“Those Various Scalpels”

Female Precision and Drone Aesthetics

Natalia Cecire, University of Sussex

Aesthetics of Drone Warfare, University of Sheffield, 8 February 2020

http://natalia.cecire.org/presentations/

epistemic virtue
a value simultaneously guarantees knowledge and confers a sense of virtue
(Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison)

     ... your dress, a magnificent square cathedral tower of uniform
     and at the same time diverse appearance—a
species of vertical vineyard, rustling in the storm
     of conventional opinion—are they weapons or scalpels?

Marianne Moore, "Those Various Scalpels"

flash
the ability to sufficiently metonymize a data sublime without, however, relinquishing the sense of the sublime

Henry Pickering Bowditch, composite image from
Are Composite Photographs Typical Pictures?, 1892

flash is synthetic / precision is analytical

flash masters / precision morcellizes

flash is masculinized / precision is feminized

...nor is it valid
to discriminate against "business documents and

school-books"; all these phenomena are important.

Marianne Moore, "Poetry" (1919 version)

An Octopus

of ice. Deceptively reserved and flat

Marianne Moore, "An Octopus," 1924. Based on materials from Mount Rainier National Park, Washington.

Image: Map of Mount Rainier from above. Mount Rainier National Park Archives, 1921.

Theodore M. Porter, “Speaking Precision to Power: The Modern Political Role of Social Science,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 73, no. 4 (2006): 1273–94.

How much she cares for useless pains, difficulties undertaken for their own sake! Difficulty is the chief technical principle of her poetry, almost. (For sureness of execution, for originality of technical accomplishment, her poetry is unsurpassed in our time ....) Such unnecessary pains, such fantastic difficulties!

Randall Jarrell, "Her Shield" (on Marianne Moore)

If we define the technical not just as what is difficult, but what is inaccessible and, by general consent, dispensable for those with no practical need of it, then technicality may be less closely associated with an ideal of rigorous demonstration than with craft techniques and recipes. One great ambition of science since the eighteenth century has been to open up the private world of skill and guild secrecy by articulating, rationalizing, and systematizing technological processes.

Theodore Porter, "How Science Became Technical," 2009

“a mountain with those graceful lines which prove it a volcano,”
its top a complete cone like Fujiyama's
till an explosion blew it off.

Marianne Moore, “An Octopus,“ 1924, ll. 68–71. Based on materials from Mount Rainier National Park, Washington.

Image: Map of Mount Rainier from above. Mount Rainier National Park Archives, 1921.

These products of American distraction factories are no longer individual girls, but indissoluble girl clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics. As they condense into figures in the revues, performances of the same geometric precision are taking place in what is always the same packed stadium, be it in Australia or India, not to mention America.

Siegfried Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament," 1927

He has made a study of the American ideal of womanhood and put it on the stage: in general, his girls have not only the Anglo-Saxon straightness...but also the peculiar purity and frigidity, the frank high-school-girlishness which Americans like. He does not aim to make them as sexually attractive as possible, as the Folies-Bergères does, for example. ... Furthermore, he tries to represent in dancing, not the movement and abandon of the emotions, but what the American really regards as beautiful: the stiff efficiency of mechanical movement. The ballet at the Ziegfeld Follies is becoming more and more like military drill: to see a row of girls descend a flight of stairs in a deliberate and rigid goose-step is not my idea of what ballet ought to be; it is like watching setting-up exercises. Yet there is still something wonderful about the Follies.

Edmund Wilson, "The Theatre," The Dial, April 1923

Stills from Footlight Parade, 1933

“As precise as you like.” Advertisement for Eppendorf micromanipulator (precision tool for manipulating gametes and embryos). Annual Meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE), Bologna, Italy, June 25-28, 2000. Image courtesy of Annette Burfoot.

Left: Harold Edgerton, Milk Drop Coronet, 1936. Right: still from Dames, 1934

‘I still remember the effect I produced on a small group of Galla tribesmen massed around a man in black clothes,’ reported Mussolini’s son during the [Italo-]Abyssinian war of 1935-36. ‘I dropped an aerial torpedo right in the centre, and the group opened up just like a flowering rose.’ ... [O]ne form suddenly dissolves before the war pilot’s eyes, and in an extraordinary fade-out/fade-in another form appears and reconstitutes itself. He has created it, just as a director working on a viewer can edit a scene in an aesthetically pleasing manner.

Paul Virilio, War and Cinema

Caren Kaplan, “Precision Targets: GPS and the Militarization of U.S. Consumer Identity.” American Quarterly 58, no. 3 (2006): 693–714.

Imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons. [...]

America’s strength doesn’t come from lashing out.

Strength relies on smarts, judgment, cool resolve, and the precise and strategic application of power.

That’s the kind of Commander-in-Chief I pledge to be.

Hillary Clinton, Address to the Democratic National Convention, 2016 [NYT]

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