Good morning everyone or good evening
depending on
where you are, thanks so much for
being with us and welcome to the seminar
my name's Michael Richardson and I'm a
Senior Research Fellow in the School of
the Arts and Media at
UNSW Sydney. I'm really excited for today's
seminar and for the upcoming Drone
Futures Seminar Series
but before we dive into it I'd like to
offer an acknowledgement of country and
recognize that I'm coming to you from
the
lands of the Bedegal people of the Eora
Nation
in what we now call Sydney Australia
and I'd like to acknowledge that the
lands I'm on always were always are and always
will be Aboriginal Land, sovereignty was
never ceded
to these lands and the struggle for
justice continues.
So this is the first of six virtual
public seminars
on the theme of Drone Futures if you're
here
you probably would agree that drones are
crucial to the future of war
but also of everything from policing to
agriculture to conservation
drones are reshaping how the world is
perceived, how people are governed
and how power is enacted and resisted
yet they remain elusive thanks in part
to their diversity constant evolution
and in the military
context disappearance from view from the
neocolonial violence of contemporary
wars in the Middle East and Africa
to the strange histories of unmanned
aerial vehicles
to resistant art practices this seminar
series
looks to the past and present to think
into the future. 
By showcasing scholars from multiple
disciplines it aims to spark new
connections
and stimulate debate about how to build
more just drone futures.
This series is hosted by the Media
Futures Hub in the School of the Arts
and Media at UNSW,
and it's funded by an Australian
Research Council Discovery Early Career
Researcher Award,
I'm required to say that, 
apologies,
that I hold for a project about
drones and witnessing in war
and culture. If you'd like to know more
about that project
and about drone futures, and to see the
upcoming seminars you'll find a link
below the video,
if you click 'show more'. It's a really
exciting lineup
and you can also read about the
symposium on drone cultures
that will follow these seminars later
this year, in December.
Today we're going to hear from Dr Ronak
Kapadia, Associate Professor in Gender and
Women's Studies program at the
University
of Illinois at Chicago. His first book,
Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the
Queer Life of the Forever War,
came out last year with Duke University
Press. 
It theorizes the queer world making
power of contemporary art responses to
US Militarism in the Greater Middle East
It's a really important book I think
because it shifts focus from the
artworks that have garnered the most
attention in the emerging field of drone
studies,
and instead looks to Arab, Muslim and
South Asian diasporic
artists. I'm delighted to have Ronak
open this seminar series because his
work offers a different starting point
to many of the debates and discussions
about drones
particularly their militarized variety.
Before I hand over to Ronak though I'll
just describe the format for today.
So you're all on Youtube of course and
not here in this
uh Zoom call, while it would be nice to
have many more voices speaking
the more people and connections in the
call the messier it can get,
so on Youtube you've got access to the
chat which is moderated by Madelene
Veber
a PhD candidate at UNSW who's working
with me on this
drones project. Madelene will be
following along and diving into the chat
and she'll feed your comments and
questions
into the zoom call that we're on so
while this is a less intimate format
we're hoping it'll help the discussion
flow
smoothly, and it also means you can
chat during
Ronak's talk without disturbing
anyone
and for help with how to do all this
I'd like to give a
really big thanks to Thao Phan from the
Alfred Deakin Institute
down in Melbourne who just wrapped up
her own brilliant virtual seminar series
on COVID-19,
so thank you very much Thao. Now
without further ado
I'll hand over to Dr Ronak Kapadia
with his talk:
On the Skin: Drone Warfare, Collateral
Damage and the Human
Terrain. Ronak will talk for
approximately 40, 45 minutes,
and after that we'll have plenty of time
for discussion.
So over to you Ronak. Thank you, Michael
for that warm introduction and thanks to
your whole team behind the scenes making
sure that this
totally strange time of a virtual event
goes smoothly today. Greetings
everyone from Australia to the United
States, I'm
really grateful for your presence, your
virtual presence, and time and
I'm delighted to be starting off this
really excellent
seminar series on drone futures. I am
joining you today
remotely from the great indoors on the
northwest side of the city of Chicago
on the ancestral lands of the Three
Fires Confederacy,
in late summer 2020 here when
in just a couple of weeks away from
our own academic school years are
beginning anew
and when the US is truly in free fall
we might say
attempting a patchwork an ill-advised
series of reopening plans
amidst the proliferation of the pandemic
here and as sustained revolutionary
protests continue every night
and as the sedimented traumas of this
past spring sequestration
have barely begun to register in our
collective national consciousness
let alone our individual and
differentiated body minds.
So as Michael said, I'm going to speak
for about 40, 45 minutes which should leave
plenty of time for our virtual
discussion
and what I want to do is give you a
broad overview of my new book project
Insurgent Aesthetics,
and then I'm going to spend the majority
of my time offering close readings
of the experimental works of art by New
York City-based artist Wafaa Bilal
and Durham North Carolina-based artist
elin o'Hara slavic.
Let me go ahead now and share my screen
and let's see if this works smoothly,
I'm going to share here and I'm going to
click this button,
and Michael will you just chime in and
let me know if does this look okay for
everybody on the Zoom?
Looks good.
Okay, so as I'm doing this
I should note that the major
themes of my talk today are about
embodied vulnerability,
social porousness, bodily interdependence,
unending political violence and the
terror of contagion.
Of course all concepts that now are
impossible to talk about the same way
after the calamitous events
of 2020 after the events of blank year
right, we used that formulation
so ubiquitously in our speech especially
after 9/11,
that other world-bending moment in time
that changed everything and yet nothing
at all,
that spectacular occurrence that
refracted all of the unresolved horrors
of the 20th century's global Cold War
into the new millennium nearly two
decades later,
an ever-expanding globalized
biopolitical struggle
of regulating, managing and warehousing
populations,
continues mostly unabated across the
heterogeneous terrains of the greater
Middle East, from Afghanistan and
Pakistan,
Iraq, Iran, Algeria, Syria, Palestine, Yemen,
Somalia, Libya,
Niger and beyond, to say nothing of the
numerous intertwined policing and
security arrangements closer to home.
It's difficult if not impossible in this
context to offer a sweeping appraisal
of the astounding vision and strategic
expanse of Washington's worldwide
counter-terror
and counter-insurgent war since 9/11.
but it's clear that the logics of US
counter-terrorism and national security
now appear to permeate every crevice of
the planet,
underwriting an everlasting war on life
itself,
what Derek Gregory calls an everywhere
war of the biosphere,
now suspiciously seems right
on cue for the unanticipated upheavals
of 2020,
an event horizon that also threatens to
amplify
and exacerbate every existing form of
planetary inequality and injustice.
Like 9/11, the COVID-9 pandemic features
a double accelerant effect
group differentiated premature death and
insecurity
for the global racialized underclasses,
and staggering accumulations of wealth
and safety for the shrinking global
ruling classes
as Wendy Brown swiftly summarizes, the
pandemic
intensifies existing vulnerabilities in
a world
ordered by the crude careless powers of
nation-states and capitalism.
So at a time when the accelerating
catastrophes of global fascism,
neoliberal austerity, cultural governance
and endless warfare
continue to proliferate and produce
gendered, racialized worlds of untold
anguish
for those rendered suspect or disposable
within this imperial world order.
How might we amplify the creative
strategies that contemporary artists
and cultural producers employ in service
of insurgent struggles
to end forever wars on terror and
imagine otherwise?
I've been writing for some time about
the about the need for sensuous
alternatives
and a politics of refreshment in the
wake of unending wartime violence after
9/11.
My recently published book, Insurgent
Aesthetics,
you see here the cover featuring the
gorgeous work of Mahwish Chishty, the
Pakistani American
visual artist who I know will be final
up in your seminar series later this
this term, Insurgent Aesthetics
explores the sensorial and tactile
registers
in the contemporary works of
minoritarian and diasporic artists,
as antidotes to the atomizing tactics of
US counterinsurgency wars in the
Greater Middle East and
as queer feminist methodologies of
rebellion and freedom.
The research for my book was motivated
by a supreme dissatisfaction
with the dominant discourses of 21st
century national security and empire
including on the ongoing global war on
terror against the shape-shifting
constellation of enemies,
and the attendant cottage industry of
terrorism studies
that has so impoverished our political
imaginations to date.
