Sensorial Geopolitics
By Madiha Tahir (Yale University)
This essay is part of a Vital Topics Forum on “Geopolitical Lives”
If there is a politics of aesthetics, Rancière (2010, 140) argues, “it lies in the practices and modes of visibility of art that re-configure the fabric of sensory experience.” The last twenty years of the “war on terror” have only added urgency to the question of the politics of North American art. An incomprehensible 929,000 people have died as a consequence of multiple US invasions across South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa (Costs of War, n.d.). And while only a fraction of these deaths has occurred via drone bombardment, the drone has become an emblem of this war, its spartan, toy-like, metallic frame signifying the secret play of sophisticated technologies, surveillance, and algorithms. The killer drone has become a key site of artistic production.
In 2012, the Kansas City Arts Institute announced its exhibition with an installation mounted outside the arts building: a massive, vertical billboard jutting into the open sky that displayed a grainy image of a hovering killer drone against a gray sky. The show, “On Watch,” exhibited work from a collection of artists who explored the subject of surveillance through its infrastructures, technologies, and practices.
The image on the billboard was a still that had been extracted from a short video filmed by Noor Behram and chosen for this installation by Trevor Paglen. Noor is a photographer and a journalist who lives in North Waziristan, on the southern tip of the Tribal Areas, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, where the US began drone bombardment in 2004. Trevor Paglen is an American academic and artist and a geographer by training who has spent the last several years producing books and art installations that probe the secret technical and technological infrastructures, sites, and spaces of the US military and intelligence apparatus.
In this brief essay, I interrogate the circulation of the drone as art and the sensorial geopolitics that underpin it. What is the distribution of the sensible that makes drone art intelligible? (Rancière 2004). For Rancière, the distribution and partitioning of our sensorial world is constituted out of an aesthetics that determines “what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience” (13). Politics, which Rancière distinguishes from the police, is the practice of disrupting this given sensory order. Rancière’s analytics, organized around the sensorial in relation to time and space, are, in this regard, geopolitical (Ingram 2016). Conceptualizing the geopolitical in this way moves us beyond statist discourses to multiple varying scales at which geographies, temporalities, and sensorial worlds are entangled—and to the hierarchies instituted in the sensorial life of the empire (Kapadia 2019).
I approach these questions not as an artist or an art critic but as a scholar with particular intellectual and political curiosities and obligations. What I offer here are initial reflections motivated by an installation that intersects two photographers—one, a journalist from the Tribal Areas, and the other, an artist from the United States.
The In/Visible War
Noor’s and Paglen’s photographic and artistic projects are united by a demand for a just world (Boucher 2018). Both of them are also impacted to some degree by their own personal biographies, and perhaps consequently, they differ on questions of in/visibility.
Noor lives in the border zone that has been pockmarked by US drone bombing as well as numerous Pakistani military operations. For several years, he was crisscrossing the Tribal Areas capturing the shock and devastating aftermath of drone bombings. To look through Noor’s photographic archive is to encounter ruination in mundane yet macabre full-frontal view: strewn bricks, wood, straw, rebar, the fragments of a woman’s kameez. Neighbors and children sometimes stand amid the rubble of an annihilated home exhibiting evidence: shards of Hellfire missiles offered grimly to the camera. These kinds of visual images dominate Noor’s oeuvre. In these images, the drone’s technological body recedes, for what interests Noor is not so much the drone body, per se, but the drone war as it is lived and survived around him. By 2010, the year Noor filmed the drone footage from which this still derives, drones hovering over North Waziristan had become a frequent occurrence. In fact, Obama would bomb at a rate ten times higher than his predecessor during the war on terror (Purkiss 2017).
Noor considers the fleshly inhumanity of the war to have been obscured by the haze of war on terror propaganda that has especially reduced ethnic Pashtuns like him to “citizen suspects,” populations subjected to surveillance, suspicion, and, sometimes, overwhelming violence (Al-Bulushi 2021). Consequently, Noor’s photographic practice has been oriented toward capturing the incalculable damage to life and lifeworlds in the Tribal Areas as a result of the US-led war. He has developed this project within the rubrics of global media circulations, specifically the fields of journalism and human rights, that are not of his making. For these reasons, wherever he could, Noor came to focus on children and women, those “two types of people,” as he put it to me, “whom you cannot accuse of fighting in Afghanistan or elsewhere”—in other words, those who should be considered innocent even by the United States’ own convoluted logics.
Paglen is the son of an Air Force ophthalmologist and grew up on military bases. His work, by contrast, eschews evidentiary documentation. Instead, the artist’s enduring concern is the ambiguities of vision (Simon 2013). Seeing, he argues, is historically specific (Curcio 2011). The skies may look the same across time, but the twenty-first-century skyscape is littered with technologies that are often both invisible and shape how and what we see. His photographs of drones “have become canonical” (Simon 2013). Paglen’s photo of a Reaper drone at an airbase in Nevada—an image that is both highly distorted and instantly recognizable as a drone—has come to represent “the space that drones inhabit in the public imagination,” writes one of his interviewers, Lenny Simon (2013). Paglen’s series Time Study (Predator; Indian Springs, NV) (2010) interrogates the conventions of landscape photography and consists of eight albumen prints of a Predator drone, no more than a speck, floating in the Nevada sky. Other works draw resonance from their likeness to impressionist paintings. Untitled (Drones), a photographic series composed of chromatically rich color prints of redolent skies, the drones almost entirely invisible. This staging of in/visibility is evident in other works as well. In his photographic monograph Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes, Paglen includes grainy images of classified sites—their contours ambiguous and difficult to make out without the accompanying text. And finally, still other artworks plumb the question of vision through the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning, working with computer programmers to design AI-generated artworks. In sum, it is work that probes the infrastructures of the “black world” of the US state and the technologies that increasingly may govern our lives.
