Abstract
The turn to military robotics is a striking feature of contemporary Western warfare. How then to make sense of the increasing reliance on unmanned weapons systems, in particular, the use of combat-enabled Unmanned Aerial Vehicles/drones? Questioning the intuitive and oft-repeated claim that robotics ‘take the human experience out of war’ (reducing it to a video game), I argue that in order to make sense of current developments, we need precisely to reconsider our understanding of the human, her role in, and experience of, war. In this, we are aided by a critical materialist inquiry that investigates the human–material assemblage as a complex whole, taking both fleshy and steely bodies into account. Drawing on the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Judith Butler, I show that only by considering what being human means – in ontological terms – and by asking how human experience is altered through new technologies will we be able to think politically and ethically about contemporary war.
Introduction: The Study of an Unwieldy, Human Topic (War)
The advent of military robotics brings into focus the relationship between humans and machines in war. With the aim of making sense of new technologies and their impact on the phenomenon of war, this article proposes a critical inquiry into contemporary Western warfare that takes war’s material expression seriously. Situating military robotics within a human–material assemblage of war, I seek to offer a new perspective on the study of contemporary war, characterised by equal concern for bodies of flesh and bodies of steel – or, put differently, for the materiality of sentience and for the humanlike characteristics of machines.
In so doing, this article contributes to two recent strands of debate in particular. First, it offers a new perspective on the ‘force of matter’, on the theoretical concern with materialism that has recently gained traction within International Relations (IR) and Critical Security Studies (CSS). 1 Building on the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Judith Butler, I seek to centre questions of human experience to the study of social and political phenomena, including war. 2 Merleau-Ponty’s critical phenomenology – little invoked in IR or CSS – offers a perspective on matter/materialism that is unusually attentive to questions of consciousness, meaning-making and reflexivity. His focus on the physical, bodily manifestation of human perception (notably in The Primacy of Perception, 1964) and corporeality offers unique insights into the relationship between materiality, agency and subjectivity through a ‘return to lived experience before it is written over and objectified by theory’. 3 Such a critical phenomenology, I will argue, agrees well with the interest in what it means, in ontological terms, to be human – a key concern of Judith Butler’s.
Second, this article contributes to current discussions of how war ought to be studied, a question that recently has generated considerable attention within Critical War Studies (CWS). 4 Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton’s exposure of a long-standing neglect of the study of war as a phenomenon in its own right constitutes a starting point for this article; and while one may debate the extent to which war should be seen as a phenomenon distinct from others – as opposed to always and already embedded within processes of ‘normal’ political, everyday life – Barkawi and Brighton are right to highlight the absurdity in silently assuming a distinctiveness of war without attempting to investigate it. 5 One person who did take the question of the phenomenological distinctiveness of war seriously was, of course, Carl von Clausewitz. ‘War’, he wrote on the first page of his opus, ‘is an act of force to compel the enemy to do our will’. 6 Clausewitz’s phenomenology showed antagonism to be essential to war: whatever else war is, it is antagonistic, confrontational, coercive. Barkawi and Brighton seize on Clausewitz’s phenomenology in their suggestion that ‘fighting’ should be seen to have ‘ontological primacy’ for understanding war, though the ‘fighting’ they refer to is more than mere kinetic exchange, or its imminent possibility. Instead, fighting’s excess is what makes war irreducible to the instrumentalist readings offered by classic strategists, and the phenomenon of war both constitutive and ‘generative’. 7 This perspective enables us to see how events in war are never ‘simply’ events: their reach and potency go infinitely further. For instance, the bombardment of a town or village is never simply the physical destruction inflicted: the impact on human lives, on individual psyches, thoughts and emotions, on hopes for the future on the part of those whose homes or livelihoods have been destroyed and who have lost loved ones, or suffered injury themselves, can never be fully addressed through the technical ambition of ‘reconstruction’. In terms of human experience – the focus of this article – fighting always exceeds ‘fighting’.
Conventional studies of war have largely neglected human experience, preferring to study war through abstracted notions of ‘the state’, ‘militaries’, ‘insurgents’ and so on. 8 Elaine Scarry’s potent critique of conventional understandings of war as being ‘emptied of human content’ is inspirational: for Scarry, war is centrally constituted by the injury of human beings, and the institutionalisation, routinisation and bureaucratisation of war explicable only as a political consequence of the neglect of a core human experience – that of pain. 9 For Christine Sylvester, too, injury constitutes the defining trait of the lived experience of war. Via the legacy of feminist theory, Sylvester calls for a centring of the study of war as experience on the body, both as a unit with agency and as a prime target of ‘war violence and war enthusiasms’. 10 And in response to the neglect precisely of bodily experiences in the study of war, Kevin McSorely has suggested that war be studied as ‘embodied social practice’, constituted by ‘a range of sensory, affective and embodied practices’. 11
In this article, I place a concern for ontology (ontologies of the body, of fighting, dying and of war itself) against the background of the advent of robotic warfare and, in particular, the growing reliance on the part of Western states on drone technologies. The guiding question, then, is that of how robotic warfare should influence our thinking about war and the commitment to studying its ‘fundamentals’, such that we may eventually think ethically and politically about war. By studying war as a phenomenon with its own ontological condition and structuring, interrogating bodies and the bodily experience of war, I seek to take up recent challenges from within CWS by incorporating a set of bodies less theorised – the steely bodies of drones – and asking how they fit with the fleshy ones of human beings.
