08 Pugliese FN

PROSTHETICS OF LAW AND THE ANOMIC VIOLENCE OF DRONES Joseph Pugliese*

This article examines the relationship between law and technology in the context of the use of drones by the United States in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. Specifically, I examine the relation of law to lethal unmanned aerial combat technologies (drones), which conduct war and killing at a distance, in the context of two seemingly opposed figures: the parenthetical and the prosthetic. The parenthetical relation of law to technology operates to suspend the relation between the executioner who manipulates the killing technology of the drone from the fact of the resultant execution. In this scenario, law is conceived of in the most radically instrumental of understandings: it enables and legitimates the execution while simultaneously suspending the connection between the doer and the deed. The prosthetic relation of law to technology is, conversely, premised on the indissociable articulation between technology and its seeming opposite: the biological human subject. Through a series of instrumental mediations, the biological human actor becomes coextensive with the drone that she or he pilots from the remote ground control station. I examine the use of drones by the United States in the context of the war on terror in order to bring into focus the mutation of robotic war into a type of normalised civic practice. I close the article by refocusing on the relation between law and technology, and in the process I attempt to extrapolate a general theory of law as prosthetic.

The categories of ‘law’ and ‘technology’ would seem to be at once noninterchangeable and conceptually distinct. In reductive terms, law can be said simply to act instrumentally on its various technologised agents. In this essay, I problematise this dualistic understanding by theorising the relation of law and technology as indissociably prosthetic. My theorisation of law as prosthetic will be situated in the context of the use of unmanned aerial combat vehicles, such as Predator and Reaper drones, by the United States in its pursuit and extermination of so-called ‘insurgents’ and ‘terror suspects’. Theorising law as prosthetic – that is, as inextricably entwined with technology from its originary enunciation through the technology of language – enables the disclosure of complex dynamics of power, disavowal and violence. *

Discipline Leader of Cultural Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University. My sincere thanks to Constance Owen for her generous, invaluable and tireless research assistance.

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The US government has argued that the use of drones in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan has been legitimated by both domestic and international law. In the words of Harold Hongju Koh, Legal Adviser, US Department of Justice: [I]t is the considered view of this [Obama] Administration – and it has certainly been my experience during my time as Legal Adviser – that US targeting practices, including lethal operations conducted with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, comply with all applicable law, including the laws of war. The United States agrees that it must conform its actions to all applicable law. As I have explained, as a matter of international law, the United States is in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda, as well as the Taliban and associated forces, in response to the horrific 9/11 attacks, and may use force consistent with its inherent right to self-defence under international law. As a matter of domestic law, Congress authorised the use of all necessary and appropriate force through the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). These domestic and international legal authorities continue to this day.1

The use of drones in the United States’ waging of its war on terror has dramatically increased under the Obama administration: ‘From 2004 to 2008, Bush authorized 42 drone attacks, according to the New American Foundation. The number has more than quadrupled under President Obama – to 180 at last count.’ 2 Koh’s invocation of ‘domestic and legal authorities’ operates to provide the ‘legal guidance’ that will justify the use of drones as lethal technologies that kill at a distance. Drone strikes are conducted both by conventional military personnel and the CIA. The CIA, in the execution of its own drone program, is operating effectively as a paramilitary organisation. John A Rizzo, who served as the CIA’s acting general counsel, helped draft the protocols for such lethal attacks. Requests for targeted killings are sent to the CIA’s Counter-terrorism Centre, in northern Virginia: where lawyers – there are roughly 10 of them, says Rizzo – write a cable asserting that an individual poses a grave threat to the United States. The CIA cables are legalistic and carefully argued. If the targeted killing is approved, the general counsel signs off and adds the term ‘concurred.’ Rizzo has been quoted as boasting ‘How many law professors have signed off on a death warrant’.3

1

Koh (2010), p 11.

2

Mckelvey (2011). Cited in Mckelvey (2011). Despite Rizzo’s invocation of legal procedure, the CIA conduct of drone strikes and executions has been questioned by members of the international legal community: see ‘CIA May Face Prosecution for Drones’ Raids in Pakistan’, PressTV, 24 March 2010, http://edition.presstv.ir/mobile/detail.aspx?id=121594. The American Civil Liberties Union has asked, through a Freedom of Information Act request, for a disclosure of the CIA’s role in drone strikes and executions, only to be told by US District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer that: ‘The CIA is not legally required to inform the public

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As Dana Priest and William Arkin have observed: Rizzo, the lawyers at the CTC [Counterterrorism Centre], and the head of the National Clandestine Service (formerly the CIA Directorate of Operations) would act as judge and jury on these terrorism files … without a hearing, without giving the targeted man a chance to refute the information or even to admit guilt and surrender.4

