The Eye of War: Military Perception from the Telescope to the Drone by Antoine J. Bousquet (review)

This book is an overview of military perception technologies, dating from the Renaissance until today. With such a long time-span and broad definition of technologies ranging from sonar to GPS controlled missiles, Antoine Bousquet provides an interesting analysis of the roots and implications today of present-day warfare. Despite drawing on the critique of the objectifying and static Cartesian understanding of vision, this work does not focus on the cultural consequences of the rationalization of seeing, but its technoscientific foundation and connection to military objectives. Bousquet’s book is therefore a welcome contribution to the STS literature on perception technologies. His compelling historical analysis of military agency in sight-enhancing tools and surveillance systems should interest any historian of technology.

This agency appears to be a force linking seeing to targeting; the military use perceptive technologies to quantitively represent objects of the world in order to survey them, and the aim of surveillance is targeting presumable enemies. Bousquet traces this link to the emergence of linear perspective in Renaissance art and its representation of objects through measurements and technology-aided computations (p. 26).

Technology-enhanced perception is thus used to control the human environment. As the title implies, the camera is described as an augmented eye, and ultimately human organs are also defined in terms of perceptive technologies (p. 84). This is the case in cybernetics—when implemented in aircraft control systems—“the human sensorium is rearticulated within new cognitive and perceptual architectures” set by machinic vision (p. 118). In this way, technology is controlling humans too.

Bousquet divides his summary of military perceptual technologies into the functional categories of sensing, imaging, and mapping. The sensing technologies begin with the telescope and its application on the battlefield. With gun in hand and telescopic sight set on target, “the line of sight thus becomes a lethal perpendicular ray” (p. 48). This metaphor is on the verge of being fully materialized in the blinding laser weapons currently under development in the U.S. military (p. 78).

The chapter on imaging begins with the sixteenth-century camera obscura and works its way through photography and satellite imaging to the fully digital imaging processes of today, with virtual reality as the most spectacular showcase. The focus here is on the transition from esthetics to mathematics, from painting-like pictures to matrices of numbers (p. 104). These numbers form the grid of the contemporary GPS system’s all-encompassing mapping of the world, originating from cartographic practices Bousquet traces as far back as Eratosthenes (p. 120). The GPS system is “a mission-critical component of military operations” (p. 137), which in combination with long range missiles and drones, has expanded the traditional battlefield into subsuming the entire Earth.

This brings us to the contemporary surveillance society, where “the martial gaze” built up from sensing, imaging and mapping technologies reaches all over the globe. Since the natural response to military tracking technologies is hiding (Bousquet presents techniques in the final part of his book), the act of war has transformed into a universal hunt, causing “the martial gaze [to] inexorably turn itself on the very societies from which it arose” (p. 189).

For such a broad historical summary with such bold conclusions, I find Bousquet’s book a bit too focused on U.S. military interests and technologies. Where, for example, is an historical analysis of the Chinese surveillance system? Nevertheless, it is a thought-provoking and comprehensive summary of perceptive technologies and their deep entanglement with military objectives, enjoyable not least for the many vivid pictures and unexpected connections to art history. Bousquet’s conclusions—that we are as much controlled by technology as in control of it, and that surveillance technologies have built-in threats of violence stemming from their military origin and use—are highly relevant today. This makes the book instructive not only for historians of technology and STS scholars, but for...