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Abstract
This commentary reflects on contributions to the pariss special issue Datawar. My readings highlight the implications of war's remediations for practices through which it is rendered knowable. Critical engagement with martial epistemologies requires an articulation of the irremediable locatedness and partiality of knowledge practices, and the fallacy of data-solutionism as the latest promise of an end to 'the fog of war.' I conclude with some reflections on the possibilities that these writings suggest for counter-knowledges that might further destabilize military logics, to open spaces for modes of relation not based on the violence of claims to omniscience.

The current reanimation of artificial intelligence includes a resurgence of investment in automating military intelligence on the part of the US Department of Defense. A series of programs set forth a technopolitical imaginary of fully integrated, comprehensive and real-time 'situational awareness' across US theaters of operation. Locating this imaginary within the history of 'closed world' discourse, I offer a critical reading of dominant scholarship within military circles that sets out the military's cybernetic model of situational awareness in the form of the widely referenced Observe, Orient, Decide, Act or OODA Loop. I argue that the loop's promise of dynamic homeostasis is held in place by the enduring premise of objectivist knowledge, enabled through a war apparatus that treats the contingencies and ambiguities of relations on the ground as noise from which a stable and unambiguous signal can be extracted. In contrast, recent challenges to the closed-world imaginary, based on critical scholarship and investigative journalism, suggest that the aspiration to closure is an engine for the continued destructiveness of US interventions and the associated regeneration of enmity. To challenge these technopolitics of violence we need a radically different kind of situational awareness, one that recognizes the place of ignorance in perpetuating the project of militarism. Only that kind of awareness can inform the public debate required to re-envision a future place for the US in the world, founded in alternative investments in demilitarization and commitments to our collective security.

This article aims to integrate two interrelated strands in critical security studies. The first is mounting evidence for the fallacy of claims for precision and accuracy in the United States 'counterterrorism' programme, particularly as it involves expanding aerial surveillance in support of operations of extrajudicial assassination. The second line of critical analysis concerns growing investment in the further automation of these operations, more specifically in the form of the US Department of Defense Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, or Project Maven. Building upon generative intersections of critical security studies and science and technology studies (STS), I argue that the promotion of automated data analysis under the sign of artificial intelligence can only serve to exacerbate military operations that are at once discriminatory and indiscriminate in their targeting, while remaining politically and legally unaccountable.

Der Beitrag diskutiert gegenwärtige Forschung an der Schnittstelle von feministischer Technikforschung und Science & Technology Studies (STS) mit einem Fokus auf aktuelle Entwicklungen im Bereich der "Wissenschaften vom Künstlichen", wie z. B. der Robotik oder der Künstlichen Intelligenz. In diesen Feldern gewinnen Konzeptionen von Mensch- Maschine-Verbindungen und ihre soziomateriellen Grundlagen neue Brisanz; Grenzen zwischen Natur und Künstlichkeit werden neu verhandelt. Der Text diskutiert feministische Auseinandersetzungen mit Mensch-Maschine- Beziehungen, ihren materiellen und metaphorischen Grundlagen, aber auch in den Technowissenschaften dominante Vorannahmen und Politiken der Differenz. Er stellt die Frage, wie verantwortungsbewusste Wissensproduktion möglich ist sowie ein kritischer Austausch zwischen feministischen STS und gegenwärtigen Projekten der Technowissenschaften.

Der Beitrag diskutiert gegenwärtige Forschung an der Schnittstelle von feministischer Technikforschung und Science & Technology Studies (STS) mit einem Fokus auf aktuelle Entwicklungen im Bereich der "Wissenschaften vom Künstlichen", wie z.B. der Robotik oder der Künstlichen Intelligenz. In diesen Feldern gewinnen Konzeptionen von Mensch- Maschine-Verbindungen und ihre soziomateriellen Grundlagen neue Brisanz; Grenzen zwischen Natur und Künstlichkeit werden neu verhandelt. Der Text diskutiert feministische Auseinandersetzungen mit Mensch-Maschine- Beziehungen, ihren materiellen und metaphorischen Grundlagen, aber auch in den Technowissenschaften dominante Vorannahmen und Politiken der Differenz. Er stellt die Frage, wie verantwortungsbewusste Wissensproduktion möglich ist sowie ein kritischer Austausch zwischen feministischen STS und gegenwärtigen Projekten der Technowissenschaften.

