The Target on the Screens: Scopic Technologies and the Militarization of the Visible

Abstract

Our purpose in this article is to characterize the contemporary association between vision, knowledge and targeting, which ends, according to our hypothesis, in a scopic device based on the act of targeting and in the constitution of the subject as a target. We start from the concept of skopos, and the analysis of two major regimes of attention, the projective and the immersive, which allows us to distinguish from the position of the agents in the social and economic conflicts of attention capture. On this basis, we conduct an archaeological exercise aiming to exam the development of military vision technologies, and indicate constitutive elements of a perceptual interrelationship in which a form of attention establishes targets, as well as instituting attention itself as a target. The argument goes on to the characterization of a vision politics based on the prescription of targets and on the analysis of its ways of imposing itself as a social device. We also highlight not only the epistemological, but the moral dimension associated with the scientific practices that sustain the targeting device as a whole.