!!!!A Look from the Abyss:

Drone Subjectivities and the Unwriting of Critical Feminism !!!!!Phil Henderson !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !

“Drones, in fact, are ‘unbearably human.’” 1

There exists, between the War on Terror and the critical turn in feminist thought, a

startling symmetry. Within the armed forces an astonishing reconfiguration has been underway

over the past several decades, often referred to as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA).

Amongst the goals of the RMA is the ability to wage zero-death warfare; as such, military and 2

state officials have worked alongside private industry towards the “elimination of human[s] from

the space of battle” by introducing unmanned technologies. Simultaneously, critiques have 3

emerged within feminist thought against the supposed stability by which bodies are constituted

as fleshy material. This ontological shift is outlined in works like Judith Butler’s Bodies that

Matter, N. Katherine Hayles’ My Mother was a Computer, and Donna Haraway’s Simians,

Cyborgs, and Women. Taken together, the works of these authors provide the theoretical

framework of “body drift,” a phenomenon that Arthur Kroker articulates as “how we circulate so

effortlessly from one medium of communication to another; it is how we explore intimately and

with incredible granularity of detail the multiplicity of bodies that we have become.” Keeping 4

this in mind, I posit that it is only fleshy bodies that are displaced from battle, replaced by a

hybridity of steel and flesh. Moreover, the spectrality of the drone haunts the emancipatory

moment that unshackled the subject from the chains with which the double helix held the body. A

self-aware bodily drift, the drone is the negative undoing of the emancipatory potential which

Caroline Holmqvist, “Undoing War: War Ontologies and the Materiality of Drone Warfare,” Millennium: Journal 1

of International Studies 41, no. 3 (2013) 545, http://jstor.org (accessed March 15, 2014). This is of course a euphemism. Casualties are still a central goal of military operations; however, the RMA aims to 2

ensure zero casualties on a particular side of the conflict. See Cristina Masters, “Bodies of Technology: Cyborg Soldiers and Militarized Masculinities,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 7, no. 1 (March, 2005) 120, http://jstor.org (accessed March 16, 2014). Lauren Wilcox, “Body Counts: The Politics of Embodiment in Precision Warfare,” Political Science Colloquium 3

(Dec. 11, 2009) 10. Arthur Kroker, Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, Haraway, (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 2.4

Kroker emphasizes. Prior to discussing the drone’s subjectivity, I outline the cognitive evidence

of body drift, and provide an overview of the drone’s place in warfare.

Cognitive sciences have begun to challenge the classic Cartesian model of mind-body

dualism. Mired in the 17th Century philosophy of René Descartes, scientists have struggled to

discover how “our conscious lives... [are] achieved in us by the action of brains:” Alva Noë

asserts that this is an ontology of minds existing like “brains in vats.” Against Descartes’ 5

nihilism a growing school of thought proposes the notion of embedded consciousness: that mind,

body, and environment are all necessary and interwoven components of consciousness. The

proof of this necessity for embedded processes is highlighted by Noë in reference to a study on

newborn kittens. He observes that when kittens are deprived of all visual stimuli, “during a

critical period” of cognitive development, they experience “permanent damage” to their visual

system. The effect was that animals’ brains were unable to visually interact with the world as 6

they might have otherwise. Nothing was done to directly injure the cognitive processes of these

creatures; rather, it was their relationship to the environment that was altered.

These observations illustrate Kroker’s claim that “the body has no meaning today other

than [through] its intermediaries.” Even if the intermediary is the most simple medium - light - 7

it is critical for cognitive development, as neural pathways are opened and reinforced through

repeated exposure. Inasmuch as the body is ensnared in its environment, the environment also

enmeshes itself with the body. Andy Clark notes that tools, used repeatedly, develop a sensorial

Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, 5

(New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 4. Ibid., 49.6

Kroker, Body Drift, 3.7

familiarity with the mind and begin to “feel like genuine extensions of the user’s body.” 8

Distinguishing body and environment is made difficult by the “plastic, and highly (and rapidly)

responsive [coordination of] signals from the environment” to the brain. Drifting away from the 9

confines of the fleshy body is experienced starkly by those ensnared in the circuitry of the drone,

as they are capable of feeling “the subtleties of the plane’s movements” through the controls. 10

As such, when I use the word ‘drone’ throughout this paper, it ought to be understood as

including the pilot who is hopelessly entangled in the circuitry of this emaciated machine.

