Abstract

The terms of popular debate concerning the drone and drone power have been quickly established. Debate typically centres around a set of issues which include: the diffusion of the conventional battlefield and the muddying of ‘territory’; the supposed precision of surgical strikes, or as the US military has it, ‘putting warheads on foreheads’ (Chamayou, 2015: 141); and the system of seeing and killing from thousands of miles away, with the accompanying debates concerning, on one hand, the invulnerability of drone operators (Benjamin, 2012), and on the other, the various psychological disorders suffered by these same operators (Power, 2013). There are now familiar, officially sanctioned images to accompany such issues, too: images of the drone pilot’s control room with its multiple screens, images of the Predator drone aircraft soaring above unfamiliar terrain. These images serve to illustrate the fact that such debates have a tendency to focus either on the political subject (the civilian, the soldier, the terrorist), or on the technical object (the drone, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). What then of drone culture? What of the fundamental weirdness of the drone that can be felt beyond its military operations and that refuses reduction to a set of standardized discourses?