Gregory seems to share with other notable
anti-Enlightenment scholars (ranging from Marxist Frankfurt School cultural
theorists to Foucault-influenced post-colonialists) the view that, under the
false promise of an increasing respect for human rights and general development
of living conditions through the improvements in technology, progress has
rather an evil face. Mixing Foucaldian and Deleuzian terminology, he uses the
military apparatus of the drone as a machine of vision and speech, whose visual
and textual discourse he intends to analyze, while situating his dispositif as a complex web of “actors,
objects, practices, discourses and affects” capable of producing its own
specific subjects. In the end, in spite of all ideological discourse purporting
to portray the drone as a new, more ethical and humane form of warfare, in fact
the type of techno-cultural system engendered by the drone is simply that of a
(neo-)Orientalism. Perhaps a more interesting byproduct present in Gregory’s
article is his more “aesthetical” discussions of the notion of distance, video,
digital communication, not really due to their well-acknowledged ethical
implications to modern warfare, but to an understanding of how human beings
make sense of the experience filtered by contemporary technology. In a
comparison between drone operation and videogames, he acknowledges that those
operating drones are aware of “death” and of being implicated in war; that
means, their work isn’t merely virtual: they suffer too. Also attractive is the
idea that war used to be conceived as a theater, where actors were always
limited to physical stages, to become film, a medium that distances viewer and
object and thus generates new questions of “permission and prohibition,
presence and absence” – or rather, abolishes these. Here, Gregory spends too much time in a
hopeless accusation of the inherent immorality of the indisputable fact that, in
“counterinsurgency”, it’s almost impossible to distinguish between combatants
(bad guys) and civilians. He’s particularly enraged at the notion that the
ever-present military lawyers overlooking all of the drone’s actual operators
activity are actually not there to ensure that civilian’s lives are spared, but
to render “incidental” deaths of civilians justifiable. It’s all part of a
“liberal way of war”, a cosmetic therapy destined to eliminate undesirable elements
acting within the all-embracing body of American superpower. But, one might
argue, this “colonial modality of air power” is being performed in the “global
borderlands”, while the same superpower is now, for instance, merely mumbling
words of sanction against Russia’s annexation of Crimea. My argument is that this
whole anti-facebook, anti-NSA, anti-American narrative seems to carry on many
elements of conspiracy theory, as I pointed before in “The Bomb” session. The
idea of a world divided into “an above” and “a below” where Americans control
all of the virtual (and therefore increasingly also all of real) world, where
bureaucrats who see themselves as thunder Gods sit in their Nevada desert
offices and have in their hands the destinies and lives not of all mankind, but
of every single one of its individuals, doesn’t acknowledge the “rest of
mankind’s” creative appropriation of virtual technologies in building novel
ways of human interaction. Maybe if he’d stayed more focused on the multiple
meaning of these “cultural techniques”, instead of reducing them to their
employment by evil US military, he’d have achieved something more relevant than
a denunciation pamphlet.
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