Disrupting “all the familiar geometry”: Drones,Settler Colonialism,and Nasser Hussain’s Difficult Questions

In his 2013 meditation on what it is like to be an embodied human being residing on either side of a drone strike, Nasser Hussain writes: “We have become too accustomed to seeing from the air, which violates all the familiar geometry and perspective of our mundane, grounded vision.” ¹ In discussing how tied aviation is to the photographic and cinematic “modern mode of seeing,” he reminds us of a danger attending that mode, that “we forget that seeing through an aperture produces a particular and partial visual construction.” In this article I’ll use this reminder, and Hussain’s thought more broadly, to unpack a problem Mark Rifkin calls “settler common sense,” an over-reliance of citizens of a settler colonial state on framings that “reaffirm, normalize, and propel settlement as the ‘ready-made’ against which new information, sensation, experience affectively is managed.” ² Reading Hussain’s phenomenology of drone strikes alongside past and present problems of how settler colonialism gets lived in its mundane yet deadly forms may shed new light on both while paying some measure of tribute to Hussain’s lasting influence on how I approach difficult questions.

Hussain’s article, “The Sound of Terror: Phenomenology of a Drone Strike,” looks at drone strikes from the standpoint of the human beings impacted by them. On one side we have the drone operators, viewing landscapes of purported threat from above, following a chain of command and launching deadly strikes from thousands of miles away. For them the scene is all image and no sound, abstracted from both face-to-face possibilities of communication and the fuller horizon of vision experienced by the human eye rather than the narrowing lens of a camera. On the other side there are the people on the ground, civilians and targets, hearing the buzzing of the drones but likely unable to see where they are located, thus undergoing a diffuse form of anxiety that is mostly sound and also chronic – one never knows when the drones will return, and one never knows, when the drones are present, whether they will cause harm. And so life in a drone zone gets restructured by the ever-present possibility of unseen assault from above. Hussain observes that opponents of the use of drones tend to worry that it violates international law or causes unjust civilian death, while proponents tout drones’ capacity to save lives both by keeping U.S. soldiers out of harm’s way and striking targets with more precision than is possible in combat. In other words, both supporters and detractors focus on a value calculus of drone usage. Hussain looks at the problem from a wider or different angle: the “chronic and intense harm continuous strikes wage on communities.”

Hussain shows us what the camera sees: a narrow and flattened silent cinematic view from above. And he uncovers what it doesn’t see: constant fear resulting in chronic anxiety and widespread post-traumatic stress disorder. He asks us to shift our gaze away from a preoccupation with casualty figures and accuracy statistics and toward the “diffuse but chronic deterioration of life” that “offers a thicker definition of civilian harm and dismantles, in part, the visual regime of the drone.”

He doesn’t directly address a third group of persons implicated in the regime of drone usage, but his analysis leaves room for us to do so here: U.S. citizens who approve the government’s use of drones because they prefer to keep U.S. soldiers away from dangerous battle zones, or who are indifferent to drone usage because they don’t care about people in, for instance, Pakistan, or they might care but mostly ignore U.S. use of drones because their own lives are not affected directly by it. This group of persons has let a settled way of thinking determine what they will think and see, which impacts whether a difficult question about drones can even arise, whereas Hussain’s argument demonstrates that most thinking about the pros and cons of drone usage presents only one part of a complex problem. So his argument also opens up space for us to consider why – beyond the secrecy of some aspects of the drone program – more people do not feel personally implicated in what drones make happen.

That leads us back to settler colonialism and “settler common sense.” If citizens of land that was stolen from earlier inhabitants do not feel implicated in an ongoing injustice, how did that denial become possible, and what makes it able to continue in widespread fashion? If we look at this problem, it may help us understand something about the question just raised, about the capacity of everyday citizens to ignore their government’s use of drones as an instrument of chronic terror. In turn, Hussain’s points about how drones are experienced on one side or the other of their usage may help us understand something about settler common sense and indigenous resistance.

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“Settler colonialism” is a name for a form of continuing colonization of lands where settlers arrive in order to stay and thus aim to displace and perhaps also destroy the inhabitants who were there before they arrived. It differs from the kind of colonization that arrives with an intent to exploit people and natural resources but which does not seek permanent settlement and thus also does not intend to eliminate the people dwelling in now-colonized space. The distinction can be a blurry one, however. Exploitation can also destroy persons and groups, and not all settlers wish to eliminate indigenous life. But the distinction helps clarify some things that are at stake when we discuss both indigenous political demands and continuing life in settler colonial territories. It may help us see that there are deep structures of thought dedicated to making indigenous life invisible, consigning it to a past, or assimilating it to the settler’s worldview. And it makes clear that these structures of thought not only harm indigenous persons and groups but also insulate settlers from their own implication in ongoing injustice, rendering it difficult for settlers to see that their way of life is the outcome of many of their own choices rather than a given, something that couldn’t be otherwise. Put otherwise: settler colonial subjects residing in western democracies may think their political systems are fair, just and equal; and they think that in such a way that they do not consider the background conditions of those systems, including the violence that overturned other systems and sought to eliminate other ways of living and thinking; and often, even if they do acknowledge past injustices, they do not see that the injustice continues in the present moment, kept in place by how settlers live in settler colonial societies right now. In short, because they do not consider that things could be otherwise, they do not realize that they are at least in part responsible for how things are.