In the words of one former senior US intelligence official, interviewed on the condition of anonymity by The Washington Post, the CIA drone program has turned the agency ‘“into one hell of a killing machine” … Blanching at his choice of words, he quickly offered a revision: “Instead say, ‘one hell of an operational tool’.”’ 5 The deployment of drones across different nations against which the United States is not at war, including Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, has officially been legitimated by a ‘domestic policy of anticipatory selfdefense’.6 Anticipatory self-defence effectively gives the US administration carte blanche to conduct war wherever it ‘anticipates’ its suspect targets might lurk. Predator and Reaper drones have been represented by the administration as ideal attack weapons ‘in dealing with terrorist groups in ungoverned places of the world’.7 The Orientalist trope of the lawless and ungoverned Other has lost none of its force or salience in the opening decade of the twenty-first century as the customary way of legitimising imperial incursions in places such as Afghanistan and Pakistan.8 Indeed, the international law doctrine of territorial sovereignty is conveniently reduced by the US administration’s apologists to a mere ‘diplomatic fiction’ that cannot be applied equally to all nation-states. Such apologists duly discount the possibility of drone attacks in, for example: London or Paris [as] what is justified in the ungoverned regions of Somalia or Yemen is a different matter applied to places under the rule of law such as our friends and allies. The United States is not going to undertake a targeted killing in London. The diplomatic fiction of the ‘sovereign equality’ of states makes it difficult to say, as about the use of unmanned drones to kill suspected terrorists.’ PressTV, 11 September 2011, http://edition.presstv.ir/mobile/detail.aspx?=198466. 4

Priest and Arkin (2011).

5

Tate and Miller (2011).

6

Banks (2011), p 5.

7

Anderson (2010). The issue of the violation of sovereignty in the context of Pakistan is complicated by what Priest and Arkin (2011) term ‘an elaborate Kabuki dance between Islamabad and Washington. The Pakistani government had given CIA approval for such strikes as long as they were kept secret – which they never were because Pakistanis and local journalists sooner or later discovered the ruins, and the wrong people, civilians, were often killed. For internal political reasons, the Pakistani government usually publicly condemned the very strikes they had approved each time one became known.’

8

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GRIFFITH LAW REVIEW (2011) VOL 20 NO 4 a matter of international law that, yes, Yemen is different from France, but of course that is true.9

Postcolonial legal scholars have indeed drawn attention to the historical foundation of the discipline of international law in the violent moment of the colonial encounter. In his genealogical tracking of the historical emergence of international law in Francisco de Vitoria’s jurisprudential work on the relations between imperial Spain and its Indian colonies, Antony Anghie notes that: ‘The vocabulary of international law, far from being neutral, or abstract, is mired in this history of subordinating and extinguishing alien cultures.’ 10 The Orientalist logic that enables the discursive practices of imperial intervention is perhaps nowhere more graphically evidenced than in the US military’s neologism ‘AfPak’ to describe the ‘zone of hostilities’ in which it is conducting its current war.11 AfPak, in keeping with its Orientalist determinations, homogenises and collapses two different nations, Afghanistan and Pakistan, into one undifferentiated amalgam. The conceptual flattening and erasing of difference that operates in this geopolitical neologism functions to legitimate the conduct of war across the terrain of both sovereign nations – Afghanistan and Pakistan – as though they were one. The imperial position which argues that target nations can have their sovereignty violated with impunity – because their territory is undifferentiated, malleable and always ‘open’ to the entitlements of empire – is clearly evidenced by current US doctrine: One legal view (the traditional view and that presumably taken by the Obama administration …) is that we are in armed conflict. Wherever the enemy goes, we are entitled to follow and attack him as a combatant. Geography and location – important for diplomatic reasons and raising questions about the territorial integrity of states, true – are irrelevant to the question of whether it is lawful to target under the laws of war; the war goes where the combatant goes.12

David Glazier, Professor of Laws of War, challenges this view: ‘it is hard to believe that many of the strikes conducted [in Pakistan and Yemen] realistically satisfy the imminency requirements established by international law.’13 Yet, precisely as the US drone program expands to Somalia and the ‘essentially ungoverned lands of the Gulf of Aden’, the House Armed Forces Committee of the US Congress is proposing a new Defence Bill that ‘would establish an expansive standard for the categories of groups that the United States may single out for military action, potentially making it easier for the United States to kill large numbers of low-level militants in places like 9

Anderson (2010).

10

Anghie (1999), p 104.

11

Anderson (2011), p 4.

12

Anderson (2011), p 4.

13

Glazier (2011), np.


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Somalia.’ 14 In keeping with the geopolitical latitudes of imperial power, this ‘expansive standard’ appears to be without determinate borders or circumscribed limits: ‘In an interview, Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said he would support the House version [of the bill] and that he would go further … “This is a worldwide conflict without borders.”’ 15 Taking my cue from the US doctrine that ‘the war goes where the combatant goes’, my focus in this article is on examining the relation of law to lethal unmanned aerial combat technologies that conduct war and killing at a distance. I proceed to examine this relation in the context of two seemingly opposed figures: the parenthetical and the prosthetic. I argue that the parenthetical relation of law to technology is premised on a topical hiatus that disassociates the executioner who manipulates the killing technology of the drone from the facticity of the resultant execution. In this scenario, law is conceived of in the most radically instrumental of understandings: it enables and legitimates the execution while simultaneously suspending the connection between the doer and the deed. The prosthetic relation of law to technology is, conversely, premised on the indissociable articulation between technology (understood in both the hardware and software senses) and its seeming opposite: the biological human subject. Through a series of instrumental mediations, the biological human actor becomes coextensive with the drone that she or he pilots from the remote ground control station. I close the article by refocusing on the relation between law and technology, and in the process I attempt to extrapolate a general theory of law as prosthetic. Drones The US military deploys two types of drones in the conduct of its war in Afghanistan: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), used for reconnaissance and surveillance purposes; and Unmanned Aerial Combat Vehicles (UACV), equipped with missiles that can destroy designated targets. In this essay, I focus exclusively on UACV drones. Before I proceed, however, I want to offer a brief overview of these technologies. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles can be traced back to World War I. It was during the period of the Vietnam War, however, that they began to be deployed in an intensive manner for purposes of surveillance and reconnaissance. The contemporary development of unmanned aerial vehicles was enabled under Section 845 of Public Law 103-160, Section 845; this law ‘gave DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] broad authority to carry out prototype projects that are directly relevant to weapons or weapon systems’.16 The arming of unmanned aerial vehicles with missiles designed to liquidate designated targets only occurred in the context 14

Savage (2011).

