Abstract
This article analyses the politics of seeing as a way to examine the elision of civilian casualty in the War on Terror. The author particularly focuses on the ambiguities and paradoxes at play in this discussion: the question of distance, the question of visibility and the role of the body. In doing so, she tells the story of how terrorism has emerged as a form of violence that centralizes bodies, focused on the figure of the innocent victim whose body has been destroyed by the body of another, even as the technology of drone strikes also operates by exploding bodies, but through the purported precision of techno-military operations. Such technology re-categorizes civilian death as collateral damage, defining these deaths as technological effects rather than as biological, embodied ones. This acts to disembody dead civilians even as increased attention is being given to soldier bodies (both dead and injured). In this sense, the author is not arguing that civilian death has become disembodied by virtue of the distancing caused by the drone apparatus. Rather, she seeks to tell a more complicated story of how the drone gaze functions as a perpetrator gaze, and who and what it sees.
The suicide terrorist is often referred to as a uniquely frightening phenomenon: one who would use his or her body as an act or sacrifice for a larger community ideal (Dingley and Mollica, 2007). Terrorist violence is depicted as detached from the human body because it uses the body as a tool rather than as a sacred object that is an end in itself, the logic of individualism that drives much of Western political theory. That is, terrorists are depicted paradoxically: as people who use their body to kill (hyper-embodiment) but in doing so are so detached from their body that the violence is distanced from the human body as vital object (hyper-disembodiment), precisely because such an act is profoundly inhuman and inhumane, and indeed the outcome of such an act is the radical disembodiment and dismemberment of the suicide terrorist’s victim. More recently, counter-terrorism has relied on technology to offer what is posited as a simple, technical solution to the complex ethico-political problem of modern warfare (Gregory, 2017: 212). As a result, counter-terrorism pursues apparatuses of technology, a turn away from the human, to counter violence that is paradoxically both oh-so-human (using the body as a weapon) and de-humanizing (targeting civilians and representing the destruction of the human itself). This technology is perhaps best articulated through the contemporary use of drone strikes, wherein the techno-scientific mediation of modern-day weapons systems and the symbolic mediation of television and computer screens allow drone pilots and the general public to view war ‘from a distance’ while making way for organized state violence to be seen as virtuous – that is, clean, precise, and noble. (Wall and Monahan, 2011: 246)
This article seeks to focus on the politics of seeing as a way to examine the elision of civilian casualty in the War on Terror, following recent calls to explore further how visuality produces and shapes the international as both site and sight of international politics (Grayson and Mawdsley, 2019). I particularly focus on the ambiguities and paradoxes at play in this discussion: the question of distance, the question of visibility and the role of the body. In doing so, I tell the story of how terrorism has emerged as a form of violence that centralizes bodies, focused on the figure of the innocent victim whose body has been destroyed by the body of another, even as the technology of drone strikes also operates by exploding bodies, but through the purported precision of techno-military operations. Such technology re-categorizes civilian death as collateral damage, defining these deaths as technological effects rather than as biological, embodied ones. This acts to disembody dead civilians even as increased attention is being given to soldier bodies (both dead and injured). In this sense, I am not, or at least not only, arguing that civilian death has become disembodied by virtue of the distancing caused by the drone apparatus. Rather, I seek to tell a more complicated story of how the drone gaze functions and who and what it sees. Indeed, as Grayson (2016) has noted, drone warfare itself can be considered combat over ways of seeing.
If, as WJT Mitchell (2002: 166) notes, vision is itself invisible, we cannot see what seeing is, then this article can be seen as an attempt to uncover the logic of the invisibility of vision, by asking how and why the targets of drone strikes are rendered invisible, even as they are captured through the visual logic of the technology of the drone, how and why they are deemed not worthy of seeing in return, and what impact this has on the politics of violence against civilians. Specifically, I argue that the drone gaze is a form of perpetrator gaze that renders one side all-seeing, and I elucidate how and what it sees.
