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Geography Compass - 2008 - Adey - Aeromobilities Geographies Subjects and Vision
Geography Compass - 2008 - Adey - Aeromobilities Geographies Subjects and Vision
Abstract
Studies of the social and cultural dimensions of airspace and aerial transportation
have evaded much geographical investigation until recently. While transport
geographers have sought to trace out the economic, political and organisational
dimensions and linkages air-transport creates between places, new scholarship is
beginning to contribute through disparate techniques, theories and methodologies,
more sensitive to social and cultural theory. As this article suggests, however, they
have not gone far enough in exploring both the multiple spatialities of aeromobility
and, furthermore, the spaces in which aeromobilities count most critically for
human life and quality. This article provides a short overview of recent research
that has used a disparate set of approaches to the study of aeromobilities. Issues from
passenger profiling, strategic bombing to extraordinary rendition are explored.
Introduction
In 1955, Possony and Rosenzweig attempted to set out an investigation
of the ‘geography of the air’ as a new research focus. While at first the
authors limited their scoping of this geography to the ‘physical differences
of the air in various locations and altitudes’ (Possony and Rosenzweig
1955, 1), the political scientists were more fervently interested in the
implications of this geography for flying and human activity. More specifically,
they wanted to know what ‘that invisible sea in which we live, the air’
(Possony and Rosenzweig 1955, 1) meant for international relations, strategy
and foreign policy.
While Possony and Rosenweig (1955) made some interesting observations
and should be applauded for stimulating an awareness of the importance
of air geography or ‘aerogeography’, their conception of this geography
was rather unsophisticated. Needless to say, this is really not all that startling
and it would be unfair to suggest otherwise given when the article was
written. The authors set out how the physical characteristics of airspace
constrained and enabled aerial activity, from the simple implications of air
currents, altitudes and temperatures. Deploying a flat and one-dimensional
conception of ‘geography’ as physical space, their approach lacked a sense
© 2008 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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Aeromobilities: geographies, subjects and vision 1319
that this article seeks to address. Let me outline one major shortcoming
of this work. While air-travel enables societies, it also has the capacity to
disable them. War in the 20th century was war waged predominantly by
the aeroplane. From the air raids of the Blitz to the newest unmanned
reconnaissance aircraft, aeromobilities provide both promise and possibility,
as well as dread, terror, destruction (both urban and environmental) and death.
Furthermore, it is in the spaces of air-travel, where societies are increasingly
regulated and curtailed (Salter 2007a, 2008). As flight becomes a dominant
mode of border crossing, international mobility, and a potential vehicle
for state and terrorist violence, the spaces of air-travel have become some
of the most intensely segregated and hierarchical as well as the most
monitored and controlled (Crang 2002). Simply put, the domains in which
we look at air-travel or aeromobilities needs expanding to the securitised
and militarised contexts from which the technology originally began
and the contemporary contexts to which it is now being put. We cannot
avoid some of the truly scary situations where aeromobilities are
found; how do they involve death, terror, humiliation, fear, destruction,
inequality or discrimination? As Caren Kaplan (2006) recently claims, the
topic of violence remains incredibly elusive from conceptions of mobility,
and thus ‘considerations of the entangled histories of war and mobility
serve as an important corrective’ (Kaplan 2006, 395; see also Virilio
[1985] 2005).
This article is intended to provide a step in the direction of this kind of
research by providing an overview of what has and is being done. It will
only succeed in presenting a slice of what this kind of geography does and
could look like by presenting exciting research from geographers and
beyond to exploring a set of specific geographies of aeromobilities that
intersect both visual registers and practices.2 At the same time, while the
issues presented above demand an increasingly critical analysis of aeromo-
bilities, it is because of their crucial nature that they have been so difficult
to get at methodologically. This is ironic given that aerial geographies are
usually imperceptible, ephemeral or concealed. The article will also attend
to the mobile methodologies (see Urry 2007) aeromobilities require as their
major issues and implications are exposed.
The article is divided into four key sections that deal with different
various ways that the visual and aeomobilities intersect, cross-cutting several
domains and contexts. The first section looks at the more traditional idea
of the aeromobile cosmic view, I then deal with seeing into the future,
before borders and thresholds and then finishing with more embodied and
anticipatory ways of seeing.
Cosmic Views
The aerial view is often aligned with knowledge. The view from above
has been understood as an epistemological gaze – a view that permits
© 2008 The Author Geography Compass 2/5 (2008): 1318–1336, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00149.x
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
17498198, 2008, 5, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00149.x by Hiroshima University, Wiley Online Library on [11/07/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Aeromobilities: geographies, subjects and vision 1321
The reach of the aeromobile gaze allows almost all to be known. For
Graham (2004), this kind of extensibility upturns the telescopic sight
Virilio refers to earlier. Everyday actions on the ground have a vertical
dimensionality, a signature that may be captured from above – leaked by
© 2008 The Author Geography Compass 2/5 (2008): 1318–1336, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00149.x
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
17498198, 2008, 5, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00149.x by Hiroshima University, Wiley Online Library on [11/07/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Aeromobilities: geographies, subjects and vision 1323
Foresight
In the previous section, aeromobilities were shown to permit a way of
seeing-as-knowing: a knowledge of far off places, a complexity only made
legible by pulling up and away from the milieu of the ground. Even while
Virilio (1986) suggests that these techniques were able to capture change
and movement – a way of looking back – this knowledge was also rather
presentist, continuously made out-of-date by the failure of re-presentation
to update itself (Thrift and Dewsbury 2000). In this section, I suggest that
the aeromobilities have created other forms of seeing that project not back
but forwards – that see in order to predict and anticipate potential futures.
