Digitising the Virtual: Movement and Relations in Drone Warfare

Introduction

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in US military action in the global ‘war on terror’ has introduced unsettling ethical and political concerns about posthuman warfare and killing within critical scholarship in international relations (IR). In this article, I engage with the posthuman as a methodology for thinking about the processuality of UAVs or ‘drones’ and the violence that transpires in their wake. The central concept I mobilise here is that of the virtual, drawn from Erin Manning’s writings on movement, relations, and the posthuman. Through an analysis of the drone’s processes of surveillance and a reading of the transcripts of Uruzgan drone attack in Afghanistan in 2010, I argue that the drone’s violence lies in its ways of capturing and decimating its so-called targets’ capacity to respond to their immediate environments. This results in the disruption and violation of relations through which bodies and spaces become.

Some of the underlying concerns in critical scholarship on drones have been its implication in colonial technologies of verticality, gaze, and distance ¹ ; its production of gendered and racialised human bodies as targets ² ; its production of peoples and territories as an apparatus of biopolitical power ³ ; and its engendering of social relations as constituting an apparatus of othering. ⁴ Within critical scholarship, the armed drone propels significant apprehension towards the ‘posthuman’ wherein the machinic and the real are thought to be dangerously seamless. In the fusion of the drone and the posthuman, the latter has been critiqued through the mechanisms of the drone, which severely limits the critical purchase of the posthuman for theory. I find the distanced engagement with the posthuman problematic because it both loses the drone in vocabularies of networks and power and also reduces the posthuman to machinic automation. So in this article, rather than extending the drone into offering yet another concept or mechanism for posthuman technology, I explore the ways in which the drone becomes a weapon, and its ensuing violence, from a posthuman methodology drawn primarily from Manning’s writings. This implies foregrounding relational movement: movement is not the sum of displacements; it is the shared relation of coming together of bodies and spaces. ⁵

Following this conceptual premise, my analysis of drones is twofold: first, it is concerned with the movement that informs the coming together of the drone in shifting assemblages of bodies and technologies. Simultaneously it focuses on the ways in which these assemblages disrupt and decimate relations of movement within target spaces. This intertwined analytic of processuality and violence informs my reading of the Uruzgan transcripts, departing from existing analyses of the attack by situating at the forefront of analysis movement and relations. The impetus here is to arrive at a more dynamic understanding of both drones and the posthuman, where focus is on emergent processes and relations rather than narratives, actors, or outcomes. The theoretical stance in this article moves away from a derivative understanding of the posthuman, where it is either posited as an outcome of technological evolution or subjected to a normative interrogation, instantiating it instead as a method that thinks through movement. This enables analysis to move-with processes of becoming instead of capturing becoming itself into such stultifying categories as human, non-human, subject, and knowledge.

There is an evolving focus within IR and beyond on relationality and processuality, initiated by constructivist and feminist methodologies and growing through such theoretical trends as standpoint analyses, actor–network theory, process theory, and practice theory, among others. While it is beyond the scope of this article to dwell on the intricacies of these diverse relational approaches, within IR, the relational seeks to think international politics through the material, processual, and entangled relations that inform actors, structures, objects, and events. ⁶ In very broad terms, an important distinction between the aforementioned relational approaches and Manning’s Relationscapes is that in the latter, it is movement that is relational. Relational movement thinks with creation and not representation. It offers important novel purchase for theory: the abundant, infinitesimal, and moving connections between bodies and spaces out of which worlds are ceaselessly forming. It is open-ended and creative, and does not ground bodies and spaces on fixed representational surfaces or return them to normative orderings. An analysis that moves with relations does not seek to decode things or structures but thinks with processes, allowing for articulation to move beyond bounded logics of territory, identity, and community.

The following section examines these propositions in greater detail by discussing the concepts of movement, relations, and the virtual as I understand them from Manning’s writings. This is followed by a discussion of critical literature on drones with a specific focus on texts that attend to its supposedly posthuman nature. In the following section, I offer a relational analysis of the processual becoming and violence of drone assemblages. I then proceed to situate this discussion in the context of transcripts from drone massacre of civilians in Uruzgan, Afghanistan, in February 2010. In the concluding section, I offer an overview of the argument presented here and a brief discussion of the critical value of posthuman methodology beyond drones in its de-centring of the ‘human’ via the foregrounding of movement.

Movement, Relations, and the Virtual

To approach the virtual as drawn out by Erin Manning, it is important to begin with the concept of movement, and more specifically ‘movement-moving’. ⁷ Manning posits movement as the subject of posthuman becoming. Bodies do not precede movement – movement bodies spaces. Bodying is the effect of movement-moving through spaces, gathering in objects and affects alike into relational interactions. Manning explains this idea of movement by taking the example of a body and a room. Instead of thinking movement as a specific, traceable trajectory that a prefigured body follows across a pre-existing room, Manning suggests that space be understood as coming together as ‘the room’ in the compositional combination of the moving body and the environment. The body does not arrive into an already existing room as a prefigured whole. Instead, ‘the room becomes reconfiguring as the body recomposes’. ⁸ Bodies and spaces become-with in relations of movement. This relation is what Manning calls ‘body-worlding’ – the creation of worlds through the bodying of spaces as movement moves. ⁹ Worlding is the composition of spacetimes that transpires as movement ‘bodies’. ¹⁰ ‘Bodying’ suggests that spaces are bodied as a whole, that bodies are not separable moulds of embodied matter that can be identified singularly in space, but are loosely formed, shape-shifting blocks of movement thoroughly enmeshed with the environments they move in. This enmeshing is the compositional process of worlding which is always continuous and ongoing.

Movement-moving maps relations as it passes through spacetimes, bodying the world. Thinking through movement-moving unsettles the very idea of a subjectifying grid. Movement is not traced between two given locations nor are bodies held to occupy definite positions. ¹¹ Movement is the infinite stirring of relations that engender becoming. Becoming is not a specific kind of movement nor is there a specific movement of becoming. Instead, becoming is movement – bodies moving-with space, space moving-with time, time moving-with duration, duration moving-with rhythm. The ‘withness of movement moving’ instantiates the relational core of becoming. ¹² Space becomes as relations compose in the flux of relative movements of bodies. All spacetimes are infused with the passage of movement-moving: in the path of movement-moving, bodies are coursing with relative velocities of rest and motion. Movement is the immanent force that worlds – it is the consistency that bodies and spacetimes are always already flushed with. The precepts can be thus listed: movement instead of location; movement-moving instead of displacement; bodying instead of embodiment.