Part of the problem is a tendency to think that elimination of indigenous groups happened in the past – that the U.S. and other governments did regrettable things but that was a long time ago, it is too late to fix it, there is no way to give back stolen land, and anyway indigenous peoples and their ways of life for the most part no longer exist. This is a problem of perception. Domination of indigenous persons is not only accomplished with overt violence; it is done bureaucratically, by dividing up communal land into individual allotments that may then be sold, by dictating the terms of citizenship or the terms of tribal membership, by attaching self-determination to western legal ideas about what sovereignty and land ownership mean and requiring tribes to fight those battles in courts based on those ideas, by educating indigenous children in residential schools where they are taught that their traditions are superstitions, and so on, all ways of presenting domination as empowerment and rendering it “a technical problem for civic administration.” ³ As Ingrid Huygens points out, about New Zealand, “colonialism is now held in place less by external military or economic control than by internal processes of majoritarian democracy and by an ideological consensus of a benign and inevitable colonization.” ⁴

But let’s not fail to see the very real overt violence that still attends the relationship between the U.S. government and Native American persons and groups. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that Native Americans are killed by police at a higher rate than any other ethnic or racial group in the United States – and yet this statistic rarely gets reported in the news. There are 562 federally recognized indigenous nations in the United States and 532 superfund sites located on tribal lands. ⁵ We’ve recently seen militarized response to the effort of Native American tribes to resist the construction of a pipeline on Sioux land. Kandi Mossett, an activist and tribal member who participated in the Standing Rock protests, states: “I’m out there with my three year-old daughter, looking in the face of the police in full riot gear, with mace in cans the size of small fire extinguishers, with their huge guns like something out of Rambo.” ⁶ These were peaceful protests aimed at protecting water sources and sacred sites. Live Facebook feeds showed water protectors “enduring water cannon blasts in sub-degree temperatures, LRAD sound cannons, rubber bullets, pepper spray, mace, tear gas canisters and bean bag blasts.” ⁷ And yet many mainstream media outlets reported only what law enforcement officials said. Kristen Simmons notes that at Oceti Sakowin, the #NoDAPL protest camp, “anticipation of state violence became a rhythm, with constant low-flying helicopters, floodlights, and a large militarized police presence creating a tension that settled deep into muscles.” ⁸ Energy Transfer Partners, owners of the pipeline project, hired security firm TigerSwan to monitor activists, online and physically, and provided daily “intelligence updates” to federal law enforcement. ⁹ Some of the surveillance was conducted by drones. Native Americans used drones, too – to try to counter the media blackout with evidence of what was happening on the ground. Many of the drones used by water protectors were confiscated or shot down. This helped entrench the one-sided reporting of the events.

Even the framing of the protest as an issue for law enforcement betrays a kind of settler common sense. After all, the protest is not only about water, but about the sovereign right of the Sioux to control developments that impact their land and livelihood – and multiple treaties support the claim that that the land in question belongs to the Sioux. ¹⁰ Calling what happened at Standing Rock “policing” attempts to evacuate Native tribes of their sovereignty by assuming that the conflict consists of criminality and law enforcement rather than an insistence on self-determination. As Simmons puts it, “The construction of Standing Rock as a crisis ruptures history and installs an event-based logic, rather than inviting structural interrogation.” ¹¹ What would we see if we disrupted settled settler perceptions and looked at the #NoDAPL movement as a form of continued self-assertion by Native Americans and the state’s response to it as continued repression of that self-assertion?

So, settler colonial citizens may think that there was past injustice against indigenous persons but are slower to believe that domination and expropriation are ongoing – even though any look at conditions currently in place for Native Americans would reveal a different story. And this disjunction is, at least in part, a problem of perception, of how settler colonial citizens experience the world. You might say that colonialism is a “perceptual tradition,” one in which “settlement – the exertion of control by non-Natives over Native peoples and lands – gives rise to modes of feeling, generating kinds of affect through which the terms of law and policy become imbued with a sensation of everyday certainty”: settler “common sense” (Rifkin 322). Rifkin uses Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to draw out how what isn’t given – what is fabricated by human beings and then chosen by them over and over again – can nonetheless come to be seen as an unquestionable truth inherent in the world.

