Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology

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