Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
Landa, Maria
"This thesis will examine three works of war literature in order to understand the framing of war, the potential for resistance of this very frame, and the refusal to accept and perpetuate its destructive effects. It will discuss the subsequent shift towards another solicitation that recovers the senses and, thence, allows for recognition and the facilitation of empathy." --page 5
Landa 1 Maria Landa Supervisor: Dr. Jennifer Gustar ENGL 499 Honours English Cracking Open the Frame: Recognition in Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Garcia’s Grounded and Saif’s The Drone Eats With Me Section I: Empathy, Frames of War, and The Soldier’s Matrix This essay breaks apart, cracks open, the frame that commands bodies to transform from flesh into objects of war—where men, women and children no longer are seen as lives, no longer are heard through the blast of gunfire, shriek of bombs, nor the buzz of a drone. This essay looks at the literature written on war and through the contemporary screens of drones that unlock the potential to alter or eradicate the visual and auditory components of others’ suffering: their voices, faces, agony—virtually disappear. This functions to re-write and re-describe how we view war through literary and theoretical analysis. Considerations of empathy in relation to warfare provide necessary context. Many scholars regard empathy as a principle for the potential construction of relationality and reconciliation between others (Halpern and Weinstein, Lanzoni, Koopman, Keen). Susan Lanzoni defines empathy as an expansion of sympathy: it marks a “deeper-going ability to engage with a variety of feelings and to inhabit, sometimes even bodily, the other’s perspective” (6). Halpern and Weinstein argue that empathy is integral to reconciliation after warfare, as it “challenge[s] the major aspects of dehumanization” and they further argue that “coexistence without empathy is both superficial and fragile” (569). Empathy allows for the development of Landa 2 feelings towards those we do not usually develop a relationship with, and literature can foster such connections through an introduction into multiple perspectives (Koopman 243). The important distinction between empathy and sympathy is further made clear with Keen’s explanation: empathy consists in expressions of identification, as in “I feel what you feel, I feel your pain”; sympathy is, in comparison, more distanced, as in “I feel a supportive emotion about your feelings, I feel pity for your pain” (5). Sympathy suggests more distance from the emotions of the other and is often placed alongside pity, whilst empathy consists of the ability to feel and in some sense inhabit the other’s pain. However, the notion of “inhabiting” another’s pain might gravitate towards overidentification and thence, loss of the pain as attached to the other. The pain instead becomes a component of one’s own self, rather than the victim. LaCapra’s term of “empathic unsettlement” in Writing History, Writing Trauma, imparts a richer analysis of the comprehension of empathy; LaCapra’s term dissociates empathy from overidentification: “It is dubious to identify with the victim to the point of making oneself a surrogate victim who has a right to the victim's voice and subject position” (78). In my essay, I do not argue that empathy embodies the initial key for reconciliation between ourselves and others, nor do I see it as an antidote for the justification of the brutal violence against certain bodies within the realms of war. Rather, the literature I examine here suggests that the recognition of others through the senses must come first before a discussion of empathy, or the possibility of its discovery and force emerges. There are two key concepts that I will explore in my analysis: one is the way in which the enemy is “framed” and the other, related concept, is that of the “soldier’s matrix” (Friedman 243). My arguments are founded on the theoretical insights of Judith Butler and Elaine Scarry, who argue that pain and suffering must be heard and seen rather than silenced and erased by the soldier’s matrix which assembles certain Landa 3 bodies into grievable or ungrievable lives, or re-describes them through the insignia of power within war. Not only will I address literature that describes war from the perspective of combatants in the twentieth century but also from the perspective of contemporary literature that addresses drones—which have transformed many aspects of traditional warfare—the use of which has sparked many philosophical conversations in regards to its ethical implications. Butler argues that “the implicit or explicit framing of a population as a war target is the initial action of destruction. It is not just preparation for a destruction to come, but the initiating sequence of the process of destruction” (Frames of War xvi). Framing, then, is a valuable concept to consider the ways in which war obliterates empathy and impedes the relationality between bodies. The frame is similar to a false accusation as “one’s guilty status becomes the viewer’s inevitable conclusion” (Frames of War 8); an entire population is at once made guilty, and this propels their destruction. Framing aligns closely with Robi Friedman’s concept of the “soldier’s matrix”; Friedman argues that “murderous violence is not only legitimized, but it also arouses collective unconscious strong defences against feelings of guilt, shame or empathy for the enemy’s suffering” (243-244). The matrix perpetuates the violence of war through the obliteration of specific emotions such as empathy that might normally follow recognition of the other’s suffering. The concepts of the frame and the soldier’s matrix are integral, then, to the illumination of recognition as the foundation for reconciliation between bodies because it is precisely the acknowledgement of this frame through which another demand emerges: another solicitation works through the frame, one that asks us to refuse the regulation of the senses that would accept the radical ungrievability of certain populations, or, rather, the differential distribution of grievability upon which war depends. Ungrievable lives are those that cannot be lost, and cannot be destroyed, because they already inhabit a lost and Landa 4 destroyed zone; they are, ontologically, and from the start, already lost and destroyed, which means that when they are destroyed in war, nothing is destroyed. (Butler, Frames of War xix) Through the designation of certain bodies as ungrievable and thus, “already lost and destroyed,” certain populations are not even seen as lost when killed in the midst of war. This occurs through what Butler describes above as a “regulation of the senses” which will arise within the core of my argument when discussing the literature, and the hazardous implications this carries within drone warfare. This frame is critical not only in discussions of past wars, such as World War I and II, but also, perhaps even more prevalent in today’s contemporary drone warfare where borders of designated war zones disintegrate and the relation between “civilians” and “soldiers” (or “terrorists”) are blurred (Chamayou, Calhoun, Wall and Monahan). In signature strikes, drone operators look for (what they believe to be) suspicious behaviour, rather than target specific individuals, and this unravels a plethora of opportunities for mistakes which is clearly evident in the rise of civilian deaths in war as a product of drone strikes in the twenty-first century. An organization devoted to revealing the consequences of such powers, called The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, shows that the U.S has killed between 769 and 1,725 civilians and between 253 and 397 children since they have begun collecting their data. In his reign as president, Donald Trump even revoked a policy that previously required the CIA to keep record of the number of deaths caused by the drone attacks, including that of civilians (BBC 2019). With a threefold rise in the rate of civilian casualties in Afghanistan in 2019 compared to 2018, it is imperative to address the government’s operations through both theoretical and fictive renderings (Bureau of Investigative Journalism n.p.). Landa 5 This thesis will examine three works of war literature in order to understand the framing of war, the potential for resistance of this very frame, and the refusal to accept and perpetuate its destructive effects. It will discuss the subsequent shift towards another solicitation that recovers the senses and, thence, allows for recognition and the facilitation of empathy. Erich Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, follows the story of the young German soldier, Paul, in World War I. The novel is thought to be somewhat autobiographical, as Remarque himself was drafted in 1917 to Flanders on the Western Front (Henningfeld 10). The novel follows the journey of young men who fight in a war that is nothing like what was sold to them through the patriotic stories of heroism and bravery that surrounded them. Throughout their time in war, they witness a staggering number of deaths of their own comrades as well as their enemies and experience many hardships that reflect the disillusionment of the era. Although the novel was incredibly successful in its time, it was also believed to be controversial. The Nazi Party criticized the novel as a product of “pacifist philosophy” and as negatively portraying German soldiers, and later banned the book in 1933 (Henningfeld 12). Remarque’s novel is thought by many to be one of the greatest war novels of all time and “is known as both a war novel and an antiwar novel—a reputation that might once have seemed paradoxical” (Franklin 16). Although the author himself argues that his novel “was not political, neither pacifist nor militarist, in intention, but human simply” (Hamilton and Remarque 90), I argue that Paul’s experience on the front unearths the potential and the very necessity for the recognition of others, as well as the implications this carries for not only the comprehension of the First World War, but in light of the current wars being fought entirely from unmanned aircrafts that diminish operators’ sensory perceptions for greater ease of the elimination of their enemies. Landa 6 The next pieces I will explore have received little critical analysis by other scholars perhaps due to the only recent development of literature on drones in the twenty-first century. It is also worth noting that although I have found much analysis on the philosophies of drone warfare in comparison to