Drones as Machines of Sacrifice: Enframing the Zoological Components of On-Screen Warfare

Abstract

This article examines how drone warfare transforms the targeted region into a zone of indistinction governed by anthropocentrism. Alwazir’s ‘Yemen Inside Out’, Behram’s ‘Not a Bugsplat’ portrait, and Chishty’s drone art undo the dehumanising rhetoric of ‘Bugsplat’, the US drone software, by redefining the distance between what is being targeted on the ground and drone pilots conducting on-screen assaults from above. Theorising the relegation of right-bearing humanness to the marginalised status of bare insecthood, I draw on Heidegger’s notion of distance, nearness, and the disappearance of nearness between the viewer and what is being viewed on a screen. I then invoke Agamben’s understanding of nearness, as I demonstrate how the artwork I examine enacts a distinctive subversion of Bugsplat’s political anthropocentrism and a challenge to the portrayal of the loss of life as something as easily erasable as the splat that the killing of an insect leaves on a surface.

KEYWORDS:

• drones
• Heidegger
• Agamben
• bugsplat
• insecthood
• proximity
• distance

Introduction

Anthropocentric conceptualisations of the split between ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’ lie at the centre of the rhetoric of drone operations and the zone of indistinction it creates in order to legitimise its violence. Reperforming the underlying logic of the anthropocentric machine, the rhetoric of drone warfare ensures that the borders between ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’ coincide, overlap, and become indistinguishable. This indistinguishability is then deployed by war operations in order to reduce the value of sacrificed human lives to collateral animal otherness. It is within this context that the US Department of Defense defines collateral damage as the

unintentional or incidental injury or damage to persons or objects that would not be lawful military targets in the circumstances ruling at the time. Such damage is not unlawful so long as it is not excessive in light of the overall military advantage anticipated from the attack. (Crawford, 2013: 38)

In 2003, the US Defense Department developed a software programme which allowed drone operatives to preview, forecast, and evaluate how much damage a particular missile strike could cause and how much of this damage could, if questioned, be reframed as reasonable, inevitable, and therefore, justifiable. When observed on a screen, the human causalities of this software no longer appear as humans. Instead, they are rendered and reduced to blurred pixelated images resembling the silhouette of decaying insects when they are squashed against a flat glass surface.

The fact that ‘Bugsplat’ derives its name from this resemblance reveals the ideological hierarchy of power on which a digitally mediated battlefield is predicated. Here, the apparatus of drone warfare grants its operatives the power to render human subjects they capture on their screen into superfluous collaterals they can choose to sacrifice. Highlighting the sacrificial nature of drone warfare, Lauren Wilcox quotes a drone pilot as he describes a presuppositional hierarchy between a life below which can be sacrificed and a life above to whom lives can be sacrificed. The drone pilot, within this hierarchical organization of life, assumes the position of ‘the divine’: ‘I carried a pair of Hellfire Missiles beneath my wings but my task was not to engage the enemy directly … Sometimes I felt like God hurling thunderbolts from afar’ (Wilcox, 2015: 141).¹ Just like the ‘bloblike image of an irregular-shaped “probable damage field” that looks like insects hitting a car windshield at high speed’ (Cronin, 2018: 2), collateral damage as seen from above and afar is easily cleaned off a surface, easily erasable, and, thus, easily forgettable. The ‘probability’ of on-screen loss of life brings to the fore what I call the biodigitization of ‘the human’, a process through which I believe ‘bugsplat’ enacts a correlation between the superfluity of insecthood, the insecticisation of life captured within a frame, and the reframing of this loss as an expectable sacrifice to a god-like sovereign.

