Derealization describes how technological systems progressively distance combatants from direct experience of warfare. What begins as physical combat between visible opponents becomes abstraction mediated by screens, instruments and electronic systems. The concept reveals fundamental transformations in how humans experience and conduct violence.
The term combines clinical psychology’s derealization (sense that surroundings are unreal) with analysis of technological warfare. In psychological contexts, derealization involves feeling detached from one’s environment. In military contexts, it names systematic elimination of direct experience through technological mediation.
Ernst Jünger’s testimony
Ernst Jünger provided crucial testimony about industrial warfare’s derealization effect. During First World War artillery bombardment, he described feeling alienated from his own body. He experienced himself as if viewing through binoculars whilst projectiles whispered past striking what seemed like inanimate objects.
The landscape became transparent like glass. Jünger wrote of “total transparency” where he felt simultaneously watched by invisible observers and observing his own body from a distance. This psychological state marked threshold between traditional and modern warfare.
This was not individual pathology but collective condition produced by industrial violence. Machine guns, rapid-firing artillery and chemical weapons created sensory environments exceeding human perceptual capacities. Combatants could not process what was occurring through ordinary consciousness.
Technological mediation and perception
Photography introduced fundamental changes in military perception. Direct observation yielded to mediated vision through cameras and developed images. Commanders no longer saw battlefields directly but interpreted photographs taken hours earlier from different positions.
This created epistemological problems. How to trust vertical aerial images over horizontal ground-level sight? French military command repeatedly dismissed photographic reconnaissance evidence, preferring traditional perspectival vision. This preference contributed directly to catastrophic defeats in both world wars.
The gap between direct experience and mediated representation widened with each technological innovation. Radio communication meant commanders issued orders to troops they could not see. Radar displayed aircraft as luminous blobs on screens rather than visible objects. Satellite imagery showed territories from perspectives no human naturally occupies.
Pilots and spatial disorientation
Aviation intensified derealization through spatial disorientation. Pilots experienced vertigo so profound they could swear they were banking at extreme angles whilst flying level. The weightlessness Jünger felt during artillery bombardment reproduced itself through technological confusion.
Saint-Exupéry described this as becoming an “icy scientist” conducting laboratory experiments on war. The landscape below appeared as objects under glass in museums. The pilot’s relationship to ground became fundamentally abstract, mediated by instruments and altitude.
Modern fighter aircraft intensified this condition. Pilots view battlefields through windscreen displays showing digital information. Radar screens, onboard computers, video feeds and heads-up displays fragment perception across multiple technological interfaces. The warrior’s identity disintegrates across these distributed systems.
Colonel Broughton, flying F-105 Thunderchiefs over Vietnam, described radio chatter so dense interpretation became impossible. Desperate warnings mixed with commands produced confusion about who was discussing whom. Weather created spatial disorientation where pilots lost sense of which direction was down.
The experience of unreality
Combatants tied to machines and imprisoned in electronics’ closed circuits suffer possession analogous to primitive warfare’s hallucinatory states. However, technological vertigo differs from panic-stricken terror. It involves purely cinematic derealization affecting spatial-dimension sense without immediate fear.
Young army recruits report they cannot imagine what war would be like despite massive document accumulation, publicity and films. Like Clausewitz’s rookie, they momentarily think they are at a show. This reaction stems from systematic unreality of how warfare gets represented.
The soldier must cross zones where danger continuously increases, moving toward battle’s epicentre where nature’s laws appear suspended. Beyond certain threshold, reason operates in different medium and reflects differently. Consciousness transforms under conditions exceeding ordinary human experience.
Survivors must believe they will come through. Being a survivor means remaining actor and spectator of living cinema, target of subliminal audiovisual bombardment, attempting to postpone death as last technological accident or final separation of sound and image.
Simulation and training
Military simulation exemplifies derealization’s culmination. Flight simulators enable combat training using synthetic imagery indistinguishable from actual operations. Pilots train not on aircraft instruments but on image sequences that may never correspond to real scenarios.
War simulators place visitors in windowless rooms resembling planetariums. Standing in near-total darkness, they watch distant coastlines gradually light up behind panoramic screens displaying rushes of events represented by dim flashes and fire glimmers. This creates illusion of being spectator-survivors of recent battlefields.
The Mojave Desert National Training Center employs laser engagement systems where weapons project infrared rays with ballistic characteristics approximating real ammunition. Microprocessors calculate impacts. The entire engagement occurs through technological mediation without physical projectiles.
This raises disturbing questions. If training becomes indistinguishable from actual combat, what distinguishes war from preparation for war? Simulation precedes reality, potentially determining how actual conflicts unfold. The model shapes the operation rather than operations validating models.