With these precepts in sight, the virtual can be understood as the ungraspable field of potential that composes movement. Going back to Manning’s body-room example, every step taken in relation with the room is preceded by a dynamic potential that can propel the step in any direction. Here movement’s potential is more important than its directionality. This propelling potential is movement taking form, the eventual displacement from the step arising as a response to this immanent form taking. The immanent, processual form taking is the virtual. ‘When I take a step, how the step moves me is key to where I go’. ¹³ The ‘how’ is the felt ‘incipience’ of movement taking form and precedes movement’s extension into displacement. The virtual is the felt incipience of movement as relations recombine and recompose bodies and worlds. ¹⁴ It is an indefinable block of all possible movements that could unfold in the passage of movement. These potential unfoldings cannot be traced back to definite causal structures, nor should they be understood as causal chains in themselves. The virtual replaces the causal with the relational.

To explain these concepts by way of examples I, following Manning, delve into the act of walking – more specifically walking on the swarming streets of the South Asian metropolis I inhabit. Thinking with dust, I find the ground, the dust, and my feet in an essentially immanent relation wherein ‘a’ body does not prefigure the relation. The almost invisible granules of dust chafe at the edges of my feet, gnawing through the frayed soles of my sandals, each step renewing the rhythm of this multidimensional relationality. The dust-worn crevices around the heels of my feet map this imperceptible field of relations, wherein the cracks cannot be singularly defined as either skin or dust, and nor ought they to be seen as ‘properties’ of my/a body. These cracks bring forth the relations of walking, which constitute a field of such multiplicitous inter-actions. The virtual does not exist either in my body or in the particles of dust or in the granular surfaces of roads, nor even in the acting of bodies upon one another. The virtual is the felt coming together of surfaces, volumes, forces, bodily intensities, and affects into an intimacy: a relational ‘in gathering’ of body and environment. ¹⁵ The contouring of skin is not a graspable action but a felt impulse that surges through my body any time a deep crack on my heel is painfully felt in the contact of my foot with the ground. The surging of this ungraspable relation may lead me as I take the next step to ground my toes more firmly into the surface of the path while leaving my soles dangling midway, wobbling my gait ever so slightly yet once again recomposing the field of virtual and populating it with new affects, intensities, and potentialities.

The virtuality of my movement does not exist in isolation. As I walk becoming dust, I must think-with the infinite simultaneities transpiring along the sidewalk. A stray dog lying asleep on the sidewalk appears directly in the course of the movement-moving through me. I must walk around it but also be careful enough to avoid the overgrown grass lining the edge of the path on the other side. As I cautiously pass through this ‘sidewalk hole’ between the sleeping dog and the weed, the dog sensing the proximity of my movement nonetheless jolts out of slumber and bolts across the road. ¹⁶ It has responded to the virtuality of my movement, the potential of movement to cause our bodies to collide. As it scampers across the slow-moving street, there is considerable disruption to the flow of vehicles that must now slow down further, alter direction marginally, blare horns loudly, or stop altogether to let this sudden expansion of movement pass: the relational field moves as whole. The virtuality of bodies is always intersecting. Bodies – human, animal, vehicular, granular, aural – are multiple. This multiplicitous inter-action and intra-action of qualities, materials, and affects is the ungraspable yet real field of the virtual. The passage of movement creates ‘relationscapes’: compositional arrangements of bodies in space, that both get configured in the wake of movement and also configure the ecology that lends to the continuity of movement. A relationscape can be understood as a ‘constant conversation’ unfurling in the ‘ongoing response’ of bodies in movement to what is around them. ¹⁷ ‘This responsivity creates an active environment’ and these active environments of movement and response are relationscapes. ¹⁸ Relationscapes are the active relational fields that gather in and extend out in the compositional conversation between bodies and spaces, making relationality open-ended.

Movement-moving through spacetimes engenders the specificities and particularities of geographical and cultural relations. These particularities are more durational rhythms than entrenched habits or patterns. That is, relational specificities ought not to be seen as accumulating within, or referring back to, a rigid structure of sameness. These are relations that render space durational. ¹⁹ Virtual relations of movement do not posit structures or forms but gather in bodies and spaces into durational relationscapes, where duration is not countable in minutes or seconds but is the felt quality of virtual relations. Duration is as much the invisible encounter of dust and skin happening over time as much as it is the space recomposing between the relational reflexivity of bodies.

The virtual cannot be predetermined. Nor can it be traced back from actualised displacements. Virtual is a flux of coming together and breaking apart of bodies, spaces, and affects, rendered ever more uncertain owing to the materially unlocalisable patterns and forms of the virtual. It is this processuality that moves becoming, makes it multiple and infinite. Process here does not begin with a recognised set of assumptions, logics, actors, and chains, but addresses the infinite interplays and intersections that make movement multiple. There is no causal determination between identifiable determinants. Virtual movement makes bodies, entities, movement, and becoming multiple, where one is already many. It is precisely this ‘becoming multiple’ that informs the understanding of the ‘posthuman’ here. The posthuman does not come ‘after’ the human in a linear history of human development, nor is it other-than-human, nor is it one definable entity altogether. It is a methodological concept that speaks of bodies’ immanent multiplicity composed in movement. When bodies are always already multiple, they are always already posthuman. The entangled bodying of spaces renders separation of human from non-human questionable. How can I measure and separate how much of my body is ‘human’ and how much of it is the dust, the microbes, the pollutants, the moisture, the oxygen, and so on that unceasingly compose my body in space, and how do I differentiate it from the infinite vibrating potentialities intersecting it in movement? The posthuman thinks this fundamentally inseparable entanglement as multiplicity. Body-becomings are always multiple, always entangled, always posthuman.

Concepts for the Posthuman Drone

At the heart of critical scholarship on drones, there is a recurring concern: how is the drone, as a posthuman entity, transforming the human and its becoming? ²⁰ The conception of the posthuman, for the most part, is confined to a machinic, algorithmic, and networked surpassing (or condensation) of the human, arising as the ‘rapid fusion of the digital and the real’. ²¹ The posthuman is largely refracted through the prism of networked cultures of technology and human-machinic assemblages. In order to answer to the question of the posthuman, theoretical literature has focused on reworking the ‘human’ within the drone mainframe. The methodologies central to these works include feminist analyses, postcolonial critique, actor–network theory, critical materialism, biopolitical analyses, and necropolitical analyses. I focus here on three analytical strands that crucially frame critical scholarship on the drone’s ‘posthuman’ (or machinic) relations: vertical visuality, networked materiality, and embodiment and subjectivity. My subsequent analysis of the drone’s processual becoming and its digitisation of bodies is specifically in critical conversation with these three themes which are concerned with the drone’s processes of sense-making, the implicit relations within the drone assemblage, and the drone’s violence on target bodies and spaces, respectively. In current articulations, they offer fragmented understandings of the drone’s processuality, a point that informs the following discussion of the literature and constitutes the gap that my analysis of the drone seeks to address.

