Apparatuses of Recognition

• In Event: Us and Them: Sociotechnologies of Alterity/Otherness

Abstract

Central to the various promissory trajectories of contemporary research and development in military technologies are means for the imaginative occupation of geographies that comprise the United States’ theaters of operation (see Masco 2014). In the domain of military training, this promise configures itself as the design and deployment of simulated environments for the honing of relevant aspects of what military discourse terms ‘situational understanding’ (Dostal 2001). The disintegration of the marked/uniformed body that signals the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the U.S. military imagination has engendered an intensified preoccupation with reading difference, evident among other places in new pedagogies of training in ‘cultural awareness.’ This paper is in conversation with ongoing anthropological critique of this cultural turn (Network of Concerned Anthropologists 2009), diffracted through the material semiotics of a particular technology. More specifically, I read documentation of the Cultural and Cognitive Combat Immersive Trainer (C3IT), a demonstration virtual training site for culturally aware interrogation, developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies in Southern California in 2006, against research on so-called ‘live’ exercises carried out in the American desert (Stone 2017) and developments, particularly in Iraq, during the same period as they were rendered through other accounts. The point of this reading is less to determine greater and lesser accuracy in depictions of a singular reality, than to compare how military training technologies aspire to recognition of the proxy bodies of war’s Others, both corporeal and virtual.

Author

• Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University