Indeed there is so much overlapping
dread and despair today that it often
feels like these
affective conditions have evaporated any
semblance of joy,
renewal, resistance, beauty or
alternatives.
I sought to write a book that could
intervene into this dystopian here and
now,
by spotlighting the radical experiments,
sensuous knowledges,
and freedom dreams of contemporary
minoritarian cultural workers
responding to, and complicating our
collective reckoning
with the state of forever war. Turning to
the more expansive world-making
knowledge practices of contemporary Arab,
Muslim and South Asian diasporic artists,
what I call Insurgent Aesthetics
inaugurates new ways of understanding
the politics of security and freedom
from the perspective of those most
dispossessed by US war making
and their diaspora kin. It feels
especially apt to revisit some of their
concerns now as an incalculable number
of people
are slowly starved of touch and intimate
sociality
in mundane quarantine. Today, the 11th of
August represents exactly five months
and counting for me and many people here
in the US.
While clearly distinct from the
disaggregating horrors of cultural
confinement or
murderous drone killings in imperial
warfare, the entire human species is
experiencing uneven levels of terror and
separation this year
by a contagious virus that is itself the
product of the relentless global racial
capitalist development,
and devastation of natural environments,
an airborne sickness whose differential
effects have been swiftly weaponized by
authoritarian regimes
across the world in order to exacerbate
nearly every major existing planetary
inequality,
including of course within the United
States.
This dystopian here and now certainly
appears to be playing out like a horror
film
if not also like a necropolitical
guidebook for the aspirational fascists
in our midst. And yet, while the US and
its allied global security policing
regimes around the world
have long facilitated these kinds of
murderous divisions and disorders,
their forever wars also often produce
the conditions of possibility
for imagining an insurgent otherwise.
For instance,
even as the pandemic has made touch and
sociality ever more precarious
and uncertain, laden with risk, we're
seeing the revitalization of powerful
forms of coalition
and sensuous affiliation in the United
States.
Excuse me. We're witnessing the
efflorescence
of powerful forms of coalition as I
mentioned, and the efflorescence of
Black-led rebellion in particular
against the anti-Black cultural violence
of the racial colonial states.
These race radical freedom struggles are
intersectional, internationalist, and
multi-generational on scope,
a novel coronavirus that principally
attacks the lungs has killed nearly 170,
000 people in the United States alone to
date,
a disproportionate number of whom are
Black, Brown and poor,
as militarized police forces shoot tear
gas to suffocate the lungs of Black
protesters, and their accomplices
who are working to downwardly
redistribute breath
on our streets across the nation. Could
there be any more vivid an illustration
of the necropolitical power of the
racial states,
and its mortal claims to dominion over
the insurgent body and its sensory
states.
This is a stark reminder that our senses
and embodied social lives
remain vital to any violent recruitment
effort.
And yet, in the face of so much
spectacularized state violence there is
infinite tenderness, abundance and
unadulterated care everywhere in the air
today, too.
Here in the US we're watching as
organizers putting their
vulnerable bodies on the line for their
comrades,
passing out provisions like masks and
hand sanitizer,
rejecting liberal reformist disciplinary
co-optations of their struggles,
practicing mutual aid as they tear down
white supremacist monuments,
and extinguish the cops and courts in
our collective hearts and minds.
Powerful abolitionist experiments and
pre-figurative practices abound,
if only we could transform our
collective frequencies to better respond
to their call.
These rebellious expressions of
organizing represent urgent appeals
to revitalize our collective political
imaginations in the here and now,
to become more experimental in our
tactics and strategies of insurgency to
both
the global ends of the forever wars on
terror and their domestic reverberations
which are felt most acutely through mass
incarceration, mass deportation and
police violence in the United States.
Turning the tide against endless
warfare also necessitates a critical
embrace of radical imagination
and speculative thinking of visionary
artists in order to transport us beyond
what Achille Mbembe has called,
the great chokehold of the present.
In this context I welcome the
opportunity to reflect on the power
and promise of creative archives of
insurgent art
and minoritarian aesthetics. Insurgent
aesthetic works can inspire social
movements laboring to dismantle
oppressive regimes of racism,
heteropatriarchy, Islamophobia, empire and
class exploitation
that are at the root of inequality,
precarity, and violence in its many forms.
Throughout insurgent aesthetics, I try to
mine a rich field of expressive culture
and artistic responses
to 21st century global warfare in a
search for forms of aesthetic
possibility
that open up alternative modes of
knowing sensing,
living, escaping and feeling in the
forever war.
If the forever war is an assault on the
human sensorium,
for citizens, subjects, survivors and
refugees of US
empire alike, I've chosen to center a
queer feminist analysis of the
performative body of the racialized and
dispossessed,
in order to reveal a complex insurgency
against empire's built
sensorium. The imaginative works of art
that I call insurgent aesthetics
reassemble vision
with the disqualified knowledges,
histories, geographies and memories
preserved by the so-called lower senses
of empire's gendered racialized others.
In so doing, I show how the minoritarian
body serves as a critical site
for the acquisition of unorthodox and
often unexpected political knowledge
about security,
terrorism, and war, a major goal of my
book is not only to offer a diagnosis of
how neoliberal security and warfare
have constrained dominant life worlds
and accelerated human suffering
via the atrocities of war, but also to
illuminate
how these artists provide the designs
for sensing other more disobedient
and arresting ways of being in the world.
In my close readings,
I offer the concept of a queer calculus
as a critical framework to account for
the state's
differential evaluation of human life. If
calculus implies a cold accounting of
wartime facts and figures,
these cultural workers instead upend
such an accounting.
Queering the process of archival
production so as to constitute a
different,
and we might say more sensuous mode of
reckoning with the ultimately
unaccountable devastations of war,
a queer calculus of the forever war
makes intimate what is rendered distant,
renders tactile what is made invisible,
and makes unified what is divided,
thereby conjuring up forms of embodied
critique that envision a collective
world within and beyond US,
empires perverse logics of global
culturality,
security and warfare. Now if you're still
with me,
and I hope you are out there in the
world, I'm going to move now from this
larger frame about the book to
actually ground my discussion about the
idea of queer calculus in the work of
two multimedia artists in particular,
on the left there you'll see New York
City-based Iraqi American visual artist
Wafaa Bilal,
and the North American-based, White
American artist and painter elin o'Hara
slavic.
I'm going to explore how their works
offer a meditation on the violences of
US imperial war making across the long
20th century,
and how those acts of war have
devastated humans, animals and social
ecologies,
in the Greater Middle East region in
particular. Together these artists
powerfully attested the violent expanse
of post-war US geopolitical power around
the globe,
and make palpable what I call the
sensorial life of empire.
In his contemporary Arab diasporic
aesthetic practices
generates alternative sensory knowledges
about the US racial security states
and the violent effects of the forever
war. The crucial force of Bilal's artwork
hinges primarily on the pain that he
inflicts on his own body
especially his skin. That organ of touch
and feeling that connects the body to
the social world
and provides a key platform for his
artistic interventions.
I'm going to pause here because I see
that there's some chat, okay there's some
chatting happening
in the background, and I'm going to keep
powering through because I know you're
with me out there in the virtual world.
So as I said the skin. Right, let me
get rid of this,
and move back here if I can, Oh I've
gone too far, you can see my Michelle
Obama meme here,
because part of what I want to talk
about in a second is the move from the
Bush-era ground troops,
under the Bush II-era of the early
2000s,
to the realm of aerial counter-
insurgency,
and counterterrorism, and drone strikes
under the Obama-era which of course
we're revisiting now.
, with the latest news about Kamala
Harris coming and joining the ticket
with Biden, and more on that in the Q&A.
But back to
Bilal, so part of what I want to say
about these
artistic interventions is that in these
reparative works
of insurgent aesthetics we can analyze
race and gendered embodiment
and the artist's manipulation of the
senses in order to account for
and allegorize the subjective
experiences and lived
vulnerabilities of populations that are
both produced and obscured by US
security regimes.