The discourse of this mode of monitoring life, in other words, performs a two-dimensional simulation of an unrecognisable non-human otherness. The screen it installs between pilots above and targets below reinforces what Allen Feldman describes as a ‘regime of detachability’ which governs the position drone pilots are able to assume in relation to their targets (Feldman, 2015: 19). However, in relation to Bugsplat, I believe that this regime operates beyond a pilot-target context. This is because the term ‘bugsplat’ itself carries within it an additional humanness-insecthood binary. The screen through which pilots operate this software not only ensures that pilots gaze at their targets only from a distance, thus reinforcing Feldman’s regime of detachability, but also re-enacts an anthropocentric split between the realms within which pilots and targets, ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’, exist. It functions as a barrier which prevents these two realms from overlapping: the realm within which ‘the human’ exists remains inaccessible and closed off to ‘the animal’. Therefore, the detachability drone regimes create is not only one between pilots and targets, but one between ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’, an additional element which Feldman overlooks. Just as the anthropocentric machine ensures that ‘the animal’ remains captured in and captivated by its immediate environment, the rhetoric of Bugsplat ensures that the target on the ground remains captured within a screen beyond which it is unable to engage with the pilot in the sky. If, for Heidegger, ‘the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture’ (Heidegger, 1977: 134), one particularly illuminating example of what this conquest looks like is drone warfare. Animal captivation, within my analysis of Bugsplat, undergirds drone rhetoric; the drone screen is no longer a physical divide between two modes of being, but is rather the primary site where this biodigitization of ‘the human’ takes place.

Heidegger’s critical exploration of the role technology plays in redefining the way we experience the modern world, however, does not take into account the unique interplay between technology and animal captivation. This interplay operates and results in a constellation of political frameworks which have come to govern and consolidate our perception of the world around us in ways which Heidegger himself did not anticipate. Heidegger conceives of a complete separation between the two realms which ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’ inhabit: world and environment. Where Heidegger does not envision any form of access which ‘the animal’ can be granted to the world of ‘the human’ is exactly the point where Giorgio Agamben introduces his concept of ‘the open’. This is not to suggest that Agamben’s in-between space of ‘the open’ is an alternative to Heidegger’s strict binary opposition, for Agamben’s theoretical programme ends up reperforming the very anthropocentrism he sets out to undo. Rather, I bring Heidegger and Agamben together in order to examine how the artwork of Rooj Alwazir, Noor Behram, and Mahwish Chishty is able to subvert the dehumanising rhetoric of drone warfare as they navigate the very interplay between technology and captivation, nearness and distance, humanness and insecthood.

While Heidegger’s main concern about the role of technology in re-presenting the world lies in what he conceives of as a dangerous distance between the world itself, its appearance to us, and how much of this world can be made available to us via a variety of mediums, Alwazir, Behram, and Chishty re-establish both a horizontal and a vertical nearness between drone pilots and targets on the ground. They bring viewer and viewed closer together through the power of enlarged, refocused, and unblurred photographs, going as far as subverting their positions of power. As Agamben steps in to locate ‘the open’ between Heidegger’s world and environment, with the ability to grant access to this space reserved solely for ‘the human’, Alwazir, Behram, and Chishty locate this ability, agency, and gesturality within what is being imaged, captivated within an image, and captured as an image. Because the invocation of decomposed insecthood within the term ‘bugsplat’ points to and is a symptom of an inherently violent apparatus of drone warfare, their work pursues an undoing of the drone’s biogititization of human life by not only subverting the enduring discourse of becoming and unbecoming insect, but also by creating a new realm of existence within which the human on the ground is able to step closer to and away from the drone, to gaze back at the drone, and to even touch the drone. Redefining the position of technology in relation to the on-screen images it generates as well as redrawing the distance between pilot and target, these artists remove ‘the human’ from the technologically-mediated zone of indistinction and relocate an abject animality back into the body of a dehumanising drone apparatus. The drone becomes ‘the animal’; drone pilots have now come to occupy the centre of the gaze. They are seen and are made to come face to face with the familiar human-ness which was intended to remain distanced behind a screen and captivated within it.

This article examines the way in which US drone operations have transformed their targeted region into a zone of indistinction, a landscape they govern by reproducing a logic of anthropocentrism which digitizes ‘the human’ into an insect. Alwazir’s ‘Yemen Inside Out’, Behram’s portrait in ‘Not a Bugsplat’, as well as Chishty’s drone art take up undoing the dehumanising rhetoric of this software as their main task. They do so by redefining the distance between what is being targeted on the ground and drone pilots conducting on-screen assaults from above. With this in mind, I draw specifically on Martin Heidegger’s notion of distance, nearness, and the disappearance of nearness between the viewer and what is being viewed on a screen as theorised in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics and The Question Concerning Technology. I then propose a comparison with Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of nearness, as I demonstrate the way in which the artwork I examine enacts both a distinctive subversion of the very political anthropocentrism which underlies the logic of ‘Bugsplat’, as well as a challenge to the portrayal of the loss of life as something as untraceable and as easily erasable as the splat that the killing of an insect leaves on a surface.