This article by no means captures the total significance of robotic warfare for the critical study of war. Nor do I offer a close examination of any particular example or instance of drone warfare, a productive alternative when faced with a multifaceted phenomenon and scant information about its totality. Instead, I will discuss three manifestations of the complex interplay between the human and the material in contemporary United States (US) warfare in Afghanistan/Pakistan. First, I will consider the ways in which ostensibly ‘virtual’ experiences of war turn out to have a material reality to them. Second, I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology to suggest that we ought to think of material objects in war as having ‘agentic capacities’ 12 and argue that this must have a bearing on our reading of the ontology of war. Third, I emphasise the blurring of corporeal and incorporeal in contemporary drone wars. These observations all, in different ways, point to the need to rethink the way in which ‘war’ as a phenomenon is conceptualised, and the way in which we might ultimately seek to understand the human experience of war. The notion of a ‘human–material assemblage’ is thus used in this article to denote an equal concern for bodies of flesh and bodies of steel, particularly inspired by Merleau-Ponty. The final part of the article suggests that we might think of ‘undoing war’ by redirecting our attention towards the ontology of the human, and specifically Butler’s understanding thereof.
Contemporary War – Material, Virtual, Omnipresent
The topic of robotic warfare is burgeoning at the moment, both in the policy world and in academic debate. 13 In this article, I use ‘robotic warfare’ as shorthand for weapons systems that are to various and varying degrees ‘unmanned’. Unmanned weapons systems include: those that are remote-controlled (i.e. ‘manned’ but at a distance); weapons systems programmed to work with a degree of ‘automaticity’; and systems that are, to some extent, ‘autonomous’. Automatic weapons systems range from basic anti-personnel landmines (exploding automatically when stimulated) to the more complex Phalanx system for Aegis-class cruisers, a radar system whose response to detected ‘enemy’ aircraft can be set to various degrees of automaticity. 14 ‘Autonomous’ systems have the capacity to interpret information and may identify a course of action; however, no current systems are truly autonomous in the sense of functioning entirely without human sanction or other input. 15 The main focus of this article, however, is on the use of combat-enabled unmanned weapons systems in the air, commonly referred to as drones or drone warfare. Commentators are careful to point out that unmanned weapons systems are not entirely new: they were used by Israeli armed forces in the 1973 October War and by the US in Vietnam, and the famed US Predator was first used in the war in Bosnia in 1995. While much drone warfare is shrouded in secrecy (not least given the vast proportion of drone missions under CIA control), it is beyond doubt that their use has increased substantially over the past half-decade. Under the Obama administration, both the number of drone sorties and actual attacks have escalated dramatically. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that between 2593 and 3365 people have been killed in drone strikes in Pakistan during 2004–12. 16 Drone technologies have proliferated over the last decades, and the interest within US military circles for developing them further shows no sign of waning. Rather, the US Army regularly issues new versions of their ‘Roadmap’ for ‘Unmanned Aircraft Systems’, encouraging ‘a broad vision’ for their continued development, as well as their deployment ‘along the full spectrum of operations’. 17
Importantly, the trend towards robotic warfare is part of a wider shift in concepts of operation within the US military towards ‘shadow war’ involving the increased use of US Special Forces (notably the Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC). Forming a dense matrix of secret operations designed for night raids of targeted killings (in 2011 estimated at 40 raids per night in Afghanistan, i.e. over 1000 raids monthly), Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)/drone technologies have come to fit snugly with the current pattern of Special Forces deployment – in particular, JSOC’s networked capabilities. 18 Bob Woodward in The War Within (2009) highlights the fusion of technological innovation with plans for targeted killings, most ostentatiously under the US military’s Clandestine Tagging, Tracking and Locating (CTTL) programme used to develop methods for tracking individuals using nano- and biotechnology for the creation of sensors, tags and biochemical (thermal) biometric ‘signatures’ of individuals. 19 This development is set to continue, with US officials in October 2012 alluding to a new blueprint for pursuing ‘terrorists’ in the form of a ‘disposition matrix’ – a next-generation targeting list designed to ‘go beyond existing kill-lists, mapping plans for the “disposition” of subjects beyond the reach of American drones’. 20
The standard narrative of the trend towards shadow war fought with drone technology and secret operations is for these developments to be depicted as a reaction to the costly large-scale man-intensive counterinsurgency campaigns that have dominated US (and UK) military ventures in the past decade. Instead, the two trends evolved in tandem: the ‘population-centric’ counterinsurgency warfare that evolved in Iraq and Afghanistan around 2005–7 was from the outset accompanied by reliance on secret operations featuring military robotics designed to target key individuals for capture or death. In other words, the proclaimed ambition of strengthening ‘governance’ structures, winning ‘hearts and minds’ through the communication of an appropriate message and gaining legitimacy amongst Iraqi and Afghan local populations was always and already intertwined with the increasingly mechanised killing of individuals. US General Stanley McChrystal expressed it thus: The idea was to combine analysts who found the enemy (through intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance); drone operators who fixed the target; combat teams who finished the target by capturing or killing him; specialists who exploited the intelligence the raid yielded, such as cell phones, maps and detainees; and the intelligence analysts who turned this raw information into usable knowledge.
21
As we shall see, in this complex human–material assemblage, the local populations have also become a ‘body’ of a sort in contemporary war. Targeted killings through robotic warfare and population-centric counterinsurgency are not different in kind but two sides of the same coin: they testify to a similar instrumentalisation of the populations amongst whom wars are fought.
Automated War – Virtual yet Humanly Experienced
An intuitive response to news about the increased reliance on technologies that allow for ‘killing at distance’ is that it renders war ‘virtual’ for one side of the conflict. This view follows from discussions of air power in war more generally, as we saw in the wake of NATO’s bombardment of Kosovo in 1999. 22 The drone operator, sitting in the safety and comfort of his control room in Nevada, no longer experiences war, goes the argument, and killing as a result becomes casual. 23 Shielded from physical harm, the drone operator is no longer part of the fight in an existential sense; there is no risk to his life.
