Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology

Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Arts and Politics and Co-director of the research group Archaeologies of Media and Technology at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. He co-edits the journal Cultural Politics (Duke UP), and is a series editor for Technicities (Edinburgh University Press) and Cultural Politics (Duke UP). John Phillips is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Contested Knowledge: A Guide to Critical Theory (Zed, 2000), co-editor, with Ryan Bishop and Wei-Wei Yeo, of Beyond Description: Space Historicity Singapore (Routledge, 2004), co-editor, with Ryan Bishop and Wei-Wei Yeo, of Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes (Routledge 2003), and co-editor, with Lyndsey Stonebridge, of Reading Melanie Klein (Routledge, 1998).

• Section 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.

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. -- 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.