World as picture, screen as site of captivation

Originally published in 1954, The Question Concerning Technology is Heidegger’s critical exploration of the role technology plays in redefining the way we experience the modern world. Technology, for Heidegger, is not simply a machine, an apparatus, or an instrument; rather, it operates within a constellation of political frameworks which have come to govern and consolidate our perception of the world around us, thus developing what Heidegger views as a dangerous distance between the world itself, its appearance to us, and how much of this world can be made available to us via a variety of mediums. The danger for Heidegger lies specifically in what he terms ‘enframing’ by which he refers to the process underlying and securing the position of technology in relation to the world. Enframing enables technology to redefine both the world, our access to it, and our experience of and within it with the aim of adapting what is being enframed into a means for a specified, yet undisclosed, end. Enframing ‘banishes man into that kind of revealing which is an ordering. Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing’ (Heidegger, 1977: 27). The rise of technology has, therefore, reinforced perceptions of the modern world as enframed, as continually immersed in and compromised by the process of representing the world to a viewer as a picture on a screen. Heidegger goes as far as claiming that ‘the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture’ (Heidegger, 1977: 134). Drawing on Heidegger’s conceptualisation of enframing, I argue that on-screen violence enabled by drone warfare legitimises a process of military and algorithmic enframing whereby human life is reduced to a category of inconsequential biological existence, one which is made to appear on the screen of a drone as an ‘anonymous heating-emitting entity that merely radiates signs of life’ (Pugliese, 2013: 193). Therefore, what this means for Bugsplat as a software is that, within the frame of a drone screen, enframing conceals political life, empties it of all meaning, and presents it – to the drone operator – as a formless manifestation of a superfluous ‘radiant life’ (p. 193), one whose loss cannot be detected because the mark its erasure leaves is temporary, transient, and only temporarily traceable. Nor can it be interrogated, given that a declared end justifies the undeclared sacrifice of human life on the ground to a divine sovereign in the sky. For an operator, targets exist only within the screen through which they are seen. Their lives outside and beyond what the screen captures remains irrelevant.

It is in this way which I believe drone warfare mimics the operations of the anthropological machine. Human life captured by the screen is excluded from the political, but is simultaneously included within it in terms of its exclusion. The screen becomes the very site of this paradoxical exclusive-inclusive formulation, ensuring that lives captured by and within it are stripped of any ability to step beyond it, engage with it, or manifest any form of meaningful political existence. Enframing processes carried out by the operator’s screen, therefore, not only mimic those of the anthropological machine, but also consolidate a distance between two realms of existence – the pilot’s and the target’s – who do not merge or meet. They remain distant, and it is this very distance which Alwazir, Behram, and Chishty work to redraw.

Heidegger’s lecture series of 1929–1930 which he presented at the University of Freiburg were originally published in German in 1983 and later translated into The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1995). Undertaking a phenomenological analysis of divisions, splits, and spheres where an overlap between ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’ can occur, Heidegger theorises the possibility of political existence as opposed to biological existence, with the former being exclusively characteristic of ‘the human’, while the latter remains specific to ‘the animal’. According to Heidegger, central to this political-biological binary are three modes of existence: ‘[1.] the stone (material object) is worldless; [2.] the animal is poor in world; [3.] man is world-forming’ (emphasis in original) (Heidegger, 1995: 177). What this means is that, for Heidegger, the position of ‘the animal’ in relation to its environment is governed by inevitable captivation. The way in which ‘the animal’ engages with the environment is dictated by a set of receptors in a way which is premised on, ensures, and demonstrates the animal’s captivity within this limited realm of existence. Within Heidegger’s oppositional logic of being, the stone is denied access to the environment and cannot speak of having relation to it. This oppositional logic is, therefore, also a hierarchical rhetoric, one in which elements are ordered on the basis of how much ‘relationahip’ they can demonstrate and establish within their surroundings: ‘think, Heidegger asks, of how stones, animals, or human beings have access to the world. A stone has none’, while the animal ‘remains in its specific element in such a way as to be oblivious to it’ (Cernuschi, 2012: 59). This oblivion means that the relaitonship ‘the animal’ can establish with its environment is purely drive-orientated, one in which animals ‘live in such intense and incessant proximity to their environment and its stimuli that they do not see the existential forest for the environmental trees’ (De la Durantaye, 2009: 325). In this way, one can argue that the animal cannot take a step away from its environment to reflect upon it, for the ability to perform such a task, to see the ‘existential forest’, is exclusively human which is why, within this logic, ‘the human’ is granted its unique political existence.