Gregoire Chamayou’s A Theory of the Drone significantly precipitates and informs the critical theoretical exercise around drones. Chamayou has discussed the drone’s ‘necroethics’ wherein relations of killing and vulnerability are unequally distributed between the drone operators and its targets, making warfare ‘absolutely unilateral’ on two inter-related counts – bodies can be eliminated from afar and eliminated bodies will only ever be of the putative ‘other’ or ‘enemy’ whose space becomes an indeterminate, ever expanding battlefield. ²² Chamayou’s analytic emphasises the hunter/hunted dynamics wherein warfare is emptied of relations of reciprocity. ²³ This delimits ethical relations to be based on reciprocal response. Political relations are framed within a determinative circuit of intention, action, and outcome which further situates political violence as the negation of the ability to respond reciprocally and symmetrically. Chamayou’s theory of the drone fixes relations of reciprocity and immediacy as existing between determinate subjects, the hunters and hunted, and the drone’s sensing body as framing this relational dynamic. This determinative tendency rings through critical writings on drone that analyse its relationality.

An important strand of critical scholarship responds to claims of the drone’s autonomy and objectivity. Two significant responses in this regard include a critical examination of the drone’s ways of sense-making, specifically in its practices of ‘seeing’ and analyses of its networked materiality. The drone’s visual relations have been tied to verticality, which Adey et al. have termed as constitutive of the ‘tensions of verticality’ implicit within the drone regime. ²⁴ Verticality here specifically refers to the drone’s ways of seeing from above and afar. Verticality is analysed as being primary to the production and exaggeration of cultural differences, homogenised over spaces and peoples. Wall and Monahan have theorised it as the ‘drone stare’: a form of surveillance that necessarily abstracts the other from its own cultural, political, and territorial contexts, reducing them to ‘precise grid locations’. ²⁵ Similarly, Robert Stahl has theorised the ‘drone vision’ as consolidating a ‘visual relationship between Western centres of power and the rest of the world’. ²⁶ The drone’s vertical visuality and the associated cultural abstraction and representation presuppose the omniscience of the drone’s ‘scopic regime’, its machinic ability to capture everything and ‘everywhere’. ²⁷

These analyses of the drone’s vertical visuality oversaturate the drone’s ability to create cultural projections from above. Much of the concern with the drone’s vertical tension is limited to the channels and networks of its sense-making capacity, whose responses and abilities are fixed within their own specific cultural positioning, without as much attention accorded to the processuality of vertical vision itself. While vertical ascendance is foregrounded, verticality is grounded into processes of producing and interpreting images. The volumetric sense and processuality of vertical vision is lost in the overdetermination of cultural production. ²⁸ Verticality in warfare has been demonstrated by Antonie Bousquet to be fundamentally preoccupied with arriving at possible trajectories of the target’s movement in order to determine its position precisely and exactly when the missile hits. ²⁹ Vertical warfare is bound up with this history of precision and objective perception which in-turn has been a question of the processuality of tracing and defining movement of objects on fixed surfaces.

Material analyses of drones have evolved within a broader rationality of what Michael Dillon has recognised as networked-centric warfare. The drone’s materiality has been recognised as embedded within informational networks of ‘radical relationality’, where actors are no longer independent individuals but ‘part of continuously adapting military systems operating in constantly changing battlespaces’. ³⁰ Within networked-centric warfare, networked channels of information replace single actors, and actors’ locations are situated in relation to the flow of information, with these networked wholes of actors and actions forming assemblages. Relationality appears as a subset of networks here with the assemblage being a concept for networked functions and communication. Indeterminacy is only identified externally in the constantly changing battlespaces whereas the ‘network’ appears to be a fixed form, wherein functions and actors are continuously adapting in response to external changes. This comes at the expense of the processual indeterminacy of networks and the emergent movement of assemblages.

Furthermore, a significant theoretical focus within materialist analyses is on ‘entanglement’ of the drone within socio-political or human-material assemblages such that its processual emergence is underscored. For instance, through Latour’s conception of dingpolitik, William Walters has argued that the objecthood and objectivity of the drone cannot be isolated from the assemblies of public opinion and political dispute through which it takes form. ³¹ ‘Things’ like drones, within Walter’s analysis, are drawn up from within the networks of public disputes and response, which are not confined to the battlespace but extend across social and political interconnections. While Walter’s analysis does underscore the drone as a relational entity, relations here are understood in light of networks, and entanglement is an outcome of politico-social friction and fission. Relatedly, from a critical materialist perspective, Caroline Holmqvist, in addressing the supposed ‘virtuality’ of drone warfare, examines the enmeshed materialities involved in making the drone assemblage – the fleshy body of the operator and the steely body of the drone interacting within the broader framework of the drone’s particular optics. Holmquovist seeks to synthesise the corporeal and the incorporeal aspects of warfare into a complex whole that situates the ‘humanness’ of experience, both in flesh and as collectives of ‘ethical and political relations’. ³² The stress here on human and material as two separable entities that come to be entangled together appears to instantiate a definable difference between the two. In addition, this entanglement is made to answer back to human experience, making things and networks accountable to the latter, and thus instantiating entanglement as a property of human experience. Entanglement becomes an outcome here, in that materialist analyses underscore entangled formations. Either the drone itself is an entangled object, as in Walters, or it is an entangled experience, as in Holmquovist. This makes it hard to arrive at a processual sense of entanglement itself, the always present multiplicity of body-becomings. Entangled movement is the process of relational becoming, informing the shared becoming of bodies and spaces.

The question of shared becoming is also addressed within a large strand of critical analyses focusing on the production of targets and relations of embodied subjectivity. Discussions around embodied subjectivity in relation to the drone are significantly interested in analysing the processes through which target bodies and spaces get framed as such, and are thus heavily in conversation with the infamous US policy of ‘signature strikes’ under which the larger majority of US drone attacks fall, where threats are constructed based on ‘patterns of life’ analyses. ‘Patterns of life’ analyses are engaged in locating suspicious behaviour among spaces under surveillance by closely examining bodies in their everyday activities and movements and discerning deviations therein. Integral to critical literature here is a biopolitical lens wherein life, as a whole, is the target; eliminated through an informational positing of bodies and spaces. In The Colonial Present, Derek Gregory analyses the drone’s ‘technocultural production’ leading to the production of ‘a space within which those held responsible for (the 9/11) attacks would appear as nothing more than points on a map or nodes in in a network’. ³³ The emergence of the target is thus rolled into the construction of ‘an abstract, de-corporealized space’. ³⁴ Wilcox, reading the same instance that I read subsequently in this article, has argued that the target is embodied by the necropolitics of the drone assemblage which only produces ‘killable bodies’. ³⁵ The ‘killable bodies’ so produced are subjects of ‘posthuman embodiment’, in that they are informationally embodied through the interaction of technological processes with gendered and racialised discourses. ³⁶ Relatedly, Ian Shaw has argued that within the ‘Predator Empire’, threats become informational and ‘process based’ as individual bodies are imbued with the uncertain potential to become dangerous in the future. ³⁷

