Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above 9780822372219

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AERIAL A F T E R M AT H S

next wave: new directions in w ­ omen ’ s studies

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Caren Kaplan, Inderpal Grewal, Robyn Wiegman, Series Editors

AERIAL A F T E R M AT H S wa r ­t i m e f r o m a b o v e

CAREN KAPLAN

Duke University Press  Durham and London  2018

© 2018 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper ∞ Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Minion Pro by Westchester Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Kaplan, Caren, [date–] author. Title: Aerial aftermaths : war­time from above / Caren Kaplan. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2017. | Series: Next wave | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2017028530 (print) | lccn 2017041830 (ebook) isbn 9780822372219 (ebook) isbn 9780822370086 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9780822370178 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Photographic surveying—­History. | Aerial photography—­ History. | War photography—­History. | Photography, Military. Classification: lcc ta593.2 (ebook) | lcc ta593.2 .k375 2017 (print) | ddc 358.4/54—­dc23 lc rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.g­ ov​/­2017028530 Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the University of California, Davis, which provided funds to support the publication of this book. Cover art: Grant Heilman Photography Frontispiece: Thomas Baldwin, “The Balloon Prospect from above the Clouds,” in Airopaidia. Hand-­colored ­etching. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

For Sofia

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CONTENTS

acknowl­e d gments   ​i x

Introduction AERIAL AFTERMATHS ​1

1. Surveying War­time Aftermaths THE FIRST MILITARY SURVEY OF SCOTLAND ​34

2. Balloon Geography THE EMOTION OF MOTION IN AEROSTATIC WAR­T IME ​ 68

3. La Nature à Coup d’Oeil “SEEING ALL” IN EARLY PA­N ORAMAS ​104

4. Mapping “Mesopotamia” THE EMERGENCE OF AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHY IN EARLY TWENTIETH-­C ENTURY IRAQ ​138

5. The Politics of the Sensible AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHY’S WAR­T IME AFTERMATHS ​ 180

Afterword SENSING DISTANCE ​207

notes ​2 17   works cited ​ 255   index ​ 277

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A C K N O W L­E D G M E N T S

When did this book begin? Watching the “tele­vi­sion war” in Indochina unfold when I was young? Looking on as the new twenty-­four-­hour cable news stations helped to produce the my­thol­ogy of precision warfare by transmitting “smart bomb” footage during the First Persian Gulf War? Answering the phone on the morning of September 11, 2001, when my friend Jenny called to tell me to “turn on the tele­vi­sion”? Feeding my infant ­daughter with one eye on the news as the “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq took place in 2003? ­These mediated experiences have led me to won­der what happens to a society that proposes a war with largely hidden costs and damages to ­those who wage it. Losing the ability to understand the costs of war at a distance leads to a similar loss of recognition of conflict and vio­lence “at home.” Although ­people in the United States “see” more than ever thanks to conventional and social media linked to the proliferation of communicative devices and networks, we do not always see clearly what we have lost or sense what remains imperceptible. This book emerged over a long period of time as I pondered the unseen as well as the seen, the ways in which spatial and temporal distance render some ­people, places, and ­things sharply vis­i­ble as targets while missing entirely other worlds of pos­si­ble affiliation and recognition. ­There ­were many ­people who assisted and inspired me in the pro­cess of turning this inquiry into a book. Fasten your seat ­belt (or skip what comes next if you are impatient) ­because I have a lot of ­people to thank. I must begin with the p ­ eople I never tire of talking to no m ­ atter how many years or miles intervene between our meeting in person. Inderpal Grewal, Minoo Moallem, and Jennifer Terry are the best friends of a lifetime of

thinking, writing, teaching, and fighting the endless good fight at our workplaces. ­There are ­really no adequate words to thank them for the constancy of their friendship and the inspiration I derive from their scholarship. Just across the street from my h ­ ouse I discovered a brilliant interlocutor and friend; Marisol de la Cadena has handed me just the right book to throw me into a tizzy of new thoughts, dropped just the right comment when I have been stuck, walked miles with me when I have felt too sedentary, and poured me innumerable glasses of wine when work needed to stop for the day—­thank you, neighbor. Lisa Parks has boosted my morale, inspired me with her tour de force scholarship, and demonstrated to me once again that collaboration can be one of life’s joys. I share ­house­holding, parenting, and academic life and so much more with Eric Smoodin; I could write an entire book singing his virtues and never get to the end—­absolutely nothing happens in my life without his loving care and support and I am so deeply grateful. Fortunately, I think that he has gotten over his shock when I first asked him if he happened to have a dvd copy of Test Pi­lot. Reader, he did. The greatest joy in working on an other­wise sad topic has to be the circle of smart, supportive companions who inspire and join in the work. Deborah Cowen and Emily Gilbert, you are my heroes forever. Javier A ­ rbona, Simone Browne, Lisa Cartwright, Deborah Cohler, Carolyn Dinshaw, Vernadette Gonzalez, Juana María Rodriguez, Laura Kurgan, L ­ éopold Lambert, Marget Long, Chandra Mukerji, Anjali Nath, Mimi Nguyen, Sima Shakhsari, Ella Shohat, Mimi Sheller, Bob Stam, Lucy Suchman, Federica Timeto, Robyn Wiegman, and Barb Voss lift my spirits with their innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship and personal generosity. Many thanks to Peter Adey, Attiya Ahmad, Paul Amar, John Armitage, Aaron Belkin, Ryan Bishop, Leigh Campoamor, Jordan Crandall, Tim Cresswell, Rosita Dimova, Ricardo Dominguez, Melinda Fagan, Keith Feldman, Elena Glasberg, David Theo Goldberg, Gaston Gordillo, Stephen Graham, Sarah Green, Derek Gregory, Stephen Groening, Roger Hallas, Jennifer Hamilton, Ömür Harmanşah, Cory Hayden, Jake Kosek, Mary Lou Lobsinger, Alex L ­ ubin, Derek McCormack, Nick Mirzoeff, Chandra Mukerji, Soraya Murray, Catherine Sameh, Chris Schaberg, David Serlin, Yuan Shu, Charles Stankevich, Jonathan Sterne, Phillip Vannini, Jutta Weber, Laura Wexler, and Su-­lin Yu for inviting me to t­hings, reading ­things, publishing ­things—­making all the impor­tant ­things pos­si­ble including drinking and eating in such good com­pany. ­There are so many p ­ eople who have taken an interest, cheered me on, passed along an idea or source, or served as role models and stellar colleagues; among them, thank you Crystal Baik, x 

Acknowl­e dgments

Tani Barlow, Lauren Berlant, Sutapa Biswas, Judith Butler, Rey Chow, Jim Clifford, Cathy Davidson, Joe De Lappe, Lindsey Dillon, Fran Dyson, Anna Everett, Bia Gayatto, Bill Germano, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Jennifer Greenburg, Anitra Grisales, Akhil Gupta, Yannis Hamilakis, Donna Haraway, Waleed Hazbun, Brett Holman, Lochlann Jain, Miranda Joseph, Doug Kahn, Laleh Kalili, Ronak Kapadia, Amy Kaplan, Jim Ketchum, Jill Lewis, Jon Lewis, P ­ eter Limbrick, Catherine Lutz, Karim Makdisi, Purnima Mankekar, Franco Marineo, Donald Moore, Ruth Mostern, Jen Southern, Rebecca Stein, Hayden White, and Jayne Wilkinson. Paul Saint-­Amour kindly shared images with me at a key juncture. A special thanks to Rebecca Wexler for generously sharing her wonderful master’s thesis research with me. I am deeply grateful to Jananne al-­Ani, Sophie Ristelhueber, and Fazal Sheikh for giving me permission to include their art work in this book. Some of my research and writing was greatly aided by a Digital Innovation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Socie­ties and a uc President’s Faculty Research in the Humanities Fellowship as well as a uc Davis Humanities Institute Faculty Research Seminar Grant. The uc Humanities Research Institute (uchri) has provided me with funds for working groups, conferences, and many workshops at uc Irvine, uc Berkeley, and uc Davis—­I am so grateful to David Theo Goldberg and the wonderful staff at uchri. I thank former uc Davis Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies Dean Jessie Ann Owens as well as interim deans Pat Turner and Susan Kaiser for their support of my research over the years. Some of my work has received support from the uc Davis Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and the Center for ­Women and Research. A residency fellowship from the University of Southern California led me to work with the amazing Tara McPherson and the entire talented editorial and design group at Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular—­Steve Anderson, Erik Loyer, Raegan Kelly, and Craig Dietrich. Working with Erik Loyer on the ACLS multi-­media proj­ect Precision Targets helped me to develop and realize my ideas in ways that continue to unfold. What would I have done without my wonderful online writing partners on Alan Klima’s Academic Muse website—­most of them anonymous but nonetheless dear to me—­and on the ­little Facebook “Writing Everyday” group started by Toby Beauchamp that grew and grew? You all kept me sane, helped me adhere to deadlines unrealistic and dire. You taught this rather old academic plenty of new tricks. And, we continue! In par­tic­u­lar, all my grateful love goes to four nonanonymous, brave, and brilliant writing pals who are always ­there with me: Susana Loza, Juana María Rodriguez, Sue Schweik, Acknowl­e dgments   xi

and Barb Voss. Thank you, Eric Smoodin, for writing with me e­ very day and reading every­thing many, many times over with patient care. Working in the acad­emy for so many years, I have had the im­mense plea­ sure of working with extraordinary students who have become colleagues or ­people in the world d ­ oing significant work. I have learned so much from each of them, including Rusty Bartels, Toby Beauchamp, Tallie ben Daniel, Hilary Berwick, Abigail Boggs, Rebecca Carpenter, Mark Chiang, Ben D’Harlingue, Rebecca Dolhinow, Candace Fujikane, Jane Garrity, Kristen Ghodsee, Vernadette Gonzalez, Ju Hui Judy Han, Mayu Haldan Jones, Gillian Harkins, Hsuan Hsu, Gretchen Jones, Tristan Josephson, Kim Kono, Karen Leong, Susana Loza, Victor Roman Mendoza, David Michalski, Elizabeth Montegary, Jamila Moore-­Pewu, Josef Nguyen, Mimi Nguyen, Nancy Ordover, Jackie Orr, Christina Owens, Terry Park, Katrina Petersen, Jami Proctor-­Xu, Jasbir Puar, Jillian Sandell, Millie Thayer, Kara Thompson, Barb Voss, and Edlie Wong. It has been my joy to help to build and maintain the cultural studies PhD program at uc Davis and I want to send a shout-­out not only to recent gradu­ates, some of whom are mentioned above, but also to current students, especially Xan Chacko, Diana Pardo Pedrazo, Andrea Miller, Toby Smith, and May Ee Wong. My colleagues in the Department of American Studies at uc Davis have supported me e­ very step of the way; my deepest thanks to my current chair, Julie Sze, and to Javier Arbona, Charlotte Biltekoff, Ryan Lee Cartwright,­­Anjali Nath, Michael Smith, Eric Smoodin, Carolyn Thomas, and Grace Wang. Some colleagues extend themselves to truly remarkable degrees. Thanks to Christina Cogdell’s incredible generosity I was able to spend three weeks in London to do primary research at a key point in my work. Thank you, Christina, from the bottom of my heart for the airline miles, drinks at the pub, the fun exploring, the couch to sleep on, and wonderful conversation. My work has been enlightened by hours of conversation with colleagues and gradu­ate students in our research group on critical militarization, policing, and security studies (with special thanks to Javier Arbona, Lindsey Dillon, and Anjali Nath). The vibrant sts community (and the ModLab crew) at uc Davis has offered me intellectual stimulation and collegial opportunities galore; it is a plea­sure to work with Mario Biagioli, Patrick Carroll, Tim Choy, Marisol de la Cadena, Joe Dumit, Jim Griesemer, Tim Lenoir, Emily Merchant, Colin Milburn, Roberta Milstein, and Kriss Ravetto-­Biagioli. Colleagues from other programs with whom I share work and to whom I owe many thanks and collegial recognition include Larry Bogad, Angie Chabram, Seeta Chaganti, Elizabeth Constable, Maxine Craig, Roberto Delgadillo, Tarek El Haik, Omnia El Shakry, Kris xii 

Acknowl­e dgments

Fallon, Margie Ferguson, Jaimey Fisher, Kathleen Frederickson, Beth Freeman, Laura Grindstaff, Luis Guarnizo, Angela Harris, Wendy Ho, Robert Irwin, Suad Joseph, Molly McCarthy, Sunaina Maira, Desiree Martin, John Marx, Liz Miller, Flagg Miller, Susette Min, Fiamma Montezemolo, Bettina Ng’weno, Kimberly Nettles, Hearne Pardee, Robyn Rodriguez, Parama Roy, Suzana Sawyer, Sudipta Sen, Maurice Stierl, and Gina Werfel. Susan Kaiser has extended many kinds of thoughtful support—­from my hire years ago to all her current support of the faculty as our interim dean. Among the many current and former staff ­people who have kept my world ­running, I would like to thank in par­tic­u­lar Naomi Ambriz, Aklil Bekele, Lisa Blackford, Anthony Drown, Evelyn Farias, Carlos Garcia, Fatima Garcia, Maria Garcia, Stella Mancillas, Omar Mojaddedi, Melanie Norris, and Tina Tansey. I have also benefited so much from the hard work of a series of gradu­ate student research assistants over the years; for this book in par­tic­u­lar I would like to thank Cathy Hannabach and Myrtie Williams and, for rather extraordinary dedication at the ­bitter end, the very wonderful Andrea Miller. To my friends and ­family far and wide who support me through thick and thin, cook dinner, buy drinks, like my social media posts (or not, but love me anyway), and sustain me always—­thank you, Deborah Agre, Rosio Alvarez, Arash Bayatmakou, Shahin Bayatmakou, Randy Becker, Amy Bomse, Michael Brondoli, Steve Boucher, Sharon Butler, Fred Davidson, Coca Eckel, Lena Flaum, Henry Flax, Mitch Flax, Al Jessel, Kirin Jessel, Sonal Jessel, Surina Kahn, Heidi Kaplan, Mitch Kaplan, Martha Lewis, Monica McCormick, Ann Martin, David Norton, Bob Reynolds, Brita Sands, Naomi Schneider, Robbie Smoodin, Carolyn Thomas, Bharat Trehan, Anna Weidman, and Emily Young. My loving thanks for the “eggs” to my beloved friends from college days: Meredith Miller, Ruth Rohde, Sig Roos, and Diana Stetson. Margie Cohen, Renee Dryfoos, Sarah Gould, and Rebecca Pope have brought me through it all not too much the worse for wear and much healthier in body and mind. The truism that “it takes a village” is never truer than when you are an older parent without any relatives living nearby. Thank you, Leslie Blevins, David de la Peña, Natalya Eagan-­Rosenberg, Artur Janc, Kasia Koscielska, Travis Milner, Fernando Moreno, Paul Moylan, Matt Rosenberg, Carolyn Thomas, Valerie Venghiattis, and Jennie Wadlin-­Moylan for all the shared childcare and good com­pany over the years when I was writing this book. Years ago, in a snowstorm, I talked for hours with a fascinating person who became my editor and dear friend. Thank you, Ken Wissoker, for all your advice and generous support. The entire team at Duke University Press Acknowl­e dgments   xiii

has taken ­great care with this book proj­ect. Thank you, especially, Elizabeth Ault. I am also most grateful to the anonymous readers who gave me insightful and constructive suggestions for revision. This book was written during a time in my life of tremendous loss. Mourning has brought me closer to the subject of my work in ways I could never have predicted. First, I must remember the first professor who took me seriously, Lester Mazor. I miss his wry sense of humor and his brilliant mind. His steady friendship expressed itself over de­cades of lively letters exchanged and occasional, jovial meals enjoyed together. Michael Ragussis showed me that a se­nior colleague can become a best friend. His wit, erudition, and unending generosity filled my life with encouragement and joy. I cannot believe he is ­really gone and I miss him more than I can say. Alan Pred opened up the field of geography to me by inviting me to every­thing with g­ reat enthusiasm and kindness. He got me into all kinds of trou­ble and I loved him for it. Fi­nally, but most importantly, I thank my parents for their never-­ending faith in me and for the gift of their close presence in their last years. Arthur Kaplan and Doris Flax Kaplan loved books, gardens, food, beauty in form and function, and their c­ hildren, grand­child, relatives, and friends. They wanted me to finish this book; they willed it in many ways even as my grief in losing them also required more time and thought than I might have ­imagined. I kept their memory close to me as I completed this work and I ­will have to be content with that as I celebrate its closure. This book is dedicated fully and with all my heart to my ­daughter, Sofia Malka Smoodin-­Kaplan. Sofia, thank you for holding just the right amount of curiosity in and distance from this work I have been d ­ oing throughout the span of your life thus far. Thank you for helping me step away and for sharing me when I have needed to step back in. You learned to spot “aerial perspective” in a movie almost as soon as you learned to speak and you cheerfully lugged packages into my study with just the right touch of fond sarcasm to announce “Surprise, it’s another book!” So, ­here is another book. This one is for you.

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Acknowl­e dgments

INTRODUCTION Aerial Aftermaths

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A new visual culture redefines both what it is to see, and what ­there is to see. —­B RUNO LATOUR , “Drawing ­Things Together”

The world is a mobile texture of ­these distinctions between seen and seeing objects. It is the stuff in which the inner folding, unfolding and refolding takes place which makes vision pos­si­ble between ­things. —­M ICHEL DE CERTEAU , The Practice of Everyday Life

More than a de­cade ­after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, one can get a shiver down one’s spine reading the first line of Michel de Certeau’s iconic chapter “Walking in the City” in The Practice of Everyday Life: “Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center” (de Certeau 1984, 91). Th ­ ese twin towering structures signified both the glamor and the rapacious global reach of the metropolis whose southern endpoint they anchored as well as the strug­gle for the soul of neighborhoods in the midst of rampant gentrification.1 In a city of many “sights,” the towers ­were themselves objects to be seen, their distinctive silhouettes readily identifiable in the skyline of their era. The towers also offered spectacular views—­unobstructed sight lines from the South Tower’s observation deck could stretch to fifty miles on a clear day. Observing New York City far below from a platform over 1,300 feet in the air induced in de Certeau a “voluptuous plea­sure” in “seeing the ­whole,” to read the city from a distance like a “solar Eye,” “looking down like a god.” This textualization of the g­ reat metropolis through aerial viewing

convinced de Certeau that New York, unlike its more ancient Eu­ro­pean counter­parts, continually “invents itself,” showing l­ittle regard for the past or the ­future. From the 110th floor, he wrote, the pres­ent is perceptible as excessive energy, a “universe that is constantly exploding.” On an early autumn day in 2001, spectators looked up at the World Trade Center towers as the past and the f­uture converged on the pres­ent. The view from the towers themselves in their last hours is not one we want to invite into our minds. Years ­later, far into the “war on terror” that permeates the aftermath of this event, rereading de Certeau’s writing on aerial views, the towers that became tropes of po­liti­cal extremism of all kinds return to their earlier status not only as the nth degree of muscular urban architecture but as platforms for a specific kind of observation and practice of perception—­distant, remote, abstract. Their apocalyptic fate hovers around de Certeau’s musing on the disembodied effect of being lifted so high into the air—­a weightlessness, he argues, that dissolves the spectator into a reader of a spectacular view “and nothing more” (92). That view from an observation deck that now no longer exists prompted de Certeau to contrast aerial observers to the city’s walkers, who “operate below the thresholds at which visibility begins,” making use of “spaces that cannot be seen” (93). De Certeau’s walkers “write” the urban space rather than panoptically “read it”; “neither author nor spectator,” the city’s walkers resist repre­sen­ta­tion to make city life through everyday movement. A de­cade and a half a­ fter the towers collapsed, a­ fter the war on terror and its tributary vio­lence and security practices have convinced many of us that nothing remains potentially “unseen,” de Certeau’s poetic conception of an embodied network of “moving, inspecting writings” that “compose a manifold story” of everyday life that evades the “planned and readable city” through an “opaque and blind mobility” could suggest a romantic fantasy (93). In this opposition between power­ful panopticism and subterranean re­sis­tance, which is as old as modernity, at least, aerial views play a villainous role. Seductively pleas­ur­able and all-­empowering, the view from above promises to reveal all to the state or to any other entity that can mobilize the resources to produce ­these kinds of images. Against the totalizing view that produces repre­sen­ta­tion, unruly and random mobile networks keep moving, evading the search beams of the God’s eye, building meaningful places through layers of memories stitched together by embodied quotidian practices. This book argues that the history of aerial views—­whether observed from towers or mountains or hot air balloons or planes, ­whether incorporated into cartographic surveys or panoramic paintings—­trou­bles 2 Introduction

this conventional divide between power and re­sis­tance in the storyline of visual culture in modernity. I would suggest that we move beyond de Certeau’s evocative opposition between “seen and seeing objects” to consider the pos­ si­ble presence of the unseen or unsensed, not to resort to identification or to construct a romanticized alterity but to let go of the desire for totalized vision that requires a singular world, always already legible, along with its oppositional counterpart. If the cultural history of aerial views conveys any lesson at all, it may be the recognition of the vio­lence always already inherent in pursuing both desires. SPECTACULAR AFTERM ATH

We have seen the Twin Towers collapse hundreds of times on TV. The steel and glass skyscrapers exploding like a bag of flour, the dust and smoke pluming out across Manhattan. But never like this, from above. —­Philip Delves Broughton, “Dramatic Images of the World Trade Center Collapse”

In February  2010 a “trove” of aerial photo­graphs of the collapsing World Trade Center towers was broadcast on abc tele­vi­sion news and circulated widely online (see plate 1). ­These previously “unseen” images, according to an Associated Press (ap) report, offered “a rare and chilling view from the heavens of the burning twin towers and the apocalyptic shroud of smoke and dust that settled over the city.” The photo­graphs, taken on the morning of September 11, 2001, by Greg Semendinger, a New York Police Department (nypd) aviation unit he­li­cop­ter pi­lot, had been sitting in an archive maintained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (nist), the federal agency that was put in charge of the investigation of the twin towers’ collapse. ­After abc News filed a Freedom of Information Act request, 2,779 photo­graphs (including Semendinger’s) stored at nist on nine compact discs ­were released, and a small number of Semendinger/nist ­images ­were disseminated to the public in two batches. In the parroting nature of con­temporary news culture, all subsequent stories about the distribution of the Semendinger/nist aerial images pushed the same a­ ngle—­the nypd he­li­cop­ter contained the “only photog­raphers allowed in the airspace near the skyscrapers on Sept. 11, 2001”—­with the accompanying headlines: “9/11 photos show day from dif­fer­ent perspective” and “8 years l­ater, the pictures still shock” (Ilnytzky and Long 2010, 2). Aerial observation is reputed to offer a field of vision radically dif­fer­ent from the point of view that is available from the ground. Si­mul­ta­neously Introduction   3

perceived to be abstract and realistic, once channeled into a medium like a sketch, painting, or photo­graph, the “view from above” invites decipherment. Usually associated with utilitarian state, military, or municipal proj­ects (reconnaissance, surveying, cartography, urban planning) or modernist aesthetics (abstraction, minimalism, objectivism) or a specific genre of con­temporary narrative landscape photography, aerial imagery is inevitably tied, historically and technologically, to modes of passive and powered aviation as well as methods of mechanical production and reproduction that structure the possibilities and constraints of the imagery. Due to the flattening effect on perception of three-­dimensional objects generated by extreme height, most military aerial reconnaissance photography has been believed to be useful only to specialized analysts in time of declared war or to be of historical value solely to scholars or “niche” art collectors (Sekula [1975] 1984, 33). Yet this very quality of the aerial image can generate dynamic interest as the viewer attempts to “see” clearly what appears at first glance to be “unseeable.” The history of aerial imagery itself reveals the emergence of “ways of seeing” that underscore the uneven and varied nature of embodied observation in modernity, as well as the instability of vision’s primacy in Western culture (Berger 1972, 7; Jay 1994). The first eyewitness accounts of the view from above generated by the advent of ­human flight did shock and fascinate as they circulated in late eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century public culture. Emerging in an era of near-­constant revolution and warfare, “prospects” sketched from balloons and the elevated perspectives exhibited in panoramic rotundas joined bird’s-­eye views, war maps, and estate surveys to entertain as well as to inform. This early version of what James Der Derian (2001) now calls the “military-­industrial-­ media-­entertainment network” gathered together the latest scientific inquiries into optics and chemistry with developments in landscape art and surveying practices along with emergent culture industries to bring war­time into everyday life, representing war at a distance in contrast to thriving Eu­ro­pean metropoles “at peace.” Paul Virilio has argued that the power­ful combination of the airplane and the practice of photography in the early twentieth ­century inaugurated new intensities in this historical evolution of visual culture, bringing the mode of warfare observation into perception itself (1989, 19). Perception, however, is not a stable ­thing, and neither is warfare. Both ­human flight and photography along with cartography made pos­si­ble new dynamic interplays between “seen” and “unseen” ele­ments, establishing the ambiguities of aerial observation while intensifying the links between ­these practices and the waging of war. 4 Introduction

FIGURE I.1  ​Pre-­attack

Department.

mosaic view of Hiroshima, Japan, April 13, 1945. U.S. War

Perhaps due to the inherently ambiguous nature of aerial imagery and its mostly ephemeral, utilitarian function in military practice, only a few views from above hold iconic status in the public rec­ord of catastrophic and violent events. Thus, Davide Deriu has argued that while many genres of photography have been linked to memorialization following traumatic, violent events, aerial photography has usually been excluded (2007, 197). Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that public disclosure of aerial imagery postattack or ­after a catastrophic event is a more recent phenomenon linked to increasingly globalized media industries and the availability of multiply sourced imagery.2 ­Until the coincidence of the ramp-up of visual technologies that became associated with the war on terror a­ fter 9/11 and the advent of social networking with its intensely rapid circulation of digital imagery,3 along with the unquenchable thirst of news outlets for information product twenty-­four hours a day, the “God’s-­eye view” of violent scenes was e­ ither classified as “secret” by the military or released on an extremely selective basis (for example, high-­altitude reconnaissance images of Hiroshima ­“before” and “­after” the U.S. attack by atomic bomb) (see figs. I.1 and I.2). For most of the twentieth c­ entury, aerial photography of traumatic or violent events was usually associated with official surveying, documenting, and conducting of surveillance and reconnaissance rather than the capturing of images at the “­human” level of individualized suffering that is usually associated affirmatively with photojournalism. ­Today, any major event is accompanied by aerial imagery that displays the size of the demonstration, for example, or a satellite image of the location of interest.4 Ubiquitous aerial Introduction   5

FIGURE I.2  ​Post-­attack

Department.

mosaic view of Hiroshima, Japan, August 11, 1945. U.S. War

imagery now saturates global media as well as social networking practices, reworking the distinction between distance and proximity in reporting the scale of violent or significant events. Arguably, at the cusp of the turn of this ­century, that structuring distinction between remote documentation and humanist portraiture still held firm. ­There are numerous examples of ground-­level photojournalism in the 9/11 visual archive.5 For example, around the time of the fifth-­year commemoration of the attacks in New York, two collections of photo­graphs taken by photog­raphers on the ground ­were published, both titled Aftermath. In Af­ termath: Unseen 9/11 Photos by a New York City Cop, former nypd detective John Botte memorialized the first responder as a kind of everyman whose noble heroism reflected not only the grievous loss of places and p ­ eople but also the official neglect of t­ hose, like Botte himself, who suffered from posttraumatic stress or from health prob­lems linked to the toxins that permeated the air and soil around Ground Zero. Botte’s black-­and-­white photo­graphs ­were taken primarily at ground level, but the book includes several images shot from an early morning he­li­cop­ter flyover on September 13 (Botte 2006, 100). Professional photographer Joel Meyero­witz’s Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive, originally published in 2006, was republished in 2011 for the tenth anniversary with the support of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. The museum’s link to Meyero­witz helped to position the photographer not only as a celebrated visual chronicler of the ruination of part of lower Manhattan but as an almost official mourner of individualized vic6 Introduction

tims. Both books draw on conventions of photojournalism, landscape photography, and portraiture while making claims for documentary authenticity and nationalist exceptionalism. It is in works like ­these that the concepts of the tantalizing “unseen” and the “archive” come together to produce a “spectacular aftermath”—­a hegemonic discourse that deploys imagery to reinforce the division between war and peace, suggesting that state vio­lence is rational, predictable, and confined to a proscribed space and duration. ­Whether in the authorial proj­ects of Botte and Meyero­witz or the ­Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photo­graphs exhibit that invited nonprofessional photog­raphers to contribute images linked to the events of September  11, 2001,6 the imperative to “see all” centered around visual artifacts, demanding that we “look” as closely as pos­si­ble to reveal the ground truth of an iconic experience for all humanity—­a spectacular aftermath.7 Nicholas Mirzoeff has argued, however, that the desire to “see” every­ thing, from the towers’ spectacular collapse to the chaos and fear generated at the scene of Ground Zero and beyond, remains a mostly unexamined “exercise of power” on the part of an imperial nation (2005, 3). This waging of ideological war through visual culture must be distinguished from “the right to look,” which “claims autonomy from this authority” in inventing a demo­cratic politics of presence and the real (Mirzoeff 2011, 4). Along ­these lines, David Simpson has argued that the 9/11 dead have been “framed” by a “rhetorical triumphalism and militarism” that must be critiqued through commemorative procedures disarticulated from empire (2006, 89). A some­­ what similar impulse powers the critical practice of “forensis,” intensive investigations that “reverse the forensic gaze” of states and corporations to challenge “the tyranny of their truth” (Weizman 2014, 11). Thomas Stubblefield has pointed to the paradoxical tension between an event so associated with spectacle and the undeniable experience of “absence, erasure, and invisibility” that pervaded the visual framing of 9/11 repre­sen­ta­tions (2015, 4). ­These critical practices redirect the work of viewing away from what John Taylor has called the “bazaar of death” in photojournalism—­the way in which the media abets the desire to “see all” in violent scenes, inculcating the belief that the lure of the spectacle is a justifiable part of saving the nation (1991, 1).8 The overwhelming dominance of imagery in the documentation of the immediate experience and memorialization of the attacks on the World Trade Center towers seems in many ways to offer possibilities for the demo­ cratizing “right to look” and “forensis” proj­ects. Nevertheless, throughout the first de­cade of the new ­century, as “unseen” photo­graphs and moving images continued to emerge and to be offered by the mainstream media and Introduction   7

memorializing interests as unique, authenticating emblems of patriotism, remembrance, and thrilling immersion in a world-­class spectacle, the marketplace of images inevitably exhausted the most prevalent tropes of spectacular aftermath photojournalism.9 Long a­ fter the official books, exhibits, and History Channel documentaries had first appeared, what marked the Semendinger/nist images as newsworthy in February 2010 was their apparent peculiarity of perspective; they are all aerial photo­graphs. THE VIEW FRO M AB OV E

With flight through the air and now in outer space a real­ity, our vision of the world and the universe has expanded far beyond our prevision or even imagination. Photography can hold still the fleeting glimpses of the world as seen by flyers: indeed it makes vis­i­ble, through remote space-­borne cameras, what man himself has not yet seen. —­Beaumont Newhall, Airborne Camera