So again if we want to understand modern
security politics and practices,
particularly the modes
of intelligence gathering and killing
technologies perfected in the domestic
and international contexts
of US forever wars, including drone
warfare,
then we need an alternate approach to
the maps of strategic thinkers
and security analysts, when read
alongside the escalating use of drone
technologies in US military operations
across the Greater Middle East,
Bilal's performance projects allow for
a more sophisticated understanding of
the ethical and affective
relations that can emerge between
Americans and Iraqis
under the conditions of US security and
warfare.
This insight is framed by the interplay
between what's up in the air,
namely the discourses shaping the US'
use of aerial surveillance and 21st
century military technologies writ large,
and what's on the skin as a way of
capturing the painful intimacies of
seemingly incommensurate peoples,
histories and geographies brought
together in the crosshairs of forever
warfare.
So these two modes reveal two distinct
but intersecting cartographic
representations of landscape
and the human terrain as I'll show with
very different implications
and blueprints for the future. Bilal is
one artist who uses his own body to map
the uneven contours
of human vulnerability in times of war,
uncovering the intimate and affective
politics of US imperial violence,
those animated traces and disqualified
secrets
discarded by official accounts of the
war as well as the queer calculus of
knowledge,
affect and affiliation that these
violent projects have engendered.
So a 2010 performance then by Bilal
entitled, and Counting...,
highlights the queer calculus of the
forever war by examining the ongoing
US-led massacre of Iraqi civilians,
including the artist's own brother Haji.
who was killed by a drone missile strike
in their hometown of Kufa Iraq in 2004.
So in this piece originally staged in
New York City,
the artist transforms his body into a
canvas
by tattooing the names of Iraqi cities
on his back
and then during a 24-hour live
performance tattooing 105,000
dots onto this borderless map,
solemnly reciting the names of Iraqis
and Americans killed in the US
occupation
to date since 2003. Audience members
stand as witnesses.
Five thousand dots are marked first in
red ink to represent
dead American soldiers the remaining one
hundred thousand dots
memorializing the official Iraqi death
toll from the war to date
are invisible ultra violet, invisible
unless viewed under a black light.
I'm going to show you that image in a
little bit.
So as this cursory description suggests,
Bilal's piece
asks its audience, whose death counts in
times of war?
erecting what Neferti Tadiar has called
living memories
living histories, as opening into other
futures.
The performance also elicits timely
questions about the CIA
and pentagon's proliferating use of
drone strikes
in targeted assassinations across Iraq
and the borderlands region of AfPak.
Bilal's own sensing body and pain
with
ink pressed into bare skin depicts my
focus on how we might
glean evidence of the histories,
geographies and sentiments of those
disappeared by US global warfare
in tactile and corporeal forms.
Indeed bodily pain and self-immune
mutilation provide a consistent
conceptual thread throughout Bilal's
performance of war. Bilal first gained
international recognition
for his 2007 piece, Domestic Tension,
where he confined himself to a gallery
space in Chicago for an entire month
inviting the public to visit a website
where they could shoot him
by remotely firing a paintball gun at
his body.
Originally known by the more
straightforward and provocative title,
Shoot an Iraqi, this interactive
performance piece had more than 65,000
online users fire at the artist by
month's end,
transforming this very virtual
experience about collective unfeeling
toward militarized warfare
into a very tactile experience most of
all for its subjects
self-imposed spatial confinement,
conjures the dilemma that contemporary
iraqis face every day,
including his immediate family living in
domestic confinement due to foreign
occupation and sectarian conflict.
The revised title domestic tension
itself captures both
the securitized homeland as it has been
reconfigured
under US led occupation, and gendered
experiences of colonialism,
militarism and war. Recognized for his
controversial video installations, Bilal
made national headlines again
in November of 2010 after announcing
that he would have
a very tiny fist-sized camera
surgically installed into the back of
his head for a year.
The embedded camera captured a
photograph every minute of the artist's
daily life,
and then transmitted that visual record
to a website. The inaugural images were
displayed at the Arab Museum of Modern
Art in Doha, Qatar
as part of its new permanent collection,
which includes more than 6,000 works by
Arab artists from North Africa
to the Gulf since the 1920s. 3rd I
subtends and sutures the technological
apparatus of photography onto the
artist's own body.
The hundreds of arbitrary images
captured by this cyborg creation
compose a visual record that awaits
interpretation and reception. Bilal's insurgent aesthetics is
especially timely in the context of
social media piracy
and data drops, as wikileaks released
thousands of classified national
security documents
and as Facebook and Twitter have
played increasingly visible roles
in anti-state protests in countries like
Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Iran
and in Black and Indigenous lead revolts
here in the US.
3rd I explores the ethical contours
of how new technology has transformed
the balance of power between governments
and their citizens,
a story which is of course quickly
evolving in our contemporary context.
With its simultaneous backward glands
and bodily subjection,
Bilal's piece asks us to confront
visuality's tyranny
and renewed salience in elevated
surveillance and global security
policing programs,
as well as the legacy of pain
humiliation and subordination
in performance art and tactical media
practices by racialized and minoritarian
subjects.
So I bring up these two other art pieces
briefly here to demonstrate how Bilal's
larger ensemble of works
exemplifies the complex ways in which
diasporic expressive culture
can diagnose and provide alternatives to
the US security states'
geopolitical and epistemological maps. In
the remaining discussion I want to
explore how Bilal's work further asks us
to consider how the visual field itself
is constitutive of both the logic and
materiality of war.
This is true not only in the case of
pilotless drones over the conflict zones
of Iraq and AfPak,
where cameras are quite literally
appended onto missiles and bombs,
but also in what he names the comfort
zone, those more mundane settings far
from killing fields
in which war enlists and acts upon our
senses.
Thus an encounter with Bilal's artwork
elicits a transformation
in our affective relationship to
dominant views from above,
and while I'm talking about views from
above I'm realizing that the sun is
setting here in Chicago so I'm going to
turn on my new
fancy ring light and see if that offers
a little bit more illumination for the
the corner and the in the top right
corner of your screen.
So my focus on the aerial perspective is
central to US global counter-insurgency
regimes joins a range of post-colonial
feminist cultural critics
in a collective effort to challenge the
systemic embrace of the visual,
and cultural and intellectual responses
to US global warfare
and surveillance. This concern stems from
the argument that visual and conceptual
frames
have contributed to the manufacture and
obliteration of populations
as objects of knowledge and targets of
war.
The links between vision and
epistemology have been well theorized
and rehearsed.
From these studies we learned that
perspective vision is in fact
institutive to the logic of surveillance
and the materiality of war. As the eye
became the privileged organ of knowledge
and authority
the power to see became equated with the
power to know
and the power to dominate. Throughout the
20th century we see this enduring
alliance between vision and war
as military fields increasingly became
reconfigured as real
as fields of visual perception
Preparations for war were
increasingly indistinguishable from
preparations for making a film.
Rey Chow for instance notes how war
would mean the production of maximal
visibility and illumination for the
purpose of maximal destruction.
We might conceive of the forever war
then not only as a struggle over oil,
water and the resources of globalization
but also quite centrally
over the control of the global image and
data worlds.
So given the dense interconnectivity
between vision, knowledge and warfare,
what system of knowing and writing might
adequately address both the violence of
the imperial state
tries to render invisible and the
invisible
obscene, as scholar Anne McClintock has
put it, of civilian populations exposed
endlessly to this violence.
I contend that we benefit from orienting
our attention away from the visual and
discursive frames of war
and toward analyses that feature lesser
studied senses, including touch and sound.
These extra visual sensory relations
have become newly vital to US security
governance, both
as actual military weapons and of course
we can think of the use of music and
torture and Guantanamo for example,
and as resources for diasporic public
cultures and contemporary art practices.
so rather than dispense with the visual
altogether, I'm suggesting that we attend
more closely to the ambiguities
and particularities of the visual
experience, produced by minoritarian
subjects
who are responding to these conditions
in their artwork as they reveal
alternate clues for knowing and mapping
the world.