It is in this sense that Giorgio Agamben speaks of a degree of ‘openness’ which remains beyond the reach of ‘the animal’ and outside the boundaries of its disinhibitors of and within its environment. Agamben’s unspecified and unspecifiable in-betweenness carries with it the possibility of a being-with, of co-belonging into a shared open, of establishing and coming to an understanding of a shared accessible open, and of being open into this newly launched common realm of existence. The Open professes to reimagine the processes it might take in order to prepare, to establish, or to quite literally ‘open up’ a space where stopping the anthropological machine becomes a possibility. This, I believe, remains one of the most significant theoretical undertakings of The Open, despite Agamben’s anthropocentric claim, at the very conclusion of the book, that suspending the suspension is a process which always starts within ‘the human’ and never within ‘the animal’, and that a visualisation of a progression into a form of being-with is something which only ‘the human’, benefiting from its exclusive world-forming qualities, is able to initiate. For Agamben, life outside ‘the human’ is a-political and ‘this caesura [and articulation between human and animal] passes first of all within man’, thus overlooking the possibility that these lives are already in possession of a critical political gesturality that does manifest itself outside the realm of ‘the human’.

The enframing of drone operations mimic these very splits between ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’ and their hierarchies of modes of presence in relation to an immediate environment and/or a world beyond. The distance the drone screen creates between targets on the ground and pilots behind a screen is reminiscent of the way in which anthropocentric openness remains exclusive to ‘the human’: Just as ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’ cannot be in the same world, drone warfare ensures that pilots and targets remain separated and that the killing is executed from a distance. No being with is possible because neither ‘the animal’ nor the target is able to transpose itself into the domain of ‘the human’ or the pilot. The artwork of Alwazir, Behram, and Chishty enables this being-with by eradicating the distance between pilots and targets on the ground. The nearness they create not only seeks to ‘confront the politics of verticality and remoteness’ by redrawing this distance (Parks, 2017: 154), but is also an anti-anthropocentric field of vision in which the act of gazing is reciprocated by the human captured within a screen. Alwazir and Behram re-establish this nearness when their photographed human subjectivities see and gaze back at the drone. Chishty achieves this nearness when her audience physically steps closer to capture the miniature drone. The audience can see the drone more closely, and can also touch it. While ‘drone technologies are more like 3-D printers than video games’ of life below (136), Chishty’s miniatures convert the drone itself into a 3-D print to which the target comes closer. However, while ‘the drone’s mediating work happens extensively and dynamically through the vertical field’ (136), Chishty’s artistic confrontation of this visual hegemony happens through not only the vertical, but also the horizontal field.

The animalising gaze of the drone mimics the regime of anthropocentrism as theorised by Heidegger and Agamben. The ability to distance oneself from the realm in which they exist is reserved to the operator of the drone, while, by contrast, the manifestness of being of the subject of the gaze is defined only by its relation to the frame of the screen within which it remains captivated. Just as ‘the human’ can distance itself from the world to reflect upon it, to be open to it, the drone gives its operator a certain distance from the target under surveillance. While, this distance is accompanied by ‘a greater sense of intimacy than is possible from conventional aircraft’, this intimacy, according to Derek Gregory, is accompanied by a consistent refusal to establish a ‘familiarity with the “human terrain”’ of targeted sites (Gregory, 2012: 200). This gaze of the drone only looks for ‘familiar’ US soldiers on the ground and casts ‘non-familiarity’ into the realm of collateral otherness, ‘the undifferntiated realm of the carcass’ (Pugliese, 2020: 43), as Joseph Pugliese calls it. Gregory quotes a predator pilot commenting on this sense of familiarity: ‘I knew people down there […]. Each day through my cameras I snooped around and came to recognise the figures of our soldiers and marines’ (Gregory, 2012: 200). This discourse of intimate familiarity, as opposed to distant non-familiarity, places troops on the ground and targets on the ground within an oppositional logic. It enables a hierarchical regime of openness which favours drone operators, one which not only ‘encompasses the entire range of sensorial capabilities relevant to the conduct of war, but also increasingly circumvents the human subject and “sees” without any need for visual mediations’ (Bousquet, 2018: 11). When ‘seen’, the animalised target here is pictured ‘bare’ of its ethico-political value. It exhibits a biological presence, manifesting a form of being only within the frame of the screen.

