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  • Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology: Technicities of Perception by Ryan Bishop, John Phillips
  • Chris Forster (bio)
Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology: Technicities of Perception, by Ryan Bishop and John Phillips. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. ix + 238 pp. $118.00.

Ryan Bishop and John Phillips’s Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology manages to cover an even wider and more eclectic set of subjects than its title promises. In addition to the poetry of Mina Loy and the Apache attack helicopter, it spends time with Romantic poets, postcolonial theory, the television show CSI, and Transformers action figures. Such breadth is provocative but ultimately unmanageable, and this book is not fully able to connect satisfyingly to the key terms of its title.

What Bishop and Phillips offer is neither an archaeology nor a [End Page 395] genealogy of military technologies and their relationship to modernist aesthetics but an examination of what their subtitle calls the “technicities of perception.”1 Their key inspiration in this task is deconstruction; when the authors invoke “prosthesis” as a key term, they draw on Jacques Derrida’s prosthesis of the origin more than Marshall McLuhan’s “extensions of man.”2 In eleven chapters, divided into three sections (entitled “Aesthetics, Poetics, Prosthetics,” “Broadcast, Hinge, Emergency,” and “Surveillance, Targeting, Containment”), the authors reveal a tension between how aesthetics and the military imagined the senses during the long twentieth century—a period that saw the emergence of such technological supplements of the human sensorium such as radio, film, aerial photography, and radar. 3 Both terms of the title—modernist avant-garde aesthetics and contemporary military technology—respond to “a series of inventions and technologies that altered notions about the veracity of empirical knowledge while simultaneously revealing the gap between perceiver and perceived in the attempts to close this gap” (4), though they do so in very different ways.

The gap between the perceiver and the perceived, fundamental to the very act of perception itself, opens the space for technology to insert itself and prosthetically extend the senses. (This process itself, for Bishop and Phillips, reveals that “perception” is always already a prosthetic technology; the eye itself is simply a prosthesis for perceiving light.) Being able to see more, and more quickly, than the enemy (from missile guidance to countermeasures to drone surveillance and the like) is central to military success, so military technology constantly attempts to shrink the gap of apprehension that enables such supplementation of the senses in the first place. By contrast, modernist aesthetics seeks to expand that gap: “The gap of apprehension provides both a challenge and an opportunity, a challenge to technology and an opportunity to those interested in aesthetics. As the history of visual technology manifests repeated attempts to increasingly narrow the gap, modernist aesthetics tries to highlight its unbridgeable nature” (27). This is the book’s organizing argument: while military technology seeks to master the unmasterable, “modernist aesthetics,” on the side of the deconstructive angels, resists this mastery.

The most sustained discussion of Joyce comes in the fifth chapter, “Ventriloquism, Broadcast, and Technologies of Narrative,” which argues that Finnegans Wake’s exploration of dreaming offers a synaesthetic confusion implicitly undermining the division and reconstitution of the senses offered by military technology: the dream of the Wake, in which one sense flows into another, against the radar that attempts unproblematically to transform sound waves into a visualization of location. It is possible to find this exploration provocative, without completely accepting the authors’ comparison between HCE [End Page 396] and an Apache helicopter pilot: “the dreamer is like the pilot in an Apache helicopter or in a fighter plane, but without the optoelectronic and telephonic supplements to enhance what has been removed. The pilot becomes techno-science’s dream of the dreamer, equipped with night vision, multiple perspectival potential, precision targeting capacity . . . —complete control over the expanded sensorium” (111). Joyce’s dreamer and his confused senses undermine the fantasy of mastering the senses embodied in military technology. I am unsure whether most Joyceans would agree with Bishop and Phillips’s conclusion that Joyce offers a melancholy attitude toward technological advance:

The synthesis of synaesthesia that...

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