Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare (War Culture) - Softcover

Chandler, Katherine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1978809743 ISBN 13: 9781978809741

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 2020

Synopsis

Unmanning studies the conditions that create unmanned platforms in the United States through a genealogy of experimental, pilotless planes flown between 1936 and 1992. Characteristics often attributed to the drone—including machine-like control, enmity and remoteness—are achieved by displacements between humans and machines that shape a mediated theater of war. Rather than primarily treating the drone as a result of the war on terror, this book examines contemporary targeted killing through a series of failed experiments to develop unmanned flight in the twentieth century. The human, machine and media parts of drone aircraft are organized to make an ostensibly not human framework for war that disavows its political underpinnings as technological advance. These experiments are tied to histories of global control, cybernetics, racism and colonialism. Drone crashes and failures call attention to the significance of human action in making technopolitics that comes to be opposed to “man” and the paradoxes at their basis.
 

About this title

About the Author

Katherine Fehr Chandler is an assistant professor in the Culture and Politics Program at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. She received her PhD in rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley.
 

Edition details

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1978809743
• ISBN 13: 9781978809741
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 190