The first sort of vision we can deal with is the way seeing is done by
numbers; a way to address potential aerial mobilities and the uncertainties
that pass the airport/border. To the space of the airport terminal, we may
turn to understand the prevalence of statistical techniques of calculation.
Practices of ‘risk management’ allow a reaching forwards – a way to grasp
the future. For Mark Salter (2007b, 2008), quantification transforms risks
or threats into numerate forms. The complex mobilities of the airport
system which could not previously be ‘seen’ can be now made legible and
calculable. Surveys of ‘detection rate, average passenger wait times, number
of prohibited items seized’, for Salter (2008), serve to make incalculable
threats real, forming ‘new possible objects, profiles, or groups’. These sorts
of techniques effectively create ‘things’, and make risks tangible in order
that their threatening actuality can be managed (Bigo 2006; Foucault
2007; O’Malley 2004).
Other ways of seeing ahead draw on the use of numbers as a way to
fast forward to potential futures, before playing them over and over again.
Within an early iteration of aviation, the field of operations research was
born. As a kind of ‘combat science’ (Rau 2005), operations research was
developed by the Tizard Air Committee during World War II to test and
predict strategies of air-defence in the face of aerial attack. Operations
research addressed uncertainty and indecision to stop war being conducted
by ‘gusts of mood’, instincts and intuitions. It made predictions, and the
subsequent validation of those predictions (Gray 1997; Mirowski 2001).
Photo surveys and operational research techniques combined as Barnes
and Farish (2006) show in the US Office of Strategic Services. Aerial
reconnaissance and optimisation models identified targets and approved
bombing runs, ‘whose logics were calculative rather than corporeal’ as
Derek Gregory (2006, 98) goes further to suggest. These, in short, ‘relo-
cated the sites of destruction in an abstract rather than an affective space’
(Gregory 2007, 98) and, thereby, provided a sense of emotional detachment.
© 2008 The Author Geography Compass 2/5 (2008): 1318–1336, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00149.x
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
17498198, 2008, 5, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00149.x by Hiroshima University, Wiley Online Library on [11/07/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
1324 Aeromobilities: geographies, subjects and vision
Thresholds
The kinds of efforts to see ahead just discussed appear to create and as we
will see later unmake certain thresholds, thresholds between the here and
now, with the then or what is to come. As a way to intervene in these
futures, other thresholds are drawn. Ironically, all of this is happening over
the thresholds of states.
For instance, geographers have become concerned with how aeromobilities
maintain, stabilise and sometimes unravel boundaries and borders. Geographer
Alison Williams (2007) discusses a kind of projective form of air-power,
both visually perceived and registered. As Williams (2007) writes, ‘power
projection is an “effect”, rather less tangible perhaps than bombing a city’s
electricity supply or blowing up key parts of a transport infrastructure, but
still an effect with a definite outcome’ (p. 517). In the world’s major
conflict zones, low-flying aircraft such as UAVs provide a ‘visual delimi-
tation’ of power – a performance of a boundary drawn. In the context of
Iraq, Williams (2007) asserts that UAVs provide a visual and aural reminder
of ‘space under Iraqi control and that under coalition control’ (p. 523).
We might compare this sort of equivalent or dependent relationship to
Urry’s (2003) conception of mobilities and moorings. For Williams, the
static border requires the continual maintenance or enforcement of its
boundaries by the perpetually mobile aircraft, ‘like a shark that dies if it
stops swimming, so an aircraft ceases to be a useful tool of power projection
if it is not in flight’ (Williams 2007, 509). For the researcher, lines on the
map do little justice to the border’s animated corporeal reality that is seen
and felt.
In a rather different context, Louise Amoore (2006) makes a similar
point when she pulls together the shooting of de Menezes with newly
© 2008 The Author Geography Compass 2/5 (2008): 1318–1336, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00149.x
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
17498198, 2008, 5, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00149.x by Hiroshima University, Wiley Online Library on [11/07/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
1326 Aeromobilities: geographies, subjects and vision
of what it actually is’ (Massumi 2005, 9). The power of this scenario is
that the ‘identity of the possible object determines the affective quality of
the actual situation’ (Massumi 2005, 9).