Not a new technology, unmanned aerial vehicles or ‘drones’ have been used in warfare

for reconnaissance since the Vietnam War. However, it was with the commencement of the War 11

on Terror that drones began to be used as weapons, and they have proven efficient death

machines. Between 2004 and 2012, 1650-2588 persons were killed by American drone strikes; of

these, 1357-2217 were deemed to be militants. Indeed, the drone is quickly becoming a 12 13

central tool in the military’s arsenal. The number of logged flight hours across all classes of

drones increased by more than 2,250% from 2003 to 2009, and the current fleet of 256 is 14

Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Futures of Human Intelligence, (Oxford: Oxford 8

University Press, 2003) 62. Ibid., 61.9

Brian Mockenhaupt, “We’ve Seen the Future and it’s Unmanned” Esquire (Oct. 14, 2009). http://jstor.org/ 10

(accessed March 18, 2014) Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, (London: Verso, 1989), 11.11

Ian G.R. Shaw, and Majed Akhter, “The Unbearable Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan.” Antipode 12

44, no. 4 (2012), 1491, http://jstor.org (accessed March 16, 2014). Alternatively, Holmqvist estimates the total number of causalities for that same period to be 2593-3365. Due to government secrecy and an unwillingness to conduct thorough body counts, the true figure may never be known. Please see Holmqvist, “Undoing War,” 539.

The number of victims whose deaths are legitimized on the grounds of their status as militants may be unduly 13

high as a result of how the armed forces count militants. President Obama has given approval that “all military-aged males in a strike zone” are to considered as militants “unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving there innocence,” I’m quite certain the posthumous exoneration will be of enormous comfort. Please see Ian G.R. Shaw, “Predator Empire: The Geopolitics of US Drone Warfare,” Geopolitics 18, (2013) 543, http://jstor.org (accessed March 16, 2014). Indeed, some reports indicate that the actual civilian to militant death ratio could be as high as 10:1. See Wilcox, “Body Counts,” 18.

Dave Webb, Loring Wirbel and Bill Sulzman, “From Space, No One Can Watch You Die,” Peace Review: A 14

Journal of Social Justice 22, no. 1 (2010), 31, http://jstor.org (accessed March 15, 2014).

expected to grow to 400 by 2017. This increased spending on drones coming at a time when 15 16

the military intends to shed as many as 100,000 troops from its ranks. With these facts in mind, 17

an analysis of the drone is both necessary and timely. As the RMA lauds drone warfare for its

securitizing of Western bodies, feminist thought can be deployed to problematize the supposed

stability of this system, and examine the real precarity that ungirds the drone’s subjectivity.

From the work of Judith Butler, Kroker draws heavily upon the notions of contingency

and precarity as the preconditions of subject formation and body drift. Butler’s philosophy offers

a resuscitation of the “frail, vulnerable, unintelligible, unknowable, unrepresentable” in the face

of the unbearable solidity of the liberal project. It has been the affect of the liberal age to incise 18

the subject as a whole, consistent being which exists a priori and is then thrown into social

conditions. According to Butler, the basic of act of power is the “disavowal of the contingency of

the human situation… seek[ing] to substitute itself for the lost languages of the gods.” Put 19

differently, power seeks to debase its own locality - its situatedness - imposing a false

universalism, which represses its own occlusions. Indeed, in the War on Terror this erasure of

power’s locality is performed through constant, apparently empathetic reference to the Other.

