{"id":17371,"date":"2013-10-26T05:00:05","date_gmt":"2013-10-26T09:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=17371"},"modified":"2013-10-28T08:38:19","modified_gmt":"2013-10-28T12:38:19","slug":"drones-sound-and-super-panoptic-surveillance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2013\/10\/26\/drones-sound-and-super-panoptic-surveillance\/","title":{"rendered":"Drones, Sound, and Super-Panoptic Surveillance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Aufoj9Q-J18?rel=0\" height=\"360\" width=\"480\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><br \/>\nIn last week\u2019s excellent <a href=\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2013\/10\/15\/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace\/\">post<\/a> on drones, Sarah argues that surveillance is what makes an remotely controlled, semi-autonomous robot a <i>drone<\/i>. As Sarah puts it, \u201ca drone is what a drone does: it <i>watches<\/i>.\u201d Or, more precisely, it \u201cgazes,\u201d or watches with the eyes\/from the perspective of hegemony, and for the purposes of surveillance, normalization, and discipline. In this post, I want to both agree and disagree with Sarah\u2019s definition. I agree on the fundamental premise, that a drone is what a drones does&#8211;surveil\/normalize\/discipline. I disagree, however, that this \u201cdoing\u201d is primarily watching, a manifestation of the phenomenon we both call \u201cthe Gaze.\u201d Droning, at least as I want to define it here, is a practice of surveillance distinct from Gazing.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Drones drone. This isn\u2019t just a tautology: drone aircraft and drone tones are two different things. It\u2019s just convenient that remotely-controlled and autonomous flying machines (drone aircraft) can make steady, relatively homogeneous, continuous sounds (musical drones). Listen, for example, to Simon Remiszewski\u2019s contribution to the murmuraiton drone festival, the sound piece \u201cAll Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace\u201d (which resonates nicely with Sarah\u2019s post), which you can hear <a href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/sremiszewski\/all-watched-over-by-machines\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Remiszewski likely recorded a quadcopter drone, not a Predator drone like the US military uses (I could be wrong&#8230;but that <i>sounds<\/i> like a quadcopter). However, those Predator drones are also experienced sonically. In fact, as Nasser Hussain\u2019s \u201cPhenomenology of a Drone Strike\u201d argues, the Pakistanis whom they intentionally and collaterally target experience these drones primarily as sonic phenomena: \u201cthey are mostly invisible to the people below them. But they can be heard\u201d (Hussain). \u00a0As Kate Chandler <a href=\"http:\/\/thenewinquiry.com\/essays\/system-failures\/\" target=\"_blank\">notes<\/a>, Pakistani slang for &#8220;drone&#8221; is &#8220;bangana,&#8221; and &#8220;refers to the sound drones make,&#8221; specifically, their &#8220;ongoing buzz.&#8221; This sound structures the phenomenological lifeworld (what philosophers might call the \u201chorizon\u201d of one\u2019s experience, the perceptual limit that serves as an organizing foundation for all your perceptions) of the populations whom they patrol. It organizes both actual experience&#8211;warning when a strike is imminent, it directs people\u2019s actions&#8211;and the psychological frameworks or \u201cmental models\u201d that we use to interpret and make sense of our experiences. As Hussain explains,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>one man described the reaction to the sound of the drones as \u2018a wave of terror\u2019 coming over the community.In another testimony, Hisham Abrar states, \u201cwhen children hear the drones, they get really scared, and they can hear them all the time.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><b>Drones \u201cdrone\u201d by creating a consistent psychological timbre or pitch&#8211;terror<\/b>. Or rather, frequent, repeated Predator drone strikes have struck a drone in the psyches of targeted populations. As Hussain puts it,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death&#8230;The same prolonged hovering that produces the terrifying buzzing here adds oversight to sight, combining surveillance with legal scrutiny.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><b>This droning timbre\/pitch of terror <em>resembles<\/em> what Foucaultians might call the internalized (or panoptic) gaze<\/b>&#8211;instead of needing to be watched by police, we police ourselves. This internalized gaze is the whole point of panoptic surveillance&#8211;if people feel like they\u2019re constantly being watched, they\u2019ll start watching themselves. And that\u2019s WAY more efficient for hegemony&#8211;it effectively outsources policework to the policed themselves. Droning is also a kind of outsourcing of policing, but one that doesn&#8217;t rely on internalization.\u00a0Psychologically droned populations live in constant terror, and this affects their behavior, their health, their politics, their decisions, and their values. They don&#8217;t have to internalize a surveiling gaze&#8211;&#8220;the constant reminder of imminent death&#8221; is always there, either in the presence of the drones themselves on in the psychological experience of constant anxiety. This state of terror limits people&#8217;s capacity to respond to droning, to one another, to life&#8217;s regular struggles. This &#8220;oversight&#8221; (to use Hussain&#8217;s term) doesn&#8217;t need to be internalized by people because has become an ambient condition (more on this in the next paragraph). One thing I\u2019ve been thinking about a lot in my theoretical research is the differences between visual surveillance (panopticism) and sonic\/affective surveillance (what Jasbir Puar has called \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/its-her-factory.blogspot.com\/2011\/11\/from-identity-to-profile.html\" target=\"_blank\">superpanopticism<\/a>\u201d&#8211;super as in over or above, not as in extra intense).