Indefinite Detention 1ac version 1

Guantanamo represents a global discourse of punishment that has become legally accepted which normalizes divisions based upon gender, race, and class.
This transforms the sovereign into a punishment machine, making violence inevitable and turning the prisoners at Guantanomo into the personification of homo sacer –the space between two deaths…. Just ghost detainees who aren’t fit to live but aren’t fit to die.
Brown 5 (Professor of Crimonolgy and Sociology at Ohio State, 2005 (American Quarterly,
57:3, 973-977, MUSE)
Abu Ghraib, like Guantanamo and other U.S. military prisons, marks the kind of penal
expansion that takes place in the context of wars with no end: wars on drugs, crime, and terror. In the U.S., we imprison more than anyone in the world and more than any other society has ever imprisoned for the purposes of crime control, and we do so in a manner that is defined by race.57 This unprecedented use of imprisonment has largely taken place outside
of democratic checks or public interest, in disregard of decades of work by penal scholars and activists who have introduced a vocabulary of warning through terms such as "penological crisis," "incarceration binge," "prison-industrial complex," and the "warehousing" of offenders.
Such massive expansion has direct effects upon the private lives of prisoners, prison workers,
their families, and their communities. I have tried, at least, to point to the ways in which these effects may extend far beyond their immediate contexts into a potential reconfiguration of public life. Such unprecedented penal expenditures mark the global emergence of a new discourse of punishment, one whose racial divisions and abusive practices are revised into a technical, legal language of acceptability, one in which Americans are conveniently further distanced from the social realities of punishment through strategies of isolation and exclusion, all conducted in a manner and on a scale that exacerbates the fundamental class, race, and
gender contradictions and divisions of democracy. In this respect, the "new war prison" is constituted by both material practices and a discursive language whose expansion and
intensification need recognize no limits, no borders, no bounds. I have used punishment and torture interchangeably across this piece, not because I believe they are without distinction or difference, but because I believe, as history and social theory teach us, that they are grounded in the same fundamental practice: the infliction of pain. Because punishment carries pain,
rupture, and trauma with it, its implementation will always be fundamentally tragic. Torture, then, is not incidental to punishment. It is at its core. Instead of accepting this reality, the history of the practice and study of punishment is marred by an assumption that intention matters, that explanations and justifications define punishment and its appropriate use, and
that the law can control its violence. However, these kinds of assumptions conceal the
presence of the law itself. When punishment is invoked, it is always intended to remind the people of the power and presence of the state. However, this is an invocation that is precisely meant to be avoided in democratic contexts, as strong governments have no need to rely upon force. According to both Nietzsche and Durkheim, it is a weak state that will resort to a display offeree and violence. Any regime that decides to inflict pain and harm will inevitably find itself caught up in a unique social institution whose essence is violence and whose justifications are
inherently problematic. Punishment is, thus, always most usefully understood at its most elemental level: as a bloodlust for revenge, one whose essence is passion, unreason, anger, and emotion, whose invocation is highly individualized, subjective, and personal, an insatiable

urge that knows no limits. In such a setting, as sociolegal scholar Austin Sarat argues, a
"wildness" is introduced into the "house of law," wherein "private becomes public and public
becomes private; passion is introduced into the temple of reason, and yet passion itself is subject to the discipline of reason. Every effort to distinguish revenge and retribution nevertheless reveals that Vengeance arrives among us in a judicious disguise.'"58 The vengeance that underlies the implied calm reason of systematic, procedural, proportional retribution cannot be repressed and is evidenced in contemporary patterns of punishment in the United States that often defy a rational logic of any kind. Any solidarity or sociality gained at the price of such punishment, then, speaks not only to the end of democracy but of
humanity as well. And so we went from September 11 to a war on terror, from Abu Ghraib to the summer of beheadings in an endless repetition whose limits are defined currently only in the possibility of sheer exhaustion. For American studies, this means that Abu Ghraib operates at a series of intersections and borders that have rendered the fundamental contradictions of
imprisonment in a democratic context acutely visible, if only temporarily. As the impossible case for democracy, the "scandal" at Abu Ghraib reveals how an unmarked proliferation of penal discourses, technologies, and institutions not only "set the conditions" for the grossest violations of democratic values but revealed the normalcy and acceptability of these kinds of
practices in spaces beyond and between the law. Consequently, Abu Ghraib falls within a distinct category of legal and territorial borders, those spaces that sociolegal scholar Susan
Bibler Coutin observes "defy categories and paradigms, that 'don't fit,' and that therefore reveal the criteria that determine fittedness, spaces whose very existence is simultaneously
denied and demanded by the socially powerful." Capturing the sense of doubleness that characterizes Abu Ghraib, she describes these "targets of repression and zones of militarization" as contradictory spaces that "are marginalized yet strategic, inviolate yet
continually violated, forgotten yet significant."59 Many peoples exist at these borders, and all stories may be told there. But, and this is of crucial significance, there is no guarantee that these stories will be told. So much of the writing and thought surrounding the borderlands has been directed at the development of a new social vision, derived from the pain of history and experience, but grounded in the celebratory justice of the inevitable, vindicating arrival of the
hybrid. As Gloria Anzaldua insists, "En unaspocas centurias, the future will belong to the mestiza."60 Yet Abu Ghraib falls squarely into the kind of border zone that cannot be
celebrated, a subaltern site where many stories and voices will never be told or heard, no matter how we reconstruct its history and its events. Judith Butler observes that the subject outside of the law "is neither alive nor dead, neither fully constituted as a subject nor fully
deconstituted in death."61 Under Saddam Hussein's rule, numberless thousands were lost in the prison. Under American occupation, "ghost detainees" were a prevalent problem,
unidentified, vanished inside the institution's own lost accountability. As Zizek points out, these individuals constitute the "living dead," those missed by bombs in the battlefield, "their
right to life forfeited by their having been the legitimate targets of murderous bombings." This positioning has direct impact upon the legal privilege of their captors: "And just as the
Guantánamo prisoners are located, like homo sacer, in the space 'between two deaths,' but
biologically are still alive, the U.S. authorities that treat them in this way also have an indeterminate legal status. They set themselves up as a legal power, but their acts are no longer covered and constrained by the law: they operate in an empty space which is, nevertheless, within the domain of the law."62 The spectacle of abuse at Abu Ghraib makes plain the consequences of putting prisoners and custodians in this space "between two deaths," a legal borderland filled with spectral violence, a space packed with people and yet profoundly
empty of its humanity. Bibler Coutin writes, "I cannot celebrate the space of nonexistence. Even

if this space is in some ways subversive, even if its boundaries are permeable, and even if it is
sometimes irrelevant to individuals' everyday lives, nonexistence can be deadly."63 When writing of Abu Ghraib, I find myself in a similar space, peering in at a border whose history, purpose, and foundations prevent it from being redeemed or reclaimed, its terrorized inhabitants the essence of Anzaldua's "zero, nothing, no one."64 Abu Ghraib reminds us then of the pains we had hoped to transcend, of the "intimate terrorism" we had hoped to end, of the bloody sovereignty we had hoped to eclipse in a postnational context.65 As Anzaldua observed of "life in the borderlands" nearly two decades ago: The world is not a safe place to live in. We shiver in separate cells in enclosed cities, shoulders hunched, barely keeping the panic below the surface of the skin, daily drinking shock along with our morning coffee, fearing the torches being set to our buildings, the attacks in the street. Shutting down . . . The ability to respond is what is meant by responsibility, yet our cultures take away our ability to act-shackle us in the
name of protection. Blocked, immobilized, we can't move forward, we can't move backwards.
That writhing serpent movement, the very movement of life, swifter than lightning. Frozen.66 In the working vocabulary and memory of a penal culture, Abu Ghraib remains a border lost to us, accessible only through the fixed and frozen images that remind us of its irrevocableness. We
find ourselves, in a sense, at a new border that is very old, caught at the crossroads, left alone with America, asking, and with considerable trepidation, what will our futures be?

Torture is a systematic oppression that kills agency and value to life. It’s a technique of perpetual dying.
Wolfgang 1999 (German Philosopher, Anthropologist- professor at Universities of Gottingen
& Erfurt. [Sofsky, "The endurance of impotence: The dynamics of persecutory violence,"
International Psychoanalysis Newsletter,)
The prisoners will be incarcerated or put into camps and, not rarely, are there subjected to torture. As a method of punitive and loyal justice, torture has a long prehistory which goes back to the early tyrannies. However, in the 20th century, torture has been systematized as a means of national persecution terror and been handed over to special units of the police, the military
or the militia. Its executors have invented a multitude of new methods and have freed torture from the aims of finding the truth. Contrary to a widely held view, torture is not a means to extort confessions, information or proofs. Whatever may be declared the official aim, torture is not an instrument of interrogation, for the ultimate aim of torture is not to get the victim to talk but rather to silence him. The model of the duel, of a trial of strength of the will, is a bagatellization. Torture eliminates action and breaks the person through pain, panic and isolation. The victim is totally in the hands of the perpetrator and is at the mercy of his whims, rage, lust and destructive will. Any part of his body, any of his attitudes or stirrings can be
used as a point of attack for the tormentors. Torture transforms the person into an organism, into a living piece of flesh. It tests physical reactions, generates pain and forces the tortured one to scream His insides are turned outwards, his language stifled in pain. The tortured person no longer experiences his body as a source of his own force for action. In the frenzy of pain, his
own body itself becomes his enemy. It is his body which confronts him with the suffering from which he cannot escape, however much he grits his teeth. The mortal enemy is within himself, rages in his inside and destroys the final resistance. Torture is by no means restricted to external wounds. It splits the person through the centre into two parts. Since the victim's body becomes the accomplice of the torture, it destroys the somatic relation to himself and with it the foundation of his will, his speech, his soul, his psyche. Torture, therefore, is not a technique of killing but of perpetual dying. What torture is on a small scale, the concentration camp is on a large scale. It is not the sudden death which contains the meaning of this institution but the
continuous presence of the torment. The camp is the central institution of persecutory terror in the 20th century. It serves the imprisonment of political enemies less than the transformation and extinction of those who are redundant. In the midst of society and set into a complex mesh of political and economical institutions, the concentration camp is a cosmos at the border of the social world, a universum of unparalleled destructivity

The United States federal government should repeal the 2001 Authorization to
Use Military Force act.

The plan is a crucial part of the process of making torture visible that gives a voice to the unheard screams of those who lie in the darkness of Guantanamo cells and torture chambers
Scarry 87 (Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, Elaine, The Body in Pain, 1987, BH)
In this closed world where conversation is displaced by interrogation, where human speech is
broken off in confession and disintegrates into human cries, where even those cries can be broken off to become one more weapon against the person himself or against a friend, in this world of broken and severed voices, it is not surprising that the most powerful and healing moment is often that in which a human voice, though still severed, floating free, somehow reaches the person whose sole reality had become his own unthinkable isolation, his deep
corporeal engulfment. The prisoner who, alone in long solitary confinement and repeatedly tortured, found within a loaf of bread a matchbox containing a small piece of paper that had written on it the single, whispered word "Corragio!", "Take courage";59 the Uruguayan man arranging for some tangible signal that his words had reached their destination, "My darling, if you receive this letter put a half a bar of Boa soap in the next parcel";60 the imprisoned Chilean women who on Christmas Eve sang with all their might to their men in a separate camp the song they had written, "Take heart* Jose, my love" and who, through the abusive shouts of guards ordering silence, heard "faintly on the wind... the answering song of the men"61—these acts and their multiplication in the extensive and ongoing attempts of Amnesty International to restore to each person tortured his or her voice, to use language to let pain give an accurate account of itself, to present regimes that torture with a deluge of letters and telegrams, a deluge of voices speaking on behalf of, voices speaking in the voice of, the person silenced, these acts that return to the prisoner his most elemental political ground as well as his psychic content and density are finally almost physiological in their power of alteration. As torture consists of acts that magnify the way in which pain destroys a person's world, self, and voice, so these other acts that restore the voice become not only a denunciation of the pain but almost a diminution of the pain, a partial reversal of the process of torture itself. An act of
human contact and concern, whether occurring here or in private contexts of sympathy, provides the hurt person with worldly self-extension: in acknowledging and expressing another person's pain, or in articulating one of his nonbodily concerns while he is unable to, one human being who is well and free willingly turns himself into an image of the other's psychic or sentient claims, an image existing in the space outside the sufferer's body, projected out into the world and held there intact by that person's powers until the sufferer himself regains his own powers of self-extension. By holding that world in place, or by giving the pain a place in the world, sympathy lessens the power of sickness and pain, counteracts
the force with which a person in great pain or sickness can be swallowed alive by the body.

The federal Courts don’t have jurisdiction over Guantanamo – the President has the authority and power to address the issue.
Frommer 13
(Frederic, USA Today, 7.16.13, “US Judge Turns Down Bid to End Gitmo Force-Feeding”, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/07/16/judge-rules-on-gitmo-force-feeding/2521535/,
WASHINGTON (AP) —
A federal judge Tuesday turned down a bid by three Guantanamo Bay detainees on a hunger strike to stop the government from force-feeding them
. Judge Rosemary M.
Collyer ruled that she doesn't have jurisdiction in the case , because Congress has removed
Guantanamo detainees' treatment and conditions of confinement from the purview of federal courts
. She said there was "nothing so shocking or inhumane in the treatment" that would raise a constitutional concern. Collyer, an appointee of
President George W. Bush, wrote that even if she did have jurisdiction, she would deny the detainees' motion for an injunction.
While the effort is framed as a motion to stop force-feeding, the prisoners' "real complaint is that the
U nited
S tates is not allowing them to commit suicide by starvation
," she wrote. She said that the United States cannot allow a person in custody to die of self-inflicted starvation, and that numerous courts have recognized the government's duty to prevent suicide and to provide life-saving nutritional and medical care to people in custody. The three men, Shaker Aamer, Nabil Hadjarab and Ahmed Belbacha, have all been cleared for release but remain at Guantanamo. Jon Eisenberg, one of the attorneys for the detainees, said Collyer was wrong when she said the detainees are demanding a right to commit suicide. "
She has misunderstood the purpose of the hunger strike. It's not to commit suicide, it's to protest indefinite detention
," he said.
As to her conclusion that there was nothing inhumane about force-feeding
, Eisenberg said, "
Human rights advocates, medical ethicists and religious leaders say otherwise
." He said the lawyers were considering an appeal. Another judge, Gladys Kessler, turned down a similar case last week, also concluding that she lacked jurisdiction. But she called force-feeding a "painful, humiliating and degrading process." Kessler, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, wrote that there is one person who does have the authority to address the issue
— and then quoted a recent speech from President Barack Obama in which he criticized the forcefeeding of the prisoners at Guantanamo as he said he would renew his efforts to close the prison. "
The president
of the United States, as commander in chief, has the authority
— and power
— to directly address the issue of force-feeding of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay,"
she wrote. Lawyers for prisoners say the most recent hunger strike began
in February as a protest of conditions and their indefinite confinement at the U.S. base in
Cuba.
As of Tuesday,
the military said, a little under half of the 166 detainees were participating in the hunger strike.

Indefinite Detention 1ac version 2
Even at this hour, beads of sweat crawled across his scalp. By the time the sun was up it would be another day for the black flag, which the Army hoisted whenever the temperature rose beyond reason. An apt symbol, Falk thought, like some rectangular hole in the sky that you might fall into, never to reappear.
A national banner for Camp Delta's Republic of Nobody, populated by 640 prisoners from forty countries, none of whom had the slightest idea how long they would be here. (Dan Fesperman, The Prisoner of Guantanamo)

Guantanamo represents a global discourse of punishment that has become legally accepted which normalizes divisions based upon gender, race, and class.
This transforms the sovereign into a punishment machine, making violence inevitable and turning the prisoners at Guantanomo into the personification of homo sacer –the space between two deaths…. Just ghost detainees who aren’t fit to live but aren’t fit to die.
Brown 5 (Professor of Crimonolgy and Sociology at Ohio State, 2005 (American Quarterly,
57:3, 973-977, MUSE)
Abu Ghraib, like Guantanamo and other U.S. military prisons, marks the kind of penal
expansion that takes place in the context of wars with no end: wars on drugs, crime, and terror. In the U.S., we imprison more than anyone in the world and more than any other society has ever imprisoned for the purposes of crime control, and we do so in a manner that is defined by race.57 This unprecedented use of imprisonment has largely taken place outside
of democratic checks or public interest, in disregard of decades of work by penal scholars and activists who have introduced a vocabulary of warning through terms such as "penological crisis," "incarceration binge," "prison-industrial complex," and the "warehousing" of offenders.
Such massive expansion has direct effects upon the private lives of prisoners, prison workers,
their families, and their communities. I have tried, at least, to point to the ways in which these effects may extend far beyond their immediate contexts into a potential reconfiguration of public life. Such unprecedented penal expenditures mark the global emergence of a new discourse of punishment, one whose racial divisions and abusive practices are revised into a technical, legal language of acceptability, one in which Americans are conveniently further distanced from the social realities of punishment through strategies of isolation and exclusion, all conducted in a manner and on a scale that exacerbates the fundamental class, race, and
gender contradictions and divisions of democracy. In this respect, the "new war prison" is constituted by both material practices and a discursive language whose expansion and
intensification need recognize no limits, no borders, no bounds. I have used punishment and torture interchangeably across this piece, not because I believe they are without distinction or difference, but because I believe, as history and social theory teach us, that they are grounded in the same fundamental practice: the infliction of pain. Because punishment carries pain,
rupture, and trauma with it, its implementation will always be fundamentally tragic. Torture, then, is not incidental to punishment. It is at its core. Instead of accepting this reality, the history of the practice and study of punishment is marred by an assumption that intention matters, that explanations and justifications define punishment and its appropriate use, and
that the law can control its violence. However, these kinds of assumptions conceal the
presence of the law itself. When punishment is invoked, it is always intended to remind the people of the power and presence of the state. However, this is an invocation that is precisely meant to be avoided in democratic contexts, as strong governments have no need to rely upon force. According to both Nietzsche and Durkheim, it is a weak state that will resort to a display offeree and violence. Any regime that decides to inflict pain and harm will inevitably find itself caught up in a unique social institution whose essence is violence and whose justifications are
inherently problematic. Punishment is, thus, always most usefully understood at its most elemental level: as a bloodlust for revenge, one whose essence is passion, unreason, anger,

and emotion, whose invocation is highly individualized, subjective, and personal, an insatiable urge that knows no limits. In such a setting, as sociolegal scholar Austin Sarat argues, a
"wildness" is introduced into the "house of law," wherein "private becomes public and public
becomes private; passion is introduced into the temple of reason, and yet passion itself is subject to the discipline of reason. Every effort to distinguish revenge and retribution nevertheless reveals that Vengeance arrives among us in a judicious disguise.'"58 The vengeance that underlies the implied calm reason of systematic, procedural, proportional retribution cannot be repressed and is evidenced in contemporary patterns of punishment in the United States that often defy a rational logic of any kind. Any solidarity or sociality gained at the price of such punishment, then, speaks not only to the end of democracy but of
humanity as well. And so we went from September 11 to a war on terror, from Abu Ghraib to the summer of beheadings in an endless repetition whose limits are defined currently only in the possibility of sheer exhaustion. For American studies, this means that Abu Ghraib operates at a series of intersections and borders that have rendered the fundamental contradictions of
imprisonment in a democratic context acutely visible, if only temporarily. As the impossible case for democracy, the "scandal" at Abu Ghraib reveals how an unmarked proliferation of penal discourses, technologies, and institutions not only "set the conditions" for the grossest violations of democratic values but revealed the normalcy and acceptability of these kinds of
practices in spaces beyond and between the law. Consequently, Abu Ghraib falls within a distinct category of legal and territorial borders, those spaces that sociolegal scholar Susan
Bibler Coutin observes "defy categories and paradigms, that 'don't fit,' and that therefore reveal the criteria that determine fittedness, spaces whose very existence is simultaneously
denied and demanded by the socially powerful." Capturing the sense of doubleness that characterizes Abu Ghraib, she describes these "targets of repression and zones of militarization" as contradictory spaces that "are marginalized yet strategic, inviolate yet
continually violated, forgotten yet significant."59 Many peoples exist at these borders, and all stories may be told there. But, and this is of crucial significance, there is no guarantee that these stories will be told. So much of the writing and thought surrounding the borderlands has been directed at the development of a new social vision, derived from the pain of history and experience, but grounded in the celebratory justice of the inevitable, vindicating arrival of the
hybrid. As Gloria Anzaldua insists, "En unaspocas centurias, the future will belong to the mestiza."60 Yet Abu Ghraib falls squarely into the kind of border zone that cannot be
celebrated, a subaltern site where many stories and voices will never be told or heard, no matter how we reconstruct its history and its events. Judith Butler observes that the subject outside of the law "is neither alive nor dead, neither fully constituted as a subject nor fully
deconstituted in death."61 Under Saddam Hussein's rule, numberless thousands were lost in the prison. Under American occupation, "ghost detainees" were a prevalent problem,
unidentified, vanished inside the institution's own lost accountability. As Zizek points out, these individuals constitute the "living dead," those missed by bombs in the battlefield, "their
right to life forfeited by their having been the legitimate targets of murderous bombings." This positioning has direct impact upon the legal privilege of their captors: "And just as the
Guantánamo prisoners are located, like homo sacer, in the space 'between two deaths,' but
biologically are still alive, the U.S. authorities that treat them in this way also have an indeterminate legal status. They set themselves up as a legal power, but their acts are no longer covered and constrained by the law: they operate in an empty space which is, nevertheless, within the domain of the law."62 The spectacle of abuse at Abu Ghraib makes plain the consequences of putting prisoners and custodians in this space "between two deaths," a legal borderland filled with spectral violence, a space packed with people and yet profoundly

empty of its humanity. Bibler Coutin writes, "I cannot celebrate the space of nonexistence. Even if this space is in some ways subversive, even if its boundaries are permeable, and even if it is
sometimes irrelevant to individuals' everyday lives, nonexistence can be deadly."63 When writing of Abu Ghraib, I find myself in a similar space, peering in at a border whose history, purpose, and foundations prevent it from being redeemed or reclaimed, its terrorized inhabitants the essence of Anzaldua's "zero, nothing, no one."64 Abu Ghraib reminds us then of the pains we had hoped to transcend, of the "intimate terrorism" we had hoped to end, of the bloody sovereignty we had hoped to eclipse in a postnational context.65 As Anzaldua observed of "life in the borderlands" nearly two decades ago: The world is not a safe place to live in. We shiver in separate cells in enclosed cities, shoulders hunched, barely keeping the panic below the surface of the skin, daily drinking shock along with our morning coffee, fearing the torches being set to our buildings, the attacks in the street. Shutting down . . . The ability to respond is what is meant by responsibility, yet our cultures take away our ability to act-shackle us in the
name of protection. Blocked, immobilized, we can't move forward, we can't move backwards.
That writhing serpent movement, the very movement of life, swifter than lightning. Frozen.66 In the working vocabulary and memory of a penal culture, Abu Ghraib remains a border lost to us, accessible only through the fixed and frozen images that remind us of its irrevocableness. We
find ourselves, in a sense, at a new border that is very old, caught at the crossroads, left alone with America, asking, and with considerable trepidation, what will our futures be?
Guantanamo Bay is the state of exception par excellance… prisoners in Gitmo are the modern prisoners of Auschwitz, the objects of raw power, the epitome of bare life
Gregory 06 [Derek: PhD, Peter Wall Distinguished Professor, and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the
Space of Exception” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 88, No. 4 (2006), pp.
405-427. Wiley].
Second, Agamben argues that in the contemporary
¶
world the state of exception has become the
¶
rule. Writing while Hitler's armies advanced on
¶
Paris, Benjamin had warned that 'the
"state of¶ emergency" in which we live is not the exception¶ but the rule', and Agamben endorses and enlarges
¶
this claim. 7 Although he notes that concentration
¶
camps first emerged in colonial spaces of exception
¶
in Cuba and South Africa, he passes over these (and
¶
the colonial architecture of power that produced
¶
them) to focus on Nazi concentration camps and, in
¶ particular Auschwitz. He treats the concentration
¶
camp as 'the materialization of the state of exception',
¶
'the pure, absolute and impassable biopolitical
¶
space in which juridical rule and bare life enter
¶
into 'a threshold of indistinction', through which
¶
'law constantly passes over into fact and fact into
¶
law, and in which the two planes become indistinguishable'.
¶
Unlike
Foucault, who identified the
¶
Third Reich as a paroxysmal space in which sovereign
¶
power and biopolitics coincided, however,
¶
Agamben insists that none of this is a rupture from
¶
the project of modernity On the contrary his narrative
¶
is teleological, and he identifies the camp as
¶
'the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity',
¶
and suggests that its operations have been
¶
unfurled to such a degree that today, through the
¶
multiplication of the camp as a carceral archipelago,
¶
the state of exception has 'reached its maximum
¶
worldwide deployment'. By this means that sovereign
¶
power has produced both an intensification
¶
and a
proliferation of bare life. If this seems exorbitant,
¶
Agamben is perfectly undeterred'. The normative
¶
aspect of law can thus be obliterated and
¶
contradicted with impunity, he continues, through
¶
a constellation of sovereign power and state violence
¶
that nevertheless still

claims to be applying
¶
the law'. In such a circumstance he concludes, the
¶
camp has become 'the new biopolitical nomos of
¶
the planet' and 'the juridico-political system [has
¶
transformed it self into a killing machine'.
As Agamben has developed this critique i t is,
¶
above all, the 'war on terror' that has come to be in
¶
his sights.
He argues that the locus par excellence
¶
of this new state of exception is
the US Naval Station ¶ at
Guantanamo Bay,
where from January 2002 ¶ men and boys captured during the US invasion of ¶ Afghanistan have been imprisoned he draws parallels
¶
between the legal status of prisoners in this
¶
camp and prisoners in
Auschwitz: their situations
, ¶ so he says
, are formally - 'paradigmatically-'
¶
equivalent prisoners of a war on terror who are denied the status of prisoners of war,
Agamben argued that their legal status is erased. They are not legal
¶
Subjects but' legally unnamable and unclassifiable
¶
being[s]', 'the object of a pure de facto rule' or a
¶
'raw power' whose modalities are 'entirely removed from the law and from judicial oversight'. In
¶
the detainee at Guantanamo,
he concludes
, 'bare
¶
life reaches its maximum indeterminacy'9
Allowing the state of exception to continue means that the entirety of humanity is at risk of bare life and dehumanization – the ability to demarcate the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the law gives the sovereign ultimate control of life and death
Minca 05 [Claudio: Agamben scholar, Professor and Head of the Cultural Geography chair group at Wageningen University. Holds a Research Professorship at Royal Holloway, University of London and a Visiting Professorship at the College of Tourism, Rikkyo University, Japan.. “The
Return of the Camp” Progress in Human Geography, 29, 4, 405-412]
As long as the state of exception and the
¶
normal situation are kept separate in space
¶
and time, as is usually the case', Agamben
¶
argues, 'both remain opaque, though they
¶
secretly institute each other. But as soon as
¶
they show their complicity, as happens more
¶
and more often today, they illuminate each
¶
other, so to speak, from the inside' (1998a: 44;
¶
2002: 49-50). The selective exhibition of
¶
the Guantanamo detainees and the parallel
¶
willing cancellation of the images and numbers
¶
of civilian casualties in the Iraqi and
¶
Afghan campaigns of the long war on terror
¶
are expressions of a new grammar of global
¶
biopolitics of which Guantfnamo is not only
¶
the most potent symbol, but also one of
¶
the key strategic loci. The homines Sacri of
¶
Guantanamo appear in this logic as a warning
¶
as well as dehumanized human beings; they
¶
are something indistinguishable, but just this
¶
indistinction renders them vital in the new
¶ geographies of exception. This indefinite,
¶
somehow indistinct, structure of the ban
¶
transforms all of us, in fact, into potential
¶
dehumanized human beings, into potential
¶ homines sacri. It is this mobile threshold of
¶
the ban that is constitutive of the war on
¶
terror
that pervades some of our societies
¶
today. This is why the tacit acceptance of the return of the Camp into the political
¶
vocabulary of western democracies marks
¶
the beginning of a new chapter in the production
¶
and deployment of horror. A production
¶
and deployment that are, always and
¶
inescapably, spatial.
¶
The paradoxical status of the camp as a space
¶
of exception must be considered. The camp is
¶
a piece [of territory] placed outside the normal
¶
juridical order, but it is nevertheless not simply
¶
an external space. [ ... ] The Camp is a hybrid
¶
of law and fad in which the two terms have
¶
become indistinguishable. [ ... ] Only because
¶
the camps constitute a space of exception [ ... ]
¶
in which not only is law completely suspended
¶ but fad and law are completely confused - is
¶
everything in the camps truly possible.
¶
(Agamben, 1995:189-90; 1998b: 169-70)
¶
In the Camp, 'the "external" and the "internal"
¶
are articulated not to erase the 'outside'
¶
but to produce it as the serial spacing of the
¶
exception,

for ever inscribing exclusion
¶
through inclusion' (Gregory, 2004b: 258;
¶
emphasis in original).
Sovereign decision
¶
demarcates and reproduces, each time, this
¶
threshold of indifference between inside and
¶
outside, between inclusion and exclusion:
¶
sovereign power is (consists of) this very
¶
impossibility of distinguishing between outside
¶
and inside, nature and exception, physis and
¶
nomos. The state of exception is thus not so
¶
much a spatio-temporal suspension as a
¶
complex topological figure in which not only
¶
the exception and the rule [norm] but also the
¶
state of nature and law, outside and inside, pass
¶
through one another. It is precisely this
¶
topological zone of indistindion [ ... ] that we
¶
must try to fix under our gaze.
(Agamben,
¶
1995: 44; 1998b: 37)
Biopolitics enables wholesale slaughters in the name of life, culminating in genocide and nuclear war
Foucault 78 [Michel, Prof of Philosophy, The History of Sexuality: Vol. 1, p.136-7]
Since the classical age the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power. "Deduction" has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them. There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to define itself accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. But this formidable power of death
—and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits — now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies _and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed.
And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence.
The principle underlying the tactics of battle— that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living—has become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population.
If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.

Prisoners in Guantanamo Bay undertook a hunger strike to protest indefinite detention and torture. The guards are torturing and dehumanizing the prisoners by force-feeding them while they are strapped into a chair.
Worthington 2013 (Andy, “From Guantánamo, Hunger Striker Abdelhadi Faraj Describes the
Agony of Force-Feeding” July 18 th . http://www.worldcantwait.net/index.php/torture/8320from-guantanamo-hunger-striker-abdelhadi-faraj-describes-the-agony-of-force-feeding)
Although I’ve been very busy for the last few months with a steady stream of articles about
Guantánamo and the ongoing hunger strike, I haven’t been able to keep track of everything that has been made available. In terms of publicity, this is an improvement on the years before the hunger strike reminded the world’s media about the ongoing existence of the prison, when stories about Guantánamo often slowed to the merest of trickles, and everyone involved in campaigning to close the prison and to represent the men still held there was, I think it is fair to say, becoming despondent and exhausted.
However, it is also profoundly depressing that it took a prison-wide hunger strike to wake people up to the ongoing injustice of Guantánamo, where
86 cleared men are still held (cleared for release in January 2010 by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force), and 80 others are, for the most part, held indefinitely without charge or trial. And it is just as depressing to note that, despite making a powerful speech eight weeks ago, and promising to resume releasing prisoners, President
Obama has so far failed to release anyone.
With Ramadan underway, there has been a slight dip in the total number of prisoners on the hunger strike — 80, according to the US military, down from 106, although there has been a slight increase in the number of prisoners being force-fed — from 45 to 46.
Yesterday, a judge turned down a motion submitted on behalf of
three prisoners — Shaker Aamer, the last British resident, and Ahmed Belbacha and Nabil
Hadjarab, two Algerians — asking the court to order the government to stop force-feeding
prisoners, and giving them medication without their consent, following a similar ruling last week in the case of another prisoner, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian. All four are hunger strikers, and amongst the 86 men cleared for release but still held.
In last week’s ruling, Judge Gladys Kessler
(a Bill Clinton appointee) did not seem entirely happy that judges in the court of appeals had tied her hands regarding jurisdiction over the prisoners, because of a previous ruling in 2009.
She also acknowledged that medical authorities describe force-feeding as torture , and made a point of telling President Obama that he has the authority and power to deal with the hunger strike, and the force-feeding, as Commander in Chief.
Yesterday, however, Judge Rosemary
Collyer (a George W. Bush appointee) had no interest in criticizing anyone but the prisoners and their lawyers. In her opinion, she wrote that, although the prisoners had framed their motion as one intended to stop force-feeding, their “real complaint is that the United States is not
allowing them to commit suicide by starvation.” She added, “The right to due process under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments does not include a right to commit suicide and a right to assistance in doing so.” She also wrote that there was “nothing so shocking or inhumane in the
treatment” that it could be regarded as raising a constitutional concern.
In response, Jon
Eisenberg, one of the prisoners’ lawyers, said Judge Collyer was wrong to claim that the prisoners were “demanding a right to commit suicide,” as the Associated Press described it.
“She has misunderstood the purpose of the hunger strike. It’s not to commit suicide, it’s to protest
indefinite detention,” Eisenberg said, adding that her opinion regarding force-feeding — that it

was not “inhumane” — was not backed up by experts. “Human rights advocates, medical ethicists and religious leaders say otherwise,” he said.
Judge Collyer’s ruling — and her dismissive attitude to the force-feeding — reminded me of a letter by Abdelhadi Faraj (aka
Abdulhadi Faraj), another Syrian prisoner, which was published two weeks ago in the Huffington
Post. Mr. Faraj (originally identified by the authorities as Abu Omar al-Hamawe) is one of the 86 men cleared for release but still held, and is in need of a new home because of the perilous situation in Syria. Moreover, he is one of four men captured together, who were all cleared for release, although only one of them was freed — a man named Maasoum Mouhammed, who was given a new home in Bulgaria in May 2010. He is also one of the hunger strikers, and, moreover, is one of the 46 men being force-fed.
Torture is a systematic oppression that kills agency and value to life. It’s a technique of perpetual dying.
Wolfgang 1999 (German Philosopher, Anthropologist- professor at Universities of Gottingen
& Erfurt. [Sofsky, "The endurance of impotence: The dynamics of persecutory violence,"
International Psychoanalysis Newsletter,)
The prisoners will be incarcerated or put into camps and, not rarely, are there subjected to torture. As a method of punitive and loyal justice, torture has a long prehistory which goes back to the early tyrannies. However, in the 20th century, torture has been systematized as a means of national persecution terror and been handed over to special units of the police, the military
or the militia. Its executors have invented a multitude of new methods and have freed torture from the aims of finding the truth. Contrary to a widely held view, torture is not a means to extort confessions, information or proofs. Whatever may be declared the official aim, torture is not an instrument of interrogation, for the ultimate aim of torture is not to get the victim to talk but rather to silence him. The model of the duel, of a trial of strength of the will, is a bagatellization. Torture eliminates action and breaks the person through pain, panic and isolation. The victim is totally in the hands of the perpetrator and is at the mercy of his whims, rage, lust and destructive will. Any part of his body, any of his attitudes or stirrings can be
used as a point of attack for the tormentors. Torture transforms the person into an organism, into a living piece of flesh. It tests physical reactions, generates pain and forces the tortured one to scream His insides are turned outwards, his language stifled in pain. The tortured person no longer experiences his body as a source of his own force for action. In the frenzy of pain, his
own body itself becomes his enemy. It is his body which confronts him with the suffering from which he cannot escape, however much he grits his teeth. The mortal enemy is within himself, rages in his inside and destroys the final resistance. Torture is by no means restricted to external wounds. It splits the person through the centre into two parts. Since the victim's body becomes the accomplice of the torture, it destroys the somatic relation to himself and with it the foundation of his will, his speech, his soul, his psyche. Torture, therefore, is not a technique of killing but of perpetual dying. What torture is on a small scale, the concentration camp is on a large scale. It is not the sudden death which contains the meaning of this institution but the
continuous presence of the torment. The camp is the central institution of persecutory terror in the 20th century. It serves the imprisonment of political enemies less than the transformation and extinction of those who are redundant. In the midst of society and set into a complex mesh of political and economical institutions, the concentration camp is a cosmos at the border of the social world, a universum of unparalleled destructivity

Standard procedure is humiliating and dehumanizes the prisoner.
Mark Danner 2009 (Chancellor’s Professor of English, Journalism and Politics at the University of California at Berkeley and James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics and the
Humanities at Bard College April 9 “US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites” The New York
Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/apr/09/us-torture-voices-from-the-blacksites/?pagination=false part 1
We don’t know, not definitively. For from the moment of his dramatic capture, on March 28,
2002, the man known as Abu Zubaydah slipped from one clandestine world, that of al-Qaeda officials gone to ground in the days after September 11, into another, a “hidden global
internment network” intended for secret detention and interrogation and set up by the
Central Intelligence Agency under authority granted directly by President George W. Bush in a
“memorandum of understanding” signed on September 17, 2001. This secret system included prisons on military bases around the world, from Thailand and Afghanistan to Morocco,
Poland, and Romania—”at various times,” reportedly, “sites in eight countries”—into which, at one time or another, more than one hundred prisoners…disappeared.3 The secret internment network of “black sites” had its own air force and its own distinctive “transfer procedures,” which were, according to the writers of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
report, “fairly standardised in most cases”: The detainee would be photographed, both clothed and naked prior to and again after transfer. A body cavity check (rectal examination) would be carried out and some detainees alleged that a suppository (the type and the effect of such suppositories was unknown by the detainees), was also administered at that moment.
The detainee would be made to wear a diaper and dressed in a tracksuit. Earphones would be placed over his ears, through which music would sometimes be played. He would be blindfolded with at least a cloth tied around the head and black goggles. In addition, some detainees alleged that cotton wool was also taped over their eyes prior to the blindfold and
goggles being applied…. The detainee would be shackled by [the] hands and feet and transported to the airport by road and loaded onto a plane. He would usually be transported in a reclined sitting position with his hands shackled in front. The journey times…ranged from one hour to over twenty-four to thirty hours. The detainee was not allowed to go to the toilet and
if necessary was obliged to urinate and defecate into the diaper. One works the imagination trying to picture what it was like in this otherworldly place: blackness in place of vision.
Silence—or “sometimes” loud music—in place of sounds of life. Shackles, together sometimes with gloves, in place of the chance to reach, touch, feel. One senses metal on wrist and ankle, cotton against eyes, cloth across face, shit and piss against skin. On “some occasions detainees were transported lying flat on the floor of the plane…with their hands cuffed behind their backs,” causing them “severe pain and discomfort,” as they were moved from one unknown
location to another.
Dehumanization brings society to total damnation. The concentration camp is the brutal aftermath of this oppression.
Fasching 1993 Professor of Religious Studies in the University of South Florida [Darrell J.,
Part II of The ethical challenge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Apocalypse or Utopia?, Chapter 4

"The Ethical Challenge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima to Technological Utopianism", part 4 "The
Challenge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima: From Sacred Morality to Alienation and Ethics", Ebooks]
Although every culture is inherently utopian in its potentiality, the internal social dynamic through which its symbolic world-view is maintained as a sacred order has a tendency to transform it into a closed ideological universe (in Karl Mannheim's sense of the ideological; namely, a world-view that promises change while actually reinforcing the status quo) that tends to define human identity in terms advantageous to some and at the expense of others.
Historically the process of dehumanization has typically begun by redefining the other as, by nature, less than human. So the Nazis did to the Jews, and European Americans did to the
Native Americans, men have done to women, and whites to blacks. By relegating these social definitions to the realm of nature they are removed from the realm of choice and ethical reflection. Hence those in the superior categories need feel no responsibility toward those in the inferior categories. It is simply a matter of recognizing reality. Those who are the objects
of such definitions find themselves robbed of their humanity. They are defined by and confined to the present horizon of culture and their place in it, which seeks to rob them of their utopian capacity for theonomous self-transcending self-definition. The cosmicization of social identities is inevitably legitimated by sacred narratives, whether religious or secular-scientific
(e.g., the Nazi biological myth of Aryan racial superiority), which dehumanize not only the victims but also the victors. For to create such a demonic social order the victors must deny not only the humanity of the other who is treated as totally alien but also their own humanity as well. That is, to imprison the alien in his or her enforced subhuman identity (an identity that attempts to deny the victim the possibility of self-transcendence) the victor must imprison himself or herself in this same world as it has been defined and deny his or her own selftranscendence as well. The bureaucratic process that appears historically with the advent of urbanization increases the demonic potential of this process, especially the modern state bureaucracy organized around the use of the most efficient techniques to control every area of human activity. The result is, as Rubenstein reminds us, the society of total domination in
which virtually nothing is sacred, not even human life. The heart of such a bureaucratic social order is the sacralization of professional roles within the bureaucratic structure such that technical experts completely identify themselves with their roles as experts in the use of techniques while totally surrendering the question of what those technical skills will be used for to the expertise of those above them in the bureaucratic hierarchy. It is no accident that the two cultures that drew the world into the cataclysm of World War II, Germany and Japan, were militaristic cultures, cultures that prized and valued the militaristic ideal of the unquestioningly obedient warrior. In these nations, the state and bureaucratic order became
one and the same. As Lewis Mumford has argued, the army as an invention of urban civilization is a near-perfect social embodiment of the ideal of the machine. 37 The army brings mechanical order to near perfection in its bureaucratic structure, where human beings are stripped of their freedom to choose and question and where each individual soldier becomes an
automaton carrying out orders always "from higher up" with unquestioning obedience.

The United States federal government should repeal the 2001 Authorization to
Use Military Force act.

Repealing the AUMF would remove the President’s power to wage the war on terror as well as indefinitely detain suspects at Guantanamo Bay.
McAuliff 13 [Michael. “AUMF Repeal Bill Would End Extraordinary War Powers Granted After
9/11” The Huffington Post. June 10, 2013 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/aumfrepeal-bill-war-powers_n_3416689.html]
WASHINGTON -- The sweeping law that allows the president to wage an unlimited global war
on terror would be repealed under a bill set to be offered this week.
¶
The repeal measure, crafted by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), would end the 2001 Authorization to Use MIlitary Force,
or AUMF, in 2015, as the U.S. finally exits the war in Afghanistan.
¶
Two administrations have
relied upon the AUMF to use military force in Afghanistan and around the world. They have also used the law to justify practices that lately have become more controversial, including drone strikes that have killed at least four Americans and the indefinite detention of terror suspects at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where more than 100 detainees are currently on a hunger strike.
The AUMF gives the President the power to surpass governmental constraints on power, which makes the law unintelligible and unlimited. It created
Guantanamo, the modern camp.
The New York Times 13 [“Repeal the Military Force Law” March 9, 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/opinion/sunday/repeal-the-authorization-for-use-ofmilitary-force-law.html?_r=0]
Three days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress approved the A uthorization for
U se of M ilitary F orce. It was enacted with good intentions — to give President George W.
Bush the authority to invade Afghanistan and go after Al Qaeda and the Taliban rulers who sheltered and aided the terrorists who had attacked the United States. But over time, that resolution became warped into something else: the basis for a vast overreaching of power by one president, Mr. Bush, and less outrageous but still dangerous policies by another, Barack
Obama.
¶
Mr. Bush used the authorization law as an excuse to kidnap hundreds of people — guilty and blameless people alike — and throw them into secret prisons where many were
tortured. He used it as a pretext to open the Guantánamo Bay camp and to eavesdrop on
Americans without bothering to obtain a warrant. He claimed it as justification for the invasion of Iraq, twisting intelligence to fabricate a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks.
¶
Unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama does not go as far as to claim that the Constitution gives him the inherent power to do all those things. But he has relied on the 2001 authorization to use drones to kill terrorists far from the Afghan battlefield, and to claim an unconstitutional power to kill American citizens in other countries based only on suspicion that they are or might become terrorist threats, without judicial review.
¶
The concern that many, including this page, expressed about the authorization is coming true: that it could become the basis for a perpetual, ever-expanding war that undermined the traditional constraints on government power. The result is an unintelligible policy without express limits or protective walls.

The plan is a crucial part of the process of making torture visible that gives a voice to the unheard screams of those who lie in the darkness of Guantanamo cells and torture chambers
Scarry 87 (Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, Elaine, The Body in Pain, 1987, BH)
In this closed world where conversation is displaced by interrogation, where human speech is
broken off in confession and disintegrates into human cries, where even those cries can be broken off to become one more weapon against the person himself or against a friend, in this world of broken and severed voices, it is not surprising that the most powerful and healing moment is often that in which a human voice, though still severed, floating free, somehow reaches the person whose sole reality had become his own unthinkable isolation, his deep
corporeal engulfment. The prisoner who, alone in long solitary confinement and repeatedly tortured, found within a loaf of bread a matchbox containing a small piece of paper that had written on it the single, whispered word "Corragio!", "Take courage";59 the Uruguayan man arranging for some tangible signal that his words had reached their destination, "My darling, if you receive this letter put a half a bar of Boa soap in the next parcel";60 the imprisoned Chilean women who on Christmas Eve sang with all their might to their men in a separate camp the song they had written, "Take heart* Jose, my love" and who, through the abusive shouts of guards ordering silence, heard "faintly on the wind... the answering song of the men"61—these acts and their multiplication in the extensive and ongoing attempts of Amnesty International to restore to each person tortured his or her voice, to use language to let pain give an accurate account of itself, to present regimes that torture with a deluge of letters and telegrams, a deluge of voices speaking on behalf of, voices speaking in the voice of, the person silenced, these acts that return to the prisoner his most elemental political ground as well as his psychic content and density are finally almost physiological in their power of alteration. As torture consists of acts that magnify the way in which pain destroys a person's world, self, and voice, so these other acts that restore the voice become not only a denunciation of the pain but almost a diminution of the pain, a partial reversal of the process of torture itself. An act of
human contact and concern, whether occurring here or in private contexts of sympathy, provides the hurt person with worldly self-extension: in acknowledging and expressing another person's pain, or in articulating one of his nonbodily concerns while he is unable to, one human being who is well and free willingly turns himself into an image of the other's psychic or sentient claims, an image existing in the space outside the sufferer's body, projected out into the world and held there intact by that person's powers until the sufferer himself regains his own powers of self-extension. By holding that world in place, or by giving the pain a place in the world, sympathy lessens the power of sickness and pain, counteracts
the force with which a person in great pain or sickness can be swallowed alive by the body.
Effective verbal expression of torture is crucial to mobilizing collective struggles to stop torture, as the work of Amnesty International shows.
Scarry, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, 87
(Elaine, The Body in Pain, 1987,)
Amnesty International's ability to bring about the cessation of torture depends centrally on its ability to communicate the reality of physical pain to those who are not themselves in

pain. When, for example, one receives a letter from Amnesty in the mail, the words of that letter must somehow convey to the reader the aversiveness being experienced inside the body of someone whose country may be far away, whose name can barely be pronounced, and whose ordinary life & unknown except that it is known that that ordinary life has ceased to exist. The language of the letter must also resist and overcome the inherent pressures toward tonal instability : that language must at once be characterized by the greatest possible tact ( for the most intimate realm of another human being's body is the implicit or explicit subject) and by the greatest possible immediacy (for the most, crucial fact about pain is its presentness and the most crucial fact about torture is that it is happening). Tact and immediacy ordinarily work against one another; thus the difficulty of sustaining either tone is compounded by the necessity of sustaining both simultaneously. The goal of the letter is not simply to make the reader a passive recipient of information about torture but to encourage his or her active assistance in eliminating torture . The
"reader of the letter" may now, for example, become the "writer of a letter": that is, the person may begin to use his own language (though he may also draw on the language provided by
Amnesty International, as Amnesty International in its formulations in turn has drawn on the language of former political prisoners) to address appropriate government officials or others who may have the authority to stop the torture. As even this brief description suggests, embedded in Amnesty's work, as in medical work, is the assumption that the act of verbally expressing pain is a necessary prelude to the collective task of diminishing pain.
It is also true that here, as in medicine, the human voice must aspire to become a precise reflection of material reality: Amnesty's ability to stop torture depends on its international authority, and its international authority depends on its reputation for consistent accuracy ; the words "someone is being tortured" cannot be, and are never, pronounced unless it is the case that someone is being tortured.