­ oday ­there is hardly a city or large town anywhere in the industrialized T world that does not offer a sumptuous coffee-­table volume of images of the locale taken from the air. Or, environmentally conscious versions of t­hese kinds of commodities circulate in print and digital formats, illustrating calendars and daybooks, filling screen savers with color-­drenched imagery of beautiful places on earth, often environmentally endangered, as viewed from above. We marvel at the patterns of ocean waves, paths through luscious grass, mountainous dunes, and snow-­capped peaks, as well as spectacular shots of bridges, highways, suburbs, and urban cores. Aerial images are so much a part of our everyday life as image consumers, playing with Google Earth in odd moments or glancing at the cable news transmission of a satellite image of someplace where something newsworthy has happened, that we take them for granted. We absorb t­ hese views to such a degree that they seem to become part of our bodies, to constitute a natu­ral way of seeing. But we are not “born this way.” Just as the idea of a beautiful vista would have seemed unfamiliar or just plain insane to a hardworking farmer before nineteenth-­century notions of the sublime and the picturesque permeated an emergent mass culture, the meaning and purpose of an aerial view cropped up in bits and pieces but, ­until recently, never ­really cohered. Following this historical thread, one could argue that the view from above is still a fragmentary t­ hing, only barely holding together, despite the vigorous workout it receives in con­temporary culture. As the apparent exceptionality of the Semendinger/nist aerial imagery of the immediate aftermath of the 8 Introduction

attacks of September 11, 2001, suggests, in modernity, an elevated view is si­ mul­ta­neously a way of seeing and a sight in and of itself. It has become a truism to state that the view from above empowers the observer, but how exactly does a subject accrue authority from such an act? Th ­ ere is evidence that a celestial perspective on earthly m ­ atters was first expressed as a transcendental aesthetic in ancient Greece. As Denis Cosgrove has argued, in Hellenic culture, the “Apollonian gaze” gathered “diverse life on earth” into a “vision of unity,” thereby producing an “individualized,” “divine,” and “mastering” view from a “single perspective” (2001, xi). Although views from above can be recognized as part of Ptolemy’s geographic proj­ect in the first ­century ad or as a viewpoint in classic Taoist Chinese landscapes, it is during the Eu­ ro­pean Re­nais­sance that par­tic­u­lar kinds of landscapes, maps, and theatrical settings became realized through the technique of linear (or “single-­point”) perspective. Thus, elevated or bird’s-­eye views such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Map of Tuscany and the Chiana Valley (1502) or El Greco’s View of Toledo (ca. 1596–1600) established new aesthetics of space as scalar relationships between individuals, towns, and countries leading to the unified “kosmos” of l­ater geographers and artists such as Alexander von Humboldt and Caspar David Friedrich. This view “from the heavens” has powered vari­ous repre­sen­ta­tions of not only terrain and individual communities but the Western, modern state as a po­liti­cal institution. According to Astrit Schmidt-­Burkhardt, from the French Revolution onward, drawing on Baroque Christian iconography, this “God’s eye” became incorporated literally into official state declarations, commercial log­os, coins, and paper money (2002, 22) (see fig. I.3). By the twentieth ­century, the concept of a universal, all-­seeing perspective became thoroughly incorporated into colonial, state, and military modes of organ­ization, management, and planning (Scott 1998; Haffner 2013, 2). In so many accounts of the rise of vision as a privileged sense in Western modernity, the same examples of a dramatic transformation in ­human observation recur with a regularity that borders on scholarly obsession: the advent of ballooning, railroads, and aviation. From the late eigh­teenth ­century on, this narrative asserts, new transportation technologies made pos­si­ble “unpre­ce­dented spatial experiences” that altered profoundly or even “annihilated” early modern notions of time; the sensory perceptions of a material body moving through air, above the earth, provided the experiential difference that produced modernity’s sensibilities (Kern 1983, 1–2; Schivelbusch 1986, 33; Dubbini 2002, 5). Beaumont Newhall’s iconic discussion of aerial views in Airborne Camera, published in 1969, reaffirmed the conventions of twentieth-­century attitudes ­toward the view from above—it is flight, Introduction   9

FIGURE I.3  ​Daniel

Chodowiecki, As Auge der Vorsehung [The Eye of Providence], 1787. Courtesy of the British Museum.

embodied movement through the air, that generates a radical change in visual culture. As Newhall writes, although ­imagined aerial perspectives fascinated ­human beings through the ages before they could fly, ­these views ­were “earthbound”: “They show the land seen from ­great heights, not from points suspended in space. . . . ​When man at long last was able to ascend into the air he marveled at the sight of the land stretched seemingly endlessly below him” (1969, 11). According to this line of thought, while once confined to the “mind’s eye,” the sight enabled by flight is believed to have influenced a complete transformation in the ways through which moderns perceived their world, better understood their past, and ­imagined their ­future—­a visual culture that “changed the landscape itself and the way we design and inhabit it” (Dümpelmann 2014, 1). No longer “earthbound” or moving at a pace determined by the stride of the h ­ uman body or the usual animals involved in transport, the new technologies of the early industrial age provided “marvelous” or at least completely new perspectives, enshrining vision as a dominant mode of perception. 10 Introduction

The well-­known and authoritative histories of aviation and aerial views build a seemingly incontrovertible case for this linear progression of bodies-­ in-­motion as modern observers from late eighteenth-­century balloons to twentieth-­century satellites. Propounding this unified technodeterminism of aerial perception, Richard Hallion has written that once ­human beings “gazed down on the earth” from the basket of a balloon, their perception of the world was altered “forever”: It constituted the transformation of perspective, the beginning of a three-­ dimensional appreciation unobtainable by viewers confined to a two-­ dimensional surface world. When de Rozier saw all Paris before him, and when Charles saw a double sunset, their experiences anticipated ­those of rocket pi­lots 170 years l­ater who climbed high enough to see the curvature of the earth, cosmonauts and astronauts a de­cade further who marveled at a sunrise and sunset on ­every orbit, or the crew of Apollo 8 who in December 1968 first gazed back at the frail Earth suspended—as bright and gleaming as the most elegant Montgolfière or Charlière—­against the blackness of space. (Hallion 2003, 58) It is this world-­making propensity of aerial views—­the sudden realization of both the vast scope and the vulnerability of the earth as seen from above—­ that fascinates observers and that also begs for rigorous deconstruction. For what can be seen is never just one t­ hing but always an activity undertaken with the constituting purpose of representation—to discern between t­ hings, to make distinctions (Law and Benschop 1997). If the “cosmic view” from above “pulls diverse life on earth into a vision of unity,” making an other­wise divine point of view accessible to any h ­ uman (defined by the terms of Western Eu­ro­pean Enlightenment thought), its seemingly stable form through the centuries of modernity has produced a power­ful set of commonsense attitudes: elevation yields clarity, an overview garners empowerment, and the view from above is a natu­ral result of ­human ingenuity and technical achievement (Cosgrove 2001, xi). The thrilling attainment of this “cosmic” or “Apollonian gaze,” as Cosgrove termed it, is critiqued by some scholars as a key component in Eu­rope’s “drive for territorial supremacy” or, more benignly, as a cosmopolitan point of view that unites all ­people by reminding them of their equality through the visual relations of scale afforded by global imagery (17). Almost all commentators seem to agree that the advent of h ­ uman flight marks a historical transformation of tremendous degree, and, for many, the importance of the unpre­ce­dented nature and mode of viewing is a major part of this impor­tant cultural and po­liti­cal shift. Introduction   11

How to convey ­these new imaginative possibilities and embodied experiences? Beyond the breathless anticipation of the sublime vistas of landscape art to come, practical needs for estate and military surveys met the early modern practices of navigational charts and war maps as well as bird’s-­eye views of major urban centers to form a corpus of modes of observation based on “real” or imaginary views from above. Along with the advent of flight, the invention of photography seemed almost predestined to move repre­sen­ta­tional practice into the heavens above, giving ­human beings a way to secure and save the “real” view of the earth, its structures and forms, as an image. Thus, Cosgrove argued that although photo­graphs of the earth from above have been pos­si­ble only for a relatively short span of time, the “meanings of the photographed earth” ­were “anticipated long before the photo­graphs themselves ­were taken” (2001, ix). The technical achievement of aerial photography was a tricky proposition at first—in 1858, a­ fter many futile attempts, Félix Tournachon, well known in Paris and beyond as the po­liti­cal cartoonist and portrait photographer “Nadar,” succeeded in exposing a wet-­collodion plate from a partially deflated hydrogen balloon approximately 262 feet over the French village of Bièvre. The product of this celebrated occasion is lost—­the only evidence of its birth is a newspaper account and Nadar’s own extended exposition of the event in one of his autobiographies.10 A set of images of Paris taken from another balloon ten years ­later usually stands in for the “first” photo­graph, establishing the narrative of photographic realism as one that materializes the world view of modernity. Along with an iconic shot of Boston photographed from a balloon by James Wallace Black in 1860, ­these early images are firmly emplaced as foundational cornerstones in an emerging division between the affective “dream” of aerial marveling and the presumed objective recording of the vis­i­ble by the photographic pro­cess (see fig. i.4). Given the time period, it should not surprise us that the first aerialists ­were not only emotionally overcome by sublime views or fully preoccupied with scientific experiments including the perfecting of aerial photography. One of the primary themes ­running through the early accounts of aerostation is warfare. Once aloft it was not unusual for moderns to muse on the pos­si­ble ways to incorporate the new science of flight for waging war. Ideas ranged from building enormous balloons to transport troops and arms over obstacles like large bodies of ­water or mountains to relatively ­simple platforms for observation. The latter concept was developed by the French, who used an aerostat for reconnaissance at the ­Battle of Fleurus in 1794. Napoleon disbanded the aerostatic corps soon ­after it was formed, however, as 12 Introduction

FIGURE I.4  ​James Wallace

Black, Boston as the Ea­gle and the Wild Goose See It, 1860. Boston Public Library.

debate continued throughout the first half of the nineteenth ­century as to the purpose and effectiveness of an aerial platform for military means and ends. Balloons ­were experimented with during the U.S. Civil War, primarily by the Union Army (although the Confederates attempted to build some reconnaissance balloons as well), but once again the commanding officers ­were unconvinced. Most of t­hese aerostatic efforts w ­ ere stymied not only by the prob­lem of developing a reliable, portable fuel source but by the limited accuracy of navigation posed by lighter-­than-­air vehicles. Enthusiastic supporters of tethered observation balloons never ceased touting the advantages of aerial views over conventional cavalry reconnaissance, but their advocacy encountered re­sis­tance from traditionalists even into the era of the airplane. However, once the major industrialized countries developed in­de­ pen­dent air wings of their militaries following World War I, the arguments against aerial reconnaissance began to fade away and the close association of the view from above with warfare became definitive. Throughout the now-­established narrative of the emergence of aerial views—­the Western classical foundation of a singular world ­imagined visually as a scene viewed from above, the shock and sublimity engendered by aerostation and aviation, the objectivity of the photographic rec­ord versus the Introduction   13

subjectivity of landscape art, and the suturing of flight and warfare through observational practices—­a set of primary assumptions obtain. First, the separation between the ­human body and its environment—­whether ground or air—is fundamental and echoes the nature/culture divide that has come to characterize Western modernity. Second, an aerial viewpoint provides a more objective and impartial view of the ground based on the distance between subject and object and the wider scope of inclusion of objects of vision. Third, the confusion engendered by the abstraction produced by aerial views can be overcome by methods of interpretation that ­will yield a deeper truth, one that lies beneath the surface of the aerial image yet can be realized only through mechanical reproduction and expert analy­sis of the view from above. As the air-­minded Le Corbusier (Charles-­Édouard Jeanneret) put it in that optimistic moment in airpower’s history between the two world wars, thanks to the increased visual capacities made pos­si­ble by aviation, the state could now see “in substance what the mind could only subjectively conceive” (Le Corbusier [1935] 1988, 96). At this point, a structuring contradiction in narratives of the emergence of aerial views begins to become more noticeable. Interpreting reconnaissance imagery led to what Manuel De Landa has described as the “new cult of the detail” (1991, 194); an entirely new lexicon of critical skills was reworked from an assemblage of art historians, artists, photog­raphers, librarians, and ­others with specialized abilities in evaluating the par­tic­u­lar imagery of the vertical reconnaissance image. This army of technicians produced massive amounts of data throughout the twentieth ­century, contributing to the belief that if a photographic image could reveal “all,” then an aerial photo­graph, intensively interpreted, could reveal even more. But the increased powers of observation augured by airpower generated a modern counterstrategy—­camouflage. The cat-­and-­mouse game of aerial reconnaissance and camouflage prob­ably reached its apotheosis during World War II when entire towns and factories seemed to vanish or move location thanks to the incredible arts of the “camoufleurs.” This tension between the seen and unseen trou­bles assumptions that the first balloonists and the first astronauts shared the same, literally “earthshaking,” view. ­These accounts of the revelation of a stable view, made incrementally and more precisely legible through progressive technical innovation, can be read against the grain to remind us that a visual culture is always in the pro­cess of being pulled together even as it never quite holds true. Satellite imagery and digital computing push this reminder uncomfortably closer to the front of any inquiring mind. What can be “seen” moves 14 Introduction

quickly into dif­fer­ent questions entirely once the body becomes further displaced by mechanical pro­cesses. Charges of altered or “fake” imagery saturate discussions of photojournalism in the digital age, changing the terms of camouflage from “hard”-­scape practices to m ­ atters of software manipulation. Machines of all sizes that can operate more autonomously to provide views from inside the body itself or to hover from a ­great height over “inhospitable” terrain extend sight far beyond the operations of a ­human eye to produce fragmented bits of data that come together as an image only when an operator (or a program) gives specific commands. This kind of high-­ tech viewing is undeniably linked to earlier ways of seeing, but it is also distinct. Without overvalorizing ­either a transhistorical ­human subject or a triumphant technology, a more skeptical inquiry into the significant differences produced in the name of this seemingly ­simple act of perception—­ observing from a ­great height—­makes pos­si­ble many more perspectives on what ­people think can be seen . . . ​and when and where as well as why. WAR­T IME’S “ROG UE I N TEN SI TI ES”

Caught in the whirlwind of ­these war times, without any real information or any perspective upon the ­great changes that have already occurred or are about to be enacted, lacking all premonition of the ­future, it is small won­der that we ourselves become confused as to the meaning of impressions which crowd in upon us or of the value of the judgments we are forming. It would seem as though no event had ever destroyed so much of the precarious heritage of mankind, confused so many of the clearest intellects or so thoroughly debased what is highest. —­Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death

­ hether derived from a handheld camera or generated through satellite reW mote sensing, the visual archive of 9/11 is most often marshaled to reflect an uncomplicated, noble patriotism or universalized bereavement via spectacular aftermath imagery rather than an inquiry into war­time perception. The aerial images pulled back to show just how enormous a blow was delivered to the city’s architecture, riveting the mind on the thousands of lives lost and injured. This gaze fastened on what happened in Manhattan, to the city, and by extension to the nation and then the world. Increasingly, the World Trade Center towers, pres­ent and then absent, became all that could be seen from an omniscient but nationally specific vantage point, overwhelming the repre­sen­ta­tion of the damage done to the Pentagon in Washington, DC, or the efforts to commemorate the location in Pennsylvania where one of the Introduction   15

commandeered flights crashed into the ground. Scattered among the many ­things that could not be seen by most p ­ eople in the United States w ­ ere the results of a massive retributive bombing campaign in Af­ghan­i­stan. As W. J. T. Mitchell has noted, the invasion of Af­ghan­i­stan was a “relatively minor engagement in the war of images”—­the Bush administration did not find the mountainous terrain of the country to be particularly “target-­rich” (2010, 3). But heavy damage was done. Writing soon a­ fter that campaign was deemed a “success,” Bronwyn Winter asked p ­ eople in the United States and their allies to “imagine” an “entire country that is one big gaping hole” rather than just one small section of a major metropole: “Take ­these ­imagined snapshots of devastation and multiply them throughout the country. Then you w ­ ill begin to have a picture of what Af­ghan­i­stan is like” (Hawthorne and Winter 2003, 20). The prob­lem of “seeing” Af­ghan­i­stan for Westerners, especially for most ­people in the United States at that time, was not just a question of a recalcitrant consortium of news outlets or even openly biased politicians and pundits who ­were reluctant to extend subjectivity to a population that shifted from ally against the Soviets to “­enemy” in the space of a day. The pres­ent expanded, pressing and folding ­under the colonial history of repeated air war over portions of Af­ghan­i­stan and neighboring Pakistan, making newly legible targets of vision as well as creating “unseens,” new ­things that could not be sensed or known (Omissi 1990; Satia 2006, 2014, 2015; Zamindar 2014). In the midst of death and destruction on a vast scale, it is not surprising that so much of the con­temporary commentary spoke of mourning and haunting.11 The spectacular aftermath of September 11, 2001, met the more quotidian strug­gle of coping with the recognition of what Mary Favret (2010) has termed “wartime”—­the aftermath that is always already undeclared war, the endless war that cannot locate a stable origin or believe in a definite conclusion, offering a pres­ent perceived through vari­ous states of denial, anger, numbness, or engagement. Throughout the modern period, as colonial occupations, economic precarity, population displacements, and so much ­else established what Keller Easterling has called “dispositional vio­lence,” undeclared war has been the structuring truth of officially recognized “peace” (2014, 21). The incomprehensible terror of endless war moves freely, its very mobility an insult to the displaced, who are often trapped in vectors of immobility.12 ­These two very dif­fer­ent pos­si­ble aftermaths layered over each other in the months following 9/11, as p ­ eople strug­gled to come to grips with violent events of varying scales. Was the attack on U.S. soil an exceptional act, “evil” in nature and spectacular in its repre­sen­ta­tion ­whether intimate or grandiose, or was this vio­lence dispositional, predictable, accountable, and affiliative? 16 Introduction

The unseen or “pres­ent absences” of the neighborhood surrounding and encompassing the World Trade Center itself w ­ ere disturbed to the point of discursive recognition by the collapse of the towers. Less than a year a­ fter the attacks, architectural historians and planners like Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin would argue that the physical hole left by the World Trade Center could not be addressed in a progressive or meaningful manner without first recognizing its “many ghosts,” the earlier “victims” of often violent demographic and economic changes in the city: “From the 1920 bombing of the Morgan Bank to the displacement of the largely Arab community that once thrived on the Lower West Side, to the destruction of an intimate architectural texture by megascale construction, this part of the city has been contested space” (Sorkin and Zukin 2002, x–xi). ­These lost histories, which could link the city and its trauma to some of the sites that became pushed into “­enemy territory” by the nationalist sentiments aroused by the attacks, hover atmospherically in debates about the construction of an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, for example, or the biographies of mi­grant workers in the towers (ProCon​.­org n.d.). Andrew Ross pointed out, soon ­after the towers’ collapse, that the site skirted the northern boundary of the old “Syrian Quarter,” a once-­vibrant mercantile district that provided a place of settlement for immigrants from, in addition to Syria, “Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, and other Arab states” (2001, 122). That community abutted an eighteenth-­century cemetery that held the remains of upward of twenty thousand African Americans, many of them slaves (121). Another layer of absents in the pres­ent include the Algonquin Lenapes who inhabited the island at the time of the arrival of the Dutch and who ­were close to extinct by the time the En­glish gained control of the territory. If, as Michel-­Rolph Trouillot has argued, the “prob­lem of historical repre­sen­ta­tion is how to represent the ghost” (1995, 147), then the spectacular imagery surrounding the events of 9/11 insistently draws a line between “before” and “­after,” “living” and “dead,” but finds the past always in front of it, so to speak. The “ghosts” are both “us” and “not-us,” “­here” and “not ­here.” Thus, Mark Wigley writes that what might be most horrifying about the collapse of the World Trade Center towers was “what was already ­there”: “­Things that we have been living with for some time w ­ ere disturbingly revealed. The everyday idea that architecture keeps the danger out was exposed as a fantasy. . . . ​Buildings are much stranger than we are willing to admit. They are tied to an economy of vio­lence rather than simply a protection from it” (2002, 83–84).13 This disturbance of conventions of distance and proximity, the presence of many pasts and places in what we try to think of as the ­here and now, Introduction   17

constitute war­time, modernity’s everyday aftermaths—­the undeclared wars that grieve not only the pres­ent absences but the absent pres­ents—­not so much a m ­ atter of ghosts as multiple worlds that a singular worldview cannot accommodate. The En­glish etymology of “aftermath” points to a skip in time, the acts that follow a math, the mowing, that leads to the harvesting of a second crop of grass. This link to the cutting of a second crop of grass in meadows that have already been mowed signaled the emergence of the word from the repetitive habits and rhythms of agricultural life. From the mid-­seventeenth ­century, however, a figurative adoption of “aftermath” as “something” that “results or follows” from an event that is “disastrous” or “unfortunate,” especially in relation to war, grew in usage (oed 2016). With this colloquial adaptation, the categorical separation of martial temporality into a prelude, duration, and aftermath began to lose the cyclical connotation of a repeating and productive event and to adhere to a more linear trajectory that created conceptual binaries between war and peace, event and nonevent. Yet, particularly in the case of “disastrous” or “unfortunate” events, ­people may experience aftermaths in ways that refuse to adhere closely to a linear timeline. For some, the past refuses to remain neatly contained and may roam around in the pres­ent or hail the ­future, folding dif­fer­ent times and spaces into an unruly or repetitious mode of emotional life. Kathleen Stewart refers to ­these kinds of energetic slippages and foldings as “rogue intensities”: “All the excesses and extra effects unwittingly propagated by plans and proj­ects and routines of all kinds” that “surge, experiment, and meander” (2007, 44). Aftermaths understood as unbounded by the “spectacular” generate just such unpredictable yet repetitive intensities of time and space, disturbing the singular linear or bounded world that we take for “real­ity” in Western culture. Echoing the discontinuities and excess intensities of time and space that produce war­time aftermaths, Saidiya Hartman has asked, “How might we understand mourning, when the event has yet to end?” (2002, 758). Responding in a similar vein to the insistent calls for the rapid construction of a memorial on the site of the World Trade Center towers, Laura Kurgan argued in ­those early months: “Has anyone r­eally asked what it means to build a memorial when you are still in the m ­ iddle of the war? I think the site itself is the memorial. The site is a mass grave—­the site is what it is” (2013, 130). Observing an anniversary of the attacks, Tom Engelhardt asked, “Fourteen years ­later, ­isn’t it pos­si­ble to think of 9/11 as a mass grave into which significant aspects of American life as we knew it have been shoveled?” Recounting the losses and harm, the lack of accountability, the terrible destabilizations, the creation of 18 Introduction

masses of refugees, and targeted killings, Engelhardt strug­gles with time: “do you even believe it? Did we actually live it? Are we still living it?” (2015). A few months a­ fter the beginning of World War I, Freud wrote of the “bewildering” disillusionment and “altered” attitude t­oward death that overcomes the noncombatant during the kind of unpre­ce­dented scale of vio­lence that characterized the “­Great War” (1918, 3). War­time’s destabilized pres­ent and unresolved grief resonate throughout Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” first published in 1917, as well. In that work, Freud argued that while most mourning eventually lessens, melancholia cannot end, in some part due to the generalized and pervasive nature of the affective experience: the melancholic believes that a loss has occurred but “cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost” ([1917] 1953, 245). Melancholic anomie and numbness t­ oward ­others, inspired by the bewilderment of a loss that cannot be fully perceived or comprehended consciously, produces worlds of experience and knowledge that are out of sync, almost palpable but, in the case of clinical melancholia, suppressed. Branching out from the narrowly psychological, Derek McCormack has argued that the “experience of space and place” is always “haunted by a noncoincident spatio-­temporality in which past and f­uture participate si­mul­ta­neously and in unpredictable ways” (2010, 642). This sensing in specific places of something dif­fer­ent, something ­else beyond everyday life, something lost, opens perception to more, to the unruly production of unexpected disturbances in scales of distance, embodied experiences of locale, and organ­izations of time.14 Grief not only attaches to time and space; it alters and re-­creates our perceptions of t­ hese concepts. War­time offers innumerable opportunities to sense such unruly intensities. Despite the efforts of global media and politicians to frame the attacks of September 11, 2001, as exceptional, positioning the United States as an innocent victim in a b ­ attle between abstract values of good and evil, the very melancholic “haunting” that structures the repre­sen­ta­tional space of post9/11 war­time disturbs “homeland security” on multiple levels.15 Mary Favret (2010) has explored this kind of colonial construction of real­ity in relation to another time period and nation, reading British Romantic poetry against the grain to argue that the time and space of war throughout the early to mid-­nineteenth ­century was momentously constitutive of everyday life in Britain, destabilizing profoundly the supposed division between home and away, city and country, imperial center and colony, battlefield and domestic hearth. In this period when E ­ ngland was becoming “westernized,” as Saree Makdisi (2014, ix) reminds us, over and against its internal and external Introduction   19

colonial “­others,” war was waged in many places but no longer on British soil. ­After the defeat of the Scottish Jacobite forces on Culloden moor in 1746, war took place on battlefields far away and, therefore, could be ignored, forgotten, or engaged at a comfortable remove by ­those at “home.” Yet, Favret argues, despite the distance British citizens created through patriotic compartmentalization or seeming indifference, warfare permeated British culture. War’s absence became a pro­cessual presence through its very remoteness, a “war­time” that became a “per­sis­tent mode of daily living” and a “habit of mind” (Favret 2010, 14). The very remoteness of war from its home front structured daily life in Britain as the insinuation of an always already possibility of vio­lence: “War in this era was shown to operate both globally and si­mul­ta­neously within the everyday. . . . ​Taken as a ubiquitous system, war was at once unremarkable and nearly imperceptible; something nonevident that could not always be made evident. Felt and unfelt, impersonal and intimate, war became for t­ hose experiencing it at a distance a not-­fully conscious awareness that could flare up or flicker out” (29). This affective zone of “war­time,” flickering and flaring up, produced an “unsettled” pres­ent that dislocated bounded terrain as well as knowledge to ­extend war into realms “without clear limits” (Favret 2010, 18). Distant, endless war with no limits or endpoint created an atmosphere that Favret describes as “strange and familiar, intimate and remote, pres­ent and yet not ­really h ­ ere” (15). The colonial wars in Favret’s study w ­ ere often undeclared, with ambiguous beginnings and endings. This kind of warfare folded places and times into uncanny proximity as well as stretched distances further than perhaps ever before. Significantly, Favret argues, a British population that expected daily life to be lived in the absence of the threat of warfare’s vio­lence found instead that a “set of disturbing affective responses” insinuated themselves into innumerable quotidian practices; “numbness, dizziness, anxiety, or a sense of being overwhelmed” (11) ­were not just random, unruly occurrences but a set of responses to the colonial world that Britain could no longer live without but that became increasingly difficult to live with and through. Such disturbances of time and space constitute what Derek Gregory has termed the “colonial pres­ent,” the continuities across diverse places and time periods that reproduce colonial modes of power (2004, xv).16 In Gregory’s notion of the “colonial pres­ent” and Favret’s concept of “war­ time,” we might recognize the affective environment of the United States ­today. Specifically, Favret delineates three primary modes of living in the homeland that appear to be immune from war but are constructed foundationally through the endless vio­lence operationalized by liberal po­liti­cal 20 Introduction

formations. First, and most significantly for this study of aerial imagery, Favret argues that war­time produces an abstract viewpoint, legible only from a distance, “as from a bird’s eye view.” This distanced view turns war into an “object of knowledge,” discernible through patterns. Second, Favret points out, war­time reduces “­human responsiveness” across registers such that “lack of feeling” or “inertia and apathy” become overwhelmingly dominant, generating ever greater “anomie and despair.” Favret identifies a third response to war­time, one “suspended between abstraction and numbness,” a poetic or aesthetic response that “strives to give form to feeling” and thereby “opens war­time to the pres­ent” (2010, 10). Without celebrating or romanticizing the benefits of war or minimizing the traumas of living in a battleground, this acknowl­edgment of the affective intensities that disturb the everyday experiences of t­hose who might other­wise believe that they are unscathed or untouched folds places and times onto each other while opening up pos­si­ble affiliations and historical accountability. Spectacular aftermaths display “what has been lost” over and over in a melancholic campaign to remember, to hold fast to a time and place in ever narrowing registers that generate “unseens” in tremendous profusion as the iconic “seens” ­settle into monumental commemoration. If the United States ­after 9/11 is melancholic and “cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost,” plunged into the bewildering whirlwind of perceptions that cannot cohere into linear time and bounded space, the spectacular aftermath is one way to try to regenerate certainty and belief in a progression t­oward a discernible ­future. But when we ask “are we still living it?,” the prob­lem for history is not so much how we might represent the ghosts but how we might sense differently, more remotely, to refuse the perpetration of intimate vio­lence that is unleashed through the liberal po­liti­cal construction of war and peace as mirror images. REMOTE SEN SI N G : D ECON STRUCTI N G TH E G O D ’ S - E ­ Y E VI E W

For satellite views of the earth’s surface show us not only the weather (if you are trained to read them) but also the following: This is one planet, one life, one world, one dream. This is the view of the globe from the eye of God. This is the promise of earth without its wars and bestiaries. This is our planet, its orbs humming with light and shadow in praise of the benevolent eyes of the celestial panopticon. This is the magic of a revitalized myth of origins, addressing us personally in our domestic spaces and rituals of the ­every day, but still in ­possession of its mysterious, inaccessible, distant power. —­Jody Berland, North of Empire

Introduction   21

Remote sensing is usually associated with a privileging of magisterial vision and an affirmation of the cartographic abstraction that contributes to the expansion and violent enactment of imperial power. According to this understanding, remote sensing can “aestheticize” vio­lence only by objectifying and working against the richly subjective situated knowledges and politics of location that are often proposed as modes of re­sis­tance to state power and empire. Derek McCormack has argued, however, that we can understand remote sensing as much more than instrumental alienation—in fact, it behooves us to understand the full range and scales of distance, including intimacy and connection. The conventional binary between distance and proximity and its related oppositions—­objective and subjective, global and local, unfamiliar and familiar, strange and intimate—­may be culturally and historically specific to Western modernity, but even within that narrow register of h ­ uman experience, ­there is ample evidence of greater nuance and possibility than ­these bluntly contrasted extremes. McCormack asks us to consider remote sensing “not so much as a technology of distanced, elevated image capture but as a set of mobile and modest techniques through which affective materials are sensed without direct contact or touch” (2010, 641). This mode of “worldly apprehension” acknowledges that the relationship between the material and the immaterial is never fully resolved and is therefore productive of ways of knowing and being that do not always square, literally and figuratively, with the Cartesian, bounded subject and may not always operate congruently with the aims of empire and its military and security infrastructures. ­There ­were a number of “eyes in the sky” on September 11, 2001. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (noaa) geostationary satellites on regular rotation collected high-­resolution data that generated images of collapsing and burning towers. Following the attacks, noaa jets flew five missions over five weeks to help map Ground Zero using aerial photography and Light Detection and Ranging (lidar) technology. The International Space Station captured images of the fires and released several of them through the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (nasa). The North American Aerospace Defense Command (norad) generated images, as did the air traffic control system and numerous other governmental groups and units. Unlike the imaging activities linked to official and unofficial photojournalism, this varied but power­ful infrastructure produced copious data, of which only a small fraction was made available to the public. ­These few images in the public domain range from satellite images taken from over four hundred miles above the earth to ­those Semendinger shot as his nypd aviation unit he­li­cop­ter fluttered in and around the towers while they burned and col22 Introduction

lapsed. ­These iconic aerial views, so often marshaled as vis­i­ble evidence in the ser­vice of the spectacular aftermath, also introduce an acute awareness of a par­tic­u­lar kind of time as well as spatial scale, moving from “during” to “just ­after” and into the prolonged unspooling of war­time in such a way as to refute any easy conclusion. On September 11, 2001, nypd Detective Greg Semendinger and his partner, Jim Ciccone, ­were on routine patrol duty when they heard an early report that a private plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. From their position on the ground at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, they observed something that looked much worse than the impact from a small plane. Boarding their he­li­cop­ter, they arrived at the scene in a ­matter of minutes, tasked with lifting any survivors from the roofs of the damaged towers. As Semendinger related to npr interviewer Neil Conan in February  2010: “­We’re ­doing a pattern back and forth, trying to stay out of the smoke, but also have a good view of the North Tower. The South Tower was completely engulfed in smoke. And if anybody was up t­ here, we never saw them.” Throughout the brief interview, both men agree that the photos shot with Semendinger’s personal digital camera that was always part of his kit “provide a total perspective of what happened that day,”17 yet most of what Semendinger remembers is that throughout his three-­hour shift in the air ­there was very ­little that he was actually able to see. Beyond the heavy smoke, Semendinger and Ciccone saw “debris flying from the building” and they “­didn’t know it was actually p ­ eople that was jumping u ­ ntil we w ­ ere told on the radio” (Semendinger 2010). Smoke fills the images released in February 2010 (see fig. i.5), moving across the scene as a thin haze or billowing as fires raged to the penultimate obliteration. ­These photo­graphs of the enormous amount of smoke and dust as the towers collapse still do have the power to stun and amaze the viewer. The images are sublimely spectacular and yet more suggestive than elucidating—we see smoke and infer from that visual information t­hings that we can only barely imagine but now know. No ­people. The evacuation of the h ­ uman figure from most aerial imaging is a given. The signs of h ­ uman life—­its infrastructures, for the most part—­often can be seen along with the Earth’s features and contours, but individual characteristics or even h ­ uman shapes dis­appear from view. In aerial views of urban areas, in par­tic­u­lar, we know p ­ eople are contained in the image, but they remain indiscernible, disintegrated into the larger forms of which they are always already a part. The Semendinger/nist images may show the immediate aftermath of the attacks “from a new a­ ngle,” but they adhere to the established codes Introduction   23