15

Savage (2011).

16

Yenne (2004), pp 71–72.

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of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. On 3 November 2002, a Predator drone equipped with two Hellfire missiles destroyed a car allegedly carrying a senior al-Qaeda leader in the Marib desert of Yemen. 17 This attack enunciated a new paradigm in the conduct of robotic aerial warfare, as it effectively marked the possibility of killing at a distance without ever putting the human subject controlling the plane at risk. Predator drones are unmanned planes equipped with sensors, cameras and radar that can identify targets through smoke, fog, haze and clouds. They are also equipped with laser-guidance technology and two Hellfire missiles; the laser designator in the nose of the plane locks on to a target and guides the trajectory of the missile once it is launched.18 Predator drones are usually launched from a military base close to the theatre of war but they can actually be controlled from a Ground Control Station thousands of miles away. Many of the Predator drones deployed in the war in Afghanistan are controlled from air force bases such as Creech or Nellis, located over 7000 miles away in Nevada. Predator drones are controlled by a pilot and two sensor operators from their Ground Control Station. The pilot navigates the plane while the two sensor operators control the plane’s cameras and sensors, firing the drone’s missiles when it locks on to a target. Schematically, the drone’s communication system resembles a triangulated structure. The pilot and sensor operators transmit their control signals from their Ground Control Station up to a satellite in space that, in turn, amplifies and transmits these signals down to the drone and vice versa. The violent dimensions of this robotic killing technology are underscored by the Predator drone crew’s mission statement, as succinctly articulated by Colonel Eric Mathewson, Predator drone squadron commander: ‘Most mission statements are long, complicated and italicized. Mine was three words: “Kill [Expletive] Heads.”’ 19 Predator drone crews have emblazoned this mission statement – ‘KFH’ – on their unit letterhead. Parenthetical Technologies of Law of War In her profound meditation on political economies of violence, Hannah Arendt writes that extreme forms of violence are ‘never possible without instruments’.20 ‘Violence,’ Arendt notes, ‘is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues.’21 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 17

Zaloga (2008), p 4.

18

See David (2008), pp 5 and 13.

19

Jaffe (2010).

20

Arendt (1970), p 42.

21

Arendt (1970), p 51.


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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”’.23 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.’24

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 22

MacGregor (2006).

23

Nietzsche (1969), p 45.

24

Nietzsche (1969), p 45.

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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. 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-technomediatic modernity’ and its celebration of such things as ‘live’ satellitetelevisual transmissions, Jacques Derrida sardonically remarks that ‘we should never forget that this “live” is not an absolute live, but only a live effect [un effect de direct], an allegation of “live”’.25 It 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 “différance”.’ 27 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: 25

Derrida (2002), p 40.

26

Shorter Oxford Dictionary (1978), p 48.

27

Derrida (2002), p 129.


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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 information from sensor to shooter almost immediately.28

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”’.29 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’.30 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’.31 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 28

Cited in Yenne (2004), p 6; author’s emphasis.

29

Fagan (2011), p 8.

30

Serres (1996), p 67.

31

Deleuze (1993), p 30.

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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.’ 32 ‘Another talked about flying missions in Afghanistan, and then getting home in time to watch reruns of the TV sitcom Friends.’ 33 ‘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 teletechno mediations that, in turn, transmute the ‘real’ into Baudrillardian simulacra.35 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’.36 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. 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 atomisation and incineration of bodies by drone missiles are called by the military ‘Kill TV’,37 and the material violence inflicted on human targets becomes merely 32

Cited in Singer (2009), np.

33

Singer (2009), p 330.

34

Cited in Singer (2009), p 331. See Baudrillard’s (2000) The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, which maps the transmutation of the ‘real’ into simulacra in the context of the Gulf War, even as it indulges in the most strident forms of Orientalism.

35

36 37

Singer (2009), p 330. Epstein (2011), p 1. Epstein’s report discloses the manner in which Australia’s special forces in Afghanistan are now also at the drone consoles conducting drone executions.


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‘kinetic activity’,38 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].’ 39 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.’ 40 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.’41 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”.’ 42 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?43

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 38

Ackerman (2010).

39

Cited in Singer (2009), p 367.

40

Derrida (2002), p 80.

41

Derrida (2002), p 79.

42

Associated Press (2008).

43

Alston and Shamsi (2010).

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Martin Heidegger, ‘is the conquest of the world as picture.’44 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.’ 46 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.’ 47 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’.48 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, 44

Heidegger (1977), p 134.

45


46


47

Heidegger (1977), pp 167–68.

48



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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.49

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.50 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 lowlife organisms that be exterminated with absolute impunity. The CIA’s Counter-terrorism Centre’s chief has boasted that, thanks to its droneautomated 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.’ 51 As I will presently discuss, inscribing this 49 50

51

Cloud (2010), p 12. I discuss the digitisation of human targets in the context of war and the exercise of what the US military terms ‘identity dominance’ in Pugliese (2010), pp 89–98. Cited in Singer (2009), p 34.

