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，研究飞机飞行员训练计划的历史发展，其中调动了各种模拟仪器、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，从而塑造了一个具有特定身体、思想和技能资格的现代人物。通过比较美国和日本在第二次世界大战之前、期间和之后的飞行员培训计划，它表明不同的飞行员培训制度植根于特定的历史和文化。这个项目关注的不是飞行员做了什么，而是他们变成了什么。飞行员在战争和和平时期执行侦察、运输和战斗任务，这些活动在战争和和平时期的经济中具有巨大的意义。但该项目更感兴趣的是，通过选择和训练，他们成为了什么样的人来执行这些任务。航空的一个被低估的方面是，它促进了人们的大规模生产，主要是在战争的紧急情况下，这些人学会了新的能力，比如通过机电仪器感知世界，即使在没有与世界真正的感官接触的情况下。飞行员所体现的是一种新的生存和行为模式，他们不是天生的，而是通过研究和训练获得的。在训练飞行员的过程中，形成了对人类的独特现代理解——我们如何看待和移动，或者我们的身体如何与机器相适应。随着飞行员的训练和知识的积累，一种现代的主观性也被塑造出来了。

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.