Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology

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 * Contributes to a new understanding of both military technics and modernist aesthetics

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, School of English, University of Sheffield 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, Department of English, Johns Hopkins University 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. 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.

Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Arts and Politics at Winchester School of Art, the University of Southampton. He is the editor of Baudrillard Now: Current Perspectives in Baudrillard Studies (Polity Press 2009), co-editor, with John Phillips and Wei-Wei Yeo, of Beyond Description: Space Historicity Singapore (Routledge, 2004), co-editor, with John Phillips and Wei-Wei Yeo, of Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes (Routledge 2003), and author, with Lillian Robinson, of Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle (Routledge, 1998). 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).