Technostrategic Discourse 1ac

Drone warfare occurs in the context of sanitized technological killing—the distance enacted by the phenomenological dimension of drone weapons delivery establishes a radical separation between the bureaucratic machinations that justify and order that killing and the concrete human dimensions of those same murderous practices.
Addey et al 11 (Peter Addey, Mark Whitehead, Alison Williams et al. "Introduction: Air-target
Distance, Reach and the Politics of Verticality." Theory, Culture & Society 28.7-8 2011).
The target of aerial war and security could be understood in a manner that Eyal Weizman (2002) might describe as holographical. An assembling of disparate elements, the air-target adds up to a representation yet is built by techno-cultural practices that overlay one another with multiple details and perspectives. The result appears to be a reconfigured reality, augmented
and abstracted, yet heightened at the same time. In the place of the cadastral maps, which were assiduously produced under previous regimes of aerial governmentality, we have the modularized GIS data sets, which are able to instantaneously fabricate the target as a simulacrum. Real objects and com- plex environments come to be grasped in this way, analysed by distant audi- ences in a form that can be acted upon with speed but in a way in
which the violence involved in making-abstract is increasingly obscured. This is partly because of the concatenation or telescoping of the aerial target and the chain of targeting, which leads
Ryan Bishop to suggest that the destruc- tion of aerial war is obscured by the conflation of senses, technologies and perceptions, thus closing ‘the gap of perception’ and erasing the
‘distinction between apprehension, thought and action’ (Bishop, 2009). The processes of
‘sensing and tracking’, ‘perception and action’ that Bishop locates pre- cisely within the automation of the targeting process elsewhere must then be excavated within the evolving assembling and extension of the aerial tar- geting process. This process is itself subject to ever increasing processes of rationalization and optimization by flow monitoring and the
sequencing of its activities in order to produce the dream of ‘continuous coverage’ (Ha, 2010) or ‘persistent presence’ (Williams, 2011c) that is an unblinking eye ^ an omnipresent view provided by efficient UAV cycles and sequences that seeks to observe an asymmetric yet omnipresent threat with the capacity to unpredictably surprise and disrupt.
¶
Thus what
Anderson, Gregory, Saint-Amour and Bishop show us in this section is quite different from the imagery mentioned at the start of the editorial. Let us recall Judith Butler’s evocative description of the first Gulf War from the 1990s:
¶
. . . transported from the North American continent to
Iraq, and yet securely wedged in the couch in one’s own living room. The smart bomb screen is, of course, destroyed in the moment that it enacts its destruction, which is to say that this is a recording of a thoroughly destructive act which can never record that destructiveness, indeed,
which effects the phantasmatic distinction between the hit and its consequences. Thus as viewers, we verita- bly enact the allegory of military triumph: we retain our visual dis- tance and our bodily safety through the disembodied enactment of the kill that produces no blood and in which we retain our radical impermeability.
¶
(1992: 11)
¶
Butler takes this further: the
smart bomb renders distant television audiences ‘absolutely proximate, absolutely essential, and absolutely distant’ in a way that protects the viewer while securing ‘a fantasy of

transcendence, of a disembodied instrument of destruction’, protracted and filtered through distance and censored by the fact that the ‘aerial view never comes close to seeing the effects of its destruction’, for as the bomb comes tantalizingly closer to its target ‘the screen
conveniently destroys itself’ (1992: 11). As Gregory shows, today’s processes of aerial targeting
co-involve other actors, publics and objects in more complex relationships that do not simply escape the consequences of violence or remain safely ensconced in the arm- chairs of spectator warfare.
¶
Appearing to empty the target’s subject of all of its content, rational, scientific and legal expertise are meant to take over and enact what artist Wafa Bilal describes as the sharp edge of the comfort^conflict divide (on this see Ingram, 2010) in his work Shoot an
Iraqi. In this special section we see this view questioned. For instance, Ben Anderson’s article on coun- terinsurgency and PSYOPS explores the US targeting of a ‘pre-insurgent’ population through airdropped leaflets, propaganda bombs and broadcasts. Targeting here is about immersion in the lives of the population. It is target- ing of the potential to become dangerous
by touching the passions, interests and environment of the population.
¶
This military theatre, in earlier views, might appear comfortable and calm in relation to the messy and passionate world that it punishes. One might suggest that refining the object of the target’s sights through the pro- cessual stages described in the articles in this special section also filters out the ethical decisions and orientations such an encounter would bring if it were a face-to-face encounter
(think of the smiling faces on the postcard [Figure 1] in Anderson’s article). Indeed, the critique of the aerial target is the distance such an abstraction reinforces from the life it puts at threat.
Without the fidelity of a Levinasian encounter with the Other’s face, any possibility of ethical recognition will be gone. Thus, aerial targeting seems to work precisely because it subjects its users to a distanced and rational bureaucratic orientation, so that the effects of their actions can never be fully realized. However, the assumption that passion must somehow lie out- side
of these apparatuses is no doubt problematic, as is the comfort^conflict disjuncture. The sense in which the coldness of the target and targeting holds the processes of waging war from the skies together should be con- trasted with the affects that might threaten to undo this and, furthermore, the increasing likelihood that the drone operators will see the horrors that result from their actions. Gregory shows how these issues are particularly important to the formation of realism and comradeship, as drone operators recognize or become familiar with the faces of their compatriots captured by the drone’s camera.
¶
Paul K. Saint-Amour’s article crucially shows that the visual practices involved here are less ordered and not perfectly sequential. Looking to the origins of aerial photography he shows how the processes involved in early targeting depended on pastiche, the composing of mosaics of multiple per- spectives that are blended and full of errors. To what extent, then, might a targeting system be marked not by smooth consensus but the discord of synaesthetic and contrasting imagery, information and evidence?
Even while Bishop (2009) has noted how the goal of targeting systems has ‘been control and containment from a distance’ and precisely ‘not dissemination, dispersal, autonomy and resistance’, we should not assume that these char- acteristics have escaped or been removed
from the chain. Indeed, they may be endemic to the processes themselves as we learn more of the stress, strains and fatigue of those doing the targeting and the flying, those wit- nessing the effects of a missile launched in high definition resolution. The affects that make the targeting processes uncomfortable may also lie at the heart of the indeterminate, aleatory and
‘turbulent’ (sometimes literally) dynamics that animate and befuddle contemporary air power, issues both Ryan Bishop and Paul K. Saint Amour explore in their articles.

This technologized war-at-a-distance normalizes violence in the context of the everyday lives of warfighters and warplanners. Drone warfare reduces the world to a picture whose being is just being targeted by the US.
Pugliese 11
(Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
The ensconcing of war operations, and the everyday deployment of lethal drone attacks,
within US cities such as Langley, Virginia gestures to a mutation in the conduct of war. The manner in which drone operators can
¶
exterminate human targets during their assigned
combat sessions, via their ensemble of tele-mediating technologies and military hardware, and then go home to take the kids to soccer or have a drink at their local bar, works to normalise
war as something that is effectively part of the civic continuum of everyday life practices. This continuum of practices is facilitated by the euphemisms of war: the screen media that display the atornisation and incineration of bodies by drone missiles are called by the military 'Kill TV'," and the material violence inflicted on human targets becomes merely 'kinetic activity'," as though killing were just another form of gym exercise. The televisual and video game dimensions of these killing operations help facilitate the transition from exterminatory
combat operations to civic sites and practices. In the words of an air force colonel of a Predator drone
¶
squadron: 'It teaches you how to compartmentalise it [the reality of war].'" The everyday returns to civic locations of 'home' after a series of technologically mediated killings in another country can, in fact, be seen to be inscribed by the forces of technological dis/location that drive the
¶
operations of drones: 'The more powerful and violent the technological expropriation, the delocalization,' Derrida notes, 'the more powerful, naturally, the recourse to the at-home, the return towards home.'o The violent deterritoralisation, delocalisation and dissociation experienced in the drone Ground Control Stations provokes the reaction: 'I want to be at home, I want finally to be at home, with my own, close to my friends and family.' Drone operators have remarked on how the trip home from their Ground Control Stations enables
them to transition from battle field to civic mode, with the hour's drive back to their home giving them 'that whole amount of time to leave it behind. They get in their bus or car and go into a zone - they say, "For the next hour I'm decompressing, I'm getting re-engaged into what's it's like to be a civilian"."' This return to a safe home is, of course, the privilege and prerogative
of the drone-enabled resident-soldier of the Global North. In the target countries of the Global
South - Afghanistan or Pakistan - the at-home is open to the anomic violence of drones and, as I discuss below, the ever-present risk of obliteration of home, friends and family.
¶
Philip Alston and Hina Shamsi have drawn critical attention to what they term:
¶
the 'PlayStation mentality' that surrounds drone killings. Young military personnel raised on a diet of video games now
kill real people remotely using joysticks. Far removed from the human consequences of their actions, how will this generation of fighters value the right to life? How will commanders and policymakers keep themselves immune from the deceptively antiseptic nature of drone killings?
Will the standards for intelligence-gathering to justify a killing slip? Will the number of acceptable 'collateral' civilian deaths increase?"
¶
The bracketing off that is enabled by the
parenthetical logic that governs these screen technologies can be appositely situated within
Heideggerian terms. 'The fundamental event of the modern age,' writes Martin Heidegger, 'is
the conquest of the world as picture.'4 Underscoring this epistemic shift to viewing the world as picture has been the dominance of screen technologies in mediating virtually everything that can be seen in terms of 'world'. The parenthetical bracketing off of the world that I have been
examining can effectively be understood as a form of 'enframing' the world. In his discussion of the term, Heidegger posits the process of enframing as a positive aspect of our relation to

technology, as in this understanding technology works to reveal the truth of the 'real'. I want to resignify this Heideggerian term in order to mark the manner in which screen technologies operate literally to bracket off the 'real' and to transmute it into object. Conjoining this resignified understanding of enframing to Heidegger's meditation on the 'conquest of the world as picture' effectively brings into focus the levels of epistemic and physical violence
enabled by the militarised use of tele-technologies.
¶
In his theorisation of the epistemic shift to viewing the world as picture, Heidegger notes that the process of representation is crucial to the construction of the world as picture. What is particularly relevant to my analysis of the parenthetical logic of screen technologies and the lethality of drones is the manner in which
Heidegger's analysis of the relation between representation and the world as picture
underscores the role of objectifying violence: 'Representing is ... a laying hold and grasping of what it is that is being viewed; in this scopic process, Heidegger emphasizes. 'assault rules'.45
The 'assault' on what is being viewed is legitimated by its transmutation into 'object':
'Representing is making-stand-over-against, an objectifying that goes forward and masters ...
That which is ... has the character of an object.'4 6 This process of objectification of the 'real' is undergirded by the play of science and technology: 'Science sets upon the real. It orders it into place to the end that at any given time the real will exhibit itself as an interacting network."' The
'real' in the context of drone technologies is precisely that which 'exhibits' itself through the tele-techno mediations of an 'interacting network' constituted by pilots/sensor operators, satellite links and drones. The enframing of the world as picture through 'entrapping
representation' ensures the 'real becomes secured in its objectness'."
¶
Everything in this
Heideggerian exposition can be clearly transposed to illuminate the operations of drone screen technologies in order to entrap and reduce the surveilled human figure into object that can be effectively and
¶
antiseptically liquidated from a distance. The antiseptic vision of war that is produced by the parenthetical logic of the use of drone technologies is enhanced further by
the clinical language deployed by the drone operators in the identification of suspect targets.
The Predator drone's infrared camera, with its digitally enhanced zoom, enables the sensor operators to detect the heat signature of a human body from significant distances (from an altitude of up to 3 kilometres). The term 'heat signature' works to reduce the targeted human body to an anonymous heat-emitting entity that merely radiates signs of life. This clinical process of reducing human subjects to purely biological categories of radiant life is further elaborated by the US military's use of the term 'pattern of life':
¶
The CIA received secret permission to attack a wide range of targets, including suspected militants whose names are not known, as part of a dramatic expansion of its campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan's border region. The expanded authority ... permits the agency to rely on what officials describe as
'pattern of life' analysis, using evidence collected by surveillance cameras or unmanned aircraft.
The information was used to target suspected militants, even when their full identities were not known.... Previously the CIA was restricted in most cases to killing only individuals whose names were on an approved list ... some analysts said permitting the CIA to kill people where names were unknown created a serious risk of killing innocent people."
This means that there is no value to life in the status quo—technological distancing reduces life to nothing more than something to be targeted and destroyed by militaristic impulses.
Shaw, Graaham, and Majed ’12 . Shaw, Ian Graham, and Akhter, Majed. "The Unbearable
Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan." Antipode 44.4 (September 2012).
Representation, a social practice and strategy through which meanings are constituted and

communicated, is unavoidable when dealing with militarism and military activities.
Armed
Forces, and defence institutions, take great care in producing and promoting
¶ specific portrayals of themselves and their activities in order to legitimize and justify their¶ activities
in places, spaces, environments and landscapes (Woodward 2005:729).
In this section, we argue that the ramping up of drone deployments is justified
¶
by a distinctive targeting logic. As
Paul Virrilo (1989) has long argued, there is never war without representation, which is to say, the deadly materiality of war is always coiled within a discursive system (see also Shaw 2010).
In this sense, the drone performs a well-rehearsed imaginative geography (Bialasiewicz et al
2007;
¶
Gregory 2004) that is underwritten by targeted kills across neat isometric grids and
¶ algorithmic calculations (Amoore 2009), far removed from the brutal Real (Jones
¶ and Clarke
2006), and in a peculiar relation with the visceral imagery of previous wars (Tuathail 2003). The official “definition” of a targeted kill is not agreed upon
¶ under international law. Yet as a recent
UN report on targeted killing reveals, it can
¶ be thought of as follows:
¶
A targeted killing is the
intentional, premeditated and deliberate use of lethal force,
¶
by States or their agents acting
under colour of law, or by an organized armed group
¶ in armed conflict, against a specific individual who is not in the physical custody of
¶ the perpetrator. In recent years, a few States
have adopted policies, either openly or
¶ implicitly, of using targeted killings, including in the territories of other States. Such
¶ policies have been justified both as a legitimate response to
“terrorist” threats and as a necessary response to the challenges of “asymmetric warfare”. In
the legitimate struggle against terrorism, too many criminal acts have been re-characterized so as to justify addressing them within the framework of the law of armed conflict. New technologies, and especially unarmed combat aerial vehicles or “drones”, have been added into
this mix, by making it easier to kill targets, with fewer risks to the targeting State (Alston
¶
2010:3).
¶
The means and methods of killing vary, and include sniper fire, shooting at close
¶ range, missiles from helicopters, gunships, drones, the use of car bombs, and poison
¶
(Alston
2010:4)
¶
The drone is heralded by the US military as the apex of a targeting logic— accurate,
efficient, and deadly. This logic traces a distinct genesis. In 1938 Martin
¶
Heidegger wrote of
the “age of the world picture”, in a classic essay on the split between subject and object. For him, today’s world is conceived, grasped, and conquered as a picture—and what it means “to
be” is for the first time defined as the objectiveness of representing. In this modern age of humanism, a subjective¶ “worldview” arises for the first time—humans appear as Cartesian
subjects and the¶ world as a calculated picture, engineered by science and technology. Ray
Chow
¶
(2006) extends this metaphysical analysis to contend that the world has further
¶ been
produced as a “target”. In the wake of the atomic event of Hiroshima, the entire globe is rendered as a grid of targets to be destroyed as soon as it can be made visible.
The distance between the person who kills with drone technology and the person killed is not merely the geographical space between them. Rather, the technological dimension of drone warfare inserts an ontological and moral distance between the drone and the drone pilot.
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(Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
In her profound meditation on political economies of violence, Hannah Arendt writes that
extreme forms of violence are 'never possible without instruments'." 'Violence,' Arendt notes,
'is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues."' In other words, violence, in its most murderous and instrumentalised forms, cannot be exercised without technology. The Predator drone exemplifies the instrumentalisation of violence and the law of war through a complex process

of parenthetical disassociation. This process is predicated on suspending lines of causal
connection between an ensemble of technologies and their human agents. It effectively suspends, circumscribes and holds parenthetically in abeyance the relation between
executioner and victim, cause and effect. Jeff Macgregor, in his meditation on the transmutation of life into an instrumentalised video game, writes: 'erase the pain given and taken, reduce the grunt and the struggle to the push of a button ... and the game, the war, is no more than a fast-twitch exercise - a battle fought without personal cost. It is cause without
effect, a victory only for technology and opposable thumbs'.22
¶
In the first instance, the
Predator drones, in the execution of their targets, can be said to be blind-seeing technologies
of death: as inanimate objects, they cannot 'see' what they execute; rather, they execute what must be seen for them by their sensor operators. A rift opens up in this schema between the blind executor and the human-seeing agent that is inscribed with both spatial and temporal
dimensions. This causal disconnect between the doer and deed is, in fact, something on which
Friedrich Nietzsche meditated in the context of his critical analysis of what he termed the
'seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a
"subject"'.. Nietzsche draws attention to the network of discursive relations - juridical, legislative and philosophical - that are
¶
constitutive in the creation of what Foucault terms the
'subject effect' and its relation to deeds, actions and events:
¶
there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a function added to the deed - the deed is
everything. The popular mind in fact doubles the deed; when it sees the lightning flash, it is the deed of a deed; it posits the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect.
Scientists do no better when they say 'force moves,' 'force causes,' and the like - all its coolness, its freedom from emotion notwithstanding, our entire science still lies under the misleading influence of language and has not disposed of that little changeling, the 'subject.'
¶
The parenthetical logic of drone killings, and its structural disassociation between the doer and the deed, is perfectly captured in this Nietzschean critique: the doer, in this scenario, is functionally coextensive with the deed and only becomes separated by the 'seduction of language' and its subject-predicate structure. The 'doubling' of the deed and the production of the doer/deed
effect are what enable the conceptual partitioning of the technology from the human subject.
Couched in Nietzschean terms, one can say that the drone does the killing and that the sensor operator who presses the 'fire' button is merely a type of afterthought that can only be
retrospectively constituted as separate from the deed. As I will argue, following Nietzsche's problematisation of the dualistic doer-deed formula, the viewing of the human subject/technology nexus in prosthetic terms effectively works to interrogate the parenthetical logic that inscribes the conceptual apparatus of drone technologies.
Technological distance reduces targets to numbers and mere biological life.
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
The military term 'pattern of life' is inscribed with two intertwined systems of scientific conceptuality: algorithmic and biological. The human subject detected by drone's surveillance
cameras is, in the first scientific schema, transmuted algorithmically into a patterned sequence
of numerals: the digital code of ones and zeros."o Converted into digital data coded as a
'pattern of life', the targeted human subject is reduced to an anonymous simulacrum that flickers across the screen and that can effectively be liquidated into a 'pattern of death' with
the swivel of a joystick. Viewed through the scientific gaze of clinical biology, 'pattern of life'

connects the drone's scanning technologies to the discourse of an instrumentalist science, its
constitutive gaze of objectifying detachment and its production of exterminatory violence.
Patterns of life are what are discovered and analysed in the Petri dish of the laboratory. In this way, the targeted human subjects of Afghanistan and Pakistan are represented as types of bacteria and other low- life organisms that be exterminated with absolute impunity. The CIA's
Counter-terrorism Centre's chief has boasted that, thanks to its drone- automated execution
program: 'We are killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them.' Analogically, the human subjects targeted as suspect yet anonymous 'patterns of life' by the drones
become equivalent to forms of pathogenic life. The operators of the drones' exterminatory attacks must, in effect, be seen to conduct a type of scientific ethnic cleansing of pathogenic 'life forms'. In the words of one US military officer: 'Our major role is to sanitize the battlefield."' As
Iwill presently discuss, inscribing this clinical discourse on drones is the Derridean figure of immunisation against foreign and pathogenic bodies. As mere patterns of pathogenic life, these targeted human subjects effectively are reduced to what Giorgio Agamben would term 'a kind of absolute biopolitical substance' that can killed with no concern about the possibility ofjuridical accountability: they are 'bare life' that can be killed with absolute impunity." Anonymous
'patterns of life' signify in contradistinction to legally named persons; they exemplify the
'ontological hygiene' legislated by US government policy in order to secure the reproduction of the 'principle of scarcity with respect to agency and personhood'."
¶
Situated in this Agambenian
context of the extermination of human life with absolute impunity, the Predator drones must be seen as instantiating mobile 'zones of exception': wherever the drones operate, they have
the capacity to suspend the rule of law and juridical accountability even as, paradoxically, the
US Department of State, as discussed above, argues that these attacks are conducted under formal laws of war. 'One of the paradoxes of the state of exception,' writes Agamben, 'lies in the fact that in the state of exception it is impossible to distinguish transgression of the law from
the execution of law.' In his theorisation of the state of exception, Agamben maps a space within which the agentic subject of law 'neither executes nor transgresses law, but inexecutes it'." 'Every fiction of a nexus between violence and law disappears here: there is nothing but a zone of anomie, in which violence without any juridical form acts.' Agamben's 'zone of anomie' perfectly captures the zone of violence that designates the anonymous 'patterns of life' that can be liquidated by drones with absolute impunity. I want to reaccentuate Agamben's concept of the inexecution of law by staging a parenthetical qualification. By placing a parenthetical bracket over the prefix 'in', in the term '(in)execution,' I want to argue that there is operative in these lethal drone attacks at once an execution of US Department of State law and an inexecution of it through the generation of mobile states of exception that articulate extrajudicial spaces beyond the redress of law. Even as these drone attacks execute US law (of war), they violate with impunity both international law and the sovereignty of nations such as Afghanistan and
Pakistan.
These distances form a spatial hiatus which desensitizes us to drone killing— drone operation becomes a video game with fantastic special effects, and war becomes nothing more than button-pushing.
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
The killing at a distance operations of the Predator drone ensemble of technology and human agents work to articulate a spatial hiatus and parenthetical disconnect between this place
- that

is, the Ground Control Station (GCS) located in, for example, Nevada - and that place
- the to-kill target located in Afghanistan.
Working in tandem with this spatial rift is a temporal disconnect generated by satellite technology
.
Although the killing of the designated target is supposedly conducted in terms of what the military literature terms
'real time', the mediating effects of satellite and imaging technologies on 'live' and 'real time' signify that, in effect, there can only ever be 'an allegation of "live" and of "real time".
Discussing the metaphysics of presence in the contemporary configuration of 'tele-techno- mediatic modernity' and its celebration of such things as 'live' satellite- televisual transmissions
, Jacques
Derrida sardonically remarks that
'we should never forget that this "live" is not an absolute live, but only a live effect
[uneffectdedirect], an allegation of"live
"'.25It is an allegation of live that animates the operation of drones, as 'to allege' signifies, in legal terms, 'to assert without proof and, simultaneously, to 'cite, quote'.26 In other words, the very act of 'live' and 'real time' drone Predator executions must undergo a series of tele-techno mediations that structurally ensure that the 'absolutely real present is already a memory': 'there is no purely real time because temporalization itself is structured by a play of retention or of protention and, consequently, of traces ...
The real time effect is itself a particular effect of "diff6rance".' 2 7 In other words, there opens up here a temporal rift between the 'now'
- a moment of 'retention' as experienced, for example, at Creech Ground Control
Station, Nevada - and the 'then' the relayed moment of protention that unfolds in Afghanistan as already a 'memory' for those located at the GCS in Nevada.
This temporal rift is, in effect, acknowledged by the military's use of the term 'latency' in order to identify the micro-delay that inscribes the command sent by the remote pilot to the airborne drone and its consequent response.
¶ The structure of this tele-techno mediation can be envisioned as triangulated: the human operators at their ground stations are interlinked with the drone on the other side of the globe by the interposition of the satellite in space.
This triangulated structure of interlinked communication graphically evidences the series of mediations and micro-diachronic hiatuses that transmute the 'live' image into a latent 'memory', into a retrospective artefact of 'real time'
. The micro-diachronic hiatuses that effectively turn the 'live' into 'memory' are marked, in passing, by former President George W Bush's celebratory speech on UACVs: ¶
Innovative doctrine and high-tech weaponry can shape and then dominate an unconventional conflict. Our commanders are gaining a real-time picture of the entire battlefield, and are able to get targeting ¶ 28 information from sensor to shooter almost immediately.
¶ The qualifier 'almost immediately' succinctly names the 'latency' effect discussed above, while also underscoring the micro-rift between 'live' and 'real time' and their tele-techno mediation into retrospectively constructed spatio-temporal visual artefacts.
In the techno-military literature on drone technologies, everything is driven on ultimately 'decreasing the time between sensor and shooter' and thereby 'shortening the "kill chain"'." The military term 'kill chain' diagrammatically underscores the impossibility of a synchronicity that, because of the unavoidable tele-techno mediations
, is not always already marked by the micro-hiatus that separates yet conjoins
¶
one link from another in the 'kill chain'.
¶ The prosthetic status of this triangulated structure can be elaborated in ¶ the context of the multiple dimensions it embodies: human-machine-human, life-technology-death and agent-machine-victim. As I will discuss in some detail below, this triadic structure is topologically conjoined by a series of prosthetic grafts that suture one seemingly autonomous entity to its absolute other. The prosthetic relations that
I have been mapping here can be situated within Michel Serres' theorisation of topology 'as the science of nearness and rifts'." Serres names this topology the 'fold' - as that topological figuration of space-time that is productive of simultaneous rifts and nearness. Giles Deleuze effectively elaborates on the complex logics ¶ operative in the topology of the fold by describing the 'duplicity of the fold' in terms of 'a tension by which each field is pulled into the other'.' The topology of the fold at once captures the complex spatio-temporal effects generated by drone technologies and the contradictory tensions that inscribe their field of operations by marking the indissociable relation between seemingly antithetical categories. Viewed in this context, the geometry of the triangulated structure that I have drawn upon in order to describe the drone ensemble can be seen to offer only a static image of what is in actuality a dynamic process of topological relations between rifts and nearness, the other and the same, human and technology. As I discuss below, these topological relations are fundamentally negotiated or mediated through the figure of the prosthetic.
¶ What results from the process of tele-techno mediations that I have been mapping, regardless of 'real time' and 'live' claims, is what Derrida terms 'traces'.
This is not to reduce the murderous consequences of the drone attacks to insubstantial remains; rather, it is to underscore the artefactual status of the images/traces of the killings that the GCS sensor operators work with and consume, and that structurally distance and disassociate them from the victims of their actions. Critically, it is the combined effect of the parenthetical suspension of the 'real' and the 'live' produced by this tele-techno thanatological economy of war that transmutes killing into the stuff of video games and that establishes a type of causal disconnect, and consequent disavowal, of the human operators' relation to the killing that transpires on the ground in
'remote' Afghanistan or Pakistan
.
The following remarks by Predator drone operators
located at a
GCS in Nevada exemplify
this spatio-temporal disconnect: 'It's antiseptic. It's not as potent an emotion as being on the battlefield';
'It's like a video game. It can get a little bloodthirsty . But it's fucking cool'
;
'Most of the time, I get to fight the war, and go home and see the wife and kids at night.' 'Another talked about flying

missions in Afghanistan, and then getting home in time to watch reruns of the TV sitcom
Friends.'"
'You have some guy sitting at Nellis [GCS Nevada] and he's taking his kid to soccer.
It's a strange dichotomy to war
.'34
This
strange dichotomy
of war is enabled by a parenthetical logic that brackets off causal relations through a series of tele- techno mediations that, in turn, transmute the 'real' into
Baudrillardian simulacra
." This strange dichotomy of war resonates on yet another level. On the one hand, negotiating the materiality of geography is one of the key predicates of successful warfare; on the other, drone warfare effectively ensures that 'the limitations of geography are taken out of the war that a soldier goes off to experience'. 6
For the drone soldier, the experience of geography is at once unbounded and simulated via the ensemble of screen technologies and circumscribed by the very materiality of the civic sites and spaces of his or her
everyday life.
This technostrategic distancing also erases any possible ethical dimension to warfighting—the ontological dimension of cyborg warfare instrumentalizes bodies such that they are nothing more than possible operands of violence.
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(Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
This seemingly indivisible prosthetic relation between drones and their human operators
evidences, in effect, the emergence of a new type of war that could be termed 'cyborg war'.
Drawing on Donna Haraway's celebratory trope of resistance and overturning of oppressive and destructive regimes and epistemologies of power, I re-code the term in order to evidence its violent assimilation and co-option by the very phallogocentric, militaristic and instrumentalist authorities it was designed to contest:
¶
To recapitulate certain dualisms have been persistent in
Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of
women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals- in short, domination of all constituted others ... Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature ...
High- tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and
who ismade in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices."
¶
In the drone-human relation, it is not
clear 'who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine'. The graft of the prosthetic blurs this boundary. Moreover, in the context of the digitised codes that interlink humans and drones in their operational schema: 'It isnot clear what is mind and what
is body in machines that resolve into coding practices.' The prosthetics of this new law of war, and its ensemble of human agents grafted to their drone technologies via screens, joysticks and satellite links, perfectly embodies the figure of the cyborg as the abject other to Haraway's
utopian trope. In keeping with the cyborg logic of the prosthetic, there is no 'proper' body in contradistinction to the machine; rather, couched in Derridean terms, 'this prosthetic structure is not something we add to the "proper" body but that it is already our experience of what is most proper to us, it is already the possibility of the prosthetic ... thus technology or techn is already originally in place in our own body, in what is most proper to us'. 68
¶
This profound
Derridean meditation on the infrastructural dimensions of the prosthetic effectively enables the critical interrogation of the categorical separation of the drone from its human agent. Belying its negative and reductive nomenclature, the drone cannot be reduced to a mindless machine of purely robotic acts; rather, the drone-as-prosthetic articulates a 'prosthetics of origin',"9 to use
Derrida's titular term, that conjoins it inseparably, through grafting, to its embodied agents of cognition, reflection and intent. Cyborg war, in this schema, instrumentalises bodies into lethal machines via a prosthetic structure that operates in tandem with a parenthetical logic of disassociation between the doer and deed: machine/human, doer/deed are at once tactically conjoined in the acts of surveillance, targeting and killing, and simultaneously disjoined from

the ethical consequences of these same acts. The interstice that opens up between this parenthetical and prosthetic relation must be seen as a critical fault line that compels examination. This fault line marks the radical asymmetries of power operative in the use of these drone killing technologies and their ethical ramifications.
¶
For the United States, the use of the drones is justified because it means that its soldiers are not placed in potentially fatal ground operations of war: no flesh and blood is lost, merely machines. This dualistic logic is, of
course, violently asymmetrical. For the targets of this drone war, it is flesh and blood that is shed, without the possibility of traditional combat counter- retaliation: drones kill silently, firing their missiles from a 2 mile distance. With nothing to lose but machines, the United States is
now in a position to wage war without the usual weighing up of the human cost. The US military, in fact, terms UCAVs as 'attritable': 'This means a commander can afford to lose one through attrition.'o Qualms have been expressed by military personnel such as this unnamed
Iraq combat veteran 'who helped design much of the military's doctrine for using unmanned drones': 'There's something important about putting your own sons and daughters at risk when you choose to wage war as a nation. We risk losing that flesh-and- blood investment if we go too far down this road."' The parenthetical logic of drone war brackets off the ethical questions concerning the waging of war while also suspending the flesh-and-blood risks entailed by
those fighting in the field. PW Singer terms these new warriors 'cubicle warriors', ensconced in cubicles outfitted with computers, joysticks and ergonomic furniture: For a new generation,
'going to war' doesn't mean shipping off to some dank foxhole in a foreign land to dodge bullets.
Instead, it is a daily commute in your Toyota Camry to sit behind a computer screen
¶
72 and drag a mouse.
¶
The cubicle warrior is a cyborg warrior prosthetically grafted, through satellite feeds, to his or her drone and yet effectively quarantined, through the parenthetical bracketing that is enabled by his or her cubicle location and
¶
screen technologies, from the
risks and violence of the battlefield.
¶
The fault line or rift that results from these two contradictory spatio- temporal schemas operating simultaneously is effectively captured by the jargon term for drone pilots flying planes over 7000 miles away from their location: 'remote split operation'." Remote split operation refers to the manner in which drone pilots, located at their
Ground Control Stations in the United States, are connected via satellite links to their flying charges
¶
thousands of miles away. I want to resignify this term so that it underscores the split or contradictory forces at work in the ensemble of figures and technologies that constitute drone operations. Remote split operations encapsulate the fault line that at once parenthetically brackets off the drone personnel from the locus of the battlefield while they are simultaneously prosthetically grafted to their drones via satellite links. The contradictory forces that inscribe drone technologies are not the product of accident; rather, they must be seen as having been
produced by the design demands of the US military. In its brief to the teams of designers employed to produce UCAVs, DARPA 'wanted "intelligent function allocation" to allow the UCAV to operate autonomously, while stressing the idea that the human controller would be expected to provide executive-level mission management to "remain in the decision process"'." In this schema, the drone is an entity that 'operates' autonomously, and thus independently of its operators, and simultaneously is instrumentally grafted to its human controller who will
continue to make key decisions regarding its operations. The 'autonomous' operations of
drones exemplify the conceptual shift from 'technofetishism to technoanimism' - which, as
Vivian Sobchack has argued, constitutes one of the key attributes of the prosthetic once it is personified so that it 'is seen to have a will of its own'."

The biggest internal link to all these distancing impacts is the way that technologized violence removes the emotional, affective element from the calculations of warplanning.
Grayson 12 (Kyle, Senior Lec. At Newcastle University in Critical Geopolitics and International
Politics, “Six Theses on Targeted Killing,” Political Studies Association, Vol 32,
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9256.2012.01434.x/abstract>)
¶
Space can be conceived as the four-dimensional environment (length, width, depth
¶
and time) in which ‘objects and events occur, and in which they have relative
¶
position and direction’
(Harrison and Dourish, 1996, p. 2; see also Simonsen, 1996).
¶
The majority of attention that has been placed on the spatial dimension of targeted¶ killing has focused on its territorial
positioning via cartographic practices that
¶
operate on a register of difference that delineates through the category of the nation¶ state. Locations of targeted killing are dutifully recorded and positioned within¶ these national boundaries and linked to broader geopolitical
narratives regarding¶ global counter-insurgency. Of particular interest has been the possibility for tar-
¶
geted killing to be enacted by RPAS pilots located in excess of 7,000 miles away
¶
from the immediate theatre of operation.
¶
Beyond standard territorial locations and the distortion of time and space in con-
¶
temporary counter-insurgency, Eyal Weizman (2007) draws our attention to the¶ forms of spatial management and sovereignty that are constitutive of
targeted¶ killing. Primarily, he demonstrates that in contemporary counter-insurgency it is
¶ important to denote how the practices of control have extended upwards into¶ the
stratosphere as a means of managing populations and their circulation on the¶ ground. This development reflects broader changes in military strategy over the
¶
twentieth century that equated air power with dominance over ground territory.
¶
But as Weizman (2007, p. 239) notes, this has created a reliance on air-based
¶
military technologies as a means of managing
‘problematic’ spaces and populations
¶
and the enactment of a policy that has been called
‘control without occupation’ by
¶
the Royal Air Force.
¶
As a result, counter-insurgency and insurgency war-fighting in places like Israel-¶ Palestine are ‘increasingly manifested by a creeping progression along a vertical¶ axis’ that involves ‘two spheres of extraterritorial
sovereignty’ (Weizman, 2007,
¶
pp. 253, 258). Practices like targeted killing that attempt to provide ‘control without¶ occupation’ are predicated on having both unimpeded access and control of air-¶ space as well as possessing the technology to operate within this theatre of
opera-¶ tion. In response, one can see the use of ‘subterranean warfare’ by insurgency
¶ movements – literally going under the ground to circumvent aerial interference – a
¶
practice that gained currency during the Vietnam War as a response to these
¶
counter-insurgency measures (Weizman, 2007, pp. 253–258).
¶
In addition, targeted killing alters and intensifies
forms of spatial management¶ through its ability to redefine everyday places, particularly those in which indi-
¶
viduals seek sanctuary from political, economic and social pressures. In geography,
¶
place refers to those spaces that are ‘invested with understandings of behavioural
¶ appropriateness, cultural expectations, and so forth [in which] we act’ and which
¶
we imbue with value (Harrison and Dourish, 1996, p. 3). Insurgency – in part –
¶
gains its political and affective impacts by initiating violence within public places¶ that have been declared secure
by an entity that claims sovereign power – both legally and symbolically – over such places. In contrast, targeted killing produces¶ political and affective impacts by transforming private
sanctuary places like the¶ home into a public theatre of counter-insurgency warfare.
Moreover, as a spatial
¶
incursion from afar that cannot be easily countered or avenged, it places the
¶
interface of violence much closer to places of sanctuary for the ‘enemy’. Targeted¶ killing
as a practice can thus defile sanctified places. The symbolic power comes not
¶
just from the

ability to defile but also from the a-temporal character of defiled space
¶
– as Feldman (1991, p.
67) notes, ‘defiled space never goes away’. Thus, as a tactic,
¶
targeted killing demonstrates how counter-insurgency also ‘seeks to violate the
¶
spatial constructs that function as armatures of the victim’s social order’ (Feldman,
¶
1991, p. 75).
Technostrategic discourse manifests itself in the necropolitics of dividing the populations who receive the sovereign right to life and death, and those who don’t. In the Feb. 2010 Uruzgan drone strike, this is demonstrated by the discourse that removes what is foreign, intangible and violent and, instead, associates it with the familiar question of masculinity and femininity. Here, the drone operators feminize and thus are able to target their victims.
Allinson 12.
(Jamie, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Westminster,
International Relations PhD, University of Edinburgh, “Necropolitics of the Cyborg Empire:
Rethinking the Drone War,” Millennium Conference, http://millenniumjournal.files.wordpress. com/2012/10/allinsonmillenium2012necropoliticscyborg-empire.docx)
The particular interlude prompted by the demand for weapons to be seen at 5:18 leads to a
highly revealing exchange between the Predator team and the screeners, which is worth quoting at length:
¶
At 0529D the Predator pilot states to the crew ‘does it look like he is ho'n something across his chest. It's what they've been doing here lately, they wrap their
*expletive* in their man dresses so you can't PID it.’ Then on the radio to [redacted] he says
"looks like the dismounted pax on the hilux pickup on the east side is carrying something, but we cannot PID what it is at this time but he is carrying something’. After the Predator crew prompted the twice in mIRC, the screeners call out a possible weapon and then ask the crew to go white hot to get a better look. The response from the sensor operator is ‘white hot is not going to give us anything better, that truck would make a beautiful target’. The Predator pilot then at 0534D made this radio call "All players, all Players from [redacted] from our DGS, the
MAM that just mounted the back of the hilux had a possible weapon, read back possible rifle.'
During their post strike review, the screeners determined that this was not a weapon. At 0624D the screeners called out a weapon, this the only time that the Screeners called out a weapon without being prompted by the Predator crew. At 0655D, the Predator pilot called [redacted] and told him that the Screeners called out two weapons. The Screeners had not made any call outs of weapons. At 0741 the Predator pilot calls [redacted] and says ‘there's about 6 guys riding in the back of the highlux, so they don't have a lot of room. Potentially could carry a personal weapon on themselves.’
¶
A great deal is to be understood about the necropolitical logic at work in the occupation of Afghanistan through this passage. As an indicator of the role of
Orientalist fantasy in the tendency of Western militaries to ‘effeminise the men of the
[occupied] population through both symbolic and practical emasculation’ the Predator pilot’s characterization of the Afghan man’s clothing is quite stark: ‘their mandresses’. Nor does this phrase refer solely to the Predator pilot’s notion of what men ought to wear (presumably trousers), and the implied denigration of those whose clothing does not meet this norm. It also reveals the drawing of a caesura, a mental and political cordon around those whose actions inherently render them part of the population it is acceptable to put to death.
¶
We can consider this act of delineation at the basic level of pronouns. The Predator pilot describes
how ‘what they’ve [my emphasis] been doing round here lately’ is to ‘wrap their *expletive* in
their man dresses so you can't PID it’. Before this he asks for confirmation that the man on the screen does indeed look like he is holding something across his chest. Now, it may be objected that ‘they’ is simply a pronoun here ⎯ which it is, but this usage is in no sense simple. The pilot

could have said ‘that’s what the Taliban have been doing round here lately’, or ‘the enemy’ or
‘the insurgents’ or a similar noun. By using ‘they’ the pilot shows that he already considers the man he is looking at to be one of ‘them’, and this ‘they’ have very definite characteristics,
culled from the imaginary of what Patrick Porter calls ‘military orientalism’. ‘They’ are effete, exotic, and treacherous in transgression of the gender boundaries by, for example, their wearing ‘mandresses’. Nor is the mandress, however comfortable or stylish it may sound by comparison to US military uniform, a simple piece of clothing. It is itself weaponized, a tool of the MAM’s underhand concealment of the arms he is assumed to bear, and which the action of carrying something across the chest inadvertently reveals.
¶
The unspoken frustration behind the Predator pilot’s ascription of a motive to the Afghan man’s concealment of a (nonexistent) weapon is doubly instructive. Why do MAMs hold things across their chests and inside their clothes? They do so ‘so you can’t PID it.’ This implies that the pilot believes that the Taliban are manipulating US rules of engagement to the degree that they know what constitutes a positive identification of a weapon for a drone pilot and that they are deliberately preventing this identification, and therefore hampering the use of lethal force against them. The pilot therefore inverts the rules of engagement by evoking the tactical wrapping-up of objects in the ‘mandress’: an Afghan male without a visible weapon thereby
becomes grounds for threat.
Therefore, we affirm the affective dimension of drone technology.
Bringing the affective dimension back into drone warfare displaces the logic of efficiency which erases the concrete experience of warfare and enables the violent distancing which causes the worst atrocities in modern technologized war.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and Geo-
Informatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
The critical project that aims to bring bodies and emotions back in GT practices entails several
important elements. As feminist GT practitioners, we can appropriate the power of GT, contest the dominant uses of these technologies, and reconfigure the dominant visual practices to counter their objectifying vision. We can experiment with new geospatial practices that better articulate the complex realities of gendered, classed, raced, and sexualized spaces and experiences of individuals. These new practices should help us understand emotions in terms of their ‘‘socio-spatial mediation and articulation rather than as
entirely interiorized subjective mental states’’ (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 2005, 3). While being attentive to how emotions, subjectivities, and spaces are mutually constitutive in particular places and at particular times, these new practices should also take into account the
existence of different kinds of bodies (e.g., pregnant, disabled, old, mutilated, dead) and their
socially encoded meanings in relation to specific spatial, temporal, and cultural contexts (Rose
1993; Laws 1997; Domosh and Seager 2001; Longhurst 2001). In the arena of public policy, feminist GT practitioners have a role in questioning decisions that privilege detached
rationality and the ‘‘logic of efficiency’’ over emotions (Anderson and Smith 2001, 8). As feminist GT practitioners we deeply care about the subject(s) of our research and are
‘‘emotionally committed to our work,’’ and our geospatial practices should be infused with a

sense of ‘‘emotional involvement with people and places’’ (Bondi, Davidson and Smith, 2005,
2). We can develop GT practices that entail this emotional involvement and help express mean- ings, memories, feelings, and emotions for our subjects. We can draw on the emotional power of moving images and the techniques in narrative cinema to create GIS movies or visualizations that tell stories about the lives of marginalized people, highlight social injustice,
and—we hope—effect social change (Aitken 1991; Aitken and Craine 2006). In the three sections that follow, I discuss several GT projects to illustrate the specific ways in which bodies and emotions can be brought to bear on geospatial practices. Drawing from my recent experimentations and those by feminist scholars in cultural studies and media art, I explore how these projects contest the dominant meanings and visual prac- tices of GT. As these projects are more expres- sive than representational or analytical, taking the form of creative
visual or artistic work (e.g., GPS-assisted travelogues and 3D GIS video), they are in a certain sense ‘‘affective GT per- formances’’ that seek to transform GT into affective practices by incorporating the subject- ivities and emotions of the practitioner and research participants as an integral element of the project. Through the use of GT as a medium of self-expression and a means of re- sistance, and to articulate emotional geogra- phies and convey emotionally provocative messages, these nonrepresentational practices hint at ways of using GT that transcend the conventional duality between subject and ob- ject, design and use, author and
reader, and representation and practice (Del Casino and Hanna 2006).
The critique of technostrategic thought is a prerequisite to policymaking.
Current technocratic thought inherently produces detached knowledge, which views humans as dots on a map. Their impacts of violence are inevitable in a world where humans are dehumanized.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and Geo-
Informatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
Geospatial technologies are designed, created, and used by humans, and a large proportion of their application is for understanding or solving problems of individuals and social groups.
Bod- ies, however, are often absent or rendered irrelevant in contemporary practices of GT.
This ‘‘omission of the body’’ occurs in two different but related senses ( Johnson 1990, 18).
First, although bodies are involved in the development and use of GT, there is little room in these technologies to allow for any role of the practitioner’s subjectivities, emotions, feelings, passion, values, and ethics. Second, despite the fact that a large number of bodies are affected
by the application of GT (e.g., people profiled by geodemographic application, and civilians who were annihilated as ‘‘collateral damage’’ by GPS-guided smart bombs that missed their
tar- gets), bodies are often treated merely as things, as dots on maps, or even as if they do not exist (Gregory 2004; Hyndman 2005). The dominant disembodied practices of GT, however, are contestable as they are largely the result of a particular understanding of science and
objectivity (Kwan 2002a). This historically specific and socially constructed notion of science, as Donna Haraway (1991) argues, is predicated on the positionality of a disembodied master subject with transcendent vision. With such disembodied and infinite vision, the knower is capable of achieving a detached view into a separate, completely knowable world. The kind of knowledge produced with such disem- bodied positionality denies the partiality of the knower, erases subjectivities, and ignores the power relations involved in all forms of

knowledge production (Foucault 1977). Haraway (1991, 189) calls this decorporealized vision
‘‘the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere.’’ Closely associated with this view of science is a gendered notion of knowledge production and academic scholarship that privileges
rational thought over ‘‘irrational’’ emotionality (Bennett 2004). This ‘‘marginalization of
emotion,’’ as Anderson and Smith (2001, 7) put it, ‘‘has been part of a gender politics of research in which detachment, objectivity and rationality have been valued, and implicitly masculinized, while engagement, subjectivity, passion and desire have been devalued, and
frequently feminized.’’ Geography in particular has tended to ‘‘deny, avoid, suppress or downplay its emotional en- tanglements’’ (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 2005, 1). Yet, to paraphrase Anderson and Smith, there are times and places where lives are explicitly lived through pain, love, hate, anger, hope, fear, and passion. If the world is imbued with complex emotional geographies, GT practices are more relevant to real lives if they allow us to take the spatial, temporal, and social effects of feelings into account. To neglect how our research and social life are mediated by feelings and emotions is to exclude a key set of relations through
which lives are lived, societies made, and knowledge produced (Anderson and Smith 2001).

Technostrategic Discourse 1AC
Current technocratic thought inherently produces detached knowledge, which views humans as dots on a map through Geospatial Technology. All impacts of violence are inevitable in a world where humans are dehumanized in this way.
This comes before policy making.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and Geo-
Informatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
Geospatial technologies are designed, created, and used by humans, and a large proportion of their application is for understanding or solving problems of individuals and social groups.
Bod- ies, however, are often absent or rendered irrelevant in contemporary practices of GT.
This ‘‘omission of the body’’ occurs in two different but related senses ( Johnson 1990, 18).
First, although bodies are involved in the development and use of GT, there is little room in these technologies to allow for any role of the practitioner’s subjectivities, emotions, feelings, passion, values, and ethics. Second, despite the fact that a large number of bodies are affected
by the application of GT (e.g., people profiled by geodemographic application, and civilians who were annihilated as ‘‘collateral damage’’ by GPS-guided smart bombs that missed their
tar- gets), bodies are often treated merely as things, as dots on maps, or even as if they do not exist (Gregory 2004; Hyndman 2005). The dominant disembodied practices of GT, however, are contestable as they are largely the result of a particular understanding of science and
objectivity (Kwan 2002a). This historically specific and socially constructed notion of science, as Donna Haraway (1991) argues, is predicated on the positionality of a disembodied master subject with transcendent vision. With such disembodied and infinite vision, the knower is capable of achieving a detached view into a separate, completely knowable world. The kind of knowledge produced with such disem- bodied positionality denies the partiality of the knower, erases subjectivities, and ignores the power relations involved in all forms of
knowledge production (Foucault 1977). Haraway (1991, 189) calls this decorporealized vision
‘‘the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere.’’ Closely associated with this view of science is a gendered notion of knowledge production and academic scholarship that privileges
rational thought over ‘‘irrational’’ emotionality (Bennett 2004). This ‘‘marginalization of
emotion,’’ as Anderson and Smith (2001, 7) put it, ‘‘has been part of a gender politics of research in which detachment, objectivity and rationality have been valued, and implicitly masculinized, while engagement, subjectivity, passion and desire have been devalued, and
frequently feminized.’’ Geography in particular has tended to ‘‘deny, avoid, suppress or downplay its emotional en- tanglements’’ (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 2005, 1). Yet, to paraphrase Anderson and Smith, there are times and places where lives are explicitly lived through pain, love, hate, anger, hope, fear, and passion. If the world is imbued with complex emotional geographies, GT practices are more relevant to real lives if they allow us to take the spatial, temporal, and social effects of feelings into account. To neglect how our research and social life are mediated by feelings and emotions is to exclude a key set of relations through
which lives are lived, societies made, and knowledge produced (Anderson and Smith 2001).