\u00a0 <b>What are the technological, ideological, and phenomenological differences between the gaze and, well, the drone?<\/b> That is, what\u2019s different between surveillance modeled on vision and surveillance modeled on audition? And, above all, what motivates and makes possible this shift to include sound on top of (or, perhaps, below) sight? (I\u2019ve written down some more carefully developed thoughts about this <a href=\"http:\/\/its-her-factory.blogspot.com\/2013\/02\/re-viewing-neoliberalism-full-text-of.html\">here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p><b>\u201cThe gaze\u201d is one type of surveillance, one way power manifests, functions, and circulates. \u201cThe drone\u201d is another type of surveillance, another way power manifests, functions, and circulates.<\/b> \u201cThe gaze\u201d is a visual paradigm grounded in enlightenment modernity (en-LIGHT-en-ment, get it?); consequently, the gaze presumes and makes use of all the binaries that structure modernist thought&#8211;subject\/object, active\/passive, depth\/surface, authentic\/alienated&#8211;even if only to deconstruct them into post-modernisms. \u201cThe drone\u201d is a sonic paradigm grounded in neoliberal values and conventions; modernist binaries have little traction; power differentials are cut in more fluid, complicated ways.* For example, rather than visually objectifying its target, as the gaze does, droning <i>profiles<\/i> those it monitors. It gathers data and metadata, plugs them into risk-management algorithms, and then targets specific profiles for either intensified or (superficially) relaxed surveillance. In this way, droning is related to the \u201cneoliberal listening\u201d I discuss here. So, where the gaze regulates people by fixing them as objects (as, for example, Frantz Fanon argues the exclamation \u201cLook, a Negro!\u201d does), <b><i>droning regulates people by creating the conditions that lead them to exhibit the wrong (or right) sort of profile<\/i><\/b>, the sort of profile that puts you on watch lists, that disqualifies you for \u201cdiscounted\u201d credit, health insurance plans, etc. Think back to Hussain\u2019s article: droning isn\u2019t limited to drone patrols and raids; it has ongoing, lasting effects. \u201cDroning\u201d is a <i>condition<\/i> of being terrorized, a condition that impacts everything you do. So, it doesn\u2019t require people to internalize a gaze and keep themselves in line, because the practices of droning shape the ambient conditions (geographic, economic, affective, etc.) so that we can only take preprogrammed lines, so to speak.** Droning, in this way, operates like a \u201cfree\u201d or deregulated market\u2014instead of regulating people directly, it administers the conditions in and on which they act. Droning doesn\u2019t objectify people because it needs them to act, to be subjects\u2026just \u201cwrong\u201d and \u201cright\u201d kinds of subjects.<\/p>\n<p><b>The gaze and the drone are absolutely <i>not <\/i>opposed or mutually exclusive<\/b>; more often than not, they\u2019re deeply and complexly implicated in one another. That\u2019s why super-panoptic surveillance is above or on top of regular old visual panopticism; it\u2019s an additional layer, not a replacement.<\/p>\n<p>***<\/p>\n<p>In a Gaze-framework, vision (or rather, a culturally and historically specific account of vision) is privileged, and sound seems alien, foreign, \u201cother.\u201d I think Hussain\u2019s analysis of drone sound relies too heavily on a Gaze framework (which is implicit in the film theory he draws on throughout the article). Because of his debt to Gaze-theory, his article relies on an overly-simplistic dichotomization between sight and sound. \u201cSight on one side and sound on the other,\u201d he says. The powerful gaze, and the oppressed are droned. Chandler draws a similar conclusion:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>For their operators, consequently, drones exist in terms of sight, while, for those surveyed, they are known through their noise. The separation between what is seen and what is heard maps onto uneven geopolitical relations carried out, in part, through drone systems.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>For both Hussain and Chandler, the US military sees, the Pakistani people hear; the US military is not seen (but heard), the Pakistani people are seen (but do not \u2018speak\u2019). However, this dichotomization seems too neat to be actually true, phenomenologically and politically. I\u2019m very sympathetic to his attempt to center power differentials in their analyses. Using a sight\/sound dichotomy to represent imperialist power hierarchies oversimplies both how perception works and how imperialism works. <i>Power and agency are certainly asymmetrical, but they are not so cleanly dichotomized<\/i>.\u00a0 As feminist like bell hooks have long argued, it is possible to gaze \u201coppositionally,\u201d or, as Regina Bradley <a href=\"http:\/\/redclayscholar.blogspot.com\/2013\/03\/i-been-on-ratchet-conceptualizing-sonic.html\" target=\"_blank\">puts it<\/a>, to use \u201csonic ratchet\u201d to complicate visual surveillance and normativity. Similarly, sight and sound are certainly irreducible, but they are not cleanly dichotomized.