This article analyzes how visual scopic regimes of military drones configure violence as a form of man hunting. For the French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou, man hunting embodies a type of cynegetic (hunting related) violence, which military drones can execute by power surveillance. Research often focuses on the political, legal, anthropological, and ethical aspects of this type of violence; the aspects of its visual framing are often underexposed. In order to change this shortcoming, this article draws attention to the medial aspects of this violence by investigating the drone’s scopic regime. The scopic regime refers to the drone’s visual configuration, i.e. its ocular operations of capture, its optical perspective on the target, the visual sensing of the drone pilot, as well as the target’s range of vision. Three scopic dimensions of military drones, namely hypervisibility, visual immersion, and invisibility are investigated. In doing so, this article explores how drones stage, interpret, convey, mediate, and execute violence as man hunting. Excursions to the works of contemporary visual artists are conducted in order to illustrate aesthetic interventions against the drone’s visual superpower.
The Circle is a novel written by the American author Dave Eggers (2013), and it tells the story about a powerful Internet company that works with highly developed surveillance technologies to monitor workers as well as the local and global community. In discussions and research this novel often has been seen in the tradition of a dystopic and totalitarian view of society as we know from Orwell’s 1984 or Huxleys Brave New World. However, this article critically investigates a vision of democracy that is suggested in The Circle. Circlers call this political model “demoxie”, which embraces the idea that everybody who has a Circle account is also a registered voter. That means, the voter directly votes on issues via his or her Internet platform (such as decisions on healthcare, company policies, as well as international politics issues). Based on this work of fiction as well as recent discussions about cyber democracy, this article opens up a discussion about the benefits and risks of Internet technologies and democracy.
This article investigates the function and reality of language in Niklas Luhmann's systems theory. How can one interpret the systems-theoretical assumption that language is based on communication? Luhmann describes language as a dynamic media/form relationship, which is able to couple the social and psychological system. This structural coupling, which constructs consciousness and language as two autonomous systems, raises problems if one defines language from a cognitive point of view. This article discusses these problems and aims to develop assumptions and questions within the systems-theoretical approach.
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