Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Series Editors’ Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: The Long Cold War
- I PATTERN RECOGNITION
- II THE PERSISTENCE OF THE NUCLEAR
- III UBIQUITOUS SURVEILLANCE
- IV PERVASIVE MEDIATIONS
- 11 Notes from the Underground: Microwaves, Backbones, Party Lines and the Post Offi ce Tower
- 12 Insect Technics: War Vision Machines
- 13 Overt Research
- 14 Smart Dust and Remote Sensing: The Political Subject in Autonomous Systems
- Index
12 - Insect Technics: War Vision Machines
from IV - PERVASIVE MEDIATIONS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Series Editors’ Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: The Long Cold War
- I PATTERN RECOGNITION
- II THE PERSISTENCE OF THE NUCLEAR
- III UBIQUITOUS SURVEILLANCE
- IV PERVASIVE MEDIATIONS
- 11 Notes from the Underground: Microwaves, Backbones, Party Lines and the Post Offi ce Tower
- 12 Insect Technics: War Vision Machines
- 13 Overt Research
- 14 Smart Dust and Remote Sensing: The Political Subject in Autonomous Systems
- Index
Summary
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same.
H. G. Wells (1993: 5)H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds(1898) begins with ‘man’ as a ‘transient creature’ observed under a microscope, ‘swarm[ing] and multiply[ing] in a drop of water’: a fantasy or Schwärmereiof total control that is wielded, from above, by the other. The ‘human’, by contrast, is like ‘infusoria’, a unicellular, sedentary organism seen only through a magnifi cation of lenses. The Martians are fungoid, glistening, tentacular: ‘thin black whips […] like the arms of an octopus’ rise up towards ‘a circular disc [spinning] with a wobbling motion’; their ‘strange [bodies]’ are at once metallic and abjectly organic (Wells 1993: 21, 44). What the invasion of Earth reveals, more than anything, is ‘our’ own abjection, the disgusting softness of ‘our’ being as a ‘disintegrating organism’ (Wells 1993: 84). The novel ends, like The Island of Dr. Moreau(1896), with a perspective that engulfs the narrator who, in London, notices the ‘busy multitudes’ that ‘are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that [he has] seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised body’ (Wells 1993: 171, 172). The presiding image of ‘the human’, in The War of the Worlds, is that of an unassimilable, undifferentiated mass of (un)deadness.
The sovereign view from above that Wells's Martian perspective encourages, according to Christopher Hollingsworth in his discussion of the ‘poetics of the hive’, is ‘a particular sort of abstraction’ that opposes the individual to the collective understood as a mere mass (2001: ix, 3).
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- Information
- Cold War LegaciesLegacy, Theory, Aesthetics, pp. 234 - 251Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016