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

Examines the tensions between the aims of military technology and modernist aesthetics in relation to perception

`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 prise 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

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 aesthetic, 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.