No doubt, drone warfare is infinitely more real for the populations amongst whom attacks take place, who risk being killed, losing loved ones or having their homes destroyed. Yet, while such arguments have understandable appeal, close study of drone operators’ activity yields a more complicated picture. Derek Gregory’s study of drone operators’ experience focuses on the ‘scopic regime’ that enables drone warfare in the first place and closely examines the different types of vision and imaging that drone operators are exposed to, from wide area airborne surveillance to the macro-field of micro-vision. 24 These visibilities are conditional and conditioning because they are not merely technical feats but ‘techno-cultural accomplishments’. 25 Rather than any straightforward abstracting of war into a video game, the abstracting that takes place is convoluted and paradoxical. Contrary to common perception, drone warfare is ‘real’ also for those staring at a screen and, as such, the reference to video games is often simplistic. It is the immersive quality of video games, their power to draw players into their virtual worlds, that make them potent – this is precisely why they are used in pre-deployment training. 26 The video streams from the UAV are shown to have the same immersive quality on the drone operator – they produce the same ‘reality-effect’.
Virtual war, it seems, is less virtual than would appear at first glance. This conclusion is strengthened by the growing realisation that drone operators suffer as high, and possibly higher, rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as soldiers engaged in battle as a result of exposure to high-resolution images of killing, including the details of casualties and body parts that would never be possible to capture with the human eye. 27 In other words, drone operators see more than soldiers in theatre. This is not to imply any trivialising parallels between operating drones from afar and physical engagement in battle, however. The view of the ‘hunter-killer’ is, in Gregory’s words, still privileged as the drone operator empathises with his fellow comrades on the ground in Afghanistan and feels compelled to ‘protect’ and ‘help’ them by instructing to shoot. 28 Ultimately, the ‘drone stare’ still furthers the subjugation of those marked as Other. 29 What is of interest to us in examining the interaction of the virtual, material and human here, however, is that this occurs not through the experience (on the part of the drone operator) of distance, remoteness or detachment, but rather through the ‘sense of proximity’ to ground troops inculcated by the video feeds from the aerial platforms. 30 The relationship between the fleshy body of the drone operator and the steely body of the drone and its ever-more sophisticated optical systems needs to be conceptualised in a way that allows for such paradoxes to be made intelligible.
Moreover, there is clearly a need to think of the study of the experience of war in new ways: if drone operators are not as shielded from the realities of war as is generally assumed, what might they be bringing into the wider communities of which they are part? To what extent are their experiences theirs alone, and to what extent do we see them seeping out in a wider social corpus? In Merleau-Ponty’s terms, can we see the body (of the drone operator) ‘literally incarnating’ material capacities for agency, and thereby affecting the political disposition of a wider community? 31 It is well established that soldiers returning from service run a higher risk of committing domestic violence, and the US military has an established programme for combating domestic violence. 32 The high rate of PTSD amongst drone operators points to the need for follow-up studies of how these individuals behave in their home communities. By extension, this suggests that those interested in the experience of war need to include consideration also of the experience of – in this case – Nevada communities amidst which drone operators live. What such studies might yield we can only guess; yet it seems reasonable to suspect that the complex assemblage of virtual and material experiences that drone warfare produces might have its very own repercussions for processes and dynamics of societal militarisation and other manifestations of members’ violent experiences set in motion by, but far exceeding, war itself. In Merleau-Ponty’s terms, the human body is not separate from things, matter or representation; rather, ‘the flesh (of the world or my own) is … a texture that returns to itself and conforms to itself’. 33 Human bodies are ‘beings-in-the-world’, 34 and the material ‘reality’ of robotic warfare, like the flesh of human bodies, is irredeemably generative. The following section will expand on how.
Agentic Capacities of Material Objects
The targeting logic of drone warfare relies on a clear objectification of people, marking and classifying them as ‘targets’ of different ‘value’, with ‘high-value targets’ most hotly sought for capture or death, and the more recent expansion of targeting regimes to cover what are referred to as ‘low level fighters’. 35 Advocates of decapitation strategies using drone warfare often rely on precisely such objectification of people. 36 This is interesting in terms of what is revealed of the ethical relation between real people – in this case, seemingly allowing for the eschewal of any real encounter involving mutual recognition and recognisability 37 – and raises interesting questions about the way in which that relation is mediated by technology.
Yet the demarcation between subject and object, between people and things, between the human and the material, is clearly complicated in more ways than one by drone warfare. From our discussion of the screen’s capacity for interpellation as it ‘draws in’ and ‘captures’, we may say that the screen ‘acts’. This, of course, is in addition to the way in which camera or video footage acts as it enables the representability or otherwise of human beings. 38 The potency of the screen (or any digital imagery) in this regard, I want to argue, vastly exceeds ‘representation’ (though that too occurs, of course). Rather, we ought to think of the screen’s capacity for action in a much stronger sense. As such, the force of materiality goes far beyond what conventional approaches to matter would allow.
The power of the drone to act is thus not confined to the question of the extent to which the drone acts ‘autonomously’. To begin with, drones are already expected to act independently to some extent: the US Army’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Roadmap 2010–2035 states that drones are expected to be able to ‘swarm’ with a degree of autonomy and self-awareness. 39 Developments towards decision-making capabilities on the part of drones, and, crucially, their capacity to decide on attack, are no doubt alarming and worthy of close attention, 40 yet the question of whether the drone ought be seen as ‘acting’ does not reside here. Drones provide visuals of the world and human beings therein (they ‘see’ the world); drones filter the information they have in various ways (they ‘interpret’ the world through pattern recognition, etc.) and rely on their own interpretation to provide ‘information’ about sites of potential ‘danger’ and the human targets that personify that danger. The subject–object distinction is called into question by the drone’s capacity to ‘see’ and ‘interpret’, in much the same way as Merleau-Ponty invites us to eschew the subject–object distinction when examining the ‘seer’ in the form of a seeing individual, a ‘seer’ who can never be distinguished from what he ‘sees’: ‘the seer and the visible need no longer be ontological opposites; the horizon includes the seer and the world remains horizon because “he who sees is of it and is in it”’. 41
A phenomenological approach to agency allows us to break free from the conventional liberal understanding of agency bound up with an ontology of rational individualism and, further, to grasp the way in which the ability to ‘act’ is practised in various degrees across a continuum ranging from corporeality, through partially rational embodied subjects, to impersonal structures.