traditional warfare, I have yet to find scholarly criticism that place traditional warfare texts against drone war texts, which I have aimed to do here. Placing Remarque’s text (who many regard as an incredibly important World War I novel) against these other texts that address drones provides a rich opportunity to address the controversial and substantially different war being fought today that I, as well as other scholars, believe do not align with the definitions of “war” that we have familiarized ourselves with (Calhoun, Chamayou). Through the study of these two archives together, arises both the difficulty and importance of defining what “war” suggests in present-day, and the necessity for these philosophies to transform in order to address these very realities that have provoked the rise of civilian deaths within war. Kim Garcia’s play Grounded brings us into the present use of drones in combat. A woman referred to as “Pilot” transitions from a position as a pilot in the air to a pilot who is virtually “grounded” in operation of a drone; she experiences the war from an entirely different location as she is across the world from her targets. The play exhibits the perspective of a drone pilot in contemporary warfare and reveals startling similarities and contrasts between the war that Paul experiences in Remarque’s novel and her own. Finally, I turn to the memoir by Atef Abu Saif, The Drone Eats With Me. Saif reflects on the horrific destruction caused by the wars in Gaza, specifically Israel’s 2014 invasion that lasted fifty-one days and killed 2,145 Palestinians, 578 of them children. I find it integral to read and analyze a text that focuses on those who are targeted by the drones, rather than solely from the pilot’s perspective, of which there are a plethora of pieces alongside Garcia’s play (Mike Maden’s Landa 7 Drone and Blue Warrior, Ron Childress’ And West is West, Fesperman’s Unmanned, and the films, Eye in the Sky and Good Kill). Through these works of literature by Remarque, Garcia and Saif that move across time, genre and form of warfare, I argue that recognition prevails as the forefront for social justice. Recognition arises through the evocation of the senses—visual, auditory and touch—and illuminates the potential for resistance to the frame of war that functions to obliterate, rather than enable, empathy and relationality between bodies. When set against traditional warfare, the present-day drone wars exhibit technological advancements that threaten to further impede recognition as sensory perceptions are purposefully diminished, rather than heightened, and align more with torture, rather than with war. Section II: Face-to-Face (All Quiet on the Western Front) Butler’s sense of the “frame” of war, its destructive capabilities, and its production of precarity are clearly evident in Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. Paul, the central first-person narrator and ostensible writer of a war memoir, argues that his enemies are made enemies by a simple discursive gesture: “a word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends” (193-194). A command enacts the frame – the soldier’s matrix – and through this, the obliteration of recognition of others as they are designated “enemies.” An entirely different frame could be birthed from a different command: one that involves friendship. In Remarque’s novel, Paul describes the prisoners of war he encounters as follows: I know nothing of them except that they are prisoners; and that is exactly what troubles me. Their life is obscure and guiltless; --if I could know more of them, what their names Landa 8 are, how they live, what they are waiting for, what their burdens are, then my emotion would have an object and might become sympathy. But as it is I perceive behind them only the suffering of the creature, the awful melancholy of life and the pitilessness of men (193). In Paul’s description of the prisoners, he notes that if he could “know” them as something other than mere prisoners, then he might achieve sympathy. He questions the frame, but does not refuse its perpetuation. His emotions could emerge and have an “object,” or rather, he might recognize the enemy as a human subject in front of him. In this moment, he questions the frame enough that he recognizes the possibilities of knowing the other through hearing about their lives and the burdens they face; he sees that the frame limits his ability to “see, think, recognize, and apprehend” what lies in front of him (Butler, Frames of War 9). Although he then expresses a concern for social justice, he still is not able to recognize the others as human bodies which would facilitate empathy: “I will not lose these thoughts, I will keep them, shut them away until the war is ended. My heart beats fast: this is the aim, the great, sole aim, that I have thought of in the trenches; that I have looked for as the only possibility of existence after this annihilation of all human feeling” (194). He argues to himself that he must continue to fight for the sole purpose of survival so that he may carry acts of social justice only after the war ends. He does not reach empathy for the others in this moment because he still dismisses them as creatures and continues the violence against them. This essay argues that another frame emerges at these very moments that demands for recognition, empathy and an immediate cease of violence against the other—not waiting until after the war is finished to proclaim the other’s life. Paul fails to recognize the bodies as, in Butler’s terms, “grievable.” Butler writes in her collection of essays, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?: Landa 9 Ungrievable lives are those that cannot be lost, and cannot be destroyed, which means that when they are destroyed in war, nothing is destroyed. To destroy them actively might even seem like a kind of redundancy, or a way of simply ratifying a prior truth. So it is not just that such frames serve as a mechanism through which the living and the dead are distinguished and maintained in times of war. Rather, the time of war is precisely the time of this iteration, that is, this repeated and violent differentiation between the living and the dead. (xix) Paul immediately calls the men “prisoners” and succumbs to the frame’s inevitable conclusion that they are enemies and their bodies are already discarded as “creatures” rather than humans as if already obliterated. In warfare, “the goal is to out-injure the opponent” (Scarry 63), and thus, this frame functions to perpetuate the destruction of bodies. In Paul’s passage, he asserts the “nothing” that ungrievable lives become in his eyes, or that, even more potently, as Butler argues, are never really lives in the first place. To imprison and kill others is a ratification of “a prior truth” – the truth that designates them enemies and ceases to affect the German soldiers, who come to embody the frame as they have been commanded to see the prisoners as “nothing.” Paul writes how during his training to become a soldier, he was “at first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent, we recognized that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but the drill” (Remarque 22). He learns the importance of “the system” or rather, the frame, that functions to obliterate recognition; as a soldier, he is trained to follow the drill. Through his training, he moves into indifference. The frame replaces his ability to think and be conscious with the automatic motions of a boot brush; he becomes obsessed with duty, rather than consciousness—shooting a gun or throwing a grenade rather than acknowledging that a person stands before him. Although he recognizes his Landa 10 and the other soldier’s transitions into the frame itself (“the system”), he does not choose to move beyond the frame. This is similar to his interaction with the prisoners where he argues that if he could know them more, then maybe he would see them as people rather than creatures. I argue for the necessity to enact another solicitation, not only to recognize that the frame exists. His attention to the frame reveals that he questions the frame, but he does not, in this moment, refuse to perpetuate the violence the frame enacts; he rather becomes “indifferent” to its effects. One of the themes that underscores both the violence to others and the unconscious labours of the combatants in the war, is that of “the wave,” a motif that recurs again and again within the novel (55, 114, 115, 140, 172) in association with the soldier’s transformation when they reach the front. The wave reflects the force of the frame that drives the violence of war forwards and the lack of consciousness that occurs: …crouching like cats we run on, overwhelmed by this wave that bears us along, that fills us with ferocity, turns us into thugs, into murderers, into God only knows what devils; this wave that multiplies our strength with fear and madness and greed of life, seeking and fighting nothing but our deliverance. If your own father came over with them you would not hesitate to fling a bomb at him. (114) The wave “overwhelms” the soldiers. The wave takes over their consciousness and replaces it with “God only knows what devils” and propels them to kill the other. The wave can be seen as a metaphor for the frame of war, one that turns the enemy into “nothing” and creates a madness for the preservation of one’s own life at the expense of the other’s. The lack of awareness that the soldiers face is evident when Paul argues that even if his own father was in front of him, he would not hesitate to kill him. There is no recognition of the other as a face, a body, nor a person. The wave marks the ferocity of war’s drive within soldiers and the justification of war as Landa 11 grounded in self-defence. Paul argues that “we have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation” (113). Defence replaces killing, and bodies blur into “nothing but deliverance” (114). The wave constructs the soldiers into what Paul later describes as “automata”: a mechanical device rather than a human body (115). However, according to Emmanuel Levinas, “self-preservation is never a sufficient condition for the ethical justification of violence" (cited in Butler, Precarious Life 136). Butler writes that the frame “prides itself on its ability to see and feel past the vision of massive human suffering in the name of an infinitely expanding rationale of self-defence” (Frames of War xxvii). The frame disintegrates the potential for recognition through this replacement of murder with “self-defence.” Paul writes how “the front is a mysterious whirlpool. Though I am in