Electronic warfare and screen-mediated combat
Electronic warfare extends derealization to its logical extreme. Operators view battlefields through video feeds whilst sitting in climate-controlled facilities thousands of kilometres distant. They experience combat as images on screens, using video game controllers to direct weapons.
Drone operators describe surreal experiences. They watch targets for hours, observing daily routines and patterns. They fire missiles from continental distances. They see explosions through camera feeds. Then they drive home through suburban traffic to have dinner with families.
This creates profound psychological dislocation. The gap between killing and normal life collapses temporally whilst expanding spatially. Operators experience combat as both intimate (through prolonged observation) and abstract (through technological mediation). The result is derealization that clinical categories struggle to capture.
Naval warfare similarly operates through screen interfaces. Radar displays show representations of surrounding space. Targeting computers calculate firing solutions. Missiles lock onto electronic signatures. Combatants never see enemies directly but engage abstractions on displays.
The confusion of real and simulated
Photo interpreters during Vietnam War lacked skills and experience. Their evaluations contradicted ground personnel observations. Pilots watched bombs destroy targets only to receive orders fragging missions back because film analysis disagreed with their direct observations. They returned, lost personnel and aircraft, found targets destroyed as expected. But who listened to fighter pilots?
This conflict between direct experience and mediated analysis reveals derealization’s institutional dimensions. Military bureaucracies privileged technological mediation over human testimony. Screen images carried more authority than combatants’ reports. The simulation became more real than the reality it supposedly represented.
Contemporary warfare faces this problem at unprecedented scale. Satellite imagery, signals intelligence and computational analysis generate overwhelming data. Human operators cannot process information volumes without algorithmic assistance. Automated systems make targeting decisions. The role of human judgment shrinks continuously.
Cinema and psychological preparation
Cinema both documents and produces derealization. Film represents warfare through fragmentation and montage that mirror actual combat experience under technological conditions. Audiences learn to experience violence as spectacle divorced from physical consequences.
Simultaneously, cinema trains populations to accept mediated vision as authentic. Viewers trust photographic representation over direct experience. This psychological preparation proves essential for warfare where combatants operate through screens rather than direct sight.
War films create expectations shaping how soldiers experience actual combat. The mediated image precedes the experience, determining how events get interpreted. This reverses traditional epistemology where experience grounds representation. Instead, representation structures experience.
Consequences for military operations
Derealization creates specific operational problems. When combatants experience warfare as unreal, traditional military virtues like courage become difficult to sustain. What does bravery mean when fighting occurs through video feeds? How do soldiers maintain morale when combat resembles video games?
The greatest mystification involves transforming attack into apparatus of deception. Industrial warfare’s derealization makes violence function as deterrence strategy’s lure. The spectacle of destruction becomes more important than actual material effects. Wars get fought for images rather than territories.
Political and ethical dimensions
Derealization poses severe challenges for ethical accountability. When operators kill through screen interfaces, psychological distance obscures moral reality. The mediation enables violence by making consequences abstract.
Democratic oversight faces similar difficulties. Populations experience conflicts through curated imagery that bears tenuous relationship to ground realities. The gap between representation and actuality becomes unbridgeable. Citizens cannot evaluate military operations based on fundamentally unreliable information.
International law struggles with derealization. Traditional rules of war assumed combatants could distinguish civilians from military targets through direct observation. When targeting occurs through satellite imagery and computational analysis, these distinctions become classifications made by algorithms rather than human judgments.
Connections to psychopolitics
Derealization in warfare shares structural features with psychopolitics under neoliberalism. Both involve systematic mediation of experience through technological systems. Both create conditions where subjects cannot directly access realities shaping their lives.
The digital unconscious operates through similar mechanisms. Behavioural patterns get detected and exploited beneath conscious awareness. Subjects experience effects without perceiving causes. Reality becomes increasingly abstract and mediated.
Understanding derealization illuminates how contemporary power operates through managing perception rather than controlling physical spaces. The appropriation of perceptual fields proves more decisive than territorial conquest. This applies equally to military and economic domains.
Resistance and direct experience
Resisting derealization requires defending direct experience against technological mediation. This proves structurally difficult when military operations depend entirely on electronic systems. Returning to earlier forms of warfare is neither possible nor desirable.
However, maintaining awareness of gaps between mediation and reality remains politically essential. Refusing to accept screen images as transparent representations. Recognising how technological systems introduce systematic distortions. Preserving spaces for embodied experience outside instrumental frameworks.
The challenge involves developing critical capacities adequate to technological conditions without surrendering to total mediation. This requires practices combining technological competence with phenomenological awareness. Understanding systems’ operations whilst resisting their totalising claims.
Derealization represents not merely psychological state but fundamental transformation in how violence operates and gets experienced. Recognising this proves necessary for adequate political and ethical engagement with contemporary warfare.