How to Win Feminist Research Awards While Bootlicking the Pentagon

An academic essay recently made the rounds in online leftist circles. Its title, “Drone Disorientations: How ‘Unmanned’ Weapons Queer the Experience of Killing in War,” sounds like a joke — a sort of tedious, on-the-nose satire of pinkwashing. But the piece is sincere, and its implications are as repugnant as its title would suggest.

To the extent that its hostile language permits comprehension, the essay appears to say that the experience of operating unmanned aerial combat vehicles resembles the sort of vague ontological disruption that earlier poststructuralist feminist authors associate with queerness. Unfortunately, I can’t provide a more succinct encapsulation of the piece because, like many other academic works of its kind, it’s impenetrable by design.

A powerfully enduring legacy of Jacques Derrida and other European philosophers of the twentieth century’s latter half was the impulse to challenge the very idea of meaning. Derrida charged that “there is no outside-text,” that the meaning of a signifier is instead carved out of the difference between other signifiers.

I haven’t spent enough time flaying myself with the barbed language of writers from this tradition to grasp what the political implications of this revelation are meant to be. But what I’m sure of is that the tradition gave its “post-structuralist” acolytes carte blanche to erect towering, impregnable monuments to their own lexical aptitude. Because the cumbersome traditional responsibility to be clear and comprehensible had been abdicated by the movement’s philosophical underpinnings, academics were free to openly court their first love: using words and phrases that most people do not understand. Opacity was no longer a shortcoming — it was a convention.

Nathan J. Robinson showed how the problem with academic writing (much of which emerged out of this tendency) was not just that it was hard to parse, but categorically impossible to. “The problem,” he writes, “is that so many of the words being used are distant from the world of concrete things, and because the author always defines abstract terms by using other abstract terms, we never actually get a good sense of what we’re really talking about underneath it all. We are trapped in a world in which vague words with multiple meanings refer only to other vague words with multiple meanings.”

But the continental theory tradition that embraced this sadistic language-maze is meant to be radical, to deeply challenge our preconceptions. By contrast, more readable prose — like that offered by the analytic tradition of philosophy — is supposedly stodgy, male and Euro-centric. (This despite the fact that many of the most prominent members of the latter tradition — Bertrand Russell, G.A. Cohen, Noam Chomsky — were fiercely devoted leftist activists, and the darlings of the continental scene all too often lent their sympathies to fascism and capitalism.)

Enter something like Cara Daggett’s “Drone Disorientations.” Right off the bat, the perplexing use of “disorientations” as a plural noun signals to the reader that she’s in for a bumpy, uncomfortable and directionless ride. Indeed, the piece is mostly bereft of tractable insights, instead preferring to weave through a jumble of impressionistic comparisons between cultural phenomena. The few intelligible declarations, when broken down, are fairly simplistic, falling far short of the level of profundity that could justify the rarefied semantics.

For instance, according to Daggett, drones are “‘genderqueer bodies’ …human–machine assemblages that do not track onto male–female, human–machine binaries.” She goes on to remark that “Besides the illegibility of drone assemblages, drones also disorient by pointing attention in unfamiliar directions, making contact possible between strange objects and bodies (the operator screen, the air-conditioned box of combat, the figures spied through drone cameras, assassination).”

These observations are fundamentally insubstantial and boring. Drones don’t have genders (apparently a first for inanimate objects.) Drones incorporate human interaction in a number of ways. Daggett plugs uncontroversial truisms into the post-structuralist formula for obfuscation, and the stuff that comes out the other end is meant to make the reader feel that they’ve read something penetrating. But it’s just dumb shit dressed up in bullshit.

The essay concludes with what amounts to a doctrinaire, conservative defense of drones. Something you’d find in Commentary magazine or in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “This is not to be naively optimistic,” she laments. “Drones have not completely replaced more traditional combat and likely will not in the foreseeable future.” Inside every 30-year-old sayer of “intertextual” is a 60-year-old neocon clawing his way out.

Drones, of course, are horrifying. They prolong war by dramatically reducing the human cost of combat incurred by the US and increasing it for numerous countries in the Middle East. They rely on notoriously flawed signals intelligence for targeting, and as a result they kill far more innocent civilians than intended targets. Here’s an excerpt from a report by Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute:

Ten-year-old Nadia was at school when a drone strike hit her house, killing her mother and father. Having moved in with an aunt in a nearby town, Nadia told Center for Civilians in Conflict she had “no source of income with my parents gone… my aunt looks after me now and I help her in the house… but I want admission to school. I want an education.” According to the BBC, a teenager called Saadullah survived a drone strike that killed three of his family members, but lost both of his legs and one eye. He said: “I wanted to be a doctor… but I can’t walk to school anymore. When I see others going, I wish I could join them.”

Both legs and one eye. Both legs and one eye. Try to conjure the horror of having your legs and eye blown off your body by an explosion from the sky. Then imagine, if you will, being a professional academic who can look winsomely upon robot killing machines because of what they, uh, symbolize.

I’m not a big proponent of conspiratorial thinking, but I couldn’t help noticing the author’s institutional affiliation: Johns Hopkins University. That’s relevant for this reason:

The American war machine has been ratcheting up since the election of Trump. Missiles attacking a Syrian government air base, the “mother of all bombs” in Afghanistan and the expansion of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) on the Korean Peninsula. Underneath all these recent developments is the ever-present buzz of drones, flying under the radar.

If you were to follow that buzz back to its origin, there’s a good chance it would lead you to [Johns] Hopkins, specifically the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), about a 40-minute drive from the Homewood Campus. There, in 2012, the University unveiled new “swarming” drone technology.

From her position at the most influential drone-research institution in the country, Daggett offers an uncritical paean to murder-by-robots tucked into a thicket of hip rhetorical gestures. Her paper affirms the cruel consensus of American empire, while its language winks at subversiveness.

It’s a racket, and it works: the paper won the prestigious Cynthia Enloe Award for “pioneering feminist research into international politics and political economy.” That an essay so philosophically hollow and morally reckless can garner such esteem is a testament to the rampant fraudulence of the theoretical enterprise of which it is a part. The text is the beginning and end, so the author is accountable neither to reality nor to the reader. The reader knows this, and accepts the piece unquestioningly. Slap some references to “embodiment” or “fluidity” on a counterinsurgency white paper, and you’ve got yourself a steadfast, submissive academic audience. Meanwhile, Saadullah still has one eye and no legs.