still water far away from its center, I feel the whirl of the vortex, sucking me slowly, irresistibly, inescapably into itself” (Remarque 55). If we take the wave to be a representation of the frame, it drags Paul “inescapably into itself.” It pulls him towards its center until the body of Paul is no longer a body, but rather disappears into the whirlpool of the frame, and he cannot escape its grasp. The frame slowly drags a soldier into its vortex and turns him into a body without consciousness; it drowns his ability to think and replaces it with a branch of machinery—the boot brush, the shooting of a gun—all automatic and unconscious. The wave—the frame—facilitates his every move as he becomes part of it when he steps out into the front where self-defence is necessary by command, where bodies are not bodies anymore. He loses sight and insight, as he is only surrounded by the water – the walls of the frame—and does not recognize anyone who comes towards him before he throws a grenade or pulls the trigger. Paul’s lack of consciousness within the frame of war eradicates the potential for recognition: “it has transformed us into unthinking animals in order to give us the weapon of Landa 12 instinct—it has reinforced us with dullness so we do not go into pieces before the horror, which would overwhelm us if we had clear conscious thought” (Remarque 273). Paul describes himself in terms similar to those he uses to describe the prisoners in the initial passage I cited; he is a creature who does not have a ‘self’. Through the erasure of his own humanity (a body and mind with a sense of ‘self’) and transformation of his body into a “weapon of instinct” and an eradication of consciousness, he can bear the horrors of warfare and perpetuate its wave of destruction. His instinct is to kill, and there is no consciousness required. The recognition of “the horror” would overwhelm the soldiers with feeling, and thence, break down the very soldier’s matrix the war depends on. To feel would evoke what Paul believes is a destruction of his own body: he would go “into pieces before the horror,” as if his own flesh and mind would disintegrate. Yet, through more analysis, we will discover that only through a moment of recognition that facilitates empathy for an enemy which occurs in a later scene, will Paul arise from the wave that submerges him in the frame. What Paul describes later as “dangerous moments” (Remarque 274) are actually pivotal points that begin to unravel the artificial concepts that drive warfare; they function to foster recognition that eradicates the justification of the destruction of flesh through an emergence of sensory perceptions and consciousness. Through witnessing the pain of others occurring within recognizable human bodies, rather than dismissing these bodies as ungrievable lives, Paul begins to understand the importance of eradicating pain. As Scarry argues, “the act of verbally expressing pain is a necessary prelude to the collective task of diminishing pain” (9). We see one of these moments the first time Paul wounds an enemy face-to-face, rather than from a distance, and hears the other’s pain. His perception of war alters significantly: Landa 13 I did not want to kill you…you were an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me: I thought of your hand grenades; of your bayonet of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony – Forgive me comrade. How could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother just like Kat and Albert. (223) In this scene, he recognizes the other as a body just like his own and engages in conversation with him. Before this moment, the other was merely an “abstraction”—an objectified set of ideas rather than a human; he carried no relation to the other or even a sense of his own self, as he was “automata” (Remarque 115) and described his own self as an animal. Here, through a face-to-face interaction, he views the other as an extension of his own self; he even calls him his own brother and comrade. He finds, in this moment, the relation of himself to the other that arises from a founding of his own consciousness. Butler argues in Precarious Life that an “I” cannot even exist without the other: “I find that my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself is paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others” (46). Here, we witness almost a birth of his own self through the acknowledgement of the other as part of his own self. The breakage of the matrix is simultaneously the breakage of his ability to be a soldier and the emergence of his own ethical self. He recognizes the power of the frame that is contained within the uniforms that they wear – the designation of bodies as grievable or ungrievable – the uniform that marks the ideology of the system of war. Through recognition, Landa 14 Butler argues one will “solicit a becoming, to instigate a transformation, to petition the future always in relation to the Other” (Precarious Life 44). After the man dies in front of him, he petitions a future where he is tied in relation to him: “this dead man is bound up with my life” (Remarque 225). He petitions to be in relation to the other, and through this he becomes conscious of his actions and finds his own sense of ‘self’ through this relation. This moment drives him towards a fight for recognition that illuminates the fragility of the frame upon which war depends when viewed through an alternate perspective, one that sees the other as a human body and thus, a grievable life: “if I come out of it, comrade, I will fight against this, that has struck us both down; from you, taken life—and from me—? Life also. I promise you, comrade. It shall never happen again” (226). If he comes out alive, he will fight to cease the primary outcome of warfare: death. Notably, it is through an awakening of his sensory perceptions that Paul recognizes the other as a human body. He first writes that “every gasping breath is like a cry, a thunder—but it is only my heart pounding. I want to stop his mouth, stuff it with earth, stab him again…” (Remarque 216). But he cannot. He instead witnesses the pain of the other and records it in his memoir on the pages. Scarry argues that “physical pain has no voice but when it at last finds a voice, it begins to tell a story” (3). Paul moves to help, rather than deny the existence of the other’s pain and unravels the frame that once held the other’s body as “nothing” to be lost. In The Body in Pain, Scarry argues that when a body is in pain, the pain destroys language and “bring[s] about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language” (4). This reversion, Scarry argues, leads to political and perceptual consequences such as the other’s pain transformed into the insignia of power in war. She argues, Landa 15 The failure to express pain—whether the failure to objectify its attributes or instead the failure, once those attributes are objectified, to refer them to their original site in the human body—will always work to allow its appropriation and conflation with debased forms of power; conversely, the successful expression of pain will always work to expose and make impossible that appropriation and conflation. (14) This quote exhibits the significance of witnessing an other’s pain as originating from their own body, rather than silenced into a successful accomplishment of war through “debased forms of power.” Paul’s witnessing and account of the other’s pain gives the pain a voice—a story that must be heard and challenged as a form of real pain, rather than a moment of triumph. Through his witnessing and recognition of the other’s pain as expression (which Scarry argues to be integral to the movement towards ceasing pain (9)), he also expresses how he too is wounded through his act of stabbing the other: “But every gasp lays my heart bare. This dying man has time with him, he has an invisible dagger with which he stabs me: Time and my thoughts” (Remarque 221). He hears the other’s screams and gasps and does not choose to eradicate it from existence, nor remove it from the written pages of his war memoir, nor re-describe his pain into the insignia of power that functions to make the other’s pain virtually disappear. Here, not only does he recognize the man’s pain, but also recognizes his own pain that is a direct result of his own interrelation. This moment fractures the matrix: first, he witnesses the other’s pain as coming from an other’s human body, then he listens and records his suffering so it is not forgotten and finally, experiences empathy when he feels wounded just like the other suffering in front of him. After he finds out the man’s name and sees pictures of his family among his letters, he writes how “each word I translate pierces me like a shot in the chest; --like a stab in the chest” (225). He begins to feel the other’s pain through recognition and relation; he experiences Landa 16 empathy (only after he recognizes the other as a human) as he, returning to our definitions of empathy, feels his pain, rather than merely feels pity for him (Keen 5). In an act of wounding the other, he wounds his own self; he first describes how the pain feels like a “shot in the chest” but then alters it to “a stab in the chest,” which parallels his own actions in relation to the other. The frame crumbles: and “to call the frame into question is to show that the frame never quite contained the scene it was meant to limn, that something was already outside, which made the very sense of the inside possible, recognizable. The frame never quite determined precisely what it is we see, think, recognize, and apprehend” (Butler, Precarious Life 9). But it is important to not mistake empathy—a sudden feeling of the other’s pain—as the primary facilitation of his decision to cease the destruction of warfare, but instead the very recognition of the other’s life as grievable and the existence of a family and an identity to which he becomes profoundly connected to. Not only does he recognize the other as a comrade, but also learns his name which he first resists: “So long as I do not know his name perhaps I may still forget him, time will obliterate it, this picture. But his name, it is a nail that will be hammered into me and never come out again. It has the power to recall this forever, it will always come back and stand before me” (224). His description of the name as a nail infinitely hammered into him expresses his body as infinitely impressed by the other—his body will always feel the other as part of him and his body will perpetually be in pain. He then opens the man’s book and finds his name: Gérard Duval (225). Through recognition