Supplanting the spectacle of sacrifice: Drone warfare and the anti-spectacle of the safe military body

The society of the spectacle and the visual spectacle

The visual spectacle and the anti-spectacle exist within the political ontology of Guy Debord’s (2014) Society of the Spectacle. Debord envisaged the society of the spectacle as a condition embracing ‘news or propaganda, advertising or the actual consumption of entertainment’ as the ‘prevailing model of social life’ (p. 4). While this hypothesis was ‘paradoxical to many people at the time’, the world ‘seems to have committed itself to relentlessly confirm’ Debord’s analysis of the configuration of the integrated global spectacle (Agamben, 2000: 79).

While the totalizing set of social practices that constitute the spectacle is not a product of modern vision technologies alone, but rather a product of the force and value of images in constructing and mediating modern late capitalist relations, new visual technologies certainly facilitate the expansion of this ontological control. As such, we might say that the spectacle is the constant organizing schematic of Western society in which these fluctuations occur: ‘the means by which our experiences are constantly mediated by images’ (Murray, 2011: 166). Just as the idiom Mark Fisher (2009: 2) attributed to Frederic Jameson reminds us that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world’ than the ‘end of capitalism’, so we might sooner envisage the end of the world than an existence beyond this ontology of the spectacle.

It is within this political ontology of the society of the spectacle that the visual spectacle and the anti-spectacle are manifest as specific genres of visuality, conceiving of ‘visuality’ as that which arrives, through the sense of sight, before one’s eyes, determined by ‘how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see’ (Foster, 1988: ix). The ‘visual spectacle’ is a genre of visuality comprised chiefly of awe-inducing visual materials and a correlate vernacular of pleasurable visual consumption that has gained particular prominence within our ‘ocularcentric’ present (Jay, 1999: 3). This division between the political ontology of the spectacle and spectacular visual practices echoes the distinction John MacAloon (2006: 15) makes that ‘spectacle’ should be approached ‘as a performative genre in its own right . . . and not just as a loose, imperial trope for everything dubious about the contemporary world’.

Thinking of the aesthetics of the image as the initial ‘material experiences’ of the surface level of the image, concerned ‘with the way the sensual world greets the sensate body, and with the affective forces that are generated in such meetings’, the visual spectacle is defined by its visually striking, attracting and awe-inducing aesthetic qualities (Highmore, 2010: 121). As such, it is typically marked by a combination of ‘grandiosity, power, and displays of excess’ (Hancox, 2013: 58). The resulting tapestry of visual materials that make up the visual spectacle are predicated upon continual exposure of phenomena displayed, encouraging the spectator to sit up and look.

During these moments of ocular contact between spectator and visually spectacular material, the visual spectacle stimulates, primes and conditions affects. Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg (2010: 1) pin down the essence of what is an invariably elusive and immeasurable phenomenon, describing ‘affect’ as:

those forces – visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can service to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us (as if in neutral) across a barely registering accretion of force relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability.

Affects are therefore pre-subjective in the respect that they arise prior to, and can then either stimulate or pacify deliberate thought as primers of what Raymond Williams (2001: 319) called the ‘structures of feeling’. While affects are generated from a ‘heterogeneous array of elements’ and cannot neatly be ascribed to their moment of original chrystallization, as scholars appreciate, the visual realm operates as an important apparatus in the stimulation of affect (Anderson, 2014: 34). The visual spectacle can be thought of as a particular ‘machine’ for structuring feeling via the production of affective flows: namely, the displays of excess and grandiosity typical of the spectacle evoke a sense of ‘awe and wonderment’ that encourages viewership ‘in large numbers’, whether in a fixed location or, now more typically, separately (Couldry, 2008: 162).

The visuality of warfare during the late modern era is a prime example of the visual spectacle since war tends to be produced and mediated as an ‘excessive, overblown, superficial event’ (Bakogianni, 2015: 5). Over the past few decades, scholars have repeatedly analysed the imagery of war through this lens of visual spectacularity and highlighted the closer alignment of this nexus parallel to technological advances in mechanisms of capture and dissemination (Stahl, 2009). It is against these prevalent traditions of spectacular display cultures that the visuality of drone warfare and its attendant affective force marks a disjuncture.

