Anders Pedersen

The dissertation charts the momentous shift in the thinking of war that takes place in Europe around 1800. Against the background of the Napoleonic Wars, it examines the discourse on war in literature, military theory, philosophy, cartography, mathematics, and pedagogy. It argues that across these fields and disciplines, war is constituted as a world in itself, but a destabilized world governed by chance and contingency. As one theorist states, the complexity of warfare has risen to such a degree that war has become an empire of chance – 'l'empire du hazard.' Centered on the notion of the 'state of war,' the dissertation maps out the attempts to describe this complex epistemic regime as well as the inventions devised to manage it. These inventions are inextricably linked to a reconfiguration of the poetics of war. Across traditional genre boundaries, in treatises, in novellas and novels, but also on sketches, maps, and in games, war becomes just as much a poetological problem as an epistemological one. Having to reconstruct the state of war with symbolic means, the operational logic of war games, the topographical image of the military map, and the structure of a text all reveal so many conceptions of the phenomenon of war. I show how these different media are refashioned into technologies of experience that simulate the matrix of war virtually in order to immerse individuals into this symbolic world. Against the tradition of speculative philosophy that flourishes around 1800, one can detect the emergence of an empirically minded thought that turns its attention outward to the concreta and the flux of the empirical world. Comparing the various fields that comprise the discourse on war, the dissertation traces the contours of a new world picture and the outline of a modern world-oriented subject who is fit to inhabit it

This article is articulated in three voices of scholars who have worked on questions of war, visual culture, and contemporary political aesthetics that also relates to art and film practices. Media theorist Jussi Parikka, literary scholar Anders Engberg-Pedersen, and visual culture researcher Daniela Agostinho address the relations between images, aesthetics and operations through the lens of two books published concomitantly, Parikka’s Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual and Engberg-Pedersen’s Martial Aesthetics: How War Became an Art Form. Both books expand the scope of what Czechoslovakian-born filmmaker Harun Farocki termed “operational images” in his experimental documentaries and theoretical writings from the early 2000s. Through his analyses of the politics of imagery in the military-industrial context, Farocki notably defined “operational images” as images that do not depict or represent but rather perform tasks such as tracking, surveilling, detecting, and targeting. For both Parikka and Engberg-Pedersen, Farocki’s central concept of operational images forms a point of departure for writing media archaeologies of the present. In a three-voiced dialogue, the authors unfold operations as a “machine of articulation,” a conceptual and analytical device that reveals surprising linkages and frictions across different themes, techniques, scales, and historical periods.

Since 2015, two influential American authors and military consultants have sought to leverage imaginative literature for the cause of national security. On the basis of concepts such as useful fiction and FICINT, a shorthand for fictional intelligence, they have sought to develop a new genre—the national security novel—which blends nonfictional research and predictive threat scenarios with the creative inventions and emotional appeal of fiction. In this article, I trace how the national security novel developed through a process of securitization, which has gradually merged the realm of literature with that of policy and military strategy, and I assess the genre’s current and future impact on national and global security.

The twenty-first century has witnessed a pervasive militarization of aesthetics with Western military institutions co-opting the creative worldmaking of art and merging it with the destructive forces of warfare. In Martial Aesthetics, Anders Engberg-Pedersen examines the origins of this unlikely merger, showing that today's creative warfare is merely the extension of a historical development that began long ago. Indeed, the emergence of martial aesthetics harkens back to a series of inventions, ideas, and debates in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Already then, military thinkers and inventors adopted ideas from the field of aesthetics about the nature, purpose, and force of art and retooled them into innovative military technologies and a new theory that conceptualized war not merely as a practical art, but as an aesthetic art form. This book shows how military discourses and early war media such as star charts, horoscopes, and the Prussian wargame were entangled with ideas of creativity, genius, and possible worlds in philosophy and aesthetic theory (by thinkers such as Leibniz, Baumgarten, Kant, and Schiller) in order to trace the emergence of martial aesthetics. Adopting an approach that is simultaneously historical and theoretical, Engberg-Pedersen presents a new frame for understanding war in the twenty-first century.