I conceive of the insistent technologisation of biological existence within the gaze of the drone as a process which is deeply immersed in an instrumental reorganisation of human world and animal environment. Drone operations install a hierarchical regime of being and place lives on both sides of the screen within it. The drone’s beastialisation of the existing identity of what is being captured by and within the frame of its screen places human subjectivity within a biological mode of existence, therefore reducing it to the status of an animal captivated within its environment. The drone, in this way, enacts the ‘withholding of the possibility of the manifestness of beings, a withholding which is essential and not merely an enduring or temporary one’ (Heidegger, 1995: 259). In other words, within the gaze of the drone, ‘the human’ is captivated within a technologically mediated animal environment where it is assigned an otherness – here, in the form of the insecthood implied in the term ‘bugsplat’ – in relation to a detached human spectator behind the screen.

Reimagined geographies, redrawn proximities

The advent of the Obama presidency brought about and coincided with a significant shift in the way the US administers and conducts activities of ‘counterterrorism’ beyond its borders. Under the Bush administration, counterterrorism policies were underpinned predominantly by the proliferation of a consistent and systematic recourse to a public discourse on pre-emptive or retroactive ‘regime change’ wars, as well as on indefinite detention, torture, and other gestures of empirical violence carried out in the name of ‘enhanced interrogation’ in numerous US prisons abroad, such as Abu Gharib. Within the counterterrorism policy implemented during Obama’s presidency, subjects designated as suspects are no longer simply an abject, world-impoverished body. Rather, ‘the US drone program, with its “Kill, don’t capture” dictate’ means that they are less likely to be indefinitely detained than to be remotely identified, targeted, and assassinated (Pugliese, 2020: 169). With the increased deployment of drones against suspected militants in countries such as Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan, US drone assassinations, euphemised as targeted killings, have become a lawful world-making exception which has, so far, largely escaped international scrutiny and accountability.

The implementation of classified drone campaigns by the US as one paradigmatic instrument in its so-called war on terror in Pakistan has been largely conducted against the former semi-autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Frequently hailed for its ‘surgical’ ability to sight and remotely target militants, Obama’s covert drone programme had, by the end of 2015, and according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, ‘carried out 421 strikes, killing between 2472 and 3990 people and injuring between 1167 and 1747 others’ (Gregory, 2017: 28). These drone operations significantly benefited not only from FATA’s geographical proximity to the national borders of Pakistan, but also from the relationship this region had with Pakistan’s central government.² Existing simultaneously within the national borders of Pakistan but outside its constitution, FATA became ‘the perfect testing ground for a remote-controlled military strategy […] where violations of international law and civilian casualties go mostly uninvestigated’ (Shah, 2012). In fact, it is only after some local and international human rights and civil society organisations intensified their efforts to highlight the aftermath of indiscriminate drone strikes in the region and increased their pressure on the Pakistani government to formally address the American downplaying of the number of the civilian casualties that the latter began to pursue the legal justifications within which overriding imperatives, rationalities, and techniques legitimising the consigning of human life into the realm of dispensable life were anchored, as well as those by which the imaged space of the borderland was relegated into a state of exception.

The power to render the region of the borderlands into a state of exception is mediated not only by enduring articulations of political life within it as an expendable form of life hollowed of all meaning, but also by biopolitical processes of capturing life within an infinite inexistence. While the designation of lives as such begins as a decision which carries with it no possibility of redress, the impact it has upon the lives of its victims remains unchanged. These victims do not simply occupy the position of a bare life. Nor do they remain captured somewhere between life and death. Rather, they are forced to inhabit a virtual realm beyond both the living and the dead, one which is outside even bare life. A sovereign frequently mediates this forced fictionalisation of life by foregrounding an understanding that lives can be easily eradicated since they were never experienced or recognised as real in the first place. This supposedly persuasive formulation, however, is compromised, if not outperformed, by the literary and artistic extension of digitally fictionalised life into the real, thus turning these creative expressions into a counter narrative and an afterlife of political erasure when it is the very extinguishing of life that the sovereign seeks.