George Yancy has made similar phenomenologically-grounded observations about whiteness in relation to racial inequality. In Look, a White!, he describes what often happens when he uses the example of a white woman pulling her purse closer to her body when a black man enters an elevator, to talk about what it is like to inhabit the body of a black man in a white racist society. Here are some responses he tends to get:

What if the purse strap broke and instead of holding it for fear of being robbed, the white woman is attempting to fix it? What if the white woman on the elevator is physically blind and so does not even notice the “race” of the man? What if the white woman is claustrophobic and therefore she is simply anxious about being in an enclosed space as opposed to being in an enclosed space with a black man? ¹²

He points out that these responses, while reasonable, tend to assume that “upon entering the elevator, it is as if for the very first time I am faced with something called white racism” (155) – as if it were an abstract Cartesian predicament and not part of the lived fabric of his embodied life. The objections deny Yancy his individuality and judgment, while clinging to the individuality and judgment of the objector: it’s easy for someone to imagine that maybe her own purse strap is broken or maybe she’s claustrophobic. But that makes the scene about the white person and not about racism as background structural violence haunting many human encounters. Maybe she is claustrophobic. But we don’t need to know what was in the mind of every white person who has ever stood in an elevator and pulled her purse closer to her to know that in a society structured by white racism, there is a lot of unjust and irrational fear of people with darker colored skin, and that fear affects not only white people, but the people they irrationally fear. The excuse-making questions fail to do what Yancy calls “tarrying with the embedded and opaque white racist self.” To tarry is to take your time, to stay there and attend to what you’re doing, what it means to be a party to racism. Yancy asks us to delay the hypotheticals and the defensive excuses. This will be key to overcoming racism or settler colonialism. Slow down your reaction. Question what you think is settled. Tarry honestly with what you have inherited; learn to see it clearly rather than leaving it unexamined in the background. Also, note that the struggles of indigenous groups in the U.S. do not overlap perfectly with the struggles of other oppressed groups. For instance, expanding categories of inclusion in terms of rights, voting and citizenship does not address the ongoing colonial injury to groups that would maintain their sovereignty separate from the United States.

What I mean is: if we use “whiteness” or “settler colonialism” as terms drawing our attention to an unmarked false neutrality that has unjust outcomes, we want to be sure that we understand that those outcomes are created rather than passively received as “the way things are.” Each of us inheriting or benefiting from (or even just residing in the wake of) a history of whiteness or settler colonialism is implicated in how these dynamics “gain scope, motion, and force through reiterative yet shifting formations, practices and inclinations” (Rifkin 326). In other words, a lived hegemony or a perceptual tradition is a process that needs to be constantly recreated in order to continue existing. It is people living alongside each other acting in certain ways, accepting things as true or unquestionable, and failing (or deciding not) to seek out other possibilities that keeps a structure in place. Without their support (willed or unwitting), the structure would not remain vibrant. Raymond Williams argues that “the strongest barrier to the recognition of human cultural activity is this immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products,” such that “relationships, institutions and formations in which we are still actively involved are converted, by this procedural mode, into formed wholes rather than forming and formative processes.” ¹³ That is how “settlement can appear as a de facto monolith” (Rifkin 326). However, if settlement is instead seen as a force that requires continual renewal, that might make clear not only that it is up to all of us to choose between different possible outcomes, “but the durability, consistency, scope, and consolidation of the phenomena” can be called into question, and non-Natives can begin to ask how their everyday actions, aspirations and goals contribute meaningfully to a continuing settler colonial regime (Rifkin 327).

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Hussain writes, “Aerial vision at once expands the range of view and hones in on a perceived target. But this focus inwards, this claim of precise aim, is not just one among other ways of looking. Rather, the accuracy of the drone’s eye structures more than vision; it shapes the way we think about, talk about, and evaluate a bombing.” We take a partial, bird’s-eye, silent, non-communicative view on a complex human scene, and use that as the basis on which to decide how to judge the necessity and outcome of a violent intervention into that scene. Hussain continues: “We focus on the target, the moment of impact. We dispute how contained or collateral the damage was, how many civilians died alongside the chosen target. These questions begin to eclipse all other questions about the global military apparatus that makes the strike possible or about civilian injury that goes beyond body counts.” Or, if we’re settler colonial citizens, we focus on property law (without asking how we ended up owning what was stolen), we wish our ancestors had not cheated, degraded and killed indigenous groups (without thinking about how some of the ways we live contribute to current incarnations of those harms), or we regret past losses of indigenous cultures and wisdoms (without asking after what we might learn, right now, from surviving indigenous cultures and wisdoms). With regard to both drone usage and the contemporary relationship of settler colonial citizens to indigenous tribes, we keep ourselves immersed in a perceptual tradition that shields us from difficult truths and very real responsibilities. We don’t ask hard questions.