So what the aesthetic works of Wafaa
Bilal then make possible
is an alternative sensorial relationship
to the forever war,
and counting is offered as a way of
archiving both
personal and collective traumas. Bilal is
a blacklisted political refugee from
Saddam-era Iraq,
mourning the loss of his brother who was
killed by a drone strike for simply
being in the way,
the so-called collateral damage that
belies the war machines
and precision. Bilal's use of tattooing
and body art here in this piece is
particularly instructive.
First we must contend with the map of
Iraq tattooed onto Bilal's body.
Although maps regularly function as
instruments of centralized surveillance,
information retrieval and war making ,the
borderless cartography that bilal
imprints onto his back resonates instead
i think with what literary historian
Jonathan Flatly has called
an affective map, that is a map that not
only gives us a view of a terrain shared
with others in the present
but also traces the paths resting places,
dead ends and detours
we might share with those who came
before us,
following Freud and Benjamin, Flatley's
affective mapping
evokes modernity's new historical
relation a collective
affective attachment where one might ask,
who shares
my losses, and who is subject to the same
social forces.
Flatly's approach here I think allows
for a reconsideration of Bilal's
individual art practices
as part of an epistemological project
engaged in a politics of knowledge, one
that has
collective and social effects. As viewers
and witnesses
to and Counting, we are being asked to
think about individual and collective
pain,
sorrow mourning and loss and hope
concurrently
to think of Bilal's pain, to give it
shape and meaning
is then necessarily to attempt an
account of collective pain and loss for
Iraqis around the globe,
a diaspora whose connective tissue is
forged in bloodshed, violence,
occupation and permanent war. Bilal's
performances of pain and mourning are
hence not solely metaphors but also
evidence of the historicity of his and
our subjectivity.
Yet it's important to know that the
source of this affective connection
is the artist's own skin, as I said that
organ of touch
and feeling that sutures the body to the
social world.
Thus while this performance is surely a
visual and sonic experience for his
audience
it is only through the tactile where we
are asked to confront Bilal's body and
pain
that this affective relation to past
histories is being drawn
through touch not vision Bilal provides
effective relationality
and newly conceptualizes the self in
relationship to others.
His haptic impulse to touch the past by
charting the dead ends and detours
shared with those who came before him
thus becomes crucial in specifying his
sensorial interventions,
as it suggests another way of archiving
the forever war. Now Bilal's
calculus of pain here demands a complex
relationship to the senses for
minoritarian subjects.
We achieve better conceptual clarity on
the operations of killing and violence
perfected in the theaters of the forever
war by isolating touch
and other modes of affective
transmission that circumvent the visual
field, that might
even contradict the scopic altogether.
The critical import of turning to the
tactile realm here stems
from the hope that knowing through touch
might elicit an alternative
sometimes contradictory
conceptualization of social relations
than that offered by visually based
epistemologies.
Sensations can reveal feelings otherwise
inaccessible to the regime of the
visible,
and make possible other ways of
organizing collective social life
beyond security logics. The idea here is
not simply to discard the visual
registry which
of course i'm saying is embedded in
these larger processes of war making,
but to elaborate a fuller epistemology
that understands
touch in relation to sight and other
sensorial processes.
So then if we return to this performance
piece then.
We must question what this borderless
map on Bilal's back
is really supposed to represent, here it
is.
So what is the unspoken calculus of the
value of a life and death on a planet
on our planet with Bilal's work we're
forced to contend with the failure of
numbers
to represent the disappeared and the
relations of force that produce such
disappearances
of course we can never really know how
many people have died in the name of
security and freedom in the terror wars
that the US currently ongoing
wages, there's no evidence of that in the
material archive
of war, we have body counts and estimated
death tolls
but these don't quite account for those
losses, as we're seeing again
in the context of COVID-19. indeed the
value of numerical calculations
in collective efforts both to wage and
to memorialize war is dubious
at best as Judith Butler outlines
in her book, Frames of War. This fact
suggests that the failure of enumeration
and quantitative reasoning
in order to understand state violence
fully and the population's most
vulnerable to its destructive force
This is part of what I'm calling a queer
calculus and the need for a stranger
calculus in which to engage with a
collective reckoning of war.
So what I think is called for instead is
a sociology of the trace
proposed by sociologists Herman Gray
and Macarena Gomez-Barris.
This method offers a way to attenuate
the distance between
empirically social worlds and those
things that are not easily found through
methodologies that attempt to
empirically account for social reality
In contrast to the sociological
imperative towards generalizability,
systematicity and a normative notion of
rigor,
Gray and Gomez-Barris suggest an
alternative methodological approach
that points toward inscriptions traces
the audible, the inaudible
and what they call hauntings as
methodological necessities,
rather than those things that do not
quite fit into overtly social categories
their emphasis on archives of traces and
inscriptions speaks to the larger
political dimensions
of my anti-colonial queer feminist
approach in this talk and in my book
more generally.
By connecting Bilal's abstract
performance works to histories and
theories of aerial bombardment, this
project attempts to de-center the
primacy of the visual
given its centrality in US global
security logics.
It tends instead to extra visual sensory
and haptic relations as a way of
attenuating the distance
between the counter-insurgency views
from above and from below.
Bilal's work reveals that positivist
framings of loss,
including death counts cannot cannot
contain what it seeks to make visible
or readable. While this dominant
necropolitical frame of war jettisons
the delegitimated alternative versions
of reality
It's busily generating what Judith
Butler calls a rubbish heap
whose animated debris provides the
potential resources for resisting.
So given that the US global security
archive continues to violently unfold
today
even as it refuses to see itself as an
archive,
i want to follow the specters that haunt
the animated and de-ratified traces of
killing.
This approach provides a trenchant
methodological antidote to archival
based
studies of US racial formation, state
secrecy and imperial warfare.
It also demonstrates how conventional
representations of the death toll
fail to capture the complex amalgam of
memory,
imagination and pain in queer diasporic
visual arts.
So if my queer account of Bilal's
insurgent aesthetics rejects the
politics of enumeration,
in its place we are left to confront
Bilal's back under black light
that image that I promised you, here's
first the map
and then here it is again under
blacklight
just take a second to take that in
As you can see here his back was
transformed by the tattoo performance
into a craggy terrain
that looks like the remnants of a
surface scarred by cluster bombs and
missile strikes.
There are no numbers present in this
image, instead the tattoo assemblage
conjures burn marks,
a starry night, a galaxy from outer space
or satellite imagery
which is all too pervasive in this era
of global positioning systems.
Yet we must recall that Bilal's own view
from above
is a cartographic representation that is
permanently inscribed on his skin,
a reminder that the abstract queer
calculus of the forever war
is often materially inscribed quite
literally on the minoritarian cultural
worker's body and pain.
So while critically assessing Bilal's
craters back
under black light I'm transported to
another
haunting aesthetic archive that
confronts the material
effects of bombing campaigns and their
aftermaths that I want to turn to next.
elin o'Hara slavic's drawings and
paintings series titled, Protesting
Cartography,
are places the united states has bombed
1998 to 2005,
offers an important intertext to Bilal's
embodied performances that I want to
discuss by way of conclusion today.
So moving from a formalist analysis of
diasporic performance works in the work
of Bilal to painting and drawing in
slavic necessitates a more expansive
interdisciplinary lens and toolkit
to assess the continuities and
discontinuities
across artistic forms and mediums that
is consonant with my queer feminist
scavenger methodology for insurgent
aesthetics
more generally in my book. Composed on
paper from
ink watercolor graphite and other media
slavic's 60 drawings and Protesting
Cartography
likewise confront our collective
so-called failure of imagination
about what bombs do to populations
bodies and topographies
Working from an eclectic archive of
military surveillance imagery
aerial photographs battle plans and maps,
slavic reimagines these geographies and
landscapes
disengaging them from what she terms
authorities clenched fist.
In the process her drawings composed a
sustained archive
of largely uninterrupted US aerial
bombing campaigns since the 1940s
from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which of
course,
this week marks the 75th anniversary of
those two bombings,
to Vienna, France, Korea, Vietnam
Vieques, Laos, Lebanon, Afghanistan,
Haiti, El Salvador, Iran, Grenada, Pakistan
and even sites closer to home including
Almagordo, New Mexico,
which is the site of the first atomic
explosion in 1945.