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps this (false) dichotomization is appealing because it allows us to treat sound like the solution to imperialist vision. Hussain assumes that sound is what the Gaze excludes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>the layers of supervision effectively evacuate the world of so<i>und and the interpersonal reality that sound produces;<\/i> to argue about how precise or imprecise, focused or unfocused, such strikes are is to remain within a v<i>isual economy\u2026.A<\/i>lthough the pilots can hear ground commands, there is no microphone equivalent to the micro-scopic gaze of the drone\u2019s camera. <i>This mute world of dumb figures m<\/i>oving about on a screen has particular consequences for how we experience the image&#8230;In the case of the drone strike footage, t<i>he lack of synchronic sound renders it a ghostly world in which the figures seem unalive, even before they are killed. T<\/i>he gaze hovers above in silence. <i>The detachment that critics of drone operations worry about comes partially from the silence of the footage. <\/i>(emphasis mine)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The Gaze is alienating\u2014it desensitizes us to sound <i>and<\/i> in that very same set of gestures, to the humanity, the moral personhood, and the suffering of those whom the US drones. Because we can\u2019t hear them, these targets \u201cseem unalive, even before they are killed.\u201d The Gaze alienates \u201cus\u201d (the US) from our receptivity to others. Hussain\u2019s article implies that sound is a\/the remedy to imperialist alienation, which manifests here as the separation of sight from sound. If only \u201cwe\u201d\u2014the imperialist drone operators\u2014could <i>hear<\/i> what our victims hear, then we wouldn\u2019t be so quick to dehumanize them.***<\/p>\n<p>It is certainly true that visual technologies and techniques developed cooperatively with imperialism. But so have sonic ones. <b>My concept of \u201cDroning\u201d shows that sound is not necessarily a remedy to imperialist control.<\/b> It\u2019s not just vision that can be \u201cmyopic\u201d (to use one of Hussain\u2019s terms)&#8211;hearing can be similarly structured by ignorance. It structures ignorance in different forms and with different methods. So, for example, instead of alienation, Droning rivets you to material conditions, affects, and sensations that compel you to behave in specific ways, and not in others. So riveted, you might think and feel like \u201cthere is no alternative,\u201d to use a catchphrase often associated with neoliberal ideology.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m trying to push back against tendencies to reduce sound to sight (or rather, sight&#8217;s opposite), and to conflate superpanoptic surveillance&#8211;what I call &#8220;Droning&#8221;&#8211;with more conventional panopticism, a.k.a. &#8220;Gazing.&#8221; It&#8217;s important to consider the sonic dimensions of drone tech and drone practices. And de-centering vision and sight means we also have to de-center &#8220;the Gaze&#8221; as a conceptual framework. That&#8217;s what I&#8217;m trying to accomplish with this concept of &#8220;Droning&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>* For example, women who \u201cLean In\u201d can participate, to some degree, in bourgeois\u00a0 white patriarchal privilege. Gender privilege here isn\u2019t a binary (masculine\/feminine), because feminine subjects who perform a sufficient degree of bourgeois white patriarchal masculinity get some of the privileges usually reserved for white capitalist patriarchs.<\/p>\n<p>** Droning doesn\u2019t require the inside\/outside or surface\/depth binaries that organize practices of gazing, and the hierarchical relationship between the too-be-looked-at object (surface) and looking subject (depth, interiority).<\/p>\n<p>*** Hussain\u2019s article treats sound as both (a) what white\/Western people are alienated from, but what non-white\/non-Western people experience immediately, and (b) the solution to white\/Westerners\u2019 alienation. This parallels the Gaze\u2019s treatment of affective receptivity as both (a) what white\/Western people are alienated from, but what non-white\/non-Western people experience immediately, and (b) the solution to white\/Westerners\u2019 alienation. This framework makes white cultural appropriation of non-white\/non-Western cultures seem therapeutic (for whites\/whiteness). The politics here are, obviously, not the best.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>Robin is on twitter as @doctaj.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In last week\u2019s excellent post on drones, Sarah argues that surveillance is what makes an remotely controlled, semi-autonomous robot a drone. As Sarah puts it, \u201ca drone is what a drone does: it watches.\u201d Or, more precisely, it \u201cgazes,\u201d or watches with the eyes\/from the perspective of hegemony, and for the purposes of surveillance, normalization, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1929,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[10794,3249,868,16042,2143],"class_list":["post-17371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-drones","tag-philosophy","tag-power","tag-sound","tag-surveillance"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1929"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17371"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17462,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17371\/revisions\/17462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}