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Of Skulls and Stealth: Reflections on the Image of the New Military Technology

2003; Eastern Michigan University; Volume: 33; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jnt.2011.0039

1549-0815

Mark Dorrian,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

Of Skulls and Stealth: Reflections on the Image of the New Military Technology Mark Dorrian I. In his essay "Norm and Form," Ernst Gombrich commented that the standard art historian's technique of using twin slide projectors when lecturing had its origin in the work of Heinrich Wölfflin.1 Behind the all-toofamiliar double image lies an originary opposition which was of course the nexus of Principles of Art History, Wölfflin's most influential book— the classic and the baroque—and which he analyzed in terms of his famous "five pairs of concepts": linear and painterly; plane and recession; closed and open form; multiplicity and unity; and absolute and relative clarity (13-16). In the spirit of this opposition I want to invoke two images. They are both used for publicity purposes and appear on websites. On, let's say, the left hand side (on which the "classic" usually appears) is Concorde, commonly refened to as the most beautiful aircraft ever built. The text on the British Airways website describes it in a sort of Hegelian epiphany as the "perfect combination of form and function" (perfect "combinations" or "balances" are always classical).2 The aircraft is pictured as a transcendent object framed by the heavenly blue of the stratosphere. In contrast, the other image, that of the US Air Force's F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighter aircraft, is a much more paradoxical affair. There are no perfect combinations here. Although evidently in the air, the object seems strangely and JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 33.1 (Winter 2003): 98-111. Copyright © 2003 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. O/ Skulls and Stealth 99 even malignantly earthbound. We are no longer below the object gazing up at the limitless heavens; instead we see the aircraft against a desolate and folded earthly tenain with which it seems almost contiguous.3 The main concern of this paper is to analyze the cultural reception of this aircraft. More particularly, I want to say some things about it as an object of fascination for contemporary architects and architectural theorists. Although most of the critical apparatus is not derived from Walter Benjamin , I do want to signal at the outset a tentative link with certain themes in Benjamin's Trauerspiel study, namely: —the antinomic character of the Baroque object; —the centrality of the image of the skull or death's head to me Baroque—the role it plays as the very emblem of emblems, as something that as Benjamin puts it "lacks all 'symbolic' freedom of expression, all classical proportion , all humanity" (Origin of German Tragic Drama, 166). (In particular I want to consider it in relation to the Baroque tradition of anamorphosis, something which Benjamin curiously does not discuss); —the amorphous, formless quality of the Baroque object, whereby, in Benjamin's account, the collapse of perfect nature is proclaimed and a physiognomy of putrefaction and decay revealed. While through the alchemy of the allegorist the glimmer of significance is retained in the object, its material is soon exhausted and, as an inert husk, cast aside, in the triumph of matter over allegorical significance. II. When form topples and "falls," when matter becomes exorbitant through modes of distortion, deformation, liquidation, putrefaction or mutilation , a complex double movement, up and down, is historically evident. The primary gesture which splits the field of objects into the well-formed and the ill-formed, the normative and the abenant, is followed by a secondary discrimination which bifurcates the second field, the domain of abenations, into "bad" and "good" parts; that is, a division is instituted between , on one hand, the (honific or abject) abenant phenomena which 100 JNT must be disavowed, and, on the other, those which can be reintegrated with the discourse (conceming nature, the will of the divine, the movement of spirit, etc.) within which the primary gesture (the designation of "good form") is itself anchored and authorized. Thus the formless abenation can, in its evaluation, even come to exceed good form. This economy of recuperation has a long history, and the ambivalence attached to the monstrous figure is only one example: Ambroise Paré signals this characteristic scission, which produces the high and the low, the...