The Gorgon Stare: On the ocular politics of the drone
Drones have inaugurated a particular visual logic associated with the war-on-terror (Adey, 2010; Gregory, 2011; Kaplan, 2006; Wilcox, 2015). As Wall and Monahan (2011: 239) draw attention to, the ‘corporeal politics of space, place, and identity are powerfully inflected by technological systems of remote surveillance and violence’. Similarly, Bracken-Roche (2016) has drawn attention to the way drones, and specifically their domestic use in the US, encourage a reconceptualization of space centered on the idea of verticality (Weizman, 2002), while Adey (2016: 320) has focused less on the vertical view than on the ‘side-long view’. Lauren Wilcox (2015), as well, has argued that drone warfare reorganizes space to materialize the bodies of killable enemies, and Daggett (2015) has argued that drones queer the distance–intimacy continuum. Yet my aim here is to focus on the narrative of the fantastic and mythological in the visual politics and culture of the drone and the drone strike. As Peter Adey (2016: 319) has noted: in the drone we find not only the future of a barely imaginable if apparently cleaner and more precise violence that militaries and governments are keen to communicate, but analogues of mythic figures possessing powerful capacities of sight and war-making.
He traces the way in which others have articulated the drone: as ‘winged fusion of human beast and machine’ (Crandall, 2014), as both ‘monster capable of terrible acts’ and ‘hero, uniting disparate technological forces’ (Rothstein, 2015: xiv). I draw on these mythic figurations and the paradoxes they invoke to articulate the ocular politics of the drone: to examine the way in which the drone gaze, the ability to look everywhere and see everything has come to be claimed as the technological solution to defeating evil. I focus specifically on the context of US counter-terrorism operations. After tracing this logic, I articulate the radical disembodiment of civilians inherent in this ocular politics.
In a recent article (Auchter, 2018), I argued that ISIS beheadings invoke a Medusa-like logic that depicts an inherent threat in the gaze, where viewing the videos and images is itself already dangerous. What is to be viewed is already known as a threat even before it is seen. I noted that there is a near-epidemiological fear of watching ISIS beheadings. In that sense, the visual regulation of these images is performed precisely in such a way as to depict them as contagious, as too real. In the context of ISIS beheading videos, I called attention to a complex visual paradox at play here: ISIS is evil, so simply looking at their handiwork is dangerous, yet to engage this threat, we must both see them for what they really are (or what we assume them to be), and to do so without them seeing us. It is this latter component I wish to explore further here in the context of the ocular politics of drone strikes, particularly as it relates to the deaths caused using this technology. In this sense, I will articulate how the drone strike has been depicted as quite Persean.
The key component of the Medusa story is her beheading by Perseus, who is depicted in artistic representations holding the severed head of Medusa, while wearing the helmet of invisibility and carrying the mirrored shield. Both of these tools enabled Perseus to defeat Medusa: the mirrored shield allowed him to see her reflection without being turned to stone from her gaze, and the helmet allowed him to be invisible to Medusa, so she did not anticipate his attack. Medusa is the naturalized threat: simply looking at her is dangerous. Yet, the only way to engage with this threat is to participate in a visual paradox: to both look at her without looking at her, while oneself remaining invisible. There must be a double relationship of asymmetry: looking at her without her being able to look back, but looking at her without actually looking at her. So we ensure that there is nothing to see, just as one guarantees that one remains unseen.
Indeed, it is precisely the fact that the Medusan head is not watchable that renders it disturbing. Cavarero (2009: 8) notes that Medusa represents the unwatchability of one’s own death, but more than that, the ‘unwatchability of the the spectacle of disfigurement, which the singular body cannot bear’. The drone strikes from afar, its pilot possessing the power of unobscured sight and a weapon to make use of it, while those targeted cannot see those who kill them (the pilots wear Perseus’s invisibility helmet, which here is technological): the ocular politics of the drone is asymmetrical. In this sense, the drone is the assemblage of the Perseus/mirror/sword. Or at least that is how the drone is depicted: as a technological mastery over evil. 1 In this vein, the drone operator is a heroic figure who has slain the Medusa, who has visually overcome the command not to look directly at evil, and has instead obliterated it.