42
Drawing on Coole’s notion of ‘agentic capacity’ (in turn based on Merleau-Ponty) as a property also of innate beings, of matter, we can address the question of drone autonomy in a very different way from that which focuses only on the ‘pull the trigger’ aspect of robotic technologies. The drone always and already ‘acts’, as described above, and a critical materialist reading of drone warfare could, as the discussion above illustrates, just as well focus on the agentic capacities of the screen as on the actual aerial vehicle capturing the surveillance images or dropping the bomb. Judith Butler suggests as much in the preface to the paperback edition of Frames of War, as she invokes drone warfare to call for new approaches to materiality: Of course, persons use technological instruments, but instruments surely also use persons (position them, endow them with perspective, establish the trajectory of their action); they frame and form anyone who enters into the visual or audible field, and, accordingly, those who do not … there can surely be, and are, different modalities of violence and of the material instruments of violence.
43
This step on the part of Butler is an important one, not least given her concern for the way in which attention to the frames of war allows us to uncover a deeply set politics and ethics of viewing war and the human beings therein. Taking into account the possibility of material objects having ‘agency’ provides space also for new conceptions of political agency. 44 We may thus conceive of the drone even as a political actor, with the crux of the argument being that drones, in fact, are ‘unbearably human’ in the sense that they are deeply embedded within the imperial and military apparatus behind them, though those human relations are ‘masked and mystified’. The ascription of human relations to the steely construction of the drone is borne out in analysis of how the drone could not have been invented or constructed other than as part of the particular apparatus of military power that envisaged their use. 45 Thus, they are ‘already’ political agents, regardless of the ‘actual’ autonomy of their decision-making.
Yet another way of reading the agentic capacity of drones is to think of them as inducing ‘embodied performances’ by virtue of their ‘superhuman’ qualities – the fact that the hyper-vision provided by drone optics far extends human vision through an unblinking, ‘all-seeing’ stare. 46 Such a reading sheds further light on the paradox of drone warfare being at once distant and close, and the contradictory experiences drone warfare gives rise to as killing at a distance paradoxically makes for a vivid experience for the individual seated in physical security in his control room, thousands of miles away from the ‘actual’ action. For Brian Massumi, contemporary war is ‘omnipresent’; it is one of a ‘total situation’. 47 We recognise this terminology from critical literature on the global war on terror, which has focused on the discursive expansion of war to envelop the world as a whole. Yet, the omnipresence suggested here is of a different order, based not on the power of discursive representation, but on the material conditions of contemporary war. Under these conditions, ‘the only way to act … is to act on the conditions of emergence of the battle, prior to its occurrence … you must act “totally” on the intangibles of the situation’. 48 As a consequence, the distinction between tangible and intangible is obliterated: under conditions of omnipresent war, the boundaries between the corporeal and the incorporeal become irreversibly blurred: ‘To act on the former, you have to act on the latter.’ 49 In Massumi’s analysis, we have two things going on: a temporal shift from the actual to the emergent which he finds intrinsic to the way in which contemporary war is fought (by Western forces), and the suggestion that the demarcation between corporeal and non-corporeal is compromised. The next section will allow us to draw out further affinities between bodies of flesh and steel and to tease out the ways in which combining accounts of material and non-material in a critical phenomenological sense will further analysis also of the human in war.
Blurring the Boundaries between Corporeal and Incorporeal
The difficulty with locating the corporeal/material and its relation to the incorporeal/immaterial is central to critical materialist thinking. It is also an issue that feminist theorising has long struggled with. 50 The issue can hardly be resolved here; I would simply like to make two observations on the place of the corporeal in the study of contemporary Western warfare prompted by Massumi’s statement. The first concerns perception (of individual sentient beings) and the second the view of collectives of bodies – of ‘populations’ in contemporary war. Both observations are offered as routes to thinking politically and ethically about the human–material assemblage that is contemporary war.
For Merleau-Ponty, human perception is ‘primary’; perception is what happens first, prior to thought, and even prior to ‘feeling’. This is the basis of his existential phenomenology, and one of the reasons that his phenomenology does not (as one might otherwise expect) clash with notions of discursive construction and representation, but rather allows for both: Just as my body, as the system of all my holds on the world, founds the unity of the objects which I perceive, in the same way the body of the other – as bearer of symbolic behaviours and of the behaviour of true reality – tears itself away from being one of my phenomena, offers me the task of true communication, and confers on my objects the new dimension of intersubjective being or, in other words, of objectivity.
51
The body, in this view, is ‘the pivot of the world’ through its capacity for pre-rational sentience – the bodily experience of feelings such as anxiety, rush, exhilaration. 52 (Massumi treads a similar path when he suggests that perception is a form of ‘body matter’, and feelings like fear may not best be thought of as emotions but as ‘sharp bodily affect moments’. 53 ) By centring bodies both in the fleshy material sense and in the emotive sense, Merleau-Ponty’s work has important implications for the way in which we theorise the human–material assemblage of contemporary war. The focus on human perception and sentience constitutes a counterpart to the ‘human’ capacities of matter (the agentic capacities of the camera, screen or drone aircraft). At the same time, the view of the individual body and its capacity for perception holds implications also for, and is generalisable to, ‘transpersonal qualities of the flesh’ – in other words, for the collective of human beings. 54 Accordingly, individuals are described by Merleau-Ponty as ‘organs of one single intercorporeity’. 55 Seeing material and non-material bodies thus is ultimately what allows critical materialism to open up new roads also of thinking politically. For the assemblage of human and material in the contemporary war machine is a political phenomenon, and for us to understand it politically, we must give due consideration to the complex whole of which the corporeal and incorporeal are part. This is what Merleau-Ponty invites us to do as he explores intercorporeity as an intertwining, a chiasm. 56 Merleau-Ponty’s notion of humanity is that of an embodied humanity, involving sentient and sensible bodies, where thought is interwoven with matter in a single corporeality. This is the flesh that Merleau-Ponty writes of: a flesh that ‘is not matter, is not mind, is not substance’, but ‘the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible upon the touching body’; the flesh, in short, is something ‘for which there is no other name in philosophy’, according to Merleau-Ponty, and which we can only approximate as ‘an element’, ‘an element of Being’. 57
The second observation regarding bodies in war concerns local populations in contemporary Western constructions of ‘theatres of operation’. With the reorientation of strategic thinking towards populations as a whole (populations ‘amongst’ whom war is fought and who are considered crucial to the success of the mission), 58 there is a perceptible view of populations in their entirety as a ‘body’. Population-centric counterinsurgency constitutes a very particular way of relating to local populations, a mode of relating that is both conceptual and technical. This affinity between material and discursive ways of constructing the corpus of local populations is especially revealing of the politics and ethics of contemporary counterinsurgency war.