Social justice is impossible in the world where technocratic discourse dominates all science. Only by the transformative use of art and film through the feminist perspective can masculine ideology be deconstructed
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and Geo-
Informatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
The wars following 9/11 have taken an enormous human toll, sometimes with the assistance
of GT such as GPS and remote sensing. The failures that Hurricane Katrina revealed, which many had hoped to be able to avoid through the help of GT, are also disconcerting. As feminist
GT practitioners, we need to think carefully about the kinds of geospatial practices that are truly relevant to the contemporary world. We should engage in the development of GT practices that help to create a less violent and more just world. I have argued in this article that embodied practices and passionate politics of GT that are attentive to bodies, emotions, and subjectivities will help us move beyond software and data to focus on real people and real lives. Drawing on recent developments in feminist thinking, I suggest that attention to the importance of affect and possibilities of performing ( practicing) GT as resistance would lead to distinctively feminist contribution to research and practice on GT.¶ Feminist geography affords a rare discursive space for making emotions, feelings, values, and ethics an integral
part of our work (Whatmore 2002; Ekinsmyth et al. 2004; Sharp, Browne, and Thien 2004;
Trauger 2004; Bondi, Davidson and Smith 2005; Kobayashi 2005). Mobilizing emotions in our work not only rep- resents an important element of the feminist project that seeks to recenter bodies in geospatial practices, it also entails experimentations with more expressive and
evocative forms of visual practices for conveying provocative feminist messages. As video artist Pipilotti Rist points out, ‘‘Messages that are conveyed emotionally and sensually can break up more prejudices and habitual behavior patterns than . . . intellectual treatise’’ (cited in
Riemschneider and Grosenick 2001, 142). Feelings and emotions have long been silenced in research and social life. Bringing them back to bear upon our GT practices would have considerable potential for yielding insights about new ways of using GT.
¶
In order to effect broader social change, how- ever, it is important to scale our care or concern from the personal/local level up to larger con- texts. Although most of the projects I describe in this article were undertaken as personal endeavors, our personal politics of resistance needs to be scaled up to the level of collectively practiced feminist politics. Collaborative projects under- taken by GT researchers, feminist/art activists, and community groups throughout the world
offer important inspiration for how this may be accomplished (e.g., McLafferty 2002, 2005a; kanarinka 2006). As feminist GT practitioners, we should develop innovative means to protest against the use of GT for violence and to engage in political activism that turn violence and fear into hope. Only when emotions, feelings, values, and ethics as well as a commitment to social justice become integral elements of our geospatial practices will moral geospatial practices become possible. Only then can GT help create a less violent and more just world.

Therefore, we affirm the affective dimension of geospatial technology.
Geospatial technology art contests the masculine detachment, rationality and objectifying nature of drones.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and Geo-
Informatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
As Parks’s and my own work have shown, GT can be appropriated as media for self-expression
and articulation of emotional geographies. These experimentations contest the detach- ment, rationality, and objectifying vision en- tailed in conventional GT practices. Map artists and art activists have long created art maps that contest the authority and content of official maps—
witness the maps produced by the Sur- realists and the Situationists (Krygier 2006; Varanka
2006; Wood 2006). Art maps are often created by extensively reworking preexisting maps,
‘‘redrawing, digitally altering, painting over, and reorienting the original images’’ (Wood 2006,
10). They point toward worlds other than those mapped in official maps and seek to ‘‘produce new configurations of space, subjectivity and power’’ (kanarinka 2006). Each art map is
therefore not only a ‘‘work of art’’ but also a ‘‘political action’’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987,
12). Similarly, GT can be appropriated as a digital art medium and used to create artworks that protest against social injustice and violence. GT art practices can be undertaken or per-
formed as a form of resistance (Deleuze 1998; Kaufman 1998; Klebesadel 2003).
Based on these notions of art practices as pol- itics of resistance, I have explored GIS as an art- istic medium for generating digital artwork using GIS software and data. As GIS was not developed and designed for artistic work, my GIS art project intends to challenge the
understanding of GT as scientific apparatus for producing ob- jective knowledge or as an
instrument of domination. I seek to destabilize the fixed meanings of GT that have precluded their use in novel and creative ways. Through my GIS art I also articu- late my discontent with the use of GT in wars and international conflicts that result in large num- bers of civilian casualties (Gregory 2004; Hynd- man 2005, 2007). I also protest against the use of these technologies in any applications that vio- late personal rights and privacy, as in geodemo- graphic and surveillance applications. I have explored the aesthetic potential of GIS by
experimenting with various artistic styles and techniques (Figures 1 and 2).3 The digital spaces of GIS have been appropriated as my spaces of resistance, which elude state sanction on the
more readily recognizable spaces of political protest (Pile 1997; Wainwright forthcoming). My
GIS art project was undertaken out of my sadness in light of the human casualties resulted from the attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11 as well as the ensuing wars and violent conflicts in the Middle East. In the project, GIS was used to create digital images that are aesthetically pleasing, but none of the visual elements in these images corresponds to any particular object in the world. For instance, the image shown in Figure 1 was created with three layers of real vector GIS data. The color schemes of these data and their overlay proper- ties were first tweaked in a GIS. The map file was then imported to an image processing program and processed with several artistic filters that transformed it into a drastically different image.

Geospatial Technology art allows for a politics of resistance at the individual level which is key to solve. Social change is only possible after recognizing the importance of the human body without reducing humans to mere statistics.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and Geo-
Informatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
Through this abstract and nonrepresentation- al GIS art practice, GIS is momentarily dissociated from any precepts of science, objectivity, transcendent vision, exploitation,
surveillance, or control. I thus participated in the cultural politics of contending the meanings of
GT (al- beit at a personal level), as cultural politics ‘‘are contestations over meanings, over borders and boundaries, over the ways we make sense of our worlds, and the ways we live our lives’’ (Mitchell 2000, 159). Through this geospatial aesthetics grounded on my concern about the role of GT in global violence, I insist that GT should be used primarily for creating a more just and peaceful world, as when the technologies are used in re- search on environmental
justice or for empowering marginalized social groups (e.g., Mennis 2002; McLafferty 2005a). In the project, GIS was used as a medium of passionate politics for countering the dominant practices. It is in this sense that my GIS art project can be understood as part of a broader counterhegemonic struggle over GT, as a form of questioning, and a form of protest and resistance. and to effect broader social change, politics of resistance at the individual level needs to be scaled up and connected to collectively practiced politics. The recent trend of increasing collaboration between researchers, artists, and community groups in projects that seek to understand people’s feelings and concerns may be indicative of how this connection
can be made (e.g., Rose 1997). For instance, the Greenwich Emotion Map Project engaged art activists and local residents to reflect on the social change taking place on the Greenwich Pen- insula (Nold 2005). It was a mapping project that aimed at understanding how local residents feel about the area based on their personal exploration and journeys. In the project, biomapping devices worn by participants recorded their emotional response (their body’s level of stimulation) to and interaction with their immediate environment, and a GPS tracked the routes they took. On returning to the studio, the information and photos taken along the way were up- loaded and interpreted by participants to create a personal visual narrative. The resulting emo- tion maps encouraged participants’ personal reflection on the complex relationship between them, their local environment, and their fellow citizens. The project allowed local residents of the Greenwich Peninsula to visualize where they feel stressed and excited, to articulate their concerns, and to engage with wider community issues (Nold 2005).
Feminist geospatial technology can deconstruct masculine technocratic ideology through incorporating the body to an otherwise reductionist and dehumanizing science.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and Geo-
Informatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)

Like travel photography, Parks (2001, 213) suggests, ‘‘the GPS receiver, rather than capturing an objective record, instead generates a visual display that may activate memories of subjective perspective, of a particularly situated point of view.’’ GPS not only registers location coordinates but also records the highlights, landmarks, and special events of one’s
journey— those personal experiences that are not coded within conventional maps. In this sense, Parks argues, the GPS map combines the objective and omniscient discourse of cartography with the subjective, grounded experience of the user. Visual representation of the
moving body by GPS introduces the possibility of subject(ive) mapping. Although represented as a series of lines and dots, the body’s movement transforms the map from an omniscient
view of territory into an individualized expression. By plotting the personal, GPS inscribes embodied practices into the discourse of mapping and allows the user to call into question the
objective status of the map by inflecting it with personal move- ment. The producer of the GPS map is none other than the body that traveled, walked, or moved along a certain trajectory carrying a GPS receiver. The practice of plotting the personal, then, figures the user as subject, produced through a series of movements and encounters. Drawing on Paul Virilio (1997) and
Gilles Deleuze (1986), Parks calls this subject ‘‘the trajective self,’’ referring to a space in between the subjective and objective that accounts for the ongoing condition of bodily
movement. Further, as Parks (2001, 214) suggests, ‘‘GPS mapping involves the act of self- positioning by recording and displaying movements from here to there. The goal of the personal plot is not to reproduce panoramic vistas, but rather to dis- play one’s changing position and archive one’s routes.’’ The GPS maps therefore represent the possibility of a mediated experience, as they often necessitate storytelling and narration because what they
reveal is seen and experienced from very specific and personal points of view. When used as a technology of self-reflection, GPS invites the user to see herself as a subject- in-motion, as an author and a reader, reflexively

Technostrategic Discourse 1ac
Drone warfare occurs in the context of sanitized technological killing—the distance enacted by the phenomenological dimension of drone weapons delivery establishes a radical separation between the bureaucratic machinations that justify and order that killing and the concrete human dimensions of those same murderous practices.
Addey et al 11 (Peter Addey, Mark Whitehead, Alison Williams et al. "Introduction: Air-target
Distance, Reach and the Politics of Verticality." Theory, Culture & Society 28.7-8 2011).
The target of aerial war and security could be understood in a manner that Eyal Weizman (2002) might describe as holographical. An assembling of disparate elements, the air-target adds up to a representation yet is built by techno-cultural practices that overlay one another with multiple details and perspectives. The result appears to be a reconfigured reality, augmented
and abstracted, yet heightened at the same time. In the place of the cadastral maps, which were assiduously produced under previous regimes of aerial governmentality, we have the modularized GIS data sets, which are able to instantaneously fabricate the target as a simulacrum. Real objects and com- plex environments come to be grasped in this way, analysed by distant audi- ences in a form that can be acted upon with speed but in a way in
which the violence involved in making-abstract is increasingly obscured. This is partly because of the concatenation or telescoping of the aerial target and the chain of targeting, which leads
Ryan Bishop to suggest that the destruc- tion of aerial war is obscured by the conflation of senses, technologies and perceptions, thus closing ‘the gap of perception’ and erasing the
‘distinction between apprehension, thought and action’ (Bishop, 2009). The processes of
‘sensing and tracking’, ‘perception and action’ that Bishop locates pre- cisely within the automation of the targeting process elsewhere must then be excavated within the evolving assembling and extension of the aerial tar- geting process. This process is itself subject to ever increasing processes of rationalization and optimization by flow monitoring and the
sequencing of its activities in order to produce the dream of ‘continuous coverage’ (Ha, 2010) or ‘persistent presence’ (Williams, 2011c) that is an unblinking eye ^ an omnipresent view provided by efficient UAV cycles and sequences that seeks to observe an asymmetric yet omnipresent threat with the capacity to unpredictably surprise and disrupt.
¶
Thus what
Anderson, Gregory, Saint-Amour and Bishop show us in this section is quite different from the imagery mentioned at the start of the editorial. Let us recall Judith Butler’s evocative description of the first Gulf War from the 1990s:
¶
. . . transported from the North American continent to
Iraq, and yet securely wedged in the couch in one’s own living room. The smart bomb screen is, of course, destroyed in the moment that it enacts its destruction, which is to say that this is a recording of a thoroughly destructive act which can never record that destructiveness, indeed,
which effects the phantasmatic distinction between the hit and its consequences. Thus as viewers, we verita- bly enact the allegory of military triumph: we retain our visual dis- tance and our bodily safety through the disembodied enactment of the kill that produces no blood and in which we retain our radical impermeability.
¶
(1992: 11)
¶
Butler takes this further: the
smart bomb renders distant television audiences ‘absolutely proximate, absolutely essential, and absolutely distant’ in a way that protects the viewer while securing ‘a fantasy of
transcendence, of a disembodied instrument of destruction’, protracted and filtered through distance and censored by the fact that the ‘aerial view never comes close to seeing the effects of its destruction’, for as the bomb comes tantalizingly closer to its target ‘the screen

conveniently destroys itself’ (1992: 11). As Gregory shows, today’s processes of aerial targeting
co-involve other actors, publics and objects in more complex relationships that do not simply escape the consequences of violence or remain safely ensconced in the arm- chairs of spectator warfare.
¶
Appearing to empty the target’s subject of all of its content, rational, scientific and legal expertise are meant to take over and enact what artist Wafa Bilal describes as the sharp edge of the comfort^conflict divide (on this see Ingram, 2010) in his work Shoot an
Iraqi. In this special section we see this view questioned. For instance, Ben Anderson’s article on coun- terinsurgency and PSYOPS explores the US targeting of a ‘pre-insurgent’ population through airdropped leaflets, propaganda bombs and broadcasts. Targeting here is about immersion in the lives of the population. It is target- ing of the potential to become dangerous
by touching the passions, interests and environment of the population.
¶
This military theatre, in earlier views, might appear comfortable and calm in relation to the messy and passionate world that it punishes. One might suggest that refining the object of the target’s sights through the pro- cessual stages described in the articles in this special section also filters out the ethical decisions and orientations such an encounter would bring if it were a face-to-face encounter
(think of the smiling faces on the postcard [Figure 1] in Anderson’s article). Indeed, the critique of the aerial target is the distance such an abstraction reinforces from the life it puts at threat.
Without the fidelity of a Levinasian encounter with the Other’s face, any possibility of ethical recognition will be gone. Thus, aerial targeting seems to work precisely because it subjects its users to a distanced and rational bureaucratic orientation, so that the effects of their actions can never be fully realized. However, the assumption that passion must somehow lie out- side
of these apparatuses is no doubt problematic, as is the comfort^conflict disjuncture. The sense in which the coldness of the target and targeting holds the processes of waging war from the skies together should be con- trasted with the affects that might threaten to undo this and, furthermore, the increasing likelihood that the drone operators will see the horrors that result from their actions. Gregory shows how these issues are particularly important to the formation of realism and comradeship, as drone operators recognize or become familiar with the faces of their compatriots captured by the drone’s camera.
¶
Paul K. Saint-Amour’s article crucially shows that the visual practices involved here are less ordered and not perfectly sequential. Looking to the origins of aerial photography he shows how the processes involved in early targeting depended on pastiche, the composing of mosaics of multiple per- spectives that are blended and full of errors. To what extent, then, might a targeting system be marked not by smooth consensus but the discord of synaesthetic and contrasting imagery, information and evidence?
Even while Bishop (2009) has noted how the goal of targeting systems has ‘been control and containment from a distance’ and precisely ‘not dissemination, dispersal, autonomy and resistance’, we should not assume that these char- acteristics have escaped or been removed
from the chain. Indeed, they may be endemic to the processes themselves as we learn more of the stress, strains and fatigue of those doing the targeting and the flying, those wit- nessing the effects of a missile launched in high definition resolution. The affects that make the targeting processes uncomfortable may also lie at the heart of the indeterminate, aleatory and
‘turbulent’ (sometimes literally) dynamics that animate and befuddle contemporary air power, issues both Ryan Bishop and Paul K. Saint Amour explore in their articles.

This technologized war-at-a-distance normalizes violence in the context of the everyday lives of warfighters and warplanners. Drone warfare reduces the world to a picture whose being is just being targeted by the US.
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
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The ensconcing of war operations, and the everyday deployment of lethal drone attacks,
within US cities such as Langley, Virginia gestures to a mutation in the conduct of war. The manner in which drone operators can
¶
exterminate human targets during their assigned
combat sessions, via their ensemble of tele-mediating technologies and military hardware, and then go home to take the kids to soccer or have a drink at their local bar, works to normalise
war as something that is effectively part of the civic continuum of everyday life practices. This continuum of practices is facilitated by the euphemisms of war: the screen media that display the atornisation and incineration of bodies by drone missiles are called by the military 'Kill TV'," and the material violence inflicted on human targets becomes merely 'kinetic activity'," as though killing were just another form of gym exercise. The televisual and video game dimensions of these killing operations help facilitate the transition from exterminatory
combat operations to civic sites and practices. In the words of an air force colonel of a Predator drone
¶
squadron: 'It teaches you how to compartmentalise it [the reality of war].'" The everyday returns to civic locations of 'home' after a series of technologically mediated killings in another country can, in fact, be seen to be inscribed by the forces of technological dis/location that drive the
¶
operations of drones: 'The more powerful and violent the technological expropriation, the delocalization,' Derrida notes, 'the more powerful, naturally, the recourse to the at-home, the return towards home.'o The violent deterritoralisation, delocalisation and dissociation experienced in the drone Ground Control Stations provokes the reaction: 'I want to be at home, I want finally to be at home, with my own, close to my friends and family.' Drone operators have remarked on how the trip home from their Ground Control Stations enables
them to transition from battle field to civic mode, with the hour's drive back to their home giving them 'that whole amount of time to leave it behind. They get in their bus or car and go into a zone - they say, "For the next hour I'm decompressing, I'm getting re-engaged into what's it's like to be a civilian"."' This return to a safe home is, of course, the privilege and prerogative
of the drone-enabled resident-soldier of the Global North. In the target countries of the Global
South - Afghanistan or Pakistan - the at-home is open to the anomic violence of drones and, as I discuss below, the ever-present risk of obliteration of home, friends and family.
¶
Philip Alston and Hina Shamsi have drawn critical attention to what they term:
¶
the 'PlayStation mentality' that surrounds drone killings. Young military personnel raised on a diet of video games now
kill real people remotely using joysticks. Far removed from the human consequences of their actions, how will this generation of fighters value the right to life? How will commanders and policymakers keep themselves immune from the deceptively antiseptic nature of drone killings?
Will the standards for intelligence-gathering to justify a killing slip? Will the number of acceptable 'collateral' civilian deaths increase?"
¶
The bracketing off that is enabled by the
parenthetical logic that governs these screen technologies can be appositely situated within
Heideggerian terms. 'The fundamental event of the modern age,' writes Martin Heidegger, 'is
the conquest of the world as picture.'4 Underscoring this epistemic shift to viewing the world as picture has been the dominance of screen technologies in mediating virtually everything that can be seen in terms of 'world'. The parenthetical bracketing off of the world that I have been
examining can effectively be understood as a form of 'enframing' the world. In his discussion of the term, Heidegger posits the process of enframing as a positive aspect of our relation to

technology, as in this understanding technology works to reveal the truth of the 'real'. I want to resignify this Heideggerian term in order to mark the manner in which screen technologies operate literally to bracket off the 'real' and to transmute it into object. Conjoining this resignified understanding of enframing to Heidegger's meditation on the 'conquest of the world as picture' effectively brings into focus the levels of epistemic and physical violence
enabled by the militarised use of tele-technologies.
¶
In his theorisation of the epistemic shift to viewing the world as picture, Heidegger notes that the process of representation is crucial to the construction of the world as picture. What is particularly relevant to my analysis of the parenthetical logic of screen technologies and the lethality of drones is the manner in which
Heidegger's analysis of the relation between representation and the world as picture
underscores the role of objectifying violence: 'Representing is ... a laying hold and grasping of what it is that is being viewed; in this scopic process, Heidegger emphasizes. 'assault rules'.45
The 'assault' on what is being viewed is legitimated by its transmutation into 'object':
'Representing is making-stand-over-against, an objectifying that goes forward and masters ...
That which is ... has the character of an object.'4 6 This process of objectification of the 'real' is undergirded by the play of science and technology: 'Science sets upon the real. It orders it into place to the end that at any given time the real will exhibit itself as an interacting network."' The
'real' in the context of drone technologies is precisely that which 'exhibits' itself through the tele-techno mediations of an 'interacting network' constituted by pilots/sensor operators, satellite links and drones. The enframing of the world as picture through 'entrapping
representation' ensures the 'real becomes secured in its objectness'."
¶
Everything in this
Heideggerian exposition can be clearly transposed to illuminate the operations of drone screen technologies in order to entrap and reduce the surveilled human figure into object that can be effectively and
¶
antiseptically liquidated from a distance. The antiseptic vision of war that is produced by the parenthetical logic of the use of drone technologies is enhanced further by
the clinical language deployed by the drone operators in the identification of suspect targets.
The Predator drone's infrared camera, with its digitally enhanced zoom, enables the sensor operators to detect the heat signature of a human body from significant distances (from an altitude of up to 3 kilometres). The term 'heat signature' works to reduce the targeted human body to an anonymous heat-emitting entity that merely radiates signs of life. This clinical process of reducing human subjects to purely biological categories of radiant life is further elaborated by the US military's use of the term 'pattern of life':
¶
The CIA received secret permission to attack a wide range of targets, including suspected militants whose names are not known, as part of a dramatic expansion of its campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan's border region. The expanded authority ... permits the agency to rely on what officials describe as
'pattern of life' analysis, using evidence collected by surveillance cameras or unmanned aircraft.
The information was used to target suspected militants, even when their full identities were not known.... Previously the CIA was restricted in most cases to killing only individuals whose names were on an approved list ... some analysts said permitting the CIA to kill people where names were unknown created a serious risk of killing innocent people."
This means that there is no value to life in the status quo—technological distancing reduces life to nothing more than something to be targeted and destroyed by militaristic impulses
Shaw, Graaham, and Majed ’12 . Shaw, Ian Graham, and Akhter, Majed. "The Unbearable
Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan." Antipode 44.4 (September 2012).
Representation, a social practice and strategy through which meanings are constituted and
communicated, is unavoidable when dealing with militarism and military activities.
Armed

Forces, and defence institutions, take great care in producing and promoting
¶ specific portrayals of themselves and their activities in order to legitimize and justify their¶ activities
in places, spaces, environments and landscapes (Woodward 2005:729).
In this section, we argue that the ramping up of drone deployments is justified
¶
by a distinctive targeting logic. As
Paul Virrilo (1989) has long argued, there is never war without representation, which is to say, the deadly materiality of war is always coiled within a discursive system (see also Shaw 2010).
In this sense, the drone performs a well-rehearsed imaginative geography (Bialasiewicz et al
2007;
¶
Gregory 2004) that is underwritten by targeted kills across neat isometric grids and
¶ algorithmic calculations (Amoore 2009), far removed from the brutal Real (Jones
¶ and Clarke
2006), and in a peculiar relation with the visceral imagery of previous wars (Tuathail 2003). The official “definition” of a targeted kill is not agreed upon
¶ under international law. Yet as a recent
UN report on targeted killing reveals, it can
¶ be thought of as follows:
¶
A targeted killing is the
intentional, premeditated and deliberate use of lethal force,
¶
by States or their agents acting
under colour of law, or by an organized armed group
¶ in armed conflict, against a specific individual who is not in the physical custody of
¶ the perpetrator. In recent years, a few States
have adopted policies, either openly or
¶ implicitly, of using targeted killings, including in the territories of other States. Such
¶ policies have been justified both as a legitimate response to
“terrorist” threats and as a necessary response to the challenges of “asymmetric warfare”. In
the legitimate struggle against terrorism, too many criminal acts have been re-characterized so as to justify addressing them within the framework of the law of armed conflict. New technologies, and especially unarmed combat aerial vehicles or “drones”, have been added into
this mix, by making it easier to kill targets, with fewer risks to the targeting State (Alston
¶
2010:3).
¶
The means and methods of killing vary, and include sniper fire, shooting at close
¶ range, missiles from helicopters, gunships, drones, the use of car bombs, and poison
¶
(Alston
2010:4)
¶
The drone is heralded by the US military as the apex of a targeting logic— accurate,
efficient, and deadly. This logic traces a distinct genesis. In 1938 Martin
¶
Heidegger wrote of
the “age of the world picture”, in a classic essay on the split between subject and object. For him, today’s world is conceived, grasped, and conquered as a picture—and what it means “to
be” is for the first time defined as the objectiveness of representing. In this modern age of humanism, a subjective¶ “worldview” arises for the first time—humans appear as Cartesian
subjects and the¶ world as a calculated picture, engineered by science and technology. Ray
Chow
¶
(2006) extends this metaphysical analysis to contend that the world has further
¶ been
produced as a “target”. In the wake of the atomic event of Hiroshima, the entire globe is rendered as a grid of targets to be destroyed as soon as it can be made visible.
The distance between the person who kills with drone technology and the person killed is not merely the geographical space between them. Rather, the technological dimension of drone warfare inserts an ontological and moral distance between the drone and the drone pilot.
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In her profound meditation on political economies of violence, Hannah Arendt writes that
extreme forms of violence are 'never possible without instruments'." 'Violence,' Arendt notes,
'is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues."' In other words, violence, in its most murderous and instrumentalised forms, cannot be exercised without technology. The Predator drone exemplifies the instrumentalisation of violence and the law of war through a complex process

of parenthetical disassociation. This process is predicated on suspending lines of causal
connection between an ensemble of technologies and their human agents. It effectively suspends, circumscribes and holds parenthetically in abeyance the relation between
executioner and victim, cause and effect. Jeff Macgregor, in his meditation on the transmutation of life into an instrumentalised video game, writes: 'erase the pain given and taken, reduce the grunt and the struggle to the push of a button ... and the game, the war, is no more than a fast-twitch exercise - a battle fought without personal cost. It is cause without
effect, a victory only for technology and opposable thumbs'.22
¶
In the first instance, the
Predator drones, in the execution of their targets, can be said to be blind-seeing technologies
of death: as inanimate objects, they cannot 'see' what they execute; rather, they execute what must be seen for them by their sensor operators. A rift opens up in this schema between the blind executor and the human-seeing agent that is inscribed with both spatial and temporal
dimensions. This causal disconnect between the doer and deed is, in fact, something on which
Friedrich Nietzsche meditated in the context of his critical analysis of what he termed the
'seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a
"subject"'.. Nietzsche draws attention to the network of discursive relations - juridical, legislative and philosophical - that are
¶
constitutive in the creation of what Foucault terms the
'subject effect' and its relation to deeds, actions and events:
¶
there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a function added to the deed - the deed is
everything. The popular mind in fact doubles the deed; when it sees the lightning flash, it is the deed of a deed; it posits the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect.
Scientists do no better when they say 'force moves,' 'force causes,' and the like - all its coolness, its freedom from emotion notwithstanding, our entire science still lies under the misleading influence of language and has not disposed of that little changeling, the 'subject.'
¶
The parenthetical logic of drone killings, and its structural disassociation between the doer and the deed, is perfectly captured in this Nietzschean critique: the doer, in this scenario, is functionally coextensive with the deed and only becomes separated by the 'seduction of language' and its subject-predicate structure. The 'doubling' of the deed and the production of the doer/deed
effect are what enable the conceptual partitioning of the technology from the human subject.
Couched in Nietzschean terms, one can say that the drone does the killing and that the sensor operator who presses the 'fire' button is merely a type of afterthought that can only be
retrospectively constituted as separate from the deed. As I will argue, following Nietzsche's problematisation of the dualistic doer-deed formula, the viewing of the human subject/technology nexus in prosthetic terms effectively works to interrogate the parenthetical logic that inscribes the conceptual apparatus of drone technologies.
Technological distance reduces targets to numbers and mere biological life.
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The military term 'pattern of life' is inscribed with two intertwined systems of scientific conceptuality: algorithmic and biological. The human subject detected by drone's surveillance
cameras is, in the first scientific schema, transmuted algorithmically into a patterned sequence
of numerals: the digital code of ones and zeros." Converted into digital data coded as a
'pattern of life', the targeted human subject is reduced to an anonymous simulacrum that flickers across the screen and that can effectively be liquidated into a 'pattern of death' with
the swivel of a joystick. Viewed through the scientific gaze of clinical biology, 'pattern of life'

connects the drone's scanning technologies to the discourse of an instrumentalist science, its
constitutive gaze of objectifying detachment and its production of exterminatory violence.
Patterns of life are what are discovered and analysed in the Petri dish of the laboratory. In this way, the targeted human subjects of Afghanistan and Pakistan are represented as types of bacteria and other low- life organisms that be exterminated with absolute impunity. The CIA's
Counter-terrorism Centre's chief has boasted that, thanks to its drone- automated execution
program: 'We are killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them.' Analogically, the human subjects targeted as suspect yet anonymous 'patterns of life' by the drones
become equivalent to forms of pathogenic life. The operators of the drones' exterminatory attacks must, in effect, be seen to conduct a type of scientific ethnic cleansing of pathogenic 'life forms'. In the words of one US military officer: 'Our major role is to sanitize the battlefield."' As
Iwill presently discuss, inscribing this clinical discourse on drones is the Derridean figure of immunisation against foreign and pathogenic bodies. As mere patterns of pathogenic life, these targeted human subjects effectively are reduced to what Giorgio Agamben would term 'a kind of absolute biopolitical substance' that can killed with no concern about the possibility ofjuridical accountability: they are 'bare life' that can be killed with absolute impunity." Anonymous
'patterns of life' signify in contradistinction to legally named persons; they exemplify the
'ontological hygiene' legislated by US government policy in order to secure the reproduction of the 'principle of scarcity with respect to agency and personhood'."
¶
Situated in this
Agambenian context of the extermination of human life with absolute impunity , the Predator drones must be seen as instantiating mobile 'zones of exception': wherever the drones
operate, they have the capacity to suspend the rule of law and juridical accountability even as, paradoxically, the US Department of State, as discussed above, argues that these attacks are conducted under formal laws of war. 'One of the paradoxes of the state of exception,' writes
Agamben, 'lies in the fact that in the state of exception it is impossible to distinguish
transgression of the law from the execution of law.' In his theorisation of the state of exception, Agamben maps a space within which the agentic subject of law 'neither executes nor transgresses law, but inexecutes it'." 'Every fiction of a nexus between violence and law disappears here: there is nothing but a zone of anomie, in which violence without any juridical form acts.' Agamben's 'zone of anomie' perfectly captures the zone of violence that designates the anonymous 'patterns of life' that can be liquidated by drones with absolute impunity. I want to reaccentuate Agamben's concept of the inexecution of law by staging a parenthetical qualification. By placing a parenthetical bracket over the prefix 'in', in the term '(in)execution,' I want to argue that there is operative in these lethal drone attacks at once an execution of US
Department of State law and an inexecution of it through the generation of mobile states of exception that articulate extrajudicial spaces beyond the redress of law. Even as these drone attacks execute US law (of war), they violate with impunity both international law and the sovereignty of nations such as Afghanistan and Pakistan.
These distances form a spatial hiatus, which desensitizes us to drone killing—drone operation becomes a video game with fantastic special effects, and war becomes nothing more than button-pushing.
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The killing at a distance operations of the Predator drone ensemble of technology and human agents work to articulate a spatial hiatus and parenthetical disconnect between this place
- that

is, the Ground Control Station (GCS) located in, for example, Nevada - and that place
- the to-kill target located in Afghanistan.
Working in tandem with this spatial rift is a temporal disconnect generated by satellite technology
.
Although the killing of the designated target is supposedly conducted in terms of what the military literature terms
'real time', the mediating effects of satellite and imaging technologies on 'live' and 'real time' signify that, in effect, there can only ever be 'an allegation of "live" and of "real time".
Discussing the metaphysics of presence in the contemporary configuration of 'tele-techno- mediatic modernity' and its celebration of such things as 'live' satellite- televisual transmissions
, Jacques
Derrida sardonically remarks that
'we should never forget that this "live" is not an absolute live, but only a live effect
[uneffectdedirect], an allegation of"live
"'.25It is an allegation of live that animates the operation of drones, as 'to allege' signifies, in legal terms, 'to assert without proof and, simultaneously, to 'cite, quote'.26 In other words, the very act of 'live' and 'real time' drone Predator executions must undergo a series of tele-techno mediations that structurally ensure that the 'absolutely real present is already a memory': 'there is no purely real time because temporalization itself is structured by a play of retention or of protention and, consequently, of traces ...
The real time effect is itself a particular effect of "diff6rance".' 2 7 In other words, there opens up here a temporal rift between the 'now'
- a moment of 'retention' as experienced, for example, at Creech Ground Control
Station, Nevada - and the 'then' the relayed moment of protention that unfolds in Afghanistan as already a 'memory' for those located at the GCS in Nevada.
This temporal rift is, in effect, acknowledged by the military's use of the term 'latency' in order to identify the micro-delay that inscribes the command sent by the remote pilot to the airborne drone and its consequent response.
¶ The structure of this tele-techno mediation can be envisioned as triangulated: the human operators at their ground stations are interlinked with the drone on the other side of the globe by the interposition of the satellite in space.
This triangulated structure of interlinked communication graphically evidences the series of mediations and micro-diachronic hiatuses that transmute the 'live' image into a latent 'memory', into a retrospective artefact of 'real time'
. The micro-diachronic hiatuses that effectively turn the 'live' into 'memory' are marked, in passing, by former President George W Bush's celebratory speech on UACVs: ¶
Innovative doctrine and high-tech weaponry can shape and then dominate an unconventional conflict. Our commanders are gaining a real-time picture of the entire battlefield, and are able to get targeting ¶ 28 information from sensor to shooter almost immediately.
¶ The qualifier 'almost immediately' succinctly names the 'latency' effect discussed above, while also underscoring the micro-rift between 'live' and 'real time' and their tele-techno mediation into retrospectively constructed spatio-temporal visual artefacts.
In the techno-military literature on drone technologies, everything is driven on ultimately 'decreasing the time between sensor and shooter' and thereby 'shortening the "kill chain"'." The military term 'kill chain' diagrammatically underscores the impossibility of a synchronicity that, because of the unavoidable tele-techno mediations
, is not always already marked by the micro-hiatus that separates yet conjoins
¶
one link from another in the 'kill chain'.
¶ The prosthetic status of this triangulated structure can be elaborated in ¶ the context of the multiple dimensions it embodies: human-machine-human, life-technology-death and agent-machine-victim. As I will discuss in some detail below, this triadic structure is topologically conjoined by a series of prosthetic grafts that suture one seemingly autonomous entity to its absolute other. The prosthetic relations that
I have been mapping here can be situated within Michel Serres' theorisation of topology 'as the science of nearness and rifts'." Serres names this topology the 'fold' - as that topological figuration of space-time that is productive of simultaneous rifts and nearness. Giles Deleuze effectively elaborates on the complex logics ¶ operative in the topology of the fold by describing the 'duplicity of the fold' in terms of 'a tension by which each field is pulled into the other'.' The topology of the fold at once captures the complex spatio-temporal effects generated by drone technologies and the contradictory tensions that inscribe their field of operations by marking the indissociable relation between seemingly antithetical categories. Viewed in this context, the geometry of the triangulated structure that I have drawn upon in order to describe the drone ensemble can be seen to offer only a static image of what is in actuality a dynamic process of topological relations between rifts and nearness, the other and the same, human and technology. As I discuss below, these topological relations are fundamentally negotiated or mediated through the figure of the prosthetic.
¶ What results from the process of tele-techno mediations that I have been mapping, regardless of 'real time' and 'live' claims, is what Derrida terms 'traces'.
This is not to reduce the murderous consequences of the drone attacks to insubstantial remains; rather, it is to underscore the artefactual status of the images/traces of the killings that the GCS sensor operators work with and consume, and that structurally distance and disassociate them from the victims of their actions. Critically, it is the combined effect of the parenthetical suspension of the 'real' and the 'live' produced by this tele-techno thanatological economy of war that transmutes killing into the stuff of video games and that establishes a type of causal disconnect, and consequent disavowal, of the human operators' relation to the killing that transpires on the ground in
'remote' Afghanistan or Pakistan
.
The following remarks by Predator drone operators
located at a
GCS in Nevada exemplify this spatio-temporal disconnect:
'It's antiseptic. It's not as potent an emotion as being on the battlefield';
'It's like a video game. It can get a little bloodthirsty . But it's fucking cool'
;
'Most of the time, I get to fight the war, and go home and see the wife and kids at night.' 'Another talked about

flying missions in Afghanistan, and then getting home in time to watch reruns of the TV sitcom
Friends.'"
'You have some guy sitting at Nellis [GCS Nevada] and he's taking his kid to soccer.
It's a strange dichotomy to war
.'34
This
strange dichotomy
of war is enabled by a parenthetical logic that brackets off causal relations through a series of tele- techno mediations that, in turn, transmute the 'real' into
Baudrillardian simulacra
." This strange dichotomy of war resonates on yet another level. On the one hand, negotiating the materiality of geography is one of the key predicates of successful warfare; on the other, drone warfare effectively ensures that 'the limitations of geography are taken out of the war that a soldier goes off to experience'. 6
For the drone soldier, the experience of geography is at once unbounded and simulated via the ensemble of screen technologies and circumscribed by the very materiality of the civic sites and spaces of his or her
everyday life.
This technostrategic distancing also erases any possible ethical dimension to warfighting—the ontological dimension of cyborg warfare instrumentalizes bodies such that they are nothing more than possible operands of violence.
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
This seemingly indivisible prosthetic relation between drones and their human operators
evidences, in effect, the emergence of a new type of war that could be termed 'cyborg war'.
Drawing on Donna Haraway's celebratory trope of resistance and overturning of oppressive and destructive regimes and epistemologies of power, I re-code the term in order to evidence its violent assimilation and co-option by the very phallogocentric, militaristic and instrumentalist authorities it was designed to contest:
¶
To recapitulate certain dualisms have been persistent in
Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of
women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals- in short, domination of all constituted others ... Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature ...
High- tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and
who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices."
¶
In the drone-human relation, it is not
clear 'who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine'. The graft of the prosthetic blurs this boundary. Moreover, in the context of the digitised codes that interlink humans and drones in their operational schema: 'It is not clear what is mind and
what is body in machines that resolve into coding practices.' The prosthetics of this new law of
war, and its ensemble of human agents grafted to their drone technologies via screens, joysticks and satellite links, perfectly embodies the figure of the cyborg as the abject other to Haraway's
utopian trope. In keeping with the cyborg logic of the prosthetic, there is no 'proper' body in contradistinction to the machine; rather, couched in Derridean terms, 'this prosthetic structure is not something we add to the "proper" body but that it is already our experience of what is most proper to us, it is already the possibility of the prosthetic ... thus technology or techn is already originally in place in our own body, in what is most proper to us'. 68
¶
This profound
Derridean meditation on the infrastructural dimensions of the prosthetic effectively enables the critical interrogation of the categorical separation of the drone from its human agent. Belying its negative and reductive nomenclature, the drone cannot be reduced to a mindless machine of purely robotic acts; rather, the drone-as-prosthetic articulates a 'prosthetics of origin',"9 to use
Derrida's titular term, that conjoins it inseparably, through grafting, to its embodied agents of cognition, reflection and intent. Cyborg war, in this schema, instrumentalises bodies into lethal machines via a prosthetic structure that operates in tandem with a parenthetical logic of disassociation between the doer and deed: machine/human, doer/deed are at once tactically conjoined in the acts of surveillance, targeting and killing, and simultaneously disjoined from

the ethical consequences of these same acts. The interstice that opens up between this parenthetical and prosthetic relation must be seen as a critical fault line that compels examination. This fault line marks the radical asymmetries of power operative in the use of these drone killing technologies and their ethical ramifications.
¶
For the United States, the use of the drones is justified because it means that its soldiers are not placed in potentially fatal ground operations of war: no flesh and blood is lost, merely machines. This dualistic logic is, of
course, violently asymmetrical. For the targets of this drone war, it is flesh and blood that is shed, without the possibility of traditional combat counter- retaliation: drones kill silently, firing their missiles from a 2 mile distance. With nothing to lose but machines, the United States is
now in a position to wage war without the usual weighing up of the human cost. The US military, in fact, terms UCAVs as 'attritable': 'This means a commander can afford to lose one through attrition.'o Qualms have been expressed by military personnel such as this unnamed
Iraq combat veteran 'who helped design much of the military's doctrine for using unmanned drones': 'There's something important about putting your own sons and daughters at risk when you choose to wage war as a nation. We risk losing that flesh-and- blood investment if we go too far down this road."' The parenthetical logic of drone war brackets off the ethical questions concerning the waging of war while also suspending the flesh-and-blood risks entailed by
those fighting in the field. PW Singer terms these new warriors 'cubicle warriors', ensconced in cubicles outfitted with computers, joysticks and ergonomic furniture: For a new generation,
'going to war' doesn't mean shipping off to some dank foxhole in a foreign land to dodge bullets.
Instead, it is a daily commute in your Toyota Camry to sit behind a computer screen
¶
72 and drag a mouse.
¶
The cubicle warrior is a cyborg warrior prosthetically grafted, through satellite feeds, to his or her drone and yet effectively quarantined, through the parenthetical bracketing that is enabled by his or her cubicle location and
¶
screen technologies, from the
risks and violence of the battlefield.
¶
The fault line or rift that results from these two contradictory spatio- temporal schemas operating simultaneously is effectively captured by the jargon term for drone pilots flying planes over 7000 miles away from their location: 'remote split operation'." Remote split operation refers to the manner in which drone pilots, located at their
Ground Control Stations in the United States, are connected via satellite links to their flying charges
¶
thousands of miles away. I want to resignify this term so that it underscores the split or contradictory forces at work in the ensemble of figures and technologies that constitute drone operations. Remote split operations encapsulate the fault line that at once parenthetically brackets off the drone personnel from the locus of the battlefield while they are simultaneously prosthetically grafted to their drones via satellite links. The contradictory forces that inscribe drone technologies are not the product of accident; rather, they must be seen as having been
produced by the design demands of the US military. In its brief to the teams of designers employed to produce UCAVs, DARPA 'wanted "intelligent function allocation" to allow the UCAV to operate autonomously, while stressing the idea that the human controller would be expected to provide executive-level mission management to "remain in the decision process"'." In this schema, the drone is an entity that 'operates' autonomously, and thus independently of its operators, and simultaneously is instrumentally grafted to its human controller who will
continue to make key decisions regarding its operations. The 'autonomous' operations of
drones exemplify the conceptual shift from 'technofetishism to technoanimism' - which, as
Vivian Sobchack has argued, constitutes one of the key attributes of the prosthetic once it is personified so that it 'is seen to have a will of its own'."

The biggest internal link to all these distancing impacts is the way that technologized violence removes the emotional, affective element from the calculations of warplanning.
Grayson 12 (Kyle, Senior Lec. At Newcastle University in Critical Geopolitics and International
Politics, “Six Theses on Targeted Killing,” Political Studies Association, Vol 32,
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9256.2012.01434.x/abstract>)
¶
Space can be conceived as the four-dimensional environment (length, width, depth
¶
and time) in which ‘objects and events occur, and in which they have relative
¶
position and direction’
(Harrison and Dourish, 1996, p. 2; see also Simonsen, 1996).
¶
The majority of attention that has been placed on the spatial dimension of targeted¶ killing has focused on its territorial
positioning via cartographic practices that
¶
operate on a register of difference that delineates through the category of the nation¶ state. Locations of targeted killing are dutifully recorded and positioned within¶ these national boundaries and linked to broader geopolitical
narratives regarding¶ global counter-insurgency. Of particular interest has been the possibility for tar-
¶
geted killing to be enacted by RPAS pilots located in excess of 7,000 miles away
¶
from the immediate theatre of operation.
¶
Beyond standard territorial locations and the distortion of time and space in con-
¶
temporary counter-insurgency, Eyal Weizman (2007) draws our attention to the¶ forms of spatial management and sovereignty that are constitutive of
targeted¶ killing. Primarily, he demonstrates that in contemporary counter-insurgency it is
¶ important to denote how the practices of control have extended upwards into¶ the
stratosphere as a means of managing populations and their circulation on the¶ ground. This development reflects broader changes in military strategy over the
¶
twentieth century that equated air power with dominance over ground territory.
¶
But as Weizman (2007, p. 239) notes, this has created a reliance on air-based
¶
military technologies as a means of managing
‘problematic’ spaces and populations
¶
and the enactment of a policy that has been called
‘control without occupation’ by
¶
the Royal Air Force.
¶
As a result, counter-insurgency and insurgency war-fighting in places like Israel-¶ Palestine are ‘increasingly manifested by a creeping progression along a vertical¶ axis’ that involves ‘two spheres of extraterritorial
sovereignty’ (Weizman, 2007,
¶
pp. 253, 258). Practices like targeted killing that attempt to provide ‘control without¶ occupation’ are predicated on having both unimpeded access and control of air-¶ space as well as possessing the technology to operate within this theatre of
opera-¶ tion. In response, one can see the use of ‘subterranean warfare’ by insurgency
¶ movements – literally going under the ground to circumvent aerial interference – a
¶
practice that gained currency during the Vietnam War as a response to these
¶
counter-insurgency measures (Weizman, 2007, pp. 253–258).
¶
In addition, targeted killing alters and intensifies
forms of spatial management¶ through its ability to redefine everyday places, particularly those in which indi-
¶
viduals seek sanctuary from political, economic and social pressures. In geography,
¶
place refers to those spaces that are ‘invested with understandings of behavioural
¶ appropriateness, cultural expectations, and so forth [in which] we act’ and which
¶
we imbue with value (Harrison and Dourish, 1996, p. 3). Insurgency – in part –
¶
gains its political and affective impacts by initiating violence within public places¶ that have been declared secure
by an entity that claims sovereign power – both legally and symbolically – over such places. In contrast, targeted killing produces¶ political and affective impacts by transforming private
sanctuary places like the¶ home into a public theatre of counter-insurgency warfare.
Moreover, as a spatial
¶
incursion from afar that cannot be easily countered or avenged, it places the
¶
interface of violence much closer to places of sanctuary for the ‘enemy’. Targeted¶ killing
as a practice can thus defile sanctified places. The symbolic power comes not
¶
just from the

ability to defile but also from the a-temporal character of defiled space
¶
– as Feldman (1991, p.
67) notes, ‘defiled space never goes away’. Thus, as a tactic,
¶
targeted killing demonstrates how counter-insurgency also ‘seeks to violate the
¶
spatial constructs that function as armatures of the victim’s social order’ (Feldman,
¶
1991, p. 75).
Technostrategic discourse manifests itself in the necropolitics of dividing the populations who receive the sovereign right to life and death, and those who don’t. In the Feb. 2010 Uruzgan drone strike, this is demonstrated by the discourse that removes what is foreign, intangible and violent and, instead, associates it with the familiar question of masculinity and femininity. Here, the drone operators feminize and thus are able to target their victims.
Allinson 12.
(Jamie, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Westminster,
International Relations PhD, University of Edinburgh, “Necropolitics of the Cyborg Empire:
Rethinking the Drone War,” Millennium Conference, http://millenniumjournal.files.wordpress. com/2012/10/allinsonmillenium2012necropoliticscyborg-empire.docx)
The particular interlude prompted by the demand for weapons to be seen at 5:18 leads to a
highly revealing exchange between the Predator team and the screeners, which is worth quoting at length:
¶
At 0529D the Predator pilot states to the crew ‘does it look like he is ho'n something across his chest. It's what they've been doing here lately, they wrap their
*expletive* in their man dresses so you can't PID it.’ Then on the radio to [redacted] he says
"looks like the dismounted pax on the hilux pickup on the east side is carrying something, but we cannot PID what it is at this time but he is carrying something’. After the Predator crew prompted the twice in mIRC, the screeners call out a possible weapon and then ask the crew to go white hot to get a better look. The response from the sensor operator is ‘white hot is not going to give us anything better, that truck would make a beautiful target’. The Predator pilot then at 0534D made this radio call "All players, all Players from [redacted] from our DGS, the
MAM that just mounted the back of the hilux had a possible weapon, read back possible rifle.'
During their post strike review, the screeners determined that this was not a weapon. At 0624D the screeners called out a weapon, this the only time that the Screeners called out a weapon without being prompted by the Predator crew. At 0655D, the Predator pilot called [redacted] and told him that the Screeners called out two weapons. The Screeners had not made any call outs of weapons. At 0741 the Predator pilot calls [redacted] and says ‘there's about 6 guys riding in the back of the highlux, so they don't have a lot of room. Potentially could carry a personal weapon on themselves.’
¶
A great deal is to be understood about the necropolitical logic at work in the occupation of Afghanistan through this passage. As an indicator of the role of
Orientalist fantasy in the tendency of Western militaries to ‘effeminise the men of the
[occupied] population through both symbolic and practical emasculation’ the Predator pilot’s characterization of the Afghan man’s clothing is quite stark: ‘their mandresses’. Nor does this phrase refer solely to the Predator pilot’s notion of what men ought to wear (presumably trousers), and the implied denigration of those whose clothing does not meet this norm. It also reveals the drawing of a caesura, a mental and political cordon around those whose actions inherently render them part of the population it is acceptable to put to death.
¶
We can consider this act of delineation at the basic level of pronouns. The Predator pilot describes
how ‘what they’ve [my emphasis] been doing round here lately’ is to ‘wrap their *expletive* in
their man dresses so you can't PID it’. Before this he asks for confirmation that the man on the screen does indeed look like he is holding something across his chest. Now, it may be objected that ‘they’ is simply a pronoun here ⎯ which it is, but this usage is in no sense simple. The pilot

could have said ‘that’s what the Taliban have been doing round here lately’, or ‘the enemy’ or
‘the insurgents’ or a similar noun. By using ‘they’ the pilot shows that he already considers the man he is looking at to be one of ‘them’, and this ‘they’ have very definite characteristics,
culled from the imaginary of what Patrick Porter calls ‘military orientalism’. ‘They’ are effete, exotic, and treacherous in transgression of the gender boundaries by, for example, their wearing ‘mandresses’. Nor is the mandress, however comfortable or stylish it may sound by comparison to US military uniform, a simple piece of clothing. It is itself weaponized, a tool of the MAM’s underhand concealment of the arms he is assumed to bear, and which the action of carrying something across the chest inadvertently reveals.
¶
The unspoken frustration behind the Predator pilot’s ascription of a motive to the Afghan man’s concealment of a (nonexistent) weapon is doubly instructive. Why do MAMs hold things across their chests and inside their clothes? They do so ‘so you can’t PID it.’ This implies that the pilot believes that the Taliban are manipulating US rules of engagement to the degree that they know what constitutes a positive identification of a weapon for a drone pilot and that they are deliberately preventing this identification, and therefore hampering the use of lethal force against them. The pilot therefore inverts the rules of engagement by evoking the tactical wrapping-up of objects in the ‘mandress’: an Afghan male without a visible weapon thereby
becomes grounds for threat.
Therefore, we affirm the affective dimension of drone technology.
Bringing the affective dimension back into drone warfare displaces the logic of efficiency which erases the concrete experience of warfare and enables the violent distancing which causes the worst atrocities in modern technologized war
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and Geo-
Informatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
The critical project that aims to bring bodies and emotions back in GT practices entails several
important elements. As feminist GT practitioners, we can appropriate the power of GT, contest the dominant uses of these technologies, and reconfigure the dominant visual practices to counter their objectifying vision. We can experiment with new geospatial practices that better articulate the complex realities of gendered, classed, raced, and sexualized spaces and experiences of individuals. These new practices should help us understand emotions in terms of their ‘‘socio-spatial mediation and articulation rather than as
entirely interiorized subjective mental states’’ (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 2005, 3). While being attentive to how emotions, subjectivities, and spaces are mutually constitutive in particular places and at particular times, these new practices should also take into account the
existence of different kinds of bodies (e.g., pregnant, disabled, old, mutilated, dead) and their
socially encoded meanings in relation to specific spatial, temporal, and cultural contexts (Rose
1993; Laws 1997; Domosh and Seager 2001; Longhurst 2001). In the arena of public policy, feminist GT practitioners have a role in questioning decisions that privilege detached
rationality and the ‘‘logic of efficiency’’ over emotions (Anderson and Smith 2001, 8). As feminist GT practitioners we deeply care about the subject(s) of our research and are
‘‘emotionally committed to our work,’’ and our geospatial practices should be infused with a
sense of ‘‘emotional involvement with people and places’’ (Bondi, Davidson and Smith, 2005,
2). We can develop GT practices that entail this emotional involvement and help express mean-

