Watching War: The British in the Spanish Civil War - Softcover

Mieszkowski, Jan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804782407 ISBN 13: 9780804782401

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

What does it mean to be a spectator to war in an era when the boundaries between witnessing and perpetrating violence have become profoundly blurred? Arguing that the contemporary dynamics of military spectatorship took shape in Napoleonic Europe, Watching War explores the status of warfare as a spectacle unfolding before a mass audience. By showing that the battlefield was a virtual phenomenon long before the invention of photography, film, or the Internet, this book proposes that the unique character of modern conflicts has been a product of imaginary as much as material forces.

Warfare first became total in the Napoleonic era, when battles became too large and violent to be observed firsthand and could only be grasped in the imagination. Thenceforth, fantasies of what war was or should be proved critical for how wars were fought and experienced. As war's reach came to be limited only by the creativity of the mind's eye, its campaigns gave rise to expectations that could not be fulfilled. As a result, war's modern audiences have often found themselves bored more than enthralled by their encounters with combat. Mieszkowski takes an interdisciplinary approach to this major ethical and political concern of our time, bringing literary and philosophical texts into dialogue with artworks, historical documents, and classics of photojournalism.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Jan Mieszkowski is Professor of German and Humanities at Reed College. His first book, Labors of Imagination: Aesthetics and Political Economy from Kant to Althusser was published in 2006.

Jan Mieszkowski is Professor of German and Humanities at Reed College. His first book, Labors of Imagination: Aesthetics and Political Economy from Kant to Althusser was published in 2006.

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Watching War

By Jan Mieszkowski

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8240-1

Contents

List of Illustrations................................ixAcknowledgments......................................xiIntroduction: Watching War...........................1§ 1 How to Tell a War Story.....................30§ 2 The Witness Under Fire......................64§ 3 Looking at the Dead.........................96§ 4 Visions of Total War........................144Conclusion: Old Wars, New Wars.......................173Notes................................................195Index................................................239

Chapter One

How to Tell a War Story

Men are reduced to walk-on parts in a monster documentary film which has no spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on the screen.

— Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

The central tenet of the Napoleonic ideology of warfare is that the course of world history is shaped by titanic one- day clashes of men under arms. The decisions made by generals at key moments in these engagements are thought to impact the fates of nations for generations to come. To fully appreciate the implications and the abiding influence of this doctrine, it is important to understand that it emerged as a reaction against seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of the battlefield that had in turn sought to reject earlier military thinking. More than a century before Waterloo, Thomas Hobbes opened the Leviathan with the assertion of a sharp distinction between combat and the semblance of a commitment to pursue it, declaring that war consisted "not of Battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battle is sufficiently known.... [T]he nature of War consists not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto.... All other time is Peace." For Hobbes, war was both a series of violent conflicts and a condition of hostility in which no shots need be fired. What we today refer to as the spectacle of war is therefore not principally a matter of landscapes covered in clashing armies or the fireworks of aerial bombardments. To wage war, we must demonstrate a capacity for self- expression; we must be able to make our readiness to fight apparent to the enemy. Hobbes's warring posture aims to manifest something metaphysical—a will—as something physical that is accessible to the senses.

Since our relationship to any alleged intention to fight—even when it is our own—is highly mediated, Hobbes's distinction between war and battle creates a realm ripe for duplicity. If war is the ultimate example of a sequence of events with consequences, it is equally a field of simulation since any war is permanently under suspicion of being a phony war, emerging only in virtue of an opposition between an act and the announcement of an alleged plan to act. War is as much a matter of signifying performances—declarations and threats, feints and bluffs—as of hand-to-hand combat. Pretense and facades are as central to its arsenal as cannonballs and bullets.

The lasting influence of Hobbes's doctrine is manifest in the work of Paul Virilio, a contemporary theorist who has extensively explored the logic of battlefield spectatorship. Best known for his lapidary formulation "war is cinema, and cinema is war," Virilio characterizes combat as a struggle to see, which means not just seeing the enemy before the enemy sees and targets us but also being seen in such a way as to demoralize and intimidate our opponent, perhaps eliminating the very need to come to blows. In these Hobbesian terms, to wage war is to direct a show; it means managing appearances, in particular one's own, as much as slaying foes—hence, it is an aesthetic, as well as a physical, moral, or economic struggle.

Virilio sometimes gives the impression that the forces of self-expression peculiar to warfare are more easily governed than is actually the case. Designed to regulate semantic missives, as well as material projectiles, military ventures unfold as projects in which the ability to dissimulate the difference between a real intention to attack and an imitation thereof is as important as the deployment of troops and munitions. Still, we should not assume that warring parties are ever in complete control of their presentations, whether they regard them as sincere articulations of their inner feelings or as pure fakery. On the one hand, the deception at work in military posturing may be a form of self-deception—nowhere is self-awareness a more precarious state of mind than when commanding officers, governments, or people consider trading death blows with a foe. On the other hand, even the most heartfelt performances of intent may not succeed in realizing their illocutionary or perlocutionary goals. If the physical violence of warfare tends to outstrip the aims of its purveyors, this is equally the case in the signifying realm. Fighting a war means engaging in a struggle to make one's threats meaningful and convincing to oneself, as well as to one's enemy, and it is a struggle that no warring force can ever bring to a close. Much of the instability and inherent unpredictability of military campaigns, which never seem to follow the script, stems from the fact that no party ever masters this particular facet of combat.

The argument for the inherently self-expressive nature of the military program comes close to conceiving of war as a self-validating, almost completely self-contained process. In his 1985 Simulation and Simulacra Jean Baudrillard proposed that contemporary warfare had lost its antagonistic core. Although it still boasted bloody engagements in which tens of thousands of people were injured and killed, it no longer took place in the name of anything external to the destructive process, whether a noble ideal or a crass grab for power. In short, war had become war for war's sake. Ten years later in his infamous The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Baudrillard described the solipsism of war as a system preening for its grand entrance: "The war ... watches itself in a mirror: Am I pretty enough, am I operational enough, am I spectacular enough, am I sophisticated enough to make an entry onto the historical stage?" The "will to spectacle," as Baudrillard termed it, threatened to become the dominant impulse governing military operations such that we would no longer be able to evaluate a war as just or unjust, righteous or evil, but would have to assess it entirely by its ability to create a scene. This has been one of the great challenges in understanding the spectacle of war in the post-Napoleonic era. War imposes itself upon a mass audience, presenting itself as a show that no one can afford to miss, but this war time performance unfolds according to solipsistic standards that can be appreciated only by a warring compatriot or an armed foe. Small wonder that the modern viewer so often feels cheated, as if for all the millions of lives and trillions of dollars that have been poured into the production of the theater of war, there has been precious little return for its public.

In conceiving of war as the sum of social and cultural practices that confirm a commitment to fighting one's opponents, Hobbes opened the door to what in the twentieth century would be termed "total war." Once we suspend the distinction between threatened and actual combat, between battle imagined and battle realized, all wars...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804782407
• ISBN 13: 9780804782401
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland