The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Gunner

The omnipresence of drones in the world’s skies—haunting Afghanistan, hovering over Yemen, delivering your tacos—has lately found its equivalent in world culture and art. Thinkers and creators in many genres have been wrestling with the unsettling implications of this new aerial technology, with its pilotless cockpits and all-seeing eyes. The French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou’s A Theory of the Drone, published last year and recently translated into English—you can read a four-chapter excerpt here—is an unabashedly polemical investigation of the historical, geopolitical, and ethical questions raised by remote-controlled high-tech war. (Chamayou has in turn been criticized, in articles nearly as linguistically dense as A Theory of the Drone itself, for things like stacking the evidentiary deck in his own favor and romanticizing the myth of the boots-on-the-ground “noble soldier.”) In a much-reproduced series of tweets billed as “seven short stories about drones,” the novelist Teju Cole mordantly imagined seven great protagonists of world literature destroyed by fire from the sky before their stories could even begin. At New York’s Public Theater, Anne Hathaway is starring in Grounded, a one-woman show directed by Julie Taymor in which Hathaway plays an alienated former F-16 pilot going slowly insane as she wages remote-controlled war in Afghanistan from in front of a screen in Nevada. Slate’s war correspondent Fred Kaplan recently wrote of Grounded: “As drama, it’s... Continue reading at 'Slate'

[ Slate | 2015-05-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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