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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 of juridical accountability: they are ‘bare life’ that can be killed with absolute impunity.52 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’.53 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.’ 54 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’.55 ‘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.’56 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. Prosthetics of Law If, as I argued above, a parenthetical logic of tele-techno mediations functions to suspend the causal relation between the doer and deed, then in this section of the article I want to argue that, in this techno-legal economy of war at a distance, something entirely opposite is operating simultaneously. 52

Agamben (2008), p 156; Agamben (1998), p 90.

53

Graham (2002), p 35.

54

Agamben (1998), p 57.

55

Agamben (2005), p 50.

56

Agamben (2005), p 59.


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This something entirely opposite is what I want to term the prosthetics of law. As Kieran Tranter noted in his rubric for the symposium at which this article was first presented: ‘The predominant theory of law in the orthodox scholarship is instrumental and sovereign. At a fundamental level law is conceived as a process, a machine that can be deployed.’ 57 In proceeding to conceptualise law as a prosthetic, I want to interrogate this instrumentalist view of law as machine that is fundamentally separate from its human agents – who, as sovereign subjects, merely deploy it instrumentally in order to achieve their desired goals. A prosthetics of law, on the contrary, is concerned with conceptualising the human agent as always already inscribed by the technics of law. If, as Derrida argues, ‘the question of the prosthesis’ is concerned with the ‘phantom member’,58 then the drone must viewed as a type of phantom member grafted through the operations of the laws of war on to the sensor operators located in their remote Ground Control Stations. In deploying the figure of prosthetics and its ‘phantom member’, I am invoking, by definition, the category of disability – specifically, of an impaired body with needs that must be supplemented by a techno-conceptual ‘crutch’ – that is, a militarised, phallogocentric ‘phantom member’. I am, in other words, inscribing my analysis within the domain of what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder term ‘narrative prosthesis’. ‘Narrative prosthesis,’ Mitchell and Snyder write, ‘is meant to indicate that disability has been used throughout history as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight.’ 59 Although Mitchell and Snyder focus largely on literary narratives in their examination of narrative prosthesis, their thesis can productively be transposed to other genres and domains of knowledge production. Precisely as the figure of prosthesis enables, in what follows, the articulation of analytical insights into the complex operations of drones and law, I risk the danger, as Mitchell and Snyder argue, of effacing the materiality of the disabled body by focusing exclusively on the metaphoric or tropological dimensions of prosthesis. In order to counter this risk, I address below the material dimensions of prosthesis and disabled bodies in terms of the violent effects of technologies of war. Law as prosthetic works to problematise instrumentalist conceptualisations of law that are predicated on a dichotomy between human agents and technology. Law as prosthetic is predicated on the understanding that law as technology is always already embodied, and that the dichotomy between human subject and technology/technè is, in effect, untenable. In contradistinction to a conceptualisation of the body as a purely natural datum (with technology as its polar opposite), I proceed to conceptualise the body as an entity that can only achieve its cultural intelligibility as ‘body’ precisely because it is always already inscribed by a series of discursive and 57

Tranter, rubric to The Laws of Technology and the Technology of Law symposium, Law School, Griffith University, 3 May 2011.

58

Derrida (2002), p 25.

59

Mitchell and Snyder (2000), p 49.

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technological mediations. As I have discussed elsewhere, I understand the body as indissociably tied to technology, and not as something that stands in contradistinction to it.60 Drawing on the work of Derrida, I refuse the body/technology or natural/synthetic binary. In his theorisation of the relation between body and technology, Derrida articulates the inextricable tie between the natural (physis) and the synthetic (technè).61 He emphasises that this relation ‘is not an opposition; from the very first there is instrumentalization [dés l’origine il y a de l’instrumentalisation] … a prosthetic strategy of repetition inhabits the very moment of life. Not only, then, is technics not in opposition to life, it also haunts it from the very beginning.’ 62 From the very beginning, then, the body is always already intextuated and instrumentalised by a series of technologies. At the most elementary level, this process of technical inscription, through the technology of language, is essential in rendering the body culturally intelligible. At yet another level, the body is inscribed from the very beginning (at birth) by a series of laws that proceed to determine its legal identity, its gender, its maternity and paternity, and so on. Law, in other words, is never something that comes after the body; rather, law is always already inscribed on the body, precisely as technè from the very first. This process of prosthetic inscription operates to constitute the very conditions of possibility for the conceptual marking of the body as ‘human’: ‘The prosthesis,’ notes Bernard Stiegler, ‘is not a mere extension of the human body; it is the constitution of this body qua “human”.’ 63 In arguing, then, for an understanding of law as always already a technics of embodiment, I want to proceed to conceptualise the pilots and sensor operators who control the drones from their far-away locations in Nevada (Nellis) or Virginia (Langley) as embodied prostheses of the laws of war grafted on to their respective technologies – both in ready-to-hand Heideggerian terms (joysticks and push-buttons) and in tele-techno mediated forms via satellite uplinks to and from the airborne drones. In this schema, the drones must be seen prosthetically as the ‘phantom members’ of the pilots and sensor operators. Operating here is a relation of indissociable articulation between seemingly separate parts – the human agent and the technological equipment – that is simultaneously predicated on technically augmenting the power and reach of the human agent through the figure of prostheticity. Stiegler writes: ‘Prostheticity … is a putting outside-the-self that is also a putting-out-of-range-of-oneself.’ 64 As I discuss below, the putting out of range of oneself through the prosthetics of drones is precisely what enables the violent asymmetry that inscribes the conduct of drone warfare, with the drone operators safely ensconced in their ergonomic 60

Pugliese (2005), p 362.