ings, memories, feelings, and emotions for our subjects. We can draw on the emotional power of moving images and the techniques in narrative cinema to create GIS movies or visualizations that tell stories about the lives of marginalized people, highlight social injustice,
and—we hope—effect social change (Aitken 1991; Aitken and Craine 2006). In the three sections that follow, I discuss several GT projects to illustrate the specific ways in which bodies and emotions can be brought to bear on geospatial practices. Drawing from my recent experimentations and those by feminist scholars in cultural studies and media art, I explore how these projects contest the dominant meanings and visual prac- tices of GT. As these projects are more expres- sive than representational or analytical, taking the form of creative
visual or artistic work (e.g., GPS-assisted travelogues and 3D GIS video), they are in a certain sense ‘‘affective GT per- formances’’ that seek to transform GT into affective practices by incorporating the subject- ivities and emotions of the practitioner and research participants as an integral element of the project. Through the use of GT as a medium of self-expression and a means of re- sistance, and to articulate emotional geogra- phies and convey emotionally provocative messages, these nonrepresentational practices hint at ways of using GT that transcend the conventional duality between subject and ob- ject, design and use, author and
reader, and representation and practice (Del Casino and Hanna 2006).
The critique of technostrategic thought is a prerequisite to policymaking. Current technocratic thought inherently produces detached knowledge, which views humans as dots on a map. Their impacts of violence are inevitable in a world where humans are dehumanized.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and Geo-
Informatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
Geospatial technologies are designed, created, and used by humans, and a large proportion of their application is for understanding or solving problems of individuals and social groups.
Bod- ies, however, are often absent or rendered irrelevant in contemporary practices of GT.
This ‘‘omission of the body’’ occurs in two different but related senses ( Johnson 1990, 18).
First, although bodies are involved in the development and use of GT, there is little room in these technologies to allow for any role of the practitioner’s subjectivities, emotions, feelings, passion, values, and ethics. Second, despite the fact that a large number of bodies are affected
by the application of GT (e.g., people profiled by geodemographic application, and civilians who were annihilated as ‘‘collateral damage’’ by GPS-guided smart bombs that missed their
tar- gets), bodies are often treated merely as things, as dots on maps, or even as if they do not exist (Gregory 2004; Hyndman 2005). The dominant disembodied practices of GT, however, are contestable as they are largely the result of a particular understanding of science and
objectivity (Kwan 2002a). This historically specific and socially constructed notion of science, as Donna Haraway (1991) argues, is predicated on the positionality of a disembodied master subject with transcendent vision. With such disembodied and infinite vision, the knower is capable of achieving a detached view into a separate, completely knowable world. The kind of knowledge produced with such disem- bodied positionality denies the partiality of the knower, erases subjectivities, and ignores the power relations involved in all forms of
knowledge production (Foucault 1977). Haraway (1991, 189) calls this decorporealized vision
‘‘the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere.’’ Closely associated with this view of science is a gendered notion of knowledge production and academic scholarship that privileges

rational thought over ‘‘irrational’’ emotionality (Bennett 2004). This ‘‘marginalization of
emotion,’’ as Anderson and Smith (2001, 7) put it, ‘‘has been part of a gender politics of research in which detachment, objectivity and rationality have been valued, and implicitly masculinized, while engagement, subjectivity, passion and desire have been devalued, and
frequently feminized.’’ Geography in particular has tended to ‘‘deny, avoid, suppress or downplay its emotional en- tanglements’’ (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 2005, 1). Yet, to paraphrase Anderson and Smith, there are times and places where lives are explicitly lived through pain, love, hate, anger, hope, fear, and passion. If the world is imbued with complex emotional geographies, GT practices are more relevant to real lives if they allow us to take the spatial, temporal, and social effects of feelings into account. To neglect how our research and social life are mediated by feelings and emotions is to exclude a key set of relations through
which lives are lived, societies made, and knowledge produced (Anderson and Smith 2001).
Current forms of discourse are actively produced to forward narratives that are as favorable as possible to the state and manipulated to neutralize incompatible narratives.
Shapiro 1990 [Michael J. Shapiro is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa,
“Strategic Discourse/Discursive Strategy: The Representation of "Security Policy" in the Video Age”,
International Studies Quarterly Vol. 34, No. 3 (Sep. 1990) pp. 327-340]
Therefore, in order for the overt/covert economy to operate appropriately, cer- ¶ tain discursive strategies for representing the relationship must be maintained. The ¶ President and his staff must be regarded as being in control of foreign policy, if not ¶ of all the details of its implementation. That
policy must not be seen as duplicitous; ¶ for example, the use of force or intimidation externally must be seen as operating in ¶ behalf of "national security," and not even partly on the basis of private commercial ¶ interests. To maintain the credibility of its strategic discourse, the American state ¶ must
therefore manage the articulation and expression of policy. And because of ¶ recent contention in
Congressional hearings and elsewhere surrounding the propri- ¶ eties of the covert dimension of policy, the state must either contain expressions of ¶ the relationships between overt and covert policy or it must actively produce repre- ¶ sentations aimed at preempting or responding to modes of
representation that are ¶ hostile or incompatible with the constructions it desires.
¶
In a sense, then, a major function of official discourse is to strategically affect the ¶ interpretation of policy structures, ideals, and implementation. And the discursive ¶ economies of this function involve significant
mediating structures. The first is tex- ¶ tual structure. This level of economy is influenced by both such
textual mechanisms ¶ as narrative, rhetoric, and grammar and by genre, by the forms of articulation- ¶
verbal utterances, video images, or combinations of these. The second level of econ- ¶ omy has to do with the diffusion and ownership of the medium through which non- ¶ official voices and images produce commentaries on policy on which official ¶ discourse must attempt to impose its
interpretations. Of course these levels are ¶ connected inasmuch as the communication strategies of defenders of strategic policy ¶ must respond with textual strategies that are addressed to competing interpreta- ¶ tions. The expressions of official discourse can therefore involve counter-narrative, ¶ counter-rhetorical, and alternative grammars aimed at discrediting various models ¶ of agency or
responsibility that non-official sources ascribe to American policy. The ¶ strategy of official discourse must involve the appropriate media as well as textual ¶ mechanisms. It will respond with narratives about the course of events when histori- ¶ cal sequences leading up to an action are at issue, and it must respond with graphics ¶ and videos when what was perceived before an action was taken is at issue.
Given the ¶ increasing availability of at-the-scene video footage carried by television into millions ¶ of
American homes, those in charge of official discourse have become increasingly ¶ sophisticated in. the
use of images and the creation of favorable verbal scenarios to ¶ accompany them.

The gendered ontology of realism hides the human impacts of nuclear war and never considers disarmament as a policy option
Duncanson and Eschle 8 (Claire Duncanson, PhD Lecturer in IR at University of Edinburgh; Catherine Eschle, PhD
Senior Lecturer University of Strathclyde “Gender and the Nuclear Weapons State: A Feminist Critique of the UK
Government’s White Paper on Trident” New Political Science, Vol. 30, No. 4, December 2008)
The previous section discussed the masculine character of the identity of the
¶
“Protector”; in the next, we go on to address the masculine identity of the state more generally. In the dominant Realist view, upheld by both mainstream
¶
academics and the majority of policy-makers, states are “unitary actors whose
¶ internal characteristics, beyond an assessment of their relative capabilities, are not
¶
seen as necessary for understanding their vulnerabilities or security-enhancing
¶
behaviour.”70 This assumption that states act as coherent units draws its strength
¶
from their treatment as “notional persons” in early modern
jurisprudence.71
¶
Relatedly, the state is understood to be independent, signified by the status of
¶ sovereignty, which entails a claim not only to authority within a territory but to
¶
independence from, and legal equality to, other such authorities. Realists do not
¶
distinguish between the legal status of sovereignty and actual state practice; they
¶
assume that states are as independent from one another as they claim to be.
¶
Moreover, like a person, the state must be able to act—and act in particular ways.
¶
The fact of international anarchy (or lack of overarching government) is
¶
interpreted by realists as bringing with it a “self-help” system in which states
¶
cannot rely on others and must seek to defend themselves or perish. Finally, as
¶
Alan James makes clear, the state for Realists is a fundamentally rational actor:
¶
The state is said to behave rationally because it is pictured as bending its efforts in a
¶
consistent and
calculated way towards a clearly-established goal. And it can be so
¶
depicted because it is a single unit.
The analogy is with the sober and mature man
¶
who gives careful thought to the achievement of his purposes.72
¶
As this quote indicates, the Realist state is a “manly state.”73 We can see here
¶
the systematic mobilising of gendered dichotomies such as active/passive,
¶
independent/(inter)dependent, and rational/irrational, and the assumption that
¶
the state fits with the masculine side of the
dichotomies. Needless to say, the
¶
model of rationality that James describes has been critiqued by countless feminist
¶
philosophers. Proponents of this model are accused of neglecting social context,
¶
both in terms of the domestic labour and relationships that make the processes of
¶
rational decision-making possible, and in terms of the consequences of the
¶
rational decisions made. As Jacqui True points out,
“[r]ational thinkers such as
¶
men and states do not figure in their cost –benefit analyses of foreign policies
¶
(military build-up, war mobilisation, economic liberalisation or protection), the
¶
social costs that are borne by ‘private’ family-households and communities.”74 In
¶
addition, proponents of this model of rationality are criticised for evacuating
¶
emotional and ethical dimensions of thought, historically gendered feminine, as
¶
highlighted in our discussion above about the limitations of technostrategic
¶ discourse.
¶
If Realism’s epistemology (its underlying conception of knowledge) is
¶
gendered, its ontology
(its underlying conception about the self and agency) is
¶
equally so. Feminists would argue that James’s analogy comparing the state to a man is not accidental but intrinsic to how the state is understood: this is
“an
¶
exclusionary masculine model of agency derived from a context of unequal
¶
gender relations, where primarily women’s child rearing and care-giving work
¶
supports the development of autonomous
male selves.”75 In order to appear
¶
unitary, active and independent, then, these selves must mask their internal
¶
fractures, the constraints and tendencies to inertia that they might face, and their
¶
relations of
(inter)dependency on internal and external others. Indeed, as Spike
¶
Peterson points out (in a demonstration of the close linkage here with gendered
¶
protection discourses),
¶
Dependency is demeaning, a status indicative of subordination and one shunned by
¶
the free man ... being protected is
an identity to be avoided as much as possible.
¶
This version of protection constructs dependency in narrow, dichotomous terms
¶
that obscure (inter)dependent relations as a pervasive feature of social reality.76
¶
These dimensions of state identity can all be found in the White Paper. For
¶
example, the unitary, coherent character of the UK is constantly emphasised
¶
through the use of several rhetorical techniques. Several of these can be seen in the
¶
following sentences from Section 1:
¶
1.1: The United
Kingdom is committed to helping to secure international peace and
¶
security. Since 1956, the UK’s nuclear deterrent has underpinned our ability to do
¶
so, even in the most challenging circumstances ... we have employed our nuclear
¶
forces strictly as a means to deter acts of aggression against our vital interests ...
¶

1.2: Our manifesto at the 2005 General Election made a commitment to retain the
¶
UK’s existing nuclear deterrent.77
¶
What can be seen here is, first, the use of the collective pronoun “we” and its
¶
possessive form “our” to equate both with the UK state and the current
¶
government, often in close proximity. This is done throughout the text, and it
¶
serves to legitimise the current regime by masking internal debates, fusing this
¶
government with past ones and government with state. Second, the “vital
¶
interests” and actions of the state and the people within it are also fused, masking
¶
any disjuncture between citizens and their government. Third, the unified,
¶
coherent and even strong nature of the UK state is established through an implicit
¶
contrast with the “weak and failing states” emphasised above as a key enemy
¶
Other in the White Paper. While there are a couple of slippages in this
¶
construction, with two passing references to past governments and an occasional
¶
acknowledgement of internal opposition to the government’s plans on Trident,
¶
the overriding impression is of a state that thinks and acts as one.
¶
The ways in which this thinking and acting are presented are key to the
¶
masculine character of the construction. Specifically, the capacity of the British
¶
state for rational decision-making and then to act decisively and unhindered is
¶
constantly emphasised. As the executive summary states: “We have thus decided
¶
to take the steps necessary to sustain a credible deterrent capability in the 2020s
¶
and beyond.”78 To take the rationality part of this construction first, this is constantly drawn out through an explicit (if highly selective and edited)
¶
discussion of the decision-making process, particularly in Annex B.
It is clear that
¶
reasoning is conceived as the correlation of means and ends, thus “a thorough
¶
review of the widest possible range of options” was undertaken79 in order to see
¶
how the goal of maintenance of
the nuclear deterrence could be achieved. “Our
¶
manifesto at the 2005 General Election made a commitment to retain the UK’s
¶
existing nuclear deterrent ... We have now reached the point at which
¶ procurement decisions are necessary.”80 The rationality at work here is
¶
decontextualized and strategic, focused only on how best to uphold a pre-set
¶
objective (there is no discussion, for example, of the possibility of disarmament as
¶
an alternative goal). Further, this mode of reasoning involves undertaking a cost –
¶
benefit analysis when assessing the best means to obtain that objective.
Concretely,
¶
this means that the relative power and vulnerability of various nuclear systems
¶
are compared, along with their price.81 There is, as already mentioned above, no
¶
attention to the human cost of using the bomb, nor to the moral and emotional
¶
problems involved in threatening to use it.
¶

Technostrategic Discourse 1ac
Drone warfare occurs in the context of sanitized technological killing—the distance enacted by the phenomenological dimension of drone weapons delivery establishes a radical separation between the bureaucratic machinations that justify and order that killing and the concrete human dimensions of those same murderous practices.
Addey et al 11
(Peter Addey, Mark Whitehead, Alison Williams et al. "Introduction: Air-target
Distance, Reach and the Politics of Verticality." Theory, Culture & Society 28.7-8 2011).
The target of aerial war and security could be understood in a manner that Eyal Weizman (2002) might describe as holographical. An assembling of disparate elements, the air-target adds up to a representation yet is built by techno-cultural practices that overlay one another with multiple details and perspectives. The result appears to be a reconfigured reality, augmented
and abstracted, yet heightened at the same time. In the place of the cadastral maps, which were assiduously produced under previous regimes of aerial governmentality, we have the modularized GIS data sets, which are able to instantaneously fabricate the target as a simulacrum. Real objects and com- plex environments come to be grasped in this way, analysed by distant audi- ences in a form that can be acted upon with speed but in a way in
which the violence involved in making-abstract is increasingly obscured. This is partly because of the concatenation or telescoping of the aerial target and the chain of targeting, which leads
Ryan Bishop to suggest that the destruc- tion of aerial war is obscured by the conflation of senses, technologies and perceptions, thus closing ‘the gap of perception’ and erasing the
‘distinction between apprehension, thought and action’ (Bishop, 2009). The processes of
‘sensing and tracking’, ‘perception and action’ that Bishop locates pre- cisely within the automation of the targeting process elsewhere must then be excavated within the evolving assembling and extension of the aerial tar- geting process. This process is itself subject to ever increasing processes of rationalization and optimization by flow monitoring and the
sequencing of its activities in order to produce the dream of ‘continuous coverage’ (Ha, 2010) or ‘persistent presence’ (Williams, 2011c) that is an unblinking eye ^ an omnipresent view provided by efficient UAV cycles and sequences that seeks to observe an asymmetric yet omnipresent threat with the capacity to unpredictably surprise and disrupt.
¶
Thus what
Anderson, Gregory, Saint-Amour and Bishop show us in this section is quite different from the imagery mentioned at the start of the editorial. Let us recall Judith Butler’s evocative description of the first Gulf War from the 1990s:
¶
. . . transported from the North American continent to
Iraq, and yet securely wedged in the couch in one’s own living room. The smart bomb screen is, of course, destroyed in the moment that it enacts its destruction, which is to say that this is a recording of a thoroughly destructive act which can never record that destructiveness, indeed,
which effects the phantasmatic distinction between the hit and its consequences. Thus as viewers, we verita- bly enact the allegory of military triumph: we retain our visual dis- tance and our bodily safety through the disembodied enactment of the kill that produces no blood and in which we retain our radical impermeability.
¶
(1992: 11)
¶
Butler takes this further: the
smart bomb renders distant television audiences ‘absolutely proximate, absolutely essential, and absolutely distant’ in a way that protects the viewer while securing ‘a fantasy of
transcendence, of a disembodied instrument of destruction’, protracted and filtered through

distance and censored by the fact that the ‘aerial view never comes close to seeing the effects of its destruction’, for as the bomb comes tantalizingly closer to its target ‘the screen
conveniently destroys itself’ (1992: 11). As Gregory shows, today’s processes of aerial targeting
co-involve other actors, publics and objects in more complex relationships that do not simply escape the consequences of violence or remain safely ensconced in the arm- chairs of spectator warfare.
¶
Appearing to empty the target’s subject of all of its content, rational, scientific and legal expertise are meant to take over and enact what artist Wafa Bilal describes as the sharp edge of the comfort^conflict divide (on this see Ingram, 2010) in his work Shoot an
Iraqi. In this special section we see this view questioned. For instance, Ben Anderson’s article on coun- terinsurgency and PSYOPS explores the US targeting of a ‘pre-insurgent’ population through airdropped leaflets, propaganda bombs and broadcasts. Targeting here is about immersion in the lives of the population. It is target- ing of the potential to become dangerous
by touching the passions, interests and environment of the population.
¶
This military theatre, in earlier views, might appear comfortable and calm in relation to the messy and passionate world that it punishes. One might suggest that refining the object of the target’s sights through the pro- cessual stages described in the articles in this special section also filters out the ethical decisions and orientations such an encounter would bring if it were a face-to-face encounter
(think of the smiling faces on the postcard [Figure 1] in Anderson’s article). Indeed, the critique of the aerial target is the distance such an abstraction reinforces from the life it puts at threat.
Without the fidelity of a Levinasian encounter with the Other’s face, any possibility of ethical recognition will be gone. Thus, aerial targeting seems to work precisely because it subjects its users to a distanced and rational bureaucratic orientation, so that the effects of their actions can never be fully realized. However, the assumption that passion must somehow lie out- side
of these apparatuses is no doubt problematic, as is the comfort^conflict disjuncture. The sense in which the coldness of the target and targeting holds the processes of waging war from the skies together should be con- trasted with the affects that might threaten to undo this and, furthermore, the increasing likelihood that the drone operators will see the horrors that result from their actions. Gregory shows how these issues are particularly important to the formation of realism and comradeship, as drone operators recognize or become familiar with the faces of their compatriots captured by the drone’s camera.
¶
Paul K. Saint-Amour’s article crucially shows that the visual practices involved here are less ordered and not perfectly sequential. Looking to the origins of aerial photography he shows how the processes involved in early targeting depended on pastiche, the composing of mosaics of multiple per- spectives that are blended and full of errors. To what extent, then, might a targeting system be marked not by smooth consensus but the discord of synaesthetic and contrasting imagery, information and evidence?
Even while Bishop (2009) has noted how the goal of targeting systems has ‘been control and containment from a distance’ and precisely ‘not dissemination, dispersal, autonomy and resistance’, we should not assume that these char- acteristics have escaped or been removed
from the chain. Indeed, they may be endemic to the processes themselves as we learn more of the stress, strains and fatigue of those doing the targeting and the flying, those wit- nessing the effects of a missile launched in high definition resolution. The affects that make the targeting processes uncomfortable may also lie at the heart of the indeterminate, aleatory and
‘turbulent’ (sometimes literally) dynamics that animate and befuddle contemporary air power, issues both Ryan Bishop and Paul K. Saint Amour explore in their articles.

This technologized war-at-a-distance normalizes violence in the context of the everyday lives of warfighters and warplanners. Drone warfare reduces the world to a picture whose being is just being targeted by the US.
Pugliese 11
(Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
The ensconcing of war operations, and the everyday deployment of lethal drone attacks,
within US cities such as Langley, Virginia gestures to a mutation in the conduct of war. The manner in which drone operators can
¶
exterminate human targets during their assigned
combat sessions, via their ensemble of tele-mediating technologies and military hardware, and then go home to take the kids to soccer or have a drink at their local bar, works to normalise
war as something that is effectively part of the civic continuum of everyday life practices. This continuum of practices is facilitated by the euphemisms of war: the screen media that display the atornisation and incineration of bodies by drone missiles are called by the military 'Kill TV'," and the material violence inflicted on human targets becomes merely 'kinetic activity'," as though killing were just another form of gym exercise. The televisual and video game dimensions of these killing operations help facilitate the transition from exterminatory
combat operations to civic sites and practices. In the words of an air force colonel of a Predator drone
¶
squadron: 'It teaches you how to compartmentalise it [the reality of war].'" The everyday returns to civic locations of 'home' after a series of technologically mediated killings in another country can, in fact, be seen to be inscribed by the forces of technological dis/location that drive the
¶
operations of drones: 'The more powerful and violent the technological expropriation, the delocalization,' Derrida notes, 'the more powerful, naturally, the recourse to the at-home, the return towards home.'o The violent deterritoralisation, delocalisation and dissociation experienced in the drone Ground Control Stations provokes the reaction: 'I want to be at home, I want finally to be at home, with my own, close to my friends and family.' Drone operators have remarked on how the trip home from their Ground Control Stations enables
them to transition from battle field to civic mode, with the hour's drive back to their home giving them 'that whole amount of time to leave it behind. They get in their bus or car and go into a zone - they say, "For the next hour I'm decompressing, I'm getting re-engaged into what's it's like to be a civilian"."' This return to a safe home is, of course, the privilege and prerogative
of the drone-enabled resident-soldier of the Global North. In the target countries of the Global
South - Afghanistan or Pakistan - the at-home is open to the anomic violence of drones and, as I discuss below, the ever-present risk of obliteration of home, friends and family.
¶
Philip Alston and Hina Shamsi have drawn critical attention to what they term:
¶
the 'PlayStation mentality' that surrounds drone killings. Young military personnel raised on a diet of video games now
kill real people remotely using joysticks. Far removed from the human consequences of their actions, how will this generation of fighters value the right to life? How will commanders and policymakers keep themselves immune from the deceptively antiseptic nature of drone killings?
Will the standards for intelligence-gathering to justify a killing slip? Will the number of acceptable 'collateral' civilian deaths increase?"
¶
The bracketing off that is enabled by the
parenthetical logic that governs these screen technologies can be appositely situated within
Heideggerian terms. 'The fundamental event of the modern age,' writes Martin Heidegger, 'is
the conquest of the world as picture.'4 Underscoring this epistemic shift to viewing the world as picture has been the dominance of screen technologies in mediating virtually everything that can be seen in terms of 'world'. The parenthetical bracketing off of the world that I have been
examining can effectively be understood as a form of 'enframing' the world. In his discussion

of the term, Heidegger posits the process of enframing as a positive aspect of our relation to technology, as in this understanding technology works to reveal the truth of the 'real'. I want to resignify this Heideggerian term in order to mark the manner in which screen technologies operate literally to bracket off the 'real' and to transmute it into object. Conjoining this resignified understanding of enframing to Heidegger's meditation on the 'conquest of the world as picture' effectively brings into focus the levels of epistemic and physical violence
enabled by the militarised use of tele-technologies.
¶
In his theorisation of the epistemic shift to viewing the world as picture, Heidegger notes that the process of representation is crucial to the construction of the world as picture. What is particularly relevant to my analysis of the parenthetical logic of screen technologies and the lethality of drones is the manner in which
Heidegger's analysis of the relation between representation and the world as picture
underscores the role of objectifying violence: 'Representing is ... a laying hold and grasping of what it is that is being viewed; in this scopic process, Heidegger emphasizes. 'assault rules'.45
The 'assault' on what is being viewed is legitimated by its transmutation into 'object':
'Representing is making-stand-over-against, an objectifying that goes forward and masters ...
That which is ... has the character of an object.'4 6 This process of objectification of the 'real' is undergirded by the play of science and technology: 'Science sets upon the real. It orders it into place to the end that at any given time the real will exhibit itself as an interacting network."' The
'real' in the context of drone technologies is precisely that which 'exhibits' itself through the tele-techno mediations of an 'interacting network' constituted by pilots/sensor operators, satellite links and drones. The enframing of the world as picture through 'entrapping
representation' ensures the 'real becomes secured in its objectness'."
¶
Everything in this
Heideggerian exposition can be clearly transposed to illuminate the operations of drone screen technologies in order to entrap and reduce the surveilled human figure into object that can be effectively and
¶
antiseptically liquidated from a distance. The antiseptic vision of war that is produced by the parenthetical logic of the use of drone technologies is enhanced further by
the clinical language deployed by the drone operators in the identification of suspect targets.
The Predator drone's infrared camera, with its digitally enhanced zoom, enables the sensor operators to detect the heat signature of a human body from significant distances (from an altitude of up to 3 kilometres). The term 'heat signature' works to reduce the targeted human body to an anonymous heat-emitting entity that merely radiates signs of life. This clinical process of reducing human subjects to purely biological categories of radiant life is further elaborated by the US military's use of the term 'pattern of life':
¶
The CIA received secret permission to attack a wide range of targets, including suspected militants whose names are not known, as part of a dramatic expansion of its campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan's border region. The expanded authority ... permits the agency to rely on what officials describe as
'pattern of life' analysis, using evidence collected by surveillance cameras or unmanned aircraft.
The information was used to target suspected militants, even when their full identities were not known.... Previously the CIA was restricted in most cases to killing only individuals whose names were on an approved list ... some analysts said permitting the CIA to kill people where names were unknown created a serious risk of killing innocent people."
This means that there is no value to life in the status quo—technological distancing reduces life to nothing more than something to be targeted and destroyed by militaristic impulses.
Shaw, Graaham, and Majed ’12 . Shaw, Ian Graham, and Akhter, Majed. "The Unbearable
Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan." Antipode 44.4 (September 2012).

Representation, a social practice and strategy through which meanings are constituted and
communicated, is unavoidable when dealing with militarism and military activities.
Armed
Forces, and defence institutions, take great care in producing and promoting
¶ specific portrayals of themselves and their activities in order to legitimize and justify their¶ activities
in places, spaces, environments and landscapes (Woodward 2005:729).
In this section, we argue that the ramping up of drone deployments is justified
¶
by a distinctive targeting logic. As
Paul Virrilo (1989) has long argued, there is never war without representation, which is to say, the deadly materiality of war is always coiled within a discursive system (see also Shaw 2010).
In this sense, the drone performs a well-rehearsed imaginative geography (Bialasiewicz et al
2007;
¶
Gregory 2004) that is underwritten by targeted kills across neat isometric grids and
¶ algorithmic calculations (Amoore 2009), far removed from the brutal Real (Jones
¶ and Clarke
2006), and in a peculiar relation with the visceral imagery of previous wars (Tuathail 2003). The official “definition” of a targeted kill is not agreed upon
¶ under international law. Yet as a recent
UN report on targeted killing reveals, it can
¶ be thought of as follows:
¶
A targeted killing is the
intentional, premeditated and deliberate use of lethal force,
¶
by States or their agents acting
under colour of law, or by an organized armed group
¶ in armed conflict, against a specific individual who is not in the physical custody of
¶ the perpetrator. In recent years, a few States
have adopted policies, either openly or
¶ implicitly, of using targeted killings, including in the territories of other States. Such
¶ policies have been justified both as a legitimate response to
“terrorist” threats and as a necessary response to the challenges of “asymmetric warfare”. In
the legitimate struggle against terrorism, too many criminal acts have been re-characterized so as to justify addressing them within the framework of the law of armed conflict. New technologies, and especially unarmed combat aerial vehicles or “drones”, have been added into
this mix, by making it easier to kill targets, with fewer risks to the targeting State (Alston
¶
2010:3).
¶
The means and methods of killing vary, and include sniper fire, shooting at close
¶ range, missiles from helicopters, gunships, drones, the use of car bombs, and poison
¶
(Alston
2010:4)
¶
The drone is heralded by the US military as the apex of a targeting logic— accurate,
efficient, and deadly. This logic traces a distinct genesis. In 1938 Martin
¶
Heidegger wrote of
the “age of the world picture”, in a classic essay on the split between subject and object. For him, today’s world is conceived, grasped, and conquered as a picture—and what it means “to
be” is for the first time defined as the objectiveness of representing. In this modern age of humanism, a subjective¶ “worldview” arises for the first time—humans appear as Cartesian
subjects and the¶ world as a calculated picture, engineered by science and technology. Ray
Chow
¶
(2006) extends this metaphysical analysis to contend that the world has further
¶ been
produced as a “target”. In the wake of the atomic event of Hiroshima, the entire globe is rendered as a grid of targets to be destroyed as soon as it can be made visible.
The distance between the person who kills with drone technology and the person killed is not merely the geographical space between them. Rather, the technological dimension of drone warfare inserts an ontological and moral distance between the drone and the drone pilot.
Pugliese 11
(Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
In her profound meditation on political economies of violence, Hannah Arendt writes that
extreme forms of violence are 'never possible without instruments'." 'Violence,' Arendt notes,
'is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification

through the end it pursues."' In other words, violence, in its most murderous and instrumentalised forms, cannot be exercised without technology. The Predator drone exemplifies the instrumentalisation of violence and the law of war through a complex process
of parenthetical disassociation. This process is predicated on suspending lines of causal
connection between an ensemble of technologies and their human agents. It effectively suspends, circumscribes and holds parenthetically in abeyance the relation between
executioner and victim, cause and effect. Jeff Macgregor, in his meditation on the transmutation of life into an instrumentalised video game, writes: 'erase the pain given and taken, reduce the grunt and the struggle to the push of a button ... and the game, the war, is no more than a fast-twitch exercise - a battle fought without personal cost. It is cause without
effect, a victory only for technology and opposable thumbs'.22
¶
In the first instance, the
Predator drones, in the execution of their targets, can be said to be blind-seeing technologies
of death: as inanimate objects, they cannot 'see' what they execute; rather, they execute what must be seen for them by their sensor operators. A rift opens up in this schema between the blind executor and the human-seeing agent that is inscribed with both spatial and temporal
dimensions. This causal disconnect between the doer and deed is, in fact, something on which
Friedrich Nietzsche meditated in the context of his critical analysis of what he termed the
'seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a
"subject"'.. Nietzsche draws attention to the network of discursive relations - juridical, legislative and philosophical - that are
¶
constitutive in the creation of what Foucault terms the
'subject effect' and its relation to deeds, actions and events:
¶
there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a function added to the deed - the deed is
everything. The popular mind in fact doubles the deed; when it sees the lightning flash, it is the deed of a deed; it posits the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect.
Scientists do no better when they say 'force moves,' 'force causes,' and the like - all its coolness, its freedom from emotion notwithstanding, our entire science still lies under the misleading influence of language and has not disposed of that little changeling, the 'subject.'
¶
The parenthetical logic of drone killings, and its structural disassociation between the doer and the deed, is perfectly captured in this Nietzschean critique: the doer, in this scenario, is functionally coextensive with the deed and only becomes separated by the 'seduction of language' and its subject-predicate structure. The 'doubling' of the deed and the production of the doer/deed
effect are what enable the conceptual partitioning of the technology from the human subject.
Couched in Nietzschean terms, one can say that the drone does the killing and that the sensor operator who presses the 'fire' button is merely a type of afterthought that can only be
retrospectively constituted as separate from the deed. As I will argue, following Nietzsche's problematisation of the dualistic doer-deed formula, the viewing of the human subject/technology nexus in prosthetic terms effectively works to interrogate the parenthetical logic that inscribes the conceptual apparatus of drone technologies.
This technostrategic distancing also erases any possible ethical dimension to warfighting—the ontological dimension of cyborg warfare instrumentalizes bodies such that they are nothing more than possible operands of violence.
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)

This seemingly indivisible prosthetic relation between drones and their human operators
evidences, in effect, the emergence of a new type of war that could be termed 'cyborg war'.
Drawing on Donna Haraway's celebratory trope of resistance and overturning of oppressive and destructive regimes and epistemologies of power, I re-code the term in order to evidence its violent assimilation and co-option by the very phallogocentric, militaristic and instrumentalist authorities it was designed to contest:
¶
To recapitulate certain dualisms have been persistent in
Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of
women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals- in short, domination of all constituted others ... Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature ...
High- tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and
who ismade in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices."
¶
In the drone-human relation, it is not
clear 'who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine'. The graft of the prosthetic blurs this boundary. Moreover, in the context of the digitised codes that interlink humans and drones in their operational schema: 'It isnot clear what is mind and what
is body in machines that resolve into coding practices.' The prosthetics of this new law of war, and its ensemble of human agents grafted to their drone technologies via screens, joysticks and satellite links, perfectly embodies the figure of the cyborg as the abject other to Haraway's
utopian trope. In keeping with the cyborg logic of the prosthetic, there is no 'proper' body in contradistinction to the machine; rather, couched in Derridean terms, 'this prosthetic structure is not something we add to the "proper" body but that it is already our experience of what is most proper to us, it is already the possibility of the prosthetic ... thus technology or techn is already originally in place in our own body, in what is most proper to us'. 68
¶
This profound
Derridean meditation on the infrastructural dimensions of the prosthetic effectively enables the critical interrogation of the categorical separation of the drone from its human agent. Belying its negative and reductive nomenclature, the drone cannot be reduced to a mindless machine of purely robotic acts; rather, the drone-as-prosthetic articulates a 'prosthetics of origin',"9 to use
Derrida's titular term, that conjoins it inseparably, through grafting, to its embodied agents of cognition, reflection and intent. Cyborg war, in this schema, instrumentalises bodies into lethal machines via a prosthetic structure that operates in tandem with a parenthetical logic of disassociation between the doer and deed: machine/human, doer/deed are at once tactically conjoined in the acts of surveillance, targeting and killing, and simultaneously disjoined from
the ethical consequences of these same acts. The interstice that opens up between this parenthetical and prosthetic relation must be seen as a critical fault line that compels examination. This fault line marks the radical asymmetries of power operative in the use of these drone killing technologies and their ethical ramifications.
¶
For the United States, the use of the drones is justified because it means that its soldiers are not placed in potentially fatal ground operations of war: no flesh and blood is lost, merely machines. This dualistic logic is, of
course, violently asymmetrical. For the targets of this drone war, it is flesh and blood that is shed, without the possibility of traditional combat counter- retaliation: drones kill silently, firing their missiles from a 2 mile distance. With nothing to lose but machines, the United States is
now in a position to wage war without the usual weighing up of the human cost. The US military, in fact, terms UCAVs as 'attritable': 'This means a commander can afford to lose one through attrition.'o Qualms have been expressed by military personnel such as this unnamed
Iraq combat veteran 'who helped design much of the military's doctrine for using unmanned drones': 'There's something important about putting your own sons and daughters at risk when you choose to wage war as a nation. We risk losing that flesh-and- blood investment if we go too far down this road."' The parenthetical logic of drone war brackets off the ethical questions

concerning the waging of war while also suspending the flesh-and-blood risks entailed by
those fighting in the field. PW Singer terms these new warriors 'cubicle warriors', ensconced in cubicles outfitted with computers, joysticks and ergonomic furniture: For a new generation,
'going to war' doesn't mean shipping off to some dank foxhole in a foreign land to dodge bullets.
Instead, it is a daily commute in your Toyota Camry to sit behind a computer screen
¶
72 and drag a mouse.
¶
The cubicle warrior is a cyborg warrior prosthetically grafted, through satellite feeds, to his or her drone and yet effectively quarantined, through the parenthetical bracketing that is enabled by his or her cubicle location and
¶
screen technologies, from the
risks and violence of the battlefield.
¶
The fault line or rift that results from these two contradictory spatio- temporal schemas operating simultaneously is effectively captured by the jargon term for drone pilots flying planes over 7000 miles away from their location: 'remote split operation'." Remote split operation refers to the manner in which drone pilots, located at their
Ground Control Stations in the United States, are connected via satellite links to their flying charges
¶
thousands of miles away. I want to resignify this term so that it underscores the split or contradictory forces at work in the ensemble of figures and technologies that constitute drone operations. Remote split operations encapsulate the fault line that at once parenthetically brackets off the drone personnel from the locus of the battlefield while they are simultaneously prosthetically grafted to their drones via satellite links. The contradictory forces that inscribe drone technologies are not the product of accident; rather, they must be seen as having been
produced by the design demands of the US military. In its brief to the teams of designers employed to produce UCAVs, DARPA 'wanted "intelligent function allocation" to allow the UCAV to operate autonomously, while stressing the idea that the human controller would be expected to provide executive-level mission management to "remain in the decision process"'." In this schema, the drone is an entity that 'operates' autonomously, and thus independently of its operators, and simultaneously is instrumentally grafted to its human controller who will
continue to make key decisions regarding its operations. The 'autonomous' operations of
drones exemplify the conceptual shift from 'technofetishism to technoanimism' - which, as
Vivian Sobchack has argued, constitutes one of the key attributes of the prosthetic once it is personified so that it 'is seen to have a will of its own'."
The biggest internal link to all these distancing impacts is the way that technologized violence removes the emotional, affective element from the calculations of warplanning.
Grayson 12 (Kyle, Senior Lec. At Newcastle University in Critical Geopolitics and International
Politics, “Six Theses on Targeted Killing,” Political Studies Association, Vol 32,
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9256.2012.01434.x/abstract>)
¶
Space can be conceived as the four-dimensional environment (length, width, depth
¶
and time) in which ‘objects and events occur, and in which they have relative
¶
position and direction’
(Harrison and Dourish, 1996, p. 2; see also Simonsen, 1996).
¶
The majority of attention that has been placed on the spatial dimension of targeted¶ killing has focused on its territorial
positioning via cartographic practices that
¶
operate on a register of difference that delineates through the category of the nation¶ state. Locations of targeted killing are dutifully recorded and positioned within¶ these national boundaries and linked to broader geopolitical
narratives regarding¶ global counter-insurgency. Of particular interest has been the possibility for tar-
¶
geted killing to be enacted by RPAS pilots located in excess of 7,000 miles away
¶
from the immediate theatre of operation.
¶
Beyond standard territorial locations and the distortion of time and space in con-
¶
temporary counter-insurgency, Eyal Weizman (2007) draws our

attention to the¶ forms of spatial management and sovereignty that are constitutive of
targeted¶ killing. Primarily, he demonstrates that in contemporary counter-insurgency it is
¶ important to denote how the practices of control have extended upwards into¶ the
stratosphere as a means of managing populations and their circulation on the¶ ground. This development reflects broader changes in military strategy over the
¶
twentieth century that equated air power with dominance over ground territory.
¶
But as Weizman (2007, p. 239) notes, this has created a reliance on air-based
¶
military technologies as a means of managing
‘problematic’ spaces and populations
¶
and the enactment of a policy that has been called
‘control without occupation’ by
¶
the Royal Air Force.
¶
As a result, counter-insurgency and insurgency war-fighting in places like Israel-¶ Palestine are ‘increasingly manifested by a creeping progression along a vertical¶ axis’ that involves ‘two spheres of extraterritorial
sovereignty’ (Weizman, 2007,
¶
pp. 253, 258). Practices like targeted killing that attempt to provide ‘control without¶ occupation’ are predicated on having both unimpeded access and control of air-¶ space as well as possessing the technology to operate within this theatre of
opera-¶ tion. In response, one can see the use of ‘subterranean warfare’ by insurgency
¶ movements – literally going under the ground to circumvent aerial interference – a
¶
practice that gained currency during the Vietnam War as a response to these
¶
counter-insurgency measures (Weizman, 2007, pp. 253–258).
¶
In addition, targeted killing alters and intensifies
forms of spatial management¶ through its ability to redefine everyday places, particularly those in which indi-
¶
viduals seek sanctuary from political, economic and social pressures. In geography,
¶
place refers to those spaces that are ‘invested with understandings of behavioural
¶ appropriateness, cultural expectations, and so forth [in which] we act’ and which
¶
we imbue with value (Harrison and Dourish, 1996, p. 3). Insurgency – in part –
¶
gains its political and affective impacts by initiating violence within public places¶ that have been declared secure
by an entity that claims sovereign power – both legally and symbolically – over such places. In contrast, targeted killing produces¶ political and affective impacts by transforming private
sanctuary places like the¶ home into a public theatre of counter-insurgency warfare.
Moreover, as a spatial
¶
incursion from afar that cannot be easily countered or avenged, it places the
¶
interface of violence much closer to places of sanctuary for the ‘enemy’. Targeted¶ killing
as a practice can thus defile sanctified places. The symbolic power comes not
¶
just from the ability to defile but also from the a-temporal character of defiled space
¶
– as Feldman (1991, p.
67) notes, ‘defiled space never goes away’. Thus, as a tactic,
¶
targeted killing demonstrates how counter-insurgency also ‘seeks to violate the
¶
spatial constructs that function as armatures of the victim’s social order’ (Feldman,
¶
1991, p. 75).
Therefore, we affirm the affective dimension of drone technology.
Bringing the affective dimension back into drone warfare displaces the logic of efficiency which erases the concrete experience of warfare and enables the violent distancing which causes the worst atrocities in modern technologized war.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and Geo-
Informatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)

The critical project that aims to bring bodies and emotions back in GT practices entails several
important elements. As feminist GT practitioners, we can appropriate the power of GT, contest the dominant uses of these technologies, and reconfigure the dominant visual practices to counter their objectifying vision. We can experiment with new geospatial practices that better articulate the complex realities of gendered, classed, raced, and sexualized spaces and experiences of individuals. These new practices should help us understand emotions in terms of their ‘‘socio-spatial mediation and articulation rather than as
entirely interiorized subjective mental states’’ (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 2005, 3). While being attentive to how emotions, subjectivities, and spaces are mutually constitutive in particular places and at particular times, these new practices should also take into account the
existence of different kinds of bodies (e.g., pregnant, disabled, old, mutilated, dead) and their
socially encoded meanings in relation to specific spatial, temporal, and cultural contexts (Rose
1993; Laws 1997; Domosh and Seager 2001; Longhurst 2001). In the arena of public policy, feminist GT practitioners have a role in questioning decisions that privilege detached
rationality and the ‘‘logic of efficiency’’ over emotions (Anderson and Smith 2001, 8). As feminist GT practitioners we deeply care about the subject(s) of our research and are
‘‘emotionally committed to our work,’’ and our geospatial practices should be infused with a
sense of ‘‘emotional involvement with people and places’’ (Bondi, Davidson and Smith, 2005,
2). We can develop GT practices that entail this emotional involvement and help express mean- ings, memories, feelings, and emotions for our subjects. We can draw on the emotional power of moving images and the techniques in narrative cinema to create GIS movies or visualizations that tell stories about the lives of marginalized people, highlight social injustice,
and—we hope—effect social change (Aitken 1991; Aitken and Craine 2006). In the three sections that follow, I discuss several GT projects to illustrate the specific ways in which bodies and emotions can be brought to bear on geospatial practices. Drawing from my recent experimentations and those by feminist scholars in cultural studies and media art, I explore how these projects contest the dominant meanings and visual prac- tices of GT. As these projects are more expres- sive than representational or analytical, taking the form of creative
visual or artistic work (e.g., GPS-assisted travelogues and 3D GIS video), they are in a certain sense ‘‘affective GT per- formances’’ that seek to transform GT into affective practices by incorporating the subject- ivities and emotions of the practitioner and research participants as an integral element of the project. Through the use of GT as a medium of self-expression and a means of re- sistance, and to articulate emotional geogra- phies and convey emotionally provocative messages, these nonrepresentational practices hint at ways of using GT that transcend the conventional duality between subject and ob- ject, design and use, author and
reader, and representation and practice (Del Casino and Hanna 2006).
The critique of technostrategic thought is a prerequisite to policymaking.
Current technocratic thought inherently produces detached knowledge, which views humans as dots on a map. Their impacts of violence are inevitable in a world where humans are dehumanized.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and Geo-
Informatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)

Geospatial technologies are designed, created, and used by humans, and a large proportion of their application is for understanding or solving problems of individuals and social groups.
Bod- ies, however, are often absent or rendered irrelevant in contemporary practices of GT.
This ‘‘omission of the body’’ occurs in two different but related senses ( Johnson 1990, 18).
First, although bodies are involved in the development and use of GT, there is little room in these technologies to allow for any role of the practitioner’s subjectivities, emotions, feelings, passion, values, and ethics. Second, despite the fact that a large number of bodies are affected
by the application of GT (e.g., people profiled by geodemographic application, and civilians who were annihilated as ‘‘collateral damage’’ by GPS-guided smart bombs that missed their
tar- gets), bodies are often treated merely as things, as dots on maps, or even as if they do not exist (Gregory 2004; Hyndman 2005). The dominant disembodied practices of GT, however, are contestable as they are largely the result of a particular understanding of science and
objectivity (Kwan 2002a). This historically specific and socially constructed notion of science, as Donna Haraway (1991) argues, is predicated on the positionality of a disembodied master subject with transcendent vision. With such disembodied and infinite vision, the knower is capable of achieving a detached view into a separate, completely knowable world. The kind of knowledge produced with such disem- bodied positionality denies the partiality of the knower, erases subjectivities, and ignores the power relations involved in all forms of
knowledge production (Foucault 1977). Haraway (1991, 189) calls this decorporealized vision
‘‘the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere.’’ Closely associated with this view of science is a gendered notion of knowledge production and academic scholarship that privileges
rational thought over ‘‘irrational’’ emotionality (Bennett 2004). This ‘‘marginalization of
emotion,’’ as Anderson and Smith (2001, 7) put it, ‘‘has been part of a gender politics of research in which detachment, objectivity and rationality have been valued, and implicitly masculinized, while engagement, subjectivity, passion and desire have been devalued, and
frequently feminized.’’ Geography in particular has tended to ‘‘deny, avoid, suppress or downplay its emotional en- tanglements’’ (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 2005, 1). Yet, to paraphrase Anderson and Smith, there are times and places where lives are explicitly lived through pain, love, hate, anger, hope, fear, and passion. If the world is imbued with complex emotional geographies, GT practices are more relevant to real lives if they allow us to take the spatial, temporal, and social effects of feelings into account. To neglect how our research and social life are mediated by feelings and emotions is to exclude a key set of relations through
which lives are lived, societies made, and knowledge produced (Anderson and Smith 2001).