On the one hand, we can see the effects of new technologies for surveillance and targeting as a means of constructing or producing populations: certain individuals are ‘tagged’ and ‘tracked’, whilst others are constituted as the grey mass of non-existence or possibly ‘collateral damage’. Consider, for instance, the way in which the US military counts all adult males killed in drone strikes as ‘militants’ unless these individuals are specifically exonerated after their death. 59 On the other hand, we have the discursive far-end of counterinsurgency war, manifest in the recent focus on the concept of ‘strategic communication’ in US and UK military circles. 60 The logic of strategic communication instructs the verbal stratification of populations in theatres of operation according to how receptive they are believed to be to the message communicated by the intervening forces. Inspired by commercial logics of marketing, populations are strategised into distinct ‘audiences’ – from those whose hearts and minds are thought amenable to change to the ‘die hard’ terrorists, on whom no communication campaign, however ‘effective’, will work and who thus can only be removed through capture or death. A sinister objectification of local populations unites these seemingly disparate features of contemporary Western campaigns – an objectification that warns of a very particular ethical relation, or, rather, non-relation. The construction of populations in contemporary warfare is thus both ideational/discursive and material: the discursive construction of populations into audiences/targets is matched by the material realities and agentic capacities of surveillant and other automated weapons systems. The corporeal encroaches on the incorporeal and vice versa.
Thinking a Complex Whole: How a Critical Engagement with Materiality Allows Us to Re-centre Ontological Concerns (and via Them Ethico-political Ones Too)
What we need to do then, it seems, is to integrate accounts of the human, both a material, fleshy body and a sentient being in ethical and political relation with others, with accounts of matter in ways that do not reify or essentialise materialities of war, but recognise matter’s ‘human’ qualities – its agentic capacities or its otherwise ‘unbearable humanness’. The question becomes one of how to integrate accounts of the real/material – of the actual injury sustained by actual people in contexts of war – with accounts of how we come to see what we see, know what we know and think what we think about war: accounts of the epistemologies of war. Perhaps counter-intuitively, my proposition here is that the advent of new technologies derided as ‘non-human’ beckons us to rethink the human in war. It is not simply that the human is written out of war by military robotics – rather, robotic technologies produce a number of paradoxical consequences precisely for how we think the human in war. Part of it relates to how we think ‘bodies’ in war: visceral, bodily experience is clearly an important part of power relations, and war is no exception. The implications of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology are thus decidedly political: it affects the way in which we think about ourselves as human and compels us to rethink agency. Furthermore, as has been argued, there are a number of important ways in which drone technologies challenge conventional understandings of the corporeal – of both the fleshy and the steely kinds.
The materialist turn, I have suggested, has significant intellectual purchase on the study of the advent of robotic warfare. Yet critical materialist inquiry and insight hold promise also for the study of war per se, irrespective of time and circumstance. I opened this article by drawing attention to recent initiatives regarding the study of war, in particular, calls for studying war in ontological terms (Barkawi and Brighton) and for studying war as experience (Sylvester). The section to follow suggests that if we think of these two impetuses in conjuction, that they are mutually enhancing and illuminating. Central to a critical inquiry into war, I argue, is the human being. The human experience is continually altered by human beings’ encounters with technology, as this article has argued, and to understand the human being in war we need to consider the way in which fleshy and steely bodies associate, interact, merge – the dissolution between the corporeal and the incorporeal. This pushes us towards engagement with the ontology of the human. This, I suggest, also allows for renewed ethico-political engagement with war: at the base of any ethics is an ontological assumption about what it means to be human.
Ontology of the Human
Butler’s theorising of gender, and more recently of war, offers precisely an ontology of the human which allows us to think ethically. For Butler, that ontology centres on the notion of ‘undoing’: Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel.
61
‘Undoing’ is what makes our existence ‘precarious’ for Butler: ‘precariousness’, she tells us, ‘implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other’. 62 From Emmanuel Levinas, Butler invites a ‘consideration of the structure of address itself’ in order to develop a sense, ethically, of what is going on around us. The structure of address thus helps us to understand the way in which moral authority works, but only if we accept ‘that in some way we come to exist, as it were, in the moment of being addressed’. 63 In Butler’s view, the fundamental sociality of life is what makes us able to think and act ethically; we are ethically bound to one another because we are ‘undone’ by one another. Like Levinas, she ascribes no ‘essence’ to ethics: ethics ‘occurs’ through the relationship with the Other. Levinas’s ethics builds on the idea of killing and dying: the face beckons us in both directions. Inquiring into the ways in which we relate to one another and the ways in which subjectivities are created is a central element of Butler’s work. Similarly, in her efforts to understand human pain, Scarry describes as her central concern ‘the way other persons become visible to us, or cease to be visible to us’. 64
A key feature of drone warfare is that it creates specific norms of the human. We saw this in the discussion above comparing the tracking and targeting of ‘high-value targets’ for capture or death, mirrored in strategising of populations as a whole. There is a dialectics of subjectification and objectification that goes on in drone war which makes it particular.