61

Derrida (2002), p 244.

62

Derrida (2002), p 244.

63

Stiegler (1998), pp 152–53.

64

Stiegler (1998), p 146.


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cubicles in the United States while they rain down bombs on their suspect targets. In his work on the logic of the prosthesis, David Wills terms this process of articulation the ‘contrivance of this transferential interface’, ‘prosthesis’.65 The transferential interface operative between humans and technology – a technics of law and its agents and targets – enables a prosthetic system of relationality that defies categorical separation of different entities and figures. This seemingly indivisible process of prostheticised grafting is something that is brought into clear focus by the observation of US Air Force Colonel Matt Martin, who remarks that, even as he is located in the Ground Control Station of Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, he views himself as having become completely coextensive with the drone he is piloting, regardless of the fact that the drone is actually flying thousands of miles away in Afghanistan: ‘I was already starting to refer to the Predator and myself as “I”, even though the airplane was thousands of miles away.’ 66 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 … Hightech 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.67

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 65

Wills (1995), p 13.

66

Cited in Caryl (2011).

67

Haraway (1991), p 177.

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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 technè 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’,69 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 counterretaliation: 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.’ 70 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-andblood investment if we go too far down this road.’ 71 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:

68

Derrida (2001), p 78.

69

Derrida (1998).

70

Yenne (2004), p 11.

71

Cited in Mayer (2009), p 13.


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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 and drag a mouse.72

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 spatiotemporal 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’.73 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”’.74 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’.75 The prosthetic grafting of drones to their land-based operators, however, opens up critical questions regarding accountability in the context of traditional laws of war that have failed to keep pace with the technological developments in the military field. Singer encapsulates the cluster of problematics that now inscribe the field: While the party line is that the process for determining legal accountability would be the same as if a manned pilot made such a 72

Singer (2009), p 329.

73

Air Force Print News Today (2008).

74

Yenne (2004), p 109.

75

Sobchack (2006), p 23.

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GRIFFITH LAW REVIEW (2011) VOL 20 NO 4 mistake [such as killing civilians], the new technology complicates matters. At times it was unclear which chain of command the pilots fell under as they were conducting combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan but sitting in Nevada. Both the local commander in the United States and those using them out in the region wanted to control assets. But he [a former commander of a Predator drone squadron] guessed it would be the reverse if something went wrong.76

Articulated in this blurring of lines of accountability is a complex network of prostheticised and tele-techno mediated relations and relays that can no longer be clearly demarcated along lines of categorical divisibility: such is precisely the logic of the prosthetic. As the military now attempts to grapple with this prostheticised landscape of war, it inevitably turns to technocratic solutions to questions of accountability concerning lethal drone strikes that kill the wrong targets: ‘It depends on the situation,’ rationalises a DARPA-funded roboticist. ‘But if it happens too frequently, then it is just a product recall issue.’ 77 The language of ‘product recall’ and consequent ‘product replacement’ clearly enunciates the biopolitical instrumentalisation of the life and death of the targeted other. The violent asymmetry of this new technocratic warfare is graphically marked in this caesura between replaceable robots and irreplaceable human life, and the manner in which this othered sub-life fails to enter the equation. This biopolitical asymmetry is nowhere more painfully materialised than in the killing by a drone of Daraz Khan and two of his friends in southern Afghanistan. Daraz Khan and his friends were collecting scrap metal on a hillside when they were liquidated by a drone missile, after they were mistakenly taken to be planting mines in the area. The anomic violence of drone killings, which suspends and violates judicial procedures and laws of war, is perfectly encapsulated in this Pentagon response: ‘We’re convinced that it was an appropriate target … [although] we do not yet know exactly who it was.’ 78 As one commentator has noted, framing this type of killing in human rights terms, ‘it should have attempted, at a minimum, to detain and capture, offer surrender, before striking. And once having detained, it should then charge and try suspects on criminal grounds.’ 79

76

Singer (2009), p 386.

77


78

Cited in Singer (2009), p 397; author’s emphasis. Anderson (2011), p 8. John B Quigley (2011), Professor of Law at Ohio State University, writes: ‘Killing with drones means killing without a trial. But going back to the 1960s, the United States signed human rights treaties that outlaw arbitrary killing. Drone killings skirt these safeguards. No indictment. No judge or jury. No defense. But, says the Obama administration, in war one can kill without a trial. The drone killings are premised on the “militants” being participants in the “war on terror,” even though Obama avoids that Bush-era term. But is there such a war, or is this war a convenient legal fiction? Even if “militants” can lawfully be killed on a war rationale, that does not let us kill in the territory of another country.’