It is against this discourse of virtual collateral damage that Noor Behram works to produce a photographic memorialisation of lives rendered unliveable by so-called precision strikes, as well as a visual campaign against and critique of the abjectification of aerial space. Having visited seventy drone strike sites and documented over six hundred victims, Behram ‘estimate[s] that for every dead extremist there are some 15 civilian victims’ (Kazim, 2011). Wired obtained a number of exclusive photographs by Behram each of which is dated, accompanied by sufficient context provided by Behram himself, and based upon his reflections and observations upon arrival at the site (Ackerman, 2012), ‘thus making Berhram’s work much more situated, personal and embodied. His disclosure is an act in its own right, a relatively undetached account of what he saw and felt as he arrived at each scene. Behram is a subject in this war’ (Walters, 2014: 290). While Behram’s campaign brings to the fore the ability and power of the photograph to counter ‘remote killing with a visual form that speaks of closeness and immediacy’ (Dorrian, 2014: 54), I believe that this closeness affirms further political implications within which the artwork I examine in this article is anchored. For Behram, the aim is not just to bring a spectator closer to the vision of victims on the ground, but rather to illuminate the fact that the drone itself is captured within the vision of those it images, including that of Behram himself. In other words, the artwork in question does not simply pose a challenge to drone rhetoric though the power of the portrait, but through an act of capturing – though the portrait – of the power to see and gaze back at the drone. The closeness I speak of is, therefore, one between the vision of the drone from above and vision of its victim from below, for what is at stake here is not the visibility of the target itself, but the ability to render the invisible drone visible, to capture it within its own field of vision. Chishty, on the other hand, is able to rethink and arrive at this closeness not through the power of photography, but by creating a space in which the victim is invited to physically step closer to the drone. I examine the political implications of Chishty’s rethinking of closeness in further detail later in this article.

The closeness through which Behram’s victims are able to gaze back is most evident in his photograph of the three children at the drone strike on Dande Darpa Khel, and particularly in the way the photograph has been reimagined. The three siblings Behram features lost their parents and their seven-year-old brother, Syed Wali Shah, in a drone strike. The three siblings stand side by side and hold what appears to be rubble from their home or exploded shrapnel up to the camera. In April 2014, a group of artists installed an enlarged portrait of the older sister in Behram’s three siblings photo. Challenging the insensitivity of images produced by the drone software Bugsplat, the artists’ Not a Bugsplat installation sees and gazes back at the drone hovering above and aiming to remain unseen. What is now captured by a drone camera is no longer ‘the literal decomposition of what were once human subjects and their more-than-human relations into undifferentiated necropolitical substance’ (Pugliese, 2020: 179), as implied by the term ‘bugsplat’. Behram’s camera reimagines the vacant geography of the ground and recaptures the intelligibility of a human face whose gaze renders the drone visible. The perpetrator is now ‘seen’. The installation, for this reason, is designed to be captured by satellites. ‘Not a Bugsplat’, therefore, resists the objectification of a collateral other. It produces a counter-narrative of being enframed ‘as an empty placeholder, a possible target that is defined by conditions rather than fixed identities’ (Stubblefield, 2020: 121).

In fact, the way in which photographed faces reclaim targeted urban geographies, particularly in the case of Alwazir’s work, reinstates their relations with the city and enacts a reinclusion of their lives into the realm of the polis. Agamben speaks of the exclusion of life from the realm of polis, that is, the socio-political city, and asks ‘in what way does bare life dwell in the polis?’ (Agamben, 1998: 8). Alwazir’s work, as I see it, answers this question by bringing a dehumanised life back into the centre of the city of Sanaa, thus reconfiguring the divide the drone operates between biological and political life, on the one hand, and depoliticised sites and the political city, on the other hand. While Agamben believes that ‘the living being […] dwells in the polis by letting its own bare life be excluded, as an exception, within it’ (8), Alwazir reaffirms that the political body behind the gaze of the drone, represented here by the drone operator, as well as the insecthood into which this gaze casts its objects, is what in fact remains external to the polis.

Rooj Alwazir is an independent Yemeni film and documentary maker, artist, journalist, and photographer based in the US. Daughter of two exiled parents, her work grapples with the imaginative recreation of Yemeni land and cityscapes, as well as with the damage the decade-long war on Yemen has wrought onto the country and its people. In 2011, she co-founded Support Yemen, a non-profit media and art collective which brings together a small group of professionals from a range of fields, including filmmaking, research, writing, and photography, with the aim of using various forms of art to tell stories about and from within Yemen.