While this strand of critical literature makes significant contribution in the recognition of the drone’s racialised and gendered technologies, my reservation is that these analyses end up securing bodies and spaces too rigidly within performative and interpretive codes. The ‘post’-human is identified in the machinic and informational regulation of human embodiment. Much of this regulation is routed back to human/Western ways of representation and interpretation that enable the drone’s regime of tracking and killing. While the concept of the posthuman is mobilised extensively here, repercussions are limited because of an overt emphasis on human subjectivity. The informational and the interpretive are conflated, as targets are argued to be determined by the interpretational fixing of the informational units within the drone assemblage, as well as the domestic discourses of power, terror, and race in American politics. ³⁸ Once again, the processuality that is inherent to both body-becoming and drone-becoming is fixed within a predetermined grid of subjectifying and signifying power. The argument of mutual co-constitution of space and body as a performatively embodied racialised ‘threat’ does not demonstrate shared becomings as much as it brings together performativity and interpretation within a single subjectifying matrix. Shared becomings appear to be interpretive outcomes of technologies and discourses of power, divorced from the movement of life itself.

Across the literature discussed here, the relational emerges as an outcome of situated processes of vertical abstraction, or networked materiality, or subjectifying discourses. For the most part, the categories of information and relational networks have been held concrete, supposedly signifying determinate objects and events. Relations are broadly held to be quantifiable and traceable, and situated around the flow of information or in supposedly paradoxical entanglements of human/non-human or subject/object. Networked relationality and informational flows are overdetermined at the expense of the radical indeterminacy which is at the heart of relational becoming. Furthermore, conceptual critique of the posthuman evinces an anxiety towards the assumed overcoming and dislodging of the human and accordingly the predominant concern of theoretical analyses is to draw out the meanings and implications for the ‘unbearable humanness’ of drone warfare. ³⁹ This is problematic for two significant reasons: first, the ‘human’ appears as an uncritically universal category of experience that is the centre and source of all ethical relations. This ontologised ‘human’ emerges from the thick of Western philosophies of ‘being’ and centres worldview around a very specifically Western human experience. Second, the conflation and reduction of the posthuman to technology, where technology is always already held to supersede a pregiven human, diminish the conceptual possibilities that emerge in thinking with the posthuman.

To respond to these gaps, I propose to introduce the concept of the virtual in the discussion on drones, in order to emphasise the indeterminacy that moves relations and to think through the possibilities of the posthuman for analyses of the violence of drones and beyond. The following section draws out an analysis of the drone as a weapon with relational movement as the point of departure.

Relational Undoing: Drones and Virtual Movement

Thinking-with Manning’s posthuman becoming, I posit political violence to be the unmaking and undoing of relations. I understand violence here to be the forced stopping of relational movement of becoming. This capture is one that alters the virtuality of movement by ostensibly rendering it amenable to representation. Political violence begins with the distillation of the virtual into regimes of signs and subjectivity. While the virtual by its very nature always exceeds the discourses that seek to situate it, it is nonetheless sought in supposedly predictable patterns, signals, and functions. My sense is that violence constitutes in specifying the body as singular, forcibly ejecting it from the relational field wherein it becomes, and reading its virtuality as a matter of gestures and signs. Movement is emptied of its relational core, its withness, and read as displacement: a trail of traceable points and locations charted by a prefigured body.

The drone warfare has at its core this violent disruption of virtuality that attends to the relational becoming of bodies and spacetimes. For instance, the ‘signature strikes’ discussed above are processually oriented around striking individuals who elicit suspicion based on their patterns of movement and activities. In the exhaustive search for ‘combatants’ amid ‘civilians’, a host of bodies are followed around surreptitiously from the skies, sometimes for days, fixing them along the grid of their traceable displacements. The feltness of these bodies’ relational becoming is obviously lost to apparatuses that can only ‘see’ from afar. The armed drone focuses on individuating and separating military aged male bodies from all other bodies, objects, and terrains, even as the passage of movement unfolds by inseparably enmeshing bodies and spaces. This is not simply to make an emotive claim about the negation and loss of the fundamental movement of life-worlds. The armed drone’s capture of movement and its associated inability to respond to the virtual is a matter of life and death for the ‘targets’ being surveilled. The violence here is twofold: first, durational rhythms intimate to spaces and bodies under surveillance are misappropriated as habits, patterns, and customs, and decisions about these bodies are made on the basis of this forced misappropriation. Threats are virtually besieged within the putative ‘patterns of life’ analyses, wherein cultural becoming is individuated and seen as a linear and constant structure. This artificially linearised structure is stratified upon the spaces and bodies under scrutiny and then employed to offer signs and symptoms of dangerous activity. The credibility of these analyses is suspect given that the personnel performing these analyses are not implicated within the spaces under consideration. They do not move-with these bodies and spaces and project forms from afar. In light of the discussion on movement-moving, ‘patterns of life’ analyses are extremely problematic. Movement and life activity of the ‘other’ is prefigured as evidentiary material for the identification of not only persons but also intentions. The violence here appears in the absence of the possibility for recognition, let alone consideration, of the fundamental relations of movement and worlding. The supposedly sophisticated measures of surveillance employed are wholly inept at sensing the relational virtuality of movement.

Second, and relatedly, virtuality is reduced to being a measure of futurity. Jordan Candrall, discussing the modalities of contemporary precision-guided technologies suggests that with the onset of machine-aided perception, there has been a shift from ‘seeing’ to ‘tracking’. ⁴⁰ Tracking seeks to capture the minuteness of movement in order to calculate, predict, and visualise the futurity of bodies. ⁴¹ The rhythms of bodily affects, heat signatures, interactions with other individuals, all come to form a continuous stream of information that digitise bodies in an abstract realm of representation. ⁴² Movement is completely individualised and made to appear to belong to the body being tracked. If it is deemed that I own the ways in which I move, it can be assumed that I will have determinable patterns of movement that I am the author and controller of. This logic of continuity serves as the principle for tracking in which breaks and ruptures appear extraordinary. The purpose here is to digitise the virtual and render bodies and affects pliable to mechanisms of predictability. However, the virtual is thoroughly stripped of its relational core already. By making it a function of individual bodies, individual propensities, and individual dispositions, the virtuality of relational movement is not even slightly apprehended.