of the man in front of him as suffering and as now having a name, and thence, an identity, he emerges into consciousness; he crawls out of the water that drowned him into the whirlpool of his own self—in the waves that propelled him to kill anyone who moved towards him. Through recognition of the other as an extension of his own self, he Landa 17 unearths a different frame: the refusal to kill, and the drive for social justice and the grievability of all lives. This moment is a radical pause in the constant wave of madness that most of the novel emits. This “dangerous” moment exhibits the power of re-claiming one’s own senses to expose the other’s pain and suffering. But how exactly is Paul able to experience the suffering of an other in the battlefield? Is it due to his ability to see the other face-to-face, rather than from a distance when he is kept behind a gun? The complexity of such an encounter is at the heart of the reflections upon “the face” by Levinas and Judith Butler, who raise similar arguments to those that Scarry voices in The Body in Pain. The face is a critical term for discussions on the recognition of the other as human—an aspect of recognition that Paul reaches at this moment within the novel. Butler writes that “the face makes various utterances at once: it bespeaks an agony, an injurability, at the same time that it bespeaks a divine prohibition against killing” (Precarious Life 135). Here, she identifies the face as “speaking”; through hearing and seeing the face, one in pain evokes a movement that should halt, rather than instigate killing. The face cries out, even without literally speaking from the mouth. The three theorists—Levinas, Butler, and Scarry—in effect, provide very similar arguments: all express the body in pain as one that should facilitate recognition and interrupt the desire to eliminate the other. While Levinas calls the bodily suffering “the face,” it is not necessarily meant as solely the physical face of a person, but also, for example, a person’s curved back could represent an “agonized vocalization” (Butler, Precarious Life 133). Butler, in this next passage, provides an argument again similar to Scarry’s, where this moment of pain is one that is no longer expressed through verbal language: “let us remember that Levinas has also told us that the face—which is the face of the Other, and so the ethical demand made by the Other—is that vocalization of agony that is not yet language or no longer language, the one by Landa 18 which we are wakened to the precariousness of the Other's life, the one that rouses at once the temptation to murder and the interdiction against it" (Precarious Life 139). This very loss, or, in Scarry’s argument, rather the birth of language itself, wakens the ethical demand we have for the other; this body, or the face, as one in pain screams and speaks without having to literally speak. When one sees the face, there are two impulses according to Levinas: “if the first impulse towards the other’s vulnerability is the desire to kill, the ethical injunction is precisely to militate against the first impulse” (Butler, Precarious Life 137). Thus, the principle of ethics is founded on the ability to refuse the first impulse. If this is the case, then Paul ultimately fails in that he does carry through with his first impulse, which is to stab the enemy in attempt to kill. However, integral to this scene is the call for future ethics. He expresses how “the eyes cry out, yell, all the life…gathered together there in a dreadful terror of death, of me” (Remarque 219). Although the enemy does not speak, the eyes and face scream to reveal his pain: they demand recognition. He recognizes that what the other fears is, in fact, him. He is the one who is responsible for his injury. First, Paul stabs what he calls “an abstraction”—the instrument of war—but then sees the body as dying, as therefore necessarily living before death: “the man is not dead, he is dying, but he is not dead” (218). His repetition of the man as “not dead, not dead…not dead,” illuminates his entrance into consciousness of the other as living. But his entrance is not unchallenging; his repetition marks an anxiety in reaching such a conclusion: how can war move forward if the soldier’s matrix is ruptured? In making the powerful claim that this man has life in front of him, how can he kill again in war? Paul describes his life as ever-connected to the man he kills: “If I come out of it, comrade, I will fight against this, that has struck us both down” (226). Prior to this moment of face-to-face interaction with the other, his call for ethics remained solely connected to his comrades, which prior meant only his fellow German soldiers: “we shall have a Landa 19 purpose, and so we shall march, our dead comrades beside us, the years at the Front behind us:--against whom, against whom?” (140). Here, earlier in the novel, Paul expresses the men he stands with as his own German soldiers, and although he questions who he is fighting against, he does not recognize the other as someone connected to him, at least not yet. After Paul’s interaction with him, he designates Gérard as a comrade; perhaps then not only does “comrade” include his own soldiers, but also those who were once thought of as enemies or creatures. The scholar Middleton-Kaplan argues, through the use of Levinasian concepts, that there is a point at which Levinas and Remarque diverge. Remarque's novel leaves us with an overwhelming sense of useless suffering, wasted lives, pointless war, senseless slaughter. That is his theme, and that propels his novel as a vehicle of anti-war thought and sentiment. The novel rages against useless suffering by portraying it without compromise and without comfort. But while Remarque keeps our gaze focused on that useless suffering, Levinas turns us toward the possibility of rendering suffering not-useless (88). Remarque offers, according to Middleton-Kaplan, the loss of human lives that cannot be altered or changed as even Paul dies in the end, and after his face-to-face moment with the other, the war moves forward in full force. Through the face, and as I argue, through Butler and Scarry’s lens of the importance of witnessing and recognizing the pain of others in human bodies, we gain a better understanding of Remarque’s novel. These theorists and the analysis they allow offer a different perspective for the future, one that actually fulfills Paul’s decision to always live in relation with the other. Middleton-Kaplan argues that Remarque and Levinas diverge, and through an analysis that puts the characters and the theorist alongside each other, “the lamp of Levinas illuminates the darkness of Remarque's vision and the luminousness of the Levinasian lamp's own light” (88). Thus, if we only look at Remarque’s text itself and ignore Levinas, it Landa 20 seems that the text argues that there is no point to his interaction with the other because by the end of his interaction with Gérard, the sharp crack of a rifle brings Paul back into the war, and he continues the fight. However, I argue, Levinas allows for the ability to read the text in a manner that demands for a different solicitation. That is, I extend my argument in comparison to Middleton-Kaplan through a relation to not only Levinas but Butler and Scarry, as well as within drone literature that reveals the inability to even have a chance of seeing “the face” on a screen; with application of these theorists, I argue that there is a chance to cease the violence—that a moment like this for a soldier is not wasted, and should not be deemed insignificant because the war still continues. This moment causes the soldier to pause in relation to the other. In my analysis of the next texts, I seek to find the consequence of a war that does not even allow the soldier to pause, that does not even allow access to their senses because of a screen. How, then, can these theorists be applied to contemporary war? How can they be used to illuminate the greater darkness that is the drowning of a soldier by drones? How, if possible, can a soldier rise up from the waves that pull him or her into the frame that governs their senses? Is recognition and, thence, empathy possible in a technology that radically strengthens the frame of war? Section III: Blurred Screens and Muted Pain (Grounded) Elaine Scarry defines traditional warfare as a mode of injury and contest: “one participates not simply in the act of injuring, but in the activity of reciprocal injuring where the goal is to out-injure the opponent” (63). This definition, as we have seen above, applies germanely to Remarque’s analysis and critique of war in All Quiet on the Western Front. However, drone warfare has transformed traditional warfare through technological advancements Landa 21 of the twenty-first century. I argue that the use of drones in war aligns itself more with Scarry’s definition of torture, rather than her definition of war, and this further impedes the ability for recognition of others and thence, empathy. Drones create greater distance from the other and, most significantly, transform war into a non-reciprocated form. Scarry argues that the basis of the distinction between war and torture is “consent”: “in war, the persons whose bodies are used in the confirmation process have given their consent over this most radical use of the human body, while in torture no such consent is exercised” (21). She argues that nuclear warfare is a form of torture because no consent could ever be attained by the thousands, or millions of bodies that can be, or have already been, killed by nuclear bombs. In drone warfare, no longer is a soldier controlling the drone in danger of being killed and no longer must this soldier witness the pain he or she enacts on another human being. With the escalation of the use of drones and the radical rise of civilian casualties that questions the consent of bodies, this technological development demands our attention. This fundamental principle of reciprocity and consent in war are abolished. What does this leave us with? Chamayou argues in his collection of essays, Drone Theory, that it is in the disparity between the self and other that makes drone warfare such a travesty: in this disparity, he writes, “lies the root of the scandal: by suggesting that lives of the enemy are completely dispensable while ours are absolutely sacrosanct, one introduces a radical inequality in the value of lives, and this breaks with the inviolable principle of the equal dignity of all human lives” (155). Thus, although drones radically escalate the safety of the pilot in that they are in no immediate danger, the