All is not lost, however, as no tradition is a monolith. Rifkin’s description of the problem shows both how difficult it can be to overcome a perceptual tradition but also the possibility of its being overcome:

If the familiarity of inhabitance depends less on the inherent character of the place one inhabits then the iterability and durations of occupancy itself, the sensation of belonging – of properly extending into the place one occupies – arises out of an “impress” that also orients, directing attention to some things and not others while providing a working map of extant relations and potentials in the space of inhabitance as well as an animating impetus in traversing it. (328)

That I am familiar with the places where I grew up and the places where I now dwell isn’t only because of an inherent quality of those places but relies on how long I was there, what it meant to me and those around me to be there, and how I and we tell stories about how we lived there. All of those forces – time passing, feelings felt, stories told and heard – make an “impress” on me and in being “impressed” I am also oriented to look at and think about some things but not others: “property law” and “family tradition” but not “how the land became property” or what “other traditions” might say. As Sara Ahmed puts it: “We do not have to consciously exclude those things that are not ‘on line.’ The direction we take excludes things for us, before we even get there.” ¹⁴

I think both Hussain in his essay and I in this article are trying to “impress” on you that it matters what stories we tell ourselves about these things. As Donna Haraway puts it, “it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with.” ¹⁵ It matters because, as should be apparent, a perceptual tradition is just that – a tradition, Rifkin’s “working map of extant relations.” It was built up over time by the way people live together, what they value, what they look at and what they do not see – and, as with any map, all of that can change. If we use different stories to narrate our traditions, we may begin to see that different outcomes are possible – different outcomes than the ones we thought were foregone conclusions or “simply how the world is.”

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What would interrupt current certainties about “how the world is,” making us see that feeling at home is manufactured, and that spaces are built to make some bodies more comfortable than others? Learning to listen to other voices can help, whether that means staying within your tradition but expanding its scope (for instance, listening carefully to what Yancy says from within western philosophy and allowing that to change what you think about what it means to respond to and be responsible for a culture steeped in racism) or listening to other traditions (reading indigenous literature and learning new ways of seeing, or supporting tribal efforts to secure self-determination, and working to make sure they can do this on their terms, which means listening – to learn what that means). Daniel Heath Justice, Colorado-born Canadian citizen of the Cherokee Nation, asserts that “when we read the work of Indigenous writers, we participate in the possibilities inherent in that different world, and we become part of the network of relations that make possible more generous, more thoughtful, and more just relationships with one another.” ¹⁶ Lee Maracle, Coast Salish First Nations author and poet, makes a similar point differently: “Critics, instructors, and institutions must respect that the picture First Nations advance is true, even if they don’t see it that way, that it is half of the colonial picture, that what you see may be true, but it is not what we see.” ¹⁷ There are other accounts of how the world is, who belongs to its spaces, and how such belonging is ascertained. That there are other accounts does not have to mean endless discord, however. Maracle also points out that listening to each other’s stories may make space for creation of new, more inclusive stories: “The moment we share a commonly constructed picture, a story, then we can begin to pull at the fabric holding the picture together, see its construction, and dismantle and recreate the design. Only then can we collectively recreate a community more human than before” (69).

Reading and learning to listen, to hear not only what you expect to hear but to be receptive to hearing what you could not have expected, these skills can interrupt settler common sense, and open up different futures. So can participating in a political movement, encountering people different from you, learning from them, even learning how to be with or alongside them despite differences or disagreements. Rifkin suggests that in our practices we can modify our dispositions of thought, and the ways that we inhabit space, in ways that make the familiar strange. He continues: “Becoming conscious of the everyday enactment of settlement involves relinquishing the notion of an autonomous, extra-political selfhood existing in a place apart, instead opening onto a recognition not only of enduring Native presence within contemporary political economy but of the effaced history of imperial superintendence and displacement” that allows settler citizens to consider themselves unproblematically free on land that is legitimately theirs (336). Legitimacy, in this context, is granted by law. But that law is built on a deep history of expropriation. We need to learn to see that.

This does not only matter because we should stop believing lies. Changing the stories we tell ourselves – remembering that (to use another of Haraway’s formulations) “it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas with” (12) – is the only way we will succeed in changing the world. Huygens, reflecting on attempts to develop decolonizing practices in New Zealand, points out that “changing institutional outcomes was not enough if the settler colonizer group remained in control” (71). Decolonizing must mean more than revising existing institutions. It is important to recognize that indigenous self-determination will be built in and by indigenous institutions, which may have different approaches and goals than settler colonial ones. If those different approaches are to be recognized and honored by settlers such that social transformation is possible, it will matter what stories settlers tell themselves about their own history and the history of indigenous groups. Together we will have to build a perceptual tradition capable of inhabiting these complexities.