For all their machinic sharpness, processes of tracking cannot digitally synthesise movement-moving through spaces and bodies. With the focus being so completely and thoroughly on individuation and displacements, relational becoming is always already off the radar of tracking. Relations only serve as a perfunctory logic for assimilating bodies into pre-established groups and communities. By sheer virtue of its ungraspability, the virtual exceeds the methodologies and processes of tracking. In case of the armed drone, which draws out patterns of life in order to locate and execute its targets, individual propensities, abstracted from the broader spatial conversation that composes them, are first identified as gestures, signals, and so on and then read as threats. The individuated propensities that are invasively coded into data are separated from the virtual relations that always exceed this coding, once again stratifying the movement of relations on individual bodies.

The processes of tracking follow actualised displacements in order to pick up supposed patterns, which are then re-deployed on the tracked bodies with the intention of making the virtuality of their movement predictable and calculable. The processes of engendering digitised bodies are shared across the drone assemblage. The drone pilot, Joanna Bourke writes, ‘operating thousands of miles from his target – is a networked being, connected to local, national, and global computer and satellite systems, including being streamed directly into the offices of the U.S. Secretary of State for Defense and the President’. ⁴³ The target is ‘his’, in that the pilot creates the target and is in a relation, together with the drone, of production. This production, authored by the sensory, algorithmic eyes of the drone, is operationalised by the pilot who reads the data stream and produces a narrative. The pilot, in the simultaneous act of engendering and reading the data, produces his targets. The drone is the ‘writing subject’ picking up sensuous codes as the pilot guides its movement, while the pilot reads the texts produced from ‘algorithmic automation’, and together they engage in ‘distributed processes of authoring’. ⁴⁴ To be sure, the drone pilot is just one among the many in an expanding network of eyes and the processes of authoring are shared across emergent drone assemblages comprising troops and special operations units on ground, senior commanders, mission controllers, military lawyers, data analysts, and image technicians, distributed through various locations across the globe. ⁴⁵ However, it is not the same assemblage that gathers every time the drone moves as a weapon. Assemblages, as I understand them, are loosely held gatherings of materials, bodies, technologies, affects, across emergent networks that function as ephemeral wholes. They emerge in the nexus of form and function, coming together relationally and experienced durationally. This is crucial in the case of drones where the networks are expansive, spread across geographies, and are experienced within a virtual abstraction. The drone assemblage takes shape anew in the simultaneous in-gathering of forms (steely/fleshy, material/non-material), affects, and functions each time the drone takes flight. The drone pilots who remotely operate the drone go on to live their ordinary lives with their families after finishing their session in the air base at Nevada, USA. As Stahl notes, this point recurs extensively in the discourses on drones as a ‘plot device’ to draw out the pilot’s subjectivity as a paradoxical amalgamation of the banal and the extraordinary. ⁴⁶ It can only appear paradoxical when relations and experiences are imagined to progress over a continuous, linear arc; when the drone pilot is held to be a singular individual across spacetimes. The drone operators’ relations do not quantify the drone’s network; they engender it as much as they are engendered by it. The pilot becomes one with the drone’s flight such that it is no longer a question of fleshy and steely bodies but the drone pilot becoming as a relational whole. This space rewrites the logic of presence and absence in a relational register where sensing bodies in movement engender spacetimes as not apart from movement itself. That the drone is an assemblage marks the indeterminate and immediate processuality that underwrites the drone’s becoming-weapon. The drone as an assemblage suggests that it is multiple in its movement: a whole that comes together in a moving synthesis of multiple relations.

Furthermore, there is a marked absence of spacetime intervals connecting the drone assemblage to the spaces it tracks. Candrall has noted how ‘shrinking space time intervals’ help deliver on the promise of tracking to see and predict the future better and faster. ⁴⁷ To specify, this is not to suggest that the drone has transcended space and time altogether. Spacetime exigencies continue to define how the drone moves, for instance, in unpredictable weather patterns or sudden cloud covers, and so on. The lack of interval here suggests that between the drone assemblage and the populations it tracks, there are no connecting axes across which relational movement can form. Its use as a weapon is specifically based in this lack of relational intervals. Relational exigencies are minimised in ‘real time’: a unit of time, simultaneously shrunken and magnified, that radicalises presence and immediacy. In real time, the ‘now’ is shortened to the duration of milliseconds, the time it takes for sensory cues to be translated into visual data on screens. Simultaneously the ‘now’ extends across and folds itself over the drone optics such that everything becomes a matter of the eternal present. While movement moves through spaces and bodies, mapping them into effervescent relationscapes, processes of tracking digitally situate and codify the bodies as traceable singular units in a given space. The durational rhythm intimate to relational becoming is stymied in the real-time digitisation of spacetimes.

The violence is not limited to digitisation of bodies and the associated blockage of relational becoming. It explodes into relationscapes and foils the immanent movement therein. This is not to suggest that the violence is totalising, for relational movement is always composing and recomposing, figuring and refiguring, in excess of any representational gaze. The possibility of resistance is always already coursing through bodies as they come into relation. From the more basic camouflage measures such as hiding among trees and moving-with space, to engendering space itself to counter the drone’s invisibility by employing reflective glass on rooftops and cars, relations are always recomposing in response. ⁴⁸ Manning terms it ‘a relational shape shifting’. ⁴⁹ The very notion of relationscapes is based in the understanding that relations exceed modes of representational capture and the processuality of becoming is imbued with the ‘response-ability’ to engender relations anew. ⁵⁰ However, this response-ability itself may be threatened if relational spacetimes are marked with the externalised indeterminacy of sudden attacks. Strikes, if and when they come, appear without warning, suddenly and conclusively. The US policy of ‘double tap strikes’ is particularly problematic in this regard. Based on the assumption that bodies emerging in the immediate aftermath of a drone strike to assist surviving victims are also insurgents, the armed drone has been known to strike at the target once again after a period of 5 to 20 minutes from the first strike. Caught in the violence of the double tap strikes have been first responders, and also civilians, looking for bodies that may have survived. What is evident here is the decimation of the capacity to respond to the immediate environment and not simply reciprocate. And I find the former to be the more destructive tenet of the drone’s elimination of combat. The undoing of emergent relationscapes is gravely apparent in the drone’s crushing of the responsive reconfiguration of spaces immanent to the movement of becoming.