Technostrategic Discourse 1ac
RPA warfare occurs in the context of sanitized technological killing—the distance enacted by the phenomenological dimension of RPA weapons delivery establishes a radical separation between the bureaucratic machinations that justify and order that killing and the concrete human dimensions of those same murderous practices.
Addey et al 11
(Peter Addey, Mark Whitehead, Alison Williams et al. "Introduction: Air-target
Distance, Reach and the Politics of Verticality." Theory, Culture & Society 28.7-8 2011).
The target of aerial war and security could be understood in a manner that Eyal Weizman (2002) might describe as holographical. An assembling of disparate elements, the air-target adds up to a representation yet is built by techno-cultural practices that overlay one another with multiple details and perspectives. The result appears to be a reconfigured reality, augmented
and abstracted, yet heightened at the same time. In the place of the cadastral maps, which were assiduously produced under previous regimes of aerial governmentality, we have the modularized GIS data sets, which are able to instantaneously fabricate the target as a simulacrum. Real objects and complex environments come to be grasped in this way, analysed by distant audiences in a form that can be acted upon with speed but in a way in which the
violence involved in making-abstract is increasingly obscured. This is partly because of the concatenation or telescoping of the aerial target and the chain of targeting, which leads Ryan
Bishop to suggest that the destruction of aerial war is obscured by the conflation of senses, technologies and perceptions, thus closing ‘the gap of perception’ and erasing the ‘distinction
between apprehension, thought and action’ (Bishop, 2009). The processes of ‘sensing and
tracking’, ‘perception and action’ that Bishop locates pre- cisely within the automation of the targeting process elsewhere must then be excavated within the evolving assembling and extension of the aerial targeting process. This process is itself subject to ever increasing processes of rationalization and optimization by flow monitoring and the sequencing of its
activities in order to produce the dream of ‘continuous coverage’ (Ha, 2010) or ‘persistent presence’ (Williams, 2011c) that is an unblinking eye ^ an omnipresent view provided by efficient UAV cycles and sequences that seeks to observe an asymmetric yet omnipresent threat with the capacity to unpredictably surprise and disrupt.
¶
Thus what Anderson, Gregory, Saint-
Amour and Bishop show us in this section is quite different from the imagery mentioned at the start of the editorial. Let us recall Judith Butler’s evocative description of the first Gulf War from the 1990s:
¶
. . . transported from the North American continent to Iraq, and yet securely wedged in the couch in one’s own living room. The smart bomb screen is, of course, destroyed in the moment that it enacts its destruction, which is to say that this is a recording of a thoroughly destructive act which can never record that destructiveness, indeed, which effects the
phantasmatic distinction between the hit and its consequences. Thus as viewers, we verita- bly enact the allegory of military triumph: we retain our visual distance and our bodily safety through the disembodied enactment of the kill that produces no blood and in which we retain our radical impermeability.
¶
(1992: 11)
¶
Butler takes this further: the smart bomb renders
distant television audiences ‘absolutely proximate, absolutely essential, and absolutely distant’
in a way that protects the viewer while securing ‘a fantasy of transcendence, of a disembodied
instrument of destruction’, protracted and filtered through distance and censored by the fact

that the ‘aerial view never comes close to seeing the effects of its destruction’, for as the
bomb comes tantalizingly closer to its target ‘the screen conveniently destroys itself’ (1992:
11). As Gregory shows, today’s processes of aerial targeting co-involve other actors, publics and objects in more complex relationships that do not simply escape the consequences of violence or remain safely ensconced in the arm-chairs of spectator warfare.
¶
Appearing to empty the target’s subject of all of its content, rational, scientific and legal expertise are meant to take over and enact what artist Wafa Bilal describes as the sharp edge of the comfort^conflict divide (on this see Ingram, 2010) in his work Shoot an Iraqi. In this special section we see this view questioned. For instance, Ben Anderson’s article on coun- terinsurgency and PSYOPS explores the US targeting of a ‘pre-insurgent’ population through airdropped leaflets, propaganda bombs and broadcasts. Targeting here is about immersion in the lives of the population. It is targeting of the potential to become dangerous by touching the passions,
interests and environment of the population.
¶
This military theatre, in earlier views, might appear comfortable and calm in relation to the messy and passionate world that it punishes.
One might suggest that refining the object of the target’s sights through the processual stages described in the articles in this special section also filters out the ethical decisions and orientations such an encounter would bring if it were a face-to-face encounter (think of the smiling faces on the postcard [Figure 1] in Anderson’s article). Indeed, the critique of the aerial target is the distance such an abstraction reinforces from the life it puts at threat. Without the fidelity of a Levinasian encounter with the Other’s face, any possibility of ethical recognition will be gone. Thus, aerial targeting seems to work precisely because it subjects its users to a distanced and rational bureaucratic orientation, so that the effects of their actions can never be fully realized. However, the assumption that passion must somehow lie out- side of these
apparatuses is no doubt problematic, as is the comfort/conflict disjuncture. The sense in which the coldness of the target and targeting holds the processes of waging war from the skies together should be contrasted with the affects that might threaten to undo this and, furthermore, the increasing likelihood that the drone operators will see the horrors that result from their actions. Gregory shows how these issues are particularly important to the formation of realism and comradeship, as drone operators recognize or become familiar with the faces of their compatriots captured by the drone’s camera.
¶
Paul K. Saint-Amour’s article crucially shows that the visual practices involved here are less ordered and not perfectly sequential. Looking to the origins of aerial photography he shows how the processes involved in early targeting depended on pastiche, the composing of mosaics of multiple perspectives that are blended and full of errors. To what extent, then, might a targeting system be marked not by smooth consensus but the discord of synaesthetic and contrasting imagery, information and evidence?
Even while Bishop (2009) has noted how the goal of targeting systems has ‘been control and containment from a distance’ and precisely ‘not dissemination, dispersal, autonomy and resistance’, we should not assume that these characteristics have escaped or been removed
from the chain. Indeed, they may be endemic to the processes themselves as we learn more of the stress, strains and fatigue of those doing the targeting and the flying, those wit- nessing the effects of a missile launched in high definition resolution. The affects that make the targeting processes uncomfortable may also lie at the heart of the indeterminate, aleatory and
‘turbulent’ (sometimes literally) dynamics that animate and befuddle contemporary air power, issues both Ryan Bishop and Paul K. Saint Amour explore in their articles.

This technologized war-at-a-distance normalizes violence in the context of the everyday lives of warfighters and warplanners. RPA warfare reduces the world to a picture whose being is just being targeted by the US.
Pugliese 11
(Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
The ensconcing of war operations, and the everyday deployment of lethal drone attacks,
within US cities such as Langley, Virginia gestures to a mutation in the conduct of war. The manner in which drone operators can
¶
exterminate human targets during their assigned
combat sessions, via their ensemble of tele-mediating technologies and military hardware, and then go home to take the kids to soccer or have a drink at their local bar, works to normalise
war as something that is effectively part of the civic continuum of everyday life practices. This continuum of practices is facilitated by the euphemisms of war: the screen media that display the atornisation and incineration of bodies by drone missiles are called by the military 'Kill TV'," and the material violence inflicted on human targets becomes merely 'kinetic activity'," as though killing were just another form of gym exercise. The televisual and video game dimensions of these killing operations help facilitate the transition from exterminatory
combat operations to civic sites and practices. In the words of an air force colonel of a Predator drone
¶
squadron: 'It teaches you how to compartmentalise it [the reality of war].'" The everyday returns to civic locations of 'home' after a series of technologically mediated killings in another country can, in fact, be seen to be inscribed by the forces of technological dis/location that drive the
¶
operations of drones: 'The more powerful and violent the technological expropriation, the delocalization,' Derrida notes, 'the more powerful, naturally, the recourse to the at-home, the return towards home.'o The violent deterritoralisation, delocalisation and dissociation experienced in the drone Ground Control Stations provokes the reaction: 'I want to be at home, I want finally to be at home, with my own, close to my friends and family.' Drone operators have remarked on how the trip home from their Ground Control Stations enables
them to transition from battle field to civic mode, with the hour's drive back to their home giving them 'that whole amount of time to leave it behind. They get in their bus or car and go into a zone - they say, "For the next hour I'm decompressing, I'm getting re-engaged into what's it's like to be a civilian"."' This return to a safe home is, of course, the privilege and prerogative
of the drone-enabled resident-soldier of the Global North. In the target countries of the Global
South - Afghanistan or Pakistan - the at-home is open to the anomic violence of drones and, as I discuss below, the ever-present risk of obliteration of home, friends and family.
¶
Philip Alston and Hina Shamsi have drawn critical attention to what they term:
¶
the 'PlayStation mentality' that surrounds drone killings. Young military personnel raised on a diet of video games now
kill real people remotely using joysticks. Far removed from the human consequences of their actions, how will this generation of fighters value the right to life? How will commanders and policymakers keep themselves immune from the deceptively antiseptic nature of drone killings?
Will the standards for intelligence-gathering to justify a killing slip? Will the number of acceptable 'collateral' civilian deaths increase?"
¶
The bracketing off that is enabled by the
parenthetical logic that governs these screen technologies can be appositely situated within
Heideggerian terms. 'The fundamental event of the modern age,' writes Martin Heidegger, 'is
the conquest of the world as picture.'4 Underscoring this epistemic shift to viewing the world as picture has been the dominance of screen technologies in mediating virtually everything that can be seen in terms of 'world'. The parenthetical bracketing off of the world that I have been
examining can effectively be understood as a form of 'enframing' the world. In his discussion of the term, Heidegger posits the process of enframing as a positive aspect of our relation to

technology, as in this understanding technology works to reveal the truth of the 'real'. I want to resignify this Heideggerian term in order to mark the manner in which screen technologies operate literally to bracket off the 'real' and to transmute it into object. Conjoining this resignified understanding of enframing to Heidegger's meditation on the 'conquest of the world as picture' effectively brings into focus the levels of epistemic and physical violence
enabled by the militarised use of tele-technologies.
¶
In his theorisation of the epistemic shift to viewing the world as picture, Heidegger notes that the process of representation is crucial to the construction of the world as picture. What is particularly relevant to my analysis of the parenthetical logic of screen technologies and the lethality of drones is the manner in which
Heidegger's analysis of the relation between representation and the world as picture
underscores the role of objectifying violence: 'Representing is ... a laying hold and grasping of what it is that is being viewed; in this scopic process, Heidegger emphasizes. 'assault rules'.45
The 'assault' on what is being viewed is legitimated by its transmutation into 'object':
'Representing is making-stand-over-against, an objectifying that goes forward and masters ...
That which is ... has the character of an object.'4 6 This process of objectification of the 'real' is undergirded by the play of science and technology: 'Science sets upon the real. It orders it into place to the end that at any given time the real will exhibit itself as an interacting network."' The
'real' in the context of drone technologies is precisely that which 'exhibits' itself through the tele-techno mediations of an 'interacting network' constituted by pilots/sensor operators, satellite links and drones. The enframing of the world as picture through 'entrapping
representation' ensures the 'real becomes secured in its objectness'."
¶
Everything in this
Heideggerian exposition can be clearly transposed to illuminate the operations of drone screen technologies in order to entrap and reduce the surveilled human figure into object that can be effectively and
¶
antiseptically liquidated from a distance. The antiseptic vision of war that is produced by the parenthetical logic of the use of drone technologies is enhanced further by
the clinical language deployed by the drone operators in the identification of suspect targets.
The Predator drone's infrared camera, with its digitally enhanced zoom, enables the sensor operators to detect the heat signature of a human body from significant distances (from an altitude of up to 3 kilometres). The term 'heat signature' works to reduce the targeted human body to an anonymous heat-emitting entity that merely radiates signs of life. This clinical process of reducing human subjects to purely biological categories of radiant life is further elaborated by the US military's use of the term 'pattern of life':
¶
The CIA received secret permission to attack a wide range of targets, including suspected militants whose names are not known, as part of a dramatic expansion of its campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan's border region. The expanded authority ... permits the agency to rely on what officials describe as
'pattern of life' analysis, using evidence collected by surveillance cameras or unmanned aircraft.
The information was used to target suspected militants, even when their full identities were not known.... Previously the CIA was restricted in most cases to killing only individuals whose names were on an approved list ... some analysts said permitting the CIA to kill people where names were unknown created a serious risk of killing innocent people."
This means that there is no value to life in the status quo—technological distancing reduces life to nothing more than something to be targeted and destroyed by militaristic impulses.
Shaw, Graaham, and Majed ’12 . Shaw, Ian Graham, and Akhter, Majed. "The Unbearable
Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan." Antipode 44.4 (September 2012).
Representation, a social practice and strategy through which meanings are constituted and

communicated, is unavoidable when dealing with militarism and military activities.
Armed
Forces, and defence institutions, take great care in producing and promoting
¶ specific portrayals of themselves and their activities in order to legitimize and justify their activities in
places, spaces, environments and landscapes (Woodward 2005:729).
In this section, we argue that the ramping up of drone deployments is justified
¶
by a distinctive targeting logic. As Paul
Virrilo (1989) has long argued, there is never war without representation, which is to say, the deadly materiality of war is always coiled within a discursive system (see also Shaw 2010). In this sense, the drone performs a well-rehearsed imaginative geography (Bialasiewicz et al
2007;
¶
Gregory 2004) that is underwritten by targeted kills across neat isometric grids and
¶ algorithmic calculations (Amoore 2009), far removed from the brutal Real (Jones
¶ and Clarke
2006), and in a peculiar relation with the visceral imagery of previous wars (Tuathail 2003). The official “definition” of a targeted kill is not agreed upon
¶ under international law. Yet as a recent
UN report on targeted killing reveals, it can
¶ be thought of as follows:
¶
A targeted killing is the
intentional, premeditated and deliberate use of lethal force,
¶
by States or their agents acting
under colour of law, or by an organized armed group
¶ in armed conflict, against a specific individual who is not in the physical custody of
¶ the perpetrator. In recent years, a few States
have adopted policies, either openly or
¶ implicitly, of using targeted killings, including in the territories of other States. Such
¶ policies have been justified both as a legitimate response to
“terrorist” threats and as a necessary response to the challenges of “asymmetric warfare”. In
the legitimate struggle against terrorism, too many criminal acts have been re-characterized so as to justify addressing them within the framework of the law of armed conflict. New technologies, and especially unarmed combat aerial vehicles or “drones”, have been added into
this mix, by making it easier to kill targets, with fewer risks to the targeting State (Alston
¶
2010:3).
¶
The means and methods of killing vary, and include sniper fire, shooting at close
¶ range, missiles from helicopters, gunships, drones, the use of car bombs, and poison
¶
(Alston
2010:4)
¶
The drone is heralded by the US military as the apex of a targeting logic— accurate,
efficient, and deadly. This logic traces a distinct genesis. In 1938 Martin
¶
Heidegger wrote of
the “age of the world picture”, in a classic essay on the split between subject and object. For him, today’s world is conceived, grasped, and conquered as a picture—and what it means “to
be” is for the first time defined as the objectiveness of representing. In this modern age of humanism, a subjective “worldview” arises for the first time—humans appear as Cartesian
subjects and the world as a calculated picture, engineered by science and technology. Ray
Chow
¶
(2006) extends this metaphysical analysis to contend that the world has further
¶ been
produced as a “target”. In the wake of the atomic event of Hiroshima, the entire globe is rendered as a grid of targets to be destroyed as soon as it can be made visible.
The distance between the person who kills with RPA technology and the person killed is not merely the geographical space between them. Rather, the technological dimension of RPA warfare inserts an ontological and moral distance between the drone and the drone pilot.
Pugliese 11
(Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
In her profound meditation on political economies of violence, Hannah Arendt writes that
extreme forms of violence are 'never possible without instruments'." 'Violence,' Arendt notes,
'is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues."' In other words, violence, in its most murderous and instrumentalised forms, cannot be exercised without technology. The Predator drone exemplifies the instrumentalisation of violence and the law of war through a complex process

of parenthetical disassociation. This process is predicated on suspending lines of causal
connection between an ensemble of technologies and their human agents. It effectively suspends, circumscribes and holds parenthetically in abeyance the relation between
executioner and victim, cause and effect. Jeff Macgregor, in his meditation on the transmutation of life into an instrumentalised video game, writes: 'erase the pain given and taken, reduce the grunt and the struggle to the push of a button ... and the game, the war, is no more than a fast-twitch exercise - a battle fought without personal cost. It is cause without
effect, a victory only for technology and opposable thumbs'.22
¶
In the first instance, the
Predator drones, in the execution of their targets, can be said to be blind-seeing technologies
of death: as inanimate objects, they cannot 'see' what they execute; rather, they execute what must be seen for them by their sensor operators. A rift opens up in this schema between the blind executor and the human-seeing agent that is inscribed with both spatial and temporal
dimensions. This causal disconnect between the doer and deed is, in fact, something on which
Friedrich Nietzsche meditated in the context of his critical analysis of what he termed the
'seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a
"subject"'.. Nietzsche draws attention to the network of discursive relations - juridical, legislative and philosophical - that are
¶
constitutive in the creation of what Foucault terms the
'subject effect' and its relation to deeds, actions and events:
¶
there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a function added to the deed - the deed is
everything. The popular mind in fact doubles the deed; when it sees the lightning flash, it is the deed of a deed; it posits the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect.
Scientists do no better when they say 'force moves,' 'force causes,' and the like - all its coolness, its freedom from emotion notwithstanding, our entire science still lies under the misleading influence of language and has not disposed of that little changeling, the 'subject.'
¶
The parenthetical logic of drone killings, and its structural disassociation between the doer and the deed, is perfectly captured in this Nietzschean critique: the doer, in this scenario, is functionally coextensive with the deed and only becomes separated by the 'seduction of language' and its subject-predicate structure. The 'doubling' of the deed and the production of the doer/deed
effect are what enable the conceptual partitioning of the technology from the human subject.
Couched in Nietzschean terms, one can say that the drone does the killing and that the sensor operator who presses the 'fire' button is merely a type of afterthought that can only be
retrospectively constituted as separate from the deed. As I will argue, following Nietzsche's problematisation of the dualistic doer-deed formula, the viewing of the human subject/technology nexus in prosthetic terms effectively works to interrogate the parenthetical logic that inscribes the conceptual apparatus of drone technologies.
Technological distance reduces targets to numbers and mere biological life.
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
The military term 'pattern of life' is inscribed with two intertwined systems of scientific conceptuality: algorithmic and biological. The human subject detected by drone's surveillance
cameras is, in the first scientific schema, transmuted algorithmically into a patterned sequence
of numerals: the digital code of ones and zeros."o Converted into digital data coded as a
'pattern of life', the targeted human subject is reduced to an anonymous simulacrum that flickers across the screen and that can effectively be liquidated into a 'pattern of death' with
the swivel of a joystick. Viewed through the scientific gaze of clinical biology, 'pattern of life'

connects the drone's scanning technologies to the discourse of an instrumentalist science, its
constitutive gaze of objectifying detachment and its production of exterminatory violence.
Patterns of life are what are discovered and analysed in the Petri dish of the laboratory. In this way, the targeted human subjects of Afghanistan and Pakistan are represented as types of bacteria and other low- life organisms that be exterminated with absolute impunity. The CIA's
Counter-terrorism Centre's chief has boasted that, thanks to its drone- automated execution
program: 'We are killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them.' Analogically, the human subjects targeted as suspect yet anonymous 'patterns of life' by the drones
become equivalent to forms of pathogenic life. The operators of the drones' exterminatory attacks must, in effect, be seen to conduct a type of scientific ethnic cleansing of pathogenic 'life forms'. In the words of one US military officer: 'Our major role is to sanitize the battlefield."' As
Iwill presently discuss, inscribing this clinical discourse on drones is the Derridean figure of immunisation against foreign and pathogenic bodies. As mere patterns of pathogenic life, these targeted human subjects effectively are reduced to what Giorgio Agamben would term 'a kind of absolute biopolitical substance' that can killed with no concern about the possibility ofjuridical accountability: they are 'bare life' that can be killed with absolute impunity." Anonymous
'patterns of life' signify in contradistinction to legally named persons; they exemplify the
'ontological hygiene' legislated by US government policy in order to secure the reproduction of the 'principle of scarcity with respect to agency and personhood'."
¶
Situated in this Agambenian
context of the extermination of human life with absolute impunity, the Predator drones must be seen as instantiating mobile 'zones of exception': wherever the drones operate, they have
the capacity to suspend the rule of law and juridical accountability even as, paradoxically, the
US Department of State, as discussed above, argues that these attacks are conducted under formal laws of war. 'One of the paradoxes of the state of exception,' writes Agamben, 'lies in the fact that in the state of exception it is impossible to distinguish transgression of the law from
the execution of law.' In his theorisation of the state of exception, Agamben maps a space within which the agentic subject of law 'neither executes nor transgresses law, but inexecutes it'." 'Every fiction of a nexus between violence and law disappears here: there is nothing but a zone of anomie, in which violence without any juridical form acts.' Agamben's 'zone of anomie' perfectly captures the zone of violence that designates the anonymous 'patterns of life' that can be liquidated by drones with absolute impunity. I want to reaccentuate Agamben's concept of the inexecution of law by staging a parenthetical qualification. By placing a parenthetical bracket over the prefix 'in', in the term '(in)execution,' I want to argue that there is operative in these lethal drone attacks at once an execution of US Department of State law and an inexecution of it through the generation of mobile states of exception that articulate extrajudicial spaces beyond the redress of law. Even as these drone attacks execute US law (of war), they violate with impunity both international law and the sovereignty of nations such as Afghanistan and
Pakistan.
These distances form a spatial hiatus which desensitizes us to RPA killing—RPA operation becomes a video game with fantastic special effects, and war becomes nothing more than button-pushing.
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
The killing at a distance operations of the Predator drone ensemble of technology and human agents work to articulate a spatial hiatus and parenthetical disconnect between this place
- that

is, the Ground Control Station (GCS) located in, for example, Nevada - and that place
- the to-kill target located in Afghanistan.
Working in tandem with this spatial rift is a temporal disconnect generated by satellite technology
.
Although the killing of the designated target is supposedly conducted in terms of what the
military literature terms 'real time', the mediating effects of satellite and imaging technologies on 'live' and 'real time' signify that, in effect, there can only ever be 'an allegation of "live" and of "real time".
Discussing the metaphysics of presence in the contemporary configuration of
'tele-techno- mediatic modernity' and its celebration of such things as 'live' satellite- televisual transmissions
, Jacques
Derrida sardonically remarks that 'we should never forget that this "live" is not an absolute live, but only a live effect
[uneffectdedirect], an allegation of"live
"'.25It is an allegation of live that animates the operation of drones, as 'to allege' signifies, in legal terms, 'to assert without proof and, simultaneously, to 'cite, quote'.26 In other words, the very act of 'live' and 'real time' drone Predator executions must undergo a series of tele-techno mediations that structurally ensure that the 'absolutely real present is already a memory': 'there is no purely real time because temporalization itself is structured by a play of retention or of protention and, consequently, of traces ...
The real time effect is itself a particular effect of
"diff6rance".' 2 7 In other words, there opens up here a temporal rift between the 'now'
- a moment of 'retention' as experienced, for example, at Creech Ground Control Station, Nevada - and the 'then' the relayed moment of protention that unfolds in Afghanistan as already a 'memory' for those located at the GCS in Nevada.
This temporal rift is, in effect, acknowledged by the military's use of the term 'latency' in order to identify the micro-delay that inscribes the command sent by the remote pilot to the airborne drone and its consequent response.
¶ The structure of this tele-techno mediation can be envisioned as triangulated: the human operators at their ground stations are interlinked with the drone on the other side of the globe by the interposition of the satellite in space.
This triangulated structure of interlinked communication graphically evidences the series of mediations and microdiachronic hiatuses that transmute the 'live' image into a latent 'memory', into a retrospective artefact of 'real time'
. The micro-diachronic hiatuses that effectively turn the 'live' into 'memory' are marked, in passing, by former
President George W Bush's celebratory speech on UACVs:
¶
Innovative doctrine and high-tech weaponry can shape and then dominate an unconventional conflict. Our commanders are gaining a real-time picture of the entire battlefield, and are able to get targeting
¶
28 information from sensor to shooter almost immediately.
¶ The qualifier 'almost immediately' succinctly names the 'latency' effect discussed above, while also underscoring the micro-rift between 'live' and 'real time' and their tele-techno mediation into retrospectively constructed spatio-temporal visual artefacts.
In the techno-military literature on drone technologies, everything is driven on ultimately 'decreasing the time between sensor and shooter' and thereby 'shortening the "kill chain"'." The military term 'kill chain' diagrammatically underscores the impossibility of a synchronicity that, because of the unavoidable tele-techno mediations
, is not always already marked by the micro-hiatus that separates yet conjoins
¶
one link from another in the 'kill chain'.
¶
The prosthetic status of this triangulated structure can be elaborated in ¶ the context of the multiple dimensions it embodies: human-machine-human, life-technology-death and agent-machine-victim. As I will discuss in some detail below, this triadic structure is topologically conjoined by a series of prosthetic grafts that suture one seemingly autonomous entity to its absolute other. The prosthetic relations that I have been mapping here can be situated within Michel Serres' theorisation of topology 'as the science of nearness and rifts'." Serres names this topology the 'fold' - as that topological figuration of space-time that is productive of simultaneous rifts and nearness. Giles Deleuze effectively elaborates on the complex logics ¶ operative in the topology of the fold by describing the 'duplicity of the fold' in terms of 'a tension by which each field is pulled into the other'.' The topology of the fold at once captures the complex spatio-temporal effects generated by drone technologies and the contradictory tensions that inscribe their field of operations by marking the indissociable relation between seemingly antithetical categories. Viewed in this context, the geometry of the triangulated structure that I have drawn upon in order to describe the drone ensemble can be seen to offer only a static image of what is in actuality a dynamic process of topological relations between rifts and nearness, the other and the same, human and technology. As I discuss below, these topological relations are fundamentally negotiated or mediated through the figure of the prosthetic.
¶ What results from the process of tele-techno mediations that I have been mapping, regardless of 'real time' and 'live' claims, is what Derrida terms 'traces'. This is not to reduce the murderous consequences of the drone attacks to insubstantial remains; rather, it is to underscore the artefactual status of the images/traces of the killings that the GCS sensor operators work with and consume, and that structurally distance and disassociate them from the victims of their actions. Critically, it is the combined effect of the parenthetical suspension of the 'real' and the 'live' produced by this tele-techno thanatological economy of war that transmutes killing into the stuff of video games and that establishes a type of causal disconnect, and consequent disavowal, of the human operators' relation to the killing that transpires on the ground in 'remote' Afghanistan or Pakistan
.
The following remarks by
Predator drone operators
located at a GCS in Nevada exemplify
this spatio-temporal disconnect: 'It's antiseptic. It's not as potent an emotion as being on the battlefield';
'It's like a video game. It can get a little bloodthirsty . But it's fucking cool'
;
'Most of the time, I get to fight the war, and go home and see the wife and kids at night.' 'Another talked about flying missions in Afghanistan, and then getting home in time to

watch reruns of the TV sitcom Friends.'"
'You have some guy sitting at Nellis [GCS Nevada] and he's taking his kid to soccer.
It's a strange dichotomy to war
.'34
This
strange dichotomy
of war is enabled by a parenthetical logic that brackets off causal relations through a series of tele- techno mediations that, in turn, transmute the 'real' into Baudrillardian simulacra
." This strange dichotomy of war resonates on yet another level. On the one hand, negotiating the materiality of geography is one of the key predicates of successful warfare; on the other, drone warfare effectively ensures that 'the limitations of geography are taken out of the war that a soldier goes off to experience'. 6
For the drone soldier, the experience of geography is at once unbounded and simulated via the ensemble of screen technologies and circumscribed by the very materiality of the civic sites and spaces of his or her everyday life.
This technostrategic distancing also erases any possible ethical dimension to warfighting—the ontological dimension of cyborg warfare instrumentalizes bodies such that they are nothing more than possible operands of violence.
Pugliese 11
(Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
This seemingly indivisible prosthetic relation between drones and their human operators
evidences, in effect, the emergence of a new type of war that could be termed 'cyborg war'.
Drawing on Donna Haraway's celebratory trope of resistance and overturning of oppressive and destructive regimes and epistemologies of power, I re-code the term in order to evidence its violent assimilation and co-option by the very phallogocentric, militaristic and instrumentalist authorities it was designed to contest:
¶
To recapitulate certain dualisms have been persistent in
Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of
women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals- in short, domination of all constituted others ... Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature ...
High- tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and
who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices."
¶
In the drone-human relation, it is not
clear 'who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine'. The graft of the prosthetic blurs this boundary. Moreover, in the context of the digitised codes that interlink humans and drones in their operational schema: 'It is not clear what is mind and
what is body in machines that resolve into coding practices.' The prosthetics of this new law of
war, and its ensemble of human agents grafted to their drone technologies via screens, joysticks and satellite links, perfectly embodies the figure of the cyborg as the abject other to Haraway's
utopian trope. In keeping with the cyborg logic of the prosthetic, there is no 'proper' body in contradistinction to the machine; rather, couched in Derridean terms, 'this prosthetic structure is not something we add to the "proper" body but that it is already our experience of what is most proper to us, it is already the possibility of the prosthetic ... thus technology or techn is already originally in place in our own body, in what is most proper to us'. 68
¶
This profound
Derridean meditation on the infrastructural dimensions of the prosthetic effectively enables the critical interrogation of the categorical separation of the drone from its human agent. Belying its negative and reductive nomenclature, the drone cannot be reduced to a mindless machine of purely robotic acts; rather, the drone-as-prosthetic articulates a 'prosthetics of origin',"9 to use
Derrida's titular term, that conjoins it inseparably, through grafting, to its embodied agents of cognition, reflection and intent. Cyborg war, in this schema, instrumentalises bodies into lethal machines via a prosthetic structure that operates in tandem with a parenthetical logic of disassociation between the doer and deed: machine/human, doer/deed are at once tactically conjoined in the acts of surveillance, targeting and killing, and simultaneously disjoined from

the ethical consequences of these same acts. The interstice that opens up between this parenthetical and prosthetic relation must be seen as a critical fault line that compels examination. This fault line marks the radical asymmetries of power operative in the use of these drone killing technologies and their ethical ramifications.
¶
For the United States, the use of the drones is justified because it means that its soldiers are not placed in potentially fatal ground operations of war: no flesh and blood is lost, merely machines. This dualistic logic is, of
course, violently asymmetrical. For the targets of this drone war, it is flesh and blood that is shed, without the possibility of traditional combat counter- retaliation: drones kill silently, firing their missiles from a 2 mile distance. With nothing to lose but machines, the United States is
now in a position to wage war without the usual weighing up of the human cost. The US military, in fact, terms UCAVs as 'attritable': 'This means a commander can afford to lose one through attrition.'o Qualms have been expressed by military personnel such as this unnamed
Iraq combat veteran 'who helped design much of the military's doctrine for using unmanned drones': 'There's something important about putting your own sons and daughters at risk when you choose to wage war as a nation. We risk losing that flesh-and- blood investment if we go too far down this road."' The parenthetical logic of drone war brackets off the ethical questions concerning the waging of war while also suspending the flesh-and-blood risks entailed by
those fighting in the field. PW Singer terms these new warriors 'cubicle warriors', ensconced in cubicles outfitted with computers, joysticks and ergonomic furniture: For a new generation,
'going to war' doesn't mean shipping off to some dank foxhole in a foreign land to dodge bullets.
Instead, it is a daily commute in your Toyota Camry to sit behind a computer screen
¶
72 and drag a mouse.
¶
The cubicle warrior is a cyborg warrior prosthetically grafted, through satellite feeds, to [their] his or her drone and yet effectively quarantined, through the parenthetical bracketing that is enabled by his or her cubicle location and
¶
screen technologies, from the
risks and violence of the battlefield.
¶
The fault line or rift that results from these two contradictory spatio- temporal schemas operating simultaneously is effectively captured by the jargon term for drone pilots flying planes over 7000 miles away from their location: 'remote split operation'." Remote split operation refers to the manner in which drone pilots, located at their
Ground Control Stations in the United States, are connected via satellite links to their flying charges
¶
thousands of miles away. I want to resignify this term so that it underscores the split or contradictory forces at work in the ensemble of figures and technologies that constitute drone operations. Remote split operations encapsulate the fault line that at once parenthetically brackets off the drone personnel from the locus of the battlefield while they are simultaneously prosthetically grafted to their drones via satellite links. The contradictory forces that inscribe drone technologies are not the product of accident; rather, they must be seen as having been
produced by the design demands of the US military. In its brief to the teams of designers employed to produce UCAVs, DARPA 'wanted "intelligent function allocation" to allow the UCAV to operate autonomously, while stressing the idea that the human controller would be expected to provide executive-level mission management to "remain in the decision process"'." In this schema, the drone is an entity that 'operates' autonomously, and thus independently of its operators, and simultaneously is instrumentally grafted to its human controller who will
continue to make key decisions regarding its operations. The 'autonomous' operations of
drones exemplify the conceptual shift from 'technofetishism to technoanimism' - which, as
Vivian Sobchack has argued, constitutes one of the key attributes of the prosthetic once it is personified so that it 'is seen to have a will of its own'."

The biggest internal link to all these distancing impacts is the way that technologized violence removes the emotional, affective element from the calculations of warplanning.
Grayson 12 (Kyle, Senior Lec. At Newcastle University in Critical Geopolitics and International
Politics, “Six Theses on Targeted Killing,” Political Studies Association, Vol 32,
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9256.2012.01434.x/abstract>)
¶
Space can be conceived as the four-dimensional environment (length, width, depth
¶
and time) in which ‘objects and events occur, and in which they have relative
¶
position and direction’
(Harrison and Dourish, 1996, p. 2; see also Simonsen, 1996).
¶
The majority of attention that has been placed on the spatial dimension of targeted killing has focused on its territorial
positioning via cartographic practices that
¶
operate on a register of difference that delineates through the category of the nation state. Locations of targeted killing are dutifully recorded and positioned within these national boundaries and linked to broader geopolitical narratives
regarding global counter-insurgency. Of particular interest has been the possibility for tar-
¶ geted killing to be enacted by RPAS pilots located in excess of 7,000 miles away
¶
from the immediate theatre of operation.
¶
Beyond standard territorial locations and the distortion of time and space in con-
¶
temporary counter-insurgency, Eyal Weizman (2007) draws our attention to the forms of spatial management and sovereignty that are constitutive of
targeted killing. Primarily, he demonstrates that in contemporary counter-insurgency it is
¶ important to denote how the practices of control have extended upwards into the stratosphere
as a means of managing populations and their circulation on the ground. This development reflects broader changes in military strategy over the
¶
twentieth century that equated air power with dominance over ground territory.
¶
But as Weizman (2007, p. 239) notes, this has created a reliance on air-based
¶
military technologies as a means of managing ‘problematic’ spaces and populations
¶
and the enactment of a policy that has been called ‘control without occupation’ by
¶ the Royal Air Force.
¶
As a result, counter-insurgency and insurgency war-fighting in places like
Israel-¶ Palestine are ‘increasingly manifested by a creeping progression along a vertical¶ axis’
that involves ‘two spheres of extraterritorial sovereignty’ (Weizman, 2007,
¶
pp. 253, 258).
Practices like targeted killing that attempt to provide ‘control without occupation’ are predicated on having both unimpeded access and control of air-space as well as possessing
the technology to operate within this theatre of operation. In response, one can see the use of
‘subterranean warfare’ by insurgency
¶
movements – literally going under the ground to circumvent aerial interference – a
¶
practice that gained currency during the Vietnam War as a response to these
¶
counter-insurgency measures (Weizman, 2007, pp. 253–258).
¶
In addition, targeted killing alters and intensifies forms of spatial management through its ability to
redefine everyday places, particularly those in which indi-
¶
viduals seek sanctuary from political, economic and social pressures. In geography,
¶
place refers to those spaces that are ‘invested with understandings of behavioural
¶
appropriateness, cultural expectations, and so forth [in which] we act’ and which
¶
we imbue with value (Harrison and Dourish, 1996, p. 3). Insurgency – in part –
¶
gains its political and affective impacts by initiating violence within public places that
have been declared secure by an entity that claims sovereign power – both legally and symbolically – over such places. In contrast, targeted killing produces political and affective impacts by transforming private sanctuary places like the home into a public theatre of
counter-insurgency warfare. Moreover, as a spatial
¶
incursion from afar that cannot be easily countered or avenged, it places the
¶
interface of violence much closer to places of sanctuary for the ‘enemy’. Targeted¶ killing as a practice can thus defile sanctified places. The symbolic power comes not
¶
just from the ability to defile but also from the a-temporal character of

defiled space
¶
– as Feldman (1991, p. 67) notes, ‘defiled space never goes away’. Thus, as a tactic,
¶
targeted killing demonstrates how counter-insurgency also ‘seeks to violate the
¶
spatial constructs that function as armatures of the victim’s social order’ (Feldman,
¶
1991, p. 75).
Technostrategic discourse manifests itself in the necropolitics of dividing the populations who receive the sovereign right to life and death, and those who don’t. In the Feb. 2010 Uruzgan RPA strike, this is demonstrated by the discourse that removes what is foreign, intangible and violent and, instead, associates it with the familiar question of masculinity and femininity. Here, the drone operators feminize and thus are able to target their victims.
Allinson 12.
(Jamie, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Westminster,
International Relations PhD, University of Edinburgh, “Necropolitics of the Cyborg Empire:
Rethinking the Drone War,” Millennium Conference, http://millenniumjournal.files.wordpress. com/2012/10/allinsonmillenium2012necropoliticscyborg-empire.docx)
The particular interlude prompted by the demand for weapons to be seen at 5:18 leads to a
highly revealing exchange between the Predator team and the screeners, which is worth quoting at length:
¶
At 0529D the Predator pilot states to the crew ‘does it look like he is ho'n something across his chest. It's what they've been doing here lately, they wrap their
*expletive* in their man dresses so you can't PID it.’ Then on the radio to [redacted] he says
"looks like the dismounted pax on the hilux pickup on the east side is carrying something, but we cannot PID what it is at this time but he is carrying something’. After the Predator crew prompted the twice in mIRC, the screeners call out a possible weapon and then ask the crew to go white hot to get a better look. The response from the sensor operator is ‘white hot is not going to give us anything better, that truck would make a beautiful target’. The Predator pilot then at 0534D made this radio call "All players, all Players from [redacted] from our DGS, the
MAM that just mounted the back of the hilux had a possible weapon, read back possible rifle.'
During their post strike review, the screeners determined that this was not a weapon. At 0624D the screeners called out a weapon, this the only time that the Screeners called out a weapon without being prompted by the Predator crew. At 0655D, the Predator pilot called [redacted] and told him that the Screeners called out two weapons. The Screeners had not made any call outs of weapons. At 0741 the Predator pilot calls [redacted] and says ‘there's about 6 guys riding in the back of the highlux, so they don't have a lot of room. Potentially could carry a personal weapon on themselves.’
¶
A great deal is to be understood about the necropolitical logic at work in the occupation of Afghanistan through this passage. As an indicator of the role of
Orientalist fantasy in the tendency of Western militaries to ‘effeminise the men of the
[occupied] population through both symbolic and practical emasculation’ the Predator pilot’s characterization of the Afghan man’s clothing is quite stark: ‘their mandresses’. Nor does this phrase refer solely to the Predator pilot’s notion of what men ought to wear (presumably trousers), and the implied denigration of those whose clothing does not meet this norm. It also reveals the drawing of a caesura, a mental and political cordon around those whose actions inherently render them part of the population it is acceptable to put to death.
¶
We can consider this act of delineation at the basic level of pronouns. The Predator pilot describes
how ‘what they’ve [my emphasis] been doing round here lately’ is to ‘wrap their *expletive* in
their man dresses so you can't PID it’. Before this he asks for confirmation that the man on the screen does indeed look like he is holding something across his chest. Now, it may be objected that ‘they’ is simply a pronoun here ⎯ which it is, but this usage is in no sense simple. The pilot could have said ‘that’s what the Taliban have been doing round here lately’, or ‘the enemy’ or

‘the insurgents’ or a similar noun. By using ‘they’ the pilot shows that he already considers the man he is looking at to be one of ‘them’, and this ‘they’ have very definite characteristics,
culled from the imaginary of what Patrick Porter calls ‘military orientalism’. ‘They’ are effete, exotic, and treacherous in transgression of the gender boundaries by, for example, their wearing ‘mandresses’. Nor is the mandress, however comfortable or stylish it may sound by comparison to US military uniform, a simple piece of clothing. It is itself weaponized, a tool of the MAM’s underhand concealment of the arms he is assumed to bear, and which the action of carrying something across the chest inadvertently reveals.
¶
The unspoken frustration behind the Predator pilot’s ascription of a motive to the Afghan man’s concealment of a (nonexistent) weapon is doubly instructive. Why do MAMs hold things across their chests and inside their clothes? They do so ‘so you can’t PID it.’ This implies that the pilot believes that the Taliban are manipulating US rules of engagement to the degree that they know what constitutes a positive identification of a weapon for a drone pilot and that they are deliberately preventing this identification, and therefore hampering the use of lethal force against them. The pilot therefore inverts the rules of engagement by evoking the tactical wrapping-up of objects in the ‘mandress’: an Afghan male without a visible weapon thereby
becomes grounds for threat.
Therefore, we affirm the affective dimension of RPA technology.
Bringing the affective dimension back into RPA warfare displaces the logic of efficiency which erases the concrete experience of warfare and enables the violent distancing which causes the worst atrocities in modern technologized war.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and Geo-
Informatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
The critical project that aims to bring bodies and emotions back in GT practices entails several
important elements. As feminist GT practitioners, we can appropriate the power of GT, contest the dominant uses of these technologies, and reconfigure the dominant visual practices to counter their objectifying vision. We can experiment with new geospatial practices that better articulate the complex realities of gendered, classed, raced, and sexualized spaces and experiences of individuals. These new practices should help us understand emotions in terms of their ‘‘socio-spatial mediation and articulation rather than as
entirely interiorized subjective mental states’’ (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 2005, 3). While being attentive to how emotions, subjectivities, and spaces are mutually constitutive in particular places and at particular times, these new practices should also take into account the
existence of different kinds of bodies (e.g., pregnant, disabled, old, mutilated, dead) and their
socially encoded meanings in relation to specific spatial, temporal, and cultural contexts (Rose
1993; Laws 1997; Domosh and Seager 2001; Longhurst 2001). In the arena of public policy, feminist GT practitioners have a role in questioning decisions that privilege detached
rationality and the ‘‘logic of efficiency’’ over emotions (Anderson and Smith 2001, 8). As feminist GT practitioners we deeply care about the subject(s) of our research and are
‘‘emotionally committed to our work,’’ and our geospatial practices should be infused with a
sense of ‘‘emotional involvement with people and places’’ (Bondi, Davidson and Smith, 2005,

2). We can develop GT practices that entail this emotional involvement and help express mean- ings, memories, feelings, and emotions for our subjects. We can draw on the emotional power of moving images and the techniques in narrative cinema to create GIS movies or visualizations that tell stories about the lives of marginalized people, highlight social injustice,
and—we hope—effect social change (Aitken 1991; Aitken and Craine 2006). In the three sections that follow, I discuss several GT projects to illustrate the specific ways in which bodies and emotions can be brought to bear on geospatial practices. Drawing from my recent experimentations and those by feminist scholars in cultural studies and media art, I explore how these projects contest the dominant meanings and visual practices of GT. As these projects are more expressive than representational or analytical, taking the form of creative
visual or artistic work (e.g., GPS-assisted travelogues and 3D GIS video), they are in a certain sense ‘‘affective GT performances’’ that seek to transform GT into affective practices by incorporating the subjectivities and emotions of the practitioner and research participants as an integral element of the project. Through the use of GT as a medium of self-expression and a means of resistance, and to articulate emotional geographies and convey emotionally provocative messages, these nonrepresentational practices hint at ways of using GT that transcend the conventional duality between subject and object, design and use, author and
reader, and representation and practice (Del Casino and Hanna 2006).
The critique of technostrategic thought is a prerequisite to policymaking.
Current technocratic thought inherently produces detached knowledge, which views humans as dots on a map. Impacts of violence are inevitable in a world where humans are dehumanized.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and Geo-
Informatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
Geospatial technologies are designed, created, and used by humans, and a large proportion of their application is for understanding or solving problems of individuals and social groups.
Bodies, however, are often absent or rendered irrelevant in contemporary practices of GT.
This ‘‘omission of the body’’ occurs in two different but related senses ( Johnson 1990, 18).
First, although bodies are involved in the development and use of GT, there is little room in these technologies to allow for any role of the practitioner’s subjectivities, emotions, feelings, passion, values, and ethics. Second, despite the fact that a large number of bodies are affected
by the application of GT (e.g., people profiled by geodemographic application, and civilians who were annihilated as ‘‘collateral damage’’ by GPS-guided smart bombs that missed their
tar- gets), bodies are often treated merely as things, as dots on maps, or even as if they do not exist (Gregory 2004; Hyndman 2005). The dominant disembodied practices of GT, however, are contestable as they are largely the result of a particular understanding of science and
objectivity (Kwan 2002a). This historically specific and socially constructed notion of science, as Donna Haraway (1991) argues, is predicated on the positionality of a disembodied master subject with transcendent vision. With such disembodied and infinite vision, the knower is capable of achieving a detached view into a separate, completely knowable world. The kind of knowledge produced with such disembodied positionality denies the partiality of the knower, erases subjectivities, and ignores the power relations involved in all forms of knowledge
production (Foucault 1977). Haraway (1991, 189) calls this decorporealized vision ‘‘the god-trick

of seeing everything from nowhere.’’ Closely associated with this view of science is a gendered notion of knowledge production and academic scholarship that privileges rational thought
over ‘‘irrational’’ emotionality (Bennett 2004). This ‘‘marginalization of emotion,’’ as Anderson
and Smith (2001, 7) put it, ‘‘has been part of a gender politics of research in which detachment, objectivity and rationality have been valued, and implicitly masculinized, while
engagement, subjectivity, passion and desire have been devalued, and frequently feminized.’’
Geography in particular has tended to ‘‘deny, avoid, suppress or downplay its emotional en- tanglements’’ (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 2005, 1). Yet, to paraphrase Anderson and Smith, there are times and places where lives are explicitly lived through pain, love, hate, anger, hope, fear, and passion. If the world is imbued with complex emotional geographies, GT practices are more relevant to real lives if they allow us to take the spatial, temporal, and social effects of feelings into account. To neglect how our research and social life are mediated by feelings and emotions is to exclude a key set of relations through which lives are lived,
societies made, and knowledge produced (Anderson and Smith 2001).

Critical Hostilities 1ac
United States military forces have been occupying Afghanistan for 12 years.
RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan has provided recent accounts of the violence and oppression that continue and have worsened.
[The next two quotes are from Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan
(RAWA), July 3rd, 2013 (Organization established in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1977 as an independent political/social organization of Afghan women fighting for human rights and for social justice in Afghanistan “Afghan women burn in the fire of the oppression of the occupiers and fundamentalists” http://www.rawa.org/rawa/2013/03/07/rawa-statement-on-iwd-2013english.html)
“The persistence of the current instability and the West's support of the ‘Northern Alliance’ terrorists in
Afghanistan proves that the US and her [its] allies pay no attention to human rights and women rights, but seek only their political and economical interests. Today, even the most optimistic people in our country, confess that Afghan women have not been liberated, and have become a commodity for the
Western propaganda. Thanks to the presence of the US, women are gang-raped by warlords, are flogged in many Taliban-controlled areas, are preys of acid attacks, or are mercilessly stoned to death”
Even though our occupation has been justified under the illusion of saving women, the legal situation has not provided assistance to women .
“ In this country, laws are just pieces of paper that aid only in deceiving people, and are never practically applied … When criminal husbands, fathers, or brothers kill women under different contexts, they are never punished. In many cases, women are convicted by the judicial bodies and thrown into jails for the crime of ‘running away from home’, where they are further raped by the jail keepers. In such a hostile situation, most women find self-immolation the only solution to free them from a slow torturous death.
The suicide rates among our women has risen in an unprecedented manner”
The prevailing western representations of Afghanistan justify a flawed ideology that American Forces are here to save the brown Other from chaos. This practice of otherization ensures epistemic violence.
Crowe 2007 (Lori, Grad Student in Pol. Sci. – York U., “The “Fuzzy Dream”: Discourse,
Historical myths, and Militarized (in)Security Interrogating dangerous myths of Afghanistan and the ‘West’”, http://archive.sgir.eu/uploads/Crowe-loricrowe.pdf)
In his re-theorization of foreign policy, Campbell exposes the essential role binaries play in the processes implicated in state identity formation: It emphasizes the exclusionary practices, the discourses of danger, the representations of fear, and the enumeration of threats, and downplays the role of affirmative discourses such as claims to shared ethnicity, nationality, political ideals, religious beliefs, or other commonalities.76 Looking specifically at the relationship between the US and Afghanistan
, the US has defined its own identity (as good, modern, normal, etc.) in relation to its difference from the
Afghan ‘Other’, cultivating its demonization on the basis of perceived danger and moral
valuations (superior/inferior) that are spatially constructed.
Claims that the West is constructing a peaceful, democratic, and liberal nation (values claimed to be at the core of “our civilization, freedom, democracy and ways of life”) are motivated by the need to transform “their barbarism, inhumanity, low morality and style of life”.77 Eisenstein explains that

‘Others’ are constructed or fabricated in order to deal with the fear of not-knowing:
“Creating the savage, or slave, or woman, or Arab allows made-up certainty rather than honest complex variability and unknowability.”78 Unfortunately, this is not a novel phenomenon unique to the contemporary situation in Afghanistan: articulations of security that rely on definitions of
‘otherness’ as threats to security, argues Campbell, replicates the logic of Christendom’s
‘evangelism of fear’
. Obstructions to security/order/God become defined as irrational, abnormal, mad, etc. in need of rationalization, normalizations, punishment, moralization, etc.: “The state project of security replicates the church project of salvation”.79 As is commonly known, under Christendom it was such ‘discourses of danger’ that were instrumental in establishing its own authority and disciplining its followers. Similarly, by relying on discourses of danger to define who “we” are, who “we” are not, and who “they” are that we must fear, the state constructs enemies who’s elimination/domination is necessary to preserve the states own identity (and security): “All powers are geared against a single “alien.” And all the rationalizations are raging against the advent of “Evil.”80 Thus,
the “war on terror”, or
Afghanistan, or Iraq, becomes, in the words of Baudrillard, an endless war of prevention to
“exorcise” “evil”; an ablation of a non-existent enemy masquerading as the leitmotiv for
universal safety.
81 These elements of oppositional binaries is closely related to the second element: contemporary discourse has developed from and further perpetuates a particular ideology that emanates from a neo-liberal capitalist and imperial agenda that is founded upon neo-colonialist attitudes and assumptions. “The US campaign to ‘fight terrorism’, initiated after September 11th” explains Nahla Abdo “has crystallized all the ideological underpinnings of colonial and imperial policies towards the constructed ‘other’.”82 This emerges in the “heroism” myth mentioned above; for example, Debrix explains how narratives around humanitarianism serve an ideological purpose in that it “contributes to the reinforcement of neoliberal policies in ‘pathological’ regions of the international landscape.83 It also emerges in the militarization myth, insofar as neoliberal globalisation relies on the institutionalization of neo-colonialism and the commodification and (re)colonization of labor via militarized strategies of imperial politics. That is, as Agathangelou and Ling point out, “Neoliberal economics enables globalized militarization”.84 Embedded in this normalization of neo-colonial frames are the elements of linearity and thus assumed rationality of reasoning in the West. As Canada stepped up its role in direct combat operations (which included an increase of combat troops, fighter jets, and tanks with long-range firing capacities85), Stephen Harper appealed to troop morale on the ground in Afghanistan, stating: “Canada and the international community are determined to take a failed state and create a "democratic, prosperous and modern country."86 (my italics) Proposed solutions to the conflict(s) in
Afghanistan have been framed and justified not only as ‘saving backwards Afghanistan’ but also as generously bringing it into the modern, capitalist, neoliberal age. Moreover, this element represents an continuity of colonial power, presenting the one correct truth or resolution, emanating from the ‘objective gaze’ of the ‘problem-solving’ Western world.
Representations of Afghanistan present Western voices as the authority and the potential progress such authority can bring to the ‘East’ as naturally desirable. This ‘rationality’ also
presumes an inherent value of Western methodology (including statistical analysis, quantification of data, etc) and devalues alternative epistemologies including those of the
Afghan people. This is problematic for several reasons: 1) It forecloses and discourages thinking
“outside the box” and instead relies upon the “master’s tools” which include violent military force, the installation of a democratic regime, peacekeeping, and reconstruction and foreign aid – alternative strategies are deemed “radical”, “unworkable”, and “anti-American”; 2) it prioritizes numbers and statistics over lived experiences
. By relying on tallies of deaths, percentages of voters, and numbers of insurgents for example, the experiences of those living in the region are obfuscated and devalued, and;
3)it reproduces a colonial hierarchy of knowledge production. Old colonial narratives of have resurfaced with renewed vigor in the case of Afghanistan is contingent on and mutually
reinforced by opposing narratives of a ‘civilized’ and ‘developed’ ‘West’.
For example: “Consider the language which is being used…Calling the perpetrators evildoers, irrational, calling them the forces of darkness, uncivilized, intent on destroying civilization, intent on destroying democracy.
They hate freedom, we are told. Every person of colour, and I would want to say also every Aboriginal person, will recognize that language. The language of us versus them, of civilization versus the forces of darkness, this language is rooted in the colonial legacy.”87 This colonizer/colonized dichotomy is key to the civilisational
justification the US administration pursues (“We wage war to save civilization itself”88) which, as Agathangelou and Ling explain, is motivated by a constructed medieval evil that threatens
American freedom and democracy, the apotheosis of modern civilization, and therefore must be disciplined/civilized.
In his Speech to Congress on September 21, 2001, Bush portrays the irrational Other as Evil and retributive seeking to destroy the
‘developed, ‘secure’ ‘prosperous’ and ‘civilized’ free world: These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life…Al Qaeda is to terror what the mafia is to crime. But its goal is not making money; its goal is remaking the world, and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere.”89
This production of othering and re-institutionalization
of colonial discourse has been enabled by and facilitated ‘culture clash’ explanations.
90 The danger of such theories, warns Razack, lies not only in their decontextualization and dehistoricization, but also on its reliance on the Enlightenment narrative and notions of European moral superiority that justify the use of force. This is evident in the unproblematic way in which outside forces have assumed a right of interference in the region spanning from the 18th century when imperial powers demarcated the Durrand Line (which created a border between British India and Afghanistan with the goal of making Afghanistan an effective ‘buffer state’for British Imperial interests91) to the American intervention that began in the Cold War, followed by the Soviets in the 1980’s and the Americans,
Canadians and British today. In fact, The West’s practical engagement in Afghanistan reveals how it has served to reporoduce this neo-colonial myth as well as the complexities and paradoxes which simultaneously de-stabilize that myth.