65
The classic Butlerian take on the creation of the norm of the human is to see that creation as taking place through visual and discursive frames: There are frames that will bring the human into view in its frailty and precariousness, that will allow us to stand for the value and dignity of human life, to react with outrage when lives are degraded or eviscerated without regard for their value as lives. And then there are frames that foreclose responsiveness.
66
Yet, the norm of the human is produced not only through discursive powers, but also though material ones, as the present discussion should indicate. Although Diana Coole laments the fact that Butler is neglectful of the materialist, existential and phenomenological influences on her thought, Coole sees in the work of Judith Butler an existential sense of corporeality. 67 In fact, Butler invokes Merleau-Ponty’s term ‘chiasmus’ precisely to describe the complex relationship of speech acts and bodily acts in performativity: an intertwining of discursive and non-discursive. And, indeed, the preface added to the second edition of Butler’s Frames of War (quoted from earlier) suggests a renewed or more overt engagement with the materiality of war by Butler than Frames otherwise indicates. Centring the ontology of the human in our study of war, then, is a good first step towards ‘undoing’ war itself.
Undoing Contemporary War
In this final section, I suggest a link between ‘undoing’ as an ontological condition of the human and the study of war in ontological terms. This is a theoretical and conceptual leap prompted as much by inquiry into the ethical relations of war (which I have pursued elsewhere) 68 as by the insights derived from critical materialist inquiry into drone warfare and the gestures towards the conceptualisation of a blurred corporeality/incorporeality in and of war.
When Barkawi and Brighton write of the ‘excess of fighting’ as being an ontological condition of war – part of what makes war distinctly war – they refer to ‘[fighting’s] ability to draw in and disrupt wider certitudes and coordinates of human life’, to ‘“cast into motion” subjects who are then alienated from themselves and come to know themselves and the world in new ways’ 69 . Indeed, they find the essential nature of war to be both an actual and potential undoing: ‘an undoing of all that stands as essential in human orders’ 70 . Both the ‘ontological structure’ and the ‘ontological status’ of war, in Barkawi and Brighton’s view, centre on the ‘undoing of certitudes and … in the generation of new ones’ 71 . The invoking of the idea of undoing in this context is striking. Being undone by one another is a fundamentally human condition, we learn from Butler; it is intrinsic to what being human means. In an analogous move, Barkawi and Brighton invite us to consider the condition of undoing and unmaking of certitudes, ‘casting into motion’, as being intrinsic to the phenomenon of war 72 . Scarry’s voice echoes as subtext here: she states as the central purpose of her writings on war ‘to expose the interior shape of “unmaking”.… [This is so] because the “structure of war” and the “structure of unmaking” are not two subjects but one’ 73 .
One way of taking seriously the quest for research into war in ontological terms would be to take seriously research into the human in war – to ask, fundamentally, what it means to be a human being living the condition of war. This is precisely what Sylvester implores us to do as she considers what it means to study war in terms of lived experience. Undoing, unmaking, casting into motion, these ought to be core tenets in the exploration not only of war in ontological terms, but also of the human in war. What I suggest is that conceptually linking ontologies of war with ontologies of the human holds exciting prospects for a renewed study of war – and especially so if it involves engaging with the material forces that shape and condition our existence. In such an endeavour, studying the experience of war would need to be centrally concerned with the experience of uncertainty – uncertainty as to what social and political orders will shape the future; uncertainty as to what forces, structures and technologies, human and non-human, will condition our existence and life together; and uncertainty, ultimately, as to what it means to be human.
What, then, is to be said of the lived experience of war’s generative capacities that Barkawi writes of, of war’s intrinsic capacity to unmake and cast into motion all kinds of ‘truths’? Massumi writes of war’s generative capacities: ‘any application of force (at this level) is ontopower: a power through which being becomes’. 74 How could we possibly study the ‘power through which being becomes’, let alone the lived experience of it? To this, there is no simple answer but, as has been argued throughout this article, doing so would certainly involve questioning simple assumptions about what constitutes the ‘material’ and what is ‘virtual’, and engaging in a materialism that is open, which does not foreclose the discursive but embraces it, and which allows us to unmask the ways in which we, as an ontological condition of being human, are, necessarily, undone by one another – materially as well as emotionally. It is not something we can opt out of; it is what being human means.
Conclusion
The study of war is the study of an unwieldy, human topic. Taking up the challenges from within CWS, this article has considered a topical feature of war: the increased reliance on robotic technologies, but also the question of how war can, could and ought to be studied. I sought to push the limits of how we might think of war both as phenomenon and as experience by coupling inquiry into the discursive with inquiry into the material and, above all, by recognising that no clear boundaries can be drawn between the two.
Three claims were made about the materiality of contemporary drone warfare, the first being that the relation between ‘virtual’ and ‘material’ in drone warfare is complex and full of contradictions. For instance, the operators in the control room in the US cannot be killed, but research has shown that they too suffer bodily effects from exposure to high-resolution killing in the form of PTSD. The second proposition was that we need to rethink conceptions of agency in war to make room for the agentic capacity of matter if we are to fully grasp the consequences of robotic warfare. The third claim was that the corporeal and the incorporeal are blurred in contemporary war, a realisation arrived at not only via the study of things or bodies as such, but also through a return to Merleau-Ponty’s ontological claims about corporeality, flesh and the chiasm.