For Alwazir, uninscribing the geopolitical currency assigned to ‘the human’ within a drone warfare context entails, first and foremost, accounting for the deliberately obscured human subjectivities. This is most evident in the way she has frequently used her work to speak up against the US bombardment of Yemen, particularly using drones. Her ‘Landscape’ series includes an artistic reproduction of a vast and desolate area of land which she photographed and onto which she projected a repeating pattern of bananas, thus forcing the reader to come closer to the photo in order to be able to have a better view of the aftermath of the bombardment which has taken place there.³ Refocusing the gaze of the drone back onto the Yemini lives on the ground, her ‘Yemen Windows’ shows a drone-view of a land being closely surveilled and targeted from above. In this artwork, Alwazir replaces the apartment buildings of this residential area with enlarged screen-like house windows turned upwards to face the drone. ‘Time, Space, and Apples’ superimposes a picture of an apple against that of a drone, in what I believe to be Alwazir’s artistic interpretation of Apple’s refusal to offer a drone-tracking app created by Josh Begley and called Drones+ through its App Store. However, Alwazir’s creation also features a gesture of defiance against ‘the apple of the eye’, represented here by the gaze of the drone.

Using the power of photography to resist the US drone programme against the Yemeni people, Alwazir organised the Inside Out Sanaa art project as a way to create an alternative space in which counter narratives of recognisability can be told from inside Yemen and shared with the world. The project displayed enlarged black and white portraits of 233 ordinary Yemenis on the walls of Sanaa, thus not only revealing the faces of the people forced to live under a dominant narrative of dispensability and a constant threat of death from above, but also disrupting the field of a drone’s distant vision, now resensitised and refacialised by bringing the legibility of the face of ‘the human’ back into its focus. These subjectivities are no longer easily erasable bugsplats, but are active agents whose photographs have transformed the urban landscape of Sanaa from a purely biological zone of sacrifice into one which captures and transmits the human agency of its subjects. In this way, the process of capturing ‘the human’ within the screen of a drone is accompanied by another process in which Alwazir artistically refacialises what the drone reduces into an empty zone of indistinction. Displaying these portraits, Inside Out Sanaa enables targeted human subjectivities to pose as a photographic counter-narrative to the blurred images created of them.

While the counter-politics of Alwazir and Behram are premised upon and result in a photographic reinstatement of human subjectivity, Chishty’s counter politics carries with it a problematisation of Heidegger’s theorisation of distance and nearness.⁴ Chishty is a contemporary Pakistani artist who invokes the truck-art genre from Pakistani culture: ‘she refracts the drone’s signature shadows and lines through elegant embellishments that mimic the vibrant floral patterns and calligraphic folk art used to adorn the long-haul trucks in Pakistan’ (Kapadia, 2019: 4). She combines poetic expressions with colourful intricate patterns to paint the drones in a way which, in some of her paintings, makes them look less like killer machines, and more like insects, thus producing a ‘mode of vision through which the human eye is able to take on an animal dimension’ (Stubblefield, 2020: 110). Insecthood, in this way, is no longer a mode of being specific to drone casualties, but is rather a dominant feature of the drone itself. While ‘Not a Bugsplat’ subverts a drone’s vision by bringing the unnamed child and the drone operator to share the same field of vision, of what is being ‘seen’, Chishty’s drone art series, with its miniature paintings, removes the dividing drone screen between the pilot and the victim, thus bringing the onlooker closer to the painted drone and reducing the distance between the two. Establishing not only a new nearness between the two modes of existence, but also imagining a mode of ‘being with’, Chishty points out that:

Intricacy and patterns all are a way for me to lure the audience into the work, get closer to the work, get more intimate with it. I see the use of bright colour almost like it would be in nature, like [the fact that] brightly coloured animals are more deadly. It is hinting on that aspect of the sinister, the deadly side of what drones actually are (Pong and Maxwell, 2020).