What is the anti-spectacle?

I categorize the anti-spectacle as a genre of visuality which materializes in the present age of spectacle. The anti-spectacle does not then dislodge from the political ontology of the Debordian spectacle, nor overturn the existence of the visual spectacle, but can be thought of as a distinct visual style. That is, although the anti-spectacle and the visual spectacle are visually different, ‘they do not displace, much less disprove, one another’ (Foster, 2015: 12). My contention is that the variances in visuality at work in the anti-spectacle denote discrete reworkings of the structures and conditions of the visual spectacle, rather than a wholesale manifestation of a new visual paradigm.

The anti-spectacle is distinct because it manifests via a specific praxis of image making and aesthetic qualities which, in contrast to the visual spectacle, exhibit that there is nothing notable for the spectator to see, therefore encouraging the spectator to look away. ² What is unique regarding my conceptualization of the anti-spectacle versus other scholarly theorizations (Mirzoeff, 2005: 14) is that it is chiefly the anti-spectacular display, rather than a direct state instruction or act of visual statecraft, as in Nicholas Mirzoeff’s adaptation of Jacques Rancière’s (2010) concept of the police command, which chiefly configures the conditions of spectatorial inattention and apathy. ³

Accordingly, the anti-spectacle commands a distinct affective relationship and mode of spectatorship to that which the visual spectacle configures. From this point of view, the anti-spectacle is deeply congruent with Debord’s (2014: 1) conception of the ontology of the spectacle as a composite of images and visual materials that mediate and engender its own ‘social relationship’. Indeed, if the spectacle is, in Debord’s (2014: 13) words, ‘the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity’, then the anti-spectacle is fundamentally consistent with its logic. In fact, we can even say that, in stimulating a heightened degree of spectatorial passivity, the anti-spectacle is an amplification of this pacifying element of Debord’s political ontology.

The cogency of the anti-spectacle is enhanced by the current conditions of the society of the spectacle. Chief amongst these conditions is that life is now perpetually mediated by images and exposed to a cascade of visual spectacles. It is this image-saturated quality of the present that participates in relinquishing the bind of distracted attentiveness and facilitating the spectatorial turn away stimulated by the anti-spectacle, driven by ‘having seen too much, having looked too often in the past’ (Guerin, 2015: 6). Visual spectacularity is, in this respect, not in tension with the anti-spectacle, but can be thought of as a condition for its very existence, conditioning a particularly fragmented and fleeting model of visual consumption.

I posit the military drone and the mode of warfare it configures as the paradigm of the anti-spectacle, performing a ‘decisive strategic function for the understanding’ of this genre of visuality ‘in its ideal form’ (Agamben, 2002). Nevertheless, we must recognize that spectators can and do experience drone warfare in a visually spectacular key via other media. Indeed, since drone warfare manifests within our ocularcentric society of the spectacle, this modality of force can become subsumed in spectacular display cultures via video games and filmic representations. ⁴ This explains how scholars can, in certain respects, cogently situate drone warfare as a continuation of the military-entertainment spectacle (Stahl, 2009: 91). However, I would argue that these two modes of spectatorship – of visually spectacular and anti-spectacular spectatorship – are not mutually exclusive, but that spectators can be invited to look closer via the drone’s lens in a game, while the visual material of a state operation concurrently discourages attention. As such, it is important to underline that the anti-spectacle is one genre of visuality within a competing field. It is this anti-spectacular genre of visuality that is the focus of the remainder of this article.

Let us explore how the state seeks to construct a spectacle of sacrifice as a way to embellish military death in war, before turning to consider how this mode of visual statecraft becomes only problematically workable during the late modern era, and is then supplanted in the context of modern drone warfare given the emergence of the anti-spectacle of the safe military body.

The Vietnam War and the spectacle of the missing

During the Vietnam War, US public attention was fixated upon the body of the American soldier, particularly during the aftermath of the war when the US government increased its efforts to recover living missing personnel or remains which might identify bodies (Hawley, 2005: 1). The very presence of fallen military personnel gives a base level of cogency to the discourse of sacrifice, enlisted as a component of the state’s legitimating statecraft both during and in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The US government initially shrouded particular US military losses within the type of ‘commemorative practices that consecrate their sacrifice to the nation’ (Hawley, 2005: 199–200), the logic being that death is made tolerable when cast as a contributory act towards the affirmation of the nation state. While the US administration concurrently manipulated foreign casualty numbers in their favour, the death and suffering of US soldiers nevertheless became central to the public backlash against the war (Bellamy, 2017: 34).

