Modernist avant-garde aesthetics and contemporary military technology: technicities of perception

Bishop, Ryan and Phillips, John (2010) Modernist avant-garde aesthetics and contemporary military technology: technicities of perception , Edinburgh, GB. Edinburgh University Press, 248pp.

Abstract

As a work of critical interdiscplinary war studies underscores the confluence between violence/conflict, technology and art/cinema/literature/music, the book analyses the operation of current state-of-the-art military technology and the experimental art, music and writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. A basic aim of visual technologies is to collapse the sphere of perception with that of the perceived object. Modernist aesthetics, working the same terrain, shows that there always remains an irreducible element of time and space. Military technology tends towards the impossible goal of eliminating this dimension, while modernist aesthetics exploits it. Placing military operations alongside modernist aesthetics reveals the civic sphere suspended between two incompatible desires. Through close readings of the art and writing of Djuna Barnes, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Mina Loy, Stephane Mallarme, the Italian Futurists and H. G. Wells alongside the Apache attack helicopters, Network-Centric Warfare, satellites, decoys, sirens and radios, the chapters address issues such as: targeting, surveillance, visibility and the invisible, broadcast and media, the military body, diasporas, geopolitics and beauty, as well as art history

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