This aspect of animality is an articulation of a manifestness of being that would have been inconceivable within a Heideggerian reading of the split between human and animal, human world and animal environment. If, according to Chamayou, a mode of a ‘the more limited the distance, the more the co-presence is complete thanks to the number of senses that are involved’ in a zone of existence within which humans and animals coexist (Chamayou, 2013: 248), then Chishty’s re-creation of nearness enables an additional sense: that of touch. Chishty’s reimagination of a compelling nearness, of a being with, produces a manifestness that is no longer exclusively human or exclusively animal. Rather, it produces a ‘mode of being that must be grasped [and that] is neither disclosed nor closed off, so that being in relation with it cannot properly be defined as a true relationship, as a having to do with’ (Agamben, 2002: 54). In other words, Chishty’s drone art relocates the two in an Agambenian open space between them, relocates insecthood into the drone itself, and, more importantly, gives the onlooker the ability to step away from the realm of what is being seen as an insect in order to reflect upon it as a human. The intricate designs Chishty employs here are not a reflection of her desire to aestheticise killer machines, but an attempt to create ‘what she called a “second skin” for the drone’ (Kapadia, 2019: 4), one which invites the onlooker to come closer in order to be able to observe and reflect upon the intricacy with which they are presented. Through this invitation to come closer, the onlooker is, therefore, no longer captivated within their environment. What Chishty’s drone art is able to demonstrate here is the extent to which ‘the zoological component proves capable of not only exceeding these attempts at capture, but also destabilizing the anthropomorphic base of this narrative in the process’ (Stubblefield, 2020: 103). However, Chishty is able to achieve a subversive repositioning of human-animal, drone-target relations not only through the incorporation of Stubblefield’s ‘zoological component’, but also through relocating the ability to gaze back into the sphere of the rehumanized target on the ground. In fact, in this case, the targeted human is no longer on the ground; nor is the drone thought of by a targeted human as too high to see or even touch. Inviting the audience to observe the intricate details of her artwork more closely, Chishty has recreated a sphere where distance between the drone and the target is minimized both vertically and horizontally.

The ability of Rooj Alwazir, Noor Behram, and Mahwish Chishty to capture the asymmetrical nature of drone operations and produce a counternarrative of it is reinforced by the discourse their artwork carries around questions of nearness, distance, and the production of a range of modes of being in the ‘world’ and in relation to those who have the power to see from above. As opposed to spatial, geographic, territorial, and temporal constraints associated with more traditional forms of warfare, drone technologies are able to, from home, shift the battlefield abroad, while legitimising the killing of large numbers of civilians under a tenuous narrative of targeted killings and precision strikes. The advocation of these narratives results in and is predicated upon what appears to be an effective reframing of drone technologies into a debate between global violence being fought at home and global violence being fought abroad from home by surveilling a human figure, entrapping their subjectivity within an animalising gaze of a drone, and ‘antiseptically’ killing them from a distance without damage to home (Pugliese, 2013: 193).

Examining the work of Alwazir, Behram, and Chishty in light of philosophical accounts of nearness and animality not only presents an understanding of the points at which Agamben departs from Heidegger, but, more importantly, illuminates the reductive discourses of the world as drone image and is a critique of the extra-juridical processes of imposing enduring anthropocentric hierarchies of power through human-animal dichotomies. The creation of a nearness between these dichotomies, as I have demonstrated in this article, necessitates and establishes new modes of being, shared visions of being-with, and inclusive propositions of openness.

Notes

1 Wilcox quotes US Air Force officer Matt J. Martin who published Predator: The Remote-Control Air War Over Iraq and Afghanistan: A Pilot’s Story which he dedicates ‘To the men and women of the United States Air Force: unblinking, persistent and always on target’, thus highlighting the all-seeing, omnipresence of a drone’s vision. Watching life below, Martin ‘felt a bit like an omnipotent god with a god’s seat above it all’ (Martin, 2010: 121).

2 For an analysis of the colonial legacies and security policies shaping Pakistan’s FATA region from its establishment in 1947 up to its merger with the neighbouring Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in 2018, see Yousaf (2021). For an exploration of constitutional, economic, political, and administrative reforms shaping the relationship between FATA and Pakistan’s central government, see Ali and Rehman (2013. ).

3 ‘Landscapes’, along with more of Alwazir’s work, is available to view on her website Rooj Alwazir, <roojalwazir.com> [accessed 03 July 2022].

4 Chishty’s Drone Art series is available to view at http://www.mahachishty.com/drone-art-series/ (accessed November 11, 2020).