Agency and Aesthetics

We have seen that the cover of the brochure is perspectival and that it is also about motion. It tells—or shows—that the TSR2 is capable of high-speed, low-altitude flight. Performed within a technical nar­rative, it is important to demonstrate this capability because it is a way of avoiding antiaircraft missiles. But, as I noted in chapter 2, this isn’t the primary argument that’s being made on the front cover, for here we are not in the world of technics. Instead, it presents a combi­nation of perspectivalism, the Albertian apparatus of depth with the convention that we are looking through a window onto the world,10 and a somewhat separate set of conventions about motion. Together they generate a fast-moving window and a series of contrasts that are relevant to, indeed perform, the distribution of agency. Let’s look at that distribution a little more carefully. I want to suggest that it comes in three forms.

(1) Active versus passive agency. The eye moves. It moves toward the horizon, whereas the world stays in place. This much we have established. But this sense of motion is both strengthened and ren­dered more complex by other ‘‘details.’’ Look at the ground. On the left there are trees, perhaps stylized cypresses or poplars. Then, in the middle we see what may be fields, which also seem to be a little like a passage, a passage that has opened up across the surface of the earth between the aircraft and that embracing vanishing point. And in the center at the bottom, and on the right, there are three or four buildings—houses or perhaps some of them are barns or light indus­trial buildings. We barely get to see any of this; instead what we see are outlines.

At this point the practical thought intrudes itself: that is simply how it is. For if you fly at 550 or 600 miles an hour at only two hundred feet above the ground then indeed you barely see what passes beneath

you. This was no doubt part of the thinking of the artist, but the pic­ture could have been drawn otherwise. For instance, we might, as in the television depictions of exemplary cruise-missile attacks in the Gulf War, have looked right into the windows of the buildings. But we don’t, and we don’t because to do so and to see such ‘‘detail’’ would undermine the dominant distribution that is here being performed: the division between the dynamics of the aircraft and the statics of the world.

We established that much in chapter 2. But if agents act, then they act because the capacity or propensity for action has been distributed in their direction. They have been constituted in that way. This was the claim with which I started. On the cover of the brochure we see the performance of such a distribution. The plane is being performed as an actor possessed of certain attributes, and in particular one capable of rapid and powerful movement, in the air. But that sense of move­ment and power is built in contrast for it cannot be separated from the buildings, the trees, and the fields. And the contrast works most strongly because of their pictured physical proximity, viewpoint, and ground. The relative motion is made visible by performing them as near and yet as almost infinitely far. Their physical proximity pre­cisely marks a powerful boundary that performs them as static agents, agents made inert, close and yet Other, a division that is thereby re­inforced by ‘‘the details.’’

Look again. Trees? Fields? Houses? To put it mildly, the combina­tion is striking. What more conventional depictions of nature and cul­ture could one ever hope to find? And if the buildings do not take the form of interiors (or even exteriors) by Johannes Vermeer, then this hardly matters because we already know that gardens, barns, and orchards are places of domestication, domesticity. That they are slow and soft, in some important senses passive. We know this, and the pic­ture rests in part on this knowledge. But it also recursively performs it, performs them as passive, precisely because they are made to stand in contradistinction to the power of the aircraft, an aircraft made to inhabit a theater of activity, the theatre of work and war.11 We are deal­ing not simply with a division between the aircraft and the houses; instead we are witnessing the (further) performance of a distribution between two great worlds: the world of the active and the world of 122 Aesthetics the passive. A distribution that implies their mutual dependence.

(2) Transcendence versus mundanity. Now move to the horizon.

No, to beyond the horizon. The ability to make this move again works by combining Albertian perspectivalism and its promise of bound­less (but not yet visible) volume—what Rotman (1987) calls a ‘‘zero point’’—with the depiction of motion within that volume. The com­bination operates to generate a second contrast between that which is here, present, and that which is not. As with the formalism in the pre­vious chapter, one might argue that the aircraft is both here and not here. It is present but also absent. It is here, for a split second, above these buildings. But it is also, already, for all intents and purposes, beyond the horizon at the dominant vanishing point.

So this is another version of absence/presence, of heterogeneity.

