Description
This paper considers forms and intensities of detachment from the drone-saturated, techno-patriotic mythologies of the ‘China Dream’. To do so, it analyses recent drone shows where this imagined future and its accordant promises are not only mobilised, but also contested and reworked. In thinking through detachments, I contrast my account with extant readings of these shows which, by assuming the intrinsic sublimity of the drone’s material-technological features, have suggested that bodies cannot fail to be attached to them and their promises (Ruppert 2022). Instead of painting these spectacles as stages for the performance of human-led scripts of the international, I argue that emergent forms of detachment are politically salient for the ways that they refuse assumptions about the affectability and manipulability of bodies in such spaces. Thinking about the drone show as a scene of detachments therefore foregrounds moments where the promises that the drone makes available feel empty, or where their illusory status is suddenly recognised. On these occasions suspicion, ambivalence and disaffection meet dominant fantasies of techno-patriotism in ways that do not align with state power, or even coalesce into recognisable modes of resistance. I argue that centring detachments alongside attachments therefore enables critical literature on drones to move beyond analyses that 1) emphasise the drone as an object of state power, 2) deconstruct the representational and discursive register to the neglect of analysing the body and how it ‘sticks’ to particular objects, 3) employ relational ontologies that reconstitute the state as the primary driver of drone attachment.
