Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology: Technicities of Perception

by Ryan Bishop, John Phillips

Overview

Examines the tensions between the aims of military technology and modernist aesthetics in relation to perception.A basic aim of visual technologies is to collapse perception with the perceived object. Modernist aesthetics shows that an irreducible element of time and space always remains. Military technology tends towards the impossible goal of eliminating this dimension; modernist aesthetics exploits it. Placing military operations alongside modernist aesthetics reveals the civic sphere suspended between two incompatible desires.Reading the art and writing of Djuna Barnes, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Mina Loy, Stephane Mallarme, the Italian Futurists and H. G. Wells against Apache attack helicopters, Network-Centric Warfare, satellites, decoys, sirens and radios, this book addresses issues such as targeting, surveillance, visibility and the invisible, broadcast and media, the military body, diasporas, geopolitics and beauty.Key Features• An important contribution to the increasingly important interdisciplinary field of war studies• Original and 'groundbreaking' readings of modernist art, literature, music, poetics and aesthetics• A valuable and provocative new reading of the avant-garde• Contributes to a new understanding of both military technics and modernist aesthetics

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780748643196
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	09/28/2011
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Arts and Politics and Co-director of the research group Archaeologies of Media and Technology at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. He co-edits the journal Cultural Politics (Duke UP), and is a series editor for Technicities (Edinburgh UniversityPress) and Cultural Politics (Duke UP).

John Phillips is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Contested Knowledge: A Guide to Critical Theory (Zed, 2000), co-editor, with Ryan Bishop and Wei-Wei Yeo, of Beyond Description: Space Historicity Singapore (Routledge, 2004), co-editor, with Ryan Bishop and Wei-Wei Yeo, of Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes (Routledge 2003), and co-editor, with Lyndsey Stonebridge, of Reading Melanie Klein (Routledge, 1998).

Table of Contents

Section 1: Aesthetics, Poetics, Prosthetics; 1. The Slow and the Blind: Unhinging the Senses to Harness Them; 2. Sighted Weapons and Modernist Opacity: Aesthetics, Poetics, Prosthetics; 3. We Make it Beautiful; 4. We Don't Make it Beautiful; Section 2: Broadcast, Hinge, Emergency; 5. Ventriloquism, Broadcast and Technologies of Narrative; 6. The Curious Logic of the Hinge; 7. Manufacturing Emergencies; 8. Among the Blind and the Delay; Section 3: Surveillance, Targeting, Containment; 9. Strategies and Technologies of Containment: Unmanning the Homeland and Containing the Political; 10. Scoping Out; 11. Satellites of Love and War.

Editorial Reviews

An intelligent, imaginative, wide-ranging and lucid work. It marks a genuine move forward for the application of deconstruction to cultural studies. And what is especially remarkable about the book is its stunning range of examples and cases, which include Finnegans Wake, Transformer toys, Malaysian gothic thrillers, poems by Keats and Blake, the war in Bosnia, ventriloquism, diaspora and the Cold War, postcolonial formations in South East Asia.

Professor Simon During

A richly fascinating, very wise book which launches a brave, telling, and at times, devastating cultural critique of the military-industrial complex. The arguments which praise the modernist avant-garde for its prescience and also its techniques of resistance to war technology are startling, refreshing and brilliant.

Professor Adam Piette