{"id":17824,"date":"2014-01-03T06:00:31","date_gmt":"2014-01-03T10:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=17824"},"modified":"2014-01-02T12:42:57","modified_gmt":"2014-01-02T16:42:57","slug":"droning-knowing-binaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2014\/01\/03\/droning-knowing-binaries\/","title":{"rendered":"More on Drone Sexuality: droning, knowing, and binaries"},"content":{"rendered":"
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If drone sexuality means machines telling us who we are and what we want, then dating site algorithms are drone sexuality, right?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\n

As I said last week, I\u2019m responding to Sarah\u2019s recent series <\/a>of posts on drone sexuality. In this post, I want to follow through\/push one of Sarah\u2019s concerns about the way her account relied on binaries–both gender binaries (masculine\/feminine) and subject\/object binaries. I don\u2019t know if Sarah would want to follow my argument all the way, but, that\u2019s one thing that\u2019s great about thinking with someone–you can develop different but related versions of a theory, and more fully explore the intellectual territory around an issue, topic, or question.<\/p>\n

What if droning isn\u2019t something \u201cmasculine\u201d phenomena do to \u201cfeminine\u201d ones, but a process that everyone\/everything undergoes, and, in sifting out the erstwhile winners from losers, distributes gender privilege? In other words, droning is a set of processes that dole out benefits to \u201cnormally\u201d gendered\/sexually oriented phenomena (masculine, cis-gendered, homo- and hetero-normative, white, bourgeois ones), and that subject \u201cabnormally\u201d gendered\/sexually oriented phenomena (feminine, trans*, queer, non-white, working class) to increased vulnerability and death?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Before I get into my argument, I want to first summarize what I understand Sarah\u2019s argument to be. I want to make sure I\u2019m not grossly misreading her ideas (or, maybe, just clarify my reading so Sarah can then point out my mistakes\/our points of divergence).<\/p>\n

Sarah is asking two main questions: (1) \u201cwhat happens to sexuality in a surveillance state,\u201d and (2) \u201cWhat happens when being known isn\u2019t the task of human beings but of machines?\u201d This second question shows, I think, that Sarah\u2019s actually asking about what happens to sexuality under a specific type of ubiquitous surveillance–surveillance performed by machines, through machines, and in which machines tell us not just \u201cthe\u201d truth, but our truths, who I really am as a person (I\u2019m riffing here a bit on Foucault\u2019s History of Sexuality v1<\/a>, in which he argues that we think our sexuality contains some deep inner truth about ourselves). Rob Horning has done some really excellent work<\/a> on this question of machines telling us our truths, telling us who we really are as people. We barf data into the algorithms, and they spit out our \u201cselves\u201d for us and everyone else to see. The important thing to take from Rob\u2019s work is that these \u201cmachines\u201d include algorithms and big data; algorithms also drone. But, back to Sarah\u2019s question: these machines aren\u2019t just surveilling us, they\u2019re producing knowledge. (And, to connect back to the sexuality question, there\u2019s that nice resonance between \u201cknowledge\u201d in the epistemic sense and \u201cknowledge\u201d in the carnal, \u201cbiblical\u201d sense.) So, drones (the surveillance machines) produce us as beings capable of knowing ourselves (i.e., conscious, self-aware subjects), and as beings capable of being known carnally, i.e., as sexual subjects. I\u2019ll return to the question of how drones produce us as knowing and knowable\/known in a bit.<\/p>\n

Importantly, as Sarah emphasizes, this surveillance is not limited to the state.<\/p>\n

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I don\u2019t think we always explicitly identify the surveillant power of drones specifically with a state. I think that drones are both vaguer and more flexible than that, and for me the idea of droneness is something that isn\u2019t reliant on a state for its existence. A drone itself is a manifestation of and a symbol for potentially any and all forms of surveillance, power, violence, control.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

…and, of course, pleasure. So, \u201cdrone\u201d is Sarah\u2019s term for a general condition–the contemporary configuration of power, domination, control, and maybe even resistance(?). Drones can, in this account, be specific instruments used to maintain and intensify that configuration (e.g., autonomous aircraft, data algorithms, watch lists, etc.). But, if droning also a \u201csymbol for potentially any and all forms\u201d this configuration of power can take, then droning is also a condition, the contemporary condition produced and maintained by these instruments.<\/p>\n

I want to think about droning as a condition not just because this builds on my earlier account of droning, but, more importantly for my purposes here, because I think it helps show how Sarah\u2019s account can work without relying on the binaries that she found troublesome. Sarah says:<\/p>\n

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The Gaze of a drone is penetrative, because all Gazes are fundamentally penetrative. Sexual violence is gendered: the aggressive performance of violence is masculine performance, and suffering the consequences of violence is constructed as a feminine act. Likewise, traditional forms of sexual power and control. Cisgendered men are powerful; women are weak and submissive. Men watch; women are available for the watching.<\/p>\n