Throughout, it has been my ambition to re-centre questions of ontology to the study of war. Most important in this regard, it has been argued, is the ontology of the human. The ontological assumptions we make about what it means to be human are at the core of all political and ethical positions and interventions – without them we are lost. In the context of contemporary wars, where war at the macro-level of the battle, siege and occupation falls into ‘absolute processual proximity’ with war at the micro-scale of everyday life 75 , this is especially poignant. Thus is the experience of contemporary war: everywhere and nowhere; of one’s own bodily flesh and of the interpersonal flesh of a general and generalisable ‘intercorporeity’; at once material and virtual; but always nonetheless possible to think in human terms.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank participants at the Millennium Annual Conference 2012 on Materialism and World Politics, especially Antoine Bousquet, Ben Meiches, Stefanie Fishel and Elke Schwarz for productive discussions. Sincere thanks also to Tom Lundborg, Swedish Institute of International Affairs, and Dan Öberg, Swedish National Defence College, Stockholm, for their feedback on previous versions of this article; and to Heather Harrison-Dinniss, Swedish National Defence College, for generously sharing her expertise on new technological developments in war. I am very grateful to Diana Coole for taking the time to discuss the topic of drones and on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thought with me at an early stage in my research. The anonymous reviewers and the editors of Millennium gave detailed and constructive feedback on the article, for which I am most grateful. All remaining faults are mine alone.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
1.
Recent debates within IR and CSS about materiality/materialisms are inspired mainly by the work of Jane Bennett and Bruno Latour, but also by Karen Barad and Gilles Deleuze. For select contributions, see Claudia Aradau, ‘Security That Matters: Critical Infrastructure and Objects of Protection’, Security Dialogue 41, no. 5 (2010): 491–514; Mike Bourne, ‘Guns Don’t Kill People, Cyborgs Do: A Latourian Provocation for Transformatory Arms Control and Disarmament’, Global Change, Peace and Security 24, no. 1 (2012): 141–63; Martin Coward, ‘Network-centric Violence, Critical Infrastructure and the Urbanization of Security’, Security Dialogue 40, nos 4–5 (2009): 399–418; Tom Lundborg and Nick Vaughan-Williams, ‘Resilience, Critical Infrastructure, and Molecular Security: The Excess of “Life” in Biopolitics’, International Political Sociology 5, no. 4 (2011): 367–83.
2.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London and New York: Verso, 2009); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on the Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alfonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968).
3.
Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (London and Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 93.
4.
Contributions here include Claudia Aradau, ‘Security, War, Violence – the Politics of Critique: A Reply to Barkawi’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41, no. 1 (2012): 112–23; Tarak Barkawi, ‘From War to Security: Security Studies, the Wider Agenda and the Fate of the Study of War’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39, no. 3 (2011): 701–16; ‘Of Camps and Critique: A Reply to “Security, War, Violence”’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41, no. 1 (2012): 124–30; Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton, ‘Powers of War: Critique, Armed Force, and the Sociology of Knowledge’, presented at the International Studies Association Annual Convention, New York, 15–18 February 2009; ‘Powers of War: Fighting, Knowledge, and Critique’, International Political Sociology 5, no. 2 (2011): 126–43; ‘Absent War Studies: War, Knowledge and Critique’, in The Changing Character of War, eds Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Shane Brighton, ‘Three Propositions on the Phenomenology of War’, International Political Sociology 5, no. 1 (2011): 101–5; Brian Massumi, ‘Perception Attack: Brief on War Time’, Theory and Event 13, no. 3 (2010): 153–85; Kevin McSorely, ed., War and the Body: Militarization, Practice and Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 2012); Patricia Owens, ‘From Bismarck to Petreaus: The Question of the Social and the Social Question in Counterinsurgency’, European Journal of International Relations 19, no. 1 (2013): 139–61; Christine Sylvester, ed., Experiencing War (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), ‘War Experiences/War Theory/War Practice’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 40, no. 3 (2012): 483–503, War as Experience (London: Routledge, 2012).
5.
Barkawi and Brighton, ‘Powers of War’ and ‘Absent War Studies’.
6.
Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 [1832]), 1. Clausewitz’s efforts at identifying a phenomenological distinctiveness to war should not be confused with the reification and idealisation of war which his followers in Strategic Studies so often engage in; rather, it testifies to the ambition to engage philosophically with war. It is this ambition that has compelled others, dealing in utterly different historical circumstances and from entirely different philosophical horizons, to engage with On War, for instance, Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (London: Penguin, 1997), 15–16.
7.
Barkawi and Brighton, ‘Powers of War’, 136.
8.
See Martin Shaw’s complaint that ‘the defect of most social theory of war and militarism is … that it has not considered war as practice, i.e. what people actually do in war’. Martin Shaw, The New Western Way of War (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 40–1 emphasis added or in original?. Shaw also cited McSorely, War and the Body, 1.
9.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 70. See also Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 1993).
10.
Sylvester, ‘War Experiences’, 484.
11.
McSorely, War and the Body, 236.
12.
Diana Coole, ‘Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities’, Political Studies 53, no. 1 (2005): 124–42.
13.
For two studies that have impacted both, see Peter W. Singer, Wired for War (New York: Penguin, 2009) and Medea Benjamin, Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control (New York and London: OR Books, 2011).
14.
The Phalanx system became infamous for the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane on 3 July 1988. None of the officers in the command crew on board the USS Vincennes patrolling the Persian Gulf were willing to challenge the computer’s assessment that the plane spotted was an Iranian F-14 fighter, and authorised it to shoot. Peter W. Singer, ‘In the Loop? Armed Robots and the Future of War’, Defense Industry Daily, 28 January 2009. For a detailed discussion of the technical aspects of unmanned systems, see Jann K. Kleffner, et al., Unmanned Systems: Legal Aspects of the Use of Unmanned Systems in the Law of Armed Conflict and Human Rights Law (Stockholm: Swedish National Defence College, 2012).
15.
Ibid., 8.
17.
US Army, Eyes of the Army: Unmanned Aircraft Systems Roadmap 2010–2035 (Fort Rucker, AL: US Army, UAS Centre of Excellence, 2010).
18.
Steve Niva, ‘Disappearing Violence: JSOC and the Pentagon’s New Cartography of Violence’, Security Dialogue 44, no. 3 (2013): page numbers not yet available. On the number of raids, Niva cites the disclosure of a ‘US military source’ to researchers for the Open Society Foundation and the Liaison Centre.