Indeed, it is perhaps no coincidence that the US military has developed a new program associated with drone technology referred to as the ‘Gorgon Stare’. The Gorgons in Greek mythology were monsters with a powerful gaze that could turn one to stone, the most famous of which was Medusa. The Gorgon Stare, first used in 2011 in Afghanistan, adapted video technology on drones to be able to get a bigger picture, a panoramic view: Equipped with both electro-optical cameras for daylight operations and infrared cameras for operations after dark, Gorgon Stare’s spherical array enabled warfighters to track enemy movements, even dismounted individuals, across an area measuring four kilometers in diameter. (Thompson, 2015)
As Major General James O Poss, Air Force Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, noted, ‘Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything’ (Nakashima and Whitlock, 2011). Loren Thompson (2015) notes that in Greek mythology, Gorgons were creatures whose terrible visages could turn men to stone with a single glance. The Air Force’s Gorgon Stare sensor system can’t do that, but its unrelenting gaze is turning thousands of terrorists into targets who can no longer elude U.S. weapons.
The idea of this unrelenting gaze focuses on visual superiority through asymmetry: the terrorists don’t know we are watching them, but our gaze sees everything, we are everywhere, what Laperruque (2017) has referred to as the ‘aerial panopticon’.
This everywhere logic, premised on the idea of ‘pattern of life’ intelligence, also renders the banality of everyday life subject to securitization. ‘Using the all-seeing eye, you will find out who is important in a network, where they live, where they get their support from, where their friends are’, said the senior military official. ‘This gives you the option to arrest the individual, talk to the individuals or . . . wait till those people have gone down a lonely stretch of road and take them out with a Hellfire missile’ (Barnes, 2009).
The Gorgon stare, then, focuses on cultivating a logic of surveillance directly connected with both better intelligence and better ability to strike. In this vein, it has been referred to as a ‘constant stare’ (Barnes, 2009), as an ‘all-seeing eye’ (Barnes, 2009), and as an ‘unrelenting gaze’ (Thompson, 2015). But what does this gaze actually see? Who is it actually turning to stone? I now turn to the argument that such a technological logic of the omniscient and omnipotent gaze presumes two components to the gaze: effective distinction between civilians and terrorists (the idea that our knowledge is in fact accurate), and that such a gaze will effectively turn the enemy to stone, drawing on the assumptions inherent in the Gorgon story. I use these to illustrate the impact of this gaze and its assumptions on civilian death.
Seeing back: Civilian death under the drone gaze
Caroline Holmqvist (2013: 539) has noted the ways in which contemporary drone wars have blurred the corporeal and incorporeal, while Wilcox (2017) has framed this in language of the drone as both embodied and embodying. Because they are defined as ‘autonomous’ weapons systems, this inculcates a certain placement of ethical responsibility away from the bodies of the operators and onto a mythical body of the drone itself. Holmqvist (2013: 543) argues that drones eschew ‘any real encounter involving mutual recognition and recognizability’, emphasizing the importance of technology in this relationship. I make a similar argument here that attempts to elucidate how drones ‘see the world’, in Holmqvist’s (2013: 544) words, under the framing of the idea of disembodiment of civilian death.
‘From the sky, differences among people may be less detectable, or – perhaps more accurately – the motivations to make such fine-grained distinctions may be attenuated in the drive to engage the enemy’ (Wall and Monahan, 2011: 243). That is, even as modern technologies of murder aim at civilizing the ways of killing by doing so invisibly, this assumes a one-sidedness to the gaze that fits with the Medusa myth. Indeed, from the perspective of those on the ground, the drone’s gaze is Medusan rather than Persean: destructive in simply looking at you, if only because you can’t look back in your own defense. It does not see you the way you see yourself, and so it disrupts the idea of Enlightenment rational individuality where recognition is premised on seeing oneself the way one is seen in his (and it is his) political community. As Mirzoeff (2011: 473) notes, the ‘look must be mutual, each inventing the other, or it fails’. But drones do not see you as you see yourself or as a politically autonomous being, and there is no mutual look. They see you as data, and then as a bug splat. ‘Bugsplat is the official term used by US authorities when humans are killed by drone missiles . . . it is deliberately employed as a psychological tactic to dehumanise targets so operatives overcome their inhibition to kill’ (Robinson, 2011). 2
In reference to drone technology being used at the US–Mexico border, one agent notes that ‘everyone looks like germs, like ants, from the Hunter’s 15,000-foot point of view. Especially when the ant hill breaks apart, and everybody scatters in a dozen different directions’ (Schachtman, 2005). This language emphasizes the way in which visual distancing not only turns humans into data, but into movement that is deemed less-than-human (the scurrying away, the paths in the landscape, the patterns of movement that humans see when they look at insects). 3 This visual regime depicts the targets of drones as simply the excesses of military strategy, where they are rendered both invisible and also not worthy of seeing in return.
