The Arts of War

Images of war from Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and Congo haunted the photojournalism year-end reviews from 2024 with the gruesome evidence of combat's costs to international militaries and, to a much greater extent, civilian lives. The journalists’ visual accounts do not aestheticize conflict but rather attempt, in the face of depredation, to testify to the horrors of war using the sophisticated arts of photography. Their images raise once again a question that has haunted aesthetic theory from its earliest days: Can the arts act on political will? Does representation promise to prevent further violence by raising awareness, or does it inure viewers to the costs of mayhem? Is photography as testimony and art form contributing to international efforts to end particular wars, or does it only incur compassion fatigue? Anders Engberg-Pedersen's excellent and incisive Martial Aesthetics: How War Became an Art Form comes at a particularly opportune moment to address those questions. In his appropriately ambitious project—carried out in a slim volume backed with voluminous research and written in approachable and elegant prose—there is little to comfort. Rather, he offers a compelling argument that military planning, primarily in Europe and the United States, has borrowed from, appropriated, and weaponized aesthetic theory from the Enlightenment through poststructuralism.Engberg-Pedersen argues that “as counterintuitive as it may seem, we need to acknowledge the constitutive role of aesthetics in war. Inventing and shaping desired futures like works of art, the military has long sought to frame war as a creative and artistic activity” (x). But the book also “points to the perils of this endeavor. Martial aesthetics not only designates a set of inventions and ideas that military institutions have produced over the past 250 years. It also signifies the systemic erasure of brutality, suffering, and death and the troubling transfiguration of collective violence into the free and noble endeavor of art—the enchantment of war as an art form” (x). The author carefully traces the place of arts in war from Friedrich Schiller's Wallenstein in the eighteenth century, to the adaptation of aesthetic theories from jazz, to French poststructuralism, to “design thinking” for the chaotic US occupation of Iraq in the twenty-first century.War games, from their earliest development, were designed first to allow military planners to act in an alternative, possible world, such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz theorized, in order to anticipate all the possible contingencies of battles to be fought in the future. Using aesthetic means, strategists could control the subjective perceptions of military personnel to manage expectation and emotions in combat, training soldiers in the habits of mind necessary to accomplish particular military goals. Perhaps the best-known example of these two intersecting processes (one that Engberg-Pedersen does not cite, perhaps because it has become almost a cliché in those scholarly circles where art and violence are considered together) is a study by S. L. A. Marshall, who found that during World War II only about 15 to 20 percent of combatants would actually fire their weapons (Marshall 53). Though Marshall's methods have been widely disputed, his conclusions were generally confirmed, and military trainers took up the challenge to overcome reluctance to discharge weapons. Their method drew from aesthetic engagement. New training techniques raised discharge rates to 90 percent by the Vietnam War (Grossman 35). One particularly effective method of achieving this result is to engage recruits in simulations designed to anticipate possible combat situations and mentally prepare military personnel to act lethally in those situations. These simulations—from the Multipurpose Arcade Combat Simulator to Full Spectrum Warrior—are a lot like video games. In fact, the US military released a public version of the latter for gamers and began to conduct recruitment through gaming communities on Twitch.Martial Aesthetics elucidates that complex dynamic in which aesthetic experience prepares soldiers for war by inculcating “an experiential fact before it is implemented in the real. The military has thereby become an agent of some of the most radical experiments in contemporary aesthetics” (5). Engberg-Pedersen asks the reader to consider that aesthetic theory and practice have been co-opted by the military over a period of centuries, that the artist figure has in recent years become a model for the soldier, and that “by historicizing and theorizing martial aesthetics, we may begin to counter the fetishization of war media and the ennoblement of war into an art form” (12).The book is divided into five brief, intricately argued chapters along with an introduction and epilogue. Dense argument is matched with eloquent storytelling to make each chapter both absorbing and surprising. Chapter 1 follows a bizarrely compelling story from the Thirty Years’ War: Albrecht von Wallenstein, the commander of the Habsburg armies, relied on astrological forecasts to predict the immediate future and plan for battle accordingly. While this practice of astrological war planning dates back to Mesopotamia, by the time Schiller wrote his lesser-known play Wallenstein, this “belief system that had informed the conduct of war for almost two millennia” was as questionable for contemporary theater audiences as it is for us today (18). Schiller's better-known project, his Letters on the Education of Man, responds to a different bloody conflict, the French Revolution and the Terror that followed. In both works, Schiller grapples with the place that art could play in forming just governance. His ideal, responding to Immanuel Kant's precedent theory regarding the intellectual autonomy of art, positions art as a medium of collective development that can prepare a polity for the independent thinking required of free citizens in a democracy. Just as Kant posited that the contemplation of the aesthetic could hone individual judgment, Schiller hoped that a collective engagement with the arts would enable communities to judge in concert and to govern from that place of collective wisdom and responsibility. In Wallenstein, he demonstrates in dramatic action the critical