In this way slavic's work powerfully
echoes my argument
about the US forever war across the
global Asias
Together these images attest to the
unimaginable breath
and uninterrupted violent expanse of
post-war US geopolitical power
I'm drawn to slavic's series not only for
the dreamy aesthetic of her paintings
which are often suave in sumptuous
primary colors
but because the aerial view that she constructs
differs so dramatically from the austere
bone-
chilling cold aerial photography that we
have come to expect in the digital age
of google earth.
That dominant view has re-educated our
senses on how to look at
and think about territories besieged by
bombs.
While both of these visual
representations are technically views
from above
they imply radically distinct
trajectories and affective connections
slavic notes that even if she could make
photographs
she would not because there are already
too many photographs, she says
too immediate, too true, too real and too
brief,
countries and lives reduced to singular
images
So working in the medium of drawing and
painting instead of photography,
instead of performance in photography
like Bilal,
slavic astutely critiques the violent
and singularizing effect of digital
photographic representations her series
however is even more prescient given
Wafaa Bilal's later performances
challenging the US military myth of
so-called precision
and precise targeting in drone warfare
to capture this contradiction
slavic uses a crucial
bleeding effect to her imagery and
formless aesthetic that you can see here
she says quote, "ink dropped onto wet
paper like blood stains on dab
cloth when it dries this becomes the
foundation upon which to tell a violent
story
I use this ground of abstract swirling
or bleeding to depict the manner in
which bombs
do not stay within their intended
borders depleted uranium and chemical
agents contaminate the soil
traveling in water and currents of air
for decades
bombs lay the groundwork for genocide
cancer more war
terrorism widows orphans and eventual
populace on all sides of conflict"
unquote, so slavic's analysis of her own
aesthetic practice
captures how bombs rarely stay within
their circumscribed borders
the abstract swirling or bleeding in her
paintings belies the unintended but all
too pervasive consequences of late
modern warfare.
Indeed this work reminds us that it was
not the Saddam Hussein regime but
successive
US administrations that freely resorted
to using weapons of mass destruction,
beginning with the 1991 Gulf War
including incendiary bombs like napalm
and depleted uranium
attending to the toxic aftermath of
these histories of US aerial bombing
in formalist terms, both slavic's and
Bilal's fine art and performance works
thus construct
an affective relation with people's
landscapes and ecologies
deemed by the US security state as
so-called collateral damage.
slavic's insights on the perennial
bleeding unintentional and collateral
nature of US forever war violence
resonate further with a key aspect of my
March 2011 interview with Bilal,
during which the artist recounted how he
was initially upset
this original digital pixelated
rendering, I don't have it right here but
if you remember the digital
pixelated rendering of the map that was
to be tattooed on his back,
did not ultimately match the final
product that you see on his body here
during the performance the tattoo
artists realized there was not enough
space
on his back to appropriately arrange the
dots across his skin according to his
pre-fabricated
image. Despite the gulf between the
abstracted digital map he had envisioned
and the tattooed landscape that
ultimately manifested on his body
Bilal was pleased because the disconnect
spoke to the realities and randomness of
waging war
this gulf between expectation and
reality is of course an affective
experience that US military planners
certainly encountered
and instigated when they hastily landed
in Iraq in 2003
as did British forces in Arabia in the
1920s and so on.
In this light the supposed failed tattoo
performance and the unintentional
insurgent aesthetic of non-alignment
that it produced
offers a potent reminder that we should
resist the impulse to cede unwarranted
ground to US air power
as a totalizing nexus domination. In
short there's nothing precise nor expert
about US forever wars,
and this imprecision of wartime violence
leads to a possible
methodology of resistance for the
dispossessed.
The disorientation produced by the fog
of war of course speaks volumes to what
slavic suggests is the affective force
behind her own drawings
which start with ink or watercolor but
bleed and drip
in unanticipated and unlikely ways.
There's one final aspect of slavic's
commentary that I want to linger on in
light of my book's argument
that a queer feminist analytic critique
of the bodily sensorial and affective
registers of violent warfare
is a crucial contribution of the
insurgent aesthetics that I've assembled
here.
She writes I do hope that, quote, "that the
cellular references that appear in many
of my drawings replicated stains in the
background
connected tissue in the foreground
concentric targets like microscopic
views of damaged cells
all of this conjures up the
buried dead and deadly diseases
as a result of warfare we know that more
civilians die in war than combatants
we know that uranium tipped missiles
cause radiation released
disease like cancer and that land mines
remove limbs from innocent children
years after the conflict,"
unquote, so attending to the unintended
bodily and sedimented forms of violence
summoned by US counterinsurgency and
counter-terror practices
slavic's remarks on the toxic toll of
US warfare
serve as a powerful reminder of how the
violence of war devastates humans,
animals and social ecologies to say
nothing of the exact
nuclear nightmare of radioactive
contamination
and hazardous waste left behind by US
weapons and bombs in Iraq.
Since the first Persian Gulf war this
fact of environmental destruction
attests
to the potential and urgency of
insurgent aesthetics to make visible
and palpable the toxic contradictions of
the forever war.
So in light of slavic's interventions I
want to return finally to Bilal's tattoo
performance if I may
and specifically to his back, by way of
conclusion,
in order to underscore the salience of
analytically isolating the extra visual
and haptic sensory relations and formal
processes in insurgent aesthetics.
So while there is no official tradition
of body art in Iraq,
Bilal's use of tattooing powerfully
captures the missing history of the
disappeared
in an interview the artist's recounts
how while living in a Saudi refugee camp
after escaping Iraq in 1991,
he was granted asylum in the United
States on the condition that the
American delegation be allowed to
interrogate his brother
who was also in the camp. One of the US
translators who befriended Bilal
informed him that Americans would not
take three kinds of people,
criminals, communists, and people with
tattoos.
Bilal's brother of course had a tattoo
and the reason that he got it was
related to the war,
because during the Iran-Iraq war of the
1980s
many young people lost family members on
the front lines and their bodies came
back unidentifiable,
so young Iraqis started getting tattoos
of their names
and cities sometimes on one or two of
their body parts
so that if they were killed and their
bodies mutilated beyond recognition
their families would still be able to
identify them.
If the Americans saw the tattoo on his
brother's arm that night
this inscription of a future death yet
to come,
they would not grant Bilal asylum so
that night his brother decided to burn
the tattoo off his arm
using a hot spoon. Bilal's vividly
painful recollections from the camp
reveals a paradoxical clear calculus at
work here
in order to gain access to refuge in the
United States his brother needed to
efface
or erase this other unseen record of the
US proxy war in the greater middle east
as evidenced by US participation in and
financing of the Iran-Iraq war off
his body.
Bilal's story captures the nexus of the
body and pain
and the violence of the regulatory
security state as it reveals the somatic
and sensorial life of empire.
The burned off tattoo provides material
evidence of powers whereabouts
what lies outside the visual archive
then are these sensorial traces
memories feelings that conjure
individual familial and collective
histories,
beyond official war records analyzing
the formal and experiential dimensions
of Bilal's creative works through queer
feminist
and affect studies this better captures the
sensorial logics of imperial governance
and its manifold resistance. Paying
attention to the tactile nature
of Bilal's performances in particular
elucidates an alternative sensorial
logic through which
we might begin to access those long
submerged and entangled histories of
violent conflicts
such an approach reveals further how the
discarded remnants
and accumulated debris of dominant US
security logics
comprise the raw materials for sensing
and feeling anew the queer calculus of
the forever war.