Part 1: Setting the Stage ; International audience ; This text is based on an invited address presented at IFIP 8.2 'Living with Monsters' in San Francisco, CA, 11 December 2018. Taking the 200th anniversary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein as a starting place, I explore questions of autonomy and control with respect to human/technology relations. I consider the ambivalence of these agencies, and recent initiatives in science and technology studies and related fields to reconceptualize the problem as matters of relation and care. While embracing this turn, I reflect as well upon the ambivalences of relation and care, and the need to address the resilient politics of alterity in our figurations (and celebrations) of the monstrous.

This text is based on an invited address presented at IFIP 8.2 'Living with Monsters' in San Francisco, CA, 11 December 2018. Taking the 200th anniversary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein as a starting place, I explore questions of autonomy and control with respect to human/technology relations. I consider the ambivalence of these agencies, and recent initiatives in science and technology studies and related fields to reconceptualize the problem as matters of relation and care. While embracing this turn, I reflect as well upon the ambivalences of relation and care, and the need to address the resilient politics of alterity in our figurations (and celebrations) of the monstrous.

Dieser Aufsatz beschäftigt sich mit dem ‹Situationsbewusstsein› innerhalb gegenwärtiger Formen der Kriegsführung (insbesondere seitens der USA) und formuliert einen Ansatz, die technischen Bedingungen der Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion zunehmend auch ethisch zu beurteilen. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf den Logistiken, Rhetoriken und materiellen Praktiken ferngesteuerter Waffen, insbesondere bewaffneter Drohnen. Unter Rückbezug auf Berichte aus dem investigativen Journalismus, auf militärische Dokumente sowie auf Texte der kritischen Forschung wird die Verbindung untersucht zwischen einerseits militärischen und Sicherheits-Diskursen «netzwerkorientierter Kriegsführung», die versprechen, ‹unsere› Körper unbeschadet zu lassen, und andererseits den Projekten / Bemühungen, jene Netzwerke zu unterbrechen, die die Kriege zu sehr «nach Hause» bringen würden. ; This essay sets out an initial analytic framing for research in progress on the problem of ‹situational awareness› within contemporary forms of (particularly U.S.) warfare. It focuses more specifically on the logics, rhetorics and material practices of remotely-controlled weapons systems (particularly armed drones). Drawing from reports in investigative journalism, military documents, and critical scholarship, the essay examines connections between the emphasis in military and security discourses on keeping ‹our› bodies safe, through so-called network-centric warfare, and the efforts to cut off the networks that might bring our wars too close to home.

This article takes as a touchstone the concept of location as it has been articulated through anthropology's reflections on its history and positioning as a field, and in relation to shifting engagements with contemporary technoscientific, political, and ethical problems. A second touchstone is one specific anthropological relocation—that is, into worlds of professional technology design. With figures of location and design in play, I describe some perspicuous moments that proved both generative and problematic in my own experience of establishing terms of engagement between anthropology and design. Though design has been considered recently as a model for anthropology's future, I argue instead that it is best positioned as a problematic object for an anthropology of the contemporary. In writing about design's limits, my argument is that, like anthropology, design needs to acknowledge the specificities of its place, to locate itself as one (albeit multiple) figure and practice of transformation.

The focus of my inquiry in this article is the figure of the Human that is enacted in the design of the humanoid robot. The humanoid or anthropomorphic robot is a model (in)organism, engineered in the roboticist's laboratory in ways that both align with and diverge from the model organisms of biology. Like other model organisms, the laboratory robot's life is inextricably infused with its inherited materialities and with the ongoing — or truncated — labours of its affiliated humans. But while animal models are rendered progressively more standardised and replicable as tools for the biological sciences, the humanoid robot is individuated and naturalised. Three stagings of human— robot encounters (with the robots Mertz, Kismet and Robota respectively) demonstrate different possibilities for conceptualising these subject objects, for the claims about humanness that they corporealise, and for the kinds of witnessing that they presuppose.

Through the case of a particular organization devoted to technological research and development, this paper investigates how values of the 'new' operate in what Appadurai (1986) has characterized as the social life of objects. Drawing on previous scholarship in anthropology and science and technology studies, I adopt the trope of the 'affiliative object' to describe the relational dynamics of association (and disassociation) that characterize the identification of objects and persons. This perspective emphasizes the multiplicity of objects within the unfolding and uncertain trajectories of organizational life, as both problem and resource for organization members. The paper examines how 'object-centered sociality' (Knorr-Cetina, 1997) is enacted as a strategic, but also contingent, resource in the alignment of professional identities and organizational positionings.