Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or drones, are increasingly employed for military purposes. They are extolled for improving operational endurance and targeting precision on the one hand and keeping drone crew from harm on the other. In the midst of such praise, what falls by the wayside is an entangled set of concerns about the ways in which the relationship between the pilots and their operational environment is being reconfigured. This paper traces the various manifestations of this reconfiguration and goes on to situate our being-with drones in a broader set of sociotechnical practices that shape our understanding of visual technologies. Our inquiry is grounded in technical reports of performance, media coverage of accidents, as well as a detailed first-person account of a former drone pilot. Our analysis suggests that being-with drones is disciplining our perception in subtle ways that remain underexplored. We conclude that when it comes to appraising technologies that interface with the human sensorium, functionalist claims of enhancement are inadequate to the task and propose that phenomenology’s commitment to the phenomena themselves can serve as a useful corrective.
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Notes
Mindell (2015) notes that about half a second of control delay is due to the speed of light. The rest occurs “in video compressors, routers, and all the other equipment that processes the data” (p. 117).
Following Merleau-Ponty, Highmore (2010) makes an intriguing suggestion in this regard. He invites us to think of synesthesia – the condition where stimulation of neural pathways typically associated with one sensory modality invokes involuntary sensations in another modality, e.g. numbers appear to have a specific color – as “an extreme case of a more general condition of sensual interconnection” (p. 120).
We have deliberately avoided the descriptor that Ihde (1990) as well as the rest of the postphenomenological tradition has used for this relation: “hermeneutic.” Our concern here is that contrasting embodiment and hermeneutics, as postphenomenology tends to do, will end up reproducing some of the stifling dichotomies that relational thinking was expected to overcome. A more thorough-going relationism takes material semiotics seriously and recognizes, with Latour (2005), that hermeneutics “is not a privilege of humans but…a property of the world itself” (p. 245).
Appeal to MAM has not been restricted to targeting. MAM has also been used to label potential collateral casualties post strike. As an intelligence community source recently told The Intercept, “‘[i]f there is no evidence that proves a person killed in a strike was either not a MAM, or was a MAM but not an unlawful enemy combatant, then there is no question… They label them EKIA [Enemy Killed In Action]’” (Devereaux 2015).
This distinction is doubly critical in contexts where drones are currently being deployed—e.g. Afghanistan, Iraq, or Yemen. Here, geographic boundaries around the combat theater are difficult to draw and combatants commonly mingle with the civilian population.
Edwards (1997) has charted the emergence of this style of thinking, what he calls the “cyborg discourse,” from the networks of people and technologies that were formed during World War II and the Cold War, Ekbia (2008) has traced its dogged persistence in various schools of thought in Artificial Intelligence, and Bardzell (2011) has critiqued its inadequacy when dealing with the full range of human computer interactions.
From the perspective of postphenomenology, the drone, like other visual technologies, is an epistemology engine, i.e. a technology that propagates its inscribed epistemology. For posthumanist scholars in STS, however, drones are ontology engines that can help us think better about possible life-matter symbioses. It should be clear by now that despite the usefulness of the phenomenological lens, our metaphysics is more in line with posthumanism. For an insightful juxtaposition of the two views, see (Pickering 2006).
The Intercept summarizes the mentality of the military as one where there is confidence that “[t]his process can work. We can work out the kinks. We can excuse the mistakes. And eventually we will get it down to the point where we don’t have to continuously come back… and explain why a bunch of innocent people got killed” (Scahill 2015).
Clark (2008), an otherwise sympathetic advocate of embodiment in mainstream cognitive science, goes so far as to charge those who take all bodily details to be implicated in perceptual experience with “sensorimotor chauvinism.”
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Acknowledgements
Parts of this paper have been previously presented in the Collective Intentionality IX conference held at Indiana University Bloomington as well as the 2015 Annual 4S Meeting in Denver. We are grateful to the organizers and participants of both events. Anonymous reviewers of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science gave valuable feedback that challenged and improved the paper. Darian Meacham provided advice, support, and many constructive comments.
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Qaurooni, D., Ekbia, H. The “enhanced” warrior: drone warfare and the problematics of separation. Phenom Cogn Sci 16, 53–73 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-016-9481-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-016-9481-z