Vincent Le - Entry No 6 (Gregory)

In his article entitled ‘From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War’, Derek Gregory examines the way in which the waging of war through drone technology has totally reconfigured the socio-culturo-intrapsychic relations between soldiers and their targets, be they combatants or civilians. Gregory begins by adumbrating the (battle-)lines of argumentation for and against drone warfare, only to critique and dismiss both sides of the debate. On the one hand, advocates argue that drone technology is a legitimate means of self-defence against the new, nationless enemy—that quasi-Platonic Form of ‘Terror’ itself!—, insofar as drones provide crucial intelligence and surveillance support, and strengthens the precision of strikes to mitigate ally and civilian casualties. On the other hand, critics argue that drone warfare counterintuitively proliferates terror by at once killing innocent civilians and, consequently, inciting these victims’ surviving friends and family to join the extremists and terrorists out of the desire for revenge against their invisible oppressor from the skies (never has The X Files’ Agent Mulder’s paranoiac, conspiratorial directive to ‘watch the skies!’ sounded so rational). Just as these victims experience their enemy as wholly Other, so, too, the critics say, are the drone operators distanciated from their targets by drone technology’s virtualization of warfare into an easily consumable video game experience. One has only to play the bestselling video game franchise, Call of Duty, that puts players in the extremely realistically simulated seat of a drone bomber (for screenshots, see: http://www.mobygames.com/game/ps3/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-2/screenshots/gameShotId,509576/ and http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-2/screenshots/gameShotId,397672/), or to regard artist, James Bridle’s aestheticization of the drone’s gaze (see Bridle’s photo series Drone Shadow: http://shorttermmemoryloss.com/portfolio/project/drone-shadows/), in order to confirm that such aesthetico-visualization of drone technology is interpellating all of us into heartless, bloodthirsty fascists—just as Walter Benjamin had portended so long ago. In light of this, it is no wonder etymological legend has it that the Latin bellum, meaning war, was routinely mistaken by the Romanic people with the sound of the Romanic bello, meaning beauty. All of this is to say that the drone’s sublime, aesthetic gaze is, according to its critics, a socio-culturally constructed fantasy-screen draped over the Real of war, so as to distanciate its perpetrators from their targets and victims by translating the latter as infinitesimal, pixilated ants. Indeed, drone technology even renders the familiar wholly Other insofar as noncombatants and allies are routinely mistranslated as enemy targets and fired upon. The human who is caught between the firing lines of the drone’s scopic regime, then, is nothing more than a vulgar Pythagorean reducing all living, corporeal bodies to a concatenation of dots, numbers and calculations. Although Gregory agrees with the critics’ claim that drone technology is not simply a technical, but, rather, and more fundamentally, a ‘techno-CULTURAL construction’, he does not think as they do that it has the effect of distanciating us from the Real of war. On the contrary, Gregory argues, drone technology renders war evermore close, personal and intimate. After all, while the drone operators may be, in vulgar Pythagorean terms again, spatially further away from the battlefield, they are, nonetheless, able to zoom in through the drone’s gaze to see the body parts fly and hear their victims’ screams at a range even closer than they could if they were actually present on the battlefield. Whereas, moreover, a video game presents isolated, discontinuous scenarios that can be paused and replayed and in which enemies and civilians are perspicuously delineated, drone warfare is as temporally continuous as ever, while the delineation between civilians and enemies is even more equivocal. Since the drone’s gaze, however, inculcates its users with the sole desire to find, identify and eliminate enemies, everyone who enters the MALE (Mid-Altitude Long-Endurance) GAZE, be they civilians or enemies, is situated in what Taussig might call the scopic space of death. Gregory claims that drone operators are interpellated as such by being situated into certain subject positions in the great apparatus of ‘the kill-chain’. Like the long chain of mistranslated commands from Napoleon’s headquarters to the battlefield, the kill-chain comprises a vast network of actors, discourses, affects, translations, and mediations leading form the confirmation of orders to the execution of drone strikes. At this juncture, I would critically suggest that Gregory’s concept of the kill-chain produces precisely the distanciating effect that he argues it does not, insofar as it taylorizes war-making such that no one subject in the kill-chain can grasp the monstrous totality of the war machine that they fragmentarily contribute to. Rather, the taylorization of war by the virtual virtue of the kill-chain has the effect of bucreaucratizing the cruelty of war, technocratizing its violence, and banalizing its evil. Indeed, the drone’s effectivity of distanciating us from the Real of war is further at play in the three modalities that Gregory identifies for precisely censoring the suffering of civilian causalities from the media reports on drone operations. 1) The most time-tested modality is to simply censor and limit media coverage of drone operations. 2) Another, more complex modality is to distinguish between ‘innocent civilians’ and ‘abusive civilians’ who are complicit in enemy activity for defiantly ‘choosing’ to make a living for themselves, raise families and attend school in the spaces of death that the drone’s gaze determines. As The Guardian reports on the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance program evinced last week, in modern warfare, ever more citizens are being identified as combatants, as if all of civil society were being reevaluated as falling under Foucault’s racial discourse. That drone technology functions in this racially discursive topology is clear from its execution of strikes in spaces of civil, peacetime society, and even in entire countries like Pakistan with whom no one is officially at war. Homologously, the civil servants and functionaries of the C.I.A.’s civilian agencies who direct and conduct these operations have, thereby, been rendered unlawful combatants as well. In a certain sense, this is not so much an evaluation of war for modern times as it is a return to war’s original etymological meaning: to confuse, to perplex, and to blur the lines and fine distinctions (here, between enemies and non-combatants). Furthermore, Gregory identifies a third, biopolitical modality of reconfiguring the language of war so that it speaks of the invaded country as a diseased social body, and the invading drone operators as doctors who surgically remove certain cancerous parts of that social body in order to save the whole. However, as nineteenth century women who were sexually stimulated by their doctors in order to treat their ‘hysteria’ must have known all too well, such amorous cures might very well be worse than the disease. In any case, by way of this Nietzschean transvaluation of values that permits one to kill, not out of hate, but out of love, Gregory’s idea of the intimization of war in recent times reemerges. With the biopolitical transvaluation of the language of war into the language of the love letter, war is rendered an amorous encounter, a kind of one-night stand of fiery (vodka) SHOTS and sneaky, explosive BLOW JOBS, after which one never sees the Other again. In the field of judicial discourse, however, the language of war is transvaluated not to personalize, but, contrary to Gregory’s claims, to distance us from war’s Real. Against the critics’ claim that drone strikes amount to extra-judicial murders, Gregory observes how a virtual fleet of legal advisers are stationed on the borders of drone operation rooms to examine images, make collateral damage calculations, and assess the legal consequences of any strikes. Gregory describes this judicial process, however, as if there were actually any chance that military court tribunals would decide to sanction themselves. Indeed, Gregory later concedes as much when he says that the judges are incorporated into the apparatus of the kill-chain, rather than the military personnel being incorporated into an impartial legal apparatus. In a global civil society that is becoming increasingly partial to one side over the other in a geopolitical war that is, like Gregory’s article itself, so close and yet so faraway from said society, I am also tempted to take a side and declare, against Foucault, that SOCIETY MUST BE DESTROYED.