Indeed, the experience of the drone operator is very different than that of the person on the ground. The drone operator sees the ‘impact of the bomb, when it hits, and their targets blowing up’, while the person on the ground sees nothing at all and may only hear the buzzing of drones at all times (Speri, 2014). Jessy Ohl (2015) has referred to the visual rhetoric of the drone as ‘boring’, gesturing to the lack of spectacular violence primarily because the strike itself is not seen except by the operator himself (and certainly, the target does not see it coming). She notes the aesthetic minimalism of the drone and argues that ‘drone imagery bores through the (re)production of nearly identical photographic and digital images lacking in visual stimuli’ (p. 617). Drone images depict ‘infinite sky, desolate desert, and empty hangar’ (p. 618), and, as a result, bore audiences in ways that inure them from war, war that has in the past been depicted through colorful images of violence and action. 4 Part of this is because of the absence in drone images of the ‘subjects and territories impacted by drone strikes’ (Ohl, 2015: 621). That is, the visual rhetoric tells us that there is nothing to see here. As Mirzoeff (2011: 474) argues in a parallel example, when the police say ‘move on, there’s nothing to see here’, this is an example of the opposite of the right to look, the ‘authority to tell us to move on and that exclusive claim to be able to look’, that one does not recognize the other and thus one claims the only right to look.
It is significant that the targets cannot see back from the perspective of modern ethics of war, which often focuses on the dynamics of a fair fight, from both an ethical and legal perspective. Seeing back, for example, is necessary for the ability to surrender and take advantage of one’s protections under the Laws of Armed Conflict (LOAC). In this sense, while I focus here on the visual politics of civilian death tolls, it is not really even about legitimate versus illegitimate targets, as even legitimate targets have a right to surrender under LOAC. Instead, the drone gaze removes the ability of those on the ground to be recognized as autonomous political subjects.
Killing is only done invisibly if one has excellent vision, and if we do not look at what is happening on the ground. The gaze only goes from the drone to the ground, and not the other way around. Those on the ground, and their humanity, are invisible, which is precisely necessary for the very functioning of the myth. The enemy must only ever be a bug splat to depict one’s own war as clean, heroic, and just.
5
As John Yoo, legal advisor to George W Bush, noted in 2013: with drone killings, you do not see anything, not as a member of the public. You read reports perhaps of people who are killed by drones, but it happens 3,000 miles away and there are no pictures, there are no remains, there is no debris that anyone in the United States ever sees. It’s kind of antiseptic. (quoted in Bowden, 2013)
I would go a step further and argue that, in addition to no pictures, no remains, and no debris, there are no civilians in the visual frame. Because of the lack of attention paid to the effects on the ground in the service of the narrative of the drone gaze and its technological superiority, the after effects of the drone strike are reducible to ‘militants killed’ and ‘winning’. This makes sense when one considers that the War on Terror has inaugurated a shift from the classic mutual combat war to the style of a manhunt, ‘defined by a strong hunter, who advances, and a prey that hides and flees’ (Maurer, 2017: 142). 6 Yet, hiding is no longer possible with the advent of modern drone technology, so the story always ends with the hunter catching prey, or perhaps it should be said that what he catches is discursively constructed as prey, post hoc. The ‘drone stare’ is a type of surveillance that abstracts people from contexts, thereby reducing variation, difference, and noise that may impede action or introduce moral ambiguity (Wall and Monahan, 2011). The way this argument most often manifests is in the critique that drone strikes do not adequately distinguish civilians from combatants.