Michael Billig argues that “ideology operates to make people forget that their world has been historically constructed.” ¹⁸ What Billig calls ideology we might also call, in the terms of this article (following Merleau-Ponty and Rifkin), perceptual tradition: we have all learned how to see, where to look, and what to think about what we see when we look. That training rules out certain types of thoughts and glances, and leaves potentially brilliant sources of other forms of light in the shadows. But Huygens reminds us that even if ideology is a sturdy container it is not impermeable: “Gramsci recommended pitting an ‘educational politics’ against a colonial hegemony. Freire recommended ‘conscientising’ dialogue with others to reveal and name the situation” (61). These tools come from historical resistance to oppressive situations and may be called upon, alongside other resources local or far-flung, new or old, when considering how to transform human relationships, institutions that form and are formed by those relations, and the stories that get told about how and why things are how they are and how they ought to be. Any tradition may be permeated and changed, and that is true at least in part because tradition is never monolithic, nor a foregone conclusion, not even concluded, but always underway, in process. And one can always interfere with something underway, to change its outcome.

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Michael Shapiro’s book Politics and Time discusses “the problem of sustaining an imagination that connects our local, small world to the larger world of interdependence responsible for making available what we consume.” ¹⁹ This problem applies to drone warfare as much as it does to the labor conditions behind most of what we buy. If major news and media outlets in the United States tend to report rather than question official statements about what drone strikes achieve, and thus do not cover the murderous on-the-ground consequences of those strikes, then perhaps it is not surprising that “by recent estimates, only 13 percent of the US population has a negative attitude toward drone-targeted killings” (Shapiro 128). In that case, the “imagination” of news consumers is given no data with which to question information received. Of course, one could seek out more information, from sources beyond mainstream media. A recent Stanford/New York University report on the use of drones in Pakistan found that “from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, available data indicate that drone strikes killed 2,652–3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474–481 were civilians, including 176 children.” ²⁰ If that were the story forming the background to judgments about whether drone strikes are justifiable – if that were the idea we used “to think other ideas with,” per Haraway’s formulation – perhaps the percentage of negative attitudes would rise. However, even knowing something is wrong is no guarantee that people will be moved to protest it or to try to change government policy. That speaks to the second part of Shapiro’s point, that we sometimes have a hard time connecting the “small” world nearby to the larger world, even if that larger world provides the conditions for what is nearby. What is needed, then, is a form of imagination that goes farther. This is, perhaps, another way of saying that we need to find ways to interrupt existing perceptual traditions.

Shapiro suggests the creation of “genres that facilitate slow looking” to counter the media’s tendency to present atrocities that are new and then quickly move on rather than following up or keeping a sustained eye on a continuing problem (Shapiro 123). Slow looking creates space for reflection where what is settled may be interrupted. (Compare this to Yancy’s “tarrying with the embedded and opaque white racist self.”) That we tend not to do this Shapiro identifies as a problem of phenomenology. Quoting Zadie Smith’s story, “The Embassy of Cambodia,” wherein a character opines, “the fact is if we followed the history of every little country in this world … we would have no space left in which to live our own lives or apply ourselves to necessary tasks,” ²¹ he notes, “the story implies that the hiddenness of war crimes and atrocities is owed as much to the psychic suppressions of the phenomenology of everyday life as it is to suppression strategies of government-controlled media” (Shapiro 125).

On the one hand, that’s true. We’ve all, I imagine, felt overwhelmed by the seeming infinity of the ethical demands placed on us by global injustice. There is barely anything we can do in our daily lives that is not poisoned by some unjust relation, and even if we tried to keep ourselves pure of that, we could not succeed. And if we truly understood how far it extends, and also cared deeply about every part of that extension, it would indeed be difficult to “live our own lives or apply ourselves to necessary tasks.” But I want to propose a slower read of what Shapiro says here, about the “psychic suppressions of the phenomenology of everyday life,” because these suppressions are not givens but are part of what we’ve been calling a “perceptual tradition.” So, even if it is not possible to be utterly ethically pure, it is possible to craft an imagination that goes farther, that seeks out information with more depth, that brings nuance to analysis of harm, and that senses the implication of all of us in harms nearby and far away. Perhaps some of my clothing will still be made by slave labor but I will have made sure that much of it was not and the companies that have unacceptable practices have heard my voice. Perhaps I’ll stop believing that mainstream news media gives me the full picture of my implication in the world, and that will make me look elsewhere for important information. Perhaps I’ll begin to see, reading reports from law clinics and articles about the phenomenology of a drone strike that the use of drones is destructive, unjust, should be criminal, and likely does not contribute to keeping US citizens safe. And perhaps I’ll make sure my political representatives at all levels, as well as my friends and colleagues, know this. Perhaps I’ll put my body in the street with others to make this known and visible.