other—the target—is held by a form of torture in a body that is radically ungrievable through further government of the senses and altered perceptions when they are viewed through a screen. Landa 22 Near the end of Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul reflects on the introduction of technological advancements within warfare—in his case, tanks—and argues that “more than anything else [they] embody for us the horror of war…they are annihilation, they roll without feeling…invulnerable steel beasts” (282). Near the end, he also exclaims, “I see how people are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make [the war] yet more refined and enduring” (263). Combatants are positioned in models of combat, without themselves even knowing, but through obedience and through the manipulation of their bodies to only operate within a certain frame, the frame becomes sacrosanct: the frame positions bodies other than their own as ungrievable. And the government and advocates of war find ways to make this transition easier and more long-lasting. Drones, too, are “invulnerable steel beasts,” but unlike the tank, they reflect an even further transition within the realm of war and perhaps embody even more horror: an unmanned instrument of weaponry. Chamayou argues that the drone screen “remains partial. It is filtered through the interface. Quite apart from the fact that the sensory gamut is reduced to the optical dimension, the resolution, although detailed enough to allow the operator to aim, is not good enough to distinguish faces. All that operators can see are little figures blurred into facelessness” (117). Drones, then, erase the other’s face which further impedes the ability to decipher the body as a human body and to recognize that very body as capable of pain. Through this erasure of distinguishing features of a body, the drone screen might align with what Scarry writes of “the torturer’s dream of absolute nonreciprocity” (80). Scarry argues that anticipatory injury is, in fact, a form of injury (79). Thus, with a drone hovering above a city indefinitely, its people are continuously injured whilst the operator is absent from any injury, which I will further explore in the literature of Garcia and Saif, in Landa 23 reflections of drone warfare as a mode of torture, rather than “war”. Scarry goes on to speak of the “dream” of absolute control as a torturer’s dream: The dream of an absolute, one-directional capacity to injure those outside one’s territorial boundaries, whether dreamed by a nation-state that is in its interior a democracy or a tyranny, may begin to approach the torturer’s dream of absolute nonreciprocity, the dream that one will be oneself exempt from the condition of being embodied while one’s opponent will be kept in a state of radical embodiment by its awareness that it is at any moment deeply woundable. (80) This dream might be better understood through the enactment of drone warfare, where one body carries perpetual destruction over another which is entirely passive. We can see this in The Drone Eats With Me as the drones hover above Gaza indefinitely; they become what Saif describes as an unwelcomed house guest continually in their presence. The Pilot within George Brant’s play, Grounded, first describes the world she sees on the screen as “not like a videogame/a videogame has color/I stare at the grey/at a world carved out of putty/like someone took the time to carve a putty world for/me to stare at twelve hours a day” (28). The repetition of the term “putty” is unsettling; it suggests a world that can be shaped and reshaped as a form of clay that can continuously be altered by another’s hand. The screen as deprived of colour draws the Pilot into a world unlike her own, and this difference might impede recognition when the bodies on the screen are first seen as grey, as well as similar to a clay substance rather than human flesh, which cannot bleed nor suffer. The colourlessness also might enforce the greater distance, with its dissociation from the world around her that, in fact, does have colour. “Grey” not only pertains to a colour, but also can be defined as lacking cheer such as in mood, but also can be related to a “vaguely defined position, condition or character” Landa 24 (Merriam-Webster.com). Not only does grey apply to difference, but almost non-existence, as the bodies of and world surrounding the others is uncertain, which becomes paradoxical when the Pilot later writes that any military-aged male is certainly an enemy she must kill. Perhaps, too, does grey apply to the others’ apparent lack of emotion and liveliness. Finally, grey also concerns dullness: the bodies of the others lack resonance, force and sharpness. It is important to pause at the significance of this descriptor because the entire world and body of the other is made up of greyness, dullness, lack—putty. Soon after, she writes how “You can’t see faces/Not really/But you don’t need to your mind fills them in/And these are the faces of military age males by the/side of the road” (31). This reveals in narrative terms the extent of the “facelessness” that Chamayou discusses in his criticism of drones and enforces the aspect of the world as grey “putty” that she describes. The others’ world is at mercy of the drone operator who can “fill in” the faces of the other on the screen, or rather, mold them into the guilty and the dehumanized, which has hazardous implications. This raises issues of perspective and context within drone warfare. Wall and Monahan argue that The drone stare further abstracts targets from political, cultural, and geographical contexts, thereby reducing variation, difference, and noise that may impede action or introduce moral ambiguity. In combination, these processes further normalize the ongoing subjugation of those marked as Other, those targeted for discriminatory observation and attack, those without comparable resources to contest the harmful categories within which they are placed. (250) They emphasize, in the initial lines, the absence of sensory engagement—differentiation through sight and sound. Instead, the Pilot is immersed in her own context, across the world from her targets; the face of the other is replaced by a blurry generalized descriptor of a “military age Landa 25 male” – all that is necessary to justify an attack. There is no recognition of the face. There is solely the perspective of the operator who notes suspicious activity and decides to attack. She writes, “You can’t hide from the eye in the sky my children/We look down from above we see all and we have/pronounced you guilty/boom” (Brant 34). This exhibits how the power of decision lies entirely with the operator. Her reference to the people below her as “children” evinces a god-like power that she holds as an untouchable body across the world from her targets, which will come to haunt her later in the play when she projects her own child onto the face of the other. She represents the epitome of sovereignty: the body deemed “sacrosanct” by her nation, and the others are mere children, as if they must obey her. She decides their fate. The depiction of a drone “stare” embodies both a vacancy and uncomfortable intimacy in the drone operator towards her “enemies.” The drone is, in effect, always above its targets and always staring at the people beneath it, but can never see clearly. The screen regulates her senses physically as the others’ faces, bodies, pain are erased. Later in the text, the mere suggestion of a car driving faster than usual is enough to instigate an attack: “Too fast to be innocent too fast for me to really see/who’s in it but the speed is guilt enough” (Brant 36). “Guilt” is constructed through the actions of the others that she sees from soil that is not a battleground. This radical imbalance of power over the others beneath her proves detrimental when the context might be entirely different on the ground compared to what she sees, which I will examine in The Drone Eats With Me, where fear is pervasive when drones have targeted people smoking cigarettes because it might be taken as a weapon on a blurry screen. In fact, in 2014, a wedding party in Yemen was targeted by a U.S drone strike when the operators believed that the people were a group of terrorists. They killed over a dozen people and injured dozens more (Friedersdorf). Landa 26 Although Paul in All Quiet on the Western Front momentarily escapes the waves that drown his own consciousness, the Pilot is forcefully kept under the whirlpool when she cannot hear or see beyond a blur of grey shapes. Brant later writes, “I will be the one to erase you/You are the Prophet but I am God/And you do not speak for me” (58). Not only does the Pilot view the others as children, but also believes their religion to be inferior to Western Christianity when she proclaims herself to be God whereas they are merely Prophets. She uses these racist judgements to justify her actions. The others cannot speak back or exhibit their suffering; they are not able to stand trial, to speak of why they were driving faster than usual. The last sentence is chilling, in that it silences the other entirely: “you do not speak for me”. This is radically different from the moment where Paul must face the other after he stabs him. She does not reach any recognition in this moment of the other as a grievable life, nor does she see the face of the other, nor can she engage in any conversation with the other. She “erases” the other as if they never existed at all; in effect, they never were able to exist on the drone screen at all. The screen propels the force of the frame as it already diminishes the impact of the senses. The screen mutes voices, faces, and even colour to devoid the other of any aspects of life. In its representation of a lack of recognition, Grounded exhibits the necessity for recognition in a system that operates to reduce bodies to facelessness, a system that governs in order to promote ultimate protection of one nation’s bodies and the destruction of any other that seems merely suspicious, even if that means constructing guilt from the speed with which they drive. She does not witness the pain of the other, and thus, as we learn from Scarry, she loses the ability to eradicate pain. She only describes “a silent grey boom” (Brant 32). The destruction booms in silence on her screen. Butler writes how war begins with “an assault on the senses; the senses are the first target of war” (Frames of War xvi). Here, when she steps into the cockpit of a Landa 27 drone, her senses are muted and transformed through the screen; bodies are turned into silent, grey, faceless, putty. As the Pilot