Thank you
Thank you so much Ronak for a really
beautiful and urgent
presentation really appreciate it and
I know
just from having glanced in and out
of the the chat on Youtube a little bit
as you were as you were talking that the audience has been
super engaged and really interested and
there's already a few really
fantastic questions there
I mean everyone hasn't left already 40 minutes ago
No you're good you're good
uh so we will start to gather
questions from
from the youtube
chat in in just a moment. There's a
lot and there's lots of virtual claps
coming in too
I'll add which is like the hard thing,
you know we were talking before Ronak
started that the hard thing is
is how you is sort of
feeling the audience in this in this
kind of environment, so thank you for
thank you for all those those virtual
claps
What I've been talking about the sort
of devoid of the sensuousness right
is that you know this virtual platform
part of what Bilal and I think slavic
are doing is trying to reanimate the
senses
in a way despite all of our virtual
digital divides so, and the sun is set
here as you can see I hope my lighting
is okay
and carry on Michael please
That looks great
So you know on that note actually I
think I'd like to pick up with a
from a question that that was
popped up in the chat
a bit earlier which is from my
friend and colleague Anna Munster who
writes, who just said you know and
maybe this is a kind of half
provocative
question which is just like, what if
bodies in the way that
you've been talking about them in and
in perhaps in the way
many of us care about them just don't
just don't matter anymore from
the view of those in the air,
particularly in the air of
of drone war
Yes i mean what a
provocative and important question
because so much of the discourse at
least the dominant discourse
of unmanned remote warfare is about the
the fact that fleshiness is 
devoid, right that the fleshiness of the
human is dissolved and no more it's
partly,
at least in the argument of during the
Obama-era was, about the surgical
precision of drone warfare
is about limiting the so-called
collateral damage
of you know of boots on the ground for
example and of course
you know for those of us who paid
attention and studied the actual effects
the disorganizing and disaggregating
effects of drone warfare in AfPak
or throughout the Greater Middle East
the see
that actually no there are still all
these devastations that have deeply
human consequences of life and death
of maiming of disorganizing disordering
communal ways of being right  in the
frontiers of US political violence
and US sort of forever wars and of
course we also know that drone
creep is happening and the drone
technology has been sold now all over
the world and that
you know here in my city of Chicago the
south and west side is soon to be
policed not by the helicopters the
police have helicopters which already
exist
but by those unmanned drones that are
being piloted from
you know the US-Mexico border and being
brought to cities like Chicago and
Minneapolis and Milwaukee, and wherever
else there has been
so much unrest and uprising this year
and there are bodies on the ground there
are bodies and communities and histories
that are
completely disordered despite the fact
that the state would like to think
that the human is no more
that we've moved to a kind of non-human
future and so I think part of
why I turn to the minoritarian cultural
worker and why
I want to attend to fleshiness and the
haptic and the tactiles to say,
no we need to reanimate we need to
repopulate the senses
that the state wants us to
go along with an idea of the kind of
machinic
assemblage that is the drone, and so the
artwork or the
minoritarian artist in pain is a kind of
antidote and a counterpoint to that it's
a it's a reminder to us that
we're not yet at that non-human
future
that this state would like to imagine
for us.
yeah thank you I mean I think that's an important reminder and I
think
particularly as you would know in
so much of the academic work on drone warfare and I
think even in some of the
the critical work outside the academy
there can be this reflexive emotion that
that it's
that it's that we're already there
and that uh
resistance is is difficult if not futile
and in fact that seems not to be
the case and
you know um the fissures and failures
and faults
of drone warfare are
are important to pry open and press in
upon more and
i think you put that really beautifully
in in your book,
uh just on on that
note I was really struck right at
the start of your talk or very early in
the in your talk
you mentioned the need to kind
of
or an emerging politics that seeks to
redistribute breath
and I wondered I mean we might be
veering into where your work is going
now
rather than rather than where it's
been but but I wondered
you know whether that idea of a
politics that redistributes breath fits
into what you've just been talking about
about the need for a
reconfiguration or a re-emergence of the
sensorial in response to this kind of
politics
well it's it's certainly breath and
breathing is certainly on that is the
topic at hand on so many people's minds
now in the context of COVID certainly
but I think
in the aftermath at least in the United
States of the death
of Eric Gardner and Michael Brown and
the emergence of Black Lives Matter the
discussion about you know not being able
to breathe black people
literally being suffocated by the
state and its policing apparatus which
of course is a long story it's the story
of the new world
and of the terrorization of Black and
Indigenous peoples in the new world
but that reanimated around 2014
2015 and
one of the things I've been doing in
research for my second book project that
I've been working on that was called or
at least provisionally is called
Breathing in the Brown Queer Commons, I
might have to
rethink that title now uh based on
what's happened of course this year,
was looking at the role of breath,
breathing,
healing and the embodiment as quite
central to liberation of struggles
and rather than and try to think about
it as collective survival and
care as being the work of radical social
movements as opposed to the thing that
happens on the side,
and so you know the project sort of
started as an antidote or reflexive
reaction to the language of self-care
and the way that self-care was being
imagined and circulated as this
neoliberal
individuated automated thing that we do
comrade go to the spa on the weekend
right, as opposed to what we know from
the history of
Black and Indigenous and women of color
feminisms here in North America,
that there's actually a long history of
collective forms of care and
collective forms of healing and so what
if we think about healing as the
modality through which to understand
what movement work is about
and in the process of all that of course
I've been interested in
Black studies work the work of Sean
Crowley, Christina Sharpe
you know people who've been talking
about breath and breathing as a metaphor
for flight
and as a metaphor for freedom and that
the restriction and constriction of
breath of course
is a historical phenomenon that
was crucial to torture regimes on the
plantation
So literally constricting the
lung capacity of the enslaved
person was a way of you know
maintaining a kind of
plantation hierarchy and structure in
the context of slavery and so
there's these long roots of that right,
so breath breathing respiration and now
there's
a whole new sort of subfield of
breathing studies
of people and a newer generation of
scholars who are informed by affect
studies and by
certainly all the work in sensory
studies to think about breathing anew
again,
so how does that relate to this topic
well
you know I am reminded that you know
the Bilal piece that I talked about here
is a decade old
it was an earlier moment in Youtube's
history and the history of you know all
of these social media platforms that
have completely taken over our lives and
you know when Wafaa did the cyborg
creation and had the camera on the back
of his head
you know the Wall Street Journal
wrote articles about it and it was quite
controversial and of course it was
to call attention to the increasing
encroachment of surveillance and privacy
issues
in the early Obama years, we've moved far
afield from that a decade later it's
and it feels like a
a historical piece more than anything in
some sense
but i think some of the questions around
performance and performativity,
liveness that he was trying to get at
and Counting
are useful for us now right, like what
does it mean to be
have a virtual event that's live and not
and not pre-recorded what does it mean
to be in space with other people to
communion to mourn collectively
to gather collectively in a space
certainly that has changed in the
context of 2020
so some of those early questions that
he was asking in 2010
have come back to us anew and I think
freshly
force us to sort of engage with
questions about performance about
liveness
about what collective reckoning and
warning will mean as we move forward
as we try to think through the ends of
the forever wars right
um so that's how I would say long-winded
yeah yeah thanks so much um yeah just on
just picking up
further on this idea of breath
my colleague Adam Fish writes that,
regarding breath how about the use of
leaf blowers in Hong Kong and Portland
to blow back
tear gas as a kind of ephemeral
aesthetic and pragmatic
atmospheric intervention and that kind
of builds on an earlier question that
that Adam had about you know is
insurgent activism
of the kind that you kind of
addressed in the talk and described in
the book
is that, are there  other
modes of
atmospheric activism or atmospheric
intervention
at work?
