Martial Aesthetics

Front matter

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MARTIAL AESTHETICS

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Contents

Preface ix

Introduction: Creative Warfare 1 Astrological War Media 15 The Artifact of War 39 Operational Aesthetics 59 The War Artists 91 Designing War 122 Epilogue: Failures of Imagination 149

Acknowledgments 159 Notes 163 Index 197

Preface

The twenty-first century has witnessed a pervasive militarization of aesthetics. Western military institutions have co-opted the creative worldmaking of art and aesthetics and merged it with the destructive forces of warfare. This unusual merger has taken place both in the material domain of media and technologies and in the theoretical domain of military ideas and doctrines. Artificial aesthetic worlds such as 3D terrain simulations and synthetic training environments pervade contemporary war efforts, and thinkers in several leading Western militaries have adopted key aesthetic concepts from the discourse on design. Today, military institutions form an unexpected avant-garde in both senses of the term: as the military front-runner for a new operational aesthetics.

What are we to make of this curious imbrication of two phenomena that seemingly belong to entirely different realms and orders of human experience? How is the brutal business of war and the disastrous effects it has on people’s lives tied up with artistry, artifacts, and creative worldmaking? And when did military thinkers begin to speak the language of art and aesthetics? Martial Aesthetics: How War Became an Art Form examines the origins of this at once strange and sinister phenomenon. It shows that the creative warfare of the twenty-first century is merely the most recent moment in a historical development that began much longer ago. Indeed, the emergence of martial aesthetics harkens back to a series of inventions, ideas, and debates in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Already then, military thinkers and inventors adopted ideas from the field of aesthetics about the nature, purpose, and force of x PREFACE art and retooled them into innovative military technologies and a new theory that conceptualized war not merely as a practical art but as an aesthetic art form. Adopting an approach that is simultaneously historical and theoretical, the book shows how early war media (from star charts and horoscopes to the Prussian Kriegsspiel, or wargame) and military discourses (from Kepler to Clausewitz) were entangled with classical ideas in philosophy and aesthetic theory (by thinkers such as Leibniz, Baumgarten, Kant, and Schiller), in order to trace the emergence of martial aesthetics. Against this historical background, the book also presents a new theoretical frame for war in the twenty-first century. The book argues that, as counterintuitive as it may seem, we need to acknowledge the constitutive role of aesthetics in war. Inventing and shaping desired futures like works of art, the military has long sought to frame war as a creative and artistic activity. But the book also points to the perils of this endeavor. Martial aesthetics not only designates a set of inventions and ideas that military institutions have produced over the past 250 years. It also signifies the systematic erasure of brutality, suffering, and death, and the troubling transfiguration of collective violence into the free and noble endeavor of art—the enchantment of war as an art form.