79


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In his analysis of the necropolitical dimensions of empire, Achille Mbembe poses two critical questions that cut to the heart of these imperial asymmetries of power: What difference is there between killing with a missile helicopter or a tank and killing with one’s body? Does the distinction between the arms used to inflict death prevent the establishment of a system of general exchange between the manner of killing and the manner of dying?80

In his essay, Mbembe does not discuss the use of drones in war; however, his latter question can effectively be transposed to the imperial use of this technology: precisely what the necropolitical use of drones precludes is ‘a general system of exchange’ between the prosthetic tele-techno ensemble of the US imperial state and its anonymous and unsuspecting victims, who have neither a right of reply nor recourse to judicial procedure. Juxtaposed against this extrajudicial killing of anonymous, and thus unknown, human targets is the desperate apostrophe made by Daraz’s niece: ‘Why did you do this? Why did Americans kill Daraz? We have nothing, nothing, and you have taken from us our Daraz.’ 81 Two things stand out in this interrogative and despairing apostrophe: the counter-discursive appellation of the innocent victim, Daraz, who had been reduced to an anonymous target and dispatched to a violent death, and the marking of the violently asymmetrical material relations that characterise the North/South axis. The repetition of ‘nothing, nothing’ underscores the asymmetry of this axis. Enframed by cameras and monitors, the victims of these strikes become themselves mere drones to these unseen attacks, scurrying insects that are dismembered and incinerated by the airborne fire that is unleashed by the Predator and Reaper drones. Drone sensor operators jokingly term the human targets running for cover when Hellfire missiles explode as ‘squirters’.82 In tropological terms, there is a complex process of prosopopeia operative in the figuration of drone technologies. On the one hand, as cyborg, the drone is brought to ‘life’ through the ruse of an animating logic that invests it with animal qualities of predatory agency. For example, following its successful strike on a target, the Predator drone is described in the literature in this manner: ‘The eyes of its Lynx side aperture have seen, and the talons of the AGM-114 Hellfire missile on the starboard talon have struck.’ 83 On the other hand, the tropic transposition of the technology’s entomological nomenclature to the actual victims of the technology, and the consequent process of tactical de-humanisation and animalisation of its human targets, is underscored by one drone commentator who likens the drone attacks to ‘going into a beehive, one bee at a time’, with the resultant 80

Mbembe (2003), p 36.

81


82

Mayer (2009), p 5.

83

Yenne (2004), p 9.

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problem that ‘the hive will always produce more bees’.84 The CIA, in fact, terms a successful drone hit as ‘bugsplat’.85 The term ‘bugsplat’ caricatures its victims by inserting them within the field of a cartoonish pop culture where, as disposable figures, their deaths are scripted as mere comic mishap. ‘Bugsplat’ reduces the human victims of drones to nothing more than liquefied entomological waste generated via a technology driven by a more highly evolved species – qua the human as opposed to the insect. Operative here is that foundational biopolitical caesura that philosophically separates certain privileged humans from animals and that, simultaneously, enables the coding of certain other humans as animals that can be killed, as nonhuman animals are, with impunity. As I argue elsewhere, the disavowed figure of a virulent speciesism haunts Foucault’s conceptualisation of the biopolitical uses of race in order to create hierarchies of life – hierarchies that determine who can live and who can be left to die.86 The speciest recoding of human targets in terms of insects that can effectively be liquidated without compunction or ethical scruples is further evidenced by the manner in which this dehumanising military language has been reproduced by civilians watching drone strikes on YouTube. One YouTube blogger posted the following comment regarding a ‘Kill TV’ drone execution in Afghanistan: ‘You’re not watching murder, you’re watching pest extermination.’87 Drone attack videos have, in fact, become YouTube hits. Effectively recoding the agents and actors of this cyborg war into the very phallogocentric terms that Haraway opposed in her radical conceptualisation of the cyborg, the YouTube viewers of drone killings talk about ‘drone porn’ giving them ‘raging hard ons’.88 Citing the work of Claudia Springer, Rosi Braidotti has underscored that: the social imaginary around cyborgs, or technologies, is masculine, militarized and eroticized. It supports images of hyper-masculine killing machines, with wired circuitry both replacing and reinforcing muscular power.89

The social imaginary around drones graphically evidences this assertion: their gleaming, hard metal armour, their lethal capabilities and their electronically enabled muscular power are all conducive to their hypermasculinisation and phallogocentric eroticisation. The phallogocentricism that inscribes drones is perhaps best evidenced by the military terminology used to describe them: the ‘unmanned’ status of drones needs to be crucially supplemented by the prosthetic recoding of drones as ‘phantom members’.

84

Mayer (2009), p 14.

85

‘Out of the Blue (2011).

86

Pugliese (forthcoming).

87

‘Drone Videos Flying High’ (2011).

88

‘Drone Videos Flying High’ (2011).

89

Braidotti (2002), p 231.


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The prosthetics of this hyper-masculinisation of war are, moreover, assuming psychopharmacological dimensions through the US military’s possible use of beta-blocker drugs such as propanolol.90 Jonathan Moreno has drawn attention to the experimental use of beta-blockers, originally used to treat heart disease, in order to ‘block neurotransmitters that consolidate emotion with long-term memory’ so that soldiers can circumvent the experience of post-traumatic stress after witnessing the horrors of battle.91 Edmund Howe, a medical ethicist, outlines what is at stake in the military use of beta-blockers: If you have the pill, it certainly increases the temptation for the soldier to lower the standard for taking lethal action, if he thinks he’ll be numbed to the personal risk or consequences. We don’t want a soldier saying willy-nilly, ‘Screw it. I can take my pill and even if doing this is not really warranted, I’ll be OK.’92

Drone operators, despite their remote locations, also claim to experience post-traumatic stress, due to the sharp resolution of the images that they are compelled to witness – images that ‘can be pretty graphic, pretty vivid, and these are the things we try to offset’.93 The parenthetical logic that inscribes drone killing operations can, in effect, be greatly enhanced precisely by the use of psychopharmacological prosthetics by drone pilots and the consequent numbing of their emotional response to the ‘remote’ killings they cause. The cyborg nature of the drone war being conducted in Afghanistan is further evidenced by a recent Wikileak: Flying over southern Afghanistan on a combat mission, one of the Air Force’s premier armed drones, a Reaper, went rogue. Equipped with advanced radar and sophisticated cameras, as well as Hellfire missiles and 500-pound bombs, the Reaper had lost its satellite link to a pilot who was remotely steering the drone from a base in the United States. Again and again, the pilot struggled to regain control of the drone. Again and again, no response … As a last resort, commanders ordered an Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet to shoot down the $13 million aircraft before it soared into neighbouring Tajikistan.94