Thus, under the logic of pre-emption magnified in this case, an effort
to stop disruption, public fear and panic – to halt catastrophe – creates a
catastrophe of its own: it stimulates or induces fear. Acting in advance of
what might happen in an effort to ward off the effects of a possible object
sees dramatic airport closure, decontamination crews and police presence.
The effects ripple outwards. ‘Far-flung airports with originating flights
due to land are affected. The media amplify the alarm in real-time with
live news bulletins. The fear of the disruption has become the disruption’
(Massumi 2005, 8–9). Even an academic observer’s resourceful bodily
experience of these sorts of atmospheres provides a way into the emotional
state of the emergency.
Pre-emptive strategies have a tendency to induce or stimulate what they
hope to prevent by the pre-visualisation of the threat – taken as real and
acted on – but then with the tendency to stimulate a fearful impact. But
we must ask more questions about how the effects of these techniques are
anticipated themselves, and, furthermore, what sort of subjects are imagined
to have these particular effects. In taking such a focus, current scholarship
has investigated the imaginings of just what is being targeted by aerial
warfare, from the conception of the civilian, to the rather intangible
concept of morale. As scholarship has demonstrated the embodied effects
of strategic and terror bombing, others have explored how these ‘effects’
are imagined and understood within the strategies behind them (Gregory
2007).
For Steve Graham and other, cities are often constructed as a target
(Bishop and Clancey 2004; Graham 2003). In an aerial war, cities become
mortal, their diagnosis terminal (Coward 2006; Davis 2002; Grayling 2006).
Infrastructure is also targeted. Airpower effects a subterranean reach, and
an ability to effect low-down through bunker-busting bombs that terminate
buried infrastructures and people. Derek Gregory (2007) and Beau Grosscup
(2006) do more to focus on conception of the ‘civilian’ target in the aerial
warfare performed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those who lie outside this
definition, they are argue, are constructed as ‘other’ and therefore deserving
of what is coming to them; a justification for both the means and ends of
their life.
For others, contemporary and historic aerial bombardment has con-
structed what Ben Anderson describes as a ‘targeting of morale’. As
Anderson (forthcoming) and others show, bombing campaigns of World
War II saw a less personal attack on individuals, but on an ephemeral
collective consciousness of feeling and/or national will. Similarly, the shock
and awe strategic bombing campaign in the early stages of the Iraq War was
a demonstration of so-called ‘effects-based’ operations (Anderson forth-
coming; Grosscup 2006). Premised on the theories produced by Ullman
© 2008 The Author Geography Compass 2/5 (2008): 1318–1336, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00149.x
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
17498198, 2008, 5, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00149.x by Hiroshima University, Wiley Online Library on [11/07/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
1330 Aeromobilities: geographies, subjects and vision
and Wade (1998), which closely resemble the earlier stratagem of strategic
or moral bombing, shock and awe or ‘rapid dominance’ is intended as a
strategy to ‘command perception’ – to control the fears, the anxieties – the
feelings – of the enemy so that it may be catapulted into capitulation. This
targeting was aimed at the visual register, supposedly shocked and awed
by the nightly destruction of Baghdad.
But the visually arresting bombing campaign had a secondary target:
the viewing television audience of the West. The constant exaggeration
of precision by the armed forces and the US administration, indeed, the
‘brilliance’ of precision, the ‘extraordinariness’ of the night attacks was meant
to awe, and thereby legitimate (Grosscup 2006, 6). The visual spectacle
and firework display that lit up the night sky served to communicate back
to the populations sitting behind their televisions screens. As Samuel
Weber writes, ‘we are exhilarated at the sight of such power and control,
we are relieved to be still in one piece’ (Weber cited in Gregory 2007).
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to the helpful comments of two referees and suggestions
from Ian Cook. The article has benefited from discussion with Ben
Anderson and a collaboration with Lucy Budd. And questions from audiences
at Bristol and Durham also helped tremendously.
Short Biography
Peter Adey is a Lecturer in the School of Physical and Geographical
Sciences and the Institute for Law, Politics and Justice at Keele University,
Keele, UK. He has published peer-reviewed articles on the topic of
mobility, security and air-travel and sits on the editorial board of the
interdisciplinary journal Mobilities. Peter’s first book, which traces the
evolution of the concept Mobility, will be published by Routledge in 2009.
Forthcoming with Wiley-Blackwell in 2010, Aerial Geographies will investigate
how the social and material spaces of the aeroplane have transfigured the
human subject.
Notes
* Correspondence address: Peter Adey, Earth Sciences and Geography, Keele University, William
Smith Building, Keele ST5 5BG, UK. E-mail: p.adey@esci.keele.ac.uk.
1
This article is informed and inspired by the ‘new mobilities paradigm’.
2
I do not mean visual in the sense of just the scopic. Instead, I mean the embodied, sensual,
affective, emotional and anticipatory ways of seeing, although this should not imply that they
are ways of thinking necessarily.
3
It should be noted that the balloon and later the aeroplane were commonly used for the
purposes of scientific pursuit.
4
On affect and anticipation, see particularly Anderson’s (2007) arguments in the context of
nanotechnology.
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