Absolutely and you know in the
book project the epilogue looks at the
sort of scalar dimensions of
various insurgent practices and looks at
you know it was written in the summer
of 2018 I suppose now
in the moment of the Trump Baby Balloon
protests that were happening in the UK
and
I try to connect that to the long you
know magic magisterial work of
people like Caren Kaplan who've given us
a long history of thinking about
aerial balloon technologies, views
from above, what does it mean to
think about you know insurgent views
from above right, I don't ever get
into a place where we think that
you know that from below or on the skin
is the resistant
sort of and you know resistance side and
the
from above is always the tactic of the
state, it doesn't work that
well and I think what the art shows
is that it's much more complicated that
we can have actually insurgent views
from above as well
but I should step back and say what do I
mean by insurgency you know part of
I use the language of insurgency is both
the hail the language of the Muslim
terrorists and
the way that circulates within
the west but it's also
you know um to sort of hail the long
history of subterranean and fugitive
consciousness of insurgent struggle what
Ruthie Gilmore calls infrastructures of
feeling against the forces of
empire gender racial capitalism, so
that's a way of saying
can we suture the work of these
contemporary Arab and Muslim and South
Asian diaspora cultural workers
in the long history of primarily black
and native-led rebellion against
the sort of dominant security
paradigm
in the new world from 1492 to the
present right so the forever war is not
a post-9/11 formation we know that we
have to actually
embed our discussion of contemporary
security logics and resistance struggles
within that longer history and so that's
part of what i'm trying to gesture at
with the language of insurgency and you
know I see this
question here about the fact that the
right the political right
in specifically in the North American
and European context than
I imagined in other white settler
colonies around the world
had, the right has been particularly adroit
at mobilizing affects right
consolidating
political power through the role of
affect and I think that's absolutely
true and
it's something that the left we're
seeing that today in the context of
discussions about
settling for Biden the Democratic
Party's decision making
that when offered 
lush new compelling innovative
structurally substantive interventions
our oppositional party will always
choose the centrist bland
middle-of-the-road cultural solution to
the thinking about you know the here and
now and
so yeah the left broadly defined
has a lot of work to do about
securing
and conquering affect to the same degree
and there's certainly no
political primacy that the right or the
left has about affect we know that
affect is
the way affect circulates it can be
mobilized towards contradictory ends
all the time, and so again I want to move
away from the idea that there's a good
bad, black white
opposition, resistance subordination
binary
yeah thanks so much and and thanks um
Kit Messham-Muir from
from Curtin University, Kit's been
working on on a project about the
role of art in conflict
for a while now, really fantastic
question.
Earlier during during the talk
towards the end of the talk, Elise
Swain in the chat had a really great
question which I think you know takes
us back a little bit
into into the space of theory but
I think
it's asking you to expand a little
bit on your
term queer calculus and what you
mean by that term, and what kind of
intervention you think it makes
yeah so you know Im thinking about
calculus as I said about a cold
counting, basically what I'm thinking
that,
well let me step back to say that you
know part of
why I am so invested in the language of
queerness and the language of queer
feminist
analysis is because I think queer
studies has the most
supple and engaged discourse around
affect intimacy the sensorium around
the utopian dimensions and emancipatory
potential of art and aesthetics
it really gives us the the most robust
language historically
to talk about this work and so what was
important to me as somebody who studied
transnational American studies and
wanted to engage with women of color and
queer of color critique in graduate
school
and you know make that the forefront of
the kind of theoretical engine behind my
project was to say
that how do we intervene in the kind of
studies that have emerged about late
modern warfare
Often a lot of the work around late
modern warfare from drone technologies
to carceral confinement to
you know the whole suite of security
policing regimes
tends to often have a kind of
an unintentional effect of
mimicking the terms and language and
frames of debate of the dominant
and I wanted to go somewhere radically
different, somewhere askew somewhere askance
right and so turning to the work of art
and expressive culture, but then also
mining the complexities and
contradictions of that work
I realized that I really needed queer
and feminist inquiry to be able to do
that work and that I wanted
to intervene in the primarily
straight discourse around
critiques of late modern warfare and
forever wars and actually say no, queer
studies had a lot to say
about these questions about the archive
about about memory about history about
touch and political violence writ large
so the idea of queer calculus
part of what i'm saying is that we know
that our political imaginations
have been deeply impoverished by the
prevailing ways that we are forced to
think about
connectivity, collectivity, political
violence, the way that
nation states should be connected in the
world in the 21st century
and that we need a politics of
refreshment, as I'm saying we need a
stranger calculus
another way of reading right so part of
what queer calculus is offering us is a
kind of alternative reading practice
and I mean calculus in three terms in
the book you know I kind of laid out
in the very lengthy introduction but
briefly I'm thinking about
calculus both as a kind of logic or of
reasoning as a form of systematicity and
saying we need
an alternative logic and that's partly
what I talked about today tonight
um I also think about calculus in terms
of it stretching the idea of
calcification
calculus to calcification to talk about
the sedimentation of painful
elements in the body and so again that's
a way of prioritizing those somatic
and sensorial dimensions of war making
and its collateral effects,
so calculus here is about affect and
embodiment
and then third I try to talk about
calculus as a kind of sensuous
affiliation, the kinds of
non-blood-based forms of affiliation
that have emerged
in the context of the forever wars,
the kinds of
unlikely coalitions and constellations
of radical affinities
that have emerged between in my case in
the context of the book
Arabs and Muslims and South Asians in
the diaspora
who we don't necessarily need to fold in
together but can actually talk about the
kind of non-blood-based
forms of affiliation that have emerged
which is also a kind of queer method
right it's to say
how do we talk about affiliation that
isn't about um you know blood
and isn't about family so those are the
three ways in which I think queerness
becomes really crucial to talking about
calculus as
about logics, affects and affiliations
that's what I would say about the idea
of queer calculus.
Thank you and just on while we're on uh
terminology,
Dan Binns from RMIT has asked
where you take the term forever war
from
um which I think you might mention that
you're kind of drawing on
Derek Gregory right in that
articulation but
I'm wondering if you could
expand a little bit on
how you see that term in your work
and
and I'm particularly interested perhaps
in the time horizon
that it expands indefinitely as a
frame and
and what you think about 
marshaling that kind of
language because
you know a question might be like how
does one ever get outside for a war if
one accepts them
yeah well let me work backwards to say
you know part of what I wanted is
juxtaposed in the book project and so
first to say forever war
comes out of science fiction there are
there are been journalistic accounts
that have used that language
of course there's Derek Gregory and
and other people within the world of
kind of critical militarism studies
there's also the language of the long
war which you know one of my mentors
Nikhil Pal Singh
uses the language of long war which we
get from Donald Rumsfeld to talk about
the kind of
incipient Cold War style 21st century
long geographically open project
so there's lots of different genealogies
and I'm not invested in
tracing any one particular other than to
say part of what interests me in the
book project was I wanted to juxtapose
the seemingly sort of durative nature of
war making
right, the endless everywhere war
that is you know expanded geographical
boundaries the unmanned nature of it
that makes it everywhere and nowhere all
at the same time
with the seemingly ephemeral
constellation of artists and activists
that I'm bringing together
in the book project but also to talk
about Arab, Muslim, South Asian for
example that framework
it meant something very specific around
2003, 2004 to
in the early years of the war on terror
in the United States because
it was a moment in which in the context
of
special registration and the
deportations in the Bush-era early years
of the homeland security state
where Arabs and Muslims and South Asians
were being racialized
in similar kinds of ways in North
America for not the first time but
really you know in national public
consciousness
and so that developed a kind of
discussion about
Arab, Muslim, South Asian, Southwest Asian
SWANA is another term right so all of
these terms
sort of emerged to talk about the
racializing assemblages that were
starting to develop as a result
of counterterrorism and
counterinsurgency wars
and so what I wanted and so of course
now the book's been published in 2019,
2020-era Muslim studies means something
very different now,
brownness means something differently
right, you know my other my late mentor
Jose Esteban Munoz his
last posthumous book is coming out this
fall is called The Sense of Brown
and it's a way of theorizing the
affective
logics of brownness as something other
than
identitarianism as a way of as a way of
feeling,
is the structure of feeling
right and we're following the Raymond Williams
side of affect things here so where
was I so
Arab Muslim salvation meant something
very distinct in the early 2000s than it
does today
and so what I wanted to sort of play
through and experiment with in the book
project is that can we talk about
the sort of juxtaposition of
something that's seemingly ephemeral
a constellation that emerges in a
particular place and time
and the seemingly derivative nature of
war making but then also
point to the sort of cracks and fissures