exclaimed in the beginning, the world is, in fact, already carved out by someone for her—in the frame of war, like the whirlpool that Paul is being drawn into, but instead of slowly dragging him towards its center, the screen already pulls the Pilot directly into the center (Brant 28). However, some critics argue that she reaches empathy when her life as a soldier collides with her domestic life, given that this new form of warfare that requires her to return home after shift’s end each day. Inga Meier argues that “while the screens through which she engages in warfare appear to provide a closer perspective of her targets, the geographical distanciation actually brings the combat closer to home, causing the boundaries between the military and domestic spheres to blur and, eventually, to collapse” (69). This collapse, to Meier, paves the way for empathy as she can no longer “distinguish between herself and the Prophet, or between Sam [her child] and the Girl [on the screen]. In her mind, the Prophet’s car becomes her car and the Girl her daughter. The domestic bleeds into the military and vice versa” (71). In the final pages of the play, she refuses to kill the daughter of the Prophet when she believes the child is her own, Sam. The matrix ruptures when she realizes the connection between her and the other, her child and an other’s child. Yet, she does not recognize the other as a body first; she only erases the body that she cannot see well enough on a screen and molds the child’s body into her own child’s. She does not reach recognition, which I argue to be integral before empathy can even be discussed. Although critics like Meier and also Elise Morrison argue that she is “ambushed” by empathy by the end of the play, as if suddenly wounded through the screen by the other, I rather side with Christine Evans’ argument: Landa 28 what Morrison labels empathy at this moment is not triggered through recognition of a shared humanity across ‘radical differences’; rather, it is precisely through mis- recognition- the projection of an American face onto another’s. The Pilot tries to abort the strike to save the child because she sees her own daughter in the viewfinder. Can the projection of an American child’s face over an Afghan’s really induce a ‘burden of responsibility’ or invite the audience to ethical witnessing? (673). Unlike Paul, in All Quiet in the Western Front, who recognizes the other as a person with a name and does not replace his victim’s face with his own or another’s, the Pilot in Brant’s play erases the other again: she replaces his daughter with her own. She does not recognize the child’s own ‘face’ in the sense implied by Levinas. Rather, she replaces the child’s face with that of her child: “But then/The girl/Her face/She stops running and I see it/Her face/I see it clearly/I can see her/It’s Sam/It’s not his daughter it’s mine” (Brant 60). This erasure reveals the extent of the misrecognition of the face within the screen of a drone operator. Although the Pilot does refuse to kill the child through this transfiguration, there still lies the important demand to recognize the other as a self, one different than her own or her child’s self. There is irony as she insists that she can “see it clearly,” when she obviously cannot through the screen that has evolved to inhibit recognition. Evans also writes that “the importance of listening to veterans’ war stories is stressed, but in keeping with the rules of the virtuous war, near-silence attends the far greater number of wrecked Iraqi (and Afghan) lives. Within this mirror-ball context, of which the play is itself a tightly compressed metonym, the Other’s pain can only appear as rupture, crack, collapse” (674). The other is left silenced, not only through the screen but by the Pilot herself when she chooses to only see the child as her own. Butler and Scarry demand suffering to be heard, recognized, seen as suffering from the body of the other. We must, yes, recognize Landa 29 ourselves to be wounded in the wake of an other’s pain, but must recognize the other as carrying that pain first. This dilemma is better understood if we turn to LaCapra’s Writing History, Writing Trauma and his term “empathic unsettlement,” which “involves a kind of virtual experience through which one puts oneself in the other's position while recognizing the difference of that position and hence not taking the other's place” (78, emphasis mine). Empathy should not overtake the other’s experience of pain, as if it is entirely their own. LaCapra works to alter the previous definitions of empathy that do not leave room for the other as a separate body and the importance of that in ethical considerations. He further argues that empathy is mistakenly conflated with identification or fusion with the other; it is opposed to sympathy implying difference from the discrete other who is the object of pity, charity, or condescension. In contradistinction to this entire frame of reference, empathy should rather be understood in terms of an affective relation, rapport, or bond with the other recognized and respected as other. It may be further related to the affirmation of otherness within the self—otherness that is not purely and discretely other. (212-213) To understand, respect and hear the suffering of the other, you cannot choose to erase their existence and replace it with your own form of their suffering. In Grounded, The Pilot virtually erases the child of an other, by replacing the image with her own child. Similar to LaCapra, Aleida Assmann and Ines Detmers, in Empathy and its Limits, argue that “a clear understanding of the difference between self and other is the precondition for more complex forms of empathy where the self is no longer used as the template for the imagination, but an effort is made to stretch the imagination by putting oneself into the others shoes” (6). Empathy requires a balance Landa 30 between distance and sensitivity which the Pilot overthrows. Previously, the Pilot admits, “You can’t see faces” (Brant 31). Thus, her only option is to fill in the blurred face of the other’s child with a face she knows—her own child’s, one that she sees every day and who elicits an empathetic response. Perhaps Grounded exhibits the very fact that in drone warfare empathy cannot be entirely achieved in its complex stages; the screen limits the ability for the Pilot to interact with the other. As Evans argues, “the occlusion of the Other from the augmented visual field of the drone, then, is complex, partial, and volatile” (673). The Pilot cannot, then, see the suffering of the other through the screen. I am not arguing that she has no empathy at all, but rather a limited form. She is not “ambushed by empathy”; yes, she refuses to kill a child, but only when she sees that child as her own. Unlike Paul, in All Quiet on the Western Front, who petitions to live his life for the other he kills, who recognizes the other as a person with a name, a life, a family—the Pilot, through the screen of the drone, cannot engage in relation to the other and his child. Paul engages in conversation with the other, helps the other, is able to see the fear and pain in the other’s eyes and hear it in his voice: he witnesses the face, in accordance to Levinas. He recognizes the soldier as like himself, but not himself. The Pilot cannot. Even in the moment where the other embraces his child, she still calls him “the Prophet,” racializing his identity. Also, whilst Paul must learn the other’s name, she never is able to find out the “Prophet’s” name. She is also always referred to as “the Pilot” rather than by her own name, emphasizing her submersion in the frame that functions to erase her own identity in order to perpetuate the violence to others that also do not carry individual identities, except for the generic and racist name she calls the other, “the Prophet”. Everyone remains nameless, except for her child “Sam”; however, that naming, too, is used to erase the other’s child’s identity at the end of the play. Everyone, then, by the end Landa 31 of the play is either nameless, faceless, or misrecognized. Brant chose to write the play as a one-woman show as well, with the Pilot’s voice and body the only one we see and hear throughout the piece. This amplifies the disappearance of the others’ voices and bodies from the stage itself; they are left entirely absent except for what is filtered through the drone screen from the Pilot’s perspective. The stage is empty except for a single body—the Pilot. Drone warfare might be seen as resisting any potential fractures in the soldier’s matrix: it withholds, erases, blurs. Section IV: Bodies in Pain (The Drone Eats With Me) Through the constant erasure of the other’s voice evident within the representation of drone warfare we find in Grounded, which focuses entirely on the pilot’s perspective rather than the victims themselves, I would now like to turn towards a memoir by Atef Abu Saif, The Drone Eats With Me. Saif reflects on witnessing the horrific destruction caused by the wars in Gaza, specifically Israel’s 2014 invasion that lasted fifty-one days and killed 2,145 Palestinians (578 of them children), injured over 11,000 people, and destroyed more than 17, 000 homes. The United Nations wrote that the total percentage of citizens killed was around 70% and that civilians and the children “paid the heaviest price” (United Nations, n.p.). The representative for Iran in a UN committee in 2014 argued that Israel’s “policies and practices continued to violate the fundamental human rights and dignity of the Palestinian people and other Arabs living in its occupation” (United Nations, n.p.). Saif argues that the drone operator enacts ultimate control over all bodies, just as the Pilot expresses in Grounded. The operator bears power over context and, thus, what constitutes threats: A young man who sold kids’ food—sweets, chocolates, crisps—became, in the eyes of the drone operator, a valid target, a danger to Israel. Every single human being in Gaza, Landa 32 whether walking on foot, riding a bicycle, steering a toktok, or driving a car, is a threat to Israel. We’re all guilty until proven otherwise, and how are we ever going to do that, whether alive or not? Your innocence doesn’t matter- you have to abandon all that. Survival is your only care. (Saif 12) All bodies are guilty in the eyes of the operator. The frame through which they are seen initiates their destruction. Saif highlights the absolute horror of fatalism: even a young man who sells sweets is a guilty body. Fatalism was evident in All Quiet on the Western Front, but was kept within designated war zones; the people on