Thus, the face of the Afghani or Iraqi woman is constantly materialized in Western discourses

only to be dissolved by the inhumanity of their necessary victimhood. Dissolution in this case 20

is indicative of inhumanity, as it represents a foreclosure of the Other’s desire to be anything but

Scott Fitzsimmons, and Karina Sangha, “Killing in High Definition: Combat Stress among Operators of Remotely 15

Piloted Aircraft,” CPSA Conference (2010). www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2013/ (accessed March 17, 2014). Drones currently account for 31% of total Air Force aircrafts. See Roger Stahl, “What the drone saw: the cultural 16

optics of the unmanned war,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 67, no. 5 (2013), 660, http://jstor.org (accessed March 16, 2014).

Shaw, “Predator Empire," 537.17

Kroker, Body Drift, 30.18

Ibid., 31.19

Ibid., 54.20

Western; their oppression is a result of their difference, the antidote to which is a process of

creating sameness. Heard in Butler is the cry to embrace precarity and contingency in rejection

of the stable whole; what is seen in the life of the drone, however, is the undoing of each of

these.

Perhaps more compellingly than anything else, Butler’s thought reinvigorates a need to

embrace precarity - that state of existence characterized by uncertainty, necessitating a

relationship to the Other. However, it is precisely this state which popular commentators have

been quickest to note as absent in the phenomenon of the drone. They take for granted that a

body remote from the battle field cannot be in a precarious relationship to combat. Indeed, in her

paper on the mechanization of the soldier, Cristina Masters notes that one the major effects of

mechanization is enabling the “circumvention of emotional and biological limitations in the

[soldiers’] bio-bodies.” Butler’s own words seem to buttress this; as she writes that it is through 21

the body, with its implicit “mortality, vulnerability, [and] agency” that precarity enters human

life, as we are bare to the “gaze of the others… to [their] touch and to [their] violence.” If this 22

is true, then repositioning the body of the drone pilot thousands of miles away - beyond gaze,

touch, or violence - would seem to irrevocably break the cycle of precarity, leaving the pilot in a

position of untouchable dominance. Moreover, the systematization of death in which the drone

finds itself embedded, offers a purportedly “scientific” break with the historically messy business

of murder. From start to finish, the targeting and killing process of the drone is “rendered as a 23

purely technical division of labour” with pursuant results that are necessarily “logical and

Cristina Masters, “Bodies of Technology: Cyborg Soldiers and Militarized Masculinities,” International Feminist 21

Journal of Politics 7, no. 1 (March, 2005) 122, http://jstor.org (accessed March 16, 2014). Judith Butler, Precarious Life:The Powers of Mourning and Violence, (London:Verso, 2004), 26.22

Tom Hyland, “The law of instant death,” The Age (Feb. 21, 2010), www.theage.com.au (accessed March 14, 23

2014).

rational.” This process (which revolves around patterns of life rather than living beings) will be 24

discussed more fully below, suffice to note here that it is intended to alleviate any undue mental

anguish on the part of the drone. That is, it is meant to undo the precarity that has hereto

accompanied the decision to kill, by insisting that it is precise mechanical calculations instead of

fallible human intuition which have targeted the victim. 25 26

Beyond precarity, Butler also insists on a realization of humanity’s contingencies; that is,

the necessary relationship to each other, our social system, and the natural environment that is

experienced daily. An affective result of the drone is the deliberate severance of many of these

contingent points of entry. Paul Virilio was amongst the first to note this trend while considering

fighter pilots. In flight, the pilot’s normal perception of their body is not so much “destroyed as

derealized or dematerialized,” only to be rematerialized as coterminous with the body of the

aircraft. Indeed efforts are consistently made to ensure smoothness in the pilot’s experience of 27

this body drift. Virilio notes that cockpits have been designed and refined over the years to “shut

out the world of the senses,” ensuring that pilots become evermore fully enmeshed into their

machines. These modifications have resulted in a transformation of the aircraft into a lethal 28

camerae obscurae - a device meant to illuminate a small window of the external, while

shrouding the internal in darkness. Obfuscation of the immediate is the exact decoupling of 29

Derek Gregory, “War and Peace,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35, no. 2 (April 2010) 174, 24

http://jstor.org (accessed March 15, 2014). Despite these pretensions, the humanness entangled in the machine always offers failure to this supposedly 25

objective status. For instance, from the position of the drone, it is nearly impossible to be certain if targets are planting explosive devices or irrigating crops. See Hyland, “The law of instant death.”