process he theorized in his letters.Chapter 2 addresses the nineteenth century's chesslike Kreigspiel, aesthetic play that facilitated optimum bellum planning. These complex games were designed to replace the written word. The boring military tactics and strategies manuals taught in European war colleges gave way to the interactive immersion of beautifully crafted games, allowing soldiers in training to project themselves into the world of battle. Where the previous century's philosophers posited the autonomy of art, nineteenth-century military thinkers harnessed “formal purposiveness to a practical objective” (62): art not for its own sake but for the sake of domination in battle. Those games, as chapter 3 demonstrates, retain their aesthetic power in the present, engaging the senses of recruits in the “military-entertainment complex” (67), which promises not only to prepare combatants for the contingencies of contemporary warfare but also to regulate their emotional responses to lethal conditions.Anyone who has dipped a toe into the waters Engberg-Pedersen swims is familiar with Sun Tzu's The Art of War. The military thinkers of the twenty-first century, described in chapter 4, take the aesthetic claims of this classic text literally and aim to create “war artists” from the students of “military science.” In Kant's terms, the “determinate” judgments of the scientist are to give way to the “reflexive” judgment of the artist and the aesthete alike (Kant 20–21). For Carl von Clausewitz and his lesser-known, but perhaps more influential, collaborator Otto August Rühle von Lilienstern, the geniuses of Romantic poetry have their corollaries in the military commander “who creates a new work of art on the battlefield” (98). Von Clausewitz may be best known for his claim that “war is the continuation of policy with other means” (Von Clausewitz 87), but he also dabbled in aesthetic speculation in essays like “On the Concept of Corporeal Beauty.” His famous On War draws on the earlier work; in his conception of war as art form, as Engberg-Pedersen explains, “[T]he means are no longer the sounds, the clay, or the images of the fine arts but violence; and the purpose is not the production of the beautiful work of art but the military victory and the political goals that this victory enforces” (105). By the twentieth century, Von Clausewitz's principles became so accepted as to be accessible in banal catchphrases in which soldiers are encouraged to “be all they can be,” as if boot camp were an atelier for creative self-improvement.The Israeli military, like its counterparts in the Global North, honed the arts of technological warfare by training military personnel to think like designers, to cultivate habits of thought that respond with immediacy and creativity to the contingencies of battle. War, in this training, chapter 5 indicates, is “an aesthetic phenomenon to be understood and managed with the conceptual tools offered by the fine arts” (135). The horrific decimation of Gaza today is an outgrowth of an earlier military improvisation: Operation Defensive Shield was operationalized in the West Bank in the spring of 2002. During this invasion the Israeli military sustained four casualties while Palestinian civilians suffered nearly five hundred injuries and deaths. The infrastructure in Nablus succumbed to the technological war machine, leaving more than seventeen thousand people without homes.While Martial Aesthetics addresses fine arts principles more generally, its treatment of the novel form, if brief, is particularly chilling. Ronald Reagan may have girded his loins for the Cold War by enjoying Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October in the quiet of the White House residential spaces, but today the military novel projects wars for the future. Peter Warren Singer and August Cole, authors of Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War, regularly enjoy speaking engagements among the United States’ premier military institutions. Engberg-Pedersen observes that their literary techno-thriller paints a lurid futuristic dystopia. Where these military consultants’ literary talents may flag, their military influence is ascendant in the powerful military-industrial apparatus. Singer and Cole describe their book as “fictional intelligence” or “useful fiction” that combines the techno-thriller and current affairs genres. The virtue of their approach, they claim, is to engage the imagination while also preparing the mind for multiple possible conflict scenarios. Preparing for war need not be boring.A few times a year as the professoriate compiles lists of learning objectives for syllabi, we could easily rip a page from Army Design Methodology's goals for student soldiers who will “break their frame” of previous assumptions through “creative thinking” (U.S. Army Research Institute and U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies 42). Having completed this course, the soldier, like the liberal arts student, will have “an open mind and room for new ideas,” “an inquisitive mindset” and be “curious and eager for knowledge” (25). This soldier, like the reader of assigned novels, will be “comfortable with ambiguity” and will possess “creative—and innovative—thinking skills” (136–37). Only this ideal is so often not the actual outcome. We might wish for such lofty outcomes for our students, but our goals are articulated in more modest and “measurable” terms: merely becoming familiar with the methods and concepts of literary studies. Our students pursue a diluted set of ambitions now that our dearly held beliefs about the aesthetic experience have been successfully co-opted for the purposes of domination. Or is that necessarily the case?Engberg-Pedersen's deeply persuasive, knowledgeable, and penetrating claims don't actually leave the reader in this place of complacent despair. Maybe our sacred pedagogies have been stolen for lethal purposes, but Martial Aesthetics demonstrates what scholarship can be at its best, challenging each careful reader to reimagine Schiller's challenge. How can the aesthetic education we offer train citizens to live justly in our current, savage conditions? Maybe the demonstrations that rattle campuses in the winter of 2024, as students protest the brutalization of Gaza, are some evidence that our required courses have their moral effects.