The notion that drone strikes cause civilian casualties is not one that is new to this audience. Indeed, a recent (2017) report released by the Pentagon claimed that its air war against ISIS is one of the most accurate in history and that it is so careful in who it targets that the 14,000 US airstrikes in Iraq have killed just 89 civilians. An 18-month-long investigation by The New York Times (Khan and Gopal, 2017) found that the US-led military coalition was killing civilians in Iraq at a rate 31 times higher than it was admitting. From April 2016 to June 2017, investigators traveled to nearly 150 sites in three ISIS-controlled areas in Northern Iraq. These were sites where the coalition conducted airstrikes against targets ostensibly linked to the militant group. In the places they visited, they found that the coalition vastly underreported how many civilians had died in the bombing. The US-led coalition claimed that one civilian had been killed in every 157 airstrikes. But Khan and Gopal report that, actually, the rate is one civilian death for every five airstrikes. The report tells the story of 56-year-old Basim Razzo, an Iraqi man whose family was killed in an airstrike in September 2015. The coalition later put up a video of the airstrike on Razzo’s home on YouTube. The video claimed to be hitting an ISIS bomb factory. Razzo’s family was not counted among the civilian deaths until Khan and Gopal raised the matter with coalition officials. Khan and Gopal could not find a noticeable ISIS target near half of the strikes they visited.
More stories of civilian casualties proliferate, of course. Yet much of the focus on civilian casualty is premised on an ethical critique of the distinction between civilians and militants, an important critique. However, my argument is slightly different here. For me, it is not necessarily about who dies, but about how they die and who sees these deaths, of people we know are both militants and civilians. To speak to the former, the whole visual set-up of the screen of the drone pilot, its co-presence, its simultaneous proximity and distance, and its high-definition reality effects provide an illusionary frame of transparency. It constructs a place of heightened visibility, in which one side cannot get out of the frame; this side is petrified by a gaze that predominantly seeks to annihilate. This visual framing does not allow the otherness as being other, but rather represents a techno-cultural system that signifies our space as familiar even though being in their space. (Maurer, 2017: 147)
That is, anyone in the visual frame is turned to stone: the gaze is petrifying, and thus there cannot be any real distinction in the drone gaze itself. Yes, military strategy can distinguish targets, but the drone gaze is Medusan in the way it turns those in sight to stone. In the context of who sees these deaths, it should be noted that, because of the technological improvements in footage, the drone operators can actually see quite clearly before they strike, and can see the aftermath in a way other soldiers may not. As Kathrin Maurer (2017: 146–147), notes, and it is worth quoting at length: The close-up shots on the targets from afar present a visual frame that is still based on the hunter–prey dichotomy. This is because the screens convey a completely one-sided form of intimacy. The drone pilot gets immersed and close to the target, but the target has no possibility of looking back, there is no chance of seeing, pointing to, or recognizing the enemy . . . Thus, this form of intimacy/closeness that is based on the abjection of the right of looking is highly selective, and it can often lead to the very construction of targets which ‘others’ civilians into enemies. Incidences of civilians being mistakenly taken for terrorists are very common because their movements are interpreted as suspicious. Cameras are mistaken for rifles, children for adolescent warriors, prayers as Taliban signifiers, and peaceful daily behavior is sometimes seen as tactical movement.
Add to this the fact that the footage of strikes is ‘now routinely sent everywhere the military’s network extends which means soldiers far removed from the front lines finally get to see a little action in real time’ (Schachtman, 2005), and we can get a more substantive sense of how this ocular politics becomes replicated. Drone footage is being circulated to other commands around the world so that they can watch it. ‘It’s like a video game. It can get a little bloodthirsty. But it’s fucking cool’, says an American analyst serving in Qatar. This asymmetrical gaze becomes political discourse rather than just an event through the mechanism of this visual replication.