Additionally, the machinery itself is subject to particular modes of failure that are absent in other systems. A 26

particularly humorous anecdote relates an incidence where a stray cat infiltrated a pilot station in Nevada and "fried the electronics," incapacitating that particular drone while repairs were conducted. See Shaw and Akhter, “The Unbearable Humanness of Drone Warfare," 1494.

Virilio, War and Cinema, 15.27

Ibid., 24.28

Ibid., 49.29

contingencies that Butler denounces; moreover, it is reproduced most clearly in the structure of

the drone.

In the groundbreaking GQ interview, former drone pilot Brandon Brant relates his

experiences. Regarding the pilots’ stations, Brant indicates that they were always kept “dark so

they [the pilots] could focus” solely on the task of flying. Extending the pilot’s senses across 30 31

time and space, the drone simultaneously inhibits the here and now - constraining the pilot to see

only through the machine. Returning to the notion of embedded consciousness, a similarity

emerges between the experiments performed on the kittens and the experience of drone pilots

today. Both undergo a narrowing of sensory inputs; the difference being that the pilot’s is then

augmented by drone sight. Elizabeth Grosz writes that when the “bodily instrument is modified,

so too is the instinct.” The modifications engendered by the drone are towards a subject bereft 32

of precarity, thrown into the skies of Afghanistan, Pakistan, or elsewhere with no contingent

relationships to the world that presses in upon it. Butler’s work is horrifyingly undone by the

smoothness of the drone, and its incapability of being grabbed and ensnared in the net of ethical

relations.

Persisting in his search for drifting bodies, Kroker turns to the work of N. Katherine

Hayles, wherein he finds the necessary love of complexity congealed to a post-human ethics.

Hayles’ work embraces the chaotic, examining the natural fluidity of all things in a “brilliant

rethinking of the liberal subject in relationship to the era of computation.” As such, she 33

Matthew Power, “Confessions of a Drone Warrior,” GQ (Oct. 23, 2013), www.gq.com/news-politics/ (accessed 30

March 16, 2014). Further integrating the embodied experience of the pilot, drone stations in the future are meant to allow the 31

console and the pilot's chair to vibrate, simulating the effects of turbulence and missile launch. See Wilcox, “Body Counts,” 13.

Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely, (London: Duke University Press, 2004) 32

225. Kroker, Body Drift, 68-70.33

struggles to unwrite the received wisdoms that haunt our knowledge, through the fantasy of the

unblemished liberal subject. In challenging the classical form of the body, Hayles prefers a figure

of “broken margins, repressed silences, a scream for social recognition.” She sees a body that is 34

not smooth, polished, or perfected; rather it is broken, disjointed, and complex. In a similar vein

Grosz writes eloquently of this “lived body,” that is always “interwoven with and constitutive of

systems of meaning, signification, and representation.” Above all else, Hayles implores, the 35

theoretically consistent liberal body must be shed, and the path of lived embodiment pursued; in

the age of ubiquitous technology, this moulting process leads to the zone of the electric and the

digital.