What I mean to point out here is that this is not a problem of phenomenology per se (Shapiro’s naming of the “psychic suppressions of the phenomenology of everyday life” moves too quickly), but of how we inherit a phenomenological tradition. It is a feature of all “common sense” that it strikes us as obvious, as part of what is given about the world. To a certain extent we human beings need this: we need to be able to walk through a world where some things can be taken for granted, so we can devote our attention to the things that cannot. And so we need to trust that a sense we have developed in common with those amongst whom we live stands for time-tested values and procedures that we need not question at every turn. Drawing our attention to “settler common sense” as a perceptual tradition helps demonstrate both the limits to what common sense ought to encompass and how difficult it can be to know when you’ve allowed common sense to make you an agent of injustice. If this plot of land has been in my family for four generations, and I possess the legal deed to it, it may be difficult for me to hear, let alone understand that from another, also legitimate angle, this land should not be mine. I may resist knowing that with everything I’ve got. And that won’t be difficult to do, if everyone around me shares my “common sense” about what matters when we think about land in the United States.

Techniques of interruption may come into play here, however. In going farther with my imaginings, I may begin to sense the rightness of truths that counter my own, and thus open up to solutions that before were unimaginable. (Though nothing will make the solutions easy.) And I may learn to see that what seems far away about drones in Pakistan is actually nearby, and not only because drone operators are here physically. I may sense my implication in a locally-initiated injustice with global reach.

Robin James, citing Kate Chandler, notes that “Pakistani slang for ‘drone’ is ‘bangana,’ and ‘refers to the sound drones make,’ specifically their ‘ongoing buzz.’” ²² James continues: “This sound structures the phenomenological lifeworld (what philosophers might call the ‘horizon’ of one’s experience, the perceptual limit that serves as an organizing foundation for all your perceptions) of the populations whom they patrol.” This constant droning – noise and surveillance – creates a form of chronic terror, resulting in a kind of self-policing that “affects their behavior, their health, their decisions and their values … This ‘oversight’ (to use Hussain’s term) doesn’t need to be internalized by people because it has become an ambient condition.” ²³ Recall what Simmons said of #NoDAPL protests, that “anticipation of state violence became a rhythm, with constant low-flying helicopters, floodlights, and a large militarized police presence creating a tension that settled deep into muscles.” ²⁴ James suggests that this “oversight” means that people don’t need to be kept in line because they’ll keep themselves in line (as Ahmed suggested earlier), or that conditions are shaped such that “we can only take preprogrammed lines, so to speak.” What James uncovers is the terrible truth of a human invention that seemingly makes further invention impossible: “only preprogrammed lines.” Here we witness a perceptual tradition unable to see its own injustice actually rewriting the perceptual tradition of a population it terrorizes.

I don’t wish to underestimate the force of self-surveillance James reveals here, as it surely is great, and real, but I also wish to contest the “only” in her claim. ²⁵ It is never true that human beings can only take preprogrammed lines, even in circumstances where everything is weighted toward their doing so. Continued Native American resistance in the United States shows as much – though it is also important to remember what Hussain writes about the “diffuse but chronic deterioration of life” that occurs in scenes of continual injustice. Part of what is at stake in revising a perceptual tradition or overcoming hegemonic formulations is the human capacity to see beyond what seems to be given, to recognize it as a formulation that can be revised. Of course, the situation of populations terrorized by drones or other chronic threats shows just how far human formulation can push us into a zone of “preprogrammed lines.” But that is also precisely why we need to learn how to resist those lines, not only when we are in them, but when we are the citizens of a government that creates them. That is what it means to possess an imagination that goes further. If we slow down or tarry with these hard truths, it may become easier for those implicated in this widespread global harm to see their responsibilities and act on them.