This has destructive implications for the durational rhythms that map the relational engendering of peoples and geographies. As targets multiply, the relational space shrinks. This is has been extensively covered in the widely cited report Living under Drones, which details the tragic consequences of the US-led drone attacks on everyday life in the worst affected regions of Pakistan. The drone has written deep fear into compositional interactions of body-worlds. Family members are afraid to attend their kin’s funerals for fear of gathering together; members of a community suspect one another to be the next target of the drone and so deign to keep their distance from each other’s bodies, vehicles, and proximity; people avoid sitting outside in more than twos for fear of garnering unwarranted attention from the skies. ⁵¹ Inside and outside hold no meaning; people shrink as far back within their own bodies as possible to avoid being seen. The intimate interiority of spaces, of psyches, of bodily movements stands to be lost.

Annihilating Sense/Movement/Relation

In the early hours of 21 February 2010, US military forces launched an attack on a convoy of three vehicles – two Sports Utility Vehicles and a pickup truck – travelling through the Uruzgan province to Kandahar, killing as many as 27 civilians, among which were four women and one child, and injuring 12 others. ⁵² The attack followed from a sustained surveillance engagement that lasted 4 hours and comprised networked conversations between American ground forces, Predator drone pilots based in Nevada, video screeners based in Florida, an attack helicopter crew, and an AC-130 attack plane. ⁵³ From the ground to the sky, from communication signals to gestural displacements, from courtyards to the river, the drone assemblage was ‘eyes’ on everything. It gradually produced a narrative of the convoy carrying Taliban militants, or ‘military aged males’, towards a US Special Operations crew that had been positioned in the region only a few hours earlier. ⁵⁴ Weapons were wrongly identified, intentions were ascribed, and so killing became justified. As it later emerged, the three vehicles were ferrying civilians to an assortment of everyday destinations, activities, and people: ‘some were shopkeepers going to replenish supplies, others were students returning to school, people going for medical treatment, families off to visit their relatives’. ⁵⁵

The Uruzgan massacre has received considerable attention within critical scholarship on drones. ⁵⁶ Much of the literature using this massacre as a ‘case’ has sought to analyse the incident through biopolitical or necropolitical lenses, discourses and matrices of racial and gendered othering, the performative production of embodied subjectivity of both the so-called posthuman warrior and targets, and human-machinic networked materialities. My point of departure is to engage with the relational immediacy that informed and configured this specific assemblage. The transcripts offer inroads into the immediate relational processuality of drone assemblages. Instead of tracing back the affective responses of the drone operators to pregiven structures and codes of power, I wish to map the processual movement of bodies and affects within the immediate movement of the drone assemblage. Furthermore, I also feel that ‘othering’ here is distinctly revealed to be a matter of relational undoing, in that stultifying relational becoming and making relations perverse is a tactic predominantly visible in these transcripts and yet lost amid the emphasis on subjectivity, networks, and power in existing literature around this text. This is the twofold gap I hope to address in my interpretation of the transcripts.

To begin with, I suggest a departure from locating these interactions within a ‘preexisting interpretive matrix’. ⁵⁷ Interpretation grounds subjects and objects into predetermined positions with given pathways of affect and response. In my understanding, the transcripts evoke a sense of puzzling together of spaces and bodies in that it is not a matter of referring them back to, or embodying them within, governing rationalities but piecing together a workable whole, albeit in order to execute the drone’s function of killing. This function is not empty of the drone operator’s desires and affects, as evinced from their sudden turns and casual conversations. The data are becoming along with the movement of the drone assemblage. This is not an exercise in data interpretation. The whole operation is becoming-with data; the pilot, sensor operators, the Special Operations crew, they are all combining their responses and affects into the drone’s movement, reading the data as they author it. ⁵⁸ The drone operators’ engagement with the data is not extrinsic to the drone assemblage, it is formative of the drone’s movement.

Second, I wish to draw out from these transcripts an understanding of the drone’s violence in the disruption of the relational becoming of target spaces. This emerges from within the drone assemblage’s incapacitating reading of the data which cannot grasp the virtuality of relational movement. The drone assemblage’s reading remains limited because of its inability to interact with the virtuality of movement. The drone assemblage, in this instance, demonstrates a startling refusal of thinking-with movement. In these transcripts, violence begins with the situation of movement itself. Movement-moving is reduced to displacement in the becoming data of bodies and spaces. The drone assemblage traces displacement in its readings. While the vehicles move-with space, their movement mapping effervescent relationscapes, the drone assemblage forges traceable linkages along digitised landscapes on screens in real time. As virtual relations elude these digitised landscapes, the drone assemblage does not recognise shared becomings, and worse makes these shared becomings appear perverse and disposable.

Very early on in the networked communications between the personnel involved in the drone attack in Uruzgan, the Special Operations crew, Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JAC), iterates, ‘due to distance from friendlies we are trying to work on justification, we’re gonna need PID (positive identification)’. ⁵⁹ The search for possible explanation of the vehicular movement, given its distance from ‘friendlies’ deployed on ground, indicates that justification necessitates all movement to be deciphered only in relation to military personnel. In the very first instance then, this ‘working’ out of possible justifications for movement reduces movement to displacement in relation to ground troops which further facilitates its articulation as ‘definite suspicious movement and definite tactical movement’ within the space of a few minutes. ⁶⁰ The possibility of civilian movement and civilian bodies was already negated with the reading of movement as displacement in relation to troops. Initially, the JAC orders ‘containment’ fires ‘forward of their line of movement in between their position and friendlies’, ‘their’ indicating the convoys. ⁶¹ However, within a couple of minutes, the JAC overturns this order announcing that, ‘we are going to hold on containment fires and try to attempt PID, we would really like to take out those trucks’. ⁶² This change comes seemingly without provocation, almost as if on a whim. It is right after this announcement that AC-130 gunship crew ‘Slasher’ notes that ‘the two vehicles are flashing lights signalling between’ which effectively seals the fate of the convoy’s movement as ‘tactical’. ⁶³ A few minutes into the surveillance, the drone pilot had informed the networked crews that the drone operators are being called to another location and may have to leave the site soon. However, this is overturned right after the ‘signalling’ is picked up by the eyes. Almost immediately after, the Predator Pilot asks the Mission Intelligence Coordinator (MC) to ‘tell whoever is expecting us in Marjeh, that we are part of a tactical engagement right now and we can’t move’. ⁶⁴ The unprovoked shift from containment fires to ‘taking the trucks out’ is concretised in the shift from ‘watching’ to ‘tactical engagement’. Tactical is the most recurrently employed label throughout the text. Every movement, every object, every interaction within the convoy, caught on the drone’s visual feed, is annotated tactical from the very moment the flashing lights are deemed to be ‘signalling’. Intention is inscribed into the movement of the convoy through a militarised language. Caught on, and within, a virtual military network what could have been a gestural movement is instantly reduced to tactical ‘signalling’ – intentional communication of necessarily militarised repercussions. Under the rubric of tactical, all movement is rendered suspicious.