Hayles’ embrace of the endlessly complex engenders an ethics of the post-human. Absent

the rigidity of the liberal body, Hayles understands these intelligent machines as “neither objects

to dominate, nor subjects threatening to dominate” her; instead technology must be read as

“embodied entities instantiating processes that interact with processes” instantiated by equally

embodied human subjects. This over-weaving or becoming-together is expressed quite 36

explicitly by those who work most closely with electronic technology. Many drone pilots report a

sense of “merging with the technology,” feeling it as an extension of themselves. Similarly, 37 38

Ibid., 76.34

Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, (Indianapolis: Indiana 35

University Press, 1994), 18. N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, (Chicago: The University 36

of Chicago Press, 2005), 243. Indeed, in an extreme case of the subconscious affect of this merger, drone pilot Brandon Brant reported that his 37

dreams were coloured as if by an infrared camera. Here we see that even away from the machinery itself the merging of biology and technology structures our most deep-seated thoughts. See Power, “Confessions of a Drone Warrior.”

Interestingly, the armed forces seem to recognize this collapsing spatiality in the very command structure of their 38

organization. Robert Kaplan said that upon arriving at the Nevada drone base he was told: “‘Inside that trailer is Iraq; inside the other, Afghanistan’,... ‘Inside those trailers you leave North America which falls under Northern Command, and enter the Middle East, the domain of Central Command.’” Here it can be seen that the military recognizes that those who pilot drones are not really in the place of the biological bodies, they are more fully embedded and embodied with the drone in the skies of the battle-zone. See Gregory, “War and Peace,” 160.

others have claimed that they can identify which person is operating a remotely controlled device

by the way it moves - literally seeing the ghost of the biological human in the machine. Hayles 39

provocatively suggests that “human consciousness is computational;” however, in light of the 40

anti-complexity and anti-humanist age ushered in by the drone, it remains to be seen if the same

can be said of human conscience.

The complexity that Hayles reaches for is a critical aspect of feminist notions of

embodiment: as bodies are sites for the marking, inscribing, and contesting of power. Grosz

notes that “clothing, jewellery, makeup, cars, living spaces, and work” leave marks - and thereby

meaning - upon the body of the subject, running “as deeply as any surgical incision, binding

individuals to systems of significance.” Modifications of the body extend from structures of 41

power, weaving into it as both a carrier and signifier of those same structures, often in very

complex and contradictory ways. This remains true in the age of the machine, even when the

fleshiness of our bodies is becoming an obsolescence as interface; today, it is the extended 42

limits of ourselves - the ever-more embodied technologies - that incise meaning. However, the

drone has proven itself to be an immaculate surface, resisting all meaningful social inscription.

Descriptions of the physicality of drones that have been written in the popular press often

comment on the aesthetics of the machine, typically noting its amorphous features. Esquire’s

Brian Mockenhaupt commented on the “emaciated” look of drones, and the hollowness that

reverberates when tapping their “rib cage.” Leaving aside Mockenhaupt’s concession to the 43

Doree Armstrong, “Emotional attachment to robots could affect outcome on battlefield,” University of Washington 39

(Sept. 17, 2013). http://www.washington.edu/news/ (accessed March 14, 2014). Kroker, Body Drift, 74.40

Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, (New York: Routledge, 1995), 35.41

Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs, 117.42

Brian Mockenhaupt, “We’ve Seen the Future and it’s Unmanned,” Esquire (Oct. 14, 2009). http://jstor.org/ 43

(accessed March 18, 2014).

enmeshing human ontology of the drone, his descriptions belie the mainstream reading of the

drone’s form: thin, weak, ill, or empty. While Matthew Power writes that the drone has a

“sinister” appearance, he subsequently describes it as an “eyeless creature that has evolved in

darkness.” Power at once invokes fear, yet also pity for a machine that has been bred into a 44

tortured existence. These inscriptions pervert the lived experience of the drone; that of death-

dealer, untouchable surveyor, and nearly omniscient subject. As a body, nothing appears more

smooth, less intricate or resistant to complexity than the drone.