the battle grounds were presumably all soldiers or military personnel. They had a choice or were conscripted into their positions. However, the people that Saif speaks of, along with his own self, are civilians. And the horror does not end there. There is no way to prove that they are innocent: “Your innocence doesn’t matter” (12). The only thing, Saif writes, is to learn how to survive. Because, he argues, how “are we ever going to [prove otherwise]?”; they cannot speak to the operator if they have no voice through a screen. Saif’s video game analogy exhibits the extent of control the drone operator has over the people; they shoot “at [their] own discretion” (31). Later Saif writes, “I spent that day running between shells like I was playing a video game. Like I was a character in the game, someone else was playing me” (146). Saif shifts from his first suggestion that he plays a video game, into how the operator has control over his own body. War takes control of his every move. This depiction of the drone operator as playing a video game propels the argument for the “facelessness” apparent within the screen; he is virtually controlled by the operator both through movement, act, face and voice. In his demand for recognition of his people, Saif writes, “Who will convince the drone operator that the people of Gaza are not characters in a video game? Who will convince him that the buildings he sees on his screen are not graphics, but homes containing living rooms, Landa 33 and kitchens, bathrooms and bedrooms; that there are kids inside, fast asleep” (66). He then exclaims that “no one” will (67). He argues that buildings disappear like “Photoshop” (129), through only the movements of a mouse on a screen “far, far away from their killing machines…they each take turns playing their favourite game…clicking and dragging, erasing and erasing” (130). Similar to the Pilot in Grounded who exclaimed she would “erase” the Prophet, here Saif exhibits the ease of killing in the world of drone warfare. The operator across the world only has to click, drag and erase. “Erase” evokes an elimination of a mistake, as if it was never there. The operator erases bodies without leaving a trace: ungrievable lives never existed at all. Through writing his memoir, Saif insists on the existence of the Gazan people and the experience of their own pain; he highlights the misrecognition of his people as “soldiers” or “terrorists” and demands for the recognition of the Gazans as grievable lives. These passages reflect the lack of consent (which Scarry argues to be the major difference between war and torture, where torture does not include consent) and thus drone “warfare” becomes more aligned with torture. In fact, Saif describes the city of Gaza as a prison: …here the whole nation is imprisoned. It’s an image that haunts those who’ve now fled their homes to stay alive. It reminds them they are also in a prison, one called Gaza. They must enjoy it, the outside world concludes. They’ve brought it on themselves. With each refugee center, they’ve made a new prison—UN-sanctioned prison-within-a-prison. And even there, they’re bombed and shelled and murdered. (124) The entire city of Gaza is imprisoned due to the drones. There is no safe place to exist—even the refugee centers implemented by the UN are bombed. The people are perpetually displaced and are, as Saif writes, “murdered”: there is no combat. He writes: “you don’t live by choice, just as you don’t die by choice” (217). Consent is nonexistent. This key difference regarding consent is Landa 34 further made clear when Scarry argues that the body is of utmost importance—whether the body carries its own belief and whose “body is used in its confirmation” or in torture, where “the belief belongs to a person other than the person whose body is used to confirm it” (149). As seen in Grounded and The Drone Eats With Me, the bodies who are being targeted do not consent and the operator, rather than the Gazans or the men on the ground, carry the belief—the reason for killing. This further impresses the vast difference between traditional warfare and drones. Alongside the issue of consent emerges the similarities of the torture chambers that Scarry describes and the impact of drones on Gaza, as Saif reports it. Scarry describes the room of torture: The room, both in its structure and content, is converted into a weapon, deconverted, undone. Made to participate in the annihilation of the prisoners, made to demonstrate that everything is a weapon, the objects themselves, and with them the fact of civilization, are annihilated: there is no wall, no window, no door, no bathtub, no refrigerator, no chair, no bed. (41) First, homes of the people of Gaza are either destroyed by drones or other weaponry, threatened to be destroyed in the near future by Iran soldiers, or are feared to be up next for a hit. Instead of their homes being a safe place to reside in, they are instead suffused with a constant fear of attack. Even the buildings by the UN that should be “safe” are bombed. The image of the prison arises once again in the beginning of the novel when Saif writes “I feel like a prisoner in the flat as the world collapses around me. It explodes. It cracks. It slides and collapses into rubble. I can’t reassure the kids that the next missile won’t hit our building” (26). This moment sounds remarkably similar to the moment Scarry describes of the other being tortured: “it is the intense Landa 35 pain that destroys the person’s self and world” (35) and further, she remarks that this moment of torture results in the obliteration of the contents of consciousness, the elimination of world ground, which is a condition brought about by the pain and therefore one that once objectified should act as a sign of the pain, a call for help, an announcement of a radical occasion for attention and assistance, instead acts to discredit the claims of pain, to repel attention, to ensure that the pain will be unseen and unattended to. (37) Saif describes his entire world as collapsing while he is present in his own home. The home no longer contains windows nor walls. The entire flat crumbles in his mind. His world is obliterated by the war that surrounds him—the constant reminder of war through the buzz of the drones, the flashes of light they emit and the people and buildings he must witness as a product of their destruction. And instead of this moment so early in the novel as being a call for help and assistance, houses are continually bombed and destroyed, as well as bodies throughout the entirety of the novel. There is no recognition of the Gazans by the operator here. There is no structure that separates the Gazans from the war outside; there is no shelter. And there are moments where Saif steps outside, but the infinite buzz of the drone above him makes even the entire sky weaponized—“As it hovers above me, I spot another over to my right, then a third one on the left and a fourth behind me. I am surrounded by a squadron of drones. I can’t help but imagine that they have just one plan: to kill me” (227). The Gazans live in a constant fear for their own death; they are constantly tortured through the pervasiveness of the drones buzzing above them, watching their every move, bombing their neighbours’ houses, their own houses, the schools of their children. Not only do the Gazans’ houses become weaponized through their association with attack and lack of structure and safety, but they are also surrounded by the Landa 36 remnants of the bombs themselves left everywhere on the streets. These remnants provoke pain and fear for the Gazans: “This piece of shrapnel sits beside the school’s door. Violent, even in the way it sits there. When I first see it, I flinch as if it’s capable of springing back to life, slashing my face, severing my neck…death still lingers in it” (121). Saif is constantly reminded of, and forced to witness, the horrid realities of death. This particular piece of shrapnel was from a rocket that struck a UNRWA school. The shrapnel itself becomes almost alive in Saif’s eyes—it carries the power to wound him. Even a school is not a school anymore, not a place for safe education, but rather embedded with shrapnel—rooted with pain. He describes the shrapnel as capable of killing him. The drones, too, are described as ever intruding into the spaces that should be their own: “in the dark, you can almost believe they’re in your bedroom with you, behind the curtains, above the wardrobe” (189). And within the first few pages of the memoir, Saif writes that “it’s like [the drone] wants to join us for the evening and has pulled up an invisible chair” (4). The drone not only enters into the kitchen, but even his own bed. The drone’s presence is ubiquitous. As Saif is forced to witness the constant pain and suffering that surrounds him, there is a moment where he describes the bodies he sees in front of him as the wreckage of houses instead of flesh: “as all these images build up, flesh becomes the wreckage of a house: walls and ceilings, beams and staircases, windows and bits of roofs, all in the wrong places, scattered, amputated, lying on top of one another” (35). Here, not only is the house of the other under attack—the weaponized features that once gave a sense of safety, but the body as a home in of itself. Scarry in The Body in Pain, writes of how a person’s body is like a house, in that “it houses in the same way the body encloses and protects the individual within” and how “it enables the self to move out into the world and allows the world to enter” (38). Saif’s decision to Landa 37 fasten these elements together—the body and the features of a house—impels the wreckage and torture of the city of Gaza underneath the watch of drones. He chooses the components of a house that offer the most support: the walls and ceilings, beams and staircases; however, they are all in the wrong places, the house no longer stands. The bodies no longer exist as bodies: they are torn apart along with their homes and are fused with others around them. The drones do not stop at the weaponization of the Gazan’s homes, sky, schools, but proceed to rupture the only structure that keeps a body intact—the body as a body itself. The body is erased from existence—left as a mixture of often undistinguishable body parts that echo a structure once held but now obliterated—cracked open, split, ruptured. Their homes (both their houses and their bodies) are uprooted and expelled into the open—forced outside of themselves. The Drone Eats With Me insists on the importance of witnessing pain and recognizing the life of the Gazans and the other people whose lives are