Description
Book SynopsisExamines the tensions between the aims of military technology and modernist aesthetics in relation to perception
Trade ReviewA 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.
Table of ContentsSection 1: Aesthetics, Poetics, Prosthetics; 1. The Slow and the Blind: Unhinging the Senses to Harness Them; 2. Sighted Weapons and Modernist Opacity: Aesthetics, Poetics, Prosthetics; 3. We Make it Beautiful; 4. We Don't Make it Beautiful; Section 2: Broadcast, Hinge, Emergency; 5. Ventriloquism, Broadcast and Technologies of Narrative; 6. The Curious Logic of the Hinge; 7. Manufacturing Emergencies; 8. Among the Blind and the Delay; Section 3: Surveillance, Targeting, Containment; 9. Strategies and Technologies of Containment: Unmanning the Homeland and Containing the Political; 10. Scoping Out; 11. Satellites of Love and War.