Beyond its grotesquely pure aesthetics, the drone also represents the undoing of Hayles’

longed for post-human ethics. Spurred on by the entangling of the subject in the world of the

machine, Hayles has tirelessly argued for a more inclusive reconceptualization of ethics. As

mentioned above, machines are neither the docile slaves of human masters, nor are they our

vicious overlords in waiting; a liveable ethics must reflect technology’s embodied intermingling

with the biological. Yet in her admirable rush to expand the ground beneath our ethics, Hayles

neglects to consider the affect on human conscience engendered by our meshing with the

computations of the machine. At the site of the drone this enmeshing inculcates a coldly anti-

humanist ethic. In contrast to previous modes of warfare, which have depended on the

dehumanization and othering of the soldiers’ victims, drone warfare actively cultivates a

recognition of the target’s humanity. It is very typical for drone pilots to:

Watch their targets undertaking a wide range of normal, human activities, including eating, defecating, smoking, and interacting with friends and family, before attempting to kill them. The observation period preceding [a drone] airstrike, which can last hours, days, or even weeks, causes many [drone]

Power, “Confessions of a Drone Warrior.”44

operators to develop a strong sense of familiarity with the people they ultimately try to kill. 45

While this has reportedly lead to psychological strain on the drone pilots, only in a very few

cases has it actually resulted in a refusal to kill. On balance, the drone must be read as an 46

enmeshing of human and machine that, while simultaneously presenting humanity, enables its

disregard and destruction.

Not only does the drone forestall Hayles’ post-human ethics, it also appears to unravel

the traditional humanist position. As Masters writes, in the age of the drone, the “Levinasian

encounter with the other is upon us.” No longer are warriors able to pretend even feebly that 47 48

their victims are not just as ordinary, mundane, and human as themselves: they have seen the

banality of the Other’s existence and remain resolved to snuff it out. Interestingly, on this front,

the drone stands apart from previous modes of aerial warfare. Since the First World War, pilots

have often reported that they were able to carryout their bombing missions only because “they

did not see whom they were killing,” relief was expressed that this responsibility had been taken

on by others. The drone has unwritten this credo, dissolving the division of labour that had 49

been thought necessary to facilitate the calculated killing of other humans. Worst of all, this anti-

humanist technology makes the most hopelessly beautiful methods of resistance and subversion

acts of naïvety. In 2014, a group of Pakistani “artist-activists” began Project #NotABugSplat, by

putting a photograph of the “face of a little girl” whose family was killed by drone-strikes in a

Fitzsimmons and Sangha, “Killing in High Definition,” 5.45

Power, “Confessions of a Drone Warrior.”46

Masters, “Bodies of Technology,” 128.47

It should also be noted, that these technologies often depend upon the Levinasian ethical encounter to enable their 48

murderous potentials. It is believed that bin Laden was able to escape detection for so many years in part because he wore a cowboy hat - concealing his face from surveilling technology. Absent the ethical encounter of the face, the destruction of bin Laden seemed impossible. See F.S. Naiden, “Heroes and Drones,” The Wilson Quarterly (Autumn 2013), www.wilsonquarterly.com/ (accessed March 15, 2014).

Virilio, War and Cinema, 14.49

field where it would be visible to drone pilots flying over. This admirable act forgets the true 50

nature of the drone. It is very likely that the face of that little girl is already known to the pilots,

that it was known even as their missiles were launched. Resistance that focuses on humanizing

victims is doomed, as the lenses of the drone have long ago displayed the humanness that waits

in the strike-zone and ultimately discounted it. Hayles writes that “the posthuman is likely to be

seen as antihuman,” the real challenge is that the post-human subject of the drone engenders an 51

anti-humanist sentiment.

Kroker’s last and strongest push in the direction of body drift comes from the work of

Donna Haraway. A thinker who is herself a strange academic hybridity of humanities and

scientific scholarship, Haraway represents for Kroker “the last and best representative of a truly

transformative scientist.” Incredibly impactful since the late 1980s, Haraway was one of the 52

first academics to popularize the notion of the ‘cyborg’ as a challenge to the liberal subject. To

both the humanities and the sciences, Haraway offers up a challenging epistemological starting

point that posits that “the categorical separation of nature and culture is already a kind of

violence,” albeit one that is inherited through a long tradition of thought. In Primate Visions, 53