This section has sought to draw attention to the paradox of the ocular politics of the drone. While depicting themselves as shielding against the Medusan gaze of evil, drones actually posture that same gaze that sees everywhere and kills without the target looking back, rendering the drone operator almost god-like. Indeed, one drone operator noted that ‘sometimes I felt like God hurling thunderbolts from afar’ (Martin and Sasser, 2010: 3), a metaphor picked up by Engelhardt (2009) who says that ‘those about whom we make life-or-death decisions, as they scurry below or carry on as best they can, have, like any beings faced with the gods, no recourse or appeal.’ 7
Additionally, while the drone is distant from the target precisely because of this asymmetrical viewing, and because of the dehumanization of persons in the view screen through referring to them as insects and their deaths as visual bug splats, the drone also provides a visual field for closeness, where these deaths can be seen technologically better than ever before since the gaze is everywhere, and where video footage is circulated for entertainment of those seeking increased proximity with combat, as noted in the above quotation from the analyst in Qatar. These paradoxes allow for claims of civilian protection through the objective distance of technological precision, even as it encourages the lack of distinction of targets precisely in the invocation of this very precision. When dead and exploded bodies are considered bug splats, what else can we expect? That is, this matters for how we understand the politics of civilian casualty precisely because if one cannot ‘see back’, one cannot claim their legal ability to surrender and take advantage of one’s protections under international law governing armed conflict, whether they are a militant or a civilian.
The perpetrator gaze and the scopic regime: Some conclusions
The previous section illustrated the ways in which the drone gaze makes particular assumptions about civilian death, to illustrate its ocular politics. I noted that the gaze only goes one way: from the drone to the ground. Some have referred to the drone’s gaze and the visual omniscience of the drone itself, first premised on its initial role in surveillance, extended to its presumed ability to strike with precision – yet, such a logic relies on positivist and objectivist logics that assume that technology aids in the objective pursuit of knowledge, rather than acknowledging that such knowledge is political and contains particular values and biases in its modes of production (Wall and Monahan, 2011: 243). In this section, I focus on what this can tell us about the perpetrator gaze more broadly, and how this relates to the significance of scopic regimes in global conflict as a means of positing some conclusions.
The very notion of the perpetrator gaze emerges from the post-Holocaust era, primarily in reference to photographs of the dead and the barely surviving upon the liberation of concentration camps (Koppermann, 2019). As Hirsch (2012: 139) has described, what may be most astounding about perpetrator images ‘is not what they show but that they even exist’. As a result, some have suggested that we should not even use images produced by perpetrators in our contemporary study of the Holocaust (Koppermann, 2019: 102) because they depict the victims as the Nazis saw them (Crane, 2008). Susie Linfield (2010: 69) in particular has emphasized that looking at atrocity photographs may be to place ourselves ‘not just physically but morally, too – in the position of the original photographer, which is to say of a killer’. She characterizes this view as the rejectionist camp of critics related to Holocaust imagery, and notes that ‘in their view, we are all Nazis now – or will be if, like Lot’s wife, we dare to look backwards at things we shouldn’t’ (p. 70).
There is something interesting here about the invocation of the story of Lot’s wife, which invokes the image ban associated with the destruction of the human. Lot’s wife is turned to stone simply by the act of looking at God’s act of destruction in the biblical story. This violation of the image ban has material and embodied consequences, not altogether different than those who look up at the drone but have no ability to prevent its destruction, as by the time you can see it, it has likely dropped its payload. Here it also bears returning to the Medusan gaze I discussed earlier, since that gaze also turns the viewer to stone. As noted earlier, the language used by military programs is no coincidence in terms of how the gaze itself functions. New counter-drone detection programs are called MEDUSA (Strout, 2020), and the Gorgon Stare technology discussed earlier is now being used in law enforcement and investigation in US cities such as Baltimore, raising significant issues of civil liberties (Goldstein, 2019). This blurs the line of what in fact constitutes the perpetrator gaze when the gaze only goes in one direction. 8
Indeed, as Shaw and Akhter (2012) describe, the drone is simply the latest in a larger context of Cartesian scopic regimes, where being itself is defined through the ability to represent. This targeting logic is premised on a worldview that privileges science and technology as a means to engineer a purportedly objective representation, yet the entire world is produced as a target wherein ‘to see is to destroy’ (p. 1495), as in the story of Lot’s wife I describe above. It is perhaps no coincidence that such rhetoric draws on a deeply religious and sacrosanct politics of seeing wherein the all-seeing gaze is itself sacred in its power. Shaw and Akhter go on to cite Haraway’s notion of the ‘god-trick’ wherein ‘the eyes have been perfected by the logics of military, capitalist, and colonial supremacy; one that is fundamentally located within a nexus of disembodiment’ (p. 1495). It is this notion of disembodiment associated with the omnividence of the drone that I want to emphasize here.