Epistemological violence justifies a larger crusade on otherness. This division places us on a path towards genocide.
Mignolo & Tlostanova 06 [Walter & Madina, Prof of Literature & Prof of the History of
Culture, “Theorizing from the Borders,” European Journal of Social Theory, p.205-6, 208]
The modern foundation of knowledge is territorial and imperial. By modern we mean the socio-historical organization and classification of the world founded on a macro-narrative and on a specific concept and principles of knowledge. The point of reference of modernity is the
European Renaissance founded, as an idea and interpretation of a historical present, on two complementary moves: the colonization of time and the invention of the Middle Ages, and the colonization of space and the invention of America that became integrated into a Christian tripartite geo-political order:
Asia, Africa and Europe. It was from and in Europe that the classification of the world emerged and not in and from Asia, Africa or
America – borders were created therein but of different kinds. The Middle Ages were integrated into the history of Europe, while the histories in Asia, Africa and America were denied as history. The world map drawn by Gerardus Mercator and Johannes Ortelius worked together with theology to create a zero point of observation and of knowledge: a perspective that denied all other perspectives (Castro-Gómez, 2002).
Epistemological frontiers were set in place in that double move: frontiers that expelled to the outside the epistemic colonial differences (Arabic, Aymara, Hindi,
Bengali, etc.). Epistemic frontiers were re-articulated in the eighteenth century with the displacement of theology and the theo-politics of knowledge by secular ego-logy and the ego-
politics of knowledge.
Epistemic frontiers were traced also by the creation of the imperial difference (with the Ottoman, the Chinese and the Russian empires) and the colonial difference (with Indians and Blacks in America).
Both epistemic differences, colonial and imperial, were based on a racial classification of the population of the planet, a classificatory order in which those who made the classification put themselves at
the top of Humanity.
The Renaissance idea of Man was conceptualized based on the paradigmatic examples of Western
Christianity, Europe, and white and male subjectivity (Kant, 1798; Las Casas, 1552). Thus, from the Renaissance all the way down, the rhetoric of modernity could not have been sustained without its darker and constitutive side: the logic of coloniality. Border thinking or theorizing emerged from and as a response to the violence (frontiers) of imperial/territorial epistemology and
the rhetoric
of modernity (and globalization) of salvation that continues to be implemented on the assumption of the inferiority or devilish intentions of the Other and, therefore, continues to justify oppression and exploitation as well as eradication of the difference
. Border thinking is the epistemology of the exteriority; that is, of the outside created from the inside; and as such, it is always a decolonial project. Recent immigration to the imperial sites of Europe and the USA – crossing the imperial and colonial differences – contributes to maintaining the conditions for border thinking that emerged from the very inception of modern imperial expansion. In this regard, critical border thinking displaces and subsumes Max Horkheimer’s ‘critical theory’ which was and still is grounded in the experience of European internal history (Horkheimer, 1937). ‘Critical border thinking’ instead is grounded in the experiences of the colonies and subaltern empires. Consequently, it provides the epistemology that was denied by imperial expansion. ‘Critical border thinking’ also denies the epistemic privilege of the humanities and the social sciences – the privilege of an observer that makes the rest of the world an object of observation (from Orientalism to Area Studies). It also moves away from the post-colonial toward the de-colonial, shifting to the geoand body-politics of knowledge.
They Continue…
Accordingly, our first thesis is the following
. ‘Borders’ are not only geographic but also political, subjective
(e.g. cultural) and epistemic
and, contrary to frontiers, the very concept of ‘border’ implies the existence of people, languages, religions and knowledge on both sides linked through relations established by the coloniality of power
(e.g. structured by the imperial and colonial differences).
Borders
in this precise sense, are not a natural outcome of a natural or divine historical processes in human history, but were created in the very constitution of the modern/colonial world
(i.e. in the imaginary of Western and Atlantic capitalist empires formed in the past five hundred years). If we limit our observations to the geographic, epistemic and subjective types of borders in the modern/colonial world (from the European Renaissance till today), we will see that they all have been created from the perspective of European imperial/ colonial expansion: massive appropriation of land accompanied by the constitution of international law that justified the massive appropriation of land
(Grovogui, 1996; Schmitt, 1952); control of knowledge
(the epistemology of the zero point as representation of the real) by disqualifying non-European languages and

epistemologies and control of subjectivities
(by conversation, civilization, democratization) or, in today’s language – by the globalization of culture.
The epistemological constructions of the Afghanistan other are apart of a larger discourse of militarism. Presidential war powers have no limit on them by congress, which places Obama at the head of a global military network.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts 13 is former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, has held numerous university appointments. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research, "America Shamed Again: Are US Lawmakers 'Owned' by the
Israel Lobby?" 2-19-13, www.globalresearch.ca/america-shamed-again-are-us-lawmakersowned-by-the-israel-lobby/5323415, DOA: 7-31-13, y2k
Americans are a colonized people. Their government represents the colonizing powers : Wall
Street, the Israel Lobby, the
Military/Security Complex ,
Agribusiness, Pharmaceuticals, Energy, Mining, and Timber interests.
Two elected representatives who tried to represent the American people–Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich–found representative government to be an inhospitable place for those few who attempt to represent the interests of the American people. Like Ron Paul,
Dennis Kucinich, and Gerald Celente
, I stand with our Founding Fathers who opposed America’s
entanglement in foreign wars. In an effort to prevent entanglements, the Founding Fathers
gave the power to declare war to Congress. Over the years Congress has gradually ceded this power to the President to the extent that it no longer exists as a power of Congress.
The
President can start a war anywhere at any time simply by declaring that the war is not a war
but a “time-limited, scope-limited, kinetic military action.” Or he can use some other
nonsensical collection of words. In the first few years of the 21st century, the executive
branch has invaded two countries, violated the sovereignty of five others with military
operations, and has established military bases in Africa in order to counteract China’s economic penetration of the continent and to secure the resources for US and European corporations, thus enlarging the prospects for future wars . If the Republicans succeed in blocking Hagel’s confirmation, the prospect of war with Iran will be boosted. By abdicating its war power,
Congress lost its control of the purse. As the executive branch withholds more and more information from Congressional oversight committees, Congress is becoming increasingly
powerless .
As Washington’s war debts mount, Washington’s attack on the social safety net will become more intense.
Governmental institutions that provide services to Americans will wither as more tax revenues are directed to the coffers of special interests and foreign entanglements.
The tenuous connection between the US government and the interests of citizens is on its way to being severed entirely.
The occupation of Afghanistan plays a central part of preserving American
militarism in the region. Harvesting rare Earth minerals and deployment to regional conflicts ensures our power. Unfortunately, our intervention brought war criminals and rapists back into power.
Ian Sinclair and Mariam Rawi 2009 ( Ian is a journalist with Znet and Rawi is a member of
RAWA’s foreign relations committee, “Interview with the Revolutionary Association of the
Women of Afghanistan” April 29, 2009 http://www.zcommunications.org/interview-with-therevolutionary-association-of-the-women-of-afghanistan-by-ian-sinclair)

The US invaded Afghanistan to fulfil its geo-political, economic and regional strategic interests
and to change Afghanistan into a strong military base in the region. Since Afghanistan is the heart of Asia, it would serve as a strong base for controlling surrounding countries like
Pakistan, China, Iran and above all the Central. Additionally, as a superpower, it continues to occupy Afghanistan to combat rising powers like Russia and China, who are becoming greater rivals for the US in the economic, military and political fields
. Asian Republics. Many argue today that the
2001 invasion was planned before 9/11, but it gave the war-mongers in the White House and Pentagon a golden opportunity to advance its agenda in the region. In the words of Tony Blair "to be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11..."Getting hold of the multibillions drug business was another reason for invading Afghanistan and in the past few years we clearly see that the US and its allies changed Afghanistan into the opium capital of the world. Opium production increased more than 4400%, with 93% of world illegal opium produced in Afghanistan. Narcotics is said to be the third greatest trade commodity in cash terms after oil and weapons.
There are large financial institutions behind this business and the control of the routes of narcotics was important for the US government and now they have reached their goal. Furthermore,
Afghanistan holds a rich source of gas, copper, iron and other minerals and precious stones and the big powers are of course interested in looting it the way they are doing in poor African countries. In the past few years there have
been exploration efforts of our natural resources.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimates there are about 700 billion cubic meters of gas and 300 million tonnes of oil across several Northern provinces of Afghanistan. Also the world's second-biggest unexploited copper deposit is located in our country with an estimated 11 million tonnes of copper. So besides routing the oil and gas from the Central Asian Republics through Afghanistan, the US is interested in exploiting Afghanistan's resources too.
The "war on terror" and "liberation of Afghan women" were mere lies to cover the above and many other hidden agendas of the US in Afghanistan. Our peoples' dreams for liberation were shattered in the very first days after the invasion when they witnessed that the war criminals and Northern Alliance murderers and rapists who destroyed Afghanistan, were backed and brought back to power by the US and its allies after the fall of the Taliban regime. When infamous criminals like Burhanuddin Rabbani, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, Karim Khalili,
Mohammad Mohaqiq, Yunus Qanooni, Mullah Rakiti, Atta Muhammad, Rashid Dostum, Ismail
Khan, Haji Almas, Hazrat Ali and many more were decorated by the US as champions of freedom and were installed in power, everyone knew that Afghanistan had once again become the centre of a chess game of the US and its allies who made the slogans of
"democracy" and "human rights" into painful jokes for our nation.
An empowered military complex ensures global instability by propping up authoritarian governments and creating resentment amongst civilians. This is slowly spiraling into extinction.
Ismael Hossezin-Zadeh 10 teaches economics @ Drake University, “The Biggest Parasite,”
12-17-10, http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/12/17/the-globalization-of-militarism/ DOA: 7-
31-13, y2k
Many Americans
still believe that US foreign policies are designed to maintain peace
, to safeguard human rights and to spread democracy
around the world.
Regardless of their
officially stated objectives
, however, those
policies often lead to opposite outcomes
: war, militarism and dictatorship
.
Evidence of the fact that
US policy makers no longer uphold the ideals they state publicly is overwhelming . Those who
continue to harbor illusions about the thrust of US policies
around the world must be oblivious to the fact that the U nited
S tates has been overtaken by a military-industrialsecurity-financial cabal whose representatives are firmly ensconced in
both the White House and the
US
Congress
.
The ultimate goal of the cabal
, according to their own military guidelines, is “full

spectrum dominance” of the world;
and they are willing to wage as many wars , to destroy as many countries and to kill as many people as necessary to achieve that goal. The liberal hawks and petty intellectual pundits who tend to defend US foreign policies on the grounds of
“human rights” or “moral obligations” are well served to pay attention
(among other evidence) to the
US foreign policy documents that are
currently being disclosed
by the Wikileaks. The documents “show all too clearly that,” as Paul Craig Roberts puts it, “ the US government is a duplicitous entity whose raison d’etre is to control every other country
.” In essence, the documents show that while the US government
, like a global mafia godfather
, rewards the pliant ruling elites of the client states with arms, financial aid and military protections, it punishes the nations whose leaders refuse to surrender to the wishes of the bully and relinquish their national sovereignty.
US foreign policies , like its domestic policies, are revealed as catering not to the broader public
or national interests of the people but to the powerful special interests that are vested primarily in the military capital and the finance capital. US foreign policy architects are
clearly incapable of recognizing
or acknowledging the fact that different peoples and nations may have different needs and interests
.
Nor are they capable of respecting other peoples’ aspirations to national sovereignty
. Instead, they
tend to view other peoples
, just as they do the
American people, through the narrow prism of
their own nefarious interests
.
By
selfishly dividing the world into “friends” and “foe
,” or “vassal states,” as Zbigniew Brzezinski put it, powerful beneficiaries of war and militarism compel both groups to embark on a path of militarization
, which leads
inevitably to militarism and authoritarian rule.
Although militarism grows out of the military, the two are different in character. While the military is a means to meet certain ends such as maintaining national security, militarism represents a bureaucratized permanent military establishment as an end in itself
.
It is “a phenomenon
,” as the late Chalmers Johnson put it, “ by which a nation’s armed services come to put their institutional preservation ahead of achieving national security or even a commitment to the integrity of the governmental structure of which they are a part”
(The Sorrows of Empire, Metropolitan Books, 2004, pp. 423-24).
This explains the cancerous growth
and parasitic nature of US militarism
?
cancerous
because it is steadily expanding throughout many parts of the world,
and parasitic because
not only does it
drain other nations resources, it also sucks US national resources out of the public purse into the coffers of the wicked interests that are vested in the military-industrial-security complex. By creating fear and instability and embarking on unilateral military adventures
, corporate militarism
of the United States also fosters militarism elsewhere
.
A major US strategy of expanding its imperial influence and promoting militarism around the globe has been the formation of international military alliances in various parts of the world
.
These include
not only the notorious North Atlantic Treaty Organization (
NATO
), which is essentially an integral part of the Pentagon’s world command structure, and which was recently expanded to police the world, but also 10 other joint military commands called Unified Combatant Commands. They include Africa Command (
AFRICOM
), Central Command (
CENTCOM
),
European Command (
EUCOM
), Northern Command (
NORTHCOM
), Pacific Command (
PACOM
), and Southern Command
(
SOUTHCOM
). The geographic area under the “protection” of each of these Unified Combatant Commands is called Area of Responsibility (AOR).
AFRICOM’s area of responsibility includes US “military operations and military relations with 53 African nations – an area of responsibility covering all of
Africa except Egypt.” CENTCOM’s area of responsibility spans many countries in the Middle East/Near East/Persian Gulf and Central Asia. It includes
Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. EUCOM’s area of responsibility “covers 51 countries and territories, including Europe, Iceland, Greenland, and Israel.”
NORTHCOM’s area of responsibility “includes air, land and sea approaches and encompasses the contiguous United States, Alaska, Canada, Mexico and the surrounding water out to approximately 500 nautical miles (930 km). It also includes the Gulf of Mexico, the Straits of Florida, portions of the
Caribbean region to include The Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands.” PACOM’s area of responsibility “covers over fifty percent of the world’s surface area ?
approximately 105 million square miles (nearly 272 million square kilometers) ?
nearly sixty percent of the world’s population, thirty-six countries, twenty territories, and ten territories and possessions of the United States.” SOUTHCOM’s area of responsibility “encompasses 32 nations (19 in Central and South America and 13 in the Caribbean) ?
and 14 US and European territories. . . . It is responsible for providing contingency planning and operations in Central and South America, the Caribbean (except US commonwealths, territories, and possessions), Cuba, their territorial

waters.”
Together with over 800 military bases scattered over many parts of the world, this military colossus represents an ominous presence of the US armed forces all across our planet
.
Instead of dismantling NATO as redundant in the post-Cold War era, it has been expanded (as a proxy for the US military juggernaut) to include many new countries in Eastern Europe all the way to the borders of Russia. Not only has it inserted itself into a number of new international relations and recruited many new members and partners, it has also arrogated to itself many new tasks and responsibilities in social, political, economic, environmental, transportation and communications arenas of the world. NATO’s new areas of “responsibility,” as reflected in its latest
Strategic Concept, include “human rights”; “key environmental and resource constraints, including health risks, climate change, water scarcity and increasing energy needs. . .”; “important means of communication, such as the internet, and scientific and technological research. . .”; “proliferation of ballistic missiles, of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction”; “threat of extremism, terrorism and trans-national illegal activities such as trafficking in arms, narcotics and people”; “vital communication, transport and transit routes on which international trade, energy security and prosperity depend”; the “ability to prevent, detect, defend against and recover from cyber-attacks”; and the need to “ensure that the Alliance is at the front edge in assessing the security impact of emerging technologies.” Significant global issues thus claimed to be part of NATO’s expanded mission fall logically within the purview of civilian international institutions such as the United Nations. So why is the US ruling plutocracy, using NATO, now trying to supplant the United Nations and other international agencies
?
The reason is that due to the rise of the influence of a number of new international players such as Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Iran, and Venezuela the UN is no longer as subservient to the global ambitions of the United States as it once was.
Planning to employ the imperial military machine of NATO instead of the civilian multilateral institutions such as the UN clearly belies,
once again, the self-righteous US claims of trying to spread democracy worldwide.
Furthermore, NATO’s expanded “global responsibilities” would easily provide the imperial US military machine new excuses for unilateral military interventions. By the same token, such military adventures would also provide the US military-industrial-security complex additional rationale for continued escalation of the Pentagon budget. The expansion of NATO to include most of the Eastern Europe has led Russia, which had curtailed its military spending during the 1990s in the hope that, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the US would also do the same, to once again increase its military spending. In response to the escalation of US military spending, which has nearly tripled during the last 10 years (from $295 billion when
George W. Bush went to the White House in January 2001 to the current figure of nearly one trillion dollars), Russia too has drastically increased its military spending during the same time period (from about $22 billion in 2000 to $61 billion today). In a similar fashion, US military encirclement of
China (through a number of military alliances and partnerships that range from Pakistan, Afghanistan and India to South China Sea/Southeast Asia,
Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Cambodia, Malaysia, New Zealand and most recently Vietnam) has led that country to also further strengthen its military capabilities. Just as the US military and geopolitical ambitions have led Russia and China to reinforce their military capabilities, so have they compelled other countries such as Iran, Venezuela and North Korea to likewise strengthen their armed forces and buttress their military preparedness.
Not only does aggressive US militarism compel its “adversaries” to allocate a disproportionately large share of their precious resources to military spending, but it also coerces its “allies” to likewise embark on a path of militarization
. Thus, countries like Japan and Germany, whose military capabilities were reduced to purely defensive postures following the atrocities of World War II, have once again been re-militarizing in recent years under the impetus of what US military strategists call “the need to share the burden of global security.” Thus, while Germany and Japan still operate under a “peace constitution,” their military expenditures on a global scale now rank sixth and seventh, respectively (behind the US, China, France, UK and Russia).
US militarization of the world
(both directly through the spread of its own military apparatus across the globe and indirectly by compelling both “friends” and “foe” to militarize) has a number of ominous consequences for the overwhelming majority or the population the world. For one thing, it is the source of a largely redundant and disproportionately large allocation of the world’s precious resources to war, militarism and wasteful production of the means of death and destruction . Obviously, as this inefficient, class-biased disbursement of resources drains public finance and accumulates national debt, it also brings tremendous riches and treasures to war profiteers , that is, the beneficiaries of the military capital and the finance capital.
Secondly, to justify this lopsided allocation of the lion’s share of national resources to military spending, beneficiaries of war dividends tend to create fear , suspicion and hostility among peoples and nations of the world, thereby sowing the seeds of war, international conflicts and global instability.
Thirdly, by the same token that p owerful beneficiaries of war and military-security capital tend to promote suspicion, to create fear and invent enemies, both at home and abroad, they
also undermine democratic values and nurture authoritarian rule
.
As the predatory military-industrial-security-financial interests find democratic norms of openness and transparency detrimental to their nefarious objectives of limitless self-enrichment, they cleverly create pretexts for secrecy, “security,” military rule and police state.
Concealment of the robbery of public treasury in the name of national security requires restriction of information, obstruction of transparency, and curtailment of democracy.
It follows

that under the kleptocratic influence of the powerful interests that are vested in the militarysecurity-financial industries the US government has turned into an ominous global force of destabilization, obstruction, retrogression and authoritarianism .
RAWA says “The exit of foreign troops and our country’s independence, can be the first step in the path of the realization of values such as freedom and democracy, which are vital conditions for the emancipation of women”
Katelyn and I demand that The United States Congress should amend the
Authorization for the Use of Military Force and related statutes to prohibit the
President from re-introducing United States armed forces into hostilities in
Afghanistan after 2014.
Now is a key time in US occupation of Afghanistan. The Bilateral Security Agreement does not force US forces out until 2014, but members in Washington are pressuring Karzai to extend the deadline.
Ioannis Koskinas August 1, 2013 (Ioannis Koskinas was a military officer for over twenty years and now focuses on economic development projects in Afghanistan and Pakistan “The
U.S.-Afghan game of "Chicken’” http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/08/01/us_afghan_game_of_chicken
In an Afghan context, the U.S. and Afghan governments are on a collision course in a number of areas and unless cooler heads can prevail, the eventual crash will be devastating, yet totally uneven. For the United States, its international credibility will be undoubtedly damaged; but for the Afghan government, the fallout will be disastrous, and signal the beginning of the end for this period of relative progress and prosperity. Two prime examples of the stakes are
the Bilateral Security Agreement
(BSA), which will determine the size and shape of the U.S. mission post 2014, and the tussle over taxing U.S. government contractors supporting military operations in Afghanistan. Following the ill-choreographed opening of the
Taliban political office in Qatar, Afghan President Hamid Karzai put the BSA on pause. Even though U.S. officials were quick to admit that the Doha event was embarrassing and not what they had intended, they also made it clear that they had acted with Karzai's blessing. That really should have been the end of it and the negotiations should have resumed.
Karzai's decision to halt the BSA talks was yet another attempt to challenge the United States when Afghan sovereignty was on the line. But with the negotiations still stalled, his move may prove to be a pyrrhic victory. One of the unintended consequences of his decision is that a "zero option"
(keeping no U.S. forces in Afghanistan after 2014), which had little support in Washington and
in NATO-member capitals, is now being considered in earnest. As far as the U.S. government is concerned, the BSA is the sine qua non for a continued U.S. military presence past 2014. In fact, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently set an October 2013 deadline for completing the BSA in an effort to force the issue with an Afghan government that is
struggling to define its own vision of a post-2014 security environment.
Without the BSA, however, even those who warn against the "zero option" have been adamant that total withdrawal is not only likely, but also inevitable. In other words, unless the BSA is finalized quickly, the idea of leaving no U.S. troops in Afghanistan after 2014 will continue to gain momentum, and what started out as a dangerous possibility may become the most likely course of action.

The 1AC’s incorporation of alternative perspectives dismantles the colonial epistemology that has erased other’s perspectives. Understanding that history is always a constructed truth is necessary to rethink the problem at hand.
Crowe 2007 (Lori, Grad Student in Pol. Sci. – York U., “The “Fuzzy Dream”: Discourse,
Historical myths, and Militarized (in)Security Interrogating dangerous myths of Afghanistan and the ‘West’”, http://archive.sgir.eu/uploads/Crowe-loricrowe.pdf)
Conclusion: The Dangers of Myth-making We need to navigate critically and cautiously through the multiple stories, silences, and complex and contradictory narratives that lie beneath the
surface of imperial myths.
Kaufman, for example, explains that in order to study incidences of ethnic conflict, we must begin by trying to hear the myriad narratives and different assumptions and combine insights from multiple methodological and theoretical approaches.105
We need to understand that “some people are just written out of history”106, and the stories of history are so partial and there is so much those of us in the
West don’t see that we can never believe that we have arrived at a ‘truth’ or ‘reality’: History is never just simply the ‘past’. Nor is history simply its official rendering…History is made while old histories are simultaneously reproduced, without most of us ever owning the story
told…
Once I see interpretation is already embedded in the very process of thought I recognize that there is a before that I cannot completely ever know or recover. The very idea of history itself is destabilized as a process of storytelling with different storytellers…I therefore need to know whose story I am reading, who is telling the story, and from what timebound lens it is being told.107 Perhaps the best response is, as Peter Hulme suggests
: “to read speculatively, recognizing that the story can never be fully recovered, and that which has been recovered is often distorted and manufactured.”108 There are emancipatory possibilities in a critical project of discourse deconstruction: it lies in the recognition of the detrimental effects of imperial, neo-colonial,
orientalist ‘myths’ and the policy agendas that are made possible through them.
By beginning to delve into the complex and interrelated factors of Afghanistan’s history in the previous section, the dangers of historical narratives that conceal these elements start to become visible:
“By myth man has lived, died and – all too often – killed.”109 While pressure must be put on the messengers of violent and deliberately myths, we must also take responsibility and listen critically to the multiple narratives around us in order to realize a more “panoptic”110 vision; understanding, nonetheless, that we can never achieve a whole or complete understanding or “truth”. “As we listen to the antithetical
mythologies that tear our world apart,” argues Armstrong “we need to be receptive to the
counter-narrative that opposes our point of view and expresses the ‘other’ perspective.”111
One way to ‘see’ without an imperial or colonial gaze is to connect heterogeneity into a form of “collective assemblage” in a
Deleuzian and Guattarian sense; that is, accept concrete multiplicities in order to see variation without conquest.112 What are the historical myths being produced as we speak? Will history books teach young children stories about ‘uncivilized’ and ‘barbaric’
Afghanistan, harborer of evil and Muslim terrorists, saved by the heroic and technologically vanguard strategies of Western militaries?
All myths are political and embody a very particular and power infused representation about how the world works. We must historicize particular forms of knowledge and acknowledge their partiality by unpacking the theories that underpin the “facts” produced by situated knowledge’s; “A thicker and more complex vision of humanity is urgently
needed.”113 If, as Taylor pronounces, history and its myths are not indeed about the past, but rather the future, than the question we must continually ask ourselves (and of other myth producers, as we are all implicated in this process) is what kind of world is being produced
through what myths and who is benefiting and who is being disappeared?

The processes and conditions that secure subordination are also the means one gains agency
Mahmood 02 [Saba: professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley “Feminist Theory,
Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival” Cultural
Anthropology p. 210]
In trying to move beyond the teleology of emancipation underwriting many accounts of women’s agency, I have found insights offered by poststructuralist theorists into power and the constitution of the subject useful in analyzing the women’s mosque movement. Germane to this formulation is the reconceptualization of power as a set of relations that do not simply
dominate the subject, but also, importantly, form the conditions of its possibility. In following
Foucault, feminist theorist Judith Butler calls this the paradox of subjectivation, insomuch as the very processes and conditions that secure a subject’s subordination are also the means by
which she becomes a self-conscious identity and agent (Butler 1997b; Foucault 1980, 1983).
Stated otherwise, one may argue that the set of capacities inhering in a subject—the abilities that define its modes of agency—are not the residue of an undominated self that existed prior to the operations of power but are themselves the product of those operations. Such a conceptualization of power and subject formation also encourages us to understand agency not simply as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for action
that specific relations of subordination create and enable. In order to clarify this point, we might consider the example of a virtuoso pianist who submits herself to the, at times painful, regime of disciplinary practice, as well as hierarchical structures of apprenticeship, in order to acquire the ability—the requisite agency—to play the instrument with mastery. Importantly, her agency is predicated on her ability to be taught, a condition classically referred to as docility.
Although we have come to associate docility with abandonment of agency, the term literally implies the malleability required of someone to be instructed in a particular skill or knowledge—a meaning that carries less a sense of passivity and more that of struggle, effort,
exertion, and achievement.30 Such a way of thinking about agency draws our attention to the practical ways in which individuals work on themselves to become the willing subjects of a particular discourse. Importantly, to understand agency in this manner is neither to invoke a self-constituting autonomous subject nor subjectivity as a private space of cultivation. Rather, it draws our attention to the specific ways in which one performs a certain number of operations on one’s thoughts, body, conduct, and ways of being, in order to “attain a certain
kind of state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (Foucault 1997:24) in accord with a particular discursive tradition.31

Technostrategic Discourse 1ac
Drone warfare occurs in the context of sanitized technological killing—the distance enacted by the phenomenological dimension of drone weapons delivery establishes a radical separation between the bureaucratic machinations that justify and order that killing and the concrete human dimensions of those same murderous practices.
Addey et al 11
(Peter Addey, Mark Whitehead, Alison Williams et al. "Introduction: Air-target
Distance, Reach and the Politics of Verticality." Theory, Culture & Society 28.7-8 2011).
The target of aerial war and security could be understood in a manner that Eyal Weizman (2002) might describe as holographical. An assembling of disparate elements, the air-target adds up to a representation yet is built by techno-cultural practices that overlay one another with multiple details and perspectives. The result appears to be a reconfigured reality, augmented
and abstracted, yet heightened at the same time. In the place of the cadastral maps, which were assiduously produced under pre vious regimes of aerial governmentality, we have the modularized GIS data sets, which are able to instantaneously fabricate the target as a simulacrum. Real objects and com- plex environments come to be grasped in this way, analysed by distant audi- ences in a form that can be acted upon with speed but in a way in
which the violence involved in making-abstract is increasingly obscured. This is partly because of the concatenation or telescoping of the aerial target and the chain of targeting, which leads
Ryan Bishop to suggest that the destruc- tion of aerial war is obscured by the conflation of senses, technologies and perceptions, thus closing ‘the gap of perception’ and erasing the
‘distinction between apprehension, thought and action’ (Bishop, 2009). The processes of
‘sensing and tracking’, ‘perception and action’ that Bishop locates pre- cisely within the automation of the targeting process elsewhere must then be excavated within the evolving assembling and extension of the aerial tar- geting process. This process is itself subject to ever increasing processes of rationalization and optimization by flow monitoring and the sequencing of its activities in order to produce the dream of ‘continuous coverage ’ (Ha, 2010) or ‘persistent presence’ (Williams, 2011c) that is an unblinking eye ^ an omnipresent view provided by efficient UAV cycles and sequences that seeks to observe an asymmetric yet omnipresent threat with the capacity to unpredictably surprise and disrupt.
¶
Thus what
Anderson, Gregory, Saint-Amour and Bishop show us in this section is quite different from the imagery mentioned at the start of the editorial. Let us recall Judith Butler’s evocative description of the first Gulf War from the 1990s:
¶
. . . transported from the North American continent to
Iraq, and yet securely wedged in the couch in one’s own living room. The smart bomb screen is, of course, destroyed in the moment that it enacts its destruction, which is to say that this is a recording of a thoroughly destructive act which can never record that destructiveness, indeed,
which effects the phantasmatic distinction between the hit and its consequences. Thus as viewers, we verita- bly enact the allegory of military triumph: we retain our visual dis- tance and our bodily safety through the disembodied enactment of the kill that produces no blood and in which we retain our radical impermeability.
¶
(1992: 11)
¶
Butler takes this further: the
smart bomb renders distant television audiences ‘absolutely proximate, absolutely essential, and absolutely distant’ in a way that protects the viewer while securing ‘a fantasy of
transcendence, of a disembodied instrument of destruction’, protracted and filtered through

distance and censored by the fact that the ‘aerial view never comes close to seeing the effects of its destruction’, for as the bomb comes tantalizingly closer to its target ‘the screen
conveniently destroys itself’ (1992: 11). As Gregory shows, today’s processes of aerial targeting
co-involve other actors, publics and objects in more complex relationships that do not simply escape the consequences of violence or remain safely ensconced in the arm- chairs of spectator warfare.
¶
Appearing to empty the target’s subject of all of its content, rational, scientific and legal expertise are meant to take over and enact what artist Wafa Bilal describes as the sharp edge of the comfort^conflict divide (on this see Ingram, 2010) in his work Shoot an
Iraqi. In this special section we see this view questioned. For instance, Ben Anderson’s article on coun- terinsurgency and PSYOPS explores the US targeting of a ‘pre-insurgent’ population through airdropped leaflets, propaganda bombs and broadcasts. Targeting here is about immersion in the lives of the population. It is target- ing of the potential to become dangerous
by touching the passions, interests and environment of the population.
¶
This military theatre, in earlier views, might appear comfortable and calm in relation to the messy and passionate world that it punishes. One might suggest that refining the object of the target’s sights through the pro- cessual stages described in the articles in this special section also filters out the ethical decisions and orientations such an encounter would bring if it were a face-to-face encounter
(think of the smiling faces on the postcard [Figure 1] in Anderson’s article). Indeed, the critique of the aerial target is the distance such an abstraction reinforces from the life it puts at threat.
Without the fidelity of a Levinasian encounter with the Other’s face, any possibility of ethical recognition will be gone. Thus, aerial targeting seems to work precisely because it subjects its users to a distanced and rational bureaucratic orientation, so that the effects of their actions can never be fully realized. However, the assumption that passion must somehow lie out- side
of these apparatuses is no doubt problematic, as is the comfort^conflict disjuncture. The sense in which the coldness of the target and targeting holds the processes of waging war from the skies together should be con- trasted with the affects that might threaten to undo this and, furthermore, the increasing likelihood that the drone operators will see the horrors that result from their actions. Gregory shows how these issues are particularly important to the formation of realism and comradeship, as drone operators recognize or become familiar with the faces of their compatriots captured by the drone’s camera.
¶
Paul K. Saint-Amour’s article crucially shows that the visual practices involved here are less ordered and not perfectly sequential. Looking to the origins of aerial photography he shows how the processes involved in early targeting depended on pastiche, the composing of mosaics of multiple per- spectives that are blended and full of errors. To what extent, then, might a targeting system be marked not by smooth consensus but the discord of synaesthetic and contrasting imagery, information and evidence?
Even while Bishop (2009) has noted how the goal of targeting systems has ‘been control and containment from a distance’ and precisely ‘not dissemination, dispersal, autonomy and resistance’, we should not assume that these char- acteristics have escaped or been removed
from the chain. Indeed, they may be endemic to the processes themselves as we learn more of the stress, strains and fatigue of those doing the targeting and the flying, those wit- nessing the effects of a missile launched in high definition resolution. The affects that make the targeting processes uncomfortable may also lie at the heart of the indeterminate, aleatory and
‘turbulent’ (sometimes literally) dynamics that animate and befuddle contemporary air power, issues both Ryan Bishop and Paul K. Saint Amour explore in their articles.

This technologized war-at-a-distance normalizes violence in the context of the everyday lives of warfighters and warplanners. Drone warfare reduces the world to a picture whose being is just being targeted by the US.
Pugliese 11
(Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
The ensconcing of war operations, and the everyday deployment of lethal drone attacks,
within US cities such as Langley, Virginia gestures to a mutation in the conduct of war. The manner in which drone operators can
¶
exterminate human targets during their assigned combat sessions , via their ensemble of tele-mediating technologies and military hardware, and then go home to take the kids to soccer or have a drink at their local bar, works to normalise
war as something that is effectively part of the civic continuum of everyday life practices. This continuum of practices is facilitated by the euphemisms of war: the screen media that display the atornisation and incineration of bodies by drone missiles are called by the military 'Kill TV'," and the material violence inflicted on human targets becomes merely 'kinetic activity'," as though killing were just another form of gym exercise. The televisual and video game dimensions of these killing operations help facilitate the transition from exterminatory
combat operations to civic sites and practices. In the words of an air force colonel of a Predator drone
¶
squadron: 'It teaches you how to compartmentalise it [the reality of war].'" The everyday returns to civic locations of 'home' after a series of technologically mediated killings in another country can, in fact, be seen to be inscribed by the forces of technological dis/location that drive the
¶
operations of drones: 'The more powerful and violent the technological expropriation, the delocalization,' Derrida notes, 'the more powerful, naturally, the recourse to the at-home, the return towards home.'o The violent deterritoralisation, delocalisation and dissociation experienced in the drone Ground Control Stations provokes the reaction: 'I want to be at home, I want finally to be at home, with my own, close to my friends and family.' Drone operators have remarked on how the trip home from their Ground Control Stations enables
them to transition from battle field to civic mode, with the hour's drive back to their home giving them 'that whole amount of time to leave it behind. They get in their bus or car and go into a zone - they say, "For the next hour I'm decompressing, I'm getting re-engaged into what's it's like to be a civilian"."' This return to a safe home is, of course, the privilege and prerogative
of the drone-enabled resident-soldier of the Global North. In the target countries of the Global
South - Afghanistan or Pakistan - the at-home is open to the anomic violence of drones and, as I discuss below, the ever-present risk of obliteration of home, friends and family.
¶
Philip Alston and Hina Shamsi have drawn critical attention to what they term:
¶
the 'PlayStation mentality' that surrounds drone killings. Young military personnel raised on a diet of video games now
kill real people remotely using joysticks. Far removed from the human consequences of their actions, how will this generation of fighters value the right to life? How will commanders and policymakers keep themselves immune from the deceptively antiseptic nature of drone killings?
Will the standards for intelligence-gathering to justify a killing slip? Will the number of acceptable 'collateral' civilian deaths increase?"
¶
The bracketing off that is enabled by the
parenthetical logic that governs these screen technologies can be appositely situated within
Heideggerian terms. 'The fundamental event of the modern age,' writes Martin Heidegger, 'is
the conquest of the world as picture.'4 Underscoring this epistemic shift to viewing the world as picture has been the dominance of screen technologies in mediating virtually everything that can be seen in terms of 'world'. The parenthetical bracketing off of the world that I have been
examining can effectively be understood as a form of 'enframing' the world. In his discussion

of the term, Heidegger posits the process of enframing as a positive aspect of our relation to technology, as in this understanding technology works to reveal the truth of the 'real'. I want to resignify this Heideggerian term in order to mark the manner in which screen technologies operate literally to bracket off the 'real' and to transmute it into object. Conjoining this resignified understanding of enframing to Heidegger's meditation on the 'conquest of the world as picture' effectively brings into focus the levels of epistemic and physical violence
enabled by the militarised use of tele-technologies.
¶
In his theorisation of the epistemic shift to viewing the world as picture, Heidegger notes that the process of representation is crucial to the construction of the world as picture. What is particularly relevant to my analysis of the parenthetical logic of screen technologies and the lethality of drones is the manner in which
Heidegger's analysis of the relation between representation and the world as picture
underscores the role of objectifying violence: 'Representing is ... a laying hold and grasping of what it is that is being viewed; in this scopic process, Heidegger emphasizes. 'assault rules'.45
The 'assault' on what is being viewed is legitimated by its transmutation into 'object':
'Representing is making-stand-over-against, an objectifying that goes forward and masters ...
That which is ... has the character of an object.'4 6 This process of objectification of the 'real' is undergirded by the play of science and technology: 'Science sets upon the real. It orders it into place to the end that at any given time the real will exhibit itself as an interacting network."' The
'real' in the context of drone technologies is precisely that which 'exhibits' itself through the tele-techno mediations of an 'interacting network' constituted by pilots/sensor operators, satellite links and drones. The enframing of the world as picture through 'entrapping
representation' ensures the 'real becomes secured in its objectness'."
¶
Everything in this
Heideggerian exposition can be clearly transposed to illuminate the operations of drone screen technologies in order to entrap and reduce the surveilled human figure into object that can be effectively and
¶
antiseptically liquidated from a distance. The antiseptic vision of war that is produced by the parenthetical logic of the use of drone technologies is enhanced further by
the clinical language deployed by the drone operators in the identification of suspect targets.
The Predator drone's infrared camera, with its digitally enhanced zoom, enables the sensor operators to detect the heat signature of a human body from significant distances (from an altitude of up to 3 kilometres). The term 'heat signature' works to reduce the targeted human body to an anonymous heat-emitting entity that merely radiates signs of life. This clinical process of reducing human subjects to purely biological categories of radiant life is further elaborated by the US military's use of the term 'pattern of life':
¶
The CIA received secret permission to attack a wide range of targets, including suspected militants whose names are not known, as part of a dramatic expansion of its campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan's border region. The expanded authority ... permits the agency to rely on what officials describe as
'pattern of life' analysis, using evidence collected by surveillance cameras or unmanned aircraft.
The information was used to target suspected militants, even when their full identities were not known.... Previously the CIA was restricted in most cases to killing only individuals whose names were on an approved list ... some analysts said permitting the CIA to kill people where names were unknown created a serious risk of killing innocent people."
This means that there is no value to life in the status quo—technological distancing reduces life to nothing more than something to be targeted and destroyed by militaristic impulses.
Shaw, Graaham, and Majed ’12 . Shaw, Ian Graham, and Akhter, Majed. "The Unbearable
Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan." Antipode 44.4 (September 2012).

Representation, a social practice and strategy through which meanings are constituted and
communicated, is unavoidable when dealing with militarism and military activities.
Armed
Forces, and defence institutions, take great care in producing and promoting
¶ specific portrayals of themselves and their activities in order to legitimize and justify their¶ activities
in places, spaces, environments and landscapes (Woodward 2005:729).
In this section, we argue that the ramping up of drone deployments is justified
¶
by a distinctive targeting logic. As
Paul Virrilo (1989) has long argued, there is never war without representation, which is to say, the deadly materiality of war is always coiled within a discursive system (see also Shaw 2010).
In this sense, the drone performs a well-rehearsed imaginative geography (Bialasiewicz et al
2007;
¶
Gregory 2004) that is underwritten by targeted kills across neat isometric grids and
¶ algorithmic calculations (Amoore 2009), far removed from the brutal Real (Jones
¶ and Clarke
2006), and in a peculiar relation with the visceral imagery of previous wars (Tuathail 2003). The official “definition” of a targeted kill is not agreed upon
¶ under international law. Yet as a recent
UN report on targeted killing reveals, it can
¶ be thought of as follows:
¶
A targeted killing is the
intentional, premeditated and deliberate use of lethal force,
¶
by States or their agents acting
under colour of law, or by an organized armed group
¶ in armed conflict, against a specific individual who is not in the physical custody of
¶ the perpetrator. In recent years, a few States
have adopted policies, either openly or
¶ implicitly, of using targeted killings, including in the territories of other States. Such
¶ policies have been justified both as a legitimate response to
“terrorist” threats and as a necessary response to the challenges of “asymmetric warfare”. In
the legitimate struggle against terrorism, too many criminal acts have been re-characterized so as to justify addressing them within the framework of the law of armed conflict. New technologies, and especially unarmed combat aerial vehicles or “drones”, have been added into
this mix, by making it easier to kill targets, with fewer risks to the targeting State (Alston
¶
2010:3).
¶
The means and methods of killing vary, and include sniper fire, shooting at close
¶ range, missiles from helicopters, gunships, drones, the use of car bombs, and poison
¶
(Alston
2010:4)
¶
The drone is heralded by the US military as the apex of a targeting logic— accurate,
efficient, and deadly. This logic traces a distinct genesis. In 1938 Martin
¶
Heidegger wrote of
the “age of the world picture”, in a classic essay on the split between subject and object. For him, today’s world is conceived, grasped, and conquered as a picture—and what it means “to
be” is for the first time defined as the objectiveness of representing. In this modern age of humanism, a subjective¶ “worldview” arises for the first time—humans appear as Cartesian
subjects and the¶ world as a calculated picture, engineered by science and technology. Ray
Chow
¶
(2006) extends this metaphysical analysis to contend that the world has further
¶ been
produced as a “target”. In the wake of the atomic event of Hiroshima, the entire globe is rendered as a grid of targets to be destroyed as soon as it can be made visible.
The distance between the person who kills with drone technology and the person killed is not merely the geographical space between them. Rather, the technological dimension of drone warfare inserts an ontological and moral distance between the drone and the drone pilot.
Pugliese 11
(Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
In her profound meditation on political economies of violence, Hannah Arendt writes that
extreme forms of violence are 'never possible without instruments'." 'Violence,' Arendt notes,
'is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification

through the end it pursues."' In other words, violence, in its most murderous and instrumentalised forms, cannot be exercised without technology. The Predator drone exemplifies the instrumentalisation of violence and the law of war through a complex process
of parenthetical disassociation. This process is predicated on suspending lines of causal
connection between an ensemble of technologies and their human agents. It effectively suspends, circumscribes and holds parenthetically in abeyance the relation between
executioner and victim, cause and effect. Jeff Macgregor, in his meditation on the transmutation of life into an instrumentalised video game, writes: 'erase the pain given and taken, reduce the grunt and the struggle to the push of a button ... and the game, the war, is no more than a fast-twitch exercise - a battle fought without personal cost. It is cause without
effect, a victory only for technology and opposable thumbs'.22
¶
In the first instance, the
Predator drones, in the execution of their targets, can be said to be blind-seeing technologies
of death: as inanimate objects, they cannot 'see' what they execute; rather, they execute what must be seen for them by their sensor operators. A rift opens up in this schema between the blind executor and the human-seeing agent that is inscribed with both spatial and temporal
dimensions. This causal disconnect between the doer and deed is, in fact, something on which
Friedrich Nietzsche meditated in the context of his critical analysis of what he termed the
'seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a
"subject"'.. Nietzsche draws attention to the network of discursive relations - juridical, legislative and philosophical - that are
¶
constitutive in the creation of what Foucault terms the
'subject effect' and its relation to deeds, actions and events:
¶
there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a function added to the deed - the deed is
everything. The popular mind in fact doubles the deed; when it sees the lightning flash, it is the deed of a deed; it posits the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect.
Scientists do no better when they say 'force moves,' 'force causes,' and the like - all its coolness, its freedom from emotion notwithstanding, our entire science still lies under the misleading influence of language and has not disposed of that little changeling, the 'subject.'
¶
The parenthetical logic of drone killings, and its structural disassociation between the doer and the deed, is perfectly captured in this Nietzschean critique: the doer, in this scenario, is functionally coextensive with the deed and only becomes separated by the 'seduction of language' and its subject-predicate structure. The 'doubling' of the deed and the production of the doer/deed
effect are what enable the conceptual partitioning of the technology from the human subject.
Couched in Nietzschean terms, one can say that the drone does the killing and that the sensor operator who presses the 'fire' button is merely a type of afterthought that can only be
retrospectively constituted as separate from the deed. As I will argue, following Nietzsche's problematisation of the dualistic doer-deed formula, the viewing of the human subject/technology nexus in prosthetic terms effectively works to interrogate the parenthetical logic that inscribes the conceptual apparatus of drone technologies.
Technological distance reduces targets to numbers and mere biological life.
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
The military term 'pattern of life' is inscribed with two intertwined systems of scientific conceptuality: algorithmic and biological. The human subject detected by drone's surveillance
cameras is, in the first scientific schema, transmuted algorithmically into a patterned sequence
of numerals: the digital code of ones and zeros."o Converted into digital data coded as a

'pattern of life', the targeted human subject is reduced to an anonymous simulacrum that flickers across the screen and that can effectively be liquidated into a 'pattern of death' with
the swivel of a joystick. Viewed through the scientific gaze of clinical biology, 'pattern of life' connects the drone's scanning technologies to the discourse of an instrumentalist science, its
constitutive gaze of objectifying detachment and its production of exterminatory violence.
Patterns of life are what are discovered and analysed in the Petri dish of the laboratory. In this way, the targeted human subjects of Afghanistan and Pakistan are represented as types of bacteria and other low- life organisms that be exterminated with absolute impunity. The CIA's
Counter-terrorism Centre's chief has boasted that, thanks to its drone- automated execution
program: 'We are killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them.' Analogically, the human subjects targeted as suspect yet anonymous 'patterns of life' by the drones
become equivalent to forms of pathogenic life. The operators of the drones' exterminatory attacks must, in effect, be seen to conduct a type of scientific ethnic cleansing of pathogenic 'life forms'. In the words of one US military officer: 'Our major role is to sanitize the battlefield."' As
Iwill presently discuss, inscribing this clinical discourse on drones is the Derridean figure of immunisation against foreign and pathogenic bodies. As mere patterns of pathogenic life, these targeted human subjects effectively are reduced to what Giorgio Agamben would term 'a kind of absolute biopolitical substance' that can killed with no concern about the possibility ofjuridical accountability: they are 'bare life' that can be killed with absolute impunity." Anonymous
'patterns of life' signify in contradistinction to legally named persons; they exemplify the
'ontological hygiene' legislated by US government policy in order to secure the reproduction of the 'principle of scarcity with respect to agency and personhood'."
¶
Situated in this Agambenian
context of the extermination of human life with absolute impunity, the Predator drones must be seen as instantiating mobile 'zones of exception': wherever the drones operate, they have
the capacity to suspend the rule of law and juridical accountability even as, paradoxically, the
US Department of State, as discussed above, argues that these attacks are conducted under formal laws of war. 'One of the paradoxes of the state of exception,' writes Agamben, 'lies in the fact that in the state of exception it is impossible to distinguish transgression of the law from
the execution of law.' In his theorisation of the state of exception, Agamben maps a space within which the agentic subject of law 'neither executes nor transgresses law, but inexecutes it'." 'Every fiction of a nexus between violence and law disappears here: there is nothing but a zone of anomie, in which violence without any juridical form acts.' Agamben's 'zone of anomie' perfectly captures the zone of violence that designates the anonymous 'patterns of life' that can be liquidated by drones with absolute impunity. I want to reaccentuate Agamben's concept of the inexecution of law by staging a parenthetical qualification. By placing a parenthetical bracket over the prefix 'in', in the term '(in)execution,' I want to argue that there is operative in these lethal drone attacks at once an execution of US Department of State law and an inexecution of it through the generation of mobile states of exception that articulate extrajudicial spaces beyond the redress of law. Even as these drone attacks execute US law (of war), they violate with impunity both international law and the sovereignty of nations such as Afghanistan and
Pakistan.

