War and Aesthetics Art, Technology, and the Futures of Warfare

A provocative edited collection that takes an original approach toward the black box of military technology, surveillance, and AI—and reveals the aesthetic dimension of warfare.

War and Aesthetics gathers leading artists, political scientists, and scholars to outline the aesthetic dimension of warfare and offer a novel perspective on its contemporary character and the construction of its potential futures. Edited by a team of four scholars, Jens Bjering, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Solveig Gade, and Christine Strandmose Toft, this timely volume examines warfare through the lens of aesthetics, arguing that the aesthetic configurations of perception, technology, and time are central to the artistic engagement with warfare, just as they are key to military AI, weaponry, and satellite surveillance.

People mostly think of war as the violent manifestation of a political rationality. But when war is viewed through the lens of aesthesis—meaning perception and sensibility—military technology becomes an applied science of sensory cognition. An outgrowth of three war seminars that took place in Copenhagen between 2018 and 2021, War and Aesthetics engages in three main areas of inquiry—the rethinking of aesthetics in the field of art and in the military sphere; the exploration of techno-aesthetics and the wider political and theoretical implications of war technology; and finally, the analysis of future temporalities that these technologies produce. The editors gather various traditions and perspectives ranging from literature to media studies to international relations, creating a unique historical and scientific approach that broadly traces the entanglement of war and aesthetics across the arts, social sciences, and humanities from ancient times to the present. As international conflict looms between superpowers, War and Aesthetics presents new and illuminating ways to think about future conflict in a world where violence is only ever a few steps away.

Contributors
Louise Amoore, Ryan Bishop, Jens Bjering, James Der Derian, Anthony Downey, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Solveig Gade, Mark B. Hansen, Caroline Holmqvist, Vivienne Jabri, Caren Kaplan, Phil Klay, Kate McLoughlin, Elaine Scarry, Christine Strandmose Toft, Joseph Vogl, Arkadi Zaides

Jens Bjering earned his PhD at the University of Copenhagen with a thesis on post-9/11 US torture and is now a consultant at the Royal Danish Defence College.

Anders Engberg-Pedersen is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern Denmark, Chair of Humanities at the Danish Institute for Advanced Studies, and series editor of Prisms: Humanities and War (MIT Press). He is the author of Martial Aesthetics: How War Became an Art Form.


Solveig Gade is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen and coeditor of (W)archives: Archival Imaginaries, War, and Contemporary Art.


Christine Strandmose Toft holds a PhD in Comparative Literature. She earned her degree at the Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark, with a thesis on the representations of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in fiction.

Contents
Introduction
Part I: Art, Aesthetics, and the Everyday
1 War, Beauty, and the Trouble with Witness
2 War’s Deep Time
3 War, the Aesthetic, and the Political
4 The Fabric of War: Lace, Gender, and Everyday Militarism
5 Area Panic: Histories of “Running Amok”
6 Blurry Manifestos: Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation and Its Militarized Applications
Part II: Reimagining Technology
7 Eyes, Ears, Mouths: A Sensorial Military Triptych (with Satellite, Electronic Music, and Vocoder
8 Philosophy and the Weapons of Nuclear War
9 Theorizing War: From Classical to Quantum
Part III: The Futures of War
10 The Future of Death: Algorithmic Design, Phantasmagorical Subjects, and Drone Warfare
11 When Timing Is Decisive: Distributed Sovereignty’s Halting Problem
12 The End of Reciprocity
13 The War on Futures
Contributors
Index