But what lies beyond the horizon? Most obviously, the enemy Other (which is almost always implicit rather than explicit in this brochure).

Perhaps, then, the contrast plays on the distinction discussed earlier, between activity and passivity, or domesticity and war, in which case the aircraft is shielding the home fires against the threat from beyond the horizon.12 Such would be an iconographic distribution wholly consistent with the many strategic and technical narratives about the character of ‘‘the threat.’’

But there is something else as well, for we fly at the speed of sound toward the bright place of the vanishing point that is also the focal point of the picture. There is nothing much to detain us. We are pulled toward this point of attraction down the lines of movement. So it is a central place, the zero point, but it is also a bright place that seems to shine in our eyes like the rays of the setting sun.13 And the symbol­ism is strong, for if it is the heart of the matter, a place to which we move, to which we are attracted, then it is also a place that holds out promise, the promise of illumination.

But what is the character of that illuminating promise? It might, of course, be the blinding ‘‘atomic flash’’ of nuclear detonation. But this is only one possibility. For if the aircraft is heading toward the enemy, then it is also heading toward the place where it will fulfill its mis­sion, which means that it is hurrying to a dangerous place and a future that requires great courage. This need for courage generates a rever­sal, one in which invulnerability has given way to vulnerability, but a vulnerability that is now combined with skill in combat, the com­bat of machines and men, but also with bravery (for bravery is not Aesthetics 123

possible without vulnerability). This combination makes that distant place extraordinary, a place of destiny, of desire, of consummation. For this, after all, is what the machine is all about: it is a machine to go and look, and then a machine to go and destroy.

So this is the second contrast: the performance of a distinction be­tween what is here and what is not. A play around the heterogeneity of absence/presence that is also the performance of a division between the mundane and the everyday, between the rhopographic and the prosaic on the one hand, and the extraordinary, beautiful, megalo – graphic and transcendental on the other.14 The burst of light is there­fore both literal and figurative. It is the light that takes the active agent and links him with the destiny of the hero. And the passive agent? Well, she has no place there, no place beyond. It is not for her to com­mune with the light, to test her skills in danger.

(3) Invulnerability versus vulnerability. I have mentioned vulnera­bility but I want to take this a little further by looking again at the relationship between the text of the front cover and the perspectival picture. If this is ambiguous, then perhaps there are two possibilities.

First, the picture may be read as background to the letters in the foreground. This would mean that the letters did not belong to the picture and its perspectivalism at all but rather hang in front of it like a flat screen or perhaps—like the glass at the top of an observa­tion tower—a barrier that lets us see what is beyond without actually belonging to it. It also adds the warning that it is, indeed, a screen (for it is precisely the letters that make visible the otherwise invisible screen). If this is correct, the sense of proximate detachment is over­whelming. We (the aircraft? the reader?) are there, but we are also quite apart, in which case the cover performs a distinction between the invulnerable as against the vulnerability of the world.

Second, we may take the letters off the flat screen and insert them back into the picture. If we do this they turn themselves into an icon for the object that they also tell and can be located in two ways within that picture.15 First, it may be that they are floating with their mid­point just above the line of the horizon, in which case (and contrary to my suggestion above) the picture is no longer ‘‘taken’’ from the aircraft but from immediately behind and below it at the split second that it flew past to meet its destiny at the vanishing point beyond the hori – 124 Aesthetics zon. Second, it maybe that the letters are instead written in giant pro-

portions across the horizon, like the credits at the end of a Hollywood movie.16 If this is right then the aircraft has been turned into a huge wall between us and the enemy, an invulnerable wall, which shields the vulnerable world that shelters behind it. Even so the trope is the same: invulnerability/vulnerability, invulnerability/dependence, it is another way of performing the same distribution of agency.17

Invulnerability/vulnerability. So this is a third distribution, indeed, a version of the classic distribution in which the domestic is shielded from (but provides for) work and war, which is also a distribution between the invulnerable eye and the vulnerable ground, a ground made all the more vulnerable by the way in which it has been frozen into stasis and made so that it could never touch the aircraft18— whereas, to be sure, the aircraft could touch the ground.19