Martial Aesthetics by Engberg-Pedersen Anders;

Author:Engberg-Pedersen, Anders;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

We say, then, that war does not belong in the realm of the arts or the sciences, but in the realm of social life. It is a conflict of great interests, which is resolved with blood, and it only differs from other conflicts in that respect. Rather than comparing it with art, it could more accurately be compared with commerce, which is also a conflict of human interests and activities, and it is much closer to politics, which in turn is a form of commerce on a larger scale. Moreover, politics is the womb in which war develops.51

Clausewitz seeks to move beyond the art–science debate because the material of the artist and that of the commander are different in kind. War forms a part of social life and politics and therefore cannot be compared with the dead material of the mechanical arts, nor even with the living material of the “ideal” or fine arts—the human spirit and the emotions—because they remain passive objects shaped by the artist. The commander instead works with a “living, reacting material,” which makes warfare into a dialectical relationship between equally active parts.52 The agency of the object, along with the pervasive uncertainty of intelligence about the enemy’s doings and plans, thwarts the seamless superimposition of the vocabulary of art onto warfare. Indeed, in a possible retort to Rühle von Lilienstern, Clausewitz states that the art–science debate has led the whole discussion in a false direction and has “caused an automatic equation of war with other art forms or sciences and a host of false analogies.”53

As shown earlier, one of the analogies that Clausewitz himself frequently uses is the campaign as a work of art. But just as the reactive material of war differs from the passive material of art, so the genius’s creative efforts lead to different products. Comparing the military campaign to the paintings of Raphael and Rubens, Clausewitz proceeds to underline their differences: the visual masterpieces of art can be taken in completely and in their totality, but war offers no such finished “artworks.”54 Given the incompleteness of historiography, events must be painstakingly reconstructed out of limited and often contradictory eyewitness accounts, dispatches, letters, and a range of other documents. The totality of a campaign, the “work” shaped by the strategic brilliance of the commander, will always remain a conjecture, a whole that is fuzzy not only at the edges but also at the very center. In other words, just as the material consists only of “mutable elements,”55 so does the final result of the commander’s creative endeavors.

These discrepancies reveal the uneasy relationship between art and aesthetics and warfare. Appealing and pervasive as the discourse of aesthetics is in his works, Clausewitz at once applies and disowns it. On the one hand, the fusion of the two vocabularies is made possible by the establishment of a series of basic analogies between the fields. The subject of art and the subject of war must be possessed of certain overlapping qualities and abilities—genius, creativity, originality—just as the objects correspond in their status as the end product of an artistic form-giving.

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