FIGURE I.5  ​September 11,

2001. Det. Greg Semendinger, nyc Police Aviation Unit.

of public reception circa 2001. Speaking of the entire World Trade Center attack and collapse image repertoire, Mark Wigley has observed that no photo­graphs of “broken, bloody, burned, or fragmented p ­ eople” ­were circulated or made public (2002, 73). Exceptions to the unwritten rule ­were the “dust-­laden bodies of the survivors” and the magnified, long-­range shots of p ­ eople jumping from the burning towers (73).18 Wigley reminds us, uncomfortably, that the smoke and dust we see in so many of the photo­graphs are signs of the “simultaneous destruction of body and building and the distinction between them” as many of the occupants w ­ ere “rendered into dust” by a “level of energy comparable to nuclear blasts or volcanic activity” (73). As the dust cloud billowed out and encompassed the city, Wigley remembers, “we literally breathed our architecture and neighbors” (73). The satellite imagery also rec­ords the ominous presence and mobile powers of this smoke and dust in the days following the attacks. For example, a widely reproduced ikonos satellite image of Manhattan from the morning of September 12 depicts an area of devastation with the smoke and dust still billowing (see plate 2). Laura Kurgan has worked with this image of lower Manhattan from September 12 as well as one taken from the same elevation of 423 miles above the earth on September 15 (see plate 3). Writing of the first image, 24 Introduction

Kurgan comments: “Between a satellite and thousands of bodies, a cloud of smoke drifts” (2013, 131). The smoke had cleared significantly by the time the second image was recorded, but it is still evident as a g­ reat plume, more a trace of trauma than sign of a raging inferno. One image conveyed the scale of the attacks through the obscuring properties of smoke and dust, while the other offered a clearer view of the extent of the damage. Each image transmitted an identical message through similar but dif­fer­ent views; the limits of the discourse of transparency through the God’s-­eye view are fully apparent. For an exhibition on surveillance at the Berlin gallery zkm that took place only a month a­ fter the attacks, Kurgan enlarged the first ikonos satellite image for a piece titled New York, September 11th, 2001, Four Days ­Later, a work eleven to seventeen meters long and six meters wide that she placed on the floor (see plate 4). She reports that in this emotionally ragged aftermath ­people seemed to avoid walking on the image: “It was very raw” (2013, 129). Although she offered a close-up view through the extreme enlargement of the image, ­people ­were not necessarily able to see much more than the first-­ responders on the scene. Despite the popu­lar belief that a satellite photo can show us all that ­there is to see if we can only learn to read it properly, Kurgan asserts that ­there is both too much and too ­little to see in this kind of image: ­ ere is a lot to see in this picture, too much in fact. The density of the deTh tail demands that it be viewed close-up. But ­there is no single ­thing to look for and no par­tic­u­lar piece of evidence that tells the w ­ hole story. And so the entire image is on view h ­ ere, blown up, too large to see all at once. But the zoom offers no revelation, no instant of enlightenment, and no sublime incomprehension, ­either. It tells many stories. What has happened? The satellite’s sensors capture a mass grave, a rec­ord of a crime or an act of war. Unfortunately or fortunately, the image itself offers no instructions about how to understand or respond to what it has recorded in memory. (131) Kurgan reminds us that, ultimately, “the image is neither the definitive eye-­ witness nor the rec­ord of our incomprehension”; it exists, and, in existing, the image “encodes” the event “by the light that has traveled from the ground to the satellite, captured in an instant as the memory of this event” (132). The satellite images of the aftermath of the attacks on September 11 that w ­ ere released to the public by commercial providers like Space Imaging Corporation serve as “markers,” memorials to the dead. It is the dead who are missing from the photojournalism and official photography released to the public for the most part, except in the ways in which we have not been trained or encouraged to see or to sense. Kurgan observes this pres­ent absence, Introduction   25

“beneath or beyond the limits of visibility,” arguing that the dead “remain in the image” ­whether we can see them or not and “demand a certain care or re­spect” (132–33).19 As James Ketchum has argued in relation to this work, Kurgan’s engagement with the distancing effects of satellite imagery produces an “emotional vacuum” that calls into question “the authority of both cultural narratives and the latest advanced image technologies that continually circulate them” (2011, 180). In the oblique and vertical aerial images of 9/11 and its aftermath attributed to Semendinger/nist and Space Imaging Corporation, the primary discourses of repre­sen­ta­tion in general and photography in par­tic­u­lar are both emphatically propounded and challenged. No m ­ atter how many images are collected, stored, interpreted, and released, t­ hese pictures are always a­ fter the fact of the terrible moments that could not be imaged in any total way. Always already incomplete, full of what or who is missing, ­these extreme examples of the limits of the image also offer a way to sense what was always t­ here in war­time’s everyday—­the dispositional vio­lence of histories. SAME AS IT EV ER WAS: M OB I L I Z I N G CRI TI Q U E IN WAR­T IME A FTERM ATH S

The Towers keep falling. —­Retort, Afflicted Powers

The notion of a world-­making visual culture has emerged from some of the most significant social theories of perception and knowledge produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Just before the start of World War II, Heidegger’s formulation of the “world picture” sutured basic pro­cesses of understanding to the act of looking ([1938] 1977). That war, at that time, the most fully developed air war of the modern period, raised the stakes in understanding viewing and recording scenes as more than mimetic reflection. Thus, in reference to the air war that was perfected in World War II and that continues to permeate con­temporary life, Rey Chow has argued that “in the age of bombing, the world has also been transformed into—is essentially conceived and grasped as—­a target”: “To conceive of the world as a target is to conceive of it as an object to be destroyed. . . . ​Increasingly, war would mean the production of maximal visibility and illumination for the purpose of maximal destruction” (2006, 31). Attacking the World Trade Center towers with airplanes as auto-­weapons seems to prove Chow’s post-­ Heideggerean maxim—­that the world itself, made vis­i­ble in spectacular ways through the illuminating properties of attack, is the target. 26 Introduction

But it was not the “world” per se that was the target on September  11, 2001—it was the United States, reinforcing Grégoire Chamayou’s observation that according to Western ­legal history, “warfare is and should be a geo­graph­i­cally defined object” (2013, 58). As influential as the United States might be in the society of nations, it is not yet “the world.” The attackers identified highly vis­i­ble symbols as targets—­things easily seen and widely associated with places. They assumed, rightly it seems, that an attack on singular, highly vis­i­ble objects would mobilize affective responses across a wide spectrum of seen and unseen subjects and objects, stimulating the “­whole” to action, unifying its disparate parts even as the attacks challenged the power and security of t­ hose “united” states. The targeting of iconic, easily viewed objects not only ensured spectacular media coverage but also offered to reveal that the “everywhere war” that ensued was already a lived real­ity for many ­people on the planet (Gregory 2011). The endless, undeclared wars of Eu­ro­pean empire had always already deployed a power­ful gaze on colonial “­others.” In a dialectical understanding of the under­lying strategy of the 9/11 attacks, the colonized returned the gaze of twentieth-­century airpower, utilizing the machines and media that empire had made pos­si­ble. A less binary postcolonial critical approach acknowledges the vastly uneven and complex differences within and across locations yet still has to reckon with the complete failure of vision to sense the worlds of ­others. On the thirteenth anniversary of the attacks on 9/11, the website Space​ .­com featured imagery shot by astronaut Frank Culbertson from the International Space Station in orbit 250 miles above the earth. In Culbertson’s video, we hear the self-­described “only American completely off the planet” narrate as he is filming: “we can see New York City and the smoke from the fires.” Audibly shaken, he continues, “I’m looking up and down the east coast to see if I can see anything e­ lse.” The video pans, shakes, holds still to zoom in on the smoke rising from Manhattan. A ­ fter a painful pause, Culbertson concludes with a strangely upbeat message to “the ­people of New York”: “your city still looks ­great from up ­here” (Gannon 2014). From “up ­there,” Culbertson actually observed the second tower fall, commenting in a video reminiscence years ­later that it was as if a “gray blob” had encompassed the island of Manhattan (2014). Working with his Rus­sian colleagues in the space station, Culbertson set up as many cameras as they had on board. Over many orbits of the Earth they photographed as much of the United States as they could. In the aftermath of the attacks, the “only American off the planet,” a former navy pi­lot who counted one of the hijacked airliner pi­lots as a school friend, continued Introduction   27

to look out the space station’s win­dow at a planet in an intensified state of war. He recounts: About four weeks ­after the attack I was looking out the win­dow—­I always looked at Af­ghan­i­stan, which was easy to find at night in the ­Middle East b ­ ecause ­there ­were no lights. Everywhere ­else was very well lit. I was hearing rumors from e-­mail and stuff about who was responsible for this and what our response was g­ oing to be. . . . ​And I was looking out one night and I saw flashes of light in the area of Af­ghan­i­stan. And what I was seeing for the first time was combat from space. It was the attack of the Third Fleet on the Taliban and the cruise missiles and B-52 bombs and the smart bombs from the aircraft carrier airplanes. (Culbertson 2014) Situating Af­ghan­i­stan in the “­Middle East” locates Culbertson in a mindset inherited from before World War I when Western orientalist scholars designated the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire as the “Near East,” and Iran, the Caucasus, Af­ghan­i­stan, Central Asia, and Turkestan comprised the “­Middle East” (Yilmaz 2012). Of course, ­these designations shifted ­after the war with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the reor­ga­ni­za­tion throughout the twentieth ­century of imperial administration. Airpower and the emergence of space programs contributed to the viewing of distant places like Af­ghan­ i­stan as distinct from the West yet strategically valuable. For many p ­ eople living in the United States during the televisual era, their first view of Af­ ghan­i­stan or Iraq had been the “flashes of light” that signal the commencement of combat—­tracer fire in Baghdad at the start of the First Persian Gulf War captured in the fledgling network cnn’s broadcast or the “flashes” observed from the space station by Culbertson. Rarely, if ever, has the United States been viewed in a similar fashion. Aerial views from planes and satellites are presumed to “see all,” but more often than not, the “world picture” that they provide has failed to perceive any traces of what has been rendered impossible to know. ­There are no coffee-­table books filled with photo­graphs of the results of the attack by the U.S Navy’s Third Fleet on the sovereign state of Af­ghan­i­stan in October 2001. We are not immersed in accounts of the heroic efforts of first responders to assist any survivors or ascertain the location of the dead. Civilians bore the brunt of casualties and trauma in the autumn of that year (as they had in the vio­lence of warfare years before and would continue to bear in the years to come). The long arc of airpower, becoming “stratospheric,” has observed not simply a general world of potential targets but, in fact, a limited number that have 28 Introduction

been designated over and over as legitimate and legible sites of control through violent means. The colonial foundations of war­time are world-­ making and we live in ­these aftermaths together if not in always the same ways. AERIAL AFTERM ATH S: M AP P I N G TH E B OOK

Alongside the “war machine,” ­there has always existed an ocular (and ­later optical and electro-­optical) “watching machine” capable of providing soldiers, and particularly commanders, with the visual perspective on the military action underway. From the original watch-­tower through the anchored balloon to the reconnaissance aircraft and remote-­sensing satellites, one and the same function has been in­def­initely repeated, the eye’s function being the function of a weapon. —­Paul Virilio, War and Cinema

It is a cultural truism in modernity that once a h ­ uman being looked down from the basket of a balloon, that view was as unique as it was transformational. Flight changed not only the time it would take to travel from one place to another but spatial awareness—­the view from above shifted perspectives, altered notions of scale, and produced a new, unified, and all-­encompassing worldview. Th ­ ese omniscient powers of the Apollonian gaze are now widely believed to be a benefit of aviation and almost seamlessly attached to military proj­ects. This “watching machine,” as Virilio has put it, has exercised its surveillant capacities along a continuum whose notable points include the originary watchtower, the tethered war balloon, the reconnaissance plane, and geostationary satellites to perform “one and the same function,” “in­def­initely repeated” (1989, 3). If we follow this line of thought, aerial observation is always already a form of waging war—­a provocative, generative idea. When I began this proj­ect on aerial views, I accepted this narrative at first and endeavored to place my questions about the history of military aerial observation within its discursive structure. However, the more time I spent with accounts of the early years of flight, the more I noticed a tension between ­those who assumed that aerial views produced an improved vantage point on the “real” and ­those who found the same view to be confounding, disturbing, or overwhelming. One of the central questions, then, that shapes the inquiry of this book concerns this linear continuum of the “watching machine”—is this narrative the only way to understand the emergence of networked surveillance systems in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries? Did watchtowers lead inevitably Introduction   29

to war balloons and on to aerial reconnaissance flights, ­et cetera? To answer ­these kinds of questions, I found that I had to spend much more time than I had expected thinking through the conventional starting points—­military surveys, aerostation, and panoramic paintings—­than with the technologies and objects I had assumed I would be investigating: aerial reconnaissance photography and satellite remote sensing. Along the way, I found that warfare did indeed link all t­hese practices but not in the ways in which I had initially assumed. The long wars of the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries can be folded over onto the more recent conflicts not to assert equivalencies or even to create a linear timeline. Rather, the points of continuity and discontinuity between declared and undeclared wars that take place on the same point on a map or dispersed in time and space become legibly meaningful through unusual juxtapositions. I have introduced the primary themes and concerns of the book with an extended reflection on the aerial imagery of 9/11 as a way to acknowledge my own investment in the study of this impor­tant con­temporary aftermath. As a feminist scholar in the field of American studies, with long-­standing research interests in postcolonial and transnational studies of travel and displacement, I have been drawn to think through the ways the attacks that took place on September 11, 2001, both do and do not inaugurate the next point on the line in the continuum from watchtower to space platform. This introduction interweaves discussion of the primary texts and approaches to aerial views as a Euro-­American visual culture in modernity with a consideration of the recently released cache of images taken by Det. Semendinger from an nypd he­li­cop­ter just a­ fter the World Trade Center towers had been hit by commandeered jet planes. By beginning with the aerial imagery of 9/11, I have endeavored to anchor the book’s investigations firmly to the concerns of the pres­ent even as the historical sweep of this proj­ect reaches back to the mid-­eighteenth ­century. Semendinger’s aerial photo­graphs obscure as much as they reveal, raising questions not only of commemorative repre­sen­ta­tional politics in an era of globalized commercial media but also of the ways in which the view from above operates somewhat restively even within the surveillant, nationalist discourses that dominate during the so-­called war on terror. Chapter 1, “Surveying War­time Aftermaths: The First Military Survey of Scotland,” begins with a mid-­eighteenth-­century military map in order to open up the field of geo­graph­i­cal knowledge to questions of realist repre­ sen­ta­tion. Early modern Eu­ro­pean bird’s-­eye views had offered imaginary vertical perspectives on selected sites—­usually cities—­while maps remained ceremonially symbolic or narrowly navigational. This chapter explores a 30 Introduction

hybrid object—an ambitious surveying proj­ect of the entire territory of Scotland using trigonometric mea­sure­ment as well as other methods—­ that established the enduring modi operandi of colonial cartography. Inaugurated by the British Army in the aftermath of the defeat in 1746 of the most serious Jacobite rebellion to date, the First Military Survey of Scotland sought to represent vanquished terrain in accurate detail. Moving through a devastated landscape of retributive state vio­lence, the British Board of Ordnance surveyors and draftsmen produced a vertical view of military occupation, representing a formidable terrain as largely “blank.” As a key part of the effort to “see all” at a glance, the map offered its selective repre­sen­ta­tional practice as an omniscient view. Yet the dynamics of war­time aftermath operated in unruly ways in the generation of the military survey, sometimes through the aesthetics of the map itself or in the intuitive negotiation of distance that accompanied a military avant-­garde practice of coup d’oeil. Chapter  2, “Balloon Geography: The Emotion of Motion in Aerostatic War­time,” traces two strong narrative threads in histories of aerostation: on the one hand, the sublime and transcendent views from above that produced power­ful emotional responses in the first aeronauts, and on the other, the use of tethered balloons to “see all” at a glance and produce an objective, precise mode of military observation. One narrative moves ­toward an aesthetic of landscape art, while the other grounds the history of military visual culture in an age of airpower. The life and work of a figure like Thomas Baldwin track the uneven emergence of such tensions between art and science, affectivity and objectivity, and civil society and militarism. The author of Airopaidia, a book on aerostation published in 1786 containing the first illustrations based on sketches produced while in flight, Baldwin recounted rapturous views as well as dreams of military defense and offense. As Baldwin’s account of ­free flight in the north of E ­ ngland as well as the short history of tethered war balloons makes abundantly clear, the view from above took time to cohere and become legible as both an instrument of war and an inspirational source of evidence for the arts and sciences. Chapter 3, “La Nature à Coup d’Oeil: ‘Seeing All’ in Early Pa­noramas,” explores another prevalent trope in histories of aerial views, the elevated vantage point of fully circular panoramic paintings. First patented and developed by Robert Barker in ­Great Britain in the mid- to late 1780s, pa­noramas have been linked to the general public’s enthusiasm for balloon launches and aerial prospects as well as the emergence of forms of entertainment that encouraged a stronger consciousness of national identity in an era of almost constant warfare and rapid colonization. Barker advertised his Introduction   31

first pa­noramas of Edinburgh and London as La Nature à Coup d’Oeil, drawing on the military conception of a comprehensive overview that brings instantaneous insight to amaze and thrill spectators. Disturbing the conventions of linear perspective in the creation of immersive illusory space, Barker offered scenes of cities and famous ­battles that ­were so “lifelike” that many spectators ­were overcome by power­ful emotions. Viewing nature at a glance, then, as a collaborative, spectatorial practice, was pos­si­ble only by altering perceptions of time and space, producing ambiguity along with perceptions of clarity and empowerment in war­time aftermaths. If the drive to “see all” from a distance circulates most effectively in the truth value of photography, the reconnaissance image epitomizes the “applied realism” of the technology. In chapter 4, “Mapping ‘Mesopotamia’: The Emergence of Aerial Photography in Early Twentieth-­Century Iraq,” I draw together the emergence of aerial surveying and bombardment with biopo­liti­cal modes of colonial control to deconstruct the prevailing narrative of the birth of airpower in World War I. From the first reconnaissance photography in warfare over Libya in 1911 through the so-­called sideshows of the ­Great War to the postwar Mandate period, aerial reconnaissance and mapping took place in the M ­ iddle East and North Africa on a scale that is not often fully acknowledged in Western accounts. Iraq in par­tic­u­lar became one of the most heavi­ly mapped regions in the world through a pro­ cess of producing geo­graph­i­cal knowledge that required a repre­sen­ta­tional emptying of the terrain. Like the First Military Survey of Scotland, however, ­these photo­graphs and survey maps make pos­si­ble some views of territory while losing sight of ­others. The lure of a panoramic, total view emerged as a power­ful discourse of “air control” that was practiced by the British in Iraq along with aerial bombardment and other violent means long ­after the end of World War I in the supposed “interwar” years. The reverberations of ­these declared and undeclared wars can be sensed in the format of aerial photography not only in its directly military or commercial applications but in the ways experimental and activist artworks engage ­these histories. Chapter 5, “The Politics of the Sensible: Aerial Photography’s War­time Aftermaths,” explores works by Sophie Ristelhueber, Fazal Sheikh in collaboration with Eyal Weizman, and Jananne al-­Ani in relation to the history of repre­sen­ta­tions of “desert wars” and “air control” in the ­Middle East. Ristelhueber’s post–­First Persian Gulf War photographic installation Fait draws on the conventions of the aerial reconnaissance photo­graph to explore abstraction and ambiguity in relation to asymmetrical warfare. In 32 Introduction

The Conflict Shoreline, Sheikh and Weizman produce aerial images as part of a critical forensic practice of gathering material evidence against the Israeli state to assist in Palestinian and Bedouin land claims in vari­ous ­legal and governmental forums. Al-­Ani investigates temporal and spatial dynamics of views from above through an engagement with the history of archaeological and military repre­sen­ta­tions of arid terrain from the air. In her multimedia and still photography, al-­Ani reworks reconnaissance, shifting the detection of traces of past events and actions into varying registers of what Jacques Rancière terms a “dif­fer­ent politics of the sensible” (2011, 105). Th ­ ese works are not positioned as e­ ither redemptive of or resistant to military aerial reconnaissance photography. Rather, in drawing purposefully on the format of aerial photography, they call attention to the ways in which images come into being and become instruments for vari­ous purposes that can never be entirely divorced from their historical contexts. In the book’s afterword, I review the primary questions and thematics of this proj­ect on aerial views in modernity in relation to the spatial and temporal challenges presented by unmanned aerial vehicles (uavs, or drones, as they are most commonly called) in the extended warfare overseas and at “home” that characterizes the era of the war on terror. In many ways, the entire proj­ect of this book is a prologue to considering the observational and sensing capacities of machines like drones. So much commentary on uavs and the long wars of which they have come to serve as a power­ful symbol seems ahistorical or unwilling to question the preposterously seamless linear timeline from “watchtower” to “drone.” In bending this book’s temporal focus back and forth between parts of four centuries and across just a few of the spaces of Eu­ro­pean colonial and imperial wars, I hope that I have disturbed some of the master narratives of airpower and visual culture just enough to allow for a glimpse of the possibilities of distance and, with a growing sense of uncertainty, see other­wise between.

Introduction   33

CHAPTER 1

S U R V E Y I N G W A R ­T I M E A F T E R M A T H S The First Military Survey of Scotland

—­

The land was hilly and the king remote. —­T. C. SMOUT , A History of the Scottish ­People

What could be more stable than geo­graph­i­cal knowledge? “Ground truth” anchors con­temporary preconceptions about physical geography to the comforting solid m ­ atter of the earth’s crust; terrain may vary, but it is always already presumed to be empirically knowable, objectively real. Although several de­cades of cultural and social geography research have introduced interpretive and repre­sen­ta­tional analyses of the ways in which information about places and spaces has developed historically, the cartographic products of the earth sciences continue to generate and fulfill desires for the certainties of geographic knowledge. This belief in the truth value of a map comes to constitute one of modernity’s most power­ful ideologies: the material ground of a singular, knowable world. Regardless of ample evidence that the repre­sen­ta­tional practices that produce maps can offer only partial, incomplete, or uneven approximations of what­ever it is that is “out ­there” to be mea­sured or perceived, the belief in the “bedrock” of geo­graph­i­cal science and its allied modes and formats of description remains firmly in place. It is useful, then, to consider not only the ways in which aerial views are deeply entangled in the formation of modern geo­graph­i­cal knowledge as a quantifiable science but also the ways in which that knowledge is repeatedly limited or undone by affective forces. Rec­ords and traces of t­hese unruly perceptions remind us that neither the ground nor the air is consistently or coherently sensible. This chapter inquires into a transitional moment in the

­ iddle of the eigh­teenth ­century when war­time aftermaths—­the quotidian m dispositions of undeclared war—­produced complex and dynamic modes of sensing and representing geo­graph­i­cal information. In the midst of vio­ lence, grief, and triumph, the imaginary bird’s-­eye views of an earlier period ­were incorporated into the scientific pro­cess of mea­sur­ing terrain, creating a restive, hybrid object—­the First Military Survey of Scotland (see plate 5).1 Drawing on a variety of methods to produce the effect of an omniscient view from above, the British Board of Ordnance both emptied the terrain of historical meaning and content and “discovered” its ground truth for state infrastructural and governmental proj­ects. In this early effort to innovate a “God’s-­eye” cartographic method, the aerial overview worked to unify and standardize a format of remote sensing through a total view “at a glance.” Yet the experimental effort to “see all” as if from above also generated an uneven objectivity that could not fully disguise its violent dispositions. Retrospectively, the Military Survey that was conducted in Scotland between 1747 and 1755 can be situated as the limited precursor of that much larger, high-­powered engine of cartographic mastery, the British Ordnance Survey—­a comprehensive undertaking that was initiated in 1791 and continually updated to this day. The Military Survey is a peculiar object, however. Never published or used in the field, produced through multiple techniques, and only vaguely accurate by con­temporary terms, the Military Survey was unabashedly po­liti­cal in provenance.2 Its very title made no secret of its territorializing intentions. However, the surveyors and draftsmen who produced the map ­were British Board of Ordnance employees and, therefore, attached to a hybrid entity both linked to and distinct from the army.3 Furthermore, although the Military Survey seemed to mark the definitive end of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745–46, the ways in which the proj­ect drew together ­people, places, and instruments remind us that war registers its effects across varied tempos and spatial scales that cannot be neatly sorted into “before,” “during,” and “­after” or even “­here” and “­there.” ­These complex ele­ments escape the purposeful containment of a temporal aftermath to trou­ble the Military Survey’s conventional origin story with its emphasis on an entirely new endeavor u ­ nder the sign of a unilateral spatialization of military occupation in an age of expanding empire. The Military Survey was convened to produce geo­graph­i­cal knowledge of contested terrain, “filling in” space presumed or declared to be “blank.” It is also pos­si­ble to understand the practices drawn together in the Military Survey not simply as filling in a stable spatial field but as contributing to the forceful emptying of a space always already ­under construction, creating a Surveying Wartime Aftermaths  35

specifically cartographic format as the dispositional domain of British state infrastructure. The emergent cartography of an experimental proj­ect like the Military Survey relied on a combination of ele­ments ranging from picturesque landscape art, the military sketch, chorographic maps, and mathematical methods of triangulation to practices and tools borrowed from estate mapping. As J. B. Harley noted, the Military Survey should be regarded not so much as an entirely new format but as a “fusion of existing trends” (1980, 2). Yet the Military Survey is often held to be the initiator of a more seamless and holistic view of terrain. In this instance, we can see how the modernity of mapping incorporated diverse ways and means as well as media only to subsume this uneven complexity in f­ avor of a mythologized way of seeing. This active mode of viewing, or “seeing all,” became understood to be instantaneous—­a coup d’oeil—as if a viewer could hover over the earth to survey its surface in detail and perceive every­thing in an instant. Several de­cades before h ­ uman flight in the first balloons launched in Western Eu­rope, the Military Survey represented the view from above as an embodied form of perception, as if flying far above the earth. Yet, ironically, this vantage point was made modern (as opposed to the earlier bird’s-­eye lithographs of cities) not by flight but by mea­sur­ing the ground, often on foot. This tension between a focus on the ground from the ground and a repre­sen­ta­tion of the site in its entirety as if viewed from the sky undergirds the foundation of modern cartography. Furthermore, this seemingly total and realistic aerial view moved from a physical act of observation accomplished by surveyors on-­site to remote sensing via an “inward eye” as draftsmen at a distance created the map itself. The Military Survey gave “form to feeling” by incorporating a variety of practices and modes of perception along with an early version of what con­temporary military observers term sense making—­incorporating the commander’s understanding of a situation, with the primacy of geo­graph­i­cal information as a given, as a technique of decision-­making. The Military Survey was conceived by a small group of British military commanders who argued that resurgent rebellions and potential invasions from the north could be significantly ameliorated with an accurate map of the territory. With the elimination of the threat of the reinstitution of the Stuart monarchical line ­after the ambitious Jacobite uprising was definitively suppressed in 1746, Scotland was targeted for military occupation and infrastructural development. A new map was needed in order to “see” the territory, plan for more roads and forts, and facilitate the movements of troops, goods, and civilian traffic as well as to facilitate the reor­ga­ni­ 36 Chapter 1

za­tion of property confiscated from Jacobite landowners. The advocates of the proj­ect proposed to send a tiny band of surveyors into a landscape that they described as almost impenetrably wild and unknown, nearly empty or inhabited by ­people who had come to be regarded as savages. However, the Highlands had been emptied more by war and famine than by “nature.” Carol Burns has argued that no place on earth is purely cleared or entirely empty; rather, landscapes are densely layered from accrued actions over time, making space. ­These strata are hard to see ­because they are “physically and spatially coextensive,” which leads to “interruption, simultaneity, discontinuity, synchronism, fragmentation, coincidence, and disruption.” An “abstract overlay of mathe­matics” of the kind used in modern surveys actually “masks” topography as the illusion of a singular scientific system makes invisible the multitude of “natu­ral and man-­made” systems that contribute to physical form. In this coextensive force field, Burns argues that the urge to see all, to decipher perfectly or mea­sure precisely the terrain, still leaves out what is “difficult to see,” particularly “what is not immediately pres­ent” (1991, 154). Within the omniscient grasp of the totalizing view, innumerable ele­ments may be lost to sense and thus to ­human history. On the other hand, some aspects of landscapes and life forms that are evacuated or seemingly eliminated by modern mapping may be perceptible beyond the cartographic grid through trace, evidentiary rec­ord, memory, sensation, or magnitudes of absence. Thus, even as the Military Survey attempted to represent an occupied territory through modern mathematical methods of mea­sure­ ment, “masking” difficult ele­ments of the topography u ­ nder observation and leaving absent vis­i­ble evidence of war­time aftermaths, the structural limitations of time, distance, and format generated “unruly intensities” that insinuated themselves into the scientific practices of “sense making.” WAR­T IME AFTERM ATH S: “ ROG UE I N TEN SI T I E S ” AN D VIOLEN T D I SP OSI TI ON S

The actuality of the lived world is always multispectral, sensed through a resonant array of materials. . . . ​This also means that remote sensing is never merely an act of recovery. It is always haunted by the prospect of that which cannot be sensed, by the limits of its own spectral logics. —­Derek McCormack, “Remotely Sensing Affective Afterlives”

The commonsense understanding of aftermath as linear, the duration following the end of hostilities, tries to impose a sense of order on chaotic and insensible experiences. However, traumatic events refuse to stay in place, Surveying Wartime Aftermaths  37

not simply “returning” but destabilizing perceptions of temporality and space, collapsing or expanding distance and time, producing a wide range of attempts to live on in the midst of the unpredictable excess or absence of emotion—­what Kathleen Stewart refers to as “rogue intensities” (2007, 44). Although maps may appear to our eyes as the epitome of a tightly closed system of production and interpretation—if we learn the signs and symbols, we believe that we can read any standard map—­they can be produced and read, even unevenly or partially, as productive of unruly affects. As an artifact of the dynamic and plural aftermaths of po­liti­cal vio­lence, the Military Survey generated a terrain of affective intensities that may be sensed even from the remote reaches of our ­century. Nevertheless, the Military Survey is most often presented in con­temporary geo­graph­i­cal discourse as the first accomplished instantiation of rational cartographic planning and execution from a distance. As the National Library of Scotland website puts it, “this was the first time the w ­ hole of the Scottish mainland—­the islands ­were excluded—­ had been mapped at once to the same specification” (n.d.). According to the often-­cited reminiscence of William Roy, the lead surveyor, the stated intention of the Military Survey was to ameliorate Britain’s lack of geo­graph­i­cal knowledge of a restive peripheral region, the Highlands, in order to assist in military occupation (Arden-­Close 1969, 2–3). The mountainous territory had confounded and frightened British troops and frustrated their commanders not only during the recent Jacobite uprising but over centuries of armed incursions. In mapping ground that had been represented as an always already desolate wasteland, the surveying party traversed a physical environment replete with a recent overlay of death and destruction. The surveyors operated ­aftermath. That is, they moved cyclically as well as linearly, at varying paces: inventing and supplementing established procedures of remote sensing and repre­sen­ta­tion, engaging intensities of environment and lingering hostilities, striving without always succeeding to overcome a mountainous ground that disturbed con­temporary understanding of lines of sight. If, as so many chroniclers assert, an image of national coherence came into view over time as the surveyors mea­sured and mapped, we can also sense other, less legible or easily documented encounters or possibilities. This was not a map that charted the deepening famine or the fresh graves or the empty crofts of deported or imprisoned Highlanders. This was not even a map that evinced curiosity about the best places to fish or grow a certain crop or locate a par­tic­u­lar herb. The Military Survey reminds us that most modern rational proj­ects announce insistently their objective intentions even as they transmit the affective, nonsynchronous intensities of 38 Chapter 1

conflict’s aftermaths, emptying as well as filling the fields of information and perception. The Military Survey generated a format for geo­graph­i­cal knowledge in ongoing war­time aftermaths, one that drew on direct sensory evidence as well as more remote practices of repre­sen­ta­tion. Conceived of as both a panacea to an absence of modern military maps during a past conflict and as an aggressive reshaping of the territorial imaginary of the ­future of the north of Scotland, the Military Survey required “boots on the ground,” as it ­were, as well as a “mind’s eye in motion.” That is, the small group of men who argued relentlessly for the financial and po­liti­cal support of the Military Survey not only sought to produce a more accurate map by sending surveyors out to mea­sure on foot but also proposed an abstract conceptualization of this more mathematical procedure—an aerial view of an entire area rendered to scale. This view from above would be “real” rather than imaginary like the bird’s-­eye views from the early modern period since the information would be transferred from the surveyors’ mea­sur­ing chains and sketches to the artists working in the Ordnance Survey branch office in Edinburgh.4 The entire operation would be or­ga­nized systematically and scientifically, drawing on modern methods of triangulation where pos­si­ble.5 Yet the surveyors traversed a terrain marked by warfare: burned villages, sites of executions, new prisons and garrisons ­under construction, and a population undergoing deprivation and displacement. Wearing the smart blue uniforms of the Board of Ordnance, accompanied by red-­coated British Army personnel, the surveyors represented the Hanoverian state and its enterprise of unification through military occupation.6 The map they created vibrated with conflicting affective forces and intensities even as it was intentionally formatted to produce a more universal, scientific standard.7 The Military Survey was conducted by the victors in a war that set Scots against each other as well as against Britain’s Hanoverian regime. Building on the simmering energies of uprisings earlier in the ­century, the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 sought to reestablish the House of Stuart as the rightful rulers of ­Great Britain. Drawing together a complex alliance of Catholic, Irish, and French interests as well as many power­ful Highland clan–­affiliated fighters, a large contingent led by Prince Charles Edward Stuart moved south through the Lowlands of Scotland and northern ­England, reaching a point within 150 miles of London. An alarmed King George II sent his son, Prince William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, to aggressively put down the insurrection. Pushed back into Scotland, the Jacobite forces w ­ ere defeated once and for all on April 16, 1746, in a ­battle on Culloden moor near Inverness. Surveying Wartime Aftermaths  39

