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Abstract 'Drone Poetics' considers the challenge to the theory and practice of the lyric of the development of drone warfare. It argues that modernist writing has historically been influenced by aerial technology; drones also affect notions of perception, distance and intimacy, and the self-policing subject, with consequences for contemporary lyric. Indeed, drone artworks and poems proliferate; and while these take critical perspectives on drone operations, they have not reckoned with the phenomenological implications of execution from the air. I draw out six of these: the objectification of the target, the domination of visuality, psychic and operational splitting, the 'everywhere war', the intimacy of keyhole observations, and the mythic or psychoanalytic representation of desire and fear. These six tropes indicate the necessity for a radical revision of our thinking about the practice of writing committed poetry in the drone age.
Keywords drones, aesthetics, lyric, aerial technology, psychoanalysis, Medusa, intimacy
This essay is a provocation, which seeks to determine the potential for lyric in the drone age. Prison and flight have long been important tropes for establishing the polarities of aesthetic constraint and liberty, but they also influence writing in more practical ways, as sites of literary production and ways of seeing. The airplane was particularly important in altering spatial perspectives and had far-reaching consequences for the visual arts. Gertrude Stein suggested that cubist landscapes approximated the view from an airplane.1 Paul Virilio has written provocatively about the intimacy between aerial bombing and cinematic technique.2 Planes are also an important influence on literary perspective (Time and Space, pp242-7).3 Filippo Marinetti describes how:
as I looked at objects from a new point of view, no longer head on or from behind, but straight down, foreshortened, that is, I was able to break apart the old shackles of logic and the plumb lines of the ancient way of thinking.4
The airplane produces a new vantage which leads Marinetti to fantasise about bombing language, seeking to 'destroy syntax and scatter one's nouns at random'. Planes are mythologised by Proust and Kafka as a form of the technological sublime,5 or (in the famous skywriting scene in Woolf's Mrs Dalloway) regarded by Mr Bentley as 'a symbol... of man's soul; of his determination ... to get outside his body, beyond his...