19.
20.
Greg Miller, ‘Plan for Hunting Terrorists Signals the US Intends to Keep Adding Names to Kill List’, Washington Post, 24 October 2012.
21.
McChrystal quoted in US Joint Forces Command, Commander’s Handbook for Attack the Network (Suffolk, VA: Joint Warfighting Centre, 2011), VI-7.
22.
Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000).
23.
Jane Meyer, ‘The Predator War – What Are the Risks of CIA’s Covert Drone Programme?’, New Yorker, 26 October 2009.
24.
Derek Gregory, ‘From a View to Kill: Drones and Late Modern War’, Theory, Culture and Society 27, nos 7–8 (2011): 190–4.
25.
Ibid., 193 emphasis added or in original?.
26.
Ibid., 198. See also Souvik Mukherjee and Jenna Pitchford, ‘“Shall We Pixel the Soldier?” Perceptions of Trauma and Morality in Combat Video Games’, Journal of Gaming and Virtual World 2, no. 1 (2010): 39–51.
27.
Ian Graham Ronald Shaw and Majed Akhter, ‘The Unbearable Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan’, Antipode 44, no. 4 (2012): 1493.
28.
Gregory, ‘From a View to Kill’ and ‘Seeing Red: Baghdad and the Event-ful City’, Political Geography 29, no. 5 (2010): 266–79.
29.
Tyler Wall and Torin Monahan, ‘Surveillance and Violence from Afar: The Politics of Drones and Liminal Security Scapes’, Theoretical Criminality 15, no. 3 (2011): 239–54.
30.
Gregory, ‘From a View to Kill’, 188, emphasis added.
31.
Coole and Frost, eds, New Materialisms,101.
33.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 146.
34.
Coole and Frost, eds, New Materialisms, 93.
35.
Avery Plaw and Matthew S. Fricker, ‘Tracking the Predators: Evaluating the US Drone Campaign in Pakistan’, International Studies Perspective 13, no. 4 (2012): 365.
36.
Ibid.; Shaw and Akhter, ‘The Unbearable Humanness’, 1502.
37.
Butler, Precarious Life.
38.
Ibid., 63–101.
39.
US Army, Unmanned Aircraft Systems Roadmap 2010–2035. For further discussion of self-organising systems and ‘swarming’, see Antoine Bousquet, ‘Chaoplexic Warfare or the Future of Military Organisation’, International Affairs 84, no. 5 (2008): 915–29.
40.
Losing Humanity: The Case against Killer Robots (Human Rights Watch, 2012).
41.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, translator’s introduction, xliii.
42.
There are various versions of this argument: for two different ones, see Coole, ‘Rethinking Agency’ and Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
43.
Butler, Frames of War, xi–xiii.
44.
For Coward, this may be thought of in terms of a ‘complex ecology of subjectivity’, capturing an ensemble of human and material factors. Coward, ‘Network-centric Violence’, 414.
45.
Shaw and Akhter, ‘The Unbearable Humanness’, 1490–1, 1501.
46.
Wall and Monahan, ‘Surveillance and Violence’; A.J. Williams, ‘Enabling Persistent Presence? Performing the Embodied Geopolitics of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Assemblage’, Political Geography 30, no. 7 (2011): 385.
47.
Brian Massumi, ‘Perception Attack’, 153–85.
48.
Ibid., no page numbers in electronic version of article. Emphasis added.
49.
Ibid.
50.
Sylvester refers to ‘bewildering bodies’: Sylvester, ‘War Experiences’, 498–501. For the pivotal statement on the complexity of locating ‘the body’, see Butler, Gender Trouble.
51.
Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, 18.
52.
Coole and Frost, eds, New Materialisms, 93.
53.
Brian Massumi, ‘The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat’, in The Affect Reader, eds Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 54. (Also cited in Sylvester, ‘War Experiences’, 499.)
54.
Coole, ‘Rethinking Agency’, 14.
55.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 168.
56.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 130–55.
57.
Ibid., 139–46.
58.
Rupert Smith’s notion of ‘war amongst the people’ has had much influence in military strategy circles. Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).
59.
International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic, Stanford Law School and Global Justice Clinic, NYU School of Law, ‘Living under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan’, September 2012, p. x.
60.
Caroline Holmqvist, ‘War, Strategic Communication, and the Violence of Non-recognition’, paper presented at the International Studies Association Annual Convention, San Diego, April 2012 (under review for publication).
61.
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 19.
62.
Butler, Frames, 9. I have a very different reading of Butler’s understanding of precariousness from that of, for instance, Janell Watson in ‘Butler’s Biopolitics: Precarious Community’, Theory & Event 15, no. 2 (2012): no page numbers in electronic version. The precariousness Butler describes is a condition of humanness; it is part of what being human means – not a gesture towards a ‘politics’ that would in any way negate the fact that human beings have drastically different life conditions.
63.
Butler, Precarious Life, 130.
64.
Scarry, The Body in Pain, 28.
65.
Peter Adey, Mark Whitehead and Alison J. Williams, ‘Introduction: Air Target – Distance, Reach and the Politics of Verticality’, Theory, Culture, and Society 28, nos 7–8 (2011): 177.
66.
Butler, Frames, 77.
67.
Contrary to the conventional view of Butler’s work, Coole points to the way in which corporeality is ever-present – whether as the ‘materiality of language’, ‘bodily effects of speech’ or ‘embodied rituals of everydayness’. Diana Coole, ‘Butler’s Phenomenological Existentialism’, in Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, eds Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers (London: Routledge, 2008), 23.
68.
Holmqvist, ‘War, Strategic Communication and the Violence of Non-recognition’.
69.
2011: 136, emphasis added
70.
ibid.: 139
71.
ibid.: 139
72.
2011b
73.
1985: 21
74.
Massumi, ‘Perception Attack’, no page numbers in electronic version. Emphasis added.
75.
Massumi, 2010