­ fter Culloden, the British Army exacted brutal retribution not only against A any survivors of the Jacobite cause but seemingly against all life forms in the Highlands—­a crushing combination of execution, imprisonment, deportation, and confiscation of property that included the razing of villages and estates, systematic sexual assault of ­women and girls, banning the use of the Gaelic language, as well as forbidding the Highland manner of dress and most signs of clan affiliation.8 The areas most deeply affected w ­ ere in the remote higher elevations where the British Army determined that re­ sis­tance to their presence was most likely to endure and even flourish ­unless harsh mea­sures ­were undertaken. The economy collapsed and famine ensued, sending many p ­ eople to the cities in the south or abroad to the colonies to look for work. In the Highlands, following the suppression of the Jacobite uprising, ways of life and the land itself became more firmly or­ga­nized ­under the terms of British po­liti­cal “unification” and a civilizing mission of “pacification.” Related in such a brief manner, the mainstream narrative of the Jacobite uprising and its violent end elides many complex and uneven ele­ments. One ele­ment ­running through the tragic suppression of the primarily Catholic Jacobites is the palpable presence and uncertain f­ uture of Celtic languages, ways of life, and sites of significance that contribute strata to the same cultural topography. Another aspect that may or may not sync with the dominant narrative is the rec­ord of tensions between the increasingly power­ful Presbyterians and p ­ eople of other faiths in relation to po­liti­cal proj­ects of national in­de­pen­ dence or unification. The popu­lar storyline of anachronistic Highland clans backing a false prince against a more modern po­liti­cal nation-­state can mask the huge divide between economic classes and the emergence of a worldwide mercantile trade. The “invention” of the Highlands as the incubator of rebellion and disorder through nature, as a terrain given innately to treason and therefore requiring domestication and control, required the evacuation of any evidence of multiplicities of social relations and a narrowing of legible forms to create a geo­graph­i­cal knowledge that would be intelligible “at a glance” by rulers and man­ag­ers at a distance. Scotland’s incorporation into G ­ reat Britain took many years and ­battles to accomplish, but the loss on the moor of Culloden came to stand symbolically not only for “unification” but for a new geography that would require the collation, production, and interpretation of diverse kinds of information. That the terrain was already well known not only to its inhabitants but to visitors over many years and that the emptying was in the pres­ent and the ­future to come instead of in the past only rendered the Military Survey more 40 Chapter 1

energetic in its cartographic program of documentation of the truth that it was producing. A ­ fter the supposedly definitive defeat of the Jacobite forces and the violent suppression of any signs of affiliation with its po­liti­cal program, what lived on to surge and wander around in the everyday practices of the undeclared but per­sis­tent war­time that characterized the next several de­cades? What forms did war­time assume in this official aftermath? Keller Easterling has defined infrastructural space as one made power­ful in part by its “undeclared but consequential activities,” a formulation that allows us to distinguish between a “declared intent” and an “under­lying disposition” (2014, 21–22). Successful state infrastructures produce formats that “unfold” in time, continually “updating” themselves to adapt to current conditions, less tied to a specific message than to a medium of power (14).9 The Military Survey was conceived as an act of war but developed a scientific rationale as well as a military one, extending its purview beyond the Highlands to the Lowlands and then the entirety of ­Great Britain. The attempt to “see all” constructed infrastructural space through a selective narrowing of “all” that was necessary to “see,” thereby evading an open confrontation with the vio­lence at the heart of both war­time aftermaths in general and emerging formats of geo­graph­i­cal knowledge in par­tic­u­lar. If we engage the Military Survey as an integral actor in the aftermath of the uprising of 1745, we bring the unruly energies and dispositions of war­time more to the fore instead of banishing them to the realms of the imperceptible or forgotten; that is, we return our attention to what the Board of Ordnance surveyors and draf­ters ­were ­doing and what the map did and did not make pos­si­ble.10 MAPPIN G HISTORI ES: CH OROG RAP H I ES AND B ­ AT T L E M A P S

The rise and pro­gress of the rebellion which broke out in the Highlands of Scotland in 1745, and which was fi­nally suppressed by His Royal Highness the Duke of Cumberland at the ­Battle of Culloden in the following year, convinced Government of what infinite importance it would be to the State that a country, so very inaccessible by nature, should be thoroughly explored and laid open, by establishing military posts in its innermost recesses, and carry­ing roads of communication to its remotest parts. —­William Roy (1785), quoted in Charles Frederick Arden-­Close, The Early Years of the Ordnance Survey

In the summer of 1747, twenty-­year-­old William Roy set out from Fort Augustus with instructions to survey territory that was understood to be only partially or completely unmapped. He had been hired by the Deputy Surveying Wartime Aftermaths  41

Quartermaster General for the military district of North Britain, David Watson, a man described as “fanatical” in his hatred of Jacobites (Hewitt 2010, 5). Commissioned at an early age in the British Army and appointed to the Board of Ordnance in 1743, Watson viewed surveying the Highlands as the key to pacifying the region in the interests of readying the territory for infrastructural development and settlement. Despite Watson’s passionate advocacy, the proj­ect was a hard sell to his commander, the Duke of Cumberland, and at first the resources ­were exceedingly limited. Consequently, most of the work was conducted by a group of young and relatively inexperienced Board of Ordnance surveyors and draftsmen. Watson’s handpicked surveyor, William Roy, worked mostly alone in his first year or two in the Highlands ­until he was joined in 1749 by three cadets from the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, Hugh Debbieg and John Williams (both ­under eigh­teen) along with twelve-­year-­old David Dundas (a relative by marriage of Watson’s who went on to a highly distinguished military c­ areer). A short time ­later, sixteen-­year-­old Paul Sandby joined the group as the official draftsman. As the Military Survey began to take shape, funds ­were approved for “additional Servants, Guides, Interpreters & Other­wise” and the proj­ect expanded from a complete survey of the Highlands to include the Lowlands (28). From its inception, however, it remained an experiment in practice and form, conducted by talented and industrious young men who owed their c­ areers to figures like Watson and the Duke of Cumberland who ­were linked to the power and prestige of the Hanoverian regime. Too young to have been formally mustered into the British Army to fight on the Continent or against the Jacobite forces, they ­were sent out to map the northern-­most reaches of G ­ reat Britain at a scale of one inch to one thousand yards—­a proj­ect that required the traversal of g­ reat amounts of ground to produce the effect of an aerial visualization of the entire territory “at a glance.” David Watson’s dedication to the cause of unification and the pacification of the Highlands placed him at the start of 1747 as commander at the British garrison that had been built at one end of Loch Ness in the aftermath of the insurrection of 1715, recently renamed Fort Augustus a­ fter the victorious router of the Jacobites, the Duke of Cumberland, Prince William Augustus. “Surrounded by a wall of mountains,” to many Britons the contested area around Fort Augustus “resembled the end of the earth” (Hewitt 2010, 18). When William Roy arrived at the beginning of the summer to start surveying, Watson was overseeing repairs to the fort and supervising a major expansion of the roadways through Scotland that had been initi42 Chapter 1

FIGURE 1.1  ​Timothy

Pont, chorographic map of Scotland (section portraying Loch Rannoch and Schiehallion, Perthshire), ca. 1583–1614. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland.

ated ­under General Wade between 1724 and 1740 to assist in military maneuvers following the uprising of 1715. Ordnance Survey historian Rachel Hewitt rather romantically imagines a solo William Roy “placing a staff on the perimeter of Fort Augustus, and marking the first bend or kink in the road to Inverness with another” before setting off into the unknown (20–21). Roy was prob­ably accompanied by several soldiers ­because he would have needed at least one person or more to help with his mea­sur­ing equipment. But it was a small band to begin with, at the very least. In his account of this first survey written many years l­ater, Roy stressed the strategic conceptualization of the proj­ect as a penetration into the “innermost recesses” of an “inaccessible” and remote country; his brief was to “explore” and “lay open” the terrain so that military posts and “roads of communication” could be firmly established (Arden-­Close 1969, 2).11 If we d ­ idn’t know better, we might assume from this kind of rhetorical shaping of the justification of the Military Survey that most of the territory north of the border between Scotland and ­England was uncharted, sparsely populated, and unknown to most of the con­temporary world. Yet, by the ­middle of the seventeenth c­ entury, a full one hundred years before the Military Survey was conducted, Scotland was considered to be “one of the best-­mapped countries” of its time (see fig. 1.1) (Fleet, Wilkes, and Withers 2011, 51). How did a nation like Scotland that seemed to be among the “best-­mapped” countries of the seventeenth ­century come to be considered Surveying Wartime Aftermaths  43

a blank and wild wasteland that required a comprehensive military survey only one hundred years or so ­later? This question trou­bles any assumption that the history of cartography proceeds linearly from an ancient time of insufficiently accurate maps through steady improvements to a con­temporary moment of pure precision. What counts as a map, the purpose of the repre­ sen­ta­tion, its material form, the nature of its production and circulation, and innumerable other f­actors structure the potential identification of an inscription as part of the history of cartography in the Western world. While the term cartography comes into use only from the mid-­nineteenth ­century onward, the history of drawn imagery that represents coastlines, terrain, and topography stretches back to ancient Mediterranean cultures. “Maps” across the span of Western culture have been protean t­ hings, tied to specific uses as well as to symbolic value. If the Military Survey is, indeed, the progenitor of a specific kind of mapping, it nevertheless has antecedents and corollaries—in this case, chorographies and b ­ attle maps. Scotland has been identified on one of the earliest known world maps created by the Alexandrian Claudius Ptolemy in the first c­ entury ad, but Western Eu­rope did not encounter Ptolemy’s works ­until they ­were translated and circulated in the late fifteenth c­ entury. Up to that point, the most developed Eu­ro­pean maps ­were portolan charts of coastlines that ­were used for marine navigation. During the ­Middle Ages, maps of the interior of Eu­ro­ pean nations ­were drawn or copied by hand, usually by religious personnel, but only in relatively small numbers; for example, only about twenty maps of Scotland are known to have been produced over a six-­hundred-­year period (Delano-­Smith and Kain 1999, 13). During the Eu­ro­pean Re­nais­sance, influenced by the newly translated works of Ptolemy, a descriptive mode of mapping, chorography, became a widely practiced way to promote a kingdom’s interest in coming to know its discrete regions. Eu­ro­pe­ans ­adopted the practice of chorography from the three-­part conceptualization outlined in Ptolemy’s Geographia: “geography,” or the “God’s-­eye view” that we have come to associate with the cartographic repre­sen­ta­tion based on mathematical and astronomical observation; “cosmography,” a navigational technique based on the relationship between the earth and both fixed and moving stars; and “chorography,” a method less concerned with quantitative accuracy of location and navigation and more dedicated to textual descriptions of specific regions and locales, parts instead of ­wholes.12 One of the most extensive chorographies of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was conducted in Scotland by Timothy Pont. How and why Pont undertook this ambitious proj­ect remains somewhat undetermined. 44 Chapter 1

It is pos­si­ble that he was e­ ither a direct or an inadvertent agent of King James VI, conducting the survey to verify potential areas of En­glish colonization. Other theories point to ecclesiastical politics; Pont’s f­ ather, Robert, was a prominent Scottish Presbyterian clergyman who became a major figure in a religious controversy over how to staff and finance expanding parishes. In order to ascertain the best sources of funding for this foundational aspect of Presbyterianism, the church needed to know “who was where,” especially the landowners and gentry of means along with any pertinent intelligence as to the nature and extent of their wealth (C. Withers 2001, 149). Another theory points to Pont’s education at St. Andrews, Scotland’s oldest university, which coincided with a period in which the “­mental map of Scotland” began to change in relation to discussions regarding the f­ uture direction of the nation, spurred in no small part by the incorporation of geo­graph­i­cal knowledge into the university’s curriculum (Lynch 2001, 27). The decorative or symbolic national maps that had satisfied earlier needs no longer provided the kind of intelligence that the church and state needed to plan for administrative and po­liti­cal proj­ects. A forward-­thinking young man like Timothy Pont might well have been inspired by all ­these ele­ments of the society of his time to set out to map the nation of Scotland. The interdisciplinary, descriptive capacity of chorography like Pont’s drew together all kinds of information from dif­fer­ent regions and districts and placed it within the frame of the emerging modern nation-­state, making concrete what might other­wise have been general geo­graph­i­cal knowledge (Cormack 1997, 20). Although Pont is often treated as the “single author” of his survey, chorographic compilations depended on input from numerous sources encountered in the field of inquiry, underscoring a pro­cess that Kapil Raj, in the context of the nineteenth-­century trigonometric survey of India, refers to as “co-­emergence” through the pro­cess of encounter (2007, 63). Some scholars surmise that Pont depended on a network of ­family and church affiliates to aid him along with an entire network of intelligence gatherers such as the “messengers, officials, and debt collectors” who regularly circulated through specific territories (Lynch 2001, 32–33). Since Pont did not speak Gaelic, he would have required local assistance and even protection in many locales as well (I. Mitchell 2001, 101). Thus, it can be assumed that he was affiliated to communities as well as to individual figures of influence or usefulness as he made his way across and around Scotland. Pont’s maps also reveal the attention of many hands. Scholars of the period have ascertained that all or at least portions of Pont’s survey ­were sent some years ­after his death to the Blaeus, the Dutch map-­making ­family, to inform the depiction of Scotland Surveying Wartime Aftermaths  45

in what became volume 5 of the comprehensive Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, sive, Atlas Novus. While the Blaeus began work on the maps sent to them by an intermediary, Sir John Scot, Robert and James Gordon w ­ ere enlisted to transcribe Pont’s original notes and substantially rework many of the maps. With the publication of volume 5 of the Atlas Novus in 1654 with 49 maps and over 150 pages of narrative, Scotland became vis­i­ble in a highly detailed, graphic form. In their comprehensive history of the cartography of Scotland, Christopher Fleet, Margaret Wilkes, and Charles Withers note that the “Pont-­ Gordon-­Blaeu” maps mark a period when the nation began to be charted by “native Scots” as well as outsiders, bringing more local knowledge to surveying and mapping proj­ects, a development that would seem to augur more complete charting and annotation (Fleet, Wilkes, and Withers 2011, 51). The “Pont-­Gordon-­Blaeu” chorographic maps, however, demonstrate the tensions at work in generating territorial repre­sen­ta­tions of emergent nation-­ states, including making divisions that become legible as dif­fer­ent kinds of terrain. Although Pont’s survey named close to ten thousand discrete places, the surviving manuscript maps indicate that ­there ­were large portions of the country that remained essentially “blank,” including a good portion of the Highlands (55). Thus, the “best” practices of the seventeenth c­ entury established an emerging metropolitan point of view by designating par­tic­ u­lar areas of Scotland as always already “terra incognita.” Th ­ ese apparently illegible and unknown zones tended to be mountainous areas at a distance from major, heavi­ly trafficked rivers, better roads, or towns of considerable size. Such blank spaces on the map could be interpreted as devoid of population or points of interest. Yet, during Pont’s lifetime, before the ­great removals and displacements of the following two centuries, the Highlands w ­ ere more heavi­ly populated and, if less well known to Lowlanders and visitors, intimately known to local inhabitants—­maps are most useful for outsiders, ­after all. Even some scholars who insist that Highland maps depicted blank spaces that referenced “real” absences admit that the Gaelic poetry of the same period indicated “intense, if localized, knowledge of mountain topography” across the population (I. Mitchell 2001, 93). The “empty” spaces that often came to represent the region, then, offer a singular, invested worldview that becomes “real” to rulers and other invested viewers from a distance. Maps based on Pont’s chorography projected the po­liti­cal proj­ect of En­glish territorial occupation and a long pro­cess of building a singular worldview. Early modern maps of the Highlands continued this pattern of visually emptying a populated area ­until that depopulation became a real­ity (see fig. 1.2). 46 Chapter 1

Forlani, Scotia: Regno di Scotia, ca. 1566. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland.

FIGURE 1.2  ​Paolo

Compared with chorographic compilations, which took considerable time to assem­ble, early modern Eu­ro­pean ­battle maps ­were relatively sketchy or limited in their purview. ­These maps ­were intended to be used for limited purposes and could depict troop movements, fortifications and groundworks, logistical supply routes, and barracks and encampments, along with topography and relevant vegetation.13 Yet, although designed as utilitarian, even temporary, tools, the early ­battle maps of Scotland contributed to the long-­term consolidation of ideas about where bound­aries between nations and groups of ­people ­were located and what value and meaning attached to ­those borders. B ­ attle maps of Scotland w ­ ere first produced when E ­ ngland invaded the Lowlands during the so-­called Rough Wooing in the mid-­ sixteenth ­century. The “wooing” was “rough,” indeed—­a violent occupation that resulted in the deaths of thousands. As the “Highland prob­lem” brought armies from the south into repeated cycles of invasion and violent aftermath in the mountains of Scotland, a charged concern arose in relation to specific zones and types of terrain; “high places” became perceived as “liminal, inaccessible, and pure” (Cosgrove and Della Dora 2009, 5). Early modern ­battle maps of Scotland underscored the close link between warfare and the Surveying Wartime Aftermaths  47

divisional operations of repre­sen­ta­tion, producing difference between “high” and “low” lands as well as between E ­ ngland and Scotland. In this unfolding of war­time aftermaths, of cycles of invasion and atrocities, Scotland became Britain’s prime “laboratory” for the kinds of innovations in surveying and mapping that would become standard operating procedure in the colonization of North Amer­i­ca, South Asia, and elsewhere in the years to come.14 When David Watson sent William Roy and his small group of assistants off to mea­sure and depict the Highlands, the territory was less unknown than known to be difficult for outsiders to “see.” A power­ful mode of seeing was in the making, one that would incorporate the sensory perception of embodied observation on the ground into a scientifically i­ magined format of aerial surveying. The transfer of the activity of observation from earth to sky, as it ­were, would lift the state’s modern optic high enough to view a territory in its entirety. No longer purely symbolic or simply tactical, the new format sought to justify its production through recourse to a military rationale but soon generated its own cartographic raison d’être. Geo­graph­i­cal knowledge became a value in its own right as infrastructural space emerged in war­time aftermath. Although the surveyors w ­ ere small in number, they moved through the landscape with the power of a victorious regime ­behind them and an emergent science before them. Their task was to “see” what they already “knew” in new registers and modes of perception and depiction. With or without intention, the Military Survey created a foundational disposition of spatialized vio­lence for new formats of geo­graph­i­cal knowledge, drawing on older practices of representing terrain from earlier conflicts and incorporating them into new ground truths as viewed from above. MAPPIN G POL I TI CS: P ROD UCI N G TH E G EO G ­ R A PH ­I ­C A L HIGHLAN DS IN WAR­T I M E AFTERM ATH S

To represent is to perform division. To represent is to generate distributions. Distributions between painter and observer, between a depicting surface and object depicted, between places located on a surface, between that which is depicted and that which is not. To represent is to narrate, or to refuse to narrate. It is to perform, or to refuse to perform, a world of spatial assumptions populated by subjects and objects. To represent thus renders other possibilities impossible, unimaginable. It is, in other words, to perform a politics. —­John Law and Ruth Benschop, “Resisting Pictures”

Geo­graph­i­cal information generated about Scotland by proj­ects like the Military Survey proceeded as most repre­sen­ta­tions do—by producing divi48 Chapter 1

sions, in this case between Scotland and E ­ ngland in the first instance and between the Highlands and Lowlands within Scotland in the second. Many ­people regarded “Hadrian’s Wall,” built by the Romans in the first de­cades of the second ­century, as the true geo­graph­i­cal border between Scotland and ­England, although it lay much farther south than the po­liti­cal boundary that came to be drawn on maps from the thirteenth c­ entury on. The border between the two countries remained in dispute throughout the centuries, giving rise to the term debatable lands (Lamont and Rossington 2007, 1). Where a definite “natu­ral” feature like the River Tweed suggested a border, some agreement prevailed. But many sections of this ninety-­six-­mile border w ­ ere composed of straight lines, clearly the “work of a committee” and therefore subject to endless dispute (2). It is the border between the Highlands and Lowlands, however, that has become the most naturalized ele­ment in this history, seemingly rooted in terrain as much as in customs and manners. Yet, as Charles Withers has emphatically argued, the division of Scotland between Highlands and Lowlands is “not an immutable fact of geography” (1992, 144). Or, perhaps we could say that the invention of the division, w ­ hether it is in the eigh­teenth ­century as Hugh Trevor-­Roper claims or in a geo­graph­i­cal emergence of the region in the ­Middle Ages as Withers puts forward, demonstrates the mutability of the grounds of geography itself (Trevor-­Roper 1983; C. Withers 1992, 144). Withers asserts that the “creation” of the Highlands was consolidated in the period 1745 to 1822 by the combination of several f­ actors, including “the geo­graph­i­cal ‘discovery’ of the region,” the mythologization of the Highlander as “noble savage,” and the rise of Romantic attitudes ­toward picturesque landscapes (1992, 145).15 Thus, by the ­middle of the nineteenth ­century, Victorian historian James Taylor could attribute the coming into view of two oppositional racial cultures—­one that was warlike, untrustworthy, and un-­Western, “like the Arabs of the desert,” while the other signified the supposedly exemplary characteristics of Western civilization—to the powers exerted by a ­great mass of granite, the Grampian range, that separates the Lowlands from the Highlands (1854, x, 500). At the start of his two-­volume Pictorial His­ tory of Scotland, Taylor argued that the study of the earth’s surface reveals the true “state of ­things,” a timeless nature that structures religion, manners, ­politics, and so forth to a specific place. “Geology,” he wrote, “has a claim to  be regarded as History . . . ​a rec­ord of events which lie in the far distant past” (iii). With the “opening” of the Highlands and the infrastructural  proj­ects of the mid to late eigh­teenth ­century, Scotland’s geological diversity became the subject of intense scientific attention, leading Surveying Wartime Aftermaths  49

to further “historicizing” through scientific observation of “ground truths” (Klonk 1996, 70). ­These geological and geo­graph­i­cal formulations marked certain kinds of terrain as naturally treacherous and in need of scientific engineering, particularly mountains. In the period in which the Military Survey was conducted, the belief that mountainous areas are dif­fer­ent from lowlands was shifting from a medieval conception of wasteland—­a “fallen landscape,” created as such by a deity as punishment for sins or misdeeds—to one that emphasized useful potential ­under proper stewardship (Di Palma 2014, 22). This stratification between a wild, barren terrain and a domesticated, bountiful landscape emerged in war­time aftermath and proliferated in “modern” social as well as natu­ral sciences throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, splitting Scotland into two incommensurable geographies.16 As Colin Calloway has argued, from the early geologists and geographers to the twentieth-­century historians of the Annales School,17 areas like the Scottish Lowlands became understood to be geologically composed of “rich clay and alluvial soils” that promote “intensive arable cultivation,” while the Highlands ­were viewed as inherently inhospitable to agriculture since “the soil tends to be chalky” and “the climate is too wet and cold” (2008, 51–52). The line between “rich clay” and “chalky” soil would come to mark the boundary not only between agricultural bounty and useless wasteland but between a deserving, civilized population and enclaves of perpetual outsiders. ­People ­were believed to mirror their terrain. To survey the Highlands in the war­time aftermaths of the Jacobite uprising in the ­middle of the eigh­teenth ­century required first a division between high places and low followed by an emptying and obscuring of an environment that had to be encountered by outsiders as evocative of fear, terror, and awe. The British Board of Ordnance surveyors and draftsmen understood that they had crossed a border into lands not just “debatable” but unrepresentable in con­temporary terms. The land became barren as they mea­sured it, in the sense that they filtered out anything that did not fit into the criteria of their survey. To outsiders, pathways led nowhere or into danger instead of guiding the traveler to friendly dwellings or safe havens. This “unhomely” aspect of the experience of moving through the Highlands generated the kind of “unruly intensities” that emphasized differences between places and ­people, drawing distinctions into geo­graph­i­cal information in general and the cartographic pro­cess itself. Making a map like the Military Survey in the mountains of northern Scotland was physical work that also engaged the senses and emotions. The uncanny landscape of “high places” became understood to include “irregular forms, vertiginous contrasts of height and 50 Chapter 1

depth, precipitous ledges and slopes and . . . ​intensities of heat or cold,” and ­these qualities became not so much undesirable as attractive, even sublime (Cosgrove and Della Dora 2009, 5). ­These kinds of embodied and aesthetic experiences changed the way mountains became perceived beyond the purview of mapping per se. No longer simply objects of disgust or lacking in value, landscapes like ­those found in the Highlands offered a deep fund for emergent aesthetics as well as infrastructural development. The “bedrock” argument for a natu­ral division between the cultivated space of the Lowlands and the disturbing, sublime geography of the Highlands that began to emerge through repre­sen­ta­tions like early modern b ­ attle maps and chorographies continued into the eigh­teenth ­century. The Enlightenment emphasis on scientific inquiry as well as an expanded and centralized state administration brought about new strategies for approaching the seemingly intractable prob­lem of mountains and the p ­ eople who inhabited them during ­these cycles of war and “pacification.” With the British Army in the eigh­teenth ­century came strategists, tacticians, engineers, and what we would ­today call “developers.” The seemingly blank spaces and unknown pathways called for systematic examination, energetic scientific mea­sure­ment, militarized pacification, and a massive proj­ect of building and rebuilding infrastructure. The production of geo­graph­i­cal knowledge about Scotland, especially its Highlands, accompanied the construction of numerous roads, bridges, and forts throughout the region. By 1815, over nine hundred miles of wide, graded roads had extended the network begun u ­ nder the supervision of General Wade almost one hundred years before (Guldi 2012, 30). The rural landscape was “almost completely transformed” by t­hese infrastructural “improvements” between 1700 and 1850, from a “predominantly open-­field system” and communally owned land that included a mix of “moorland, scattered trees, and upland grazing” to “an ordered, geometrical, fenced, walled and wooded landscape, with neat and more compact farms, roads and new rural employments” (Fleet, Wilkes, and Withers 2011, 125). This drastic reworking of the landscape was made pos­si­ble by large-­scale displacements of populations,18 from the forced transfer of forfeited Jacobite estates to the ­later enclosures and clearances that sent so many tenants and small-­scale subsistence farmers far from the land they had long tended, severely depopulating large areas. ­These violent disruptions reor­ga­nized affiliations and identities as well as livelihoods, “unifying” through mandated changes in language, employment, and residence. The politics of war­time aftermaths coproduced by military and state institutions divided p ­ eople and places, making spaces between what could and could not be represented, making impossible and unimaginable innumerable Surveying Wartime Aftermaths  51

ele­ments embodied in the landscape and its histories, disappearing some ­people and places while summoning and “discovering” o ­ thers. The directed intensity of an infrastructural proj­ect like the Military Survey drew on the long history of unease and, even, fear of high places to disseminate an emotional disposition through the production of definitive geo­graph­i­cal information. The ground truth of the difference between high and low, wild and tame, disloyal and loyal, barren and productive, and sublime and beautiful would be discovered and confirmed by the science of surveying. This mode of observation would bring the powers of an aerial vantage point into material form, transferring geo­graph­i­cal information from the ground to an imaginary overview that could be assessed “at a glance” through the format of the map. SEEIN G LIKE A STATE I N WAR­T I M E: TH E M I L I TA RY SURVEY’S COU P D ’ OEI L

Since all information and assumptions are open to doubt, and with chance at work everywhere, the commander continually finds that ­things are not as he expected. —­Carl von Clausewitz, On War

The Oxford En­glish Dictionary defines “surveying” as “the act of looking at something as a w ­ hole, or from a commanding position” as well as a “comprehensive ­mental view.” In this sense, a survey is a total overview, both literally and figuratively a view from above. The Military Survey incorporated, at least to some degree, the growing belief that an elevated perspective would produce not only an accurate depiction of the terrain but an almost instantaneous ­mental picture of the same. Colonization expanded territorial possessions across greater and greater distances, encouraging states to develop remote methods of perceiving and calculating terrain and property. To perceive without being pres­ent, to grasp almost intuitively, and to synthesize information as rapidly as pos­si­ble—­t hese hallmarks of modern statecraft engendered “concrete abstractions,” the making evident of a new form through empirical practices (Barthes 1979, 9). This emphasis on the remote (without touch or requiring embodied presence) and instantaneous perception of “every­thing” at a glance brought together the older pictorial practice of the bird’s-­eye view with new modes of panoramic surveying, transforming territorial abstractions into concrete geo­graph­i­cal knowledge. While the new, modern approach to managing properties, products, and populations from a distance began to entail a totalizing, aerial view, the earlier convention of bird’s-­eye views had negotiated tensions between 52 Chapter 1

FIGURE 1.3  ​Jacopo

de’ Barbari, Plan of Venice, ca. 1500.

