Adam Harvey’s Anti-Drone Wear, in Three Sites of Opacity

This essay examines the relationship between surveillance and opacity through artist Adam Harvey’s Anti-Drone wear, clothing that evades drone surveillance. Through an engagement with opacity, I argue that Anti-Drone wear’s various appeals to concealment and partial visibility raise critical questions about surveillance logics, technologies, and practices and their appeals to fantasies of total seeing and knowing. This essay takes place in three parts, each placing Harvey’s counter-surveillance works in conversation with theorists who challenge what it means to see and what it means to be visible. The first site of opacity, engaging Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s examination of paranoid and reparative reading, asks about the limits of paranoid thinking as a response to our contemporary surveillance situation. The second site of opacity shifts discussions of seeing and knowing towards situatedness, partiality, and the limits of the Western gaze; this section draws on Donna Haraway’s interventions into debates about objectivity and Chandra Mohanty’s critique of the colonial gaze in some Western feminist scholarship. The third site of opacity, which examines Harvey’s Anti-Drone wear in light of “the fog of war,” invokes Noel Sharkey and Lucy Suchman’s recent co-authored call to end the production of autonomous armed machines. Throughout these three sites of opacity, Harvey’s work opens up a response to surveillance that inhabits and embraces opacity.