On Attempting to Construct Alternative Narratives: John Law, Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience

摘要

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. 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 prob-lematizes modern concepts like airplane-ness, project-ness, and what it means to construct historical narratives. Such questioning of fundamental 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.