holistic and fragmented viewpoints. Early modern prints that portrayed bird’s-­eye views ­were assembled from sketches drawn from many dif­fer­ent vantage points across a city or a specific site. The resulting montages strove to create the effect of a fixed single perspective, but their conditions of production introduced innumerable viewpoints and uneven distances, many “imaginary” or “impossible” lines of sight. Thus, Louis Marin has described the bird’s-­eye views of Eu­ro­pean cities, such as Jacopo de’ Barbari’s well-­known woodcut of Venice dating from 1500, as “utopic” or, in a sense, impossible (1984, 208–9) (see fig.  1.3). Jean-­Marc Besse has argued that bird’s-­eye views in the early modern period are not so much utopic as virtual, offering immediate site experiences to far-­removed viewers (2003, 343). Putting it another way, Beaumont Newhall interpreted early bird’s-­eye views as “earthbound”; they portrayed the land as if i­magined from a ­great height, but they could not convey the view from “points suspended in space” in a fully realistic way (1969, 11). Giuliana Bruno steps away from concerns with realism to propose that early modern bird’s-­eye views could never produce a seamless and totalizing view since they ­were always already both “nowhere” and “now ­here”—­that is, they ­were ways of seeing that brought space and time together in an imaginatively “dislocated” and “mobilizing” pres­ent that did not exclude past and ­future. Without a true focal point, the viewer of this kind of image could “wander around” in a “permeable place of encounters between the map and the landscape” (Bruno 2002, 177). In their time and place of production, early modern bird’s-­eye views complemented chorographic and other early Eu­ro­pean mapping methods to convey significant kinds of information about specific places. But the growing perception that standardization of units of information and more uniform Surveying Wartime Aftermaths  53

conventions of repre­sen­ta­tion would benefit the state in its efforts to create rational systems of governance called for new approaches to depicting terrain. Across Eu­rope, “systematic and synoptic” ways of seeing had gained ­favor as state governments sought to standardize and increase methods of taxation, establish standing armies, and militarize borders (Scott 1998, 46, 24). Chorographies, bird’s-­eye views, cadastral and estate maps, and other early modern cartographic methods had introduced vari­ous ways of making a “local situation” legible to an “outsider.” With such a map in hand, a prospective buyer or ruler could “survey a large territory at a glance” (45). In moving from parts to ­wholes, from the dynamic tensions between “nowhere” and “now ­here” that disturbed and compelled the viewer of the early modern bird’s-­eye view, or the intensely detailed narrative emphasis of the chorographic or cadastral map of a specific region or estate, the eighteenth-­century developments in cartographic science aimed for a “static” and “schematic” overview of a terrain in its entirety (46). In the pro­cess, complex and layered landscapes and ecologies, as well as uneven and partial viewpoints, ­were masked or reduced to ele­ments perceptible in an “easily legible” survey (Dunlop 2015, 45). To “see all” like a state, as James Scott (1998) has argued, came to mean to make legible only select ele­ments, to narrow the field of vision, empty spaces out even as they ­were filled in, and to lose the benefits of other senses and modes of perception of more worlds than one.19 We can understand this history of globalization and territorial imperialism as diminishing extrasensory perceptions beyond vision. But even within the par­ameters of “sight,” this kind of “seeing” became at least partially “blind” to the possibilities of multiple worlds or “pluriverses” (Mignolo 2000; de la Cadena 2010, 2015). ­These pos­si­ble worlds are not so much Eu­rope’s “­others,” ­because such an oppositional concept that structures the modern Eu­ro­pean understanding of the world as negatively singular, as all that t­ here can be—­one is e­ ither “of ” or “not of ” the only world that might exist—is an impoverished understanding of the possibilities of living beings of all kinds in multiple spaces and times. Throughout the industrious burgeoning of mapping in the modern period, we have largely come to accept that the modern state came to see what it wanted, in effect: a mirror of its rationalizing properties writ large in such infrastructural proj­ects as topographical surveys. Thus, as surveyors and draftsmen negotiated the shift from three-­dimensional views in the field to the two-­dimensional repre­sen­ta­tional space of the paper map, they may have been able only to “see” remotely for the state and to evacuate as “aesthetic, ritual, or sentimental” any other sensing of the terrain they traversed and sought to represent and thereby control. 54 Chapter 1

The kind of surveying that produced the Military Survey, however, cannot be generalized as only simplifying and standardizing multiple worlds (­whether ­those are attributed to a romanticized “premodernity” or to a  complex modernity). As a “fusion of existing trends,” based on field observation and the tradition of the sketch map as well as trigonometrical  mea­sure­ment, the Military Survey incorporated embodied, intuitive, and affective methods of remote sensing as well as “objective” practices, and it certainly produced an aesthetic. One mode of intuitive viewing in par­ tic­u­lar ­circulated throughout the surveying of this period and, along with aftermath sensibilities, drew embodied affective practices into the ration­al proj­ect of surveying. To see all “at a glance,” to see “every­thing all at once,” emerged as a military mode of territorial reconnaissance that became generalized gradually across state and civilian ways of seeing and incorporated into a range of cartographic practices. Based on the emergence of an almost mystical belief in the innate capacity of gifted individuals to take in details of a landscape in an instant and to transform this information into actionable data, the concept of the coup d’oeil brought the long-­ standing tradition of the military sketch map that was rendered quickly by sight into an embodied practice of remote sensing that aimed for scientific objectivity. The intuitive ability to “make mea­sure­ments without instruments” or re­ connaissance a vue, linked to the term coup d’oeil, began to appear in military treatises around 1760 (Pansini 2002, 291–302; 2008, 16–17). Championed by Carl von Clausewitz in his now-­iconic account of nineteenth-­century Napoleonic warfare, the concept of coup d’oeil transfers the scopic powers of an elevated point of observation to a commander’s “inward eye.” According to Clausewitz, Napoleon and other effective generals succeeded due not only to unusual levels of courage or intelligence but to an innate ability to sense and therefore reconnoiter terrain at a glance. Only this exceptional, inborn sense could cut through the so-­called fog of war and its disorientations of time and space to produce the clear view needed for rapid and decisive action. As Clausewitz wrote: “If the mind is to emerge unscathed from this relentless strug­gle with the unforeseen, two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the in­ ner light which leads to truth; and second the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.” Clausewitz argued that the purely visual sense of the term speaks to a useful skill but remains too limited. The “genius” of coup d’oeil would lie in its extension to “any sound decision taken in the midst of action” (Clausewitz [1834] 1984, 102). Surveying Wartime Aftermaths  55

As the French term moved into En­glish usage in the ­later half of the eigh­ teenth c­ entury, this literal “striking of the eye” came to refer to any “glance taking in a general view.” But this neologism is not just an emphatic phrase or romantic fancy; it draws together observational science and intuitive, embodied experience in very specific ways that are deeply tied to efforts in the period to comprehend terrain in extreme situations. For example, Charlotte Bigg has argued that late eighteenth-­century naturalists like Horace-­Benedict de Saussure taught themselves how to look in a scientific manner at formidable mountain chains like the Alps by utilizing the concept of the coup d’oeil (2007, 77). This new kind of observation included detailed observation and precise mea­sure­ment but it did not exclude aesthetic and affective dimensions: “not only w ­ ere physical sensations and emotions often difficult to separate, but they partook in a wider conception of the unity of nature and of science and the interconnectedness of phenomena” (79–80). This sensing of the panoramic vista from ­great heights brought the “naturalist-­geographical gaze,” or coup d’oeil, into the arts and sciences in ways that cannot be reduced to an abstract and disembodied practice of mathe­matics. Eighteenth-­century surveyors and naturalists ­were beginning to see like ­future nineteenth-­century generals; that is, they had to sense in ways that exceeded vision pure and s­ imple. Moreover, they had to convert efficiently and rapidly this sensory material into repre­ sen­ta­tional formats. The transfer of this “instant, synthetic, yet detailed vision of the ­whole situation” onto paper could be understood as a “freeze-­frame” of the animated and embodied aerial sensing of a world in motion (89). The standard postcolonial discussion of the militarization of cartography links it to the ways in which the state visualized its domains, to claim that land became viewed as always already synoptically surveyed for the interests of the state, a pro­cess that turned “natu­ral environments and h ­ uman settlements into battlefields” (Dunlop 2015, 27). This line of argument links the remote sensing of “seeing like a state” to a “desocialized” or “emotionally detached” view of territory, transforming complex, diverse “inhabited landscapes” into “battlefields” (46).20 Yet in modernity the production of terrain as infrastructural space is experienced through war­time aftermaths; that is, cartographic spatialization operates through, against, and with fields of affective perception in the context of colonial and imperialist territorialization, occupation, and “pacification.” Surveying in the mid-­eighteenth ­century aimed for an overview. But in drawing together the bird’s-­eye perspective and the coup d’oeil to create a power­ful instantiation of state territorial dominance, the Military Survey was disturbed by the “rogue intensities” of unfamiliar ground surfaces, environmental ele­ments like weather and 56 Chapter 1

seasons, the resonances of warfare, the unreliability of instruments, and the rigors of travel. Th ­ ese intensities produced an aesthetic format as well as a science of surveying, bringing war­time into scientific observation and repre­sen­ta­tional practices not as alienated detachment but as palpable affective energy, even intimacy. The ways in which the surveyors sensed the Highlands in par­tic­u­lar between 1747 and 1752 became part of what many metropolitan ­people came to feel they knew so well—an emptied landscape depicted as “picturesque” or “sublime,” a “natu­ral” wasteland fated to be surveyed and developed as infrastructural space u ­ nder the sign of nation-­ state unification. The Military Survey reminds us that the vio­lence of this pro­cess proceeded not only through brute force and alienated estrangement but through repre­sen­ta­tional practices that connected the surveyors and draftsmen to the affective intensities of war­time aftermaths. MAPPIN G THE H I G H L AN D S: AFFECTI V E AE S T H E T I C S IN WAR­T IME A FTERM ATH S

A mountain shut within itself, yet a world. Immensity. So the mind may achieve, Toiling, no vision of the infinite, But a vast, dark and inscrutable sense Of its own terror, its own glory and power. —­Nan Shepherd, “Summit of Corrie Etchachan”

What did Paul Sandby see when he set out to draw a map of the Scottish Highlands in the aftermath of the Jacobite uprising of 1745? Just sixteen years old in 1747, his first and only position with the Board of Ordnance was his ser­vice as official draftsman for the Military Survey of Scotland.21 Sandby would have been trained to “see” terrain as a “dense network of related features” rather than as a view from a picturesque vantage point (Alfrey 1990, 23). But he was already an artist and would soon become celebrated as one of the key inventors of British “scenery” as a visually legible national characteristic (Bonehill and Daniels 2009, 8). The tension between cartography and art was less palpable in the mid-­eighteenth ­century than in the years that followed, but a Board of Ordnance draftsman would have been required to think more mathematically than imaginatively. Sandby was charged to systematically render topographical features in a territory that had been recently at war. Did he see the remains of b ­ attle in burned villages or the traces of military retribution in the starved f­aces of survivors? Could he see in his mind’s eye the paved roads and development of Surveying Wartime Aftermaths  57

the f­ uture? Did he see “nothing” at all, nothing out of the ordinary, or did he observe scenes of staggering beauty or overwhelming, harsh distortion? Sandby and the draftsmen John Pleydell and Charles Tarrant, who ­were brought on to the proj­ect somewhat ­later, would have spent much more time in the headquarters that w ­ ere established for the survey proj­ect in the Board of Ordnance quarters in Edinburgh, creating the more finished “fair copies” of the map, than in the field with the surveyors. But t­here is material evidence that Sandby traveled with the rest of the small band of surveyors through the central Highlands at least during the first summers of his ser­vice (Christian 1990, 19). He drew on ­these immediate and recollected impressions of the rural landscape of Scotland—­from the “wilds” of the Highlands to the manicured estates surrounding Edinburgh—as well as metropolitan scenes to produce the artwork that first brought him critical recognition. From his sketches of indigent Jacobite soldiers, now tramping the byways in rags, to his topographic landscapes of a tranquil countryside, Sandby negotiated the aftermath of war through an emerging picturesque landscape aesthetic that became the hallmark of his oeuvre. By the end of his life, Sandby’s topographical watercolors and prints of Scotland and other locations in ­Great Britain had a “wider circulation than any other artist in E ­ ngland” (Myrone 2009, 61).22 In considering the conditions ­under which the Military Survey was drafted, we can begin to grasp what repre­sen­ta­tion could and could not do. The diversity of times and spaces generated by this meeting of ­human beings and the physical environment in the aftermath of war can be sensed in the residual materials—­landscape art, historical accounts, the format of the survey map itself—as well as in the affective networks that became attached to and still haunt this terrain. Rather than ask “what did Paul Sandby see?,” the better question might be what did Paul Sandby sense and how did he layer—­ that is, work with, through, and against—­these experiences with paint and ink on paper, storing for any number of potential ­future uses every­thing, including what might or might not be vis­i­ble or what might or might not yet or ever be intelligible or legible? What affective histories of the Military Survey and its many drafts and iterations continue to unfold and attach themselves to other objects, other proj­ects, in dif­fer­ent times and places? Archival evidence establishes that Sandby accompanied the surveyors into the Grampian range in the area around Perthshire in the summer of 1749 (Christian 1990, 19). The area had been represented on Pont’s manuscript map, indicating the presence of high mountains and lakes, but the level of accuracy would not have been of much assistance to the surveyors. 58 Chapter 1

FIGURE 1.4  ​Paul

Sandby, View near Loch Rannoch, 1749. © British Library Board.

Of greater help was the military road built by General Wade from Dalnacardoch through Aberfeldy to Crieff. Not far from Aberfeldy, prob­ably along this military route, Sandby produced one of his most famous landscape paintings from the period, View near Loch Rannoch (also known as Survey Party at Kinloch Rannoch, Perthshire) (see fig. 1.4). In this watercolor sketch, we can clearly see the corps surveyors at work with their tools before an expanse of lake. Yet, although the Board of Ordnance surveyors are clearly engaged in their tasks, the scene appears to con­temporary viewers, at least, as intently peaceful; as Calloway comments, in Sandby’s drawings and watercolor works in Scotland, “rugged Highland terrain appeared rather gentle, even En­glish in character” (2008, 245). Art historians have tied both Thomas and Paul Sandby to the Dutch genre of landscape art of the late seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries, with its emphasis on ground-­level point of view and association with realistic, topographical ele­ments (Hermann 1986, 14; Myrone 2009, 57). Consonant with the Dutch school, then, View near Loch Rannoch is a seemingly bucolic scene, with a low horizon that allows us to appreciate the upward thrust of the hillside across the lake. However, this picturesque depiction of professional surveyors and friendly locals mingling on the bank of a lake on a summer day is more telling, Rachel Hewitt argues, for what has been omitted. ­B ehind the mapmakers’ Surveying Wartime Aftermaths  59

FIGURE 1.5  ​ Schiehallion,

Perthshire, Scotland. Collection of the author.

backs—­indeed, as if ­behind the viewers’ backs—­would lie “the best view in the entire region,” the ­great mountain known as Schiehallion (see fig. 1.5). Indeed, in the view from the opposite direction of Sandby’s painting, the vast flanks of Schiehallion rise up to a g­ reat height. From the shore of the lake, any realistic rendering of the mountain at such close range would have made the surveyors appear small and insignificant, as Hewitt argues, “making their task to map the ­whole of the Scottish mainland appear comically absurd.” Peopling the more benign point of view across the lake with apparently friendly locals might have been an imaginative addition—­only a scant three years before, the immediate area had been the site of violent British retribution with buildings razed, resistors executed, and property seized. Thus, Hewitt concludes, Sandby’s choice of perspective and picturesque composition of View near Loch Rannoch can also be contextualized as a “barefaced cele­bration of Hanoverian power” (2010, 30). In the face of incontrovertible evidence of violent military retribution as a foundational component of territorial occupation, such a “cele­bration” is not a far-­fetched interpretation. The artist was deeply embedded in an anti-­ Jacobite proj­ect, owed his fledgling ­career and still precarious ­future to figures of influence in the Hanoverian regime, and appeared to have been drawn to the conservative “Netherlandish” genre of landscape art. As the “first landscape artist to travel extensively in Scotland and Wales” and given the ­later commercial success of his collections of topographical views, Sandby 60 Chapter 1

not only pop­u­lar­ized the medium of watercolor painting but established the generic repre­sen­ta­tional conventions of imagery of the “wilder” regions of ­Great Britain for his generation (E. Robertson 1985, 9). As a founding member of the Royal Acad­emy and through his appointment l­ater in life as chief drawing master at the Royal Military Acad­emy at Woolwich, Sandby participated in the critical evaluation and training of artists and draftsmen at a transitional moment in the development of modern cartography and topographical arts. Yet the Military Survey he worked to produce and the watercolor “sketches” he created while he was in Scotland seem more layered with affective material beyond a blunt triumphalism than not.23 If Sandby turned his back on Schiehallion to paint the view across Loch Rannoch, that does not mean that the mountain was (and is) not pres­ent in the work. The rendering of mountains on a military map is not just a m ­ atter of cartographic style or technical method. Particularly when mountains play roles in a colonial war that seems never-­ending, their incorporation into narratives of friend and foe notwithstanding, they may generate that “per­sis­ tent and unsettling capacity of place to enchant and haunt” across times and spaces that comes to constitute the experience of geography. Schiehallion was incorporated into such “spectral geographies” several times in the early modern period, as “sensed per­sis­tence without the fullness of presence,” making perception pos­si­ble in displaced, remote, as well as immediate registers (McCormack 2010, 642). Schiehallion rises to a height of 3,553 feet in the area north of Perth, between Loch Tay and Loch Tummel, ten miles north of the town of Aberfeldy; standing quite isolated on its own, its peak rises in a perfect conical shape that is viewable from a far distance. As a formation over 3,000 feet, the mountain is categorized as a “Munro”—­a designation that emerged out of the late nineteenth-­century enthusiasm for mountaineering and recordkeeping, reserved for the very grandest and most formidable heights in the Highlands. In addition to its striking appearance, the mountain holds a certain geo­graph­i­cal symbolism since it is situated in the “latitudinal and longitudinal center” of mainland Scotland (Hewitt 2010, 58). ­People seem to have lived on or near the site since the first millennium bc, referring to the mountain as Sidh Chailleann (which can be translated from Gaelic as “Fairy Hill of the Caledonians”) (johnmuirtrust​.­org). Other names ­later attributed to the peak include Gaelic versions of “The Maiden’s Pap” and “Constant Storm” (Rannoch​.­org). The mountain and the surrounding area are well represented on Pont’s maps, although the mountain has two dif­fer­ent names on dif­fer­ent sheets; Kraich on Pont sheet 23 and Suy-­Challen (“fairy seat”) in Of Rennoch (I. Mitchell 2001, 95).24 Although Ben Nevis is Surveying Wartime Aftermaths  61

the highest peak in Scotland and ­there are 282 “Munros” on the Scottish Mountaineering Club’s list, Schiehallion circulates significantly throughout the history of the encounter of surveyor and metropolitan traveler with the mountains of the Highlands.25 By the ­middle of the eigh­teenth ­century, the mountains like Schiehallion physically embodied a challenge to a distant administration like the British state.26 Although mountains of ­great height like Schiehallion loom large in the British cultural imaginary and figure as serious obstacles to strategy and tactics in ­battle maps, they are largely absent in landscape repre­sen­ta­tions of Scotland u ­ ntil roughly the ­middle of the eigh­teenth ­century. As James Holloway and Lindsay Errington assert in their history of Scottish landscape art, such high mountains w ­ ere never represented in paintings u ­ ntil the mid-­ eighteenth ­century in part ­because travelers avoided them whenever pos­si­ ble and viewed the scenery “with ­great distaste” (1978, 3). Since the ­Middle Ages, mountains had been viewed by the En­glish as landscapes of “disgust and damnation,” as protuberances that “disfigure the earth,” linked through sexual associations to a fear, in par­tic­u­lar, of aging female bodies. As Vittoria Di Palma reminds us, the eigh­teenth ­century marked the beginning of a shift in attitudes ­toward mountains as British travelers started to view such “wastelands” as subjects of science and management, resources to be tapped and mined as well as reshaped (2014, 135–37). If the mountains ­were to be “tamed,” modern roads ­were one of the first ­orders of business in the proj­ect of domesticating the region. In response to the first Jacobite uprisings in the late seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries, General George Wade was put in charge of an ambitious proj­ect of road and bridge building to link a series of planned and existing military fortifications throughout the north of Scotland. Sighting a route in the Highlands presented significant challenges to the crews charged with road building in extreme elevations. To the En­glish military engineers and surveyors, the usual surveying sightline in the high elevations appeared as if broken to bits, interrupted by seemingly impassable formations and extreme heights. In her study of the emergence of British state infrastructure, Jo Guldi quotes Edmund Burt, one of the earlier generation of surveyors who worked ­under General Wade in the first years of road building in the Highlands, who described the bewildering and confusing vistas in letters home: “Let us suppose that where you are the Road is vis­i­ble to you for a short Space, and is then broken off to the Sight by a Hollow or Winding among the Hills.” To Burt, the only pos­si­ble routes through the seemingly endless heights appeared to be “scattered over the entire landscape, mounting up 62 Chapter 1

and down in unpredictable patterns, ­until ‘the Marks of the Road seem to almost be even with the Clouds’ ” (Guldi 2012, 30). Shapes shifted, appearing clearly only to vanish or appear at a strange ­angle. In the ­great mountains of the Highlands, the representatives of the British state strug­gled to observe terrain as they had been trained to among less extreme vistas. The disorientation of the British surveyors and engineers extended beyond the problematics of sight. At least some segments of the population did not welcome their presence (to put it mildly), and the working conditions ­were often harsh and uncomfortable. The Highlands in the eigh­teenth ­century ­were always already enmeshed in a war­time aftermath, folding de­ cades of conflict and unrest over and over u ­ ntil the politics of rebellion became naturalized as geo­graph­i­cal ecologies and racialized myths of difference. As the roads through high mountains and the bridges over rivers ­were designed and built, constructing an infrastructural network that linked key fortifications and select communities, a terrain came into view, bolstered by and consolidating divisions between communities, populations, and places. In Scotland as well as in other regions throughout ­Great Britain, attitudes ­toward bogs, forests, and high mountains began to move from outright disgust to intense interest. The development of methods of inscription, notation, and repre­sen­ta­tion to carry information across extended distances via new cir­cuits of transport and communication encouraged contact and inspired proj­ects across fields and disciplines. Di Palma argues that even as the state and its experts began to “see” wastelands as resources that required scientific methods of settlement and development, artists began to take greater plea­ sure in viewing mountains as sublime works of nature. Thus, an aesthetic emerged in which “the eye has room to range abroad, to expiate at large on the immensity of its views, and to lose itself amidst the variety of objects that offer themselves to its observation” (Di Palma 2014, 156). By the nineteenth ­century, the picturesque conventions of a wild yet accessible landscape would be fully established.27 In the midst of war­ time aftermaths, how would Sandby sense a ­mountain—­a place, a presence—­like Schiehallion? As an object of disgust, of geological interest, as a military obstacle, a tactical prob­lem of engineering, or as something sublime? But just as the Military Survey is a transitional and hybrid object of cartography, the map and the materials attached to it are equally impure works of art. Considering the art of the survey trou­bles the divide between terrain and “scenery.” As Nicholas Alfrey argues, while military draftsmen worked to render landscape “spatially,” without the picturesque conventions of linear perspective, horizon lines, and most appealing Surveying Wartime Aftermaths  63

vantage points, the early ordnance survey maps “are as much constructed images as objective rec­ords” (1990, 23). As overhead, vertical bird’s-­eye views, their imaginary projection introduced an “ele­ment of illusionism” as well as a “supreme test of skill” (24). In par­tic­u­lar, Alfrey points to the “description of relief ” that distinguished the ordnance survey maps from the estate maps that continued in popularity into the nineteenth ­century (25). The depiction of three dimensions presented the most immediate challenge to the draftsmen charged with conveying the contours of terrain—­how to show the difference between a mountain with a sheer drop or a conical shape versus one with a wide, sloping flank from a vertical vantage point? How to indicate extreme height as distinct from something more moderate? Jessica Christian maintains that Sandby’s distinguishing “capital style” is tied to his approach to depicting relief, constituting his “main contribution to the map and to the history of British cartography” (1990, 20). Indeed, it may be the evocative brushwork of the “relief ” that provides the “vibrant aesthetic quality” of the survey noted by Christopher Fleet and his colleagues in their history of Scottish cartography, reminding us of the hand of the artist at work in the making of the map (Fleet, Wilkes, and Withers 2011, 89). ­Under William Roy’s direction, the Military Survey was drawn in pen and ink with a color wash, with most of the artwork undertaken primarily by Sandby with l­ ater assistance from Tarrant.28 The color scheme they devised remains the one used for Ordnance Surveys t­ oday: red for buildings, brown for roads, blue-­green for ­water, green for woodland, yellow for cultivated ground, and beige for moorland. One of the often remarked-on ele­ments of style of the Military Survey is the brushwork to indicate the direction of the slope and the carefully differentiated gradients (National Library of Scotland n.d.) (see plate 6). As the magnified detail of Schiehallion suggests, the mountain looms large in relation to the peaks that surround it. But just exactly how large remains a question of relative scale ­until further, more precise mea­sure­ments took place some three de­cades ­later. We are reminded, then, that just like Sandby’s landscape sketches, this map is painted. Moreover, the painting is emphatic, “vibrant”; at a glance, we may not know that Schiehallion is exactly 3,353 feet at its summit, but we sense its power­ful thrust upward into the atmosphere and can well imagine its vastness, its presence. The mountainous elevations are not only “vividly” rendered in the Military Survey; Christian argues that the highest mountains are represented as if they are seen si­mul­ta­neously from an oblique as well as a vertical perspective (1990, 20). This “paint­erly” approach to representing the third dimension on a flat surface gives life and movement to the very peaks that troubled 64 Chapter 1

the surveyors and their military colleagues as they sought to mea­sure and reduce to scale the greatest heights. If the effect of the “heavy black Indian ink brush strokes” is “more paint­erly than cartographic” to at least one twentieth-­century historian of eighteenth-­ century maps (Christian 1990, 20), for Sandby’s contemporaries, the “description of relief ” was “indispensable” for the modern army, conveying with deliberate emphasis the “degree of slope” and “relative heights” (Alfrey 1990, 25). As the magnified detail of Schiehallion demonstrates, the brushwork in the Military Survey could provide potential military expeditions with useful approximations of the pitch and height of the mountainous terrain of the Highlands (see plate 7). For an occupying army looking for tactical advantages, the aesthetic strategy of this kind of brushwork was perhaps mostly evocative but better than a version with no indication of heights. However, the attachment of such descriptors as “vivid,” “vibrant,” “artistic,” and “paint­erly” to the Military Survey points not only to an anachronistic method of mapmaking before the age of mechanical reproduction or to the acknowledged split between art and cartography that insinuated itself into topographical repre­sen­ta­tion by the end of the eigh­teenth ­century but to affective material that can be sensed even remotely, folding aftermath aesthetics into its f­ uture. This power of art to convey ineffable, or not fully palpable, affective ele­ ments is fully alive in the Military Survey, particularly in the highly “paint­ erly” first drafts or “protractions.” As utilitarian objects, however, the maps ­were copied, altered, and amended, usually at the Board of Ordnance offices in Edinburgh and London. The original protractions ­were cleaned up and the views simplified—­made less “painterly”—in succeeding “fair copies.” In histories of the Military Survey, fair copies are usually described as “more reliable” if less “attractive” than the original protractions (Christian 1990, 20). Understood to be corrected and edited, fair copies of the Military Survey narrow and simplify the state’s interest in seeing the terrain at a glance while maintaining the potential for closer and detailed mining of geo­graph­i­cal data. The fair copies underscored the scientific claims of the Military Survey as an experiment in mea­sured traverses and the use of instruments. But on another level, the Military Survey continued the work of “portraiture” from above that contributed to a growing interest in landscape art throughout the eigh­teenth ­century. As Withers notes, the Military Survey, particularly Sandby’s contributions, “helped to make visual ­those connections between landscape, poetic sensitivity and historical association” that came to characterize the landscape art that followed (2001, 151). In the ­middle of the eigh­teenth ­century, when fear of a Jacobite invasion of E ­ ngland haunted the emerging cartography of Surveying Wartime Aftermaths  65

­ reat Britain, the state began to embrace the preemptive proj­ect of “seeing G all,” topographically, “at a glance.” But what that “God’s-­eye view” might produce was still not settled—­a paint­erly sketch map that gestured ­toward the sublime or a more simplified fair copy that standardized and made legible the rationale for occupation and infrastructural development. THE UN FOLDING OF T ­ H I N G S: TH E FI RST M I L I TA RY SURVEY OF S COTL AN D AT A G L AN CE

The potential stored in ordinary ­things is a network of transfers and relays. Fleeting and amorphous, it lives as a residue or resonance in an emergent ­assemblage of disparate forms and realms of life. Yet it can be palpable as a physical trace. Potentiality is a ­thing immanent to fragments of sensory experience and dreams of presence. A layer, or a layering to the ordinary, it engenders attachments or systems of investment in the unfolding of ­things. —­Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects

The Military Survey of Scotland can be situated as a pivot around which circle lively discussions of the role of geo­graph­i­cal knowledge in the emergence of the nation-­state, the rise of distinctions between maps and fine arts in modern topographical repre­sen­ta­tion, the practices of standardization and simplification at work in the modern state’s linking of legibility to infrastructural pursuits, and the close connection between cartography and territorial domination in the age of imperialism. The Military Survey also opens ­these histories to the possibility of allied and less obvious stories, ways of “seeing” that move beyond vision per se, and recalcitrant complexities that trou­ble legibility or simplification. The potentiality of places like the Highlands can be easily co-­opted into seemingly endless mythologizations as the last outposts of re­sis­tance, a sublime made anew over and over again for metropolitan delectation, offering authenticity and a manageable escape from the spoiled landscapes of the urban to a “nature” sponsored by military occupation. In the face of this choice between scientific realism and colonial fantasy, a more deconstructive approach addresses the picturesque and topographical landscapes that include the early ordnance surveys as aesthetic formats created in war­time aftermaths, producing dynamic infrastructural spaces of “rogue intensities” that remain folded into the material legacies of such terrains and their repre­sen­ta­tions in the pres­ent. As Charles Withers has pointed out, the Military Survey of Scotland’s accuracy as a map depended on most of the work taking place remotely, at a con66 Chapter 1

siderable distance from the field (2001, 150–51). Arguing that in the eigh­teenth ­century the state was the only institution that could produce something like a comprehensive topographical survey, Withers brings the romantic story­ line of a small band of surveyors and draftsmen working on the edge of the known world into dispositional perspective. The Military Survey hovers in our histories; it is a transitional object, a state proj­ect but also a work of art, linked to the “prospect” school of estate portraiture as well as to an emerging picturesque. As John Bonehill and Stephen Daniels have noted, the very term prospect signals a “view into the ­future as well as the distance” with an emphasis on “improvement in pro­gress” (Bonehill and Daniels 2009, 9). Hardly a static win­dow into a view of the terrain it was engaged in creating, the Military Survey composed and defined territory and generated systems of analy­sis; as Renzo Dubbini argues, “henceforth the picturesque was no longer merely descriptive; it proposed and prefigured” (2002, 3). The Military Survey would seem to offer a new level of accuracy and realistic repre­sen­ta­tion in the teleological movement ­toward modern cartography. Yet, as a transitional, hybrid technology of remote sensing, the First Military Survey of Scotland transformed and made space rather than simply represented it. The survey offered an aggressive mode of spatial organ­izing that folded the time and space of war into unfolding aftermaths. Despite ­these continuities, its excessive intensities interrupt the narrative of total dominance. Haunted landscapes endure not as Romantic ghosts personified as distinctive terrain but as war­time geographies that revisit and rework multiple temporalities and topographies of conflict, generating repre­sen­ta­ tions and infrastructural proj­ects.29 The emergence of ­these ways of seeing from above, at a glance, seemingly farther and more quickly than ever before, persist across histories of cartography. They operate in this moment now as active nodes in a network history of remote sensing in a war­time that seemingly never ends. In acknowledging such folding over of time and space in an exceedingly violent modernity, always already “proposed and prefigured,” descriptive and illegible, palpable and utterly unknown, language can still fail to convey the complexity of pos­si­ble perception. In Burt’s distorted and disorienting sightlines, Sandby’s relief brushwork, or the prefiguring of a military mystique of coup d’oeil, modes of observation and visual media offer reminders that affect resides in t­ hings and ways of being that are difficult to contain. Tracking some of ­these supplemental, rogue effects makes pos­si­ble a partial and meandering history of remote sensing in the spaces and times of war­time aftermaths.

