Here's a brilliant, purely verbal glimpse of interconnectedness, of the way the sorts of lines of force that are separated out in a STELLA or VenSim model or a HipBone analysis actually swirl together in reality in a much foggier manner than our best graphical depictions can suggest – "foggier" in this case meaning richer and more complex, more truthful in fact, though not necessarily terribly informative (was Socrates informative?).
The paragraph comes from a longer piece about battlefield drones -- the pilotless aircraft that now carry both video cameras and missiles -- and the issues raised by recent CIA use of them in Afghanistan when viewed in the context of a potential for DOD CIA FBI bleed together… an interesting topic in its own right, but one that I suspect works more like a Rorschach blot than anything else at this moment, unless one is naturally incurious or as well informed as James Der Derian.
My point here, in any case, is to draw attention to the way the words in this paragraph picture a process. The para itself comes from Jordan Crandall, the piece is called Fingering the Trigger, the language is (appropriately, in my view) techno-military.
Here's the para:
The military does not simply produce a weapon to meet a need; a weapons-capacity arises in a cultural-machinic field and the military organizes itself, aligns itself, around it. A drone arises out of a field shaped by continuous tradeoffs between protection, visibility, mobility, and firepower. Its capacities morph -- suddenly it is a missile-equipped drone, suddenly it is a hybridly-piloted one -- and fighting doctrines, careers, organizational strategies realign themselves accordingly. At the same time, the conventions shape the device. All rework the capacities of the human. There are continuous flows between humans, armaments, and systems of combat. There are flows and assemblages, and the modulations they allow. New forms of vision, representation, and coordination mediate these changes. What sees, what "captures," and with what capacity does it touch the trigger?*
Let's go back to that penultinmate sentence:
New forms of vision, representation, and coordination mediate these changes.The flow, in other words, passes through not just the real and virtual worlds (physical drone, video feed to remote pilot), but also through both external and interior worlds – through the realms charted if at all by anthropology, psychology and the religious and imagination…
That's the bit that gets me, the sense that the imaginal is the uninvited guest at all intelligence gathering and analytic functions.
Anthropology, depth psychology and comparative religion are the three great knowledge zones offering the potential of the greatest evaluative impact on how we view world affairs, just as systemic thinking of the sort practiced by Donella Meadows is the modal shift most needful in our thinking…