This technostrategic distancing also erases any possible ethical dimension to warfighting—the ontological dimension of cyborg warfare instrumentalizes bodies such that they are nothing more than possible operands of violence.
Pugliese 11
(Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
This seemingly indivisible prosthetic relation between drones and their human operators
evidences, in effect, the emergence of a new type of war that could be termed 'cyborg war'.
Drawing on Donna Haraway's celebratory trope of resistance and overturning of oppressive and destructive regimes and epistemologies of power, I re-code the term in order to evidence its violent assimilation and co-option by the very phallogocentric, militaristic and instrumentalist authorities it was designed to contest:
¶
To recapitulate certain dualisms have been persistent in
Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of
women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals- in short, domination of all constituted others ... Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature ...
High- tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and
who ismade in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices."
¶
In the drone-human relation, it is not
clear 'who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine'. The graft of the prosthetic blurs this boundary. Moreover, in the context of the digitised codes that interlink humans and drones in their operational schema: 'It isnot clear what is mind and what
is body in machines that resolve into coding practices.' The prosthetics of this new law of war, and its ensemble of human agents grafted to their drone technologies via screens, joysticks and satellite links, perfectly embodies the figure of the cyborg as the abject other to Haraway's
utopian trope. In keeping with the cyborg logic of the prosthetic, there is no 'proper' body in contradistinction to the machine; rather, couched in Derridean terms, 'this prosthetic structure is not something we add to the "proper" body but that it is already our experience of what is most proper to us, it is already the possibility of the prosthetic ... thus technology or techn is already originally in place in our own body, in what is most proper to us'. 68
¶
This profound
Derridean meditation on the infrastructural dimensions of the prosthetic effectively enables the critical interrogation of the categorical separation of the drone from its human agent. Belying its negative and reductive nomenclature, the drone cannot be reduced to a mindless machine of purely robotic acts; rather, the drone-as-prosthetic articulates a 'prosthetics of origin',"9 to use
Derrida's titular term, that conjoins it inseparably, through grafting, to its embodied agents of cognition, reflection and intent. Cyborg war, in this schema, instrumentalises bodies into lethal machines via a prosthetic structure that operates in tandem with a parenthetical logic of disassociation between the doer and deed: machine/human, doer/deed are at once tactically conjoined in the acts of surveillance, targeting and killing, and simultaneously disjoined from
the ethical consequences of these same acts. The interstice that opens up between this parenthetical and prosthetic relation must be seen as a critical fault line that compels examination. This fault line marks the radical asymmetries of power operative in the use of these drone killing technologies and their ethical ramifications.
¶
For the United States, the use of the drones is justified because it means that its soldiers are not placed in potentially fatal ground operations of war: no flesh and blood is lost, merely machines. This dualistic logic is, of
course, violently asymmetrical. For the targets of this drone war, it is flesh and blood that is shed, without the possibility of traditional combat counter- retaliation: drones kill silently, firing their missiles from a 2 mile distance. With nothing to lose but machines, the United States is

now in a position to wage war without the usual weighing up of the human cost. The US military, in fact, terms UCAVs as 'attritable': 'This means a commander can afford to lose one through attrition.'o Qualms have been expressed by military personnel such as this unnamed
Iraq combat veteran 'who helped design much of the military's doctrine for using unmanned drones': 'There's something important about putting your own sons and daughters at risk when you choose to wage war as a nation. We risk losing that flesh-and- blood investment if we go too far down this road."' The parenthetical logic of drone war brackets off the ethical questions concerning the waging of war while also suspending the flesh-and-blood risks entailed by
those fighting in the field. PW Singer terms these new warriors 'cubicle warriors', ensconced in cubicles outfitted with computers, joysticks and ergonomic furniture: For a new generation,
'going to war' doesn't mean shipping off to some dank foxhole in a foreign land to dodge bullets.
Instead, it is a daily commute in your Toyota Camry to sit behind a computer screen
¶
72 and drag a mouse.
¶
The cubicle warrior is a cyborg warrior prosthetically grafted, through satellite feeds, to his or her drone and yet effectively quarantined, through the parenthetical bracketing that is enabled by his or her cubicle location and
¶
screen technologies, from the
risks and violence of the battlefield.
¶
The fault line or rift that results from these two contradictory spatio- temporal schemas operating simultaneously is effectively captured by the jargon term for drone pilots flying planes over 7000 miles away from their location: 'remote split operation'." Remote split operation refers to the manner in which drone pilots, located at their
Ground Control Stations in the United States, are connected via satellite links to their flying charges
¶
thousands of miles away. I want to resignify this term so that it underscores the split or contradictory forces at work in the ensemble of figures and technologies that constitute drone operations. Remote split operations encapsulate the fault line that at once parenthetically brackets off the drone personnel from the locus of the battlefield while they are simultaneously prosthetically grafted to their drones via satellite links. The contradictory forces that inscribe drone technologies are not the product of accident; rather, they must be seen as having been
produced by the design demands of the US military. In its brief to the teams of designers employed to produce UCAVs, DARPA 'wanted "intelligent function allocation" to allow the UCAV to operate autonomously, while stressing the idea that the human controller would be expected to provide executive-level mission management to "remain in the decision process"'." In this schema, the drone is an entity that 'operates' autonomously, and thus independently of its operators, and simultaneously is instrumentally grafted to its human controller who will
continue to make key decisions regarding its operations. The 'autonomous' operations of
drones exemplify the conceptual shift from 'technofetishism to technoanimism' - which, as
Vivian Sobchack has argued, constitutes one of the key attributes of the prosthetic once it is personified so that it 'is seen to have a will of its own'."
The biggest internal link to all these distancing impacts is the way that technologized violence removes the emotional, affective element from the calculations of warplanning.
Grayson 12 (Kyle, Senior Lec. At Newcastle University in Critical Geopolitics and International
Politics, “Six Theses on Targeted Killing,” Political Studies Association, Vol 32,
< http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9256.2012.01434.x/abstract >)
¶
Space can be conceived as the four-dimensional environment (length, width, depth
¶
and time) in which ‘objects and events occur, and in which they have relative
¶
position and direction’
(Harrison and Dourish, 1996, p. 2; see also Simonsen, 1996).
¶
The majority of attention that has been placed on the spatial dimension of targeted¶ killing has focused on its territorial

positioning via cartographic practices that
¶
operate on a register of difference that delineates through the category of the nation¶ state. Locations of targeted killing are dutifully recorded and positioned within¶ these national boundaries and linked to broader geopolitical
narratives regarding¶ global counter-insurgency. Of particular interest has been the possibility for tar-
¶
geted killing to be enacted by RPAS pilots located in excess of 7,000 miles away
¶
from the immediate theatre of operation.
¶
Beyond standard territorial locations and the distortion of time and space in con-
¶
temporary counter-insurgency, Eyal Weizman (2007) draws our attention to the¶ forms of spatial management and sovereignty that are constitutive of
targeted¶ killing. Primarily, he demonstrates that in contemporary counter-insurgency it is
¶ important to denote how the practices of control have extended upwards into¶ the
stratosphere as a means of managing populations and their circulation on the¶ ground. This development reflects broader changes in military strategy over the
¶
twentieth century that equated air power with dominance over ground territory.
¶
But as Weizman (2007, p. 239) notes, this has created a reliance on air-based
¶
military technologies as a means of managing
‘problematic’ spaces and populations
¶
and the enactment of a policy that has been called
‘control without occupation’ by
¶
the Royal Air Force.
¶
As a result, counter-insurgency and insurgency war-fighting in places like Israel-¶ Palestine are ‘increasingly manifested by a creeping progression along a vertical¶ axis’ that involves ‘two spheres of extraterritorial
sovereignty’ (Weizman, 2007,
¶
pp. 253, 258). Practices like targeted killing that attempt to provide ‘control without¶ occupation’ are predicated on having both unimpeded access and control of air-¶ space as well as possessing the technology to operate within this theatre of
opera-¶ tion. In response, one can see the use of ‘subterranean warfare’ by insurgency
¶ movements – literally going under the ground to circumvent aerial interference – a
¶
practice that gained currency during the Vietnam War as a response to these
¶
counter-insurgency measures (Weizman, 2007, pp. 253–258).
¶
In addition, targeted killing alters and intensifies
forms of spatial management¶ through its ability to redefine everyday places, particularly those in which indi-
¶
viduals seek sanctuary from political, economic and social pressures. In geography,
¶
place refers to those spaces that are ‘invested with understandings of behavioural
¶ appropriateness, cultural expectations, and so forth [in which] we act’ and which
¶
we imbue with value (Harrison and Dourish, 1996, p. 3). Insurgency – in part –
¶
gains its political and affective impacts by initiating violence within public places¶ that have been declared secure
by an entity that claims sovereign power – both legally and symbolically – over such places. In contrast, targeted killing produces¶ political and affective impacts by transforming private
sanctuary places like the¶ home into a public theatre of counter-insurgency warfare.
Moreover, as a spatial
¶
incursion from afar that cannot be easily countered or avenged, it places the
¶
interface of violence much closer to places of sanctuary for the ‘enemy’. Targeted¶ killing
as a practice can thus defile sanctified places. The symbolic power comes not
¶
just from the ability to defile but also from the a-temporal character of defiled space
¶
– as Feldman (1991, p.
67) notes, ‘defiled space never goes away’. Thus, as a tactic,
¶
targeted killing demonstrates how counter-insurgency also ‘seeks to violate the
¶
spatial constructs that function as armatures of the victim’s social order’ (Feldman,
¶
1991, p. 75).

Technostrategic discourse manifests itself in the necropolitics of dividing the populations who receive the sovereign right to life and death, and those who don’t. In the Feb. 2010 Uruzgan drone strike, this is demonstrated by the discourse that removes what is foreign, intangible and violent and, instead, associates it with the familiar question of masculinity and femininity. Here, the drone operators feminize and thus are able to target their victims.
Allinson 12.
(Jamie, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Westminster,
International Relations PhD, University of Edinburgh, “Necropolitics of the Cyborg Empire:
Rethinking the Drone War,” Millennium Conference, http://millenniumjournal.files.wordpress
. com/2012/10/allinsonmillenium2012necropoliticscyborg-empire.docx)
The particular interlude prompted by the demand for weapons to be seen at 5:18 leads to a
highly revealing exchange between the Predator team and the screeners, which is worth quoting at length:
¶
At 0529D the Predator pilot states to the crew ‘does it look like he is ho'n something across his chest. It's what they've been doing here lately, they wrap their
*expletive* in their man dresses so you can't PID it.’ Then on the radio to [redacted] he says
"looks like the dismounted pax on the hilux pickup on the east side is carrying something, but we cannot PID what it is at this time but he is carrying something’. After the Predator crew prompted the twice in mIRC, the screeners call out a possible weapon and then ask the crew to go white hot to get a better look. The response from the sensor operator is ‘white hot is not going to give us anything better, that truck would make a beautiful target’. The Predator pilot then at 0534D made this radio call "All players, all Players from [redacted] from our DGS, the
MAM that just mounted the back of the hilux had a possible weapon, read back possible rifle.'
During their post strike review, the screeners determined that this was not a weapon. At 0624D the screeners called out a weapon, this the only time that the Screeners called out a weapon without being prompted by the Predator crew. At 0655D, the Predator pilot called [redacted] and told him that the Screeners called out two weapons. The Screeners had not made any call outs of weapons. At 0741 the Predator pilot calls [redacted] and says ‘there's about 6 guys riding in the back of the highlux, so they don't have a lot of room. Potentially could carry a personal weapon on themselves.’
¶
A great deal is to be understood about the necropolitical logic at work in the occupation of Afghanistan through this passage. As an indicator of the role of
Orientalist fantasy in the tendency of Western militaries to ‘effeminise the men of the
[occupied] population through both symbolic and practical emasculation’ the Predator pilot’s characterization of the Afghan man’s clothing is quite stark: ‘their mandresses’. Nor does this phrase refer solely to the Predator pilot’s notion of what men ought to wear (presumably trousers), and the implied denigration of those whose clothing does not meet this norm. It also reveals the drawing of a caesura, a mental and political cordon around those whose actions inherently render them part of the population it is acceptable to put to death.
¶
We can consider this act of delineation at the basic level of pronouns. The Predator pilot describes
how ‘what they’ve [my emphasis] been doing round here lately’ is to ‘wrap their *expletive* in
their man dresses so you can't PID it’. Before this he asks for confirmation that the man on the screen does indeed look like he is holding something across his chest. Now, it may be objected that ‘they’ is simply a pronoun here ⎯ which it is, but this usage is in no sense simple. The pilot could have said ‘that’s what the Taliban have been doing round here lately’, or ‘the enemy’ or
‘the insurgents’ or a similar noun. By using ‘they’ the pilot shows that he already considers the man he is looking at to be one of ‘them’, and this ‘they’ have very definite characteristics,
culled from the imaginary of what Patrick Porter calls ‘military orientalism’. ‘They’ are effete,

exotic, and treacherous in transgression of the gender boundaries by, for example, their wearing ‘mandresses’. Nor is the mandress, however comfortable or stylish it may sound by comparison to US military uniform, a simple piece of clothing. It is itself weaponized, a tool of the MAM’s underhand concealment of the arms he is assumed to bear, and which the action of carrying something across the chest inadvertently reveals.
¶
The unspoken frustration behind the Predator pilot’s ascription of a motive to the Afghan man’s concealment of a (nonexistent) weapon is doubly instructive. Why do MAMs hold things across their chests and inside their clothes? They do so ‘so you can’t PID it.’ This implies that the pilot believes that the Taliban are manipulating US rules of engagement to the degree that they know what constitutes a positive identification of a weapon for a drone pilot and that they are deliberately preventing this identification, and therefore hampering the use of lethal force against them. The pilot therefore inverts the rules of engagement by evoking the tactical wrapping-up of objects in the ‘mandress’: an Afghan male without a visible weapon thereby becomes grounds for threat.
Therefore, we affirm the affective dimension of drone technology.
Bringing the affective dimension back into drone warfare displaces the logic of efficiency which erases the concrete experience of warfare and enables the violent distancing which causes the worst atrocities in modern technologized war.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and Geo-
Informatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
The critical project that aims to bring bodies and emotions back in GT practices entails several
important elements. As feminist GT practitioners, we can appropriate the power of GT, contest the dominant uses of these technologies, and reconfigure the dominant visual practices to counter their objectifying vision. We can experiment with new geospatial practices that better articulate the complex realities of gendered, classed, raced, and sexualized spaces and experiences of individuals. These new practices should help us understand emotions in terms of their ‘‘socio-spatial mediation and articulation rather than as
entirely interiorized subjective mental states’’ (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 2005, 3). While being attentive to how emotions, subjectivities, and spaces are mutually constitutive in particular places and at particular times, these new practices should also take into account the
existence of different kinds of bodies (e.g., pregnant, disabled, old, mutilated, dead) and their
socially encoded meanings in relation to specific spatial, temporal, and cultural contexts (Rose
1993; Laws 1997; Domosh and Seager 2001; Longhurst 2001). In the arena of public policy, feminist GT practitioners have a role in questioning decisions that privilege detached
rationality and the ‘‘logic of efficiency’’ over emotions (Anderson and Smith 2001, 8). As feminist GT practitioners we deeply care about the subject(s) of our research and are
‘‘emotionally committed to our work,’’ and our geospatial practices should be infused with a
sense of ‘‘emotional involvement with people and places’’ (Bondi, Davidson and Smith, 2005,
2). We can develop GT practices that entail this emotional involvement and help express mean- ings, memories, feelings, and emotions for our subjects. We can draw on the emotional power of moving images and the techniques in narrative cinema to create GIS movies or

visualizations that tell stories about the lives of marginalized people, highlight social injustice,
and—we hope—effect social change (Aitken 1991; Aitken and Craine 2006). In the three sections that follow, I discuss several GT projects to illustrate the specific ways in which bodies and emotions can be brought to bear on geospatial practices. Drawing from my recent experimentations and those by feminist scholars in cultural studies and media art, I explore how these projects contest the dominant meanings and visual prac- tices of GT. As these projects are more expres- sive than representational or analytical, taking the form of creative
visual or artistic work (e.g., GPS-assisted travelogues and 3D GIS video), they are in a certain sense ‘‘affective GT per- formances’’ that seek to transform GT into affective practices by incorporating the subject- ivities and emotions of the practitioner and research participants as an integral element of the project. Through the use of GT as a medium of self-expression and a means of re- sistance, and to articulate emotional geogra- phies and convey emotionally provocative messages, these nonrepresentational practices hint at ways of using GT that transcend the conventional duality between subject and ob- ject, design and use, author and
reader, and representation and practice (Del Casino and Hanna 2006).
The critique of technostrategic thought is a prerequisite to policymaking.
Current technocratic thought inherently produces detached knowledge, which views humans as dots on a map. Their impacts of violence are inevitable in a world where humans are dehumanized.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and Geo-
Informatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
Geospatial technologies are designed, created, and used by humans, and a large proportion of their application is for understanding or solving problems of individuals and social groups.
Bod- ies, however, are often absent or rendered irrelevant in contemporary practices of GT.
This ‘‘omission of the body’’ occurs in two different but related senses ( Johnson 1990, 18).
First, although bodies are involved in the development and use of GT, there is little room in these technologies to allow for any role of the practitioner’s subjectivities, emotions, feelings, passion, values, and ethics. Second, despite the fact that a large number of bodies are affected
by the application of GT (e.g., people profiled by geodemographic application, and civilians who were annihilated as ‘‘collateral damage’’ by GPS-guided smart bombs that missed their
tar- gets), bodies are often treated merely as things, as dots on maps, or even as if they do not exist (Gregory 2004; Hyndman 2005). The dominant disembodied practices of GT, however, are contestable as they are largely the result of a particular understanding of science and
objectivity (Kwan 2002a). This historically specific and socially constructed notion of science, as Donna Haraway (1991) argues, is predicated on the positionality of a disembodied master subject with transcendent vision. With such disembodied and infinite vision, the knower is capable of achieving a detached view into a separate, completely knowable world. The kind of knowledge produced with such disem- bodied positionality denies the partiality of the knower, erases subjectivities, and ignores the power relations involved in all forms of
knowledge production (Foucault 1977). Haraway (1991, 189) calls this decorporealized vision
‘‘the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere.’’ Closely associated with this view of science is a gendered notion of knowledge production and academic scholarship that privileges
rational thought over ‘‘irrational’’ emotionality (Bennett 2004). This ‘‘marginalization of

emotion,’’ as Anderson and Smith (2001, 7) put it, ‘‘has been part of a gender politics of research in which detachment, objectivity and rationality have been valued, and implicitly masculinized, while engagement, subjectivity, passion and desire have been devalued, and
frequently feminized.’’ Geography in particular has tended to ‘‘deny, avoid, suppress or downplay its emotional en- tanglements’’ (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 2005, 1). Yet, to paraphrase Anderson and Smith, there are times and places where lives are explicitly lived through pain, love, hate, anger, hope, fear, and passion. If the world is imbued with complex emotional geographies, GT practices are more relevant to real lives if they allow us to take the spatial, temporal, and social effects of feelings into account. To neglect how our research and social life are mediated by feelings and emotions is to exclude a key set of relations through
which lives are lived, societies made, and knowledge produced (Anderson and Smith 2001).

Critical Hostilities 1ac
United States military forces have been occupying Afghanistan for 12 years.
RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan has provided recent accounts of the violence and oppression that continue and have worsened.
[The next two quotes are from Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan
(RAWA), July 3rd, 2013 (Organization established in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1977 as an independent political/social organization of Afghan women fighting for human rights and for social justice in Afghanistan “Afghan women burn in the fire of the oppression of the occupiers and fundamentalists” http://www.rawa.org/rawa/2013/03/07/rawa-statement-on-iwd-2013english.html)
“The persistence of the current instability and the West's support of the ‘Northern Alliance’ terrorists in
Afghanistan proves that the US and her [its] allies pay no attention to human rights and women rights, but seek only their political and economical interests. Today, even the most optimistic people in our country, confess that Afghan women have not been liberated, and have become a commodity for the
Western propaganda. Thanks to the presence of the US, women are gang-raped by warlords, are flogged in many Taliban-controlled areas, are preys of acid attacks, or are mercilessly stoned to death”
Even though our occupation has been justified under the illusion of saving women, the legal situation has not provided assistance to women .
“ In this country, laws are just pieces of paper that aid only in deceiving people, and are never practically applied … When criminal husbands, fathers, or brothers kill women under different contexts, they are never punished. In many cases, women are convicted by the judicial bodies and thrown into jails for the crime of ‘running away from home’, where they are further raped by the jail keepers. In such a hostile situation, most women find self-immolation the only solution to free them from a slow torturous death.
The suicide rates among our women has risen in an unprecedented manner”
The prevailing western representations of Afghanistan justify a flawed ideology that American Forces are here to save the brown Other from chaos. This practice of otherization ensures epistemic violence.
Crowe 2007 (Lori, Grad Student in Pol. Sci. – York U., “The “Fuzzy Dream”: Discourse,
Historical myths, and Militarized (in)Security Interrogating dangerous myths of Afghanistan and the ‘West’”, http://archive.sgir.eu/uploads/Crowe-loricrowe.pdf)
In his re-theorization of foreign policy, Campbell exposes the essential role binaries play in the processes implicated in state identity formation: It emphasizes the exclusionary practices, the discourses of danger, the representations of fear, and the enumeration of threats, and downplays the role of affirmative discourses such as claims to shared ethnicity, nationality, political ideals, religious beliefs, or other commonalities.76 Looking specifically at the relationship between the US and Afghanistan
, the US has defined its own identity (as good, modern, normal, etc.) in relation to its difference from the
Afghan ‘Other’, cultivating its demonization on the basis of perceived danger and moral

valuations (superior/inferior) that are spatially constructed.
Claims that the West is constructing a peaceful, democratic, and liberal nation (values claimed to be at the core of “our civilization, freedom, democracy and ways of life”) are motivated by the need to transform “their barbarism, inhumanity, low morality and style of life”.77 Eisenstein explains that
‘Others’ are constructed or fabricated in order to deal with the fear of not-knowing:
“Creating the savage, or slave, or woman, or Arab allows made-up certainty rather than honest complex variability and unknowability.”78 Unfortunately, this is not a novel phenomenon unique to the contemporary situation in Afghanistan: articulations of security that rely on definitions of
‘otherness’ as threats to security, argues Campbell, replicates the logic of Christendom’s
‘evangelism of fear’
. Obstructions to security/order/God become defined as irrational, abnormal, mad, etc. in need of rationalization, normalizations, punishment, moralization, etc.: “The state project of security replicates the church project of salvation”.79 As is commonly known, under Christendom it was such ‘discourses of danger’ that were instrumental in establishing its own authority and disciplining its followers. Similarly, by relying on discourses of danger to define who “we” are, who “we” are not, and who “they” are that we must fear, the state constructs enemies who’s elimination/domination is necessary to preserve the states own identity (and security): “All powers are geared against a single “alien.” And all the rationalizations are raging against the advent of “Evil.”80 Thus,
the “war on terror”, or
Afghanistan, or Iraq, becomes, in the words of Baudrillard, an endless war of `1prevention to
“exorcise” “evil”; an ablation of a non-existent enemy masquerading as the leitmotiv for
universal safety.
81 These elements of oppositional binaries is closely related to the second element: contemporary discourse has developed from and further perpetuates a particular ideology that emanates from a neo-liberal capitalist and imperial agenda that is founded upon neo-colonialist attitudes and assumptions. “The US campaign to ‘fight terrorism’, initiated after September 11th” explains Nahla Abdo “has crystallized all the ideological underpinnings of colonial and imperial policies towards the constructed ‘other’.”82 This emerges in the “heroism” myth mentioned above; for example, Debrix explains how narratives around humanitarianism serve an ideological purpose in that it “contributes to the reinforcement of neoliberal policies in ‘pathological’ regions of the international landscape.83 It also emerges in the militarization myth, insofar as neoliberal globalisation relies on the institutionalization of neo-colonialism and the commodification and (re)colonization of labor via militarized strategies of imperial politics. That is, as Agathangelou and Ling point out, “Neoliberal economics enables globalized militarization”.84 Embedded in this normalization of neo-colonial frames are the elements of linearity and thus assumed rationality of reasoning in the West. As Canada stepped up its role in direct combat operations (which included an increase of combat troops, fighter jets, and tanks with long-range firing capacities85), Stephen Harper appealed to troop morale on the ground in Afghanistan, stating: “Canada and the international community are determined to take a failed state and create a "democratic, prosperous and modern country."86 (my italics) Proposed solutions to the conflict(s) in
Afghanistan have been framed and justified not only as ‘saving backwards Afghanistan’ but also as generously bringing it into the modern, capitalist, neoliberal age. Moreover, this element represents an continuity of colonial power, presenting the one correct truth or resolution, emanating from the ‘objective gaze’ of the ‘problem-solving’ Western world.
Representations of Afghanistan present Western voices as the authority and the potential progress such authority can bring to the ‘East’ as naturally desirable. This ‘rationality’ also
presumes an inherent value of Western methodology (including statistical analysis, quantification of data, etc) and devalues alternative epistemologies including those of the
Afghan people. This is problematic for several reasons: 1) It forecloses and discourages thinking
“outside the box” and instead relies upon the “master’s tools” which include violent military force, the installation of a democratic regime, peacekeeping, and reconstruction and foreign aid – alternative strategies are deemed “radical”, “unworkable”, and “anti-American”; 2) it prioritizes numbers and statistics over lived experiences
. By relying on tallies of deaths, percentages of voters, and numbers of insurgents for example, the experiences of those living in the region are obfuscated and devalued, and;
3)it reproduces a colonial hierarchy of knowledge production. Old colonial narratives of have resurfaced with renewed vigor in the case of Afghanistan is contingent on and mutually
reinforced by opposing narratives of a ‘civilized’ and ‘developed’ ‘West’.
For example: “Consider the language which is being used…Calling the perpetrators evildoers, irrational, calling them the forces of darkness, uncivilized, intent on destroying civilization, intent on destroying democracy.
They hate freedom, we are told. Every person of colour, and I would want to say also every Aboriginal person, will recognize that language. The language of us versus them, of civilization versus the forces of darkness, this language is rooted in the colonial legacy.”87 This colonizer/colonized dichotomy is key to the civilisational
justification the US administration pursues (“We wage war to save civilization itself”88) which, as Agathangelou and Ling explain, is motivated by a constructed medieval evil that threatens
American freedom and democracy, the apotheosis of modern civilization, and therefore must be disciplined/civilized.
In his Speech to Congress on September 21, 2001, Bush portrays the irrational Other as Evil and retributive seeking to destroy the
‘developed, ‘secure’ ‘prosperous’ and ‘civilized’ free world: These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life…Al Qaeda is to terror what the mafia is to crime. But its goal is not making money; its goal is remaking the world, and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere.”89
This production of othering and re-institutionalization
of colonial discourse has been enabled by and facilitated ‘culture clash’ explanations.
90 The danger of such theories, warns Razack, lies not only in their decontextualization and dehistoricization, but also on its reliance on the Enlightenment narrative and notions of European moral superiority that justify the use of force. This is evident in the unproblematic way in which outside forces have assumed a right of interference in the region spanning from the 18th century when imperial powers demarcated the Durrand Line (which created a border between British India and Afghanistan with the goal of making Afghanistan an effective ‘buffer state’for British Imperial interests91) to the American intervention that began in the Cold War, followed by the Soviets in the 1980’s and the Americans,

Canadians and British today. In fact, The West’s practical engagement in Afghanistan reveals how it has served to reporoduce this neo-colonial myth as well as the complexities and paradoxes which simultaneously de-stabilize that myth.
Epistemological violence justifies a larger crusade on otherness. This division places us on a path towards genocide.
Mignolo & Tlostanova 06 [Walter & Madina, Prof of Literature & Prof of the History of
Culture, “Theorizing from the Borders,” European Journal of Social Theory, p.205-6, 208]
The modern foundation of knowledge is territorial and imperial. By modern we mean the socio-historical organization and classification of the world founded on a macro-narrative and on a specific concept and principles of knowledge. The point of reference of modernity is the
European Renaissance founded, as an idea and interpretation of a historical present, on two complementary moves: the colonization of time and the invention of the Middle Ages, and the colonization of space and the invention of America that became integrated into a Christian tripartite geo-political order:
Asia, Africa and Europe. It was from and in Europe that the classification of the world emerged and not in and from Asia, Africa or
America – borders were created therein but of different kinds. The Middle Ages were integrated into the history of Europe, while the histories in Asia, Africa and America were denied as history. The world map drawn by Gerardus Mercator and Johannes Ortelius worked together with theology to create a zero point of observation and of knowledge: a perspective that denied all other perspectives (Castro-Gómez, 2002).
Epistemological frontiers were set in place in that double move: frontiers that expelled to the outside the epistemic colonial differences (Arabic, Aymara, Hindi,
Bengali, etc.). Epistemic frontiers were re-articulated in the eighteenth century with the displacement of theology and the theo-politics of knowledge by secular ego-logy and the ego-
politics of knowledge.
Epistemic frontiers were traced also by the creation of the imperial difference (with the Ottoman, the Chinese and the Russian empires) and the colonial difference (with Indians and Blacks in America).
Both epistemic differences, colonial and imperial, were based on a racial classification of the population of the planet, a classificatory order in which those who made the classification put themselves at
the top of Humanity.
The Renaissance idea of Man was conceptualized based on the paradigmatic examples of Western
Christianity, Europe, and white and male subjectivity (Kant, 1798; Las Casas, 1552). Thus, from the Renaissance all the way down, the rhetoric of modernity could not have been sustained without its darker and constitutive side: the logic of coloniality. Border thinking or theorizing emerged from and as a response to the violence (frontiers) of imperial/territorial epistemology and
the rhetoric
of modernity (and globalization) of salvation that continues to be implemented on the assumption of the inferiority or devilish intentions of the Other and, therefore, continues to justify oppression and exploitation as well as eradication of the difference
. Border thinking is the epistemology of the exteriority; that is, of the outside created from the inside; and as such, it is always a decolonial project. Recent immigration to the imperial sites of Europe and the USA – crossing the imperial and colonial differences – contributes to maintaining the conditions for border thinking that emerged from the very inception of modern imperial expansion. In this regard, critical border thinking displaces and subsumes Max Horkheimer’s ‘critical theory’ which was and still is grounded in the experience of European internal history (Horkheimer, 1937). ‘Critical border thinking’ instead is grounded in the experiences of the colonies and subaltern empires. Consequently, it provides the epistemology that was denied by imperial expansion. ‘Critical border thinking’ also denies the epistemic privilege of the humanities and the social sciences – the privilege of an observer that makes the rest of the world an object of observation (from Orientalism to Area Studies). It also moves away from the post-colonial toward the de-colonial, shifting to the geoand body-politics of knowledge.
They Continue…
Accordingly, our first thesis is the following
. ‘Borders’ are not only geographic but also political, subjective
(e.g. cultural) and epistemic
and, contrary to frontiers, the very concept of ‘border’ implies the existence of people, languages, religions and knowledge on both sides linked through relations established by the coloniality of power
(e.g. structured by the imperial and colonial differences).
Borders
in this precise sense, are not a natural outcome of a natural or divine historical processes in human history, but were created in the very constitution of the modern/colonial world
(i.e. in the imaginary of Western and Atlantic capitalist empires formed in the past five hundred years). If we limit our observations to the geographic, epistemic and subjective types of borders in the modern/colonial world (from the European Renaissance till today), we will see that they all have been created from the perspective of European imperial/ colonial expansion: massive appropriation of land accompanied by the constitution of international

law that justified the massive appropriation of land
(Grovogui, 1996; Schmitt, 1952); control of knowledge
(the epistemology of the zero point as representation of the real) by disqualifying non-European languages and epistemologies and control of subjectivities
(by conversation, civilization, democratization) or, in today’s language – by the globalization of culture.
The occupation of Afghanistan plays a central part of preserving American militarism in the region. Unfortunately, our intervention brought war criminals and rapists back into power.
Ian Sinclair and Mariam Rawi 2009 ( Ian is a journalist with Znet and Rawi is a member of
RAWA’s foreign relations committee, “Interview with the Revolutionary Association of the
Women of Afghanistan” April 29, 2009 http://www.zcommunications.org/interview-with-therevolutionary-association-of-the-women-of-afghanistan-by-ian-sinclair)
The US invaded Afghanistan to fulfil its geo-political, economic and regional strategic interests
and to change Afghanistan into a strong military base in the region. Since Afghanistan is the heart of Asia, it would serve as a strong base for controlling surrounding countries like
Pakistan, China, Iran and above all the Central. Additionally, as a superpower, it continues to occupy Afghanistan to combat rising powers like Russia and China, who are becoming greater rivals for the US in the economic, military and political fields
. Asian Republics. Many argue today that the
2001 invasion was planned before 9/11, but it gave the war-mongers in the White House and Pentagon a golden opportunity to advance its agenda in the region. In the words of Tony Blair "to be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11..."Getting hold of the multibillions drug business was another reason for invading Afghanistan and in the past few years we clearly see that the US and its allies changed Afghanistan into the opium capital of the world. Opium production increased more than 4400%, with 93% of world illegal opium produced in Afghanistan. Narcotics is said to be the third greatest trade commodity in cash terms after oil and weapons.
There are large financial institutions behind this business and the control of the routes of narcotics was important for the US government and now they have reached their goal. Furthermore,
Afghanistan holds a rich source of gas, copper, iron and other minerals and precious stones and the big powers are of course interested in looting it the way they are doing in poor African countries. In the past few years there have
been exploration efforts of our natural resources.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimates there are about 700 billion cubic meters of gas and 300 million tonnes of oil across several Northern provinces of Afghanistan. Also the world's second-biggest unexploited copper deposit is located in our country with an estimated 11 million tonnes of copper. So besides routing the oil and gas from the Central Asian Republics through Afghanistan, the US is interested in exploiting Afghanistan's resources too.
The "war on terror" and "liberation of Afghan women" were mere lies to cover the above and many other hidden agendas of the US in Afghanistan. Our peoples' dreams for liberation were shattered in the very first days after the invasion when they witnessed that the war criminals and Northern Alliance murderers and rapists who destroyed Afghanistan, were backed and brought back to power by the US and its allies after the fall of the Taliban regime. When infamous criminals like Burhanuddin Rabbani, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, Karim Khalili,
Mohammad Mohaqiq, Yunus Qanooni, Mullah Rakiti, Atta Muhammad, Rashid Dostum, Ismail
Khan, Haji Almas, Hazrat Ali and many more were decorated by the US as champions of freedom and were installed in power, everyone knew that Afghanistan had once again become the centre of a chess game of the US and its allies who made the slogans of
"democracy" and "human rights" into painful jokes for our nation.

An empowered military complex ensures global instability by propping up authoritarian governments and creating resentment amongst civilians. This is slowly spiraling into extinction.
Ismael Hossezin-Zadeh 10 teaches economics @ Drake University, “The Biggest Parasite,”
12-17-10, http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/12/17/the-globalization-of-militarism/ DOA: 7-
31-13, y2k
Many Americans
still believe that US foreign policies are designed to maintain peace
, to safeguard human rights and to spread democracy
around the world.
Regardless of their
officially stated objectives
, however, those
policies often lead to opposite outcomes
: war, militarism and dictatorship
.
Evidence of the fact that
US policy makers no longer uphold the ideals they state publicly is overwhelming . Those who
continue to harbor illusions about the thrust of US policies
around the world must be oblivious to the fact that the U nited
S tates has been overtaken by a military-industrialsecurity-financial cabal whose representatives are firmly ensconced in
both the White House and the
US
Congress
.
The ultimate goal of the cabal
, according to their own military guidelines, is “full spectrum dominance” of the world;
and they are willing to wage as many wars , to destroy as many countries and to kill as many people as necessary to achieve that goal. The liberal hawks and petty intellectual pundits who tend to defend US foreign policies on the grounds of
“human rights” or “moral obligations” are well served to pay attention
(among other evidence) to the
US foreign policy documents that are
currently being disclosed
by the Wikileaks. The documents “show all too clearly that,” as Paul Craig Roberts puts it, “ the US government is a duplicitous entity whose raison d’etre is to control every other country
.” In essence, the documents show that while the US government
, like a global mafia godfather , rewards the pliant ruling elites of the client states with arms, financial aid and military protections, it punishes the nations whose leaders refuse to surrender to the wishes of the bully and relinquish their national sovereignty.
US foreign policies
, like its domestic policies, are revealed as catering not to the broader public
or national interests of the people but to the powerful special interests that are vested primarily in the military capital and the finance capital. US foreign policy architects are
clearly incapable of recognizing
or acknowledging the fact that different peoples and nations may have different needs and interests
.
Nor are they capable of respecting other peoples’ aspirations to national sovereignty
. Instead, they
tend to view other peoples
, just as they do the
American people, through the narrow prism of
their own nefarious interests
.
By
selfishly dividing the world into “friends” and “foe
,” or “vassal states,” as Zbigniew Brzezinski put it, powerful beneficiaries of war and militarism compel both groups to embark on a path of militarization
, which leads
inevitably to militarism and authoritarian rule.
Although militarism grows out of the military, the two are different in character. While the military is a means to meet certain ends such as maintaining national security, militarism represents a bureaucratized permanent military establishment as an end in itself
.
It is “a phenomenon
,” as the late Chalmers Johnson put it, “ by which a nation’s armed services come to put their institutional preservation ahead of achieving national security or even a commitment to the integrity of the governmental structure of which they are a part”
(The Sorrows of Empire, Metropolitan Books, 2004, pp. 423-24).
This explains the cancerous growth
and parasitic nature of US militarism
?
cancerous
because it is steadily expanding throughout many parts of the world,
and parasitic because
not only does it
drain other nations resources, it also

sucks US national resources out of the public purse into the coffers of the wicked interests that are vested in the military-industrial-security complex. By creating fear and instability and embarking on unilateral military adventures
, corporate militarism
of the United States also fosters militarism elsewhere
.
A major US strategy of expanding its imperial influence and promoting militarism around the globe has been the formation of international military alliances in various parts of the world
.
These include
not only the notorious North Atlantic Treaty Organization (
NATO
), which is essentially an integral part of the Pentagon’s world command structure, and which was recently expanded to police the world, but also 10 other joint military commands called Unified Combatant Commands. They include Africa Command (
AFRICOM
), Central Command (
CENTCOM
),
European Command (
EUCOM
), Northern Command (
NORTHCOM
), Pacific Command (
PACOM
), and Southern Command
(
SOUTHCOM
). The geographic area under the “protection” of each of these Unified Combatant Commands is called Area of Responsibility (AOR).
AFRICOM’s area of responsibility includes US “military operations and military relations with 53 African nations – an area of responsibility covering all of
Africa except Egypt.” CENTCOM’s area of responsibility spans many countries in the Middle East/Near East/Persian Gulf and Central Asia. It includes
Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. EUCOM’s area of responsibility “covers 51 countries and territories, including Europe, Iceland, Greenland, and Israel.”
NORTHCOM’s area of responsibility “includes air, land and sea approaches and encompasses the contiguous United States, Alaska, Canada, Mexico and the surrounding water out to approximately 500 nautical miles (930 km). It also includes the Gulf of Mexico, the Straits of Florida, portions of the
Caribbean region to include The Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands.” PACOM’s area of responsibility “covers over fifty percent of the world’s surface area ?
approximately 105 million square miles (nearly 272 million square kilometers) ?
nearly sixty percent of the world’s population, thirty-six countries, twenty territories, and ten territories and possessions of the United States.” SOUTHCOM’s area of responsibility “encompasses 32 nations (19 in Central and South America and 13 in the Caribbean) ?
and 14 US and European territories. . . . It is responsible for providing contingency planning and operations in Central and South America, the Caribbean (except US commonwealths, territories, and possessions), Cuba, their territorial waters.”
Together with over 800 military bases scattered over many parts of the world, this military colossus represents an ominous presence of the US armed forces all across our planet
.
Instead of dismantling NATO as redundant in the post-Cold War era, it has been expanded (as a proxy for the US military juggernaut) to include many new countries in Eastern Europe all the way to the borders of Russia. Not only has it inserted itself into a number of new international relations and recruited many new members and partners, it has also arrogated to itself many new tasks and responsibilities in social, political, economic, environmental, transportation and communications arenas of the world. NATO’s new areas of “responsibility,” as reflected in its latest
Strategic Concept, include “human rights”; “key environmental and resource constraints, including health risks, climate change, water scarcity and increasing energy needs. . .”; “important means of communication, such as the internet, and scientific and technological research. . .”; “proliferation of ballistic missiles, of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction”; “threat of extremism, terrorism and trans-national illegal activities such as trafficking in arms, narcotics and people”; “vital communication, transport and transit routes on which international trade, energy security and prosperity depend”; the “ability to prevent, detect, defend against and recover from cyber-attacks”; and the need to “ensure that the Alliance is at the front edge in assessing the security impact of emerging technologies.” Significant global issues thus claimed to be part of NATO’s expanded mission fall logically within the purview of civilian international institutions such as the United Nations. So why is the US ruling plutocracy, using NATO, now trying to supplant the United Nations and other international agencies ?
The reason is that due to the rise of the influence of a number of new international players such as Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Iran, and Venezuela the UN is no longer as subservient to the global ambitions of the United States as it once was.
Planning to employ the imperial military machine of NATO instead of the civilian multilateral institutions such as the UN clearly belies,
once again, the self-righteous US claims of trying to spread democracy worldwide.
Furthermore, NATO’s expanded “global responsibilities” would easily provide the imperial US military machine new excuses for unilateral military interventions. By the same token, such military adventures would also provide the US military-industrial-security complex additional rationale for continued escalation of the Pentagon budget. The expansion of NATO to include most of the Eastern Europe has led Russia, which had curtailed its military spending during the 1990s in the hope that, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the US would also do the same, to once again increase its military spending. In response to the escalation of US military spending, which has nearly tripled during the last 10 years (from $295 billion when
George W. Bush went to the White House in January 2001 to the current figure of nearly one trillion dollars), Russia too has drastically increased its military spending during the same time period (from about $22 billion in 2000 to $61 billion today). In a similar fashion, US military encirclement of
China (through a number of military alliances and partnerships that range from Pakistan, Afghanistan and India to South China Sea/Southeast Asia,
Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Cambodia, Malaysia, New Zealand and most recently Vietnam) has led that country to also further strengthen its military capabilities. Just as the US military and geopolitical ambitions have led Russia and China to reinforce their military capabilities, so have they compelled other countries such as Iran, Venezuela and North Korea to likewise strengthen their armed forces and buttress their military preparedness.
Not only does aggressive US militarism compel its “adversaries” to allocate a disproportionately large share of their precious resources to military spending, but it also coerces its “allies” to likewise embark on a path of militarization
. Thus, countries like Japan and Germany, whose military capabilities were reduced to purely defensive postures following the atrocities of World War II, have once again been re-militarizing in recent years under the impetus of what US military strategists call “the need to share the burden of global security.” Thus, while Germany and Japan still operate under a “peace constitution,” their military expenditures on a global scale now rank sixth and seventh, respectively (behind the US, China, France, UK and Russia).
US militarization of the world
(both directly through the spread of its own military apparatus across the globe and indirectly by compelling

both “friends” and “foe” to militarize) has a number of ominous consequences for the overwhelming majority or
the population the world. For one thing, it is the source of a largely redundant and disproportionately large allocation of the world’s precious resources to war, militarism and wasteful production of the means of death and destruction . Obviously, as this inefficient, class-biased disbursement of resources drains public finance and accumulates national debt, it also brings tremendous riches and treasures to war profiteers , that is, the beneficiaries of the military capital and the finance capital.
Secondly, to justify this lopsided allocation of the lion’s share of national resources to military spending, beneficiaries of war dividends tend to create fear , suspicion and hostility among peoples and nations of the world, thereby sowing the seeds of war, international conflicts and global instability.
Thirdly, by the same token that p owerful beneficiaries of war and military-security capital tend to promote suspicion, to create fear and invent enemies, both at home and abroad, they
also undermine democratic values and nurture authoritarian rule
.
As the predatory military-industrial-security-financial interests find democratic norms of openness and transparency detrimental to their nefarious objectives of limitless self-enrichment, they cleverly create pretexts for secrecy, “security,” military rule and police state.
Concealment of the robbery of public treasury in the name of national security requires restriction of information, obstruction of transparency, and curtailment of democracy.
It follows that under the kleptocratic influence of the powerful interests that are vested in the militarysecurity-financial industries the US government has turned into an ominous global force of destabilization, obstruction, retrogression and authoritarianism .
RAWA says “The exit of foreign troops and our country’s independence, can be the first step in the path of the realization of values such as freedom and democracy, which are vital conditions for the emancipation of women”
Brandon and I demand that The United States Congress should amend the
Authorization for the Use of Military Force and related statutes to prohibit the
President from re-introducing United States armed forces into hostilities in
Afghanistan after 2014.
Now is a key time in US occupation of Afghanistan. The Bilateral Security Agreement does not force US forces out until 2014, but members in Washington are pressuring Karzai to extend the deadline.
Ioannis Koskinas August 1, 2013 (Ioannis Koskinas was a military officer for over twenty years and now focuses on economic development projects in Afghanistan and Pakistan “The
U.S.-Afghan game of "Chicken’” http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/08/01/us_afghan_game_of_chicken
In an Afghan context, the U.S. and Afghan governments are on a collision course in a number of areas and unless cooler heads can prevail, the eventual crash will be devastating, yet totally uneven. For the United States, its international credibility will be undoubtedly damaged; but for the Afghan government, the fallout will be disastrous, and signal the beginning of the end for this period of relative progress and prosperity. Two prime examples of the stakes are
the Bilateral Security Agreement
(BSA), which will determine the size and shape of the U.S. mission post 2014, and the tussle over taxing U.S. government contractors supporting military operations in Afghanistan. Following the ill-choreographed opening of the
Taliban political office in Qatar, Afghan President Hamid Karzai put the BSA on pause. Even though U.S. officials were quick to admit that the Doha event was embarrassing and not what they had intended, they also made it clear that they had acted with Karzai's blessing. That really should have been the end of it and the negotiations should have resumed.
Karzai's decision to halt