Surveying Wartime Aftermaths  67

CHAPTER 2

BALLOON GEOGRAPHY The Emotion of Motion in Aerostatic Wartime

—­

Motion, we claim, produces emotion, and, correlatively, emotion contains a movement. Even the Latin root of the word emotion speaks clearly about a “moving force”: it stems from emovere, an active verb composed of movere, “to move,” preceded by the suffix e, “out.” The meaning of emotion, then, is historically associated with mobile space, with a “moving out, migration, transference from one place to another.” Emotion is, literally, a moving map. —­G IULIANA BRUNO , “Haptic Space”

We assume that if we can raise ourselves high enough, we w ­ ill see clearly and understand perfectly the view beneath us. An elevated view is axiomatic; it signifies powers of sight that lead to enlightened comprehension. Intrinsic to navigational problem-­solving as well as to more mystical or religious modes of comprehension, a desire to “get above” something and thereby see it fully endures across centuries. This “Apollonian” gaze, as Denis Cosgrove has termed it, has come to be commonly understood as “synoptic, omniscient, intellectually detached” (2001, 2). Before the advent of the airplane, nothing has seemed to symbolize better the empirical realization of this ideal perspective than the view from a balloon aloft; vistas that previously had been confined to the “mind’s eye” now could be perceived to be the “real ­thing.” Thus, before powered flight, the science and practice of aerostation served to validate modernity’s emerging cartographic repre­sen­ta­tions. Topographical features and relations of scale could be assessed for accuracy even as the unique perspective of the view from the balloon made pos­si­ble

the discovery of new, previously imperceptible ele­ments. But this familiar story of the birth of aviation and its allied modes of observation and repre­ sen­ta­tion, including con­temporary geo­graph­i­cal description, takes more than a few ­things for granted. Just as the First Military Survey of Scotland drew together older and newer modes of geo­graph­i­cal depiction, early accounts of aerostatic views disturb any neat division between “before” and “­after” flight. In many ways, the first aerial views produced by aerostation included new and startling evidence of sensory responses to flight. Yet the pos­si­ble formats of ­these repre­sen­ta­tions, the emerging infrastructure of the science and technology of aerostation, and the environment of “endless” war that surrounded ­these flights created uneasy continuities as well as discontinuities between past and ­future conceptions of time and space. Two discursive generalities concerning aerostation and viewing in par­tic­ u­lar require careful unpacking: the reports that flight made pos­si­ble unpre­ ce­dented aerial vistas and the conviction that one of the first responses to an aerial view was to draw it into military contexts. ­These two ways of seeing are neither the same t­hing nor an absolute binary. Rather, the complexity of their enduring tension in the historical construction of the discourse of aerostatic viewing testifies to the significance of their oppositional pairing, particularly in relation to the emergence of geo­graph­i­cal knowledge. ­These apparently parallel storylines—­the joyful discovery of the sublime view as an aesthetic in and of itself alongside the growing belief that aerial observation could transform the ways in which wars w ­ ere conducted through a new visual culture—­emerge in a j­umble in the late eigh­teenth ­century and only move fully away from each other as the divide between the purpose and practices of science and art, particularly between topographical maps and landscapes, intensifies in the nineteenth ­century. The “new” visual culture derived from the science and technology of aerostation regarded the repre­sen­ta­tion of views from the air as part of the experimental data collected in flight (along with all manner of mea­sure­ments and notations of changes in atmosphere and embodied sensations). Thomas Baldwin, who created the first published images drawn from ­human flight, called this assemblage of mobile observation and repre­sen­ta­tional practices “balloon geography” (1786, 133). In Airopaidia, the book he wrote based on his one and only flight in a balloon in the autumn of 1785, Baldwin recorded the many ways in which he was moved by the experience. Accordingly, each of the four images published in Baldwin’s book draws on a distinct style or genre to depict a singular perspective or a specific elevation and scale. For all intents and purposes, the images in Airopaidia constitute a “moving map” Balloon Geography  69

of the balloon flight’s path as well as testify to multiple perspectives and affective responses to viewing the ground from the air without consolidating or privileging any par­tic­u­lar one (Bruno 2007, 14). However, if aeronauts like Baldwin w ­ ere overjoyed and awed by their experience of flight, conveying the intensity and novelty of their impressions in multidisciplinary ways, they ­were almost never able to avoid linking their experiments to pos­si­ble military applications. Balloons ­were first launched in France and E ­ ngland in 1783, the year the American War of In­de­pen­dence came to an end and six years before the French Revolution overturned the monarchy. Continual “small wars” between France and E ­ ngland as well as between other Eu­ro­pean nations and the violent occupation of colonies led to financial as well as po­liti­cal instability. While national and regional borders ­were in the pro­cess of being redrawn to reflect new configurations, the intense enthusiasm for ballooning that swept through France and many other countries—­a veritable “balloonomania”—­offered to link spectators (and the scientists who w ­ ere sharing their discoveries with each other) beyond national considerations. Yet war was a constant experience on the Continent as well as in many of the colonies. Although no b ­ attles ­were fought on British soil ­after Culloden in 1745, a perpetual fear of invasion influenced British politics and culture, leading to a “fortress” mentality. The deleterious effects of endless, ongoing warfare in Western Eu­rope, which included a heavy drain on national coffers as well as the per­sis­tent attrition of generations of young men, ­were only partly offset by gains in territory and material or po­liti­cal resources. Borders moved and populations ­were involuntarily “removed” or more voluntarily relocated as economies and communities ­were reor­ga­nized. Aerostation emerged in this environment of demo­cratic revolutions and nation-­state territorial occupations, always already an unfolding war­time aftermath. Although the durational disruptions and affective intensities of war­ time aftermaths structured everyday life in Western Eu­rope in the late eigh­teenth ­century, the two storylines of the history of aerostatic views ­either situate the advent of ballooning as the first, almost inevitable step in the development of military airpower or turn away completely from this environment of battlefield logistics and tactics to embrace the purely enigmatic, affective ele­ments of the new technology. Both approaches to aerostation operate in and through war­time aftermaths but emphasize dif­f er­ent ele­ments of flight and sensory capacities to construct historical continuities. They both generate mythologies of “God’s-­eye” views as a natu­ral way of seeing even as they place early aerostatic experiments on one side or the 70 Chapter 2

other of an increasing divide between science and art. The first aeronauts ­were moved, physically and emotionally, in new and unpre­ce­dented ways that ­were grounded in the concerns and capacities of their time and place, including an Enlightenment commitment to observational science and an urgent consciousness of their nations’ engagement in wars near and far, as well as an awareness of the historical import of aerostation itself. War was never far from their minds, but they did not “see” warfare from above in the ways we do ­today ­after over a ­century of airpower. If the early aeronauts thought of waging war from and with balloons—­and they certainly did—­ they entertained ­these thoughts along with many other pos­si­ble schemes and dreams for the development of aerostation. That is, it is the drawing together of the intention to conduct observational science, the experience of overwhelming affective sensation, as well as military-­mindedness, that produced the power­ful, still disarticulated aerial prospects that we think of ­today as realistic aerial views. In the late eigh­teenth ­century, this mode of vision was not yet unified and was not solely scientific or only militarily oriented or even completely sublime. If ­today we expect aerial views to influence our understanding of what ­there is to be seen, offering us an immediate and totally holistic view, the first aeronauts had no such standard by which to structure their expectations. They ­were, at first, often simply confounded and amazed. As Marie Thébaud-­ Sorger has put it, the “balloonists saw the world from above, but they could not transcribe it” (2013, 46). Vision was an impor­tant part of the perception of moving through space in a balloon but it was often stymied, unresolved, or even superseded by other senses. The sensation of buoyancy was mystifying, disassembling both time and space from familiar forms. Evidence of such disturbances of perception destabilize our commonsense assumption that a view from above is a cross-­cultural, transhistorical, and stable fact. The vertical aerial view from a ­great height that seems to inform and even confirm the perfection of modern cartography was not “naturally” intelligible or legible to the first aeronauts. It is a mode of viewing that took some time to cohere. As it became ­imagined as a tool of observational reconnaissance, aerostation’s elevated platform seemed to offer the kind of total view at a glance that progressive military theorists hoped would provide strategic and tactical advantages. A “balloon geography” would move from multiple aspects and intensities of emotion to a narrower, more selective set of surveillant practices, from the experimental uncertainties of the free-­floating aerostat to the more limited range of the tethered war balloon. The military observers hoped to transcribe the view as clearly and as rapidly as pos­si­ble, to Balloon Geography  71

produce an aerial coup d’oeil and overcome the early incoherences of views from above. The imaginative properties of the coup d’oeil, however, remind us that affective ele­ments always constitute perception and that what often becomes separated out as aesthetics or phenomenology circulates throughout the rational and utilitarian arena of military operations. The emergence of an embodied aerial view of the Earth’s surface through aerostation produced new visual practices and sensory experiences while rendering ­others less perceptible or obsolete. A closer look at the imagery and textual accounts of early aerostation reveals that the “emotion of motion” circulates throughout both military and nonmilitary depictions of the view from above. BALLOON OMAN I A

Does not your mind’s eye behold me, soaring on rapture’s bright wings to the summit of happiness, and laughing at the clouds of care below? —­Vincenzo Lunardi, 1786

Balloons are enigmatic objects. Richard Holmes has described them as “mysterious” and “paradoxical”: “They are both beautiful and ephemeral. They are a mixture of power and fragility in constant flux. They offer a provoking combination of tranquility and peril; of control and helplessness; of technology and terror. They make demands” (2013, 6). If the l­ ittle inflated orbs we associate with parties and childhood do not usually inspire the kind of complex awe and fear described by Holmes, the sight of a full-­size balloon carry­ing tourists aloft, perhaps rising through the ground fog into a brilliantly blue sky, might still spark a feeling of won­der or longing. In our day and age, if we want to get a sense of lighter-­than-­air flight, we can rent a r­ ide in a vineyard to float ­free for a designated time period or move up and down a short distance on a tethered balloon at a fair. Compared with heavier-­than-­air vehicles like airplanes and he­li­cop­ters, the aerostat seems quaint, referencing an earlier era. But for some ­people, a ­ride in a balloon or even simply the idea of a balloon flight still sparks just the affective series of responses noted by Holmes; drawn into the paradoxical demands of the balloon, flight in a balloon generates both apprehension and joy. In the early 1780s, when the science of aerostation was first realized, hundreds of thousands of ­people fell madly in love with every­thing related to balloons. Although only a tiny fraction of the population actually flew in a balloon, the very idea of h ­ uman flight and every­thing connected to the science and technology, including the possibilities of the view from above, moved the public to such a degree that their response was dubbed “balloonomania.” 72 Chapter 2

FIGURE 2.1  ​ Expérience

aërostatique faite à Versailles le 19 septembre 1783 par Messieurs de Montgolfier. Library of Congress.

­ ere ­were two techniques for launching paper or fabric balloons into the Th air with enough lift to carry animals or ­people—­the first successful flights conducted by the Montgolfier ­brothers, who ­were members of a provincial French ­family of paper manufacturers, drew on the properties of hot air filling a paper-­lined sack, while the contemporaneous flights of Professor Jacques Alexandre César Charles relied on his method of inflating a bag of rubber-­coated silk with hydrogen. The launches of both kinds of balloons throughout the years 1783–84 drew record-­breaking crowds in Paris and its environs; the Montgolfiers’ launch of a sheep, a goat, and a rooster from the grounds of the Palace of Versailles in September 1783 drew throngs to witness the extraordinary event, while Charles’s balloon ascent, manned by another pair of siblings, the Robert ­brothers, gathered a crowd of 400,000—­ half the population of Paris at the time (see fig. 2.1). As the news of ­these scientific discoveries and incredible spectacles circulated, “balloonomania” spread across Eu­rope and beyond. Balloon motifs ­were applied to ­every conceivable item of clothing and ­house­hold use and balloon themes populated the plotlines of novels and plays (Hallion 2003, 58). Newspapers recounted developments in the science and technology of aerostation in ­great detail as p ­ eople debated what to do with this new invention. Balloons seemed wondrous, almost magical, while also heralding new levels of achievement in sciences like physics and chemistry. Balloon Geography  73

The intensities of emotion that attended the first years of aerostation promoted a kind of bonding between ­people from all walks of life who assembled in crowds to view what Simon Schama has called the “theatrical science of public experimentation,” generating new forms of affiliation and spectatorship (1990, 125).1 Ballooning was more than a stylish fad; as Schama writes, this new public was “enormous, elated, and unconstrained,” breaking with the usual divisions of class and rank to speak of aerostation with the “emotional vocabulary of Rousseau’s sublimity” (129). Under­lying this power­ful balloonomania was the restive, protean force of the “mob.” The French crowds that rapturously attended balloon launches had to defy official ordinances that tried to limit the size of groups of spectators at events that the state deemed to be of interest “only to scientists” (Dollfus 1961, 47; R. Gillespie 1984, 252). In the first year or two of experimental launches, however, the crowds that materialized and surged to see balloons lift off, float, and come to ground also represented an unruly demo­cratic impulse that threatened authority and po­liti­cal order. The enigmatic balloon drew ­people almost beyond the bounds of reason; like any intense passion, the mania for balloons completely enveloped some spectators, while si­mul­ta­neously producing ironic satires and anti-­aerostatic diatribes ­among ­others—­all power­ful responses to scientific developments that gripped public attention.2 Aerostation developed differently in ­Great Britain than in France in large part due to the absence of an extensive infrastructure of scientific socie­ties to invest in and develop the new technology. The head of the British Royal Society, Joseph Banks, corresponded with his friend Benjamin Franklin and other colleagues about aerostation, but he resisted the “mania,” taking a greater interest in agriculture, natu­ral history, and antiquarian subjects rather than the fields most closely associated with ballooning, such as engineering, mathe­ matics, and chemistry (R. Gillespie 1984, 263). Therefore, since aerostation was expensive and required many trial launches and experiments, in G ­ reat Britain only entrepreneurial aeronauts could try to muster enough money through public subscriptions to practice the new science. To attract subscribers and compete with other balloon spectacles, British aeronauts often made wild claims that they could not necessarily fulfill, forever linking ballooning in that country to con artists and shady deals. Adding to the uneven reception of aerostation in G ­ reat Britain was the fear of a working-­ class revolt. In the years immediately following the “Gordon Riots” of 1781 that targeted governmental and industrial sites, concerns about large, uncontrollable groups permeated official attitudes t­oward events like balloon 74 Chapter 2

launches. Thus, the Times of London warned its readers to avoid the “foreign, lower-­class, and mischievous” crowds that ­were linked to highly advertised launches and argued for such activities to be banned (264). Without any consistent state support or even interest beyond the novelty of the technology, most officials in G ­ reat Britain viewed aerostation as a disorderly stunt, tainted by association with reckless foreign adventurers who ­were believed to be more interested in making a fast fortune than in advancing a serious science. Nonetheless, crowds flocked to the balloon launches and would-be aeronauts dreamed of flight. In this heady atmosphere, the origin stories about aerostation only reinforced the public’s sense that something momentous, of tremendous potential, was taking place. Of the two primary accounts of the discovery of modern aerostation, the most frequently cited version is, in many ways, the most fanciful. One night on the rural estate of a f­amily of paper manufacturers,3 a dreamy autodidact who had never gained his ­father’s re­spect was sitting by the fire idly watching his wife’s underclothes as they dried on a rack when he observed her chemise fill with hot air and—­eureka!—­float upward. From this point on, supposedly, Joseph Montgolfier became obsessed with the idea that he could fill a paper envelope with enough hot air to lift a person into the air. He immersed himself in study, conducted innumerable experiments, and neglected the ­family business to a dangerous degree. Although most of the p ­ eople around him thought he was crazy, he was able to convince his ­brother Étienne to work with him. Together, against naysayers and skeptics, they worked feverishly to realize their ideas. The first ­human being to fly in the air, Pilâtre de Rozier,4 did so in their invention, the hot air balloon. Although this popu­lar tale of unlikely geniuses from the provinces who defeated the odds to invent a mode of lighter-­than-­air flight usually leaves out less romantic details of ­family connections to po­liti­cal and academic supporters in the French capital,5 it is an enduring narrative that celebrates hallowed tropes of ingenuity, obsession, and vindication. The second, more obscure, origin story of aerostation locates Joseph Montgolfier as the progenitor of militarized airpower. In this more martial account, Montgolfier was also hearthside but away from home in Avignon, gazing at a print of the siege of Gibraltar, when he was seized by the idea that some kind of vehicle that could convey troops by air would solve the prob­lem of seemingly unassailable fortresses and formidable terrain. According to this version, as Montgolfier watched the fire in the hearth send particles of smoke floating up into the chimney, it occurred to him that the same scientific princi­ple could be adapted to transport ­human beings into the atmosphere. He summoned Balloon Geography  75

­ rother Étienne to join him, instructing him to bring the needed supplies as b soon as pos­si­ble. Referring to his inspiration as a means to address the conflict between France and ­England over the island of Gibraltar, Montgolfier wrote: “I possess . . . ​a super-­human means of introducing our soldiers into this impregnable fortress. . . . ​By making the bag large enough, it ­will be pos­si­ ble to introduce into Gibraltar an entire army, which, borne by the wind, w ­ ill enter right above the heads of the En­glish” (Rolt 2006, 29).6 In this version, aviation and militarized airpower ­were born si­mul­ta­neously even if Montgolfier’s dream of an airborne invasion force sailing over the heads of the ­enemy took longer to achieve than he might have hoped. Both origin stories involve hearthside inspiration and sibling experimentation with paper and fabric. Both result in cele­brations of national ingenuity, anchoring early aviation to specifically French achievements in science and engineering.7 But most importantly, the explanation for the invention of aerostation is presumed on the one hand to have nothing to do with war and on the other hand to be entirely linked to military objectives. This division gives the impression that military ­matters are bounded and discrete rather than constitutive of infrastructures and institutions in the broadest sense in modern life. We are, in a sense, presented with a choice—­a “pure” science and technology or a militarized one. Yet the term militarization does not describe exactly this uneven but linked history of modern science, the arts, and the military, since a society that is founded on the precept of the security of national borders for its very identity is always already more oriented t­ oward war than not. The participants in aerostation—­from inventor to aeronaut to spectator—­lived in unfolding aftermaths in a world almost always preparing for, engaging in, or recovering from war. Without directly addressing military concerns, they could actively remember or ­were sensorially affected by past and pres­ent wars, could anticipate ­future conflicts, and, therefore, could not “see” a view or conceive of a technology that might not lend itself, even in part, to warcraft. While the two origin stories operate in a kind of productive tension with each other, the possibilities of war­time aftermaths operate in the spaces and gaps between the narratives as they fail to mesh or make sense. “DELIRIOUS FOR V I SI ON ” : B AL L OON P ROS PE C T S AN D “AEROSTATI C SPACI N G ”

If we consider for a moment the sensation which the first aerial adventurers must have felt in their exalted situation, we can hardly prevent an unusual sublime idea in ourselves;—­Imagine a man elevated to such a height, into an im­mense space, by means altogether new, viewing ­under his feet, like a map,

76 Chapter 2

a vast tract of country, with one of the greatest towns existing, the streets and environs of which ­were crowded with spectators, attentive to him alone, and all expressing, in very pos­si­ble manner, their amazement and their anxiety. Reflect on the prospect, the encomiums, and the consequences; then see if your mind remains in a state of quiet indifference. —­Tiberius Cavallo, The History and Practice of Aerostation

The first h ­ uman beings to fly reported unusual and extraordinary views and experiences. Scenes of “grandeur and beauty,” “rapture,” and “new perspectives” ­were breathlessly reported by the first aeronauts to a public ­eager to learn more (En­glish Review 1787, 429). Thus, when Professor Charles made his first flight in his own hydrogen balloon in 1783, he related that he was transported emotionally as well as physically. Using terms like bliss, joy, and delight, Charles linked his ecstasy to the “majestic spectacle” in which he was immersed. Describing a “sky f­ ree from cloud” and “in the distance the most alluring view in the world,” Charles exulted in the panoramic vista. Yet, if we imagine Charles as mesmerized solely by the unfolding spectacle above, around, and below him, we would miss the fact that he had brought with him “a barometer, thermometer, and notepaper” (Hallion 2003, 56). Ever the scientist, Charles took careful notes and mea­sure­ments ­until the increasing altitude started to freeze his fin­gers. When the extreme change in pressure caused barotrauma in his eustachian tube, the excruciating pain forced him to descend. Despite t­ hese severe shifts in temperature and the damage to his ear, Charles’s experience was transformative. Recalling his second ascent on the same day in December, Charles noted, “The cold was keen and dry, but not insupportable. I examined all my emotions calmly. . . . ​I could hear myself live, so to speak” (Charles, quoted in Rolt 2006, 53–54). Charles never flew again, but the scenario remained the same for many of the early aeronauts: a passion for mea­sure­ment and scientific observation via a vehicle of innovative design and engineering accompanied by reports of rapture and intensities of emotion—­not only excitement but a kind of serene joy, as well as periods of fear, discomfort, and even pain. If, in the strange and unexpected sensation of stillness in movement that characterized the experience of flight in a balloon, aeronauts like Charles could “hear” themselves “live,” they could also “see” the world in novel ways. Jacques Aumont has argued that this transformation in sensing helped to generate a new confidence in sight as an instrument of knowledge, especially in relation to scientific experimentation (1997, 234). Increasingly, this cosmological gaze became a Balloon Geography  77

tool in the encyclopedic proj­ect of eighteenth-­century knowledge formation, contributing to the Enlightenment desire for more sights to see and rec­ord (Cosgrove 2001, 195). Along t­hese lines, Beaumont Newhall described late eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century moderns as not only “feverish for real­ity” but especially “delirious for vision, thirsty for vis­i­ble appearances and pure phenomena” (1964, 12).8 Moderns may have been “delirious for vision,” but what could be seen? Flight itself affected vision, disturbing familiar scenes and perspectives. Flying in an untethered balloon cannot be easily described. In f­ree flight on a still day, the balloon darts up into the atmosphere at a rapid rate as soon as it is released, yet the occupants of the basket hanging below often feel as if they are not moving at all—­the only register of movement is the sight of the ground diminishing quickly. Wind is experienced differently when, rather than against it, the vehicle moves not only with it but of it. In contrast to free-­floating balloons, t­hose that are tethered do not fly as high and offer a bumpier ­ride since they can be buffeted by air currents. Yet, ­whether attached to the earth by a long tether or flying f­ree, aerostation is characterized by immersion into new and unstable ele­ments. In ­these disturbances of the usual mode of sensing embodiment and movement as well as hearing and sight, lighter-­than-­air flight creates entirely new sensory environments. In the first years of aerostation, the few ­people who flew in balloons ­were deeply moved by this experience, especially at first. Judging from their own accounts, the earliest aerostatic fliers w ­ ere bowled over by unpre­ce­dented and unpredictable sensations and sights that challenged their capacities for comprehension and description. The unruly intensities of aerostatic movement trou­ble any generalization about totalizing or unified views from above. As Derek McCormack argues, the balloon and the body traveling with/in it move together in an “affective complex” that draws together fear and pos­si­ble vertigo along with a felt sense of anticipation of letting go, becoming untethered (2009, 36). Views generated by this pro­cess of “aerostatic spacing” are not so much a limitless gaze from a stable position but a series of fragmented glimpses from a body in movement, vistas interrupted by clouds, and strange optical effects depending on distance from the ground. If early aeronautics hoped for panoramic horizontal or vertical views, often ­these vistas ­were stymied by weather conditions or active interruptions. Early aeronauts w ­ ere much occupied by innumerable tasks to safely lift off or land their vehicles and could only glance now and then over the side of the basket ­unless they ­were drifting for long hours. Many flights included serious scientific ex78 Chapter 2

periments that required laboriously detailed execution and documentation. Nevertheless, according to most accounts, this multitasking body in flight was keen to observe the views made available by aerostation. Often enveloped in clouds, vulnerable to environmental extremes of temperature, unable to navigate in any meaningfully precise way, the late eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century ­aeronaut in f­ree flight did not so much capture a complete, panoptic sight at a glance as attest to the unfolding va­ri­e­ties of perspective and perception made pos­si­ble by an unfamiliar sensation of movement as stillness. Undeniably, as aerial views shook aerostatic observers to their very core, this unpre­ce­dented experience inspired efforts to or­ga­nize and codify what could be seen, but first ­those who experienced weightlessness and other transformations in the relationship of their bodies to the ground and the air had to work through their shock, delight, and awe. If we follow Barbara Maria Stafford’s assertion that, by the seventeenth c­ entury in Eu­rope, ­people became convinced that “something r­ eally is out t­ here” and that “art and language ­were to be used to get beyond imitation,” then the balloon flight offered an unpre­ce­dented opportunity to get to the “real t­ hing” (1984, 1). Yet, in this adventurous exploration of unknown environments, the experience of “fact” led in an almost uncanny way to the sublime or, at the very least, to a new register of sensations—­including a “delirium” for vision—­rather than to the kind of objective repre­sen­ta­tion that we now associate with realism. “Aerostatic spacing,” as McCormack puts it, created an embodied relationship to the terrain observed as well as the medium traveled through. Desiring the view did not signify an alienating distance from what could be verified as seen. Remotely sensed, the empirically observed view from above could offer new justification for embodied vision and agency in repre­sen­ta­tion, as well as an embrace of modern technologies. Aerostatic spacing’s dynamic prospects encompassed both the act of observing the view from above as well as its repre­sen­ta­tion, the diverse “prospects.” The Latin origin of “prospect” referred to the spacing between buildings that needed to be maintained in order to allow for a specific view or to the vista itself (Dubbini 2002, 51). By the sixteenth c­ entury, the En­glish term took on the meaning of an “extended view.” As Stafford points out, the terms landscape and prospect ­were used interchangeably in the eigh­teenth c­ entury, but prospect usually suggested a wider, more extensive view (1984, 432). This wider and deeper perception of terrain drew on the Re­nais­sance repre­sen­ta­tional system of linear perspective, the practice of ­creating a view with depth perception as if seen from a fixed position, moving into Balloon Geography  79

depictions of landscape as art—as something distinct and apart from a rec­ord of a property holding or a topographical survey. While the landscape “sketch” had ranked fairly low in the valuation established by the Eu­ro­pean academies in comparison to historical paintings and monumental art, during the eigh­teenth ­century an upsurge in more demo­cratic social practices led to subjects and methods that did not require royal patronage, academic training, or arcane knowledge. Picturesque vistas, or prospects, emphasized princi­ples of harmonious beauty and intentional composition in the ser­vice of a constructed “naturalism” that was at the same time extremely idealized and often imbued with nationalist sentiment (Grewal 1996, 23–56; Jager 2003). The new subjects of democracy w ­ ere offered views of their cities, towns, seashores, rivers, lakes, hillsides, and moors in ­these more accessible, less academic styles. Tourism to “picturesque” sites increased along with sales and collections of ­either printed or painted souvenir views. As Christine Boyer points out, seeing the world as landscape or as an illustrated picture was a “visual and m ­ ental experience,” one that “moved from vista to vista, viewing objects from dif­fer­ent perspectives” (1996, 247). The landscape sketch, then, was generated by the mobile eye of Eu­ro­pean modernity in its expansive, not at all always benign, encounter with new terrain, ­people, and ­things. More immediate and portable, the pictorial sketch eschewed traditional composition and labored conditions of execution in ­favor of the relatively rapid production of a singular viewpoint presented as a general one. With the increase in interest in representing the encyclopedic detail of the world throughout the eigh­teenth ­century, the landscape sketch bridged science and the arts, bringing unexpected views to observers who ­were, indeed, hungry, if not “delirious,” for vision or for sights that pushed the bound­aries of the known and the familiar. This new “modern” art drew on the everyday or “uncomposed,” even fragmentary, ele­ments of views to ground an insurgent “standard of artistic, and moral, authenticity” (Galassi 1981, 28). The view from the untethered balloon, as observed by an aeronaut who tested the chemical properties of the atmosphere while undergoing intensely transformative physical and emotional sensations, drew together the mobile and immediate properties of the sketch as a study of real­ity while unmooring conventional perspectives and forms. AIROPAIDIA’S M OV I N G M AP S

This august central situation, always changing yet still the same, had the most striking effect on the senses and imagination. . . . ​Unity and sameness ­were ­there contrasted with perpetual variety: beauty of colouring; minuteness,

80 Chapter 2

and consummate arrangement;—­with magnificence and splendor: ­actual immensity;—­with apparent limitation:—­all of which ­were distinctly conveyed to the mind, at the same instant, throu’ the intervention of the organs of sight: and, to complete the scene, was added the charm of novelty. —­Thomas Baldwin, Airopaidia

