Doctoral Dissertation Research: Training Pilots, Crafting Moderns: A Comparative History of Aviation and Subjectivity in the U.S. and Japan, 1930-1960

本论文由科学技术与社会计划资助，考察了飞机飞行员培训计划的历史发展，为此动员了各种模拟仪器、科学知识、工程实践以及军事和民用机构。它考察了几个具有不同背景和兴趣的团体如何试图训练甚至约束飞行员，从而锻造出具有特定身体、智力和技能资格的现代人物。通过比较美国和日本在二战前、二战期间和二战后的飞行员培训计划，论证了不同的飞行员培训制度植根于特定的历史和文化。该项目关注的与其说是飞行员做了什么，不如说是他们成为了什么。飞行员在战争与和平时期执行侦察、运输和作战任务，这些活动在战争中和和平时期的经济中都具有巨大的意义。但该项目更感兴趣的是，通过他们的选择和培训，他们变成了什么样的人来执行这些任务。航空的一个未得到充分认识的方面是，它主要在战争的紧迫性下促进了人们的大规模生产，这些人学习了新的能力，例如即使在没有与世界进行真正的感官接触的情况下，也能通过机电仪器感知世界。飞行员所体现的是一种不是与生俱来的新的存在和行为方式，而是他们通过研究和培训获得的。在培训飞行员的过程中，形成了对人类的独特的现代理解--我们如何看待和移动，或者我们的身体与机器的适应程度如何。随着飞行员的培训和对他们的了解的产生，一种现代的主观性也应运而生。

This dissertation funded by the Science, Technology & Society program examines the historical development of airplane pilot training programs, for which a diverse set of simulation instruments, scientific knowledge, engineering practices, and military and civilian institutions were mobilized. It examines how several groups with varying backgrounds and interests attempted to train and even constrain the pilots, thereby forging a modern figure with specific qualifications of bodies, minds, and skills. By comparing the pilot training programs in the U.S. and Japan before, during, and after World War II, it demonstrates that different regimes of pilot training are embedded in particular histories and cultures.The concern of the project is not so much what pilots did, but what they became. Pilots performed reconnaissance, transport, and combat missions in times of war and peace and these activities had immense significance in the conduct of war and in the peacetime economy. But of more interest to the project is what kind of people they became through their selection and training to perform those tasks. An under-appreciated aspect of aviation is that it facilitated, mostly in the urgency of wars, the mass-production of people who learned new capacities such as perceiving the world through electro-mechanical instruments even in the absence of real sensorial contacts with the world. What pilots embodied was a new mode of existence and behavior which they were not born with but which they acquired through research and training.In the process of training pilots, a distinctively modern understanding of humans -- how we see and move or how well our bodies fit with machines -- was forged. As pilots were trained and knowledges of them generated, a modern kind of subjectivity was also crafted.