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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Grégoire Chamayou, Théorie du drone, La fabrique, Paris 2013, pp. 368
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2015-10-01
2021-09-21
2015-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Maurizio Guerri
2015/10/01
Insmli-Milano − Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera
2036-461X
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Grégoire Chamayou, Théorie du drone, La fabrique, Paris 2013, pp. 368
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16437/16792
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Grégoire Chamayou
Théorie du drone
La fabrique, Paris 2013, pp. 3681




   Chamayou’s text represents a rare philosophical study that engages with the
transformation of contemporary war by means of a device — the drone — which
is radically changing our relationship with combat. The extent of this transfor-
mation can be seen from two informative statistics: the number of armed drones
in the United States increased 1200% between 2005 and 2011; and, though the
budget for US defense actually decreased in 2013, the resources set aside for
UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) rose by 30%.
   Chamayou’s essay constitutes both a philosophical reflection on war and an
important treatise on visual culture, insofar as the war ‘fought’ with drones cor-
responds to a different perspective the offensive soldier has of his enemy, whom
has become merely a target to destroy from a distance. Chamayou’s goal is sum-
med up as follows:

    More than ever, philosophy is a battlefield. It is time to enter the fray. What I have to
    say is openly polemical, for, over and above the possible analytical contributions this
    book may make, its objective is to provide discursive weapons for the use of those men
    and women who wish to oppose the policy served by drones (p. 16).

   In a very clear way, Chamayou states that philosophy must be rooted in the
present and relate critically to it, by means of a genealogy of devices through
which power is exerted.
   Contemporary common sense tends to acknowledge drones as the ‘most ethi-
cal weapons’ men and women have ever built. Drones, therefore, are humane
weapons par excellence: the enemy is targeted without error, and ‘our’ soldiers
are spared needless sacrifice on the battlefield. Through this propagandistic re-
presentation, spread by governments and the arms industry, drones are publicly
legitimized. However, Chamayou rightly observes that this pacifying and acriti-
cal notion conceals a series of crucial problems: 1) the number of errors in hit-
ting operational targets is incredibly high, as Chamayou’s book shows through a


1
 All quotations are taken from the English translation: A Theory of the Drone, trans. by Janet Lloyd
(New York: The New Press, 2015), pp. 292.

                                                           Cinéma & Cie, vol. XV, no. 25, Fall 2015
                              Reviews / Comptes-rendus


wealth of documentation, making it difficult to believe that UAVs are infallible.
2) According to the classic rhetoric of war drones would be the weapons of co-
wards, that is, the weapon of a person who strikes from a distance without being
seen. Warfare thus becomes execution — or is it assassination? — at distance.
Drone warfare is no longer a balanced battle between the forces of two rivals,
but rather consists in one person safely seated in front of a computer screen, hun-
ting down prey that tries in vain to escape. 3) The diffusion of devices that are
perceived as neutral or innocuous — under the guise of anti-terror instruments
— furthers the possible creation of a ‘synoptic iconography’, along with certain
Internet sites, cell phones and tracked credit card usage, whereby increasing por-
tions of our lives can be monitored 24/7. Chamayou informs us, shockingly, that
in 2009 alone US drones recorded the equivalent of 24 years of video footage.
For the author, then, UAVs are less effective preventative weapons against ter-
rorism than an experimental, intrusive tool for the surveillance of everyday life,
which therefore troubles the founding principles of any democracy. In short,
today we already inhabit a ‘wide area persistent surveillance’ made by widespre-
ad ‘unblinking eyes’ (an expression used by the Sierra Nevada Corporation at a
NATO symposium), that are active day and night, 365 days a year.
   When were drones first made? Chamayou identifies a study by the engineer
John W. Clark, published in New Scientist, significantly entitled ‘Remote control
in hostile environments’ (1964). This was the first theoretical text dedicated to
designing ‘telechiric systems’ that is, machines that could operate at a distance
in hostile environments ‘by a cable or by a radio-link’, thus keeping the operator
safe, comfortably seated at his workstation in front of a screen. The setting for
the ‘telechiric systems’ is identical to the UAVs: on the one hand is the ‘danger
zone’, where the machine works as it hunts down the enemy; on the other is the
‘safe zone’, where the person monitoring the target can work in all safety. These
are two totally different spaces that reflect two equally different existential condi-
tions. Chamayou traces to Clark’s study the emergence of a new perspective and
the radicalization of asymmetric warfare. The author writes that Harun Farocki
had fully grasped the relevance of this perspective (there are numerous referen-
ces to his works in the publication) when he observes that ‘technology of military
vision produces not so much representations as “operative images”, images that
do not represent an object, but instead are part of an operation’ (p. 114). And
Chamayou writes: ‘You can click the apparatus, and when you click, you kill.
Here, though, the act of killing is in effect reduced to positioning the pointer or
arrow on little “actionable images”, tiny figures that have taken the place of the
old flesh-and-blood body of the enemy’ (p. 114). As the psychologist Stanley Mil-
gram contended, this kind of device provokes ‘a break in the “phenomenological
unity” of the act’ (p. 118).
   Among the many aspects of great interest in Chamayou’s book, there is cer-
tainly a careful philosophical reflection on how our relationship with war has
been numbed even though combat grows more and more present in our lives. In
fact, UAVs have revealed an inner contradiction of the State with regards to war.

140
                          Grégoire Chamayou Théorie du drone


It is not so much the humanization of war and our aversion to the victims that
has produced drones in conflicts as it is the suppression of the dialectic contra-
diction between war and sacrifice:

  One can thus grasp what is politically at stake here: reconciling the neoliberal re-
  striction of the aims of state power to security matters with the maintenance of its
  prerogative to wage war. Waging war, but without sacrifices. Freely exercising war-
  waging sovereignty, but within the internal political conditions of sovereign security
  and protection. Abolishing the contradiction. Wiping off the map the second schema,
  which is so problematic and in which official political relations were turned inside out
  and became unilateral in too flagrant a manner. Exercising power, at an internal level,
  in war as in peace (p. 181).


           [Maurizio Guerri, Insmli-Milano − Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera]




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