In the tradition of Arthur C Clarke’s rogue computer HAL, the drone Reaper here becomes a rogue cyborg that assumes a life of its own: recalcitrant to human commands or directives, it sets out on its own course. In this instance, it makes a mockery of DARPA’s official vision of UCAVs: 90

I am grateful to Jennifer Chandler for bringing this to my attention in the feedback to my paper at the Laws of Technology, Law of Technology symposium, Law School, Griffith University, 3 May 2011.

91

Moreno (2006), p 131.

92

Cited in Moreno (2006), pp 131–32.

93

Associated Press (2008).

94

Chivers et al (2010), p 14.

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GRIFFITH LAW REVIEW (2011) VOL 20 NO 4 The UCAV weapon system will exploit design and operational freedoms of relocating the pilot outside of the vehicle to enable a new paradigm shift in aircraft affordability while maintaining the rationale, judgment, and moral qualities of the human operator.95

As a ‘rogue’ figure, it metaphorises all too clearly the rogue status of its supposed commanders. As rogue figure, it metonymically embodies the operations of a rogue state, the United States, that insistently confers this descriptor on its absolute others: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and so on. This figure of the rogue-drone evokes a number of Derridean connotations as outlined in his Rogues, a text that stages a trenchant critique of the war on terror. Through his characteristic deconstructive manoeuvre of inversion and displacement, Derrida resignifies the United States as itself a rogue state that legitimates its own exercise of violence in the conduct of the war on terror by drawing on the legalising framework of international law: ‘Etats voyous [rogues], states denounced, confronted, and repressed by the police of supposedly legitimate states, those that respect an international law that they have the power to control.’ 96 Afghanistan, classified by the United States precisely as a rogue state, consequently must be ‘punished, contained, rendered harmless, reduced to a harmless state, if need be by the force of law [droit] and the right [droit] of force’.97 Cutting across the grain of the US administration’s doxic script, the rogue drone emblematises the rogue status of its imperial master; it evidences an ‘autoimmune pervertibility of democracy,’ performing the very self-destructive process of auto-immunity that haunts all attempts characterised by regimes of hyper-immunisation, securitisation and violent expulsion.98 Empire, Amputees and the Prosthetics of War In the course of this article, I have attempted to delineate the mutating terrain of contemporary war, and the increasing reliance of the United States on forms of automated killing at a distance technologies. In this new field of war, US combatants remain securely ensconced on home turf; US conduct of war and killing is now enmeshed within the continuum of the civic practices of soldiers’ everyday lives. In this way, war, killing and maiming become coextensive, and thus normalised, with civic practices. With drone technologies, US military personnel or CIA agents venture into the field of war through an ensemble of tele-techno mediations that prostheticise them to the killing machines deployed in the war-torn dominions of US empire. Caught up in these drone-generated killing fields are anonymous targets and civilians who have no right of response or recourse to judicial process as the drones fire their missiles from the skies. The New American Foundation has drawn attention to the ‘high rate of civilian casualties’ caused by drone 95

Cited in Yenne (2004), p 4.

96

Derrida (2005), p 68.

97

Derrida (2005), p 79.

98

Derrida (2005), p 34.


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attacks, and it has calculated the figure of civilian casualties to be ‘around 32 percent’ 99 In Pakistan alone, since President Obama took office, there have been 2292 civilians killed by US drone strikes; of these fatalities, 168 were children, including 69 children killed in a single attack on a madrassah in 2006.100 The Brooking Institute has revealed that ‘drones killed an average of ten civilians to one militant’.101 In the context of this high-tech, prostheticised terrain of drone warfare that I have been mapping, I want to bring into focus the constitutive relation between war, prosthetics and the very civilian targets and victims caught up in the ongoing imperial war in Afghanistan. In her critique of certain accounts of ‘technology as prosthesis’, Sarah Jain draws critical attention to the manner in which technophilic readings of the prosthetic trope celebrate ‘technology as antidote’ while ‘the wounding ingredients of technological production remain continually under ontological erasure’.102 It is precisely this type of ‘ontological erasure’ that I want to disrupt by juxtaposing my mobilisation of the prosthetic trope with the material literality of prosthetics: drones, as the militarised prosthetics of empire, violently generate civilian amputees in need of prosthetic limbs. In their tracking of the conditions of emergence of modern prosthetics, Raiford Guins and Omayra Zaragoza Cruz have underscored the constitutive relation between prosthetics, war and its victims: ‘The modern development of prosthetics has been traced with frequency to the challenges of war. The Civil War, for example, ushered a new era for prosthetics because of the enormous scale of human damage that was inflicted by new technologies.’103 The anomic violence of drones and their violent production of amputees in need of literal prosthetics are evidenced in a report that recounts the story of a seventeen-year-old boy named Sadaullah living in Pakistan: Sadaullah was serving food at a family iftar, the traditional breaking of the daily fast during the holy month of Ramadan, when missiles from a drone struck his grandfather’s home and killed four of his relatives. Falling debris knocked Sadaullah out, but he survived. When he awoke in a Peshawar hospital, he found that both his legs had been amputated and shrapnel had penetrated his eye, rendering it useless. Pakistani media reported that the strike had killed Ilyas Kashmiri, a militant leader. But months later, Ilyas Kashmiri was

99

Tierney (2011), p i.

