The Cruel Drone: Imagining Drone Warfare in Art, Culture, and Politics

This dissertation investigates how military UAV’s (unmanned aerial vehicles), or so-called drones, are represented within the aesthetic field as a “drone imaginary,” reflecting radical changes in the history of warfare. Using the imaginary as a conceptual framework, the drone is analyzed as a cultural construct fueled with ideological and political imagination, including, above all, promises of liberation from the burdens and vulnerabilities of human lives and bodies in war. The main goal of the dissertation is to critically analyze how the drone imaginary builds on a fantasy of the perfect weapon which is, essentially, cruel. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s thoughts and ideas, my claim is therefore that the social and cultural imagination of drone warfare follows a logic of cruel optimism. This means that the object for these desires, the drone, becomes an obstacle for its own flourishing by actively impeding the goal it promises to fulfill. In other words, my aim is to show how the popular attachment to drones is formed by fantasies and imaginations that are “cruel” in so far as they compromise themselves and obstruct their aims through a negative feedback loop, which constantly negates the promises these very same machines seem able to deliver on regarding a higher and safer mode of warfare.

Each of the chapters in the dissertation contains examples that demonstrate how these fantasies and promises in turn prove to be flawed or imperfect. Using the realm of aesthetics as prism, the analyses expose the darker side of this drone imagination focusing on its inherent cracks and frailties that altogether undermine the legitimacy as well as soundness of the fantasy of the drone as a new wonder-weapon. For instance, the analyses show how figurations of drone automation is uncannily non-human; how drone invincibility also entail trauma; how dreams of total vision become blurred by immensity; and how the myth of surgical precision ends up as carnage. Thus, each chapter specifically examines one of these drone figurations in order to show how they are con-figured into the larger drone imaginary.

Based on strategies of close-reading in combination with a cross-disciplinary conceptual approach, the dissertation offers new insights to the rapidly growing field of academic drone research. While this field has, however, so far mostly focused on the political, juridical, and ethical aspects of drone warfare and less on imaginary, literary, and aesthetic constructions and configurations vibrating beneath these debates, the dissertation contributes with an alternative cultural drone imaginary.