Finally, having had some time of late to write, here are some preliminary thoughts I've drafted regarding targeted killing and the scopic regime of counter-terrorism.
While the centrality of vision to practices of power has been identified by the likes of Michel Foucault (1977) and Edward Said (1978)--amongst others-- it is Allen Feldman (1997, p. 30) who suggests that, ‘compulsory visibility is the rationality of state counterinsurgency…’ Targeted killing is not different in this regard. It is productive of a visual politics that is predicated on ‘forms of visual surveillance that authorise this form of bodily intervention’ (Feldman 1997: 27). Targets must be visually identified, confirmed, tracked, and positioned relative to other people and material objects in the complex spaces of everyday socio-economic activity. Claims to the precise and discriminatory nature of the practice rest on a consensus about the veracity of the surveillance produced through forms of technologically enhanced vision that, in turn, are reliant on the operationalization of a specific scopic regime.
According to Feldman (1997, p. 30), a scopic regime refers to the means and techniques:
that prescribe modes of seeing and object visibility and that proscribe or render untenable other modes and objects of perception. A scopic regime is an ensemble of practices and discourses that establish truth claims, typicality, and credibility of visual acts and objects and political correct modes of seeing.
The scopic regime that operationalizes targeted killing is one that is shaped by epistemological and aesthetic realism. The pursuit undertaken by these practices of seeing is verisimilitude. The scopic regime operates under the assumption that vision—through technological enhancement—can become an infallible sense that captures the physical world that exists independently of any subjective perceptions that we may have of it. The disembodied, a-historical, and objective observation that helps to define this vision is symbolic of what Donna Haraway (1988, p. 581) refers to as the ‘god trick of seeing everything from nowhere.’ Those that are identified, tracked, targeted, and killed are positioned as both ‘indubitable recordings of what…[was]… simply there and as heroic feats of technoscientific production’ (Haraway, 1988, p. 582). The scopic regime thus encapsulates a particularly masculine way of seeing that has developed through Western traditions in the sciences and humanities (Berger 1972; Haraway 1988; O’Thuthail 1996).
Targeted killing constructs a cyborg assemblage of seeing that surveys, targets, and exterminates. UAVs with advanced camera technology combine with a human operator—and other forms of surveillance/intelligence to which the operator has been made privy— to produce an image of the field of operation within which a targeted killing will take place. The UAV then shifts these processes of visual recognition into a mode of physical extermination for as Feldman (1997, p. 38) notes, ‘[the UAV becomes] a prosthetic that extends ideology and visions of history into the depth of the human body, leaving the dead and depicted in its wake.’
But the argument that those who commit targeted killing possess a detached and disembodied vision that pursues the practice with clinical precision when circumstances justify its deployment belies that vision is also an affective sensibility. To paraphrase John Berger’s (1972) observation on the history of female portraiture in Western art, the body of the targeted, both in the role of an object of surveillance and as a physical conduit for the inscription of military power, serves to flatter the one who can view. This mode of ‘seeing without being seen’ is constitutive of an asymmetrical power-relation that produces pleasure for the viewer and can empower acts of violence (Feldman 1997, p. 40). Similarly, the demonstration of ‘scopic power’ seeks to create anxiety for potential targets (and wider populations) about being monitored so that preferred norms are internalised as a means of shaping behaviour into forms more amenable to the goals of the counter-insurgency project (Feldman 1997, p. 41). Therefore, while realism as a mode of seeing can be deployed as a means of supporting ‘truth claims about the rationality and efficacy of political violence’, it also produces a form of pleasure that can be addictive for the one with privilege of viewing (Feldman 1997, p. 41).
Works Cited
Berger, J. (1972), Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin
Feldman, A. (1997), ‘Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror’, Public Culture 10(1), pp. 24-60.
Foucault, Ml. (1977), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Edited by A. Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books.
Haraway, D. (1988), 'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective', Feminist Studies 14 (3), pp. 575-599.
O Tuathail, G. (1996), Critical Geopolitics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Said, E. (1978), Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.
Photo credit: The U.S. Army