This public backlash proposed a synecdoche that marked a disruption in the functioning of the sacrificial logic. As Thomas Hawley (2005: 195) notes, the Vietnam War ‘altered if not outright obliterated the understanding of sacrifice and unity upon which the symbolism of the unknown had formerly relied’. The predominance of the unreturned soldier’s body, categorized as ‘missing’, became a focal point of the American body politic. This began to haunt the state’s invocation of discourses which either sought to consecrate death as sacrifice (Polcyn, 2017) or project an image of a triumphant homecoming (Allen, 2009: 71).

The political mobilization of official homecoming imagery was soon eclipsed by the growing public disquiet surrounding those still missing, either categorized as a Prisoner of War (POW) or Missing in Action (MIA). It is within the public discourse surrounding the MIA and POW that ‘the absent Vietnam War body become so meaningful and so valuable’ (Hawley, 2005: 7), serving as a synecdoche for the still fractured condition of the body politic and thus debilitating the possibility of ‘closure’ (Bishop Fedorocsko, 2019). The same warring body upon which the spectacle of sacrifice might otherwise be enlisted to consecrate such loss and legitimize the war effort was troubled by the spectacle of the missing which could not be embellished with the same sacrificial motifs (Inglis, 1993: 9).

The predominant visual imagery attached to the lost soldier made visible and exacerbated this disjunction with the traditions of sacrifice. The public display of the Vietnam veteran was a composite of indications and confirmations of the soldier’s absence. The inability to present or visually confirm the retrieval of missing soldiers highlighted that the state body was still incomplete. Photos of MIA soldiers supposedly in captivity, including one which appeared on the cover of Life magazine in November 1972, were reproduced by MIA activists ‘as proof of postwar captivity’ (Allen, 2009: 203). These images of the MIA, in combination with an array of visual signifiers, including the POW/MIA flag, attached to the issue of the missing soldier (p. 36). Together, this collage of visual signifiers symbolized different elements of absence, obscuring and replacing the positive images of homecoming and suffocating the commemoration of sacrifice with the spectacle of the missing soldier.

Bush’s ‘war on terror’ and the spectacle of the returned

The soldier’s body re-emerges as a poignant site of public attention during the war on terror, illustrated in the Bush administration’s policy of concealing the soldier’s coffin on its return to US territory and the subsequent push for such images to be made public. Like the performance of operation homecoming, Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech in May 2003 was a red herring if it meant to signal the end of American military deaths and the reassembly of the American body politic. While there are differences between these two instances of corporeal loss in war – notably, the absence of conscription during the war on terror – the sacrificial schema upon which military death is inscribed remains both coherent and politically engaged across these instances of late modern war. However, like in Vietnam, albeit in relation to the fallen rather than missing soldier, the efficacy of the sacrificial spectacle again appears only problematically workable since it cannot rely on the visual representational practices on which it is grounded.

As part of a deliberate process of political concealment, in March 2003 the Pentagon issued a directive which banned all media coverage and public distribution of photographs of American soldiers’ coffins when returning to the US, typically arriving at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware (National Security Archive). The ceremonial return of the soldier’s body – a public performance of their sacrifice for the nation – paradoxically became concealed from public view. When doing so, the administration mobilized the interests of the dead soldier and their family to justify such concealment (Buncombe, 2006). In this respect, the state placed emphasis on the private memorialization of the soldier at the expense of the public function of the image, emulating the problem of anti-war sentiment in Vietnam, for which military casualties were similarly a blight that could not be positioned rhetorically or visually in the same way. Following the commencement of the ban, Tami Silicio, a government contractor, photographed coffins being loaded onto a military transport plane at Kuwait International Airport in 2004, and was fired after one of the photos appeared on The Seattle Times’ front page (Carter, 2004). The ban and such practices of enforcement made clear that reporting on casualties during the war was acceptable, but disseminating visual material that exhibits such death was not.