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In Walden, Thoreau wanted his readers to get past appearances and into what is real – he wanted to show them how to interrupt a perceptual tradition. He observes that “we the inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things” and concludes that “if a man should walk through this town … [and] give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not recognize the place in his description.” ²⁶ Those who live there have failed truly to look at what they have made and how they live. Rifkin reads Thoreau to suggest “the need to alter bodily dispositions in ways that break out of one’s entrenched experience of the place such that it can be made strange, allowing for a resurveying of ‘relations’ to the world around you” (336). But Rifkin also points out the perceptual tradition Thoreau failed to see beyond. When, in Walden, Thoreau relates an anecdote about an Indian who, trying to sell a basket to a lawyer, is outraged when the lawyer does not want to buy it and responds, “What! Do you mean us to starve?”, he uses this as an occasion to criticize the Indian. It’s a recognizable trope self-reliance in Thoreau: “I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them” (12). Thoreau’s assessment is framed by a perceptual tradition for which the Indian is not fully a human being. What kind of writing, thinking and acting would have been made possible if Thoreau had stepped back from his assumptions to ask himself when selling baskets entered the Indian’s world and how it functions there, or whether, in the Indian’s world, it would be meaningful to weave baskets for oneself rather than for others or, if that were a meaningful activity, what conditions would render it something the Indian could pursue rather than weaving for selling? Thoreau fails to see a deeply sedimented history of expropriation, unjust treatment, false personal and cultural superiority, and dehumanization in which he has played a role in this tale he uses to make a point about himself. It may have been difficult for him to see all that, at that time and in that place. But surely it was not impossible. Rifkin adds, for Thoreau and for us:

Becoming conscious of the everyday enactment of settlement involves relinquishing the notion of an autonomous, extra-political selfhood existing in a place apart, instead opening onto a recognition not only of enduring Native presence within contemporary political economy but of the effaced history of imperial superintendence and displacement that provides the continuing condition of possibility for the sense of the settler escape into the wilderness. (336)

What kind of tradition allows us to find our contracts of property valid, our individual freedom unquestionable, this country an unproblematic birthright? What might a shift in perception make possible?

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If there’s a problem with settler colonial critique, it’s that it is still focused on settlers, on whiteness, on those who have power, and thus it can end up being another way of diverting attention from the concerns of indigenous persons who have already been denied recognition in so many ways. It is good to shine a light on how colonialism or whiteness bears a history and is not a neutral background condition. But it also matters, as Joseph Bauerkemper points out, that settler colonial studies “has thus far failed to facilitate significant moves toward ethical futures.” ²⁷ When law can define territory as empty regardless of who lives there and in that way establish the terms of what is seen; when anthropology seeks out “intelligibility, cultural pattern, and persistence, that which is clearly discernible to outsiders” but ignores “processes that might be meaningful to insiders but unintelligible to outsiders” ²⁸ ; when many leaders of Occupy Wall Street do not appreciate what is problematic in the use of the verb “occupy” to describe the right of settlers to take land that their predecessors have already taken from others (a variant of the Thoreau problem) ²⁹ ; then, we need more than a description of the problem. And when the narrative of the vanishing Indian remains prominent in popular and scholarly thinking, such that there is a widely underexamined assumption that “Native peoples may have had prior claims to the land, but they, perhaps tragically, were removed from the area, or died out, or ceased to be ‘really’ Indian, or simply disappeared at some point between the appearance of the ‘last one’ and the current moment, whenever that may be” (Rifkin 324), then we can see another parallel between settler colonial discourse and Hussain’s commentary on drones. Hussain writes: “In the case of the drone strike footage, the lack of synchronic sound renders it a ghostly world in which the figures seem unalive, even before they are killed.” There is no reason to try to preserve a world that has already disappeared. This is also a perceptual inheritance.

It is important, then, that those engaging in such critique take care, as they show how powerful the continuing force of colonialism is, not to construct settler colonialism as an inevitable force incapable of revision, as that would perform an operation similar to finding the Native always already dead. Rifkin argues that “attending to settler common sense … does not so much bracket Indigenous self-determination as draw on it as an ethical inspiration to investigate the ways it is deferred through ordinary action whose aim is not such but whose effect is to reiterate the self-evidence of settler geopolitics” (337). In other words, if we are to understand how a system of coercive expropriation and assimilation comes to be lived by those who are party to it as a blameless everyday form of being and potential, we may at times need to shift attention away from questions of Native sovereignty and toward structures of feeling, how things get lived as ordinary – learning to approach relations of domination and subordination as part of a perceptual tradition that may be revised. But we can’t stay there, satisfied with that achievement. The revision must be put in the service of better futures for indigenous self-determination and thriving. If there isn’t a widespread change in attitudes toward and awareness of continuing domination of indigenous persons and groups, it will likely be harder for the claims of those groups to get a fair hearing. ³⁰ And so settler colonial critique could contribute to building a space of hearing for claims of justice.

In turn, a deeper account of the proposed justifications for use of drone warfare and surveillance might also uncover for us some unacknowledged xenophobia underlying our collective indifference toward the plight of people living their lives in Pakistan and other targeted areas. Examining these areas of underthought prejudice may help us learn to tell different stories and make other outcomes possible.