As the vertiginous “untethering” of bodies from the earth in ­free flight produced new or disturbed perceptions, only a few early aeronauts attempted to depict the view from above. Among the texts available to English-­language readers in the early years of aerostation, Thomas Baldwin’s Airopaidia holds the distinction of offering the first illustrations based on sketches made while in flight. The book also contains many numerical ­tables and lists along with extended narrative portions that shift between passionate poetic rhe­toric and rigorous analy­sis of vari­ous procedures and practices in the engineering, design, and operation of dif­fer­ent types of balloons. Part chorography, part survey, part memoir, part encyclopedia, Baldwin’s book strove to leave nothing out.9 In its capacious embrace of multiple kinds of information, Baldwin’s “balloon geography” was hardly anomalous. As Matthew Edney has argued, emergent geography in this era aimed to construct landscapes out of disparate ele­ments that ­were nonetheless based on rational princi­ples (1999, 175). ­These assemblages, relying heavi­ly on visual empiricism, attempted to link each instance to a verifiable sight, an observable objective truth. Gathered together, the disparate ele­ments of ­these texts helped to build larger conceptual unities as modern spatial ordering. Maps in the late eigh­teenth ­century may have leaned increasingly ­toward a “mathematical cosmology” in the ideal sense, but they came about u ­ nder conditions of “interdisciplinary ferment” that brought all manner of views, ideas, and information in and out of official geo­graph­i­cal knowledge (Edney 1999, 169). Decorative emblems and symbols along with picturesque landscape views continued to adorn visual texts understood to be “maps,” while novels, plays, poems, paintings, and traveler’s tales offered detailed geo­graph­ i­cal information. In other words, cartographic historiography’s strict division between art and science in the modern period m ­ istakes ideology for history, unable to account for the vibrant, interdisciplinary mixtures that, drawn together, assembled the Enlightenment geo­graph­i­cal archive (Harley 2001, 151). In thinking about a work such as Airopaidia as an assembled geography, then, it is impor­tant to keep this tumultuous variety in mind. Hardly carnivalesque or simply benign, this new vernacular system of geo­graph­i­ cal knowledge production relied heavi­ly on empirical visual observation in Balloon Geography  81

tension with a po­liti­cal context of increasing state investment in surveying territory for purposes that ­were almost always linked to expansion or possession, usually by military force. Geo­graph­i­cal observation moved across and through space in order to become realized for national or imperialist modes of power, but this mobile gaze was not necessarily unidirectional or unified (regardless of intention). Perception was subject to debate and subject to affective disturbance.10 What could Thomas Baldwin perceive when he first looked down from the basket of his balloon? We have his impressions and images produced ­after the fact and certainly composed with a par­tic­u­lar audience in mind and therefore, perhaps, tailored for a popu­lar reception. Con­temporary reviewers of Airopaidia complained about the plethora of itemizations, technical rec­ords, and other dull minutiae all packed into a book that was also burdened by Baldwin’s amateurishly verbose style.11 But Airopaidia is a wonderfully exemplary text, compressing within its capacious pages vast worlds of modern concerns. Baldwin’s neologism, “airopaidia,” connotes the late eighteenth-­century embrace of encyclopedic and pedagogic proj­ects while signaling the author’s ambitious hopes for his text. The Oxford En­glish Dic­ tionary gives an ancient Greek definition for paideia: beyond the general meaning of education or upbringing, as “an Athenian system of instruction designed to give pupils a rounded cultural education, especially with a view to public life . . . ​the sum of physical and intellectual achievement to which an individual or (collectively) a society can aspire.” Airopaidia aims for such a well-­rounded achievement, offering instruction as a mode of initiation into a thoroughly modern visual culture of sensation, science, and landscape art. If Baldwin was not the most artful writer, he clearly used ­every means at his disposal to bring together an accounting of the science and technology of his flight as well as the geography of his voyage across Lancashire and the power­ful emotions and sensations that he experienced while aloft. Although ambitious and lofty in its aims, Airopaidia barely survived the centuries. Completely lacking in connections among the celebrated intellectuals and academics of London, Baldwin failed to find success as e­ ither an aeronaut or an author. Indeed, his account fell into obscurity and, u ­ ntil very recently, has been rarely cited.12 Or, if cited, with just a few exceptions, Baldwin was dismissed as an almost unknown local man who took a joy r­ ide in Vincenzo Lunardi’s balloon and then presumed to write an entire book about his adventure. In fact, although it is difficult to find detailed information about Thomas Baldwin of Lancashire, evidence suggests that he was an avid follower of the rapid developments in aerostation and that, at least a 82 Chapter 2

year before his launch from Chester ­Castle, he had been trying to raise funds for the construction of a war balloon of his own ingenious design. In a letter written to a supporter in December 1784, Baldwin gives us an idea of the stiff competition among ­those who sought to sell subscriptions to a skeptical British public, especially between the showmen and the more scientifically inclined. Nevertheless, as he wrote to his friend, “I am still prosecuting the subject with the greatest ardor and with the probability of its taking place.” He proposed a “­grand naval balloon” of an “incombustible” material as “light as unvarnished silk, and much stronger” that could transport “­great weights” and that would be “subject to direction.” Not only did Baldwin mention some of his own unique ideas (such as attaching spring castors so that the vehicle might “alight without a shock”), but he also accused the French team of Charles and the Robert ­brothers of stealing ele­ments of his design for the balloon that they w ­ ere readying for an attempt to cross the Channel: “it ­ought with equal reason to have been called a ‘Baldwin,’ ” he wrote indignantly, rather than a “Carlo-­Montgolfiere.”13 This is e­ ither the writing of a deluded egomaniac or the anguished frustration of a provincial autodidact who, unlike the Montgolfiers, had no power­ful and indulgent industrialist ­family to support such expensive experimentation nor a government willing to invest in and legitimate aerostation.14 As Baldwin discovered, without backers with deep pockets or the kind of state support enjoyed by the French inventors of aerostation, experimentation in this new science was almost impossible, dooming the balloonist to risk ridicule and/or bankruptcy. Early aeronauts in G ­ reat Britain w ­ ere ­either foreigners with access to generous supporters or home-­grown scientists who ­were so passionately interested in new developments in chemistry, engineering, and meteorology that they managed to devise their own experiments on an ad hoc basis. Thus, James Tytler and James Sadler, the first Britons to launch and fly balloons successfully in August and October 1784, respectively, ­were both small-­town chemists (among other pursuits—­neither was from a wealthy ­family, and both tried their hands at vari­ous occupations).15 Vincenzo Lunardi, whose celebrated ascent on September 15, 1784, is often erroneously cited as the first manned flight in G ­ reat Britain (it was viewed by a huge metropolitan crowd thanks to Lunardi’s social connections and skill in self-­advertisement), hailed from Italy. Lunardi was a handsome and reportedly charming minor diplomat with a penchant for ambitious and risky per­ for­mances. A ­great performer and something of a confidence man, Lunardi does not always get the credit he may deserve as an engineer, a scientist, and an entrepreneurial impresario. Lunardi’s determined efforts to get balloons Balloon Geography  83

up into the air with ­people, preferably himself, in them often depended on his improvisational skills in instructing and coordinating craftspeople and local ­labor in the science and operational particulars of aerostation (Gardiner 1963, 91). All the early aeronauts launched themselves into the sky in flimsy vehicles powered by burning fires or combustible air to pursue unpre­ce­dented experiments. For each one that succeeded to the point of receiving credit for manned flight in the history books, ­there is evidence of many ­others who ­were close to achieving the same distinction or who strove to their utmost to reach that goal. Clearly, Thomas Baldwin was one of t­ hose nonmetropolitan “balloonomaniacs” who longed to participate directly and fully in the scientific development and cultural experience of aerostation. The seriousness of Baldwin’s interest in aerostation is abundantly evident in his “Proposal at Large, for the Construction of a G ­ rand Naval Air-­Balloon,” published to raise subscriptions in December  1784, the same month as the private letter quoted above (and addressed to the same person—­Thomas Pennant, Esq.). In this brochure, Baldwin provided more details for the unique design of his aerostatic device, mostly oriented ­toward the prob­lem of navigation. Baldwin’s proposed war balloon would include sails, oars, and rudder, as well as a “metallic cylinder of rarified air” whose “heat ­will regulate and confine the horizontal course of the balloon.” The purpose of the vehicle would be to provide “a safe and ready mode of conveyance from place to place” and to “compel the invisible fluid which surrounds us, to carry burdens in proportion to its levity; to traverse this subtle ele­ment; to enter, as it w ­ ere, into a new world; to soar above all terrestrial objects, and make the im­mense sea of air, like the ocean, subservient to the purposes of man.” Subscriptions w ­ ere thereby officially opened at the “bank of Robert Hesketh, Esq., in Chester,” as well as in diverse other cities, including London. Despite this considerable effort and prob­ably no end of heartbreak, Baldwin’s own invention was never built and his only known flight was undertaken in 1785 in a borrowed balloon. Baldwin’s aerial adventure began auspiciously on the morning of Thursday, September 8, 1785, in a balloon most likely rented to Baldwin by Lunardi to raise some much-­needed cash. Having exhausted the fiscal possibilities of the crowds of London, Lunardi was touring the north region. Although ­there is only scant evidence of the crossing of the paths of ­these two figures, we can well imagine Baldwin’s anticipation and anxious efforts to make the most of the arrival of the most famous aerialist in G ­ reat Britain.16 As the balloon inflated in the “castle-­yard” of Chester, Baldwin kept an eye on the weather. Heavy wind from the south and southwest the day before had put an end to the flight as originally advertised. Fortunately for Baldwin, since 84 Chapter 2

Lunardi’s patience was strained by the delay, at 9:00 a.m. on the eighth, the atmosphere was deemed “clear, bright, and calm below” with “an upper tier of light clouds in the zenith moving from south-­west by west, and dense ones rising in the horizon” (Baldwin 1786, 7). ­After sending off a trial balloon and making all manner of preparations, Baldwin lifted off at 1:40 p.m. In his own words, he “ascended amidst acclamations mixed with tears of delight and apprehension, the misgivings of humanity, and other usual sensations of surprise, which, in a brilliant and numerous assembly, ­will long continue to accompany a spectacle so novel in­ter­est­ing and awful, as that of seeing a fellow mortal separated in a moment from the earth, and rushing to the skies” (29). He described himself as at first too busy attending to the mechanics of the ascent to “indulge” in “looking over the brink of the car” at the “novelty of the prospect” ­until he had assured himself that all was well (30). His first visual observations are all directed upward, with some anxiety, ­toward the mouth of the balloon, which was spewing some vaporous substance of a flame-­like color. He checked the lines and cables as well as the barometer and other instruments and began making notes. Only then did he allow himself to stand up for a “full gaze before and below” (37). Like many of the first aeronauts, Baldwin went aloft armed with the tools of rational science but the uniqueness of the view derailed his intentions to quantify his experiments. He became his own experiment—in his own body, as it ­were. Once he was safely up and dared to look out and down, what scenes of “grandeur and beauty!” he reported: “A tear of pure delight flashed in his eye! of pure and exquisite delight and rapture; to look down on the unexpected change already wrought in the works of art and nature, contracted to a span by the new perspective, diminished almost the bounds of credibility” (1786, 37). The “new perspective” observed by Baldwin included what he reported to be an “endless variety of objects” that appear “minute, distinct and separate” along with a “strength of coloring, a neatness and elegance of boundary,” all adding up to a view that he deemed to be “charming” (37). This circular prospect “astonished and enchanted” the observer with an unparalleled beauty to the point that he declared himself to be “overwhelmed” (38). The uncannily strange experience of flight moved from sight to sound—­Baldwin tried his voice and “shouted for joy” but “his voice was unknown to himself, shrill and feeble” (38). Most bizarrely, “­there was no echo” (38). Unable to avoid “indulging his eye” for long, Baldwin took in as much of the entire scene around him as he could while attending to the mechanics of flight. Yet among all the new and amazing sensations, it was the view below him that fascinated: “But the beautiful among the objects below Balloon Geography  85

was still more attractive than the sublime among t­ hose around. . . . ​On looking down south by west, the balloon often turning ­gently to the right and left, and giving the aeronaut an opportunity of enjoying the circular view without a change of attitude; innumerable rays of light darted on the eye as it glanced along the ground: which, tho’ of a gay green color, appeared like an inverted firmament glittering with stars of the first magnitude” (39–40). The “beautiful” nature of the forms below engages most of Baldwin’s attention rather than the sublime ele­ments of the formless environment in which he is immersed, echoing a Kantian distinction that pervades many of the textual accounts of aerostation. Such impressions guide the composition of the four engraved plates in the book. Th ­ ese four “descriptions,” as Baldwin refers to the “aerial scenes” or illustrations in Airopaidia, begin to first delineate the ele­ments of views that could be put together as modern views from above. Two of the illustrations offer scenes that could only be seen from a balloon in flight, while one offers a picturesque scene that is more familiar from an elevated position that could easily be a hill or spire, and the fourth emulates the graphic design of a modern map. Baldwin accords ­these four plates a large degree of importance in the text, placing short descriptions of them on the very first page of the book with longer elaborations and directions “for placing them” printed at the very front of the volume. ­After complaining that many accounts of ballooning have been “vague and unsatisfactory,” he particularly laments that “balloon voyagers” have been “defective” in their descriptions of “aerial scenes and prospects” (1786, 1–2). Such scenes “constitute the true Sublime and Beautiful,” inspiring in even the most “careless mortal” unknown degrees of “enthusiastic rapture and plea­ sure” (3). But for Baldwin, ­these sensations are accessed through embodied sight: “­Every beholder is a judge of the scenery around him” (3). Therefore, it follows that ­these extraordinary experiences must be represented. As Baldwin argues: “In the history of aerostation, each event is yet new and uncom­ pared. ­Every circumstance ­ought therefore to be carefully recorded” (4). The first engraving depicts “a circular view from the balloon at its greatest elevation, with the city of Chester appearing in the center” (see plate 8). Since vertical views from g­ reat heights strain the frame of reference to the most intense degree, Baldwin’s placement of Chester at the center of the image not only privileges his own regional identification with that community (the book is dedicated to “the principal inhabitants of Chester”) but offers assistance to viewers who w ­ ill require some kind of familiar starting point for their interpretation of the image. Baldwin takes pains to explain how to comprehend the ele­ments that make up this new and strange vertical perspective 86 Chapter 2

from a ­great height: “The spectator is supposed to be in the car of the balloon, suspended above the center of the view: looking down on the Amphitheatre or white floor of clouds, and seeing the city of Chester, as it appeared throu’ the opening: which discovers the landscape below, limited, by surrounding vapour, to something less than two miles in dia­meter” (1786, iv). This striking illustration pres­ents viewers ­today with an image that reminds us of a “bull’s-­eye,” a target, but is this association relevant to Baldwin’s view in 1785? The image depicts a perfect circle bounded by the black reaches of outer space. A blue band surrounds the sphere’s planar expanse, holding together the world that can be viewed. We seem to see a bisection, as if the view w ­ ere a ball that has been sliced in half and opened flat for our inspection. This, Baldwin explains, is an effect of the height: “The breadth of the blue margin defines the apparent height of the spectator in the balloon (viz. 4 miles) above the white floor of clouds, as he hangs in the center, and looks horizontally round, into the azure sky” (1786, iv). The clouds billow up—­they must be massive but they remain far below and therefore seem miniature. Through another almost perfect circle ringed by “vapour,” the city of Chester appears to the modern eye as if through the lens of a camera or a “sight,” at the center of a target. The very heart of the county, a place ranked high in the affections of the author, Chester is clearly in view, with its snaking river colored bright red and its rooftops slate blue. Th ­ ese colors are not haphazard. Baldwin devoted a ­great deal of attention to color in his description of aerial prospects. As he reported: Nothing however raised his curiosity more than the change in color of the River Dee . . . ​which in the British language signifies the black river, from the appearance of its ­waters, when seen from an eminence ­running in their deep channel between the mountains of Wales; but which glides by Chester with a silver stream. This river, thanks to the cool climate; not like the green Mincius of Virgil!—­had now acquired the unvaried color of red lead. Nor could he discover even the appearance of w ­ ater; but merely that of a broad red line, twining in meanders infinitely more serpentine than are expressed in maps. (41) This coiling red line is dramatically apparent in the first plate, along with the bright yellow roads and the deep blue slate rooftops of Chester (which, Baldwin noted, are completely dif­fer­ent from the “artificial red tiles” found on rooftops in the cities to the south) (43). Along with the intense hues and unexpected coloring of objects when seen from the “greatest” height, Baldwin was astounded by changes in scale. Balloon Geography  87

Thus, looking down at Chester, Baldwin observed that “the highest buildings had no apparent height: their summits ­were reduced to the common level of the ground” (1786, 43). This equalization of the field of vision made it difficult to identify well-­known landmarks: “Nor was the cathedral distinguished; nor any tower or spire discerned” (43). Balloonists who ventured up into the higher elevations noted with ­great surprise the sight of the earth below as if flattened into an “uninterrupted surface” (Stafford 1984, 149). This flat and “shadowless” view (therefore more timeless or out of time), more abstractly geometric, eliminated once and for all Re­nais­sance linear perspective: “no horizon line, no vanishing point, no ­human scale, and few nuances of light and shadow” (Sichel 2007, 11). If clouds did not prevent the aeronaut from viewing the earth below, all the ele­ments of aerial viewing combined for radical shifts in scale, altered perception, intense clarity or delineation even from a g­ reat height, and a “universal disfiguration.” As an early nineteenth-­century aeronaut, Thomas Monck Mason, wrote: “the ­whole face of nature” appears to have “under­gone a pro­cess of equalization; the ­houses and the trees, the mountains and the very clouds by which they are capped, have long since been consigned to the one level; all the natu­ral irregularities of its surface completely obliterated, and the character of the model entirely superseded by that of the plane” (Turnor 1865, 377). This contraction of distance and the diminution of large objects along with the mixture of incongruous ele­ments and the embodied sensation of movement are all part of aerostatic spacing and the related thrill of viewing previously unknowable or inaccessible sights. Noting this strange effect, Mason wrote: “The summits of mountains, the tops of buildings, the upper surfaces of woods, t­hose parts, in short, of all objects which by their natu­ ral or artificial positions have hitherto been excluded from his view, are now almost the only ones that come within the scope of his observations” (Turnor 1865, 363). Along with ­these deviations from the rules of linear perspective and scale, the aerial observer was also surprised by the clarity and sharpness of delineation when clouds permitted an unobstructed view of the earth (Stafford 1984, 434). A contemporaneous reviewer of Airopaidia enthusiastically described this very effect: “All was coloring; no outline; yet each appearance curiously defined by a striking contrast of s­ imple colors, which served to distinguish the respective bound­aries with more exact precision, and inconceivable elegance. Red ­waters, yellow roads, enclosures yellow and light green, woods and hedges dark green, ­were the only objects clearly distinguishable, and their coloring was extremely vivid” (Monthly Re­ view 1786, 219). In his account of aerostatic flight some de­cades ­later, Thomas 88 Chapter 2

FIGURE 2.2  ​Thomas

Baldwin, “The Balloon over Helsbye Hill in Chesire,” in Airopaidia. London, 1786, ­etching. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Monck Mason also referred to the “remarkable sharpness of outline” that is “strengthened” by distance; thus, objects, “instead of appearing obscured and rendered more indistinct by their remotion [sic] from the point of sight, seem on the contrary to augment in clearness and decision, and absolutely gain in intensity what they lose in the magnitude of their proportions” (Turnor 1865, 364). Another mid-­nineteenth-­century aeronaut, James Glaisher, also underscored the remarkable “distinctness superior to that on earth”: “the line of sight is through a purer and less dense medium, every­ thing seems clearer, though smaller” (Turnor 1865, 389). Innumerable passages in Airopaidia bear witness to this disturbance of grounded real­ity as bodies take flight. Yet Airopaidia’s second engraving, “The Balloon over Helsbye Hill in Cheshire,” offers the relief of a more conventional picturesque landscape study with none of the flattening equalization, bizarre coloration, or destabilization of physics in evidence in the previous illustration (see fig. 2.2). Baldwin noted that this prospect was observed “from a high field” at “the end of Sutton-­Causeway”; it was presumably a view already familiar to residents or frequent visitors to the district. Balloon Geography  89

The aeronaut describes approaching the “steep crag” of Helsbye Hill through veils of “thin, semi-­transparent vapors” that allowed for shifting glimpses of the earth below “by a glance of the eye” (Baldwin 1786, 71). At first, to a twenty-­first-­century viewer, this image does not seem to ask the eye to work very hard to try to decipher unfamiliar perspectives. The engraving of Helsbye Hill sits anomalously in its place between pages 78 and 79, offering us “beauty” and the linear perspective of the “picturesque” among lengthy discussions of the bottling of “vapours” for chemical analy­sis once the aeronaut returned safely to earth. If we keep in mind Giuliana Bruno’s provocative description of the picturesque as a new type of spatiality produced by the eye’s movement through the view, the second engraving offers deeper significance for the geo­graph­i­ cal archive than its conventional banality might at first suggest (2002, 60–61). In this engraving, the balloon draws the viewer’s eye upward as if following Baldwin’s flight from the ground. The tiny balloon is centered at a distance between rolling clouds that appear heavy with potential rain, crowning the steep, distinctive mass of the hill that is surrounded by more g­ ently rolling countryside. It is a pleasing prospect, one that shows signs of cultivation and ­human habitation without losing the sense of open land and ready access to nature. A good wide road, which itself must be a symbol of modernity and governmentality in the region, leads the eye where it should go—­toward the craggy peak and up into the air where the balloon is suspended at a far distance yet clearly connected to this specific place, Cheshire, in a par­tic­u­ lar moment in time (as the text notes, “at half past II on Thursday the 8th of September, 1785” [Baldwin 1786, iv]). Baldwin’s attachment to this countryside and the ­people of the district tethers his image to the “now h ­ ere” point of view that Bruno links to the production of the bird’s-­eye views of several centuries earlier (2002, 177). It is, in its embrace of a locative realism, an “impossible” or “virtual” view in and of itself, idealized and romantic yet referencing the modern infrastructure of new roads and the emergent science of aerostation. The relationship of the balloon to the hill and countryside is emblematic of a desire for a rational order in which time and space are controlled by the gaze of the spectator—­the surest sign, perhaps, of wishful thinking since untethered balloons are unable to adhere with any precision to ­human navigational force or intention. Key to the experimentation that structures Airopaidia’s first and second illustrations is an inquiry into the nature of the air itself and the ways in which noncorporeal ele­ments such as clouds, wind, and shadows could be accessed and studied. Thus, although drawn to the view below, Baldwin was 90 Chapter 2

si­mul­ta­neously entranced by the cloud formations that appeared above and around as well as below him throughout his flight. All the images in the book include striking examples of clouds, each in very distinct generic styles. Stafford argues that part of the enormous interest in clouds and the atmosphere in the late eigh­teenth ­century stems from a Newtonian princi­ple that even the “tenuous” aspects of real­ity, the immaterial or fluid, may be experienced. Solids and liquids w ­ ere fairly well understood, but less corporeal ele­ments or “effluvia” such as “rainbows, magnetic influences, force fields, and gases,” as well as “flame, heat, and cold,” w ­ ere addressed by confusing and conflicting theories (Stafford 1984, 187). Throughout the ­century, phi­los­o­phers and scientists argued over the status of ­matter: “All agents capable of producing physical effects ­were deemed corporeal, generally only impenetrable objects qualified (although vapors such as steam w ­ ere allowed), and only t­ hose ­things subject to gravity and therefore possessing mass w ­ ere considered bodies” (188). The buoyancy of aerostats perfectly illustrated Archi­medes’s princi­ple: “When a body is completely immersed in a fluid at rest or in two stationary fluids one of which lies above the other, the body is buoyed up by a vertical force equal in magnitude to the weight of fluid dispersed” (Dollfus 1961, 5). Yet the nature of the very air in which the balloons drifted, the physical properties of wind, cloud, and temperature, remained mysterious and subject to rigorous debate. As the manifestation of buoyancy, a production of contained vapor, the aerostatic balloon itself operated as “a kind of artificial cloud,” thus in flight becoming “one cloud among many, climbing into regions where storms and meteors brew” (Stafford 1984, 219).17 Stafford notes that Baldwin did not only pass over the kind of magnificent thunderheads represented in the “View from the Balloon at Its Greatest Elevation”; he “passed through them, being penetrated by, and penetrating to, the core of a ‘soft’ m ­ atter in a way not pos­si­ble by any other mode of travel” (1984, 223): The summer scenes of fairy-­land below, being soon eclipsed by the quick intervention of a range of clouds; the sudden contrast of which was highly pleasing to the imagination; a prospect of mid winter instantaneously succeeded. The Earth’s surface seen through an immea­sur­able crater of vapor accumulated around the aeronaut, who was suspended, and seemed fixed in the center above it, no longer existed. And, if it ­will not be allowed, that a new Earth, and new sky appeared; at least, let the imagery and resemblance of what was ­really seen, be taken from that Earth, which in fact did not appear. A world of clouds, greater than the Balloon Geography  91

one below, became for the first time, the sole object that engrossed the sight. (Baldwin 1786, 135–36) Airopaidia’s third engraving, then, offers us this kind of immersive cloud-­among-­clouds viewpoint, “enmeshed in cloud and mist” (Stafford 1984, 328). Arguably, it is the sense of intimacy with clouds and the strange aspect of the ground glimpsed through them that gives the entire “prospect” a sense of immediacy and sense of movement in time as well as space (see plate 9). When Baldwin describes the effect of peering through the clouds—­the earth appearing and disappearing with ­every glance, “repeatedly escaping from sight”—he links reconnaissance geography to aerostatic spacing: through oscillation, intensity of feeling, and partial or incomplete imaging. The balloon’s path is traced, but the trajectory, like the ground, cannot be seen in its entirety; it is remotely sensed. This view “above the level of the clouds” that represents the “country from Chester to Rixton-­Moss”—in other words, the entire route of Baldwin’s flight—is accompanied by a kind of mirror image on the reverse page, the fourth illustration, an “Explanatory Print,” that resembles more closely a topographical map with the perambulating route of the balloon traced across the terrain (see fig. 2.3). In t­ hese two utterly dif­fer­ent views, the route of the balloon and the topography are constant, but their mode of repre­sen­ ta­tion is bifurcated between more illustrative or decorative reconnaissance and what looks to us like a “real” map. In offering two views of the same route—­one more resembling an “illustration” of the view of the route through clouds with the startling new coloration and flattening effects rendered as closely as pos­si­ble and one in the graphic style of a black-­and-­white line-­drawn map with only key points of interest labeled and the flight’s route traced—­Baldwin divides the same information into two dif­fer­ent but linked repre­sen­ta­tional systems. Baldwin recommends aerostation for mapping, calling for a “new system,” that of “balloon-­geography,” in which “the essentials of proportion and bearings would be far more accurate, than by the pres­ent method, both for maps and charts., viz. to make drawing by sight, from the car of a balloon, with a cam­ era obscura, aided by a micrometer applied to the underside of the transpar­ ent glass” (Baldwin 1786, 133). This technical advice for the nascent modern science of cartography notwithstanding, the “map” is the image that is given the least narrative description or mention in Airopaidia. It appears sketchy, literally; that is, large portions are ­under cloud cover and are rendered as blank. The outlines of the clouds frame the appearance of locations that ­were 92 Chapter 2

FIGURE 2.3  ​Thomas

Baldwin, “The Explanatory Print,” in Airopaidia. Hand-­colored ­etching. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

passed by the balloon in flight. In the colored and detailed “Balloon Prospect,” we can more readily imagine Baldwin’s aerostatic experience since he was, in real time, as it ­were, at this stage in the journey, lost. The cloud cover had become so dense that he was immersed in vapor and mist. The earth itself seemed to have dis­appeared. What was “­really seen”? “No towns, no ­houses appeared. No public roads ­were discoverable. No voices ­were heard” (145). It was “a world of clouds” (136). Baldwin reported that his watch told him the time, but that bore no relevance to his location. The map of the countryside he had brought along was of ­little help: “He was entirely lost in the blue fields of air; far above the summits of the clouds; tho’ the balloon was in sight of the Earth, and of the numbers who ­were gazing at it” (147). Vari­ous partial aspects of terrain riveted Baldwin’s attention, and “he wished to decipher them, but in vain” (148). At this point in the journey, as in the narrative, the balloon began to descend of its own accord, and Baldwin Balloon Geography  93

slowly let out the contents of his last bag of sand. Seemingly from nowhere, country ­people came ­running up to the deflating balloon. His first question to them was, “Pray where am I?,” and their answer was encompassing of the complete voyage: “in Lancashire” (151). In fact, Baldwin landed in the hamlet of Rixton-­Moss, “a place he had never before heard of ” that was about twenty-­five miles from Chester (1786, 152). Baldwin duly reported that this first phase of “the aerial excursion” was “performed in two hours, and a quarter, within two minutes,” exactly, and covered a distance “if traced along the ground, 30 miles” (153). Concluding the section of the book that narrates this part of the balloon journey itself, with t­ hese oscillations between descriptions of emotion, sensations and impressions, and factual data, the four balloon prospects emerge as multifaceted reconnaissance repre­sen­ta­tions of ­these mixed messages. In this way, the balloon prospect in its early iterations produces not so much a scopic, unifying mastery as a series of varied views. The images direct the observer’s eye to attempt to decipher, much as the aeronaut strained to do from the balloon’s basket, the startling new imagery and information through clouds, the equalizing and flattening effect of height, and the aberrations in color, along with the startlingly clear delineation of some of the objects viewed from above. The aerial “scenes and prospects” published in Airopaidia in 1786 could be understood to categorize the primary kinds of views made available by aerostatic flight, but they are too dissimilar in style and scale to truly function as a systematic or encyclopedic array of pos­si­ble perspectives. Rather, the first balloon prospects generated by the advent of aerostation brought embodied, mobile perception to the modern proj­ect of scientific realism, generating enthusiastic interest in techniques of immersive reconnaissance geography. Offering startlingly new views, the balloon prospects linked viewers to older and more familiar imagery and information as well. The advent of rapid aerial transport, moving through the air between locations at new speeds and altitudes, also called for innovation in the recording and understanding of time as well as space. Above all, aerostatic spacing and remote sensing produced new conceptions of ground and air as ele­ments in relation to each other. As Jen Southern (2010) has argued, embodied views from above cannot be divorced easily from their connections to the ground. Balloon prospects most often trained the gaze ­towards the ground—­through clouds, fog, and all manner of mete­ orological ele­ments. Although the ostensible goal of the balloon flight might have been to study the clouds or air itself, the incredible shifts in perspective 94 Chapter 2

of the earth below offered by the view from above captured the imaginations of the early aeronauts. Thus, aerial immersion or envelopment cannot be separated from the terrain below, but can be understood to establish dif­fer­ent registers or scales of view that mediate their seemingly dif­fer­ent environments. In this moment of contradictory and multiple practices, Enlightenment social and natu­ral sciences strove to bring together the widest pos­si­ble examples of observable phenomena and to or­ga­nize ­these vast collections in increasingly rational formats. Aerial views would seem to fall easily into this narrative of modernity. As Baldwin’s four views strongly suggest, the first aeronauts began almost immediately to try to assem­ble, or­ga­nize, and codify their observations. They recorded as many of their sensations, visual and other­wise, as they could and linked these data to the latest science in chemistry, optics, geodesy, and so forth. But ­these most modern of scientists for their age also could not fully accommodate their experiences within available science; their perceptions could be superseded by overwhelming affective experience while their senses w ­ ere challenged by new information and evidence. Indeed, aerostation generated sensations and brought together ­people, tools, devices, and environments in a uniquely productive mode of being that cannot be summarized as panoptically unified. Thus, as we have seen in the case of bird’s-­eye views from the late medieval and early modern period, we should be cautious about projecting a unified repre­sen­ta­tional practice in the case of aerial prospects at the advent of aerostation. As the first images based on perceptions gained from h ­ uman flight demonstrate, instances of repre­sen­ta­tional instability and partiality disturb the desire for a totalized overview. THE EYE OF T H E COM M AN D ER: WAR B AL L O O N S AN D THE COUP D ’ OEI L

A general likewise in the day of ­battle would derive singular advantage by ­going up in one of ­these machines, he would have a bird’s eye view not only of ­every ­thing that was ­doing in his own, but the ­enemy’s army, and by sending down his ­orders occasionally (which may be done by means of a plummet) he may literally be said “To ­ride in the whirlwind, and direct the storm.”18 —­Anonymous, The Air Balloon

Twenty-­first-­century viewers of images like ­those found in Airopaidia cannot avoid seeing targets, lines of sight, harbingers of scientific cartography, and military topography. While this ­future unfolds throughout texts like Balloon Geography  95