Haraway challenges the ‘god-trick’ preformed by researchers, who claim the power to look upon

their subject and examine it in an objective and unaffected way. Following the returned gaze of 54

Nietzsche’s abyss, Haraway understands that subjects always reach into one another. What 55

Sophia Saifi, “Not a 'bug splat:' Artists give drone victims a face in Pakistan,” CNN World (April 9, 2014) http://50

www.cnn.com/ (accessed April 10, 2014). N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, 51

(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999) 286. Kroker, Body Drift, 103. Emphasis original.52

Donna J. Haraway, How Like a Leaf, (London: Routledge, 2000), 106.53

Donna J. Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, (New York: 54

Routledge, 1989). Kroker, Body Drift, 133-134.55

emerges from her work is both an understanding of hybridity and appreciation of the

companionship inherent in coexistence. However, the drone instantiates Haraway’s fear of

technology’s ability to bring about the “‘perversity’ of second birthing and disembodiment,”

cutting the circuits that loop us all together. 56

The very nature of the drone and the systems of power into which it is embedded act to

undo the hybridity of its targets. As we have seen, while the drone - as a figure deeply enmeshed

into structures of authority - is a complex and hybrid body, those whom are targeted constitute a

singular subjectivity. Kroker writes that “the body in revolt is animal to the mind of power,

darkness to the light of surveillance, marked in relationship to the unmarked sign of state

terrorism.” While those who congeal to supposedly legitimate authority are interpellable in a 57

variety of complex ways, those who revolt against these hierarchies create a subjective opacity

impenetrable by authority and are therefore viewed as dangerous, insane, or less than human -

that is, animalistic. This dichotomy of human and animal is reproduced initially by the telescopic

sight of the drone itself. Aerial bombing physically divides the world into spheres of privilege

and destitution - above and below - based on “access to the virtual world.” Those existing 58

below are the killable subjects, zoe, or animal life within the structures that envelope the bomber.

Today the drone takes this a step further, with its ability to target the bodies of specific

individuals rather than just a geographical area. The targeting process now focuses on

identifying “patterns of life” that are most closely linked to the activities of those who revolt

against the dominant power structures. These patterns include the congregating of several men 59

Ibid., 129.56

Ibid., 114-115.57

Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-referentiality in War, Theory and Comparative Work, (Durham, NC: 58

Duke University Press, 2006), 35. Mockenhaupt, “We’ve Seen the Future and it’s Unmanned.”59

in one place, use of electricity at odd hours, or working outdoors past dusk, to name just a few.

Such a system severs the targeted individual from the larger network of living and meaning

which they occupy, reducing them to a series of suspicious actions that are associated (however

tenuously) with the singularity of the ‘terrorist.’ What we are witness to in the drone is the

“language of Science [being] mobilised… to secure the legitimacy” of killing. This murderous 60

process is made to appear objective by producing a framework representing the supposed

singularity of what a terrorist is. As Grosz has explained the modern state allows “no body

outside of its regulations: its demand for documentation relentlessly records and categorizes.” 61

Those who resist this are cast outside of the realm of representability and grafted into singular

categories. Represented by the drone as part of a singularity, the hybridity of the ‘terrorist’ and

their demands are depoliticized, delegitimized, and dehumanized before they can ever be heard

or seen. Rather than an equally hybrid being, constitutive of certain needs and desires, the

terrorist is only ever criminal, insane, or animalistic.

Haraway’s most recent work in The Companion Species Manifesto, finds itself bizarrely 62

expressed in the relationships between pilots, soldiers, and machines. In the same moment that

the drone engenders an anti-humanist position towards its victims, it also perpetuates and

strengthens in-group bias. Through their bodily drift with the drone, pilots are brought closer

than ever before to the battle field. Such spatial compression is of “special significance” as it is

strengthens the sense of accountability which the pilot feels for soldiers on the ground. 63

Gregory, “War and Peace,” 107. Emphasis original.60

Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, 107.61

Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, (Chicago: Prickly 62

Paradigm Press, 2003). Derek Gregory, “War and Peace,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35, no. 2 (April 2010) 200, 63

http://jstor.org (accessed March 15, 2014).

