Lethal visions: the eye as function of the weapon

Bousquet, Antoine (2017) Lethal visions: the eye as function of the weapon. Critical Studies on Security 5 (1), pp. 62-80. ISSN 2162-4887.

Abstract

In measure to the development of projectile weaponry, the conduct of modern war has accorded perception with destruction, marshalling and enfolding human vision into ever more sophisticated sociotechnical assemblages of targeting. Drawing upon Paul Virilio’s notion of a “logistics of perception”, this article charts the four successive orders of targeting constituted by the alignment of the line of sight with the line of fire (aiming), the measurement of distance to a target (ranging), the trailing and prediction of a target’s movement (tracking), and the directed navigation to a target’s position in space (guiding). Alongside the functional specification of each of these orders are concurrently drawn out the accompanying corporeal regimentations of the living organisms thus imbricated. With its capillaries now spanning the wider ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, the contemporary war machine has simultaneously extended its sensorial reach far beyond the confines of its original human strictures. Its culmination may well lie in the advent of laser technology and the promise of a weaponisation of light through which the definitive coincidence of perception and annihilation will be realised, even as it dispenses with the ocular orb that initiated their convergence.

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