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BISHOP Ryan, PHILLIPS JohnModernist avant-garde aesthetics and contemporary military technology : technicities of perceptionEdinburgh : Edinburgh University press, 2011, 238 p.ISBN 978-0-7486-4319-6MOND 586Résumé éditeur : This book analyses the operation of current state-of-the-art military technology and the experimental art, music and writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Modernist aesthetics renders clearer the operations of the vast surveillance and killing machines of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.A basic aim of visual technologies is to collapse the sphere of perception with that of the perceived object. Modernist aesthetics, working the same terrain, shows that there always remains an irreducible element of time and space. Military technology tends towards the impossible goal of eliminating this dimension, while modernist aesthetics exploits it. Placing military operations alongside modernist aesthetics reveals the civic sphere suspended between two incompatible desires.Through close readings of the art and writing of Djuna Barnes, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Mina Loy, Stephane Mallarme, the Italian Futurists and H. G. Wells alongside the Apache attack helicopters, Network-Centric Warfare, satellites, decoys, sirens and radios, the chapters address issues such as: targetting, surveillance, visibility and the invisible, broadcast and media, the military body, diasporas, geopolitics and beauty.Key FeaturesAn important contribution to the increasingly important interdisciplinary field of war studiesProvides original and 'groundbreaking' readings of modernist art, literature, music, poetics and aestheticsGives a valuable and provocative reading of the avant-gardeContributes to a new understanding of both military technics and modernist aestheticsRyan Bishop is professor of global arts and politics at Winchester School of Art, the University of Southampton. John Phillips is Associate Professor in the English language and literature program at the National University of Singapore.Axe de recherches :Équipe 3 : Du local aux empires : appartenances, institutions, conflits