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It won’t be easy. Once a structure that was experienced as a neutral or factual background is revealed to be an ideological construct, an expression of hegemony, or the outcome of a perceptual tradition, everything looks different. One must learn anew how to read the significance of one’s own place in a complex web. That’s bound to cause discomfort for some. It may be unsettling to learn that what one took for granted is not only not a necessary truth of the world but the reason for continuing injustice. True alarm may attend the revelation that actions experienced as innocent or neutral actively supported unjust processes and outcomes. That is one reason why it may be difficult to interrupt a tradition, or why those who are part of the tradition may not welcome its interruption. And that, further, is one reason why rewriting a world takes work – sustained work, from a lot of different people, over time. As Lorenzo Varacini says, “decolonization will not be a solution but a practice.” ³¹

“We forget that seeing through an aperture produces a particular and partial visual construction,” writes Hussain. Take this as a metaphor for a general problem of perception, that we get used to seeing things a certain way and then forget that there are always other angles to the view and other ways of looking. We may even forget that perception is a process rather than a simple reception of what’s out there in the world. Hussain suggests that we would do well to turn our eyes to the “diffuse but chronic deterioration of life” in a zone of drone usage, because that “offers a thicker definition of civilian harm and dismantles, in part, the visual regime of the drone.” Justice demands this, that we stop accepting inherited frames as our sole way of looking at harms imposed on others. This insistence on looking at received wisdom from new angles was part of Hussain’s method, recognizable in everything he did.

When we don’t do the work of recognizing the perceptual traditions in which we are immersed, it shields us from difficult truths and responsibilities. Given how comfortable it can be not to know about injustices to which we are party, for those lucky enough to be comfortable, perhaps it is understandable that inheritors of a dominant tradition may resist looking too closely at it. What I aimed to suggest – by comparing the problem of how we perceive drone usage to how colonial settlers “settle in” to a sense of the world – was that negative prospects attach to our failures of vision not only for indigenous persons or dwellers of drone-patrolled regions, but for those whose flawed vision finds them blameless in scenes in which they are implicated. It may be tempting to focus on how things have “always been” even though any responsible look would uncover that “always” has only been some decades or a few hundred years; one might fetishize legal documentation without thinking about what it means to store knowledge otherwise or make judgments differently, in other traditions; one might accept explanations offered from government agencies whose aims one may not share; one might think drones only aim at terrorists who deserve what they get; these are some of the strategies we (a diffuse “we” of persons implicated in how worlds are formed) might use to avert our eyes from the hard questions that become possible when a perceptual tradition is interrupted. In so doing we also shield ourselves from the good that may come from such interruption, again, not just for others but for ourselves. In any inherited tradition there will be much worth preserving and as much that needs another look, some critical revision, or perhaps simple (or rough) discarding. Learning to see and judge what should be saved and what no longer empowers (or perhaps never empowered, or maybe only ever empowered some at the expense of many others) affirms life and builds worlds – as much as does any inherited set of practices or beliefs.

And so, if we delay the defensive excuses that close down the possibility of hearing what isn’t expected, new and better outcomes may become possible for all involved, and new relationships that were heretofore rendered difficult or unlikely may form. Huygens argues that “when beneficiaries of colonization use critical counter-narratives, they tell the story of colonization while helping to dismantle it” (75). We can draw a parallel to what Hussain writes about what people tend to say about drones: “to argue about how precise or imprecise, focused or unfocused, drone strikes are is to remain within a visual economy.” It sticks to what it thinks it knows rather than making space for different questions to arise. But critical counter-narratives demonstrate for all who will hear them that traditions are not finished products but rather are underway, in process, always in the midst of being formed, and thus open to revision. It is always possible to disrupt what Hussain calls “all the familiar geometry” of what we have been taught to see and think.

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At some point towards the end of my drafting of this article I became aware that all my references to my friend Nasser were in the present tense. “Hussain writes…” “Hussain argues…” and etc. This realization granted to me a kind of stabbing feeling of simultaneous joy and sorrow such as is probably accessible only to an adult with a certain amount of life behind her, and so I think what is at stake in my usage is not only convention – the tradition of referring to quotations from articles one cites in the present tense unless some element of temporality dictates otherwise – but a kind of affirmation of what does not get lost when we lose people who matter to us. Nasser Hussain’s thinking – his scholarly work, his analytical mind, and also his kindness and his toughness, as well as his keen and sometimes devilish wit – had a lasting impact on everyone who encountered him. I encountered him, and am glad of it. The wonderful inheritance of his writing and thinking continues, even as it is complicated by loss. The traditions Nasser and I inherited had some overlap but also differed quite a bit, and that was part of how we were able to pose to each other difficult questions. He helped me unseat the “‘ready-made’ against which new information, sensation [and] experience” get affectively managed (Rifkin 330). And he has left that gift behind despite his physical absence. I could tell a different story about this, one where it only adds up to loss. But different stories have different outcomes, and it matters the stories we choose to tell other stories with.