Sara Brady and Lindsey Mantoan - Performance in a Militarized Culture

Sarah Bay-Cheng

In his 1991 book War in the Age of Intelligent Machines , philosopher Manuel De Landa observed the ways in which military systems have changed in response to the refinement of digital technologies since World War II. Todays computerized networks, he wrote, are imposing on the military the need to decentralize control schemes, just as the conidial bullet forced it in the nineteenth century to decentralize its tactical schemes (45). As I read Sara Brady and Lindsey Mantoans anthology manuscript in the summer of 2016, it occurs to me that part of this decentralization repeats in the conscription of digitally engaged citizens throughout the world within a new kind of decentralized and technological military network. After all, many of the devices and machines that we now readily take for grantedwristwatches, microwave ovens, personal computers, mobile phones, USB file drives, digital printing, GPS, the internet, and so onbegan as military projects. Further, as the revelations of Edward Snowden made clear in 2013, even the most seemingly innocuous use of social media could be coopted by international governments as part of widespread digital surveillance. In the United States, more research funding is directed to military purposes than any other, including public health and other scientific research. According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science report on research funding for fiscal year 2013, the money spent on research for the Department of Defense (typically through DARPA, or Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) exceeded all other agencies (e.g., National Institutes of Health, NASA, etc.) combined (AAAS). Such realities are hardly a surprise any more, but events in the summer of 2016 have made their repercussions all the more evident.

In mid-July 2016, the Dallas police responded to a sniper who was targeting officers assigned to a Black Lives Matter protest. Under the orders of the Chief of Police, David Brown, the police sent a robot equipped with explosives to the location of the shooter, killing him when the bomb detonated and likely preventing further deaths. As many news outlets remarked, it was a tactic unprecedented, but unlikely to remain unique; Chief Brown defended his choice to the media, arguing that This wasnt an ethical dilemma, for me. Id do it again to save our officers (Sidner and Simon 2016). Whatever the ethical implications, the event was a thoroughly militarized exercise. The protest was organized in response to the recent police shootings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota. The Dallas sniper, Micah Xavier Johnson, was a former member of the US Army Reserves who had served a nine-month tour in Afghanistan. In the July 7 shooting, elements brewing throughout the summer of 2016 converged: the rise of Black Lives Matter protests in response to police assaults on Black men and women in America; the increased militarization of the US police force as recipients of surplus military technology (Apuzzo 2014); the ongoing debate regarding second-amendment access to firearms; and the return of former military personnel from ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other military actions targeting Daesh, or the Islamic State.

What does it mean to consider performance in such a context? In his 2001 Perform or Else , Jon McKenzie detailed connections among technological performance, military operations, and performance studies, noting the applicability of cultural performance models in understanding the decision-making processes guiding the design, construction, and evaluation of technological performances that range from consumer products to public infrastructure systems (130). Performance in a Militarized Culture continues that process, using modes of performance analysis to not only understand but also confront and perhaps resist the effects of militarization in contemporary culture. The chapters demonstrate how instrumental performance and theatricality have been to militarized cultures, both contemporary and historical. As Brady and Mantoan argue in their introduction, performance is and has to be understood as key to the militarization of culture we experience every day. Their collective implication may be even darker, as they highlight the transformation of citizens into surveillance subjects and the weapons that haunt our social interactions like Hamlets ghost, spurring us to aggression.

In 1991 De Landa suggested that computer technologies, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), shift cognitive processes from humans to machines and thereby alter the logic and processes of warfare. For the past decade (longer?), researchers developing AI increasingly have relied on crowdsourcing to improve its functioning. Their methods often draw on integrations of social media and consumer shopping, as for example, Amazons Alexa, which combines the AI personal assistant with the websites vast array of products (Simonite 2012). (This was, at least in part, the dystopian future depicted in Alex Gardners 2014 film Ex Machina .) If De Landa and Snowden are correct, then one has to conclude that widespread global participation in otherwise banal online activities fuels and enhances digital, militarized culture as collective thinking shifts from individual processing to algorithms and digital predictors. In other words, we may be friending and shopping our way to the next generation of thinking military machines, even as we outsource much of our individual decision-making. Recalling recent events during the extraordinarily hot summer of 2016, I am reminded of Nietzsches warning that, when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you ([1886] 2002:69). In such a context, what is our relation to the thinking, warring machines around us, and how much of their intelligence have we absorbed? Mantoan and Bradys valuable anthology may not provide easy answers or reassurances, but they draw our attention back to performance as a mode for thinking and performing through our militarized, contemporary culture.