Ghost in the War Machine:
Martial Life in the Informational Episteme

Instructor: Antoine Bousquet Date & Time: Fridays, 15, 22, 29 May and June 5 2 - 4:30 PM ET

DESCRIPTION: The historical emergence and contemporary ubiquity of computation and telecommunication technologies and their associated informational episteme are deeply entangled with the experience and conduct of war. Catalysed by the intense technoscientific mobilisation of the Second World War, the information sciences have transformed our understanding of the world and ourselves, proliferating information-processing systems into every facet of social life. More than ever they shape the landscape of armed conflict today in the age of global push-button warfare, hyper-networked operations, and cyborgian assemblages. This seminar will explore the long-standing bond between information and war, tracing it through its pre-conceptual history to its scientific forging during World War II and early Cold War, and its extension into the present of network-centric warfare, remote control interfaces, military robotics, and artificial intelligence. Particular attention will be paid to foundational work and thought of key figures such as Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, and John Von Neumann with their momentous legacies in cybernetics, information science, and computing. Essential concepts such as control, feedback, teleology, homeostasis, and negentropy will be critically examined alongside their instantiations in military systems that will include anti-aircraft defences, guided missiles, nuclear command-and-control, and lethal autonomous weapons. We will consider the extent to which information and telecommunication technologies are still tributary to their martial origins as well as the how they have recasted the phenomenology of war. Finally, we will attend to the posthuman subjectivities secreted under the informational regime and the challenges these pose to notions of agency within the contemporary war machine.

Image: Rogue Squadron, Empire Strike Back, Star Wars, 1980

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