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

Ryan Bishop; John Phillips

Published by Edinburgh University Press 2010

Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology

Technicities of Perception

Ryan Bishop and John Phillips

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748672608

Overview
Contents

About this book

This 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. Modernist aesthetics renders clearer the operations of the vast surveillance and killing machines of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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: targetting, 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
Provides original and 'groundbreaking' readings of modernist art, literature, music, poetics and aesthetics
Gives a valuable and provocative reading of the avant-garde

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Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgements Publicly Available Download PDF	vi
List of Figures Publicly Available Download PDF	viii
Part I. Aesthetics, Poetics, Prosthetics Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part II. Broadcast, Hinge, Emergency Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	93
Part III. Surveillance, Targeting, Containment Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	229

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 248
Illustrations
- Other: 23 B/W illustrations
Keywords: Literary Studies

eBook

Published: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 9780748672608