Experiments in Posthumanism: On Tactical Rhetorical Encounters between Drones and Human Body Heat

Abstract

Abstract This essay examines a particular, and particularly fraught enactment of digital and material rhetoric: a tactical media intervention into the militarized drone program, to map a posthumanist reading of “tactics,” updating Michel de Certeau’s famous concept for the current global situation. To introduce what will be posthuman about the model of tactics presented, this essay reviews the current state of work in rhetoric and composition on posthumanism and rhetorical materiality, arguing that it points us to a materiality that is not reducibly, simply present. This situation, on the one hand, produces a political need for experimentation, and yet if we encourage an experimental, tactical response to complex posthuman encounters such as that with the drone’s thermal vision, then we are also encouraging an affirmation of that encounter, which entails its own risks. This essay then argues that while Certeau gives us the tools to imagine how we can tactically use the things of the world, we need to reimagine tactics in a posthumanist key. This essay calls for a retooled model of tactics that would draw out the experimental possibilities of media tactics through understanding their imbrication in systems that are material, distributed, and yet not simply self-present things.