and failures of the warfare state as you
as you noted that's partly you know how
frame the introduction and my
discussion of Mahwish Chishty and the
introduction of my book is so much about
you know attending to the kind of
glimmers and cracks
as opposed to buying into the buying
into the idea of the
seemingly omniscient and durative nature of war making because
how else will we get to the moment when
war finally misses its mark as
as Butler and other folks have talked
about yeah
yeah thanks a lot it's that those those
fissures and failures are
really interesting to me I've
recently read Kate Chandler's new
book Unmanning
and Kate's speaking later in this
seminar series as you
would have seen, and so and you
know she charts this like history
of failure actually within technological
development particularly around drones
and
you know programs that get money
and go nowhere that attempt to build
things that never fly, that
you know, so on and so forth and um
you know I was struck reading that
book too about
about you know I'm reading about the
development of
network technologies within the US
military and
just you know how limited actually the
network and surveillance capacities of
the military
were like right up until 9/11 and even
into the kind of post-9/11 era that like
the sheer bandwidth capacity for
instance of the US military was
incredibly limited
and you know drones are one of
the key technologies that kind of pushed
an expansion of the network
capacity
um which kind of runs counter a bit to
the to the picture we have
of like the all-seeing all-knowing
military eye and I think in
particular of you know
films like Enemy of the State
from the 90s right which is like this
kind of
really interesting kind of text of
surveillance in the state
and you know it's the, you know the
state can see everywhere all the time
grabbing video and so on, but of course at that time like the
the technological capacity for this was
like basically nothing
non-existent, and yet that's the kind of
imaginary
that keeps being keeps being pushed
forward
And of course you know
the drone is the par excellence
example of the RMA, the revolution of
military affairs and the kind of
post-war
post-cold war science that emerges into
the into the 21st century
it makes me think based on what you're
saying you know that those early Obama
years when there were so many exposes
about the the drone
operator you know living in Nevada or
Colorado I don't know if
that was true in Australian media but
certainly in the US context there was
some, there was a lot of PR being done
for
for drone technologies in those early
years and it makes you
think like was this a a PR messaging
campaign
in addition to the the shift between
Bush and Obama
you know in those early years and the
surgical procedure of course we know
that
Trump in the context and you know I, my
book sort of ends, the conclusion
epilogue is about the sort of emergence
of Trumpism
as both harbinger and architects of the
forever war,
but it ends with the reminder that Trump
has really
exacerbated and amplified every site of
forever war making right
and we're not getting a lot of stories
about drones in the US
media anymore it's like you don't see
New York Magazine or
New York Times or New Yorker ever
profile any discussion
and it's happening at a clip that's
exponential compared to those early
years of the Obama
administration so that's just something
to note about what we see and don't see
and how that maps on
to those debates
Yeah I think
in Australia what a lot of what we see
of the
of drawing war is that it is something
very far away
and Australian complicities in that
process
which are not just ambient and
political but material through our
role within the
signals architecture of global
military networks
we're kind of important in
in that network actually, because of
where we sit geographically,
so there's a base called pine gap that is
pretty crucial to a lot of drone
military operations,
and Australia is actually developing
some like attack drones like drone
fighter pilot drone, not fighter pilots
drone fighter jets so,
but these two occasions very little 
debate and discussion
here yeah, we're getting
towards the end of our time so
you know I just I've got another
question for you but, I but I'd also just
noting that for those who are
following along on on Youtube to
tap away and get in your get in
any final questions
the question I have for you is to
kind of invite you to think into the
future a little bit
and I think you know thinking into the
future is
a fraught proposition at times and
it's something that maybe we might want
to be tentative about
but you know thinking into the future
and imagining
and better futures is part of how we
build and organize towards them right
so I'm just wondering where you
what you think, what are the
the kind of trajectories perhaps
that might unfold for an
insurgent aesthetics as we move into
this next decade
of war?
Goodness, yeah that's a big question and let me
take a little sliver of it just a crumb
on this corner of that which is
to say that we've reached the tipping
point now with drones where
for many years we talked about the
potential
boomerang effect of drone warfare that
these were
military technologies that were being
innovated and experimented
on the laboratories of US empire in
AfPak
and the Greater Middle East right but
that eventually it was coming home to
roost,
and my goodness you know this year of
2020 has given us so many instantiations,
so many examples of the way that
US imperial violence out there, you know
far far away
is being revitalized and re-amplified
here in the domestic sphere
and the reason I mentioned that is
because for many years here in Chicago
iIve been
learning from and organizing with my
colleagues, primarily Black feminist
colleagues
who work on questions of abolition and
have
tried to think about the IS domestic and
international contexts of war making
in synergetic relations to try
to
marry the conversations which are often
too siloed about what's happening
domestically versus what's happening
globally and
we know that prisons and policing and we
know that military and policing
are two sides of the same coin of global
repression and global capital racial
capitalism of course,
we know that we say that analytically we
talk about joint struggles
shared histories all of that but I think
the fact that
any day now those CBP and that's custom
and
border patrol helicopters and drones
that have been
surveilling the border here in the US-
Mexico border for many years, the fact that more and more of them
are starting to show up in our cities in
the
in the northern parts of the United
States including places like Chicago
and that they're being used to profile
and surveil
and target the south and west side of my
city for for instance
that the conversation the drone is going
to be the sort of
suture that allows us to talk about the
imperial circuits of violence that we've
been all talking about for years
but that it's going to be visible in
our in our homes and
I just will note you know finally I know
time is running out to say that
a couple days ago I went on my evening
walk is because that's what we do now
right
go on an evening walk to get out of the
house in quarantine
and there was a helicopter sort of
buzzing, hovering over my neighborhood
it happens, summertime certainly in
Chicago on the northwest side
but it was the day of the Lebanon
bombings
in Beirut and of course so that was on
my mind and friends and colleagues and
comrades,
who are processing the devastation of
what happened this week or past week
in Beirut and the buzzing sound of the
drones which I've written about
and I talk about the affective quality
and the sensorial quality of of the
helicopter right
as being a kind of new dystopian
every day, that suddenly on my evening
walk
that's that was the sound and it just it
was a reminder and I think it's part of
what Bilal was trying to do
a decade ago about the comfort zones
and the conflict zones and the way that
he sort of talked about that
as being distant but also quite
proximate,
we're seeing the proximity all of that
kind of remote intimacy is coming home
to roost
in ways that are profoundly
destabilizing but that I think will also
create the conditions of possibility
for new forms of coalition and alliance
and insurgency so that's my hope
for the near future and near term around
the question of drones futures.
I'd love to end on a on a on a hopeful
note,
we so rarely get to get to do that in
these kinds of conversations 
and I think that's yeah really
beautifully put,
we're almost up to our hour and
a half and so I think I will just
sort of
bring things to a close and I mean
I'll do that first by just thanking
all of you for joining today and
for all the fantastic questions and
supportive comments and
and reflections and so on through the
chat, really appreciate that
it's been really terrific
If you've enjoyed this
seminar please do come along to the next
in our drone futures series
which is at 5 p.m on Wednesday the 2nd
of September
Sydney time, it features Antoine Bousquet
author of The Eye of War, and Jairus
Grove
author of Savage Ecology and they're
going to be in a kind of dialogue titled
Martial Autonomy's Rise of War Machines
knowing Antoine and Jairus a
little bit I'm not sure that we'll end
on a note of hope
but we'll see so that's um
5 p.m Sydney time and it is
I think it's 9 p.m in Hawaii where
Jairus is
and 8 a.m in london where Antoine is so
we've really had to thread the needle
time-wise so apologies if you're tuning
in from
from a location right now where where
that time just won't
just won't work, it'll put you in the
middle of the night
so you can register for that talk or
many of the other
almost all the other seminars we have
coming up
on eventbrite there's a link
below the video
and speaking of following along
if you're on twitter you can find
um me at @richardson_m_a
and Ronak at @professorkapadia which is
much easier and cooler title
and links to those are also below the
video as well as a link to
the Media Futures Hub twitter account
where
we're a new research cluster at the
University of New South Wales and we're
interested in
questions about how we build towards
more just futures
across issues of theory of method
and decolonial practice.
Thank you very much Madelene for
moderating the chat today and thank you
all again for your time and thoughtful
questions and
above all thank you Ronak for a
really stimulating
talk, really appreciate you being with us
and for kicking off this
seminar series
So stay safe everybody
stay strong and
take care of one another
Thank you Michael thank you everybody out there in
the world and
one of the unintended
consequences of this quarantine and
virtual intimacies means that we get to
be in conversation
in ways that wouldn't have happened
otherwise so i'm really grateful to you
and
thank you to your whole team I
appreciate it
Thank you see you all soon