Experienced through the drone, the soldiers are sensorially very near: they can be seen through

the drone’s lens and are in direct radio contact with the pilots thousands of miles away. By

contrast, traditional bombers often communicated with the soldiers only through a chain of

command, and maintained minimal visual contact. This sense of connection is so strong that

many drone pilots refer to themselves as a “guardian angel” watching over the troops. Thus, at 64

least some connection to certain humans is maintain through the drone.

The story of companionism, however, is no longer necessarily between just biological

subjects. Indeed, in a strange twist on Haraway’s work, both soldiers and pilots are recognizing

their relationships to the machines beside and in which they operate. Recent doctoral research by

Julie Carpenter has focused on the relationship that soldiers experience with the machines

cohabiting the battlefield; not focused primarily drones, this research can nonetheless be

extrapolated upon for our purposes here. It is important to note that this relationship exists

beyond the enmeshing experience of operator and device, those who merely work beside these

machines often become their companions.

A deep admiration for their steely companions is quickly emerging across the ranks of

the military, and is often expressed in remarkable ways. Remotely operated devices are often

given names by their soldier-companions. Frequently these are the names of a current wife or

girlfriend - but never an ex. Not only does this reveal a perception of humanness enmeshed in 65

the machine, it also displays a strong emotional attachment as the soldier only ever christens

their companion with a name of deep affection. It is also very common for soldiers to read

Power, “Confessions of a Drone Warrior.”64

Armstrong, “Emotional attachment to robots.”65

emotions and personalities into these machines, going so far as to describe a drone as 66

“temperamental” and associating machinery malfunctions with likes and dislikes. This sense of 67

companionship between humans and embodied machines goes to levels that might at first glance

seem even comical. Stories from soldiers who post on Reddit often recount the lengths which a

platoon might go to in the event that one of their trusted machine-companions should fall in

battle. Twenty-one-gun salutes and awarding of military decorations - honours typical for a

fallen soldier - are not uncommon responses to a machine’s ‘death.’ Most importantly, these 68

ceremonies are organized spontaneously by the soldier-companions, not the chain of command.

They are, therefore, very likely genuine expressions of loss. This situation is revealed in its

perversity when foregrounded against the utter coldness with which this same machine allow for

the murder of other humans. Companionship is undone and rewritten to include machine

circuitry while excluding any non-conformist biology.

Arthur Kroker identifies in the works of Judith Butler, N. Katherine Hayles, and Donna

Haraway the theme of body drift: the movement of the subject beyond the confines of its

classically constituted housing. Supported by observations from the cognitive sciences, body

drift is fundamentally the embodied and lived experience of enmeshment within the world, the

free ranging joy of embedded consciousness. This is the fluidity of existence that instantiates the

precarity and contingency that Butler finds necessary for ethical living. It is the complex subject

construction that demands Hayles’ post-humanism. Body drift is also the expression of hybridity

and companionism that Haraway deploys to challenge the rigid epistemologies of the humanities

Megan Garber, “Funerals for Fallen Robots,” The Atlantic (Sept. 2013). www.theatlantic.com/ (accessed March 66

17, 2014). Mockenhaupt, “We’ve Seen the Future and it’s Unmanned.”67

Garber, “Funerals for Fallen Robots.”68

and sciences. It is, however, also the experiential definition of the drone. Just as the work of

prominent feminist thinkers threatened to unbind the human body from its determinist prison

imposed by reductive biologism, the spectral figure of the drone personifies that liberation’s

negative undoing. The subjectivity of the drone, while constituted as a self-evident bodily drift,

is a radical negation of all that is best within this critical feminist turn. Even the implosion of

bodily limitations serves only to reproduce the social networks of domination unless there is a

simultaneous restructuring of fundamental power relations.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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