This exchange also precludes being subsumed under, or explained with reference to, strategic vocabulary. The only strategy that the Predator pilot is able to come up with in order to PID weapons is to, ‘just keep looking, maybe we’ll see something’. ⁶⁵ To ‘just keep looking’ is to keep tracking the virtual, to ‘see something’ is its superimposed actualisation. Between the two, ‘maybe’ translates effortlessly into ‘definite’. These subtle movements are emerging within the immediacy of the drone spacetime. Amid conjectural exchanges of ‘possible mortars’, ‘personnel in the open by the vehicles moving tactically definitely carrying objects at this time we cannot PID’, ‘individuals egressed the trucks holding cylindrical objects in their hands’, the JAC states that ‘getting ICOM (Intercepted Communications) traffic, and the manoeuvring of these personnel and we believe their ultimate intent is to come down in this area and engage friendlies at this point’. ⁶⁶ The bodies of the ‘personnel’ are outlined from intercepted communication signals and their manoeuvres, such as of ‘moving tactically’ and egressing trucks holding ‘cylindrical objects’, captured on the visual feed. The bodies so deciphered are simultaneously imbricated with ‘beliefs’ about their ‘ultimate intent’ which is nonetheless read only in relation to ‘friendlies’ on ground.

Furthermore, the ‘other’ bodies are determinately digitised. Consider the following exchange with respect to PID of weapons.

While invisible bodily propensities, like heat signatures, can also be tracked with the drone’s sensory perception, the question of precise embodiment remains suspect here. As this brief exchange suggests, there is considerable scope for the data to present bodies differently, subject to the reading of the drone’s eyes. Bodies are being determined here from the trace of bodily inclinations and dispositions discovered on screens. The ‘warm spot’ could be a trace of where a person was sitting, a rifle, or just about any object. The drone virtually breaks bodies down into information which is then virtually pieced back together, roughly, as a digital puzzle by those who are looking/tracking. Becoming-target is part of the drone assemblage’s force field, evolving from within the processes, both representational and cognitive, that situate movement. As the sensor operator describes, the rifle is made simultaneous to the tracked body, always on it but only susceptible to the autonomous gaze when displaced in relation to body. The flash of the muzzle or the slinging of the rifle across the shoulder is what presents the rifle, and with it the body, to the ‘looking’ gaze that seeks to see something. Movement is found outside of the body, in the rifle, and of the gaze.

Additionally, at the risk of distending the evocation of hope, I do find its appearance revealing here. That they ‘hope’ to ‘make a rifle out’ suggests that identification is not only a matter of recognition and attribution but a process engendered in response to the tracing of movement. This is also demonstrated by the screener’s response detailing his processual identification of given objects which is based on his encounters within drone assemblages and not fixed matrices of power. It is intensively based in his readings of movement as tracings of bodies and objects. At the same time, the pilot’s particular evocation of hope in this situation reflects how the drone assemblage appropriates the affective unto itself and negates a similar processual response-ability of the ‘other’. The ‘hope’ is to discern weapons, subsequent killing is guaranteed. This self-assured victory is suggestive of the drone’s predetermined emptying of targets’ movement’s capacity to become in response. The outcomes are always already known in the building of the narrative. The ethical imbalance that Chamayou has pointed out is painfully visible here. However, it exceeds the nullifying of reciprocity: it is the pre-emptive delimitation of the other’s relational field of response-ability by way of an absolute ethical refusal to think-with, move-with movement.

Again around the need to PID weapons, the following exchange takes place.

Bodies-as-outlines are emphatically positioned and recognised from the perspective of the weapon’s landscape. Repeatedly the references are situated around technologies of the virtual landscape on the screen. ‘The guy under the north arrow’ is conjectured to be holding something ‘across his chest’. This distinctly underscores that the ‘real’ is only held concurrent to what is realised on screens that the pilot and the sensor operator are looking at. The relational field of movement far exceeds this digital delimitation. The digitised location of the ‘guy’ under the north arrow on the screen corresponds to the digitisation of the body. In the very next moment, ‘they all’ appear to be holding things across their chests by virtue of the cold spots on them. It seems to catch on like an internal malaise, an endemic condition. And once again, the pilot responds to what he is looking at by casting the interiority of relations as a response to question of PID and American military presence within Afghanistan. An aspect as intimate as clothing is casually derided as a ‘man-dress’, something ostensibly derogatory within American military culture, and then further cast as villainy and an offensive provocation to the teams so desperately seeking to PID weapons. The ‘man-dresses’ become part of all the ways ‘they’ hide their weapons. ‘They’ does not only obfuscate distinction between combatants and civilians, but also brings within its vast sweep all the intensities of movement through which relations move in ‘their’ territory.

This preoccupation with deriding and debilitating relations extends to and folds itself over the whole space as it emerges within the drone’s hold. Relations between the land, the river, the vehicles, and the human bodies within the vehicles and outside are through this auditory gaze captured within a weapon-enemy configuration. When the vehicles start to cross through the river, the eyes are unsettled with the phenomenon because it does not fit in with rational ways of navigating terrain.

From within their virtual battlespace, the pilot and the sensor operator can arrive at no sense of the high mountain desert terrain of Afghanistan. Vehicles traversing through the river are a sight completely out of the ordinary. For the rational subject of drone eyes, a relationscape in its particular ways of moving-with is bizarre, out of the blue, and something that justifies the decision of ‘them’ being worthy of getting shot. The drone eyes seemingly cannot grapple with the particular conditions of a terrain, a landscape, as extraordinarily harsh and simply put, different, as the cold Afghani desert. The drone assemblage is thus displacing whole relations, rendering them out of place. The contours and features through which a space becomes are read as signs and markers in order to delineate positions and demarcate bodies on screen. That what for the drone assemblage are signs of tracking a territory are spatial relations that vibrate through everyday durational rhythms, underscores the devastating inequality of relations within the drone regime. Relational spaces are deconstructed into nothingness – ‘an appropriation, aping, and reversing of the action of creating itself’. ⁷⁰

This point in the exchange comes long past any pretence of surveillance for the sake of arriving at a PID has been all but shed. Instead, the ‘tactical engagement’ is now about finding all possible justifications for annihilating these relations that are so extraordinarily out of place for American eyes, albeit within the very space these relations engender. As much is also expressly stated by the pilot a little later when he announces, ‘can’t wait till this actually happens, with all this coordination and *expletive*’, and receives ‘agreement noises from crew’. ⁷¹ ‘All this coordination’ must necessarily lead to the actualisation of what they came to do. The affective is again confined within the interiority of the drone spacetime while demonstrating an indifferent bloodlust radiating towards the ‘other’. Once again, the sheer abstraction of the drone assemblage from these unknown spaces affords much of this comfort. But it also renders the hunter/hunted dynamic questionable, since the pursuit and chase is a deeply relational and infinitely recomposing movement that moves through whole ecologies. It is not a relation of simply killing from afar but involves the gathering in and moving of multiple relational fields. The predator necessarily becomes-with the durational rhythm of not just the prey’s movement but the relational movement of the ecology as a whole as the chase moves through space. The relational intensities pass through, fold over, and turn around spatial emergences in the unfolding of the pursuit. The drone assemblage on the contrary is significantly crippled in its encounter with, or even recognition of, the virtual. The drone assemblage is not creating the target space around the pursuit, only digitising visible patterns and displacements in order to define its own pathways towards the target.