I should note here that I\u2019m treating this as more of a binary than I\u2019m strictly comfortable with, and in future I hope this framework can be expanded to allow for a better approach to the diversity of gender, because I think there\u2019s some fascinating stuff going on there.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So, in her post Sarah framed droning as something the privileged do to the less privileged: \u201cmen watch; women are available for watching.\u201d But what if droning isn\u2019t something we do (or is done to us by others), but something that\u2019s more like a precondition for our action (or interaction)? What if droning is, as I mentioned earlier, something that makes us knowing and knowable? In other words, what if droning is the process that positions us as people with specific identities (knowing) and desires for (knowable) particular sorts of people with specific identities and desires? Droning, in other words, would be what determines your position in white cisgender hetero- and homo-normative patriarchy. Let me try to explain (and again, this is pretty provisional, so if it doesn\u2019t make sense lemme know!):<\/p>\n

As I see it, droning is a configuration of the relations of social, political, economic, and ideological production. It\u2019s like a musical drone in the sense that it\u2019s the constant, consistent background that gives shape to the middle and foreground. Or, it\u2019s the field that lays out all the possibilities for gameplay. Navigating our way through these relations individual people, emerge with (a) an identity (however normative or queer that identity might be) and (b) a position in relation to others, and in relation to hegemonic institutions like the state, patriarchy\/rape culture, white supremacy, etc. I think this gets us out of the need to think strictly in binary terms bit doesn\u2019t frame droning or surveillance as something one person or group does another (\u201cwoman as image, man as bearer of the look,\u201d as Laura Mulvey puts it), but as something that affects us all. And those affects (and effects) don\u2019t have to manifest in strictly binary terms; we\u2019re produced as men, women, trans*, queer, and everything in between. In other words, navigating through these relations, we come to know who we are, and we become legible to others as that sort of being. Our identities and our social status are less like pregiven essences and more like emergent properties, properties that can\u2019t be known or foreseen without the intervention of, say, number-crunching algorithms.<\/p>\n

Droning is done to us all, and often demands our constant participation and complicity. But some people will be better situated to recover from and\/or be exempted from it, while those of lower (socioeconomic, citizenship, racial, gender, ability\/health, etc.) status aren\u2019t as well-equipped to recover, and don\u2019t get a de facto pass. Just think about the TSA and stop & frisk. For the white, cisgendered, and able-bodied, TSA screenings are a common inconvenience in contemporary middle-class life; for non-white, trans* and genderqueer people, and people with disabilities, routine TSA screening can be violent and violating, and, obviously, people from these groups are often subject to more extensive screening. Similarly, stop & frisk technically applies to anyone who behaves \u201csuspiciously,\u201d but really it applies to black and latino men. I really don\u2019t think I need to go into all the \u201couts\u201d white people get from encounters with law enforcement (I have cried my way out of a ticket in the past\u2026). Those who most easily and successfully recover from and\/or avoid the negative effects of droning (often because they disproportionately benefit from droning), these are the people who count (i.e., who are known and knowable) as \u201cwhite,\u201d as \u201cmasculine,\u201d as \u201ccisgendered,\u201d that is, as members of the privileged classes. Those who cannot successfully recover from and avoid the negative effects of droning (often because they disproportionately experience its harms), these are the people who count, who are known and knowable as non-white, feminine, trans*, queer, undocumented, poor, fat, disabled\u2026<\/p>\n

In this way, droning is the set of processes and practices that produce micro-level phenomena (individual people as raced, gendered, sexual subjects) for the purpose of maintaining a macro-level society that naturalizes and privileges whiteness, masculinity, and hetero\/homonormativity (that is, non-queer sexuality and cis gender identity). If we traditionally think of (panoptic) surveillance or the gaze as controlling and restricting individual behavior, droning doesn\u2019t control or restrict individual behavior; rather, it allows individuals to respond to a situation in whatever way they like. Droning is the stacking of the deck so that only certain kinds of responses from certain kinds of people will be successful. Put in market or economic terms, the gaze is regulatory, but droning is deregulatory.<\/p>\n

As I see it, \u201cdroning\u201d could include phenomena such as NSA\/big data surveillance, autonomous aircraft strikes, traffic cams, watch lists, TSA checkpoints, drug, fitness, and credit \u201ctesting\u201d or \u201cchecking\u201d (for social services, for health insurance, for employment), stop & frisk, even something like austerity politics. This understanding may be too metaphorical…for example, some uses of actual drones might not fall under this definition of droning (e.g., the Amazon delivery drones might not). But maybe this is something we should talk about.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t at all disagree with Sarah\u2019s original post. What I did was read a bit into some of her earlier claims about what drones are and how they work to try to push her analysis past some of its limitations (which I think were really just made for convenience and clarity in trying to pin down the original idea). In other words, what I think I did here was to show how Sarah\u2019s own idea can avoid the binary problem she diagnoses. I want to emphasize that her posts are wonderfully incisive and provocative and have really spurred me to think long and hard about my own ideas on this.<\/p>\n

If I can get my act together next week (which is our first week of classes at UNC Charlotte), I will try to say something about the role of transgression in Sarah\u2019s posts.<\/p>\n

Robin is on twitter as @doctaj.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I said last week, I\u2019m responding to Sarah\u2019s recent series of posts on drone sexuality. In this post, I want to follow through\/push one of Sarah\u2019s concerns about the way her account relied on binaries–both gender binaries (masculine\/feminine) and subject\/object binaries. I don\u2019t know if Sarah would want to follow my argument all the […]<\/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":[26528,10794,245,2143],"class_list":["post-17824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-drone-sexuality","tag-drones","tag-feminism","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\/17824","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=17824"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17824\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17835,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17824\/revisions\/17835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}