targeted each day in other places by drones, such as in Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen. In contrast to the very distant characterization of the drone operators in a video game, Saif remarks his experience witnessing the pain and horror of Gaza in front of him: “To see death, to touch it with still-living flesh, to smell its saliva, to feel it in your hands, around you, on every corner of the street. To witness its brutality, its vulgarity, its mercilessness” and “how it kidnaps its vitality in one swoop, one invisible slight of hand” (116). Through his intense sensory perceptions, he is witnessing the pain around him, a witnessing that unfolds this war’s brutality as torture and laments the lack of recognition, the apparent absence of empathy, the crimes of war repeated again and again. He witnesses the pain through all of his senses: touch, visual, auditory—even gustatory, as the drone “eats” with him. He brings the reader right into the domesticity of the battleground as a secondary witness; he forces us to hear, smell, and witness the pain of everyone around him. Landa 38 What was lacking in Grounded is forced out into the open. Life is taken away illegally as Saif describes it as a form of “kidnap.” And the killing is done through an “invisible” hand, far from the killing itself, like a brutal magic trick that only the operator sees—a trick on a screen, far from reality. Also similar to Paul, Saif’s describes being wounded by the pain of the other, here, when he helps with the aftermath of a strike; he too describes the witness as wounding him: “the remains of her body are like pieces of broken glass, each piece wounds us to pick up” (118). A screen, through its depiction of Gaza in graphics, loses, within Saif’s text, the potential for relationality between the operator and Gaza as a real city with real bodies. Saif forces the reality—human flesh and pain—into existence. He and the others are entirely separate from the operator in their violent witnessing of the suffering compared to the operator who is absent from the battleground. Saif presents his home as a record of all the suffering that is virtually missing from reports of drone war casualties that often supplement civilian casualties for necessary “collateral damage” or as “unlawful combatants” (Calhoun IX, 3). Saif also demands for the recognition of the other as something other than just another addition to the number of deaths on the rise in Gaza: “Everything is turned into numbers. The stories are hidden, disguised, lost behind these numbers. Human beings, souls, bodies—all converted into numbers” (76). Saif proceeds to name and tell the stories of these peoples lost in the counting of deaths in such a war; he refuses to let their lives be lost and hidden behind statistics. He proceeds to provide footnotes with references to the victims’ full names ages, and locations within his memoir, so that they will not be forgotten. Like Paul who recognized that once he knew the man’s name that he could never forget him, and he would always be wounded by him, Saif records their stories within the pages of his book, ensuring the lasting impress of the massive wound: Gazans who lost their lives live in the pages such as Walaa Ismail Muslim (12), Mohammed Abu Muslim (13), Ahmad Landa 39 Abu Muslim (14), Naim Moussa Abu Jarad (24), Abed Moussa Abu Jarad (30), Siham Moussa Abu Jarad (15)—and many, many more names and lives killed or affected by drone strikes (Saif 61). These three texts engage with questions of recognition in relation to frames of war. Sensory engagement within All Quiet on the Western Front reveals the ability to reach empathy through recognition of the other. Grounded then demonstrates that the obliteration of these very sensory relations impedes the operator’s ability to recognize the other and thus, robs the other of humanity when trapped within a screen. Saif, an author who writes from the perspective of those victimized by the use of drones, expresses the extent to which operators have control over their victims’ bodies and lives, and reveals how closely drones align with torture rather than traditional warfare. He gives the Gazans faces, lives, names, stories—recovers their sensory selves and condemns the stark contrast of the operator so far from the ground of attack. How, then, can we help promote the need for the initial recognition of the face, the body, given a technological advancement that functions to strengthen the frame of war by blurring others into facelessness? Organizations, such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, work hard to keep records of the number of civilian casualties through investigating Landa 40 the current drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan. They also record the stories of many of the people who have been impacted by the drone strikes, such as parents who have lost their children or other family members. Authors such as Saif expose the extent of the damage of facelessness; they demand for the recognition for the pain and suffering caused by the current use of drones. They give faces back to the lost and maimed—the tortured. An art project called #NotABugSplat also collaborated to build an enlarged poster that forces a drone operator to see the face of a child whose two young siblings and parents were killed in a drone strike in Pakistan. Projects like these force the face, the pain and suffering of the other to be recognized. My work, here, is in the passion of such a project—to reinstate the face through the reclamation of our sensory perceptions. In the work of theorists such as Butler, Scarry, LaCapra and Levinas, we become aware of their insistence on recognition as preliminary to the work of empathy and social justice for others and how this recognition is facilitated by our senses; this illumination stands in opposition to the acceptance of the perpetual framing of war that resigns itself, as Paul does in All Quiet on the Western Front, to the notion that war must always continue, and then may we find a way to reclaim the losses it causes. My thesis, and the works examined herein—theory, fiction, memoir—engage us in what Butler calls “another solicitation” (Butler, Frames of War xix) that calls upon us—a solicitation that demands our senses to be cracked open in the light of wars still being fought today as senses are still being drowned as drones continue to be dropped. Landa 41 Works Cited Assman, Aleida and Ines Detmers. Introduction. Empathy and its Limits. Palgrave Macmillian, 2016, pp. 1-17. Brant, George. Grounded. Samuel French, New York, 2014. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? Verso, London, 2016. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, London, 2006. Calhoun, Laurie. We Kill Because We Can. Zed Books, 2016. Chamayou, Grégoire. Drone Theory. United Kingdom, Penguin Books, 2013. Cheeseman, Abbie. “Threefold Rise in Civilian Casualties From U.S. Air Strikes in Afghanistan.” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2019-07-31/threefold-rise-in-deaths-from- us-air-strikes-in-afghanistan. Accessed 19 December 2019. “Drone Warfare.” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/projects/drone-war. Accessed 19 December 2019. Evans, Christine. "Drones, Projections, and Ghosts: Restaging Virtual War in Grounded and You are Dead. You are here." Theatre Journal, vol. 67, no. 4, 2015, pp. 663-686. “Excessive Number of Palestinian Fatalities during Gaza Crisis Cannot Be Dismissed as ‘Collateral Damage’, Fourth Committee Hears in Review of Israeli Practices.” United Nations, 6 November 2014. https://www.un.org/press/en/2014/gaspd574.doc.htm. Accessed 3 January 2020. Franklin, Ruth. “The Paris Review Perspective.” Critical Insights All Quiet on the Western Front, edited by Brian Murdoch, Salem Press, 2011, pp. 15-22. Landa 42 Friedersdorf, Conor. “If a Drone Strike Hit an American Wedding, We’d Ground Our Fleet.” The Atlantic, 16 December 2013. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/if-a- drone-strike-hit-an-american-wedding-wed-ground-our-fleet/282373/. Accessed 4 January 2020. Friedman, Robi. "A Soldier’s Matrix: A Group Analytic View of Societies in War." Group Analysis, vol. 48, no. 3, 2015, pp. 239-257. Hamilton, Ian and Erich Remarque. “The End of War?” Critical Insights All Quiet on the Western Front, edited by Brian Murdoch, Salem Press, 2011, pp. 85-94. “A giant art installation targets predator drone operators.” #NotABugSplat. https://notabugsplat.com. Accessed November 28, 2019. “Grey.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam Webster, 2020. https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/grey. Accessed 4 January 2020. Halpern, Jodi, and Harvey M. Weinstein. "Rehumanizing the Other: Empathy and Reconciliation." Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 3, 2004, pp. 561-583. Henningfeld, Diane Andrews. “Biography of Erich Maria Remarque.” Critical Insights All Quiet on the Western Front, edited by Brian Murdoch, Salem Press, 2011, pp. 10-14. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford University Press, New York, 2007. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. The John Hopkins University Press, 2001. Lanzoni, Susan M., and JSTOR. Empathy: A History. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2018. Meier, Inga. ""Different Desert, Same War": The Simulacrum, the Real, and Drone Warfare in George Brant's Grounded." The Theatre Annual, vol. 71, 2018, pp. 61-103. Landa 43 Middleton-Kaplan, Richard. "Facing the Face of the Enemy: Levinasian Moments in all Quiet on the Western Front and the Literature of War." Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 54, no. 1, 2008, pp. 72-90. Morrison, Elise. "Ambushed by Empathy: George Brant’s Grounded." TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 58 no. 4, 2014, p. 163-169. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/561965. Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet On The Western Front. Ballantine Books, 1982. Saif, Atef Abu. The Drone Eats With Me. Beacon Press, 2015. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. Oxford University Press, 1985. “Trump revokes Obama rule on reporting drone strike deaths.” BBC News, 7 March 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47480207. Accessed 8 January 2020. Landa 44
Graduating Project
eng
Unreviewed
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Undergraduate
University of British Columbia. ENGL 499
Cracking Open the Frame : Recognition in Remarque’s "All Quiet on the Western Front", Garcia’s "Grounded" and Saif’s "The Drone Eats With Me"
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