Technologies of Violence and Vulnerability

Critical Horizons, 2016

Vulnerability is a concept with fleeting contours as much as it is an idea with assured academic success; its topicality in Europe and the United States, however, refers to different histories. In the United States, what we see is the expression of a polyform reflection on torturable, "mutilatable" and killable bodies, especially after September 11 and the ensuing bellicosity. In this way, Judith Butler points to the irreducible dimensions of human sociality, violability and affectability, on which she founds an ethics of non-violence and imagines a new form of community. The centrality that she confers to the possibility of bodily destruction is such that she reflects the unequal distribution of vulnerability through a contrast between lives that are worth mourning and those that are not. From a wholly other perspective, one developed on the basis of ethnographic surveys on mass violence and collective rapes in India after the Partition, 1 Veena Das takes up the task of thinking through the way in which forms of life are also forms of violent death, in which a form of death is born in the matrix of everyday life. Reciprocally, she considers how the distribution of violence, torture and massacres can haunt and shape everyday relations.

The ongoing conflict in the war on terrorism puts two emblematic modes of violence into sharp relief: the drone, as an ostensibly rational, clinical and measured weapon of war, and suicide bombings, frequently portrayed as the horrid deeds of fanatics. In this article, I seek to challenge this juxtaposition and instead suggest that both modalities of killing are part of the same technologicallymediated ecology of violence. To do this, I examine the materialsemiotic assemblage of the drone and of the suicide bomber, paying attention to the technological production of each mode of violence, as well as the narratives that render each figure intelligible in the war on terrorism. I argue that the strongly divergent narratives found in Western discourse serve as a politically expedient sense–making device, whereby suicide bombing is pathologised, thereby justifying ever more intrusive violent acts with seemingly rational technologies like the drone. Rather than “solving” the problem of terrorism, this creates counter-productive, or iatrogenic, effects, in which technological mediation escalates rather than diminishes cycles of violence. By way of response, I suggest that a better understanding of the relational nature of violence in the war on terrorism might be gained by reading the two not as antithetical figures, but instead as operating in the same technological key.

The Australian Journal of Anthropology 24 (2013) 223-235

Constellations 16 (4):634-643.

History and Technology, 2011

ABSTRACT: This article provides a theoretical and empirical contribution to the political history of technology by articulating a new conceptual perspective on the power of technological things and through outlining a history of modern urban technological terror and terrorism. It introduces a user-centered perspective on technological politics in the form of ‘subject histories of technology’ which, contrasting with prevalent ‘object histories of technology’ on technological inventions and innovators, emphasize the self-fashioning power of technological artifacts. Through an overview history of technology of ‘terrormindedness’ covering the three subsequent waves of urban terror arising from aerial bombardment, nuclear weapons and substate terrorism it shows how technologies have been used by individual citizens to cope with the experience of man-made fear and insecurity. In conclusion it argues that the political history of technology should to the focus on community politics and system politics of big institutional technologies add an attention to the personal politics of the emotional and material power of small technical things." In the editors' introduction Martin Collins says: "In this issue, Mats Fridlund and Lissa Roberts, in their respective articles, take up a central problem in recent historiography and discussions of historical explanation: the interplay of materiality, the articulation of social and political space, and the constitution of individual experience. Each article seeks to make strong historical and methodological claims. In Fridlund’s narrative, it is to bring forward ‘subjectivity’ as a problem, using the history of terrorism as his interpretive lens. The sociocultural effects are his focus; he considers historical actors in the everyday world and their encounter with terrorism- related objects and discourse about these objects in particular places and times – early nineteenth century Copenhagen, London in the interwar years, and the United States after World War II, and, respectively, to each case, associated objects such as buckets; warning sirens and gas masks; and, then, bomb shelters and bollards.""

International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2013

An argument for how suicide bombings create symbolic meaning by articulating the body in ways that transgress liberalism's understanding of subjectivity. Presented at Radboud University, The Netherlands.

Fast Capitalism, 2007

2016

Ethics & International Affairs