Interviews conducted in the aftermath of the massacre with survivors revealed that various considerations and deliberations had led the convoy to take the particular route.

Because that was a short cut and the vehicles were running out of fuel and we didn’t have more fuel so we chose a shorter way. That was a part of the discussion that this was the Taliban controlled area that they were going to travel on. ⁷²

The ‘they’ that the drone eyes fixate on is a relationscape of pathways, concerns, vehicular relations, and emergent threats that bodies movement in specific ways. The convoy had chosen to take this particular route out of concerns that were never truly devoid of fear from the very beginning. The urgency of running out of fuel outweighed the risk of going through a Taliban controlled area, possibly because of this group of people’s need to get to Kandahar for the various reasons they were all heading there. The drone only saw the actualised movement – movement that has perished in its articulation and reduced to displacement – but not the incipience that propelled it: not in the anxiety of being low on fuel and not having more of it, not in the fear of going through a Taliban controlled area, or the urgency of getting to their destination that led them to make the journey, notwithstanding its perils.

The target is finally cobbled together by the JAC into one whole ‘from the weapons we have identified and the demographic of the individuals plus the ICOM’. The possibility of children being there, first identified by civilian screeners in Florida but conveniently overcome by the drone crew by suggesting that they look like ‘adolescents’, is altogether discarded when the JAC warns that a child of ‘12-13 years old with a weapon is just as dangerous’. The weapons, that were not there in the first place, that were forcefully read out of shapes and object, are made to identify bodies as dangerous – bodies of children turned into adolescents, turned into weapons, turned into danger. Similarly, the demography of individuals that the JAC was so sure of was patched together by the drone crew out of supposed bodies of ‘military aged males’ and ‘ICOM chatter’. Once again, a group of people consisting of men, women, and children, folded into a ‘demography’ of bodies and signals are read within a specifically militarised grammar of movement. To speak through Manning, ‘the real danger is not that the body will be kept still, but that a politics will be written onto the body that resists engaging with the movement that is intrinsic to the relations between bodies and worlds’. ⁷³ The drone assemblage writes precisely such a politics on the bodies that it stalks and preys upon. Regardless of whether they are eventually killed or spared, the sheer act of its sustained surveillance from the skies – of a number of eyes watching life unfold in its intimacy, without being seen, and reading without moving-with – is already a negation of that essential movement that creates bodies and worlds out of relations.

Conclusion

In this article, I have interposed the concept of the ‘virtual’, specifically virtual movement, in the critical study of drones. Drawing from Erin Manning, I have argued for the need to explore the processual immediacy and indeterminacy within drone assemblages and have also identified political violence as the disruption, stultification, and dismemberment of relational becoming. I have offered a reading of the transcripts of the Uruzgan massacre in 2010 where I have mapped the processual relations that engendered the digitisation of target bodies and spaces and crippled the relational movement therein, eventually leading to the killing of unsuspecting civilians. I have argued that the drone assemblage is an emergent relation that creates digitised bodies as it moves. In the digitisation of bodies, the drone assemblage is unable to respond to the virtuality that informs movement and creates bodies and spaces. The drone only responds to its digitised creation, not the movement-moving through space. This marks the violence of the drone assemblage in that first, it can only comprehend movement as displacement and second, it pre-empts the targets bodies’ responsivity to the environment they move in. This is also how I understand political violence: the crippling of relational movement and relations of becoming in the untethering of bodies from the capacity to respond to and move-with spacetimes. This understanding stems from the notion of the posthuman that informs my argument, where movement is the creative force, composing relationscapes of bodies, spaces, and affects as it moves through them. Thus, two core contributions of this article can be identified: first, thinking the drone assemblage’s violence through its processuality which engenders digitised bodies and spaces, divorced from the virtuality of movement. Second, rethinking the posthuman as a methodological point of departure where instead of tracing actors, objects, or outcomes, movement and its processual relations are mapped.

Beyond drones, the methodological engagement with posthuman becoming is integral to the critical recognition that Western discourses of domination have enabled their violence by centring, posturing, and defining the human. The human has always been the marker and driver of civilisational ascendance. This centred ‘human’ has been universalised to the extent that much of the scholarship arguing against discourses and practices of domination always already positions the human at the helm. Not only does this leave out the infinite other-than-human becomings populating the world, it also excludes the ways and meanings of becoming human outside of poorly defined, yet powerfully circulated, universals. Multiplicity arrives as a solution begetting the addition of alternatives and perspectives to such pregiven categories as culture, social, and political. Within the posthuman relational framework, bodies are always already multiple, and multiplicity is a matter of the relations that configure and reconfigure bodies and spaces. Instead of being envisaged as unities that can be added as numbers to ensure the generation of multiplicity, individuals are thought through their multiple immanent relations that make them shape-shifting multiple wholes. The virtual gathers in this multiple relationality into an indeterminate force field which is generative of movement. At the level of methodology, the posthuman does not introduce a radically new proposition: it founds a conceptual framework for the most intimate affinities and indeterminacies of becoming and worlding. As Manning postulates, ‘we have always been posthuman’, to the extent that we always exceed our ‘humanistically static’ bodies. ⁷⁴

This has significant implications for the reimagination of discourses which continue to rely heavily on humanistic imaginations of bodies, borders, spaces, violence, and so on. What is novel in the posthuman vocabulary is the recognition that movement bodies spaces, and there is no movement that is not relational. To make movement and relational composition of bodies and worlds as the subject of a relational methodology and focus is to recognise shared becomings. A relational approach allows into focus the pervasive violence of regimes that are reliant on the debasement of the intrinsic movement of life-worlds. This is as true for colonial ‘conquest’ of territories and peoples as it is for the corporatised destruction of species and environments. Recognising, addressing, and thinking through relational movement are fundamentally significant for engaging with political violence without winding it around human perspective.