the BSA talks was yet another attempt to challenge the United States when Afghan sovereignty was on the line. But with the negotiations still stalled, his move may prove to be a pyrrhic victory. One of the unintended consequences of his decision is that a "zero option"
(keeping no U.S. forces in Afghanistan after 2014), which had little support in Washington and
in NATO-member capitals, is now being considered in earnest. As far as the U.S. government is concerned, the BSA is the sine qua non for a continued U.S. military presence past 2014. In fact, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently set an October 2013 deadline for completing the BSA in an effort to force the issue with an Afghan government that is
struggling to define its own vision of a post-2014 security environment.
Without the BSA, however, even those who warn against the "zero option" have been adamant that total withdrawal is not only likely, but also inevitable. In other words, unless the BSA is finalized quickly, the idea of leaving no U.S. troops in Afghanistan after 2014 will continue to gain momentum, and what started out as a dangerous possibility may become the most likely course of action.
Women in Afghanistan face systematic oppression due to a legacy of Western colonization. The removal of active forces in Afghanistan is the first step to providing women a path to resistance and empowerment.
Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), July 3rd, 2013
(Organization established in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1977 as an independent political/social organization of Afghan women fighting for human rights and for social justice in Afghanistan
“Afghan women burn in the fire of the oppression of the occupiers and fundamentalists” http://www.rawa.org/rawa/2013/03/07/rawa-statement-on-iwd-2013-english.html
A few dolled-up showpiece women in the government, parliament, and other official bodies, like
Fawzia Koofi, Sima Samar, Shukria Barikzai, Zahra Nadiri, Hassan Bano Ghazanfar, Shinkai
Karrokhail, Fawzia Sadaat, Fatima Gilani, Amina Afzali, Wazhma Forough, and others, whose mouths have been sweetened with money, luxuries and foreign that come with their official posts, do not want to speak a word about the bitter truth of the situation of women, let alone stand up against, stop and prosecute, the real perpetrators of the ongoing disaster in support of their fellow women. This handful of women who have found a position thanks to the occupation, are themselves the enemies of our women in their unison with the killers in power.
Therefore, we cannot possibly view their presence in important posts as the cementing of the deserving position women are supposed to have. These women, who can be regarded as prepared nutriment to feed the US propaganda, realize that the end of the current colonial
system and the puppet Karzai regime means the end of their pompous lives. This is why they themselves back the current deplorable and tragic situation. Most of these women who are slaves of the reactionary elements and occupiers, are in the service of war criminals, and in the best-case scenario, just want a few useless reforms in the rotten Karzai apparatus. For this reason, intentionally or unintentionally, these women are at the service of and among the enemies of the women of Afghanistan. These women can never represent the majority women, who have been charred in Afghanistan’s hell. We wrote on March 8, 2005: “The persistence of the current instability and the West's support of the "Northern Alliance" terrorists in
Afghanistan proves that the US and her allies pay no attention to human rights and women rights, but seek only their political and economical interests.” Today, even the most optimistic people in our country, confess that Afghan women have not been liberated, and have become a commodity for the Western propaganda. Thanks to the presence of the US, women are gang-raped by warlords, are flogged in many Taliban-controlled areas, are preys of acid attaks,
or are mercilessly stoned to death. But the US and its tail-wagging servants still show them a green signal and want them to join the puppet government. A considerable number of our

women are forced into prostitution of beggary due to poverty and unemployment; the maternal and infant mortality rate of Afghanistan is the highest in the world. In this country, laws are just pieces of paper that aid only in deceiving people, and are never practically
applied. The law of Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW) made by Karzai is a commendable document which has been set aside with no use. When criminal husbands, fathers, or brothers kill women under different contexts, they are never punished. In many cases, women are convicted by the judicial bodies and thrown into jails for the crime of
‘running away from home’, where they are further raped by the jail keepers. In such a hostile situation, most women find self-immolation the only solution to free them from a slow
torturous death. The suicide rates among our women has risen in an unprecedented manner.
Here, blooming flowers like Sanobars, Saimas, Anisas, Zar Bibis, Gul Afrozes, Shakeelas,
Nafeesas , Azizas, and hundreds of other innocent girls, have been blown to pieces by the filthy and blood-dripping hands of the fundamentalists. This is the agonizing reality of the life of a woman in Afghanistan, not the distorted image the false propaganda machine of the US gives to the people of the world to deceive them. Women can never have even their basic rights in a country which is not independent, and whose people are captives in the chains of colonialism and despotism. The exit of foreign troops and our country’s independence, can be the first step in the path of the realization of values such as freedom and democracy, which are vital conditions for the emancipation of women. Our people might be able to breathe with relief without foreign troops, and their aid for fundamentalist criminals, and then labor for values like freedom, democracy with secularism, social justice and their prosperity. In the current situation, the US and NATO and its Afghan agents have suppressed the advocates of
such values, and cannot indulge in their activities, as they would want to.
The 1AC’s incorporation of alternative perspectives dismantles the colonial epistemology that has erased other’s perspectives. Understanding that history is always a constructed truth is necessary to rethink the problem at hand.
Crowe 2007 (Lori, Grad Student in Pol. Sci. – York U., “The “Fuzzy Dream”: Discourse,
Historical myths, and Militarized (in)Security Interrogating dangerous myths of Afghanistan and the ‘West’”, http://archive.sgir.eu/uploads/Crowe-loricrowe.pdf)
Conclusion: The Dangers of Myth-making We need to navigate critically and cautiously through the multiple stories, silences, and complex and contradictory narratives that lie beneath the
surface of imperial myths.
Kaufman, for example, explains that in order to study incidences of ethnic conflict, we must begin by trying to hear the myriad narratives and different assumptions and combine insights from multiple methodological and theoretical approaches.105
We need to understand that “some people are just written out of history”106, and the stories of history are so partial and there is so much those of us in the
West don’t see that we can never believe that we have arrived at a ‘truth’ or ‘reality’: History is never just simply the ‘past’. Nor is history simply its official rendering…History is made while old histories are simultaneously reproduced, without most of us ever owning the story
told…
Once I see interpretation is already embedded in the very process of thought I recognize that there is a before that I cannot completely ever know or recover. The very idea of history itself is destabilized as a process of storytelling with different storytellers…I therefore need to know whose story I am reading, who is telling the story, and from what timebound lens it is being told.107 Perhaps the best response is, as Peter Hulme suggests
: “to read speculatively, recognizing that the story can never be fully recovered, and that which has been recovered is often distorted and manufactured.”108 There are emancipatory possibilities in a critical project of discourse deconstruction: it lies in the recognition of the detrimental effects of imperial, neo-colonial,
orientalist ‘myths’ and the policy agendas that are made possible through them.
By beginning to delve into the complex and interrelated factors of Afghanistan’s history in the previous section, the dangers of historical narratives

that conceal these elements start to become visible:
“By myth man has lived, died and – all too often – killed.”109 While pressure must be put on the messengers of violent and deliberately myths, we must also take responsibility and listen critically to the multiple narratives around us in order to realize a more “panoptic”110 vision; understanding, nonetheless, that we can never achieve a whole or complete understanding or “truth”. “As we listen to the antithetical
mythologies that tear our world apart,” argues Armstrong “we need to be receptive to the
counter-narrative that opposes our point of view and expresses the ‘other’ perspective.”111
One way to ‘see’ without an imperial or colonial gaze is to connect heterogeneity into a form of “collective assemblage” in a
Deleuzian and Guattarian sense; that is, accept concrete multiplicities in order to see variation without conquest.112 What are the historical myths being produced as we speak? Will history books teach young children stories about ‘uncivilized’ and ‘barbaric’
Afghanistan, harborer of evil and Muslim terrorists, saved by the heroic and technologically vanguard strategies of Western militaries?
All myths are political and embody a very particular and power infused representation about how the world works. We must historicize particular forms of knowledge and acknowledge their partiality by unpacking the theories that underpin the “facts” produced by situated knowledge’s; “A thicker and more complex vision of humanity is urgently
needed.”113 If, as Taylor pronounces, history and its myths are not indeed about the past, but rather the future, than the question we must continually ask ourselves (and of other myth producers, as we are all implicated in this process) is what kind of world is being produced
through what myths and who is benefiting and who is being disappeared?
For the purposes of our discussion, we accept that the affirmative defends a topical action carried out by the USFG, but also defends the discursive context within which such an action could take place. We reject the magic wand theory of fiat that imagines action separate from the conditions that make that action possible. Imagining a world where military policy is changed requires also imagining a radical change in social discursive structures. Negative political process DAs are irrelevant to this question because they assume a world that simply cannot coexist with the affirmative.
Bleiker 2000 [Roland, Prof of International Relations, Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and
Global Politics, p. 134-6]
Since a systematic theory cannot capture the intricate functioning of power, one must explore different ways of understanding the frameworks within which domination, resistance and social change take place. One must search for more subtle foundations that could, maybe, pro vide momentary ground for understanding how human agency functions in a transversal context. But how is one to embark upon this intricate task? Foucault continues to provide useful guidance, at least up to a certain point. He approaches power by adding an extra step to understanding it.
Power
, he argues, is not simply the relationship between individuals or groups, a type of force that one person exerts on another. It works in a more intricate, more indirect way: [W]hat defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action
, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or the future. . .[T]he exercise of power. . .is a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions.29
Power is a complex strategic situation, something that shapes and frames the boundaries within which actions can be carried out.
Such a definition inevitably raises a number of questions. What mediates the exercise of power? What is the space that lies between actions, this mesh of social forces through which actions frame the actions of others? One mediating factor is the relationship between power and knowledge. Foucault, drawing once more on Nietzsche, argues that knowledge and power are intrinsically linked. There are no power relations which do not constitute corresponding fields of knowledge. And there are no forms of knowledge that do not presuppose and at the same time constitute relations of power.30 Power is not a stable and steady force, something that exists on its own. There is no essence to power, for its exercise is dependent upon forms of knowledge that imbue certain actions with power. This is to say that the manner in which we view and frame power also influences how it functions in practice. ‘It is within discourse,’ Foucault claims, ‘that power and knowledge articulate each other.’31
Discourses are subtle mechanisms that frame our thinking process.
They determine the limits of what can be thought, talked and written in a normal and rational way.
In every society the production of discourses is controlled, selected, organised and diffused by certain procedures.
This process creates systems of exclusion in which one group of discourses is elevated to a hegemonic status while others are condemned to exile. Discourses give rise to social rules that decide

which statements most people recognise as valid, as debatable or as undoubtedly false.
They guide the selection process that ascertains which propositions from previous periods or foreign cultures are retained, imported, valued, and which are forgotten or neglected.32 Although these boundaries change, at times gradually, at times abruptly, they maintain a certain unity across time, a unity that dominates and transgresses individual authors, texts or social practices.
Not everything is discourse, but everything is in discourse. Things exist independently of discourses, but we can only assess them through the lenses of discourse, through the practices of knowing, perceiving and sensing which we have acquired over time.
Nietzsche: That mountain there! That cloud there! What is ‘real’ in that? Subtract the phantasm and every human contribution from it, my sober friends! If you can! If you can forget your descent, your past, your training – all of your humanity and animality.
There is no ‘reality’ for us – not for you either, my sober friends. . .33 Nietzsche’s point, of course, is not that mountains and clouds do not exist as such.
To claim such would be absurd. Mountains and clouds exist no matter what we think about them. And so do more tangible social practices. But they are not ‘real’ by some objective standard. Their appearance, meaning and significance is part of human experiences, part of a specific way of life. A
Nietzschean position emphasises that discourses render social practices intelligible and rational – and by doing so mask the ways in which they have been constituted and framed. Systems of domination gradually become accepted as normal and silently penetrate every aspect of society.
They cling to the most remote corners of our mind, for ‘all things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their emergence out of unreason thereby becomes improbable’.34 Discourses are more than just masking agents.
They provide us with frameworks to view the world, and by doing so influence its course.
Discourses express ways of life that actively shape social practices. But more is needed to demonstrate how the concept of discourse can be of use to illuminate transversal dissident practices. More is needed to outline a positive notion of human agency that is not based on stable foundations. This section has merely located the terrains that are to be explored. It is now up to the following chapters to introduce, step by step, the arguments and evidence necessary to develop and sustain a discursive understanding of transversal dissent and its ability to exert human agency.
Our approach recognizes the importance of the state, but is not state centric – agency transverses a multitude of actors and institutions, which makes it essential for policy analysis to account for transversal discursive dissent
Bleiker 2000 [Roland, Prof of International Relations, Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and
Global Politics, p. 6-8]
At a time when processes of globalisation are unfolding and national boundaries are becoming increasingly porous, states can no longer be viewed as the only consequential actors in world affairs.
Various scholars have thus begun to question the prevalent spatial modes of representation and the artificial separation of levels of analysis that issues from them. They suggest, as mentioned above, that global life is better understood as a series of transversal struggles
that increasingly challenge what Richard
Ashley called ‘the paradigm of sovereign man.’ Transversal struggles, Ashley emphasises, are not limited to established spheres of sovereignty. They are neither domestic nor international.
They know no final boundaries between inside and outside.
18 And they have come to be increasingly recognised as central aspects of global politics. James Rosenau is among several scholars who now acknowledge that it is along the shifting frontiers of transversal struggles, ‘and not through the nation state system that people sort and play out the many contradictions at work in the global scene’.19 Once one accepts the centrality that transversal struggles play in today’s world it becomes impossible to differentiate between political dynamics that take place in local, national or international spheres. It is the very transgressions of these spheres that drive and shape much of global life today. And once one has accepted the presence of these transgressions and the ensuing spatial contingencies, then, Campbell stresses, the levels of analysis problem is no more.20 If we are to gain an adequate understanding of contemporary dissent, and of global life in general, we must look beyond the lines that have been arbitrarily drawn into the sand of international politics. We must think past the current framing of the levels of analysis problem. It is the steady breeze, the gusty bursts of energy, the transversal forms of agency, that are gradually transforming the lines and shapes of contemporary global life. Expressed in more prosaic words, a multitude of actors, actions, spheres and issues must be recognised and discussed
as legitimate parts of international relations debates. Needless to say, there are countless forms of dissent and agency that are operative within transversal struggles. Various authors have already identified the international in spheres hitherto unseen, unappreciated and untheorised. Feminist scholars, for instance, have located women and their influence on the global economy in such spaces as households, assembly lines, sweat shops, farms, secretariats, guerrilla wars and brothels that have sprung up around foreign military bases.21 To expand the scope of international theory and to bring transversal struggles into focus is not to declare the state obsolete. States remain central actors in international politics and they have to be recognised and theorised as such. In fact, my analysis will examine various ways in which states and the boundaries between them have mediated the formation, functioning and impact of dissent. However, my reading of dissent and agency makes the state neither its main focus nor its starting point.
There are compelling reasons for such a strategy, and they go beyond a mere recognition that a state-centric approach
to international theory engenders a form of representation that privileges the authority of the state and thus precludes an adequate understanding of
the radical transformation s that are currently unfolding in global life. Michael Shapiro is among an increasing number of theorists who convincingly portray the state not only as an institution, but also,
and primarily, as a set of
‘stories’
– of which the state-centric approach to international theory is a perfect example. It is part of a legitimisation process that highlights, promotes and naturalises certain political practices and the territorial context within which they take place. Taken together, these stories

provide the state with a sense of identity, coherence and unity. They create boundaries between an inside and an outside, between a people and its others.
Shapiro stresses that such state-stories also exclude, for they seek ‘to repress or delegitimise other stories and the practices of identity and space they reflect.’ And it is these processes of exclusion that impose a certain political order and provide the state with a legitimate rationale for violent encounters.22 Transversal dissident practices
can be seen as forms of thought and action that not only transgress, but also challenge the political order which has developed around the assertion of national sovereignty.
They either question the arbitrariness of this division and its corresponding system of exclusion, or simply reveal how inadequate it has become in a world that has undergone fundamental change since the state system emerged with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

Technostrategic Discourse 1ac
First, Drone warfare occurs in the context of sanitized technological killing—the distance enacted by the phenomenological dimension of drone weapons delivery establishes a radical separation between the bureaucratic machinations that justify and order that killing and the concrete human dimensions of those same murderous practices.
Addey et al 11
(Peter Addey, Mark Whitehead, Alison Williams et al. "Introduction: Air-target
Distance, Reach and the Politics of Verticality." Theory, Culture & Society 28.7-8 2011).
The target of aerial war and security could be understood in a manner that Eyal Weizman (2002) might describe as holographical.
An assembling of disparate elements, the airtarget adds up to a representation yet is built by techno-cultural practices that overlay one another with multiple details and perspectives. The result appears to be a reconfigured reality, augmented and abstracted, yet heightened at the same time.
In the place of the cadastral maps, which were assiduously produced under previous regimes of aerial governmentality, we have the modularized GIS data sets, which are able to instantaneously fabricate the target as a simulacrum
. Real objects and com- plex environments come to be grasped in this way, analysed by distant audi- ences in a form that can be acted upon with speed but in a way in which the violence involved in making-abstract is increasingly obscured
. This is partly because of the concatenation or telescoping of the aerial target and the chain of targeting, which leads Ryan Bishop to suggest that the destruc- tion of aerial war is obscured by the conflation of senses, technologies and perceptions, thus closing ‘the gap of perception’ and erasing the ‘distinction between apprehension, thought and action’
(Bishop, 2009).
The processes of ‘sensing and tracking’, ‘perception and action’ that
Bishop locates pre- cisely within the automation of the targeting process elsewhere must then be excavated within the evolving assembling and extension of the aerial tar- geting process. This process is itself subject to ever increasing processes of rationalization and optimization by flow monitoring and the sequencing of its activities in order to produce the dream of ‘continuous coverage’
(Ha, 2010) or ‘persistent presence’ (Williams, 2011c) that is an unblinking eye ^ an omnipresent view provided by efficient UAV cycles and sequences that seeks to observe an asymmetric yet omnipresent threat with the capacity to unpredictably surprise and disrupt.¶ Thus what Anderson,
Gregory, Saint-Amour and Bishop show us in this section is quite different from the imagery mentioned at the start of the editorial. Let us recall Judith Butler’s evocative description of the first Gulf War from the 1990s:¶ . . . transported from the North American continent to Iraq, and yet securely wedged in the couch in one’s own living room.
The smart bomb screen is,
of course, destroyed in the moment that it enacts its destruction, which is to say that this is a recording of a thoroughly destructive act which can never record that destructiveness, indeed, which effects the phantasmatic distinction between the hit and its consequences
. Thus as viewers, we verita- bly enact the allegory of military triumph: we retain our visual dis- tance and our bodily safety through the disembodied enactment of the kill that produces no blood and in which we retain our radical impermeability.
¶ (1992: 11)¶ Butler takes this further: the smart bomb renders distant television audiences ‘ absolutely proximate, absolutely essential
, and absolutely distant’ in a way that protects the viewer while securing ‘a fantasy of transcendence, of
a disembodied instrument of destruction’, protracted and filtered through distance
and censored by the fact that the ‘aerial view never comes close to seeing the effects of its destruction’, for as the bomb comes tantalizingly closer to its target ‘the screen conveniently destroys itself’
(1992: 11). As
Gregory shows, today’s processes of aerial targeting co-involve other actors
, publics and objects
in more
complex relationships that do not simply
escape the consequences of violence or remain safely ensconced in the arm- chairs of spectator warfare.
¶ Appearing to empty the target’s subject of all of its content, rational, scientific and legal expertise are meant to take over and enact what artist Wafa Bilal describes as the sharp edge of the comfort^conflict divide (on this see Ingram, 2010) in his work Shoot an Iraqi. In this special section we see this view questioned. For instance, Ben Anderson’s article on coun- terinsurgency and PSYOPS explores the US targeting of a
‘pre-insurgent’ population through airdropped leaflets, propaganda bombs and broadcasts.
Targeting
here is about immersion in the lives of the population.
It is target- ing of the potential to become dangerous by touching the passions, interests and environment of the population
.¶ This military theatre, in earlier views, might appear comfortable and calm in relation to the messy and passionate world t hat it punishes. One might suggest that refining the object of the target’s sights through the pro- cessual stages described in the articles in this special section also filters out the ethical decisions and orientations such an encounter would bring if it were a face-to-face encounter (think of the smiling faces on the postcard [Figure 1] in Anderson’s article). Indeed, the critique of the aerial target is the distance such an abstraction rei nforces from the life it puts at threat. Without the fidelity of a Levinasian encounter with the Other’s face, any possibility of ethical recognition will be gone. Thus
, aerial targeting seems to work precisely because it subjects its users to a distanced and rational bureaucratic orientation, so that the effects of their actions can never be fully

realized. However, the assumption that passion must somehow lie out- side of these apparatuses is no doubt problematic, as is the comfort^conflict disjuncture
. The sense in which the coldness of the target and targeting holds the processes of waging war from the skies together should be con- trasted with the affects that might threaten to undo this and, furthermore, the increasing likelihood that the drone operators will see the horrors that result from their actions.
Gregory shows how these issues are particularly important to the formation of realism and comradeship, as drone operators recognize or become familiar with the faces of their compatriots captured by t he drone’s camera.¶ Paul K. Saint-Amour’s article crucially shows that the visual practices involved here are less ordered and not perfectly sequential. Looking to the origins of aerial photography he shows how the processes involved in early targeting depended on pastiche, the composing of mosaics of multiple per- spectives that are blended and full of errors. To what extent, then, might a targeting system be marked not by smooth consensus but the discord of synaesthetic and contrasting imagery, informati on and evidence? Even while Bishop (2009) has noted how the goal of targeting systems has ‘been control and containment from a distance’ and precisely
‘not dissemination, dispersal, autonomy and resistance’, we should not assume that these char- acteristics have escaped or been removed from the chain.
Indeed, they may be endemic to the processes themselves as we learn more of the stress, strains and fatigue of those doing the targeting and the flying, those wit- nessing the effects of a missile launched in high definition resolution.
The affects that make the targeting processes uncomfortable may also lie at the heart of the indeterminate, aleatory and
‘turbulent’
(sometimes literally) dynamics that animate and befuddle contemporary air power, issues both Ryan Bishop and Paul K.
Saint Amour explore in their articles.
Second, This technologized war-at-a-distance normalizes violence in the context of the everyday lives of warfighters and warplanners. Drone warfare reduces the world to a picture whose being is just being targeted by the US.
Pugliese 11 (Joseph Pugliese Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Macquarie University "Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones." 20
Griffeth L. Rev. 931 2011)
The ensconcing of war operations, and the everyday deployment of lethal drone attacks,
within US cities such as Langley, Virginia gestures to a mutation in the conduct of war. The manner in which drone operators can
¶
exterminate human targets during their assigned
combat sessions, via their ensemble of tele-mediating technologies and military hardware, and then go home to take the kids to soccer or have a drink at their local bar, works to normalise
war as something that is effectively part of the civic continuum of everyday life practices. This continuum of practices is facilitated by the euphemisms of war: the screen media that display the atornisation and incineration of bodies by drone missiles are called by the military 'Kill TV'," and the material violence inflicted on human targets becomes merely 'kinetic activity'," as though killing were just another form of gym exercise. The televisual and video game dimensions of these killing operations help facilitate the transition from exterminatory
combat operations to civic sites and practices. In the words of an air force colonel of a Predator drone
¶
squadron: 'It teaches you how to compartmentalise it [the reality of war].'" The everyday returns to civic locations of 'home' after a series of technologically mediated killings in another country can, in fact, be seen to be inscribed by the forces of technological dis/location that drive the
¶
operations of drones: 'The more powerful and violent the technological expropriation, the delocalization,' Derrida notes, 'the more powerful, naturally, the recourse to the at-home, the return towards home.'o The violent deterritoralisation, delocalisation and dissociation experienced in the drone Ground Control Stations provokes the reaction: 'I want to be at home, I want finally to be at home, with my own, close to my friends and family.' Drone operators have remarked on how the trip home from their Ground Control Stations enables
them to transition from battle field to civic mode, with the hour's drive back to their home giving them 'that whole amount of time to leave it behind. They get in their bus or car and go into a zone - they say, "For the next hour I'm decompressing, I'm getting re-engaged into what's it's like to be a civilian"."' This return to a safe home is, of course, the privilege and prerogative
of the drone-enabled resident-soldier of the Global North. In the target countries of the Global
South - Afghanistan or Pakistan - the at-home is open to the anomic violence of drones and, as I

discuss below, the ever-present risk of obliteration of home, friends and family.
¶
Philip Alston and Hina Shamsi have drawn critical attention to what they term:
¶
the 'PlayStation mentality' that surrounds drone killings. Young military personnel raised on a diet of video games now
kill real people remotely using joysticks. Far removed from the human consequences of their actions, how will this generation of fighters value the right to life? How will commanders and policymakers keep themselves immune from the deceptively antiseptic nature of drone killings?
Will the standards for intelligence-gathering to justify a killing slip? Will the number of acceptable 'collateral' civilian deaths increase?"
¶
The bracketing off that is enabled by the
parenthetical logic that governs these screen technologies can be appositely situated within
Heideggerian terms. 'The fundamental event of the modern age,' writes Martin Heidegger, 'is
the conquest of the world as picture.'4 Underscoring this epistemic shift to viewing the world as picture has been the dominance of screen technologies in mediating virtually everything that can be seen in terms of 'world'. The parenthetical bracketing off of the world that I have been
examining can effectively be understood as a form of 'enframing' the world. In his discussion of the term, Heidegger posits the process of enframing as a positive aspect of our relation to technology, as in this understanding technology works to reveal the truth of the 'real'. I want to resignify this Heideggerian term in order to mark the manner in which screen technologies operate literally to bracket off the 'real' and to transmute it into object. Conjoining this resignified understanding of enframing to Heidegger's meditation on the 'conquest of the world as picture' effectively brings into focus the levels of epistemic and physical violence
enabled by the militarised use of tele-technologies.
¶
In his theorisation of the epistemic shift to viewing the world as picture, Heidegger notes that the process of representation is crucial to the construction of the world as picture. What is particularly relevant to my analysis of the parenthetical logic of screen technologies and the lethality of drones is the manner in which
Heidegger's analysis of the relation between representation and the world as picture
underscores the role of objectifying violence: 'Representing is ... a laying hold and grasping of what it is that is being viewed; in this scopic process, Heidegger emphasizes. 'assault rules'.45
The 'assault' on what is being viewed is legitimated by its transmutation into 'object':
'Representing is making-stand-over-against, an objectifying that goes forward and masters ...
That which is ... has the character of an object.'4 6 This process of objectification of the 'real' is undergirded by the play of science and technology: 'Science sets upon the real. It orders it into place to the end that at any given time the real will exhibit itself as an interacting network."' The
'real' in the context of drone technologies is precisely that which 'exhibits' itself through the tele-techno mediations of an 'interacting network' constituted by pilots/sensor operators, satellite links and drones. The enframing of the world as picture through 'entrapping
representation' ensures the 'real becomes secured in its objectness'."
¶
Everything in this
Heideggerian exposition can be clearly transposed to illuminate the operations of drone screen technologies in order to entrap and reduce the surveilled human figure into object that can be effectively and
¶
antiseptically liquidated from a distance. The antiseptic vision of war that is produced by the parenthetical logic of the use of drone technologies is enhanced further by
the clinical language deployed by the drone operators in the identification of suspect targets.
The Predator drone's infrared camera, with its digitally enhanced zoom, enables the sensor operators to detect the heat signature of a human body from significant distances (from an altitude of up to 3 kilometres). The term 'heat signature' works to reduce the targeted human body to an anonymous heat-emitting entity that merely radiates signs of life. This clinical process of reducing human subjects to purely biological categories of radiant life is further elaborated by the US military's use of the term 'pattern of life':
¶
The CIA received secret permission to attack a wide range of targets, including suspected militants whose names are not

known, as part of a dramatic expansion of its campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan's border region. The expanded authority ... permits the agency to rely on what officials describe as
'pattern of life' analysis, using evidence collected by surveillance cameras or unmanned aircraft.
The information was used to target suspected militants, even when their full identities were not known.... Previously the CIA was restricted in most cases to killing only individuals whose names were on an approved list ... some analysts said permitting the CIA to kill people where names were unknown created a serious risk of killing innocent people."
Third, This means that there is no value to life in the status quo—technological distancing reduces life to nothing more than something to be targeted and destroyed by militaristic impulses.
Shaw, Graaham, and Majed ’12 . Shaw, Ian Graham, and Akhter, Majed. "The Unbearable
Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan." Antipode 44.4 (September 2012).
Representation, a social practice and strategy through which meanings are constituted and
communicated, is unavoidable when dealing with militarism and military activities.
Armed
Forces, and defence institutions, take great care in producing and promoting
¶ specific portrayals of themselves and their activities in order to legitimize and justify their¶ activities
in places, spaces, environments and landscapes (Woodward 2005:729).
In this section, we argue that the ramping up of drone deployments is justified
¶
by a distinctive targeting logic. As
Paul Virrilo (1989) has long argued, there is never war without representation, which is to say, the deadly materiality of war is always coiled within a discursive system (see also Shaw 2010).
In this sense, the drone performs a well-rehearsed imaginative geography (Bialasiewicz et al
2007;
¶
Gregory 2004) that is underwritten by targeted kills across neat isometric grids and
¶ algorithmic calculations (Amoore 2009), far removed from the brutal Real (Jones
¶ and Clarke
2006), and in a peculiar relation with the visceral imagery of previous wars (Tuathail 2003). The official “definition” of a targeted kill is not agreed upon
¶ under international law. Yet as a recent
UN report on targeted killing reveals, it can
¶ be thought of as follows:
¶
A targeted killing is the
intentional, premeditated and deliberate use of lethal force,
¶
by States or their agents acting
under colour of law, or by an organized armed group
¶ in armed conflict, against a specific individual who is not in the physical custody of
¶ the perpetrator. In recent years, a few States
have adopted policies, either openly or
¶ implicitly, of using targeted killings, including in the territories of other States. Such
¶ policies have been justified both as a legitimate response to
“terrorist” threats and as a necessary response to the challenges of “asymmetric warfare”. In
the legitimate struggle against terrorism, too many criminal acts have been re-characterized so as to justify addressing them within the framework of the law of armed conflict. New technologies, and especially unarmed combat aerial vehicles or “drones”, have been added into
this mix, by making it easier to kill targets, with fewer risks to the targeting State (Alston
¶
2010:3).
¶
The means and methods of killing vary, and include sniper fire, shooting at close
¶ range, missiles from helicopters, gunships, drones, the use of car bombs, and poison
¶
(Alston
2010:4)
¶
The drone is heralded by the US military as the apex of a targeting logic— accurate,
efficient, and deadly. This logic traces a distinct genesis. In 1938 Martin
¶
Heidegger wrote of
the “age of the world picture”, in a classic essay on the split between subject and object. For him, today’s world is conceived, grasped, and conquered as a picture—and what it means “to
be” is for the first time defined as the objectiveness of representing. In this modern age of humanism, a subjective¶ “worldview” arises for the first time—humans appear as Cartesian
subjects and the¶ world as a calculated picture, engineered by science and technology. Ray
Chow
¶
(2006) extends this metaphysical analysis to contend that the world has further
¶ been

produced as a “target”. In the wake of the atomic event of Hiroshima, the entire globe is rendered as a grid of targets to be destroyed as soon as it can be made visible.
Also, New technologies uphold traditional gender narratives
Manjikian 13 (Mary, Faculty Member, Regent University, Robertson School of Government,
International Feminist Journal of Politics, “THE GENDERING OF LETHAL AUTONOMOUS
WARFARE TECHNOLOGY”, Volume 15 2013, January, 30 th , http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfjp20#.Ufmji23ciRM)
In addition, new technologies are also subverting and changing traditional gender hierarchies and gender roles¶ within¶ the military¶ as evidenced by the character of the so-called techno geek, the one who pilots a desk or a computer rather than an aircraft. Wired Magazine’s¶
Danger Room blog describes the new generation of so-¶ called “geek warriors noting that the men who command systems like¶ Israel’s Iron Dome mobile anti¶ -rocket interception system are not stereotypically male leaders. However, American Air Force Major General Stephen J.
Miller refers to the officers who head the Eighth¶ Air Force’s new cyber command as “cyber warriors,” making the argument that the soldier who utilizes internet-based command, communications and control technology now “commands” the domain called¶ the internet, just as other types of soldiers command the air, the sea and the land or terrain.
He is also described as “defending American cyberspace.” Thus, having technical proficiency rather than typical skills like aggression and war fighting is constructed as being a different type of male
activity rather than being a feminine or gender-neutral activity. Profiles in sources like “Wired” reinforce the connection between technical prowess and masculinity through featuring¶ pictures of the new ‘geek warriors’ in military gear, posing next to the weapons which they¶
pilot remotely. (Information is also provided which notes their kill ratios.) Thus, it appears that technologies which enhance war fighting through equipping warriors with new skills and tools like better eyesight, the ability to carry greater loads, or to move faster or for longer distances are incorporated into existing gender narratives, rather than leading to the creation of new narratives.
¶
The ability to alter one’s capabilities using technology do¶ es not render one less masculine or more feminine. It simply makes one different. However, in the scenarios described above¶ –¶ the invention of technological advances in the equipment which one carries, uses or wears as a soldier, the¶ soldier’s presence is¶ still required on the battlefield. He may do a different job, but he is not replaced or absented from his job. However, Masters in particular argues that military planners have inscribed all technology as masculine, since technology is seen as providing decision makers with knowledge (which is viewed as something rational and
objective and therefore male). Indeed, descriptions of the ways in which¶ engineers seek to
“teach” robots ethics bring to mind questions derived from Carol Gilligan’s work. The¶ ethical decision is conflated with the utilitarian calculus, and within the equation there is no room for such soft, female qualities as consideration of the relationships which the robot has with
others. Thus, a robot can be seen as male, female, queer or un-gendered, depending on the narrative which one chooses to follow. However, the question still arises what such theorizing can tell us about the larger question
¶
–
¶ how does turning the task of warfare over to a subordinate (or an equal) change the nature of warfare itself, including its gender implications?

Finally, Gendered structures of international relations and politics culminate in environmental destruction, nuclear war, and extinction
Tickner 1992
(J. Ann Tickner, Professor of International Relations at USC. Gender in International Relations:
Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security. 1992, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/tickner/)
In the modern West, women's activities have typically been associated with a devalued world of reproduction and maintenance, while men's have been tied to what have been considered the more elevated tasks of creating history and meaning.
Yet all these activities are equally important for human well-being. History and the construction of meaning help us to achieve the kind of security that comes from an understanding of who we are as individuals and as citizens, while reproduction and maintenance are necessary for our survival.
In the discourse of international politics
, however, our national identities as citizens have been tied to the heroic deeds of warrior-patriots and our various states' successful participation in international wars. This militarized version of national identity has also depended on a devaluation of the identities of those outside the boundaries of the state. Additionally, it has all but eliminated the experiences of women from our collective national memories. A less militarized version of national identity, which would serve us better in the contemporary world where advances in technology are making wars as dangerous for winners as for losers, must be constructed out of the equally valued experiences of both women and men. To foster a more peaceful world, this identity must also rest on a better understanding and appreciation of the histories of other cultures and societies.
The multidimensional nature of contemporary insecurities also highlights the importance of placing greater public value on reproduction and maintenance.
In a world where nuclear war could destroy the earth and most of its inhabitants, we can no longer afford to celebrate the potential death of hundreds of thousands of our enemies; the preservation of life, not its destruction, must be valued. The elimination of structural violence demands a restructuring of the global economy so that individuals' basic material needs take priority over the desire for profit. An endangered natural environment points to the need to think in terms of the reproduction rather than the exploitation of nature. This ethic of caring for the planet and its inhabitants has been devalued by linking it to the private realm associated with the activities of women; yet caring and responsibility are necessary aspects of all dimensions of life, public and private
. They will be valued in the public realm only when men participate equally in the private realm in tasks associated with maintenance and responsibility for child rearing. If we are to move toward a more secure future, what we value in the public realm, including the realm of international politics, should not be so rigidly separated from the values we espouse in the home.
Therefore, we affirm the affective dimension of drone technology.
Bringing the affective dimension back into drone warfare displaces the logic of efficiency which erases the concrete experience of warfare and enables the violent distancing which causes the worst atrocities in modern technologized war. (gt=geospatial tech.)
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and Geo-
Informatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
The critical project that aims to bring bodies and emotions back in GT practices entails several
important elements. As feminist GT practitioners, we can appropriate the power of GT,

contest the dominant uses of these technologies, and reconfigure the dominant visual practices to counter their objectifying vision. We can experiment with new geospatial practices that better articulate the complex realities of gendered, classed, raced, and sexualized spaces and experiences of individuals. These new practices should help us understand emotions in terms of their ‘‘socio-spatial mediation and articulation rather than as
entirely interiorized subjective mental states’’ (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 2005, 3). While being attentive to how emotions, subjectivities, and spaces are mutually constitutive in particular places and at particular times, these new practices should also take into account the
existence of different kinds of bodies (e.g., pregnant, disabled, old, mutilated, dead) and their
socially encoded meanings in relation to specific spatial, temporal, and cultural contexts (Rose
1993; Laws 1997; Domosh and Seager 2001; Longhurst 2001). In the arena of public policy, feminist GT practitioners have a role in questioning decisions that privilege detached
rationality and the ‘‘logic of efficiency’’ over emotions (Anderson and Smith 2001, 8). As feminist GT practitioners we deeply care about the subject(s) of our research and are
‘‘emotionally committed to our work,’’ and our geospatial practices should be infused with a
sense of ‘‘emotional involvement with people and places’’ (Bondi, Davidson and Smith, 2005,
2). We can develop GT practices that entail this emotional involvement and help express mean- ings, memories, feelings, and emotions for our subjects. We can draw on the emotional power of moving images and the techniques in narrative cinema to create GIS movies or visualizations that tell stories about the lives of marginalized people, highlight social injustice,
and—we hope—effect social change (Aitken 1991; Aitken and Craine 2006). In the three sections that follow, I discuss several GT projects to illustrate the specific ways in which bodies and emotions can be brought to bear on geospatial practices. Drawing from my recent experimentations and those by feminist scholars in cultural studies and media art, I explore how these projects contest the dominant meanings and visual prac- tices of GT. As these projects are more expres- sive than representational or analytical, taking the form of creative
visual or artistic work (e.g., GPS-assisted travelogues and 3D GIS video), they are in a certain sense ‘‘affective GT per- formances’’ that seek to transform GT into affective practices by incorporating the subject- ivities and emotions of the practitioner and research participants as an integral element of the project. Through the use of GT as a medium of self-expression and a means of re- sistance, and to articulate emotional geogra- phies and convey emotionally provocative messages, these nonrepresentational practices hint at ways of using GT that transcend the conventional duality between subject and ob- ject, design and use, author and
reader, and representation and practice (Del Casino and Hanna 2006).
Only through a thorough feminist critique can you deconstruct masculine technocratic thought and allow for new perspectives.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and Geo-
Informatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
Geospatial technologies include a broad range of technologies for collecting, stor- ing,
displaying, or analyzing geographical infor- mation (e.g., geographical information systems
[GIS]; global positioning systems, and remote sensing). Much has been written about the lim-

itations and social implications of geospatial technologies (GT) since the early 1990s (e.g.,
Sheppard 1993; Curry 1994; Pickles 1995). Critiques have focused largely on issues of episte- mology, representation, power, ethics, privacy violation, and the noncivilian deployment of these technologies. With contributions by critical geographers from diverse perspectives, con- siderable progress has been made in the nascent subfields of critical GIS and critical cartography to date (e.g., Schuurman 1999; Kyem 2004; Sheppard 2005; Crampton and Krygier 2006; Del
Casino and Hanna 2006; Elwood 2006; Knigge and Cope 2006; Kwan and Knigge 2006;
Pavlovskaya 2006; Propen 2006; Sieber 2006; Ghose forthcoming; Kwan and Aitken forth- coming). In this article I seek to develop feminist per- spectives on GT along new directions,building on earlier contributions to feminist understand- ing of GT. First, recent feminist thinking in geography has witnessed heightened attention to the importance of
emotion in social life and knowledge production (e.g., Bondi 1999, 2003, 2005; Burman and
Chantler 2004; Davidson and Bondi 2004; Ekinsmyth et al. 2004; Ettlin- ger 2004; Thien 2004,
2005; Bondi, Davidson and Smith 2005; Tolia-Kelly 2006). As Kay An- derson and Susan Smith
(2001, 7) argue, the ‘‘human world is constructed and lived through the emotions’’ and yet
feelings and emotions are silenced in both research and social life. Since emotions affect
research processes and findings (Bennett 2004) and are highly political but rarely an important
consideration in public policy (Kwan and Aitken, forthcoming), bringing emotions back to bear upon GT practices may offer new insights about ways of using GT that contest the dominant understanding and mean- ings of GT and their relationships with the so- cial and political
world (e.g., using GT as a means of resistance or political protest).
Incorporating feminist articulations creates new discourse in security
Hoogensen and Rottem 04 (Gunhild, and Svein vingeland, Professors at University of
Tromsø, Norway, “Gender Identity and the Subject of Security”, Security Dialogue, 2004 35:
155,June 1st, http://sdi.sagepub.com/content/35/2/155.full.pdf, pp. 155-171)
¶ When women’s articulations of security are recognized and heard, this¶ results in access to the appropriate resources women need to ensure their¶ security, as well as creating new foundations for theoretical reorientations of¶ security. Although such gender theorizing and practice has been taking¶ place for over a decade, offering many fruitful and important
avenues of
¶
Gunhild Hoogensen & Svein Vigeland Rottem
¶
Gender Identity and the Subject of
Security Downloaded from
¶ research in identity and security, it has not been able to break
through to the¶ mainstream security debates. Feminist perspectives have remained on the
¶ margins of international relations and security studies, in part because of ‘a
¶ view that feminist theorizing is always, necessarily, and most usefully done
¶ by women, for women, about women’
(Carver, 1996: 4). Blanchard (2003:
¶
1289) notes that the realm of security is ‘part of the elite
world of masculine¶ high politics’, and that the discipline of international relations has ‘only
¶ recently made a place for feminist analysis, and then only grudgingly’. Ann
¶
Tickner states that international relations creates ‘an inhospitable home from
¶ the more expansive local/global trajectories of feminist inquiry’ (Runyan,
¶
2002: 361). The realization that ‘realist hypermasculinity is responsible for
¶ the emergence and eventual militarization of the state system with its
¶ imagery of protector/protected, inside/outside, and order/anarchy – a situ-
¶ ation in which security for the few is bought at the cost of insecurity of the
¶ many’ (Zalewski and
Parpart, 1998: 87) appears to be difficult for main-
¶ stream scholarship to accept or engage with.
The ‘so what’ response of¶ militaries to gender awareness in security (SAP Canada, 2002: 20)

appears to¶ be shared by mainstream security scholars. The question is, then, as Anne
¶
Sisson
Runyan (2002: 361) states:
¶
Should feminists seek to be ‘at home’ in IR (that is, have their perspectives legitimated
¶ within the discipline) or should they ‘forget IR’ in order to build more hospitable
¶ local/global homes for the world’s inhabitants, especially those marginalized by the
¶ world politics-as usual?
¶
Feminist research and action will continue whether or not it is legitimated
¶ by the mainstream and malestream disciplines of international relations and
¶ security studies. It is our contention that, given the relevance of this research
¶ to security – and especially societal security through identity – it is time for¶ the mainstream to take notice.
¶
What Can Gender Analysis Offer?
¶
The normalization of women’s identity and experience speaks directly to the
¶ decisionmaking involved in determining who is secure and who is not.
¶
Security through gender identity demands a reorientation and restructuring¶ of the concept and of
international relations in general, enabling the research
¶ to
¶ foreground local/global politics; problematize statist thinking and organization; dis-
¶ rupt boundaries between First World and
Third World, public and private, and local
¶ and global; reveal interconnections among political, economic, cultural, social, and eco-
¶ logical spheres (Runyan, 2002: 362).
¶
Broadly speaking, this approach is taken by critical security studies in
¶ general, not just feminist research. However, as
Blanchard (2003: 1292) notes,
¶
166
¶
Security Dialogue
¶ vol. 35, no. 2, June 2004
¶
even ‘critical security discourse has generally invoked, but not engaged,
¶ feminist scholarship, and even approaches that imagined societal sectors of
¶ security have yet to take gender seriously’.
Feminist security literature¶ addresses the role of women (or lack thereof) in the ‘corridors of power’
¶
(Blanchard, 2003), as well as the gendered structure within IR theory itself.¶ Through gender, security becomes reconstructed on the basis of women’s¶ experiences of violence, interrelating violence on the local, national and¶ international levels, and eradicating
structural violence instead of primarily¶ focusing on the direct violence of war (Tickner, 1992;
Sylvester, 1994;
¶
Peterson & Runyan, 1999). Seen though these gender-aware lenses, security
¶ cannot remain the exclusive ‘widened’ fortress Wæver et al. have tried to
¶ create.
¶
This contention is further supported by the development that gender
¶ appears to have more meaning and relevance to security in practice than in
¶ the halls of academe (Blanchard, 2003:
1306). Bureaucracy and policy appear
¶ to be leading the way in recognizing the important linkages between gender
¶ and security. UN Security Council Resolution 1325 of October 2000 not only
¶ focuses on violence experienced by women, but also recognizes the impor-
¶ tant role a gender perspective has with regard to peacebuilding and conflict
¶ resolution – in other words, with regard to ensuring international peace
¶ and security. Further work by the UN on this agenda resulted in the 2002
¶ document
¶
Women, Peace and Security
¶
(United Nations, 2002).
This study
¶ acknowledges there is work to be done regarding the integration of women’s¶
security needs and a gender perspective in all aspects of international peace¶ and security.
UN Secretary-General Kofi A. Annan states that ‘women still
¶ form a minority of those who participate in peace and security negotiations,
¶ and receive less attention than men in postconflict agreements, disarma-
¶ ment and reconstruction’ (United Nations, 2002: ix). Addressing this means
¶ not only ensuring that women are at the table during negotiations, but also
¶ ensuring that a gender perspective informs all approaches to international
¶ peace and security.
¶
Gender awareness and linkages between women and security were the
¶ focus of the South Asia
Partnership Canada Forum Report (SAP Canada,
¶
2002). Women from Nepal, Bangladesh,
Pakistan and other South Asian
¶ countries expressed their views about what security means to women in the
¶
South Asian region. Among things that were discussed were sexual violence,
¶ domestic violence, economic deprivation and political isolation. Linkages
¶ were made between violence on the battlefield and economic insecurity and
¶ the increase of domestic violence at home (SAP Canada, 2002: 7, 8, 14, 17, 18).
¶
Some of these articulations of insecurity mirror the

experiences of women in
¶ what are considered to be ‘secure’ regions, such as the rates of domestic
¶ violence among US military personnel and their families, and increases in
¶ domestic violence just prior to and just after military deployment (Lutz &
¶
Gunhild Hoogensen & Svein
Vigeland Rottem
¶
Gender Identity and the Subject of Security
¶
Elliston, 2002). Gender perspectives not only allow for articulations of secu-
¶ rity needs by individuals, but illustrate the ways in which these security
¶ needs transcend some of the traditional barriers we have placed between
¶ individuals on the basis of north/south or secure/insecure divisions. As
¶ such, it is ‘a new dimension that women bring in the whole question of
¶ developing an alternative discourse of human security, alternate to the real-
¶ ism paradigm of power and security’ (SAP Canada,
2002: 7). And, as Heidi
¶
Hudson (2000: 79) states in her examination of human security needs in
¶
Africa, ‘nowhere more than in Africa is the security of all people linked to the
¶ security of the women of the continent’.
The critique of technostrategic thought is a prerequisite to policymaking.
Current technocratic thought inherently produces detached knowledge, which views humans as dots on a map. Their impacts of violence are inevitable in a world where humans are dehumanized.
Kwan 07 ( Mei-Po, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of
Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Department of Land Surveying and Geo-
Informatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Affecting Geospatial Technologies:
Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion, Volume 59/1, February 2007)
Geospatial technologies are designed, created, and used by humans, and a large proportion of their application is for understanding or solving problems of individuals and social groups.
Bod- ies, however, are often absent or rendered irrelevant in contemporary practices of GT.
This ‘‘omission of the body’’ occurs in two different but related senses ( Johnson 1990, 18).
First, although bodies are involved in the development and use of GT, there is little room in these technologies to allow for any role of the practitioner’s subjectivities, emotions, feelings, passion, values, and ethics. Second, despite the fact that a large number of bodies are affected
by the application of GT (e.g., people profiled by geodemographic application, and civilians who were annihilated as ‘‘collateral damage’’ by GPS-guided smart bombs that missed their
tar- gets), bodies are often treated merely as things, as dots on maps, or even as if they do not exist (Gregory 2004; Hyndman 2005). The dominant disembodied practices of GT, however, are contestable as they are largely the result of a particular understanding of science and
objectivity (Kwan 2002a). This historically specific and socially constructed notion of science, as Donna Haraway (1991) argues, is predicated on the positionality of a disembodied master subject with transcendent vision. With such disembodied and infinite vision, the knower is capable of achieving a detached view into a separate, completely knowable world. The kind of knowledge produced with such disem- bodied positionality denies the partiality of the knower, erases subjectivities, and ignores the power relations involved in all forms of
knowledge production (Foucault 1977). Haraway (1991, 189) calls this decorporealized vision
‘‘the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere.’’ Closely associated with this view of science is a gendered notion of knowledge production and academic scholarship that privileges
rational thought over ‘‘irrational’’ emotionality (Bennett 2004). This ‘‘marginalization of
emotion,’’ as Anderson and Smith (2001, 7) put it, ‘‘has been part of a gender politics of

research in which detachment, objectivity and rationality have been valued, and implicitly masculinized, while engagement, subjectivity, passion and desire have been devalued, and
frequently feminized.’’ Geography in particular has tended to ‘‘deny, avoid, suppress or downplay its emotional en- tanglements’’ (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 2005, 1). Yet, to paraphrase Anderson and Smith, there are times and places where lives are explicitly lived through pain, love, hate, anger, hope, fear, and passion. If the world is imbued with complex emotional geographies, GT practices are more relevant to real lives if they allow us to take the spatial, temporal, and social effects of feelings into account. To neglect how our research and social life are mediated by feelings and emotions is to exclude a key set of relations through
which lives are lived, societies made, and knowledge produced (Anderson and Smith 2001).