However, the government’s act of concealment catalysed public interest in this site of war, leading to civic calls that the photographs should be disclosed. The ban on media coverage was exposed as a ‘political manoeuvre meant to sanitize the war’ (Seelye, 2009), and the act of concealment became part of the spectacle. By making the return of US soldiers’ coffins secret, critics argued that the government were instead preventing public honour being accorded (Davenport, 2009), and ‘hiding the deaths of our young’ (Seelye, 2009). As a spectacle of the soldiers’ return, these images could not, then, simply be concealed from public view, but, as the very crux of any visual spectacle’s operativity, needed to be visually ‘performed for the benefit of an audience’ (Bakogianni, 2015: 3).

Mirroring the practices of remembrance during the Vietnam War, the war dead – as a synecdoche of the body politic – must again be accorded what was regarded as appropriate public recognition. Precisely because the public are aware of the ‘display’ which is concealed behind the government’s veil, their attempt at visual concealment proved unviable. Following a freedom of information request, Kick and the Memory Hole, two websites aimed at challenging government secrecy, released 361 images of flag-draped coffins in April 2004 (Carter, 2004). Online traffic of between four and five million hits per day subsequently exceeded the bandwidth of the original sites of release, revealing a clamour to witness the performance of sacrifice (Adelman, 2015: 234).

When public attention is focused on this display of military loss, the US government is ultimately caught between a policy of concealment and the reluctant practice of revelation, both of which seem to ‘drive home the basic reality of mounting casualties’ (Mueller, 2005: 45). These images at once became a potential tool of legitimation that can lend authority to war (Griffin, 2010), while also posing the risk of rousing opposition and delegitimizing the war effort. The spectacle of the nexus between the social body politic and soldier’s body thus remained palpable during Bush’s war on terror, and attempts to veil this display arguably only rendered the inevitable loss of military life more vivid, underscoring the enduring problematic of the displayed military body during the late modern era. It is this enduring problematic of the soldier’s body in late modernity and its relationship with the spectacle of sacrifice from which I now argue that the drone pilot makes a decisive departure.

The anti-spectacle of the safe military body

Alongside news media coverage of specific drone-led operations (Sheets et al., 2015), the pilots and their work-to-home routine have become a central feature of media coverage and fictional representations of the US government’s target killing regime. Predominant within this focus on the pilots is an attempt to understand what it is like to wage war from a remote distance, and then return to suburban family life. There are, typically, two core components of this template: the pilots’ work–home life balance and their conduct in work.

A piece in The Christian Science Monitor exemplifies this fascination with the ordinary aspects of the pilots’ commuter-like routine, stating that after their shift ‘these pilots then get in their cars and drive home to their families, mow the lawn and make dinner, or take their children to soccer practice’ (Mulrine, 2012). These moments of suburban American life are ubiquitous across accounts of the drone pilots, displaying an intrigue with individuals precisely because they participate in mundane familial activities when they are not executing lethal strikes. The outcome is that ‘go home and “have dinner with their families”’ is a phrase that ‘appears time and again in press accounts’ (Stahl, 2013: 670) and indeed academic accounts (De Volo, 2016: 52), in order to ‘set the scene’ of the pilot’s almost ordinary work–life routine.

Given that the pilots are recurrently accompanied by this backdrop of the civic space in which they live, lethal state action becomes enmeshed as ‘part of the civilian continuum of everyday practices’ (Pugliese, 2016: 2). Just as these ‘tele-techno economies of war’ engender what Pugliese calls a ‘causal disconnect, and consequent disavowal’ between operators and the act of killing, so the displayed routinization of the drone operators’ practices facilitate a sense of disconnect and indifferent disavowal of state violence for the distant spectator.