Grayson and Mawdsley (2019: 442) articulate this notion of omnividence well: the drone mimics the desire in Cartesian perspectivalism for a disembodied immersion into the visual field from the perspective of an all-seeing eye. It is this disembodied ‘God’s eye’ perspective that reveals the absolute positions of objects and thus invests them with particular meanings based on the visual confirmation of their coordinates in the battlespace. By pinpointing the locations and orientations of objects, the drone offers the possibility of exercising control over them. It is thus a totalising view whose facticity derives from its claimed capacity to see all that needs to be seen in conjunction with other sensors in its network.
They also note that the drone gaze is ahistorical, flattening time and space (p. 443). Yet, as they also note, the framing of ‘God’s eye’, while emphasizing disembodiment, in fact actually is heavily embodied and invested in the actual physical body of the drone operator. However, I would note that we should distinguish between the operator gaze, which is context-dependent, humanized, and physical, and the drone gaze, which is the technological mechanism of all-seeing and all-knowing that characterizes programs like the Gorgon Stare. It is the latter that I articulate here as the perpetrator gaze because the images it generates both disembody and dehumanize, even if the operator may be proximate to those being killed by virtue of technology.
I started this article with a focus on how terrorist violence centralizes the body as target and as tool of violence, to contrast this with the way in which the ocular politics of targeting elide not only civilian death, but also promulgates the very notion that precise, modern, technological, sanitary war is one in which bodies have been replaced by the one-sided gaze which is all-seeing and all-knowing. Indeed, the disembodiment of civilian death through this gaze has important implications for how security is understood in the modern state system. ‘The surplus of imagery wrought by the drone’s gaze is the basis of a technological ersatz for divine omnipotence that may become the basis for a new ideological approach to the question of security assurance of the state’ (Rupka and Baggiarini, 2018: 343).
Additionally, this disembodiment is not a negative externality of drone warfare, but part of its very structure and design. Horsman (2020: 303) has discussed how this plays out in film in The Good Kill, particularly the opening scene, in which drone images are intercut with extreme close-ups of eyeballs glued to screens. The consistent use of extreme close-ups seems to detach the drone pilot’s eye from his body. The eye, indeed, no longer seems to be part of a face. Instead, it has become a component of an assemblage of machines. A similar fragmentation of the human body is evoked by another series of extreme close-ups, this time of fingers attached to joysticks and keyboards . . . Drone warfare, this sequence of images suggests, is, for the pilot involved, a process in which technology and the human body and sensorium are reconfigured into a new, bewildering configuration that is alienating yet profoundly bodily.
The gaze becomes itself separate, and greater than, the operator from which it derives, magnified by the technology it is associated with.
Derek Gregory (2018) has pointed out that we pay too much attention to the bodies behind the screens and not enough to the bodies on the other side. Several others have noted that the sky becomes the space of technological mastery which is ‘clean, disembodied, and a place where nobody dies (that just happens on the ground)’ (Shaw and Akhter, 2012: 1496, see also Amoore, 2009; Gregory, 2011). Yet this tends to reify the idea that there is an enforced separation: between the sky and the ground, between the man behind the gaze and those subject to it. I have tried here to complicate this a bit, by disaggregating the perpetrator gaze from this binary as a means to consider not just how the ocular politics of targeting operates but how it is constituted as a means of seeing and engaging the world as a place subject to visual consumption.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors, and there is no conflict of interest.