28 - War: Modernism in Camouflage, Strategic Fantasy and the Technological Sublime

Summary

War forced modernism’s uneasy romance with technology into crisis. Now rivals, now critics, now technophiles and technophobes, modernists confronted and embraced from the start the expansionist energies of technology. War would bring an aesthetic, political and ethical reckoning that disturbed and fractured this intimate relationship between modernism and technology. For their part, the more avant-garde writers and artists actively engaged and exacerbated the contradictions in technology revealed by the First World War. The technologies of war, like artillery, the machine gun, high explosive shells, poison gas, aeroplanes, camouflaged Dazzle Ships and the tank, seemed to be the violent double of modernist and avant-garde artistic experimentation. Like T. S. Eliot’s ‘mon semblable, mon frère’ in The Waste Land (1922), these technologies brought ‘the shock of the new’ to battlefields from late nineteenth-century ‘Little Colonial Wars’ to the First World War and beyond. Famously celebrated and aestheticised in Filippo Marinetti’s Futurist Manifestos, they seemed to offer objective correlatives or even causal mechanisms for avant-garde shock tactics.

Yet the technologies that modernised warfare from 1914 to 1945 shattered the utopian, imperious promise of modern industrial power and communications, revealing and demystifying a dystopian drive towards colonialism and war. This reinforced a modernist sense of irony and epistemological scepticism, which Paul Fussell famously argued in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) marked a descent into a generalised sense of ironic disillusionment after 1914. More disturbing than the epochal violence unleashed by military technology was the revelation for many writers and artists that modern warfare not only impoverished experience, as Walter Benjamin noted in ‘The Story Teller’, but revealed a more profound transformation of human experience and social relations. Observing famously that ‘men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience’, Benjamin argued that this tendency was part of a larger logic of modernisation: ‘For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power’ (Benjamin 1969a: 84).

I will argue here that literary modernism offered a powerful lens through which to understand the relationship between technology and modern war not only because of its obsessive ambivalence towards these relations, but because of the intimate relationship between aesthetic experimentation and experimental technologies of violence. War exposed modernism’s internal contradictions.