This recurrence of the same work–life conditions ultimately renders this narrative of modern ‘warfare’ distinct as a mode of waging war, yet unoriginal as a quotidian routine. Against the backdrop of US military death in late modern warfare, there is, it can be said, ‘barely anything more banal, quotidian, and necessary’ than a commuter routine, within which, lethal force is compartmentalized as a process safely operated by the pilot (Hancox, 2013: 582). What this faux-intimacy thereby constructs is a sense of the familiar and ordinary, yet simultaneous absence of either a truly intimate connection, or allure into the role of the military representative in modern drone warfare: we have seen everything we need to see of this mundane routine, without really seeing anything. What is on display is mundane in the sense of being unremarkable and therefore antithetical to the late modern demand for a ‘scintillating display’ (Dorrian, 2007: 12). These aesthetic features are redolent of the anti-spectacle, indicating that there is nothing particularly interesting to see and, in so doing, inviting the spectator to look elsewhere. Crucially, this is dissimilar to the Bush administration’s attempt to force the flag-draped coffin away from public view since it denotes a state of inattentiveness inspired by this available public display of the drone pilot.

This mundane non-visual mode of display begins to demonstrate the anti-spectacularity of the safe drone pilot. The visual images of the pilot, typically neglected in scholarship on drone visuality, ⁶ and the corresponding ‘at work’ narrative component together provide a different dynamic to this anti-spectacle of the safe military body, enhance the mundanity of the use of force and reinforce the message that there is nothing notable to see except for the pilot’s safety.

The anti-spectacular style of the visual display is illustrated in a cover article for GQ Magazine in which Matthew Power (2013) explores the life of a drone operator with the help of one of the program’s first recruits, Brandon Bryant. A sign of the complexities of the contemporary media culture in which the anti-spectacle manifests is that these pilots, including Bryant, are often central to the raft of public objections to drone warfare. Further, Hollywood films (Eye in the Sky, 2015, being one notable example) and documentaries (National Bird, 2016) also arguably attempt to challenge the view of drone warfare as being technically proficient and well managed. Given these alternative representations of drone warfare, it is important not to overstate the affective force of the anti-spectacle, but to recognize that such anti-spectacular visual materials coexist with these other media sources and aesthetic–affective influences.

The specific set of images used in the GQ article is indeed indicative of the anti-spectacular appearance of a well-managed state operation. We are given a photographic view inside the cockpit, commonly replicated across news media accounts of drone warfare, taken from behind the pilots’ seats, displaying two operators at work. While this visual display of modern warfare might focus on the user of force in the epicentre of a strike’s execution, the setting is suggestive of an office worker terminal or stock market trader’s desk, equipped with multiple screens displaying esoteric technical information. Meanwhile, there is a complete absence of any visual indications of death. This scene is, seemingly, civic–industrial rather than exceptional or redolent of the ‘friend–enemy’ distinction (Schmitt, 2008: 1). As such, it arguably ‘appears too ordinary to be a picture of war’ (Hariman and Lucaites, 2012). What is displayed, together with what goes unseen, therefore produces a fundamentally sterile image of the execution of lethal force – an indicative aesthetic feature of state action which appears effectively managed. That is, an image that gives the impression that the state’s operations are visible, transparent and well-ordered. This is not warfare as a visual spectacle, but as a sterile and efficiently managed process. It is not so much that there is ‘no pleasure to be had’ from this anti-spectacle, but that the oblique sense of pleasure comes from knowing that state action is under control and therefore we need not look (Chapman, 2008: 113–114).

The cultural context of this visual image augments its anti-spectacular aesthetic qualities. Namely, the photograph of operators sitting in front of a wall of screens exemplifies the vogue in use of ‘dashboards’ for government, police and military operations, described by Stephen Few, founder of the consultancy ‘Perceptual Edge’, as a ‘visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives’ (Mattern, 2015). The stock image of the drone pilots at their control centre comes within this techno-fetishistic culture in which the dashboard is suggestive of a particularly contemporary mode of efficient and technologically-aided governance. This is a mode of governance that does not call upon spectators to look, but rather demonstrates that state agents themselves continually look and are thus in control. The contemporary value of the dashboard, illuminated in Few’s description, is telling of the cogency between this image of drone warfare and the appearance of effectively managed operations, displaying the use of an apparatus which is believed to offer ‘a big-picture’ or ‘panoptic’ ‘view of what is happening in real time’ (Mattern, 2015). Simultaneously, this image is perfectly ordinary in this age of ‘Dashboard Governance’ in which the control centre – replete with screens displaying esoteric information – is a familiar scene of late modern ‘government action’ more generally.