100

Crilly (2011).

101

Shaheen (2020). Jain (1999), p 49. Kurzman (2001), p 385 also underscores this point, rightly insisting that ‘writers on prosthesis … theorize both the metaphor and the material artifacts within contexts of people’s bodies and abilities and stakes’; see also Mitchell and Snyder (1997), p 8, who critique the repeated elision of disabled people from ‘postmodern catalogs’ that draw on the ‘apparatus of disability’. Guins and Cruz (2006), p 225. On the relation between prosthetics and war, see also Serlin (2002); Perry (2002); McDaid (2002).

102

103

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GRIFFITH LAW REVIEW (2011) VOL 20 NO 4 seen alive in Afghanistan. It was only a few weeks ago that the militant was reportedly killed in yet another drone strike.104

In Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s film Kandahar, which recounts the attempt of an Afghan-born Canadian journalist’s journey back to war-torn Afghanistan in order to reach her sister, the materiality of war and the brutal literality of a prosthetics of war are evidenced in one particularly haunting scene. The scene opens with dozens of amputees, who have lost limbs in the course of the war, milling around an improvised Red Cross hospital situated on a barren plain. They are there trying to persuade the Western doctors operating from their tent surgeries to give them each a prosthetic limb so that they can continue to earn their meagre livings. There are more amputees than available prosthetics, and each amputee desperately attempts to convince the doctors of the urgency of his or her case. As this scene of pleading and squabbling unfolds, a plane is heard overhead and, as in an apparition, prosthetic limbs are air-dropped, their parachutes billowing as they gently descend. The amputees break into stilted runs towards the descending prosthetics, their halting and painful gaits set against undulating torsoless legs floating gently down from the sky. I juxtapose this scene of airborne prosthetics against the US military’s naming of its thanatological drones as ‘guardian angels’ that ‘save lives’.105 In the context of the imperial war in Afghanistan that I have been tracking, and the lethal power unleashed by the US prosthetic drones in the waging of this war, I want to invoke an inverted biblical homily on the perverse prerogatives of empire: the empire taketh away and the empire giveth. Prosthetic Extrapolations of Law In reflecting on the indissociable relation between law, technology and human subjects, drone technologies offer a graphic and specific instantiation of this relation. They exemplify the manner in which the law of war propels the development and use of particular technologies, and they evidence the way in which these technologies of law are grafted on to human agents – such as pilots and sensor operators located at their remote ground stations – through a series of tele-techno mediations. I would argue, however, that this prosthetics of law, and its logics of somatechnical grafts that suture law, technology and bodies into prostheticised ensembles, can be extrapolated into a larger schematic understanding of law as technology and technology as law, offering an alternative paradigm to dogmatic views that conceptualise law’s relation to technology in purely instrumentalist terms, views that fail to theorise the always-already prostheticised relation between law, bodies, technologies and their targets. A prosthetics of law, I would argue, is precisely what is operative across an extended micro and macro continuum that encompasses everything from police taser guns and batons, CCTVs and armed riot squads to spaces 104

Akbar (2011).

105

Fagan (2011), p 9.


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and institutions such as courts of law, prisons and detention centres. A prosthetics of law can be seen to be a critical materialisation of that knowledge/power nexus that Foucault terms governmentality, as that ‘ensemble formed by institutions, procedures … the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population … and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security’.106 In the particular context that I have been examining, the prosthetics of law is what is enabled by the institution of the techno-military-industrial complex; it names the somatechnical relation that grafts law to bodies and technologies in the deployment of apparatuses of security – both internal and external to the nation-state. A prosthetics of law underscores the biopolitical dimensions of technologies of law as apparatuses exercising forms of normative and disciplinary power – what Foucault terms ‘orthopedic instruments’ concerned with the ‘correction, training, and taming of the body’.107 The prosthetics of law, including such technologies as taser guns and prisons, operates precisely to correct, train and tame the recalcitrant body into a docile subject. The prosthetics of laws of war operates, in biopolitical terms, to tame and correct those targets that, in Orientalist terms, inhabit the ‘ungoverned’ spaces of the Global South. Captured and enframed within the thanatological ensembles of the US techno-military-industrial complex, these ‘suspect’ targets can be exterminated with impunity in order to protect the security of the imperial nation-state. Postscript As this article goes to press, the US government has assassinated one of its native-born citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki, through a drone strike in Yemen. Awlaki was actually called in to advise the Pentagon after the 9/11 attacks: on how to promote moderate over extreme Islam. But as has since become evident, whatever advice those clerics gave to the US warplanners was not followed. Two murderous invasions and occupations, replete with atrocities against innocent civilians have incited hundreds of Muslims, including Anwar Awlaki, to take arms against the United States.108

In the current deployment of drone strikes to execute its own citizens, US government lawyers have argued that ‘the president should have unreviewable authority to kill Americans’.109 This autocratic violation of a citizen’s constitutional right to due process of law has, ironically, prompted

106

Foucault (1991), p 102.

107

Foucault (2006), pp 105–6.

108

Gimbel (2011).

109

Ito (2011).

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the official al-Qaeda website to criticise the Obama administration for actions that ‘“contradict” American law.110

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