it keeps on asking stubbornly like a detective investigating a crime, uncovering bit by bit how objects are not singular, homogeneous entities, but just as heterogene and active in the formation of society and things as the subjects. It makes very clear that the 'interpellation' between human and nonhuman actors is crucial to investigate, and is itself a paradigmatic example on how to conduct such studies. Its points on the relevance of oscillating between modernity and postmodernity are lucid, imaginative and very informing.

Unless you are very used to post-modern theory, you will not find Law's idea lucid at first. I believe that I shook my head in disbelief. His explanation of a fractal reality fell on death ears, but then I read more. Once I finished the book and discussed it in class, I realized that Law had altered how I viewed technoscience. This book is highly recommended and Law should be commended for his approach to a reconciliation of the modern and post-modern.

I had to rate this a second time because my one star rating only reduced the overall rating (it's been reviewed by one other reader) to a two and a half and that's two and a half too many.

I feel like a chump for buying it, but I'm happy admitting my mistake to the world if it could save one helpless soul from having to read paragraphs like...:

"The book as a whole, then, is not treelike in structure. It is not an arborescence. Instead it takes the form of a rhizomatic network. It makes overlaps and juxtapositions, and it makes interference effects as a result of making these overlaps. So that is the fourth way of introducing the book. It is about writing fractionally." - p. 9 John Law, Aircraft Stories.

You really don't want to know about other three ways of introducing the book. I was struggling during the first two, the third had me gasping for air and number four was kinda it for me.