It is in the context of Paglen’s work that Noor’s still image of a hovering drone—so exceptional in his own oeuvre—becomes an art object. The drone body hovers in oversized proportions and appears meaningful even as it floats seemingly untethered to any of the particularities or racialized geographies that constitute the conditions for drone surveillance and bombardment. In this sense, the installation is ultimately neither a collaboration nor Noor’s project. It’s Paglen’s.
Bodied Visions
Returning from fieldwork about the drone war and looking at Paglen’s artistic productions and how they center US technologies, I am deeply ambivalent. Seeing, after all, is not only historically specific; it is also bodied. As a scholar of Muslim heritage with particular political and intellectual commitments, I am repeatedly confounded by how Muslim, Brown, and Black bodies and the racialized geographies of bombardment keep disappearing from view, substituted for by the very technologies that attempt to destroy them. I use my own sense of alienation from some of the artwork related to the drone war as a sensorial index of the geopolitical. It alerts me to the fact that this art is perhaps meant for other eyes, other bodies situated in a different kind of sensorial order. Because, twenty-six years after the First Gulf War—nicknamed the “Nintendo war” or the “video game” war for the barrage of technophilic propaganda images released by the US Defense Department and deployed by North American media—it appears to me that the technological capacities of the US state are taking center stage again, this time not as propaganda but as critique.
My own ambivalence about the form of this critique stems from the interplay of spectacle and secrecy in some of the artworks on technology and war that only appears to add a sense of mystique to the violent technologies of US empire. David E. Nye (1994, xvi) characterizes this distribution of the sensible as the “technological sublime,” that experienced sense of “awe and wonder, often tinged with an element of terror which people have had when confronted with particular natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements.” Developed against the backdrop of rampant colonization, it helped cement the idea of an American nation and American greatness through a shared structure of feeling about engineering and technological feats (i.e., railroads, bridges, NASA space launches, and the atomic bomb), with these large-scale objects sometimes being dedicated during July 4th celebrations.
It is in this broader context that the billboard installation acquires its frisson and broad meaning for US publics through such technologically oriented drone sensibilities. As Nye observes, the “dark promise of unimaginable violence” (252)—but experienced with a degree of safety—added to the experience of the sublime as with, for example, those who witnessed test atomic bomb explosions voluntarily from a distance (232). In other words, the technological sublime incorporates a mixed, fascinated sense of awe and fear that can be shared by publics on opposing ends of the political spectrum—those who are politically opposed to drone war and those who support it. As the technological sublime structures the contemporary sensorial life of US empire, it renders the technological body of the drone immediately self-evident as an intelligible artifact that signals both fascination and terror at the secret capacities of the US state. Consequently, the positioning of Noor’s image within Paglen’s artwork—invested in questions of infrastructures, technologies, and secrecy that are qualitatively removed from Noor’s concerns about his communities—thus eviscerates the temporalities, geographies, and unequally positioned lifeworlds of the gendered, racialized, and, in the context of the war on terror, Muslim populations subject to drone warfare. Ultimately, the universalizing logic of this empire means that it looks out onto the world but can only find itself gazing back (see also Dua, this forum).
What might it mean to traverse those other geographies, to conduct a geopolitics from below? In her piece on a Black sense of place, Katherine McKittrick (2011, 953) notes that even in work sympathetic to racialized subjects surviving ongoing violence, the “dead and dying black/nonwhite body” continually becomes the teleological endpoint. That is, these places and geographies are rarely seen as capable of generating a conceptual analytics about the weightier issues of war, technology, or racism. Instead, their destroyed hulks are merely presented as final evidence for the brutalities of racism and technology.
An anthropology of geopolitics would remain attentive to these questions of disappearance, traces, and ephemera. It would ask: How is it that the drone body came to be seen as the geopolitical object proper? It would probe the distribution of the sensible that constructs a given sphere as “geopolitical” and work toward provincializing the sensorial order of US empire.
References Cited
Al-Bulushi, Samar. 2021. “Citizen‐Suspect: Navigating Surveillance and Policing in Urban Kenya.” American Anthropologist 123 (4): 819–32.
Boucher, Brian. 2018. “‘This Is the Project of a More Just World’: Trevor Paglen on Making Art That Shows Alternative Realities.” Artnet website. June 11. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/trevor-paglen-interview-1299836.
Curcio, Seth. 2011. “Seeing Is Believing: An Interview with Trevor Paglen.” Daily Serving: An International Forum for the Contemporary Visual Arts, February 24.
Kapadia, Ronak K. 2019. Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
McKittrick, Katherine. 2011. “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place.” Social & Cultural Geography 12 (8): 947–63.
Nye, David E.1994. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Purkiss, Jessica. 2017. “Obama’s Covert Drone War in Numbers: Ten Times More Strikes Than Bush.” The Bureau of Investigative Journalists website, January 17. https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017–01–17/obamas-covert-drone-war-in-numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-bush.
Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.
Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Edited and translated by Steven Corcoran. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.
Simon, Lenny. 2013. “Interview: Trevor Paglen.” Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College website, December 12. https://dronecenter.bard.edu/interview-trevor-paglen.
Watson Institute. n.d. “Human Cost: Over 929,000.” Costs of War Project, Watson Institute, Brown University. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures.
Cite As
Tahir, Madiha. 2022. “Sensorial Geopolitics.” American Anthropologist website, August 4.