These anti-spectacular characteristics are enhanced by the GQ article’s written exploration of the various sensory conditions of the operator’s workspace and day-to-day operations, a typical feature of news media accounts regarding the drone pilot. The reader is given an exploration of the various sensory conditions of his workspace: the temperature – ‘the box was kept cold – precisely sixty-eight degrees’; the lighting – ‘the only light inside came from the glow of monitors’; and the sound – it was ‘quiet in the dark, cold box in the desert, except for the low hum of machines’ (Power, 2013). Power also narrates a strike solely through an observation of Bryant’s actions, writing that the pilot watches the screen ‘unblinking in the white-hot clarity of infrared’. Together, the combination of the visual display and written account of the operational conditions thus exemplify anti-spectacular screening practices that indicate to the spectator that there is nothing to see except for a routine and well-managed process.

Aside from projecting a clinical and orderly impression of the use of lethal force, each such account recurrently acts as a reminder of the safety of the operator. There is a consistent fixation on the minutiae of detail when fleshing out this narrative of the drone pilot’s operation insofar as they unearth the technical conditions of a strike and the sensory experience of operators. This focus on the actions of the pilots cannot help but emphasize their abstraction from the ‘battlefield’. In fact, whether inside or outside the cockpit, the pilots can invariably only either be pictured removed entirely from the ‘battlefield’ by virtue of the technical-material set-up of drone operations. Here, the biopolitical logic of care for life is no longer in tension with the experience of the soldier’s body. While the operator’s safety is an exceptional characteristic against the heritage of late modern war, there is a mundane feel to the repetitive showing of safety, negating the public intrigue which attached to the fallen or missing soldier of the late modern era, and instead offering a visual aesthetic ‘that is genuinely dedramatized’ (Berlant, 2010: 232). These images therefore serve as a prime example of the way in which the visual style and representational practices of drone warfare manifest differently from the orthodox of the late modern era, doing so in an anti-spectacular key.

The affective force of the anti-spectacle: Stimulating public apathy

Whereas the body that is embedded within or physically marked by the battlefield can animate the sacrificial schema and thus enliven a plethora of nationalistically inspired emotions, the drone supplants this possibility. Rather, this body seems to encode an affective connection predicated upon the disavowal of attentiveness by configuring what amounts to a fleeting recognition that the military representative of the body politic is safe and the use of force is cleanly executed. As such, this display renders obsolete the need for the spectator to object to or, indeed, consent to the use of force, meaning that the spectator can reside in a state of acquiescence given the uninteresting orderliness and seeming stability of the use of lethal force.

What Shapiro (1997: 44) speaks of as the opportunity for the ‘self-affirmation of the state body’ is here loosely delivered by the anti-spectacular display of the military body, ostensibly providing coherence and stability to the conduct of war. The visuality of the drone pilot therefore mobilizes one of the ‘affective registers of collective life that keep people loosely knotted together’ albeit, that is, an affective current which is collectively shared in the absence of any symbolic acts or gestures, instead marked out by the spectator’s apathetic turn away from this scene of lethal operations (Berlant and Prosser, 2011: 183).

While the pilot might, therefore, be conceived of as a synecdoche of the body politic in parallel with the late modern soldier, we cannot ignore the differences of the manifested affective connection. Namely, whereas the fallen or missing soldier intimately connects with the ‘broken’ status of the body politic and, in so doing, configures a relation which fosters civic attention towards the soldier’s body, the safety of the drone pilot undoes this very connection and thus reverses this economy of attention. Once the unbroken condition is established, the need for the type of public engagement which attached to the visual spectacle of the fallen soldier is eliminated. The characteristically mundane and well-managed appearance of this visuality only further placates meaningful critical public engagement and entrenches the apathy and indifference of the spectating public.

This nebulously forming affective public engenders an absence of friction between state action and affective public. Drone warfare continues in the oblique presence of this inattentive audience who have since turned away, rendered uninterested by the display of a well-managed state operation. The manifestation of this public is illustrated in the way that the ‘American population does not seem to object to this sort of thing happening’ and are ‘not particularly bothered’ when it does occur (Gerrard, 2014), perhaps illuminating the more enduring sense of public apathy which surrounds military drone killings.