Baldwin’s, it does not constrain or limit the ways in which aerostation was perceived or experienced in its first years. If war was not exceptional in the late eigh­teenth ­century but a “per­sis­tent mode of living and a habit of mind” (Favret 2010, 14), this affective environment of war­time aftermaths could be understood to circulate as dispositional vio­lence throughout the aerial perspectives of balloon “geographies.” It is precisely the ways in which military considerations format perception in relation to aerostation that alert us to the foundational reach of warfare into the “entire terrain of civil society” (Dillon and Reid 2009, 9). Ascending, floating, and descending in a hot air or helium-­fueled balloon occurred throughout war­time aftermaths—­the increasing awareness of distant wars in the spaces and activities of everyday life—­and generated views in ways that cannot be reduced to a so­cio­log­i­cal notion of militarized vision (the mobilization of something nonmilitary for the purpose of warfare). Aerostation and its observational practices could not become militarized; they w ­ ere si­mul­ta­ neously both of and also not only of the military and the environment of war. Within this complex, wide-­ranging context, military-­minded politicians and scientists, as well as strategists and tacticians in the national armies, found themselves inspired, like Joseph Montgolfier, to imagine the technicalities and logistics of airpower. Is the sedimented history of the achievement of a synoptic aerial view through aerostation a retrospective narrative, s­ haped ­after the air wars of the first half of the twentieth ­century had produced the legitimating ideologies of airpower? Certainly, t­here is ample evidence that aerostation presented itself almost immediately as a potentially power­ful platform for an overview of battlefield terrain. One of the Montgolfier ­brothers’ first ­human passengers, André Giroud de Villette, grasped quickly the possibilities of military reconnaissance from the air, writing soon ­after his historic flight: “I was convinced that this apparatus, costing but ­little, could be made useful to the army for discovering the positions of its ­enemy, his movements, his advances, and his dispositions, and that information could be conveyed to the troops operating the machine” (Christopher 2004, 12). Serving as a U.S. diplomat in Paris at the time of the first launches, Benjamin Franklin reported back to his superiors that the extraordinary new technology could be used for reconnaissance and communications: “It may be sufficient for certain purposes, such as elevating an engineer to take a view of the e­ nemy’s army, works e­ tcetera, conveying intelligence into, or from, or out of a besieged town, giving signals to distant places, or the like” (15).19 While ­these foundational insights are usually quoted to demonstrate a lin96 Chapter 2

ear genealogy of militarized aerial vision, situating aerostation in a parallel storyline as the progenitor of air and space remote sensing and “situational awareness,” the history of aerostation also directs our attention to the ways the sensory opportunities provided by flight disturbed both storylines to the point of dissolving their distinctions. It is this more overtly military engagement with aerostation that seems to bring the concept of “seeing like a state” into perfect focus, sorting out the confusions and contradictions of ground-­level life into a synoptic view of patterns, symmetrical grids, and a “vaster order” (Scott 1998, 57–58). As the oed indicates, the virtues of a view from above are nestled into the etymologies of survey and surveillance, emphasizing from the early modern period onward the act of overviewing, specifically from the late sixteenth c­ entury, the “act of looking at something as a ­whole, or from a commanding position.” Most modern mapping and surveying proj­ects aimed to emulate this imaginary bird’s-­eye view, drawing on new instantiations of geometric mea­ sure­ment and increasingly standardized methods of topographical “sketching.” The desire to see all, at a glance, incorporated into the military concept of coup d’oeil, would seem to be realized fully to previously unimaginable degrees through the aerial reach provided by aerostation. Yet, as accounts such as Airopaidia demonstrate, the first aeronauts found vision from above to be fragmented, uneven, and confounding, even if sometimes startlingly clear. The concept of a perfect total overview, comprehended at a glance, became available before the embodied view itself materialized. The conviction that an elevated viewpoint was necessary for rapid, ­accurate assessment of the location of troops and supply lines, as well as for observing the pro­gress of ­battles under way, developed adherents as the strategy and tactics of warfare underwent a significant change in the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries in Western Eu­rope. It is a truism that the commander who understands every­thing about the terrain and can “use it to his advantage” is the commander who w ­ ill achieve victory (O’Brien 1991, 1). But the requirement of an elevated view to gain topographical knowledge is not transhistorical. In the medieval period, fieldcraft called for ­battles at or near fortifications that had been built e­ ither to create continuous barriers in strategic areas or to guard a specific position. Traditional forts relied on the immensity and strength of their walls to repel attacks. However, with the introduction of gunpowder from China during the thirteenth ­century, the operation of land warfare in Eu­rope began to change. Longer-­range artillery and heavier firepower created conditions that altered the design of forts and city walls. The massive watchtowers Balloon Geography  97

attached to fortifications became too vulnerable to longer-­range artillery fire and no longer offered a valuable, secure vantage point. To avoid frontal assaults by heavy cannon fire, fortresses w ­ ere built lower and lower to the ground to the point of being half-­buried (Hughes 1974, 8). Troops engaged each other away from their fortifications on sometimes distant battlefields, requiring topographical knowledge that was often supplied by scouts attached to the cavalry.20 The heavi­ly manned extensive fortifications that strained the resources of nation-­states that w ­ ere almost constantly at war became increasingly obsolete. Consequently, throughout the eigh­teenth ­century in Western Eu­rope, the visual requirements of ­battle divided into three aspects: the acquiring of geo­ graph­i­cal knowledge about a designated terrain through survey sketches and maps, reconnaissance observation immediately preceding or during b ­ attle, and a more synoptic sensing of the field of ­battle as a ­whole. As printing and modes of communications improved throughout the period, commanders no longer w ­ ere required to fight at the head of their troops in order to keep track of the b ­ attle. With larger fighting forces, longer-range armaments, and more terrain involved as ­battle space, commanders began to situate themselves most ideally on a distant hill (van Creveld 1991, 115). Overlooking the battlefield from a distance, often aided by telescopes, fielding written and oral communications from scouts on ­horse­back, the modern commander developed a reliance on a field of vision that could be provided only by an elevated position. This physical placement, viewing from a height, embodied the multiple aspects of the coup d’oeil, defined in military manuals from the 1760s onward and generalized as a tactical sense, the capacity to think like a commander, including the innate ability to see all—­the given terrain, the troops, and e­ very pos­si­ble move—at a glance in the pro­cess of making rapid decisions (Pansini 2002, 291). The growing importance of an elevated line of sight in order to conduct warfare effectively became drawn into the debates about the purpose and meaning of the new invention of aerostation. The war balloon, at least in theory, seemed to offer a platform for the emerging “architecture of warfare” in the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries, assisting in the control of territory by “rendering it recognizable” at a glance through new formats of observation and repre­sen­ta­tion (Dubbini 2002, 30). In a pamphlet published in En­glish in 1783 almost immediately ­after the first launches, The Air Bal­ loon: Or, a Treatise on the Aerostatic Globe Lately In­ven­ted by the Celebrated Mons. Montgolfier of Paris, an anonymous author elaborated on this idea, arguing that “on the first report of a country being invaded,” an “air balloon” 98 Chapter 2

could serve as a kind of watchtower, observing and sending by rapid means detailed information on the “number of e­ nemy” as well as “their place of landing.” In addition, the author urged readers to consider the advantages of aerostation for observations at sea and during sieges, pointing to the benefits not only to reconnaissance and defense but to advancing geo­graph­i­cal and maritime knowledge. Fi­nally, the author advocated sending a “general” aloft in a balloon to gain a “bird’s eye view” not only of “every­thing that was ­doing in his own, but the e­ nemy’s army” (Anonymous 1783, 27). In four succinct paragraphs, the author of The Air Balloon presented the case for what would come to be called “airpower” in the twentieth c­ entury: superior visual reconnaissance for sea and land warfare, aerial defense of territory, and, along with potential savings in costs and lives, the potential for attacks from the air. While some far-­sighted commentators like the author of The Air Balloon predicted complex and vari­ous military uses for the experimental science of aerostation, ­there was ­little consensus on the ­matter. Could the war balloon provide the perfect platform for the commander’s coup d’oeil—­that “flash of insight” that could perceive all that needed to be known about the “lay of the land”? Even in France, however, where the national proprietary interest in aerostation was so ­great, the development of war balloons was stalled for almost ten years. Although advocates pushed for research into military applications, the unstable po­liti­cal situation leading up to the French Revolution distracted attention and divided sources of support. By 1789, France was not only in the midst of its own revolution; the new republican state was constantly at war with its neighbors. A newly formed scientific commission counted several scientists who had been involved in the development of aerostation among its members, and they revived interest in solving practical prob­lems that might lead to effective military “bird’s-­eye views” (de la Landelle 1884, 146). Balloons ­were first used for aerial observation in warfare on June 26, 1794. On that day, the French revolutionary army faced a co­ali­tion of Austrian and Dutch forces in Fleurus, Belgium. Although General Jean-­Baptiste Jourdan’s seventy-­five thousand troops outnumbered the Prince of Saxe-­Coburg’s fifty-­two thousand, the French advantage in this decisive ­battle has been attributed to the tactical decision to try out a new “instrument of war,” the observation balloon. Tethered to the ground by cables requiring the dedicated effort of at least twenty handlers, the French aerostat, L’Entreprenant,21 stayed aloft for more than ten hours throughout the ­battle (see fig. 2.4). Its two-­person crew hauled tactical queries up by the tethering cables while sending replies and directives down by the same method. In addition to the Balloon Geography  99

Naudet Le Beau, Bataille de Fleurus gagnée par l’Armée Française le 8 Messidor de l’an 2, ca. 1798–1802. Courtesy of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

FIGURE 2.4  ​Thomas

reportedly spectacular advantage of viewing the entire battlefield from the air, the startling appearance of the balloon itself reportedly amazed and terrified the e­ nemy troops, significantly affecting morale (Rolt 2006, 163). As Jean-­Marie-­Joseph Coutelle, the chemist who had been charged with the establishment of the new aerostatic unit, reported: “The e­ nemy’s soldiers, when they saw someone observing all they did, ­were discouraged by the thought that each movement was remarked; our soldiers on the other hand, found new courage from what excited both their admiration and confidence” (Turnor 1865, 282). In the years just preceding the b ­ attle of Fleurus, Coutelle and another chemist, Nicolas-­Jacques Conté, had been tasked by the scientific commission to develop innovative approaches to the use of aerostats ­under battlefield conditions, including a method to produce hydrogen fuel on-­site as well as ways to aid the rapid inflation and deflation of the aerostat’s envelope. With ample state support, Coutelle and Conté set up an aerostatic unit in Meudon outside of Paris, and by the early spring of 1794, they w ­ ere confident enough to offer their ser­vices to General Jourdan. Their primary balloon, L’Entreprenant, performed well overall and was used in several sorties and ­battles, including the iconic event at Fleurus. On the basis of t­ hese suc100 Chapter 2

cesses, a second aerostatic com­pany was formed and Coutelle was named the battalion commander and director of the training program at Meudon (Mead 1983, 13). Through ­these experiments in real-­time ­battle conditions, the possibilities and limits of elevated vision from a tethered balloon ­were carefully considered. Of his view from L’Entreprenant at several ­battles in the spring of 1794, Coutelle wrote a mea­sured evaluation: “The rocking is troublesome, and increases with the force of the wind, and sometimes prevents the use of glasses; but I must remark that one can see the movements of infantry, cavalry, and artillery with the naked eye: and at Mauberge, Mayence, and Mannheim I could count the pieces on the redoubts and ramparts without any extraneous assistance” (Turnor 1865, 283). Embodied experience in the tethered war balloon did not approximate the sublime characteristics of “aerostatic spacing” provided by ­free flight, but the demands of technical duties as well as observation and communications, combined with the intensity of battlefield conditions, generated their own intensive sensibilities. In spite of the rocky ­ride and danger of exposure to artillery fire, proponents of tethered war balloons pressed their case for aerial observation. In an 1803 pamphlet addressed to “The Right Honourable Charles Yorke,” a Major General Money argued vigorously for their use by the British military, writing: “­There are few men, Sir, in this country who know better than myself what use can be made of balloons in military operations, having been three times up with one, and expressly for that purpose. ­There never was any doubt in my mind on the subject; you see from them every­thing you wish to see” (Turnor 1865, 285). The emphasis on the clarity and far-­sightedness that the war balloon could provide linked the promise of military aerostation to emerging values of mobile, rapid visualization of the entire field of b ­ attle. If success in ­battle increasingly required an almost clairvoyant general whose “eye” needed to be as far-­sighted as pos­si­ble, piercing the smoke and “fog of war,” the tethered balloon proposed to replace the physical eye of the general with a set of prosthetic observational devices and technologies. Despite enthusiastic reports from the French aerostatic corps, the “old guard” in the French Army ­was not persuaded by the new technology. The skepticism began at the top; although Napoleon grudgingly sent war balloons to Egypt, he was not an enthusiastic supporter.22 Without commitment from the leadership, the balloon school at Meudon was closed in 1799, and by 1804 the use of war balloons for observation by the French military came to an abrupt end. Although devoted advocates of military aerostation pressed their case to their respective militaries, t­ here ­were only a few Balloon Geography  101

further trial ­efforts recorded throughout the nineteenth ­century. Thaddeus Lowe managed to convince the Union Army to try the technology for a short period during the Civil War in the United States.23 The city of Paris famously launched balloons to facilitate communications during the siege of the city in 1870, sending mail and the occasional courier or politician out of the besieged metropole and over ­enemy lines to safe territory.24 Although this desperate mea­sure was deemed a success, it was perilous—­several aerostats ­were blown ­either the wrong way into Germany and into ­enemy hands or out to sea and certain death. Consistent integration of aerial observation into military strategy and tactics remained “on hold” u ­ ntil the advent of powered flight (with more certain navigation) in the early twentieth ­century. Despite ­these brief, uneven, and unsatisfactory experimentations with military aerostation, the direct association between an aerial view and warfare persisted and flourished. Virilio has argued that this desire for a perfect realization of the God’s-­eye view, from “the original watchtower through the anchored balloon to the reconnaissance aircraft and remote sensing satellites,” mobilized vision itself into a weapon resulting in the collapse of “­actual” and “potential” sight across distance into a virtual spectacle, eroding autonomy and ceding control to automation (1989, 3). Virilio is most concerned with the correspondence between warfare and the operations of the camera, but he has generalized his argument to claim that the battlefield is always already a “field of perception” in that the “function of the weapon is the function of the eye.” In this sense, the commander is depicted in Virilio’s work as a “painter” wielding “palette and brush” through the visualized operations of warfare (20). In the era of aerostation, the surveillant properties of the “watchtower” moved into the air and became personified as the “eye” of the general, a hybrid assemblage of aerostat and aeronaut to produce an embodied coup d’oeil. The very nature of warfare, however—­its unexpected and intensely chaotic turn of events along with the physically obscuring properties of smoke and other ele­ments—­challenges the ideal concept of a total view captured at a glance from above. As Jan Mieszkowski has commented, witnessing a war entails as much “what one should see or should have seen as with what one does see” (2009, 1649). Military requirements for visual surveying during ­battle w ­ ere relatively narrow ones, shedding any information but the most relevant to achieving immediate aims. In this way, “seeing all” ­really meant “seeing less” or “seeing selectively,” a far dif­fer­ent task than the challenges to vision that w ­ ere encountered by the aeronauts in f­ ree flight. Without making a ludicrous claim that t­ hese two modes of being and sensing can be re102 Chapter 2

duced to the same, the cost of separating them is a recuperation of power­ful mythologies of nationalism and imperialist expansion. Moving between the free-­floating aerostat and the tethered balloon are passions of national affiliation, the dynamics of state infrastructures, and the narrowing of sensibilities to singular worlds in the name of new sciences. If repre­sen­ta­tions like the imagery in Airopaidia help us to sense the “moving force” of ­these modern dispositions that are so difficult to recognize, we would do well to resist placing them only in one storyline or the other. If “balloon geographies” like Baldwin’s text ­were not yet directly engaged in the synchronization of topographical knowledge and battlefield observation on-­site that came to be celebrated in Napoleonic warfare, they ­were always already mobilized as productions of war­time aftermaths in a period of profound transition. The war balloon storyline, then, is not so much a parallel track or a teleological progression of a technology that becomes militarized. Aerostation’s military narrative draws the violent dispositions of modernity’s period of republican emergence into its narrower confines, leaving the discourse of scientific achievement and aesthetic sensibility ­free of national politics beyond jockeying for “firsts” in innovation. This evacuation of colonial, imperial, and national investments and actions removes the force of movement from science and segregates the emotion of motion into the realm of phenomenology alone. If the early history of aerostation offers us anything, it is the opportunity to refuse t­ hese mythological separations. The “emotion of motion” could be sensed in any accounts of flight from this period, w ­ hether in a free-­floating or tethered balloon, and dreams of warfare w ­ ere mixed into fantasies of freedom, stunning and confounding vistas, and new scientific methods. The “moving maps” of “balloon geographies” conveyed in partial and perhaps never fully satisfying ways what the body in flight found to feel and see. Joyfully, purposefully, the aeronauts brought their past histories and pres­ ent complexities with them into the air and, in their encounter with entirely new sensations and perceptions, came to see and represent the f­ uture of war.

Balloon Geography  103

CHAPTER 3

L A N AT U R E À C O U P D ’ O E I L “Seeing All” in Early Pa­noramas

—­

The glance is a scopic scout stationed at the outpost of ­human perceptual experience. It discovers ­whole colonies of the to-­be-­seen world: places where sight has never before been—or if it has, it now sees differently. The glance guides the eye as it comes to know the perceived world, leading it out of more staid and settled ways of looking. This happens by actions of leaping from the zone of the familiar to the very edges of the unfamiliar, all the while taking in the intermediate stretches, and then leaping back again. —­E DWARD S. CASEY , The World at a Glance

By the last de­cade of the eigh­teenth ­century, the aerial visual culture of war­ time aftermaths included not only the hybrid observational aesthetics of the military surveys and the partial perspectives of the early balloon “prospects” but a new format of multimedia entertainment that offered spectators the simulation of a view from above through the sensation of immersion. The circular panoramic painting emulated the elevation of the tethered balloon held in place as if frozen in time, revealing urban and rural landscapes in startlingly realistic detail. Advertised by their creator, Robert Barker, as an opportunity to observe “nature at a glance,” the panoramic installation drew on the military conceptualization of the coup d’oeil and the elevated, oblique line of sight that was believed to yield the best and most realistic vistas.1 Lending further credence to a militaristic outlook, the themes of many early panoramic paintings often celebrated British victories in ­battle or imperial achievements.2 However, like aerostation, the first pa­noramas did not

simply and inevitably herald the birth of airpower’s visual culture. Immersion in the panoramic scene induced dizziness, confusion, and fright as well as joy and won­der, generating new sights and sensibilities while foreclosing ­others. Oliver Grau has identified the effects of immersion as a “passage from one ­mental state to another” that leads to a “diminishing critical distance to what is shown and increasing emotional involvement in what is happening” (2003, 13). If immersion locates the viewer through the sensation of being in a specific place, the lingering knowledge that this experience must be an illusion creates a tension, a dislodging of context and certainty. Drawing together military topography, Re­nais­sance linear perspective, the popularity of exhibition in the round, and the trend ­toward ever larger paintings of landscapes, the first pa­noramas seemed to reproduce a visual ideal, a lucid overview of every­thing worth seeing. Yet the new format produced far more ways of seeing and sensing than the reinscription of a masterful gaze from above. Panoramic paintings enthusiastically promoted the immersive experience of observing nature at a glance not only as a mode of entertainment but as a pedagogical practice. Barker’s first efforts assumed that spectators would need a ­great deal of assistance in learning how to see the detailed content of the paintings. ­After his first semicircular efforts, Barker’s 360-­degree paintings ­were installed in specially designed rotundas that used theatrical lighting effects to initially overwhelm the senses of spectators and then draw them into a coherent viewing practice. Visitors of all ages and classes swarmed the early pa­noramas, often making repeat visits. Studying the printed guides to the depiction of objects and sites in the paintings, spectators learned how to better observe from above and thereby “see all.” The emulation of the coup d’oeil in an environment intended to first destabilize the senses and then re­orient them provided the “thrills and chills” that marked the advent of modern spectacles. The spectator of early panoramic paintings was amazed, awed, and drawn in to a new practice of viewing—no longer from close quarters on the ground but now, synoptically and virtually, from above. However, this empowering mode of observation that proposed to reveal “all” also removed ­people and ­things from observation or produced strata of information that could be perceived only differentially. The pa­norama’s coup d’oeil made pos­si­ble strategies of disappearance as well as appearance, loss as well as presence. The emergence of new repre­sen­ta­tional formats like pa­noramas seemingly reinforced the viewpoints of the victors of wars: deleting, replacing, and adding information in modes that became institutionalized as La Nature à Coup d’Oeil  105

“realism” while promoting the achievement of a singular worldview. Yet ­people, languages, places, and memories live on in modernity’s war­time aftermaths, sometimes leaving palpable traces of other worlds and times and sometimes creating an absence whose enormity supersedes sensibility. Viewing in the round instantiated the seen and unseen dynamics of war­time aftermaths, offering a fixed standpoint for a moving spectator who could, at times, find the view to be disorienting and even impossible to comprehend. The unpredictable “emotion of motion” brought even the most patriotic spectator of im­mense circular paintings of imperial cities and naval victories uncomfortably close to sensing the wars that made pos­si­ble such scenes of national triumph. As Peter Otto has noted in relation to the apparent tension between simulation and real­ity in early panoramic paintings, this complex repre­sen­ta­tional format did not simply unfold a “series of perspectives on a single world”; rather, panoramic paintings could also reveal that “worlds are themselves multiple” (2007, para. 13). MARVELOUS SI G H TS: PA N ­ ORAM AS I N TH E A G E OF AEROS TATION

The learned ­were amazed, and the unlearned ­were enraptured. I can never forget its first impression upon my own mind. It was a ­thing dropped down from the clouds—­all fire, energy, intelligence, and animation. . . . ​The public poured in by hundreds and thousands for even a transient gaze—­for such a sight was altogether as marvelous as it was novel. You carried it home, and did nothing but think of it, talk of it, and dream of it. —­Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Reminiscences of a Literary Life

In his authoritative history of panoramic paintings, Stephan Oettermann has argued that the link between balloons and panoramic paintings is “no accident” since the pa­noramas re-­created the “unlimited field of view of the aeronauts” (1997, 20).3 In a related vein, Barbara Maria Stafford has written that the aeronaut occupied the most “supreme vantage point” of the age since this “new Icarus” experienced a “pa­norama” from the balloon that was “nothing less than the ­actual totality of undivided space” (1984, 434). Visitors to the first installations of panoramic paintings would have been familiar with accounts such as Vincenzo Lunardi’s description of his view of London from the gondola of his aerostat; like Baldwin’s first balloon prospect from the “highest elevation,” this view seemed to form “a perfect circle.” To Lunardi’s ­great plea­sure, the expanse of the modern city, its immensity shrunk to a 106 Chapter 3

viewable scale, its hurly-­burly sights and sounds stilled, produced a “­whole scene.” London viewed from above in the round appeared to Lunardi like an “enormous beehive,” with streets appearing as “lines all animated with beings, whom I knew to be men and w ­ omen, but which I should other­wise have had difficulty describing.” The bustling and dense metropolitan scene that enthralled Lunardi as his balloon drifted upward became increasingly abstract even as its vast expanse became fully and spectacularly recognizable. Most importantly, once aloft, the “industry of it was suspended” (Lunardi 1784, 40). This moment in the mobile experience of flight, frozen in time and yet so sensorily and spatially expansive, was craved by many of the visitors to early panoramic installations. For the price of a ticket, pa­noramas offered to immerse in a simulated experience of aerostatic spacing p ­ eople of any age and social standing. Moving through a built environment that gave spectators the feeling of being lifted above the earth, apprehensive visitors to panoramic installations could, nevertheless, rest assured that their feet would never actually leave the ground. This unpre­ce­dented opportunity left many early viewers overcome by strong emotions. Writer Thomas Frognall Dibdin recalled his own first encounter with a panoramic painting as a view “dropped down from the clouds,” an experience that remained with him long a­ fter he returned home, feverishly thinking about it, talking about it, and even dreaming about it (1836, 143). The emotions invoked by pa­noramas resonated with “balloonomania” and other rapturous responses to new kinds of exhibitions, shows, and demonstrations that became so popu­lar in cities in the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries. Once spectators experienced the novelty and thrills offered by amazing installations like pa­noramas, they sought to repeat ­these marvelous experiences over and over while demanding increasing registers of spectacular intensity (Griffiths 2008, 42). Panoramic paintings grew larger and larger and the simulation of real­ity became more and more hyperreal as entrepreneurial artists like Barker worked to sell their tickets at a brisk rate and keep the rotundas filled with visitors. Pa­noramas ­were first exhibited in ­Great Britain, a country that had not invested state resources in the development of aerostation. Although most balloon flights ­were undertaken by figures who ­were seen as charlatans rather than advanced scientists or national heroes (like the French inventors and aeronauts), ­there was an enormous public following and accompanying “balloonomania” throughout the British Isles. Despite such avid interest and enthusiasm, most p ­ eople could hardly hope to experience firsthand the altered physical states and sensations of flight; aerostation was expensive La Nature à Coup d’Oeil  107

to conduct and dangerous to attempt. The panoramic installation offered spectators ranging from commoners to royals across ages and most social classes access to at least part of the experience of flight in a balloon—an elevated view. If balloon flights produced mobile, emotive assemblages of diverse kinds of pos­si­ble views from aerostats, the immersive technology of panoramic paintings sought to simulate the first moments of the launch into the atmosphere and in so ­doing tethered the sight to a place and time that could not vary. This virtual and “captured” moment anchored the view to a specific site and offered much closer opportunities for observation, especially through repeated viewing. The spectator’s sensation of floating aloft and gazing slightly downward onto a dazzling and amazing scene induced the coup d’oeil or “all-­at-­once-­ness” that Lorraine Daston has identified as necessary for the “collective empiricism” of observing the “­really real” (2008, 107). The acknowledged originator of the perfectly circular, realistically rendered panoramic painting, however, did not make a direct mention of aerostation in his advertisements or other written materials concerning his invention. In Robert Barker’s strug­gle to compete with myriad other entertainments in the imperial city and to finance the building of his first rotunda, he stressed the unique and unpre­ce­dented nature of panoramic installations; they ­were unlike anything e­ lse on earth, completely new, yet revealing of views that ­were more real than real, if you ­will.4 Indeed, in the most obvious ways, panoramic paintings ­were completely unlike flight; they ­were repre­sen­ta­ tions that drew on conventional techniques such as linear perspective and military topography, and they ­were designed to be exhibited in an innovative built environment. In aerostatic flight, the passenger was relatively still while the vehicle moved through space. In the pa­norama’s rotunda, the spectator moved around a circumscribed circular space, irrefutably grounded yet transported into the simulation of an elevated view. ­These two phenomena—­a mode of transportation and a work of art—­were not at all the same and yet they ­were and continue to be powerfully linked through the experience of aerial observation. The obvious, commonsense distinction between balloons and pa­noramas rests on the difference between the immediate experience of flight and the consumption of a repre­sen­ta­tion. However, this Platonic divide between the “real” and its imitation is challenged by the inevitability of mediation between the “mind’s eye,” the physical acts of sensing, and the ways in which sensations can be rendered in any given society. Baldwin’s balloon “prospects” split a view that we now assume to be unified into at least four iterations in order to try to convey adequately what he “saw” from above. Barker’s task 108 Chapter 3

was equally difficult, but several years a­ fter the “invention” of aerostation, he was able to draw visitors into a completely novel built environment to “see” something that was si­mul­ta­neously new and potentially legible. Barker’s panoramic paintings offered a view from a low oblique a­ ngle designed to give the spectator the impression of a fixed standpoint from no ­matter where the image was observed. That this a­ ngle and view reminded many viewers then and now of one moment in the ascent or descent of a balloon should not move us to declare one experience of viewing utterly real and the other only false or imitative. The “unsettled” nature of sight, w ­ hether in flight or in a panoramic rotunda, trou­bles the divide between ­these examples and demands further inquiry into the late eighteenth-­century taste for viewing in the round. PECULIAR OBJ ECTS: V I EW I N G I N TH E ROU N D

It is habit that makes perception of a world pos­si­ble. —­Lorraine Daston, “On Scientific Observation”

For many Londoners in the fall of 1784, when the frenzy for aerostation remained at a fever pitch, one of the best ways to get close to a balloon was to view one indoors at the Lyceum, a large exhibition hall on the Strand. Aeronauts in ­Great Britain found that selling tickets to finance their launches tended to fail; as Leslie Gardiner has put it so aptly, the prob­lem with funding aerostation by subscription was that viewing a balloon in the sky was, basically, “magnificently f­ree” (1963, 68). Anyone could look out their win­dow or run outside to marvel at a balloon in flight. To help finance his first public launch without any steady financial support, Lunardi hit on the idea of selling tickets to view his aerostat indoors, in this case at the Pantheon in Oxford Street. By Lunardi’s next event, he had become one of the most famous men in the nation and beyond. Over twenty thousand p ­ eople flocked to the hall at the Lyceum to meet the glamorous aeronaut, see the amazing aerostat, and even climb into the gondola to get a sense of the experience of flight. Lunardi wrote at the time, “I exhibit ­there, not only as ­matters of curiosity to persons who have not seen or understood the French experiments, but to point out to t­ hose who have, the peculiar object of my enterprise” (1784, 11). Suspended from the ceiling of the ­great hall, Lunardi’s balloon attracted throngs who circled around and around the “peculiar object,” practicing the new habit of viewing in the round (see fig. 3.1).5 The emergence of new kinds of built environments that offered circular modes of observation can be understood in multiple ways ranging from La Nature à Coup d’Oeil  109

FIGURE 3.1  ​Francis Jukes and Valentine Green, The Interior of the Pantheon, Oxford Street, London, 1785. Courtesy of hip/Art Resource, New York.

innovations in architecture and engineering to the rise in the consumption of popu­lar entertainment in expanding metropoles, as well as to the birth of a modern culture of surveillance. It has become one of the hallowed beliefs of liberal democracies that the empiricism of the Eu­ro­pean Enlightenment produced citizen subjects in part through “undeviating observation” (Stafford 1984, 39). Sensory experience opened the individual to the encyclopedic knowledge so favored during this era and could, according to this generalized philosophy, bind each person to each other in a kind of informed republic of feeling and sensation. Specifically, the desire to “see all” led to any number of panoptic practices and environments, including circular exhibition spaces like panoramic installations as well as speculative disciplinary structures like Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon or, as Simone Browne has argued, the slave ship. Although the slave ship was not constructed to be a perfect circle, its brutal schematics provided an “almost aerial viewpoint” for the overseers of its h ­ uman cargo (Browne 2015, 49).6 The sophisticated architectural engineering of the new exhibition spaces aimed to manipulate light and lines of sight to enable what Michel Foucault described as “the unimpeded empire of the gaze” (1973, 39). The thrilling entertainment of the circular panoramic installation might seem miles apart from the surveillant disciplinary power of Bentham’s panoptic 110 Chapter 3

design for a prison or the demands of military observation. The possibilities of viewing in the round, however, offered tantalizing powers to the citizen subjects of the world’s largest empire. Both Barker and Bentham ­were thinking about circles and sight in the mid-1780s; Bentham first mentioned the concept of a panoptic prison in a letter to his ­father in 1786, while Barker patented his La Nature à Coup d’Oeil in 1787 (the neologism pa­norama does not appear in print ­until 1792). Although recent scholarship points to a number of similar ideas in the same time period, Barker is almost always identified as the progenitor of panoramic installations; the ­legal claim established by his patent was followed by the exhibition in 1788 of his half-­circle prototype, View of Edinburgh and the Surrounding Country from the Calton Hill (Altick 1978, 129–30; Comment 1999, 23; Hyde 1988, 57; Oettermann 1997, 100).7 Interestingly, prison plays a role in at least one of the pa­norama’s origin narratives. This less well-­known account places Barker in jail, incarcerated for unpaid debts in a circular cell, contemplating the movement of the light cast from an elevated win­dow as it moved around the space, imagining a “­free outlook in all directions” (Oettermann 1997, 39).8 A more flattering, standard account locates the painter out for a walk with his young d ­ aughter on Calton Hill in Edinburgh when inspiration struck (Hyde 1988, 57). Barker’s view of the city from the hill, famously captured in his first semicircular effort, could be construed as panoptic; in this version, the Irish artist, relocated to Edinburgh to teach “perspective drawing,” is portrayed as intent to reproduce exactly the scene from the hill’s optimally elevated vantage point. If we combine the two stories, however, we begin to grasp the power­ful dynamic at work in ­these experiments in viewing in the round; not just an object to be viewed in its totality but an intense experience of movement—­constrained as well as unconstrained, disciplining as well as liberating the body and its sensory capacities. The architecture of the panopticon and the pa­norama shared a number of characteristics that emphasized elevated observation and manipulation of light. Both required “round structures” built around a “central observation platform” that would separate center from periphery, and both would manipulate daylight as well as artificial light (Oettermann 1997, 41). The visitor to an early pa­norama entered the rotunda through a darkened, winding staircase that led to the viewing platform. ­After spending time in the semidarkness, moving from daylight and the busy street into the narrow enclosure of the stairs leading upward, the visitor would emerge into a dazzling space—­the circular painting theatrically lit by the win­dows built strategically into the roof to throw light only onto the painting and not La Nature à Coup d’Oeil  111

onto the viewing platform (see plate 10). With pupils dilated by moving through the darkened entry­way, the visitor would be stunned at first by the illuminated scene and then drawn to the center of the platform to observe and marvel at the realistic display in the round. Con­temporary witnesses reported that many visitors, drawn t­ oward the brilliantly lit scene, would move as close as pos­si­ble to the painting although a guard rail would hold them back at a necessary distance (Wilcox 1988, 40). This approach to viewing a painting was less a realization of Bentham’s panopticon, which would require blinding light poured into ­every corner, than an extension of the theater and, as some suggest, a precursor to the experience of cinema (Griffiths 2008, 4). Bentham’s panopticon also sought to control a population through design, but in this case, the aims of social reform operated in a more stringent manner than t­ hose of entertainment. Instead of a viewing platform for excited visitors, the panopticon was structured around a central observation tower occupied by a guard. The observer in the tower would look out not on an exquisitely rendered, realistic landscape but at a circle of cells containing prisoners. Natu­ral light lit the cells by day and lamps a­ fter dark, with a careful placement of reflecting mirrors to deliver all powers of sight to the observer in the tower, leaving the prisoners “in the dark” as to w ­ hether they ­were being actively watched. Drawing on Jean-­Jacques Rousseau’s princi­ple of constant observation as a means of social and personal control, Bentham’s panopticon proposed to exercise power in newly subtle ways, eschewing overt force in ­favor of a kind of surveillance that would become internalized such that subjects would eventually discipline themselves. As Foucault acerbically commented, “A superb formula: power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be minimal cost” (1980, 155). Although the premise of continual observation structures most architectures of control in modernity, panopticism is not uniformly successful in producing docile bodies (Browne 2015, 40). The quest for total transparency and constant illumination as a method of social and po­liti­cal control can only reveal, at best, the surface of t­hings and, even in its most probative sensing, may never make palpable worlds of which it remains ignorant or chooses to deny. At the very least, as Foucault reminded us, visibility is not the only technology of power; along with vision, the “disposition of space” enjoined other senses and sensibilities (1980, 148). During the same years that saw the emergence of the first panoramic rotunda in London and plans for a prison built on panoptic princi­ples,

112 Chapter 3

exhibition spaces that required or encouraged viewing in the round became some of the most desirable locales for metropolitan entertainments. The veritable explosion of what Richard Altick has termed “modern shows” included spectacles like Lunardi’s balloon as well as fairs, theaters, pantomimes, ­music halls, and art exhibitions along with scientific collections displayed in museums and other gallery spaces (Altick 1978, 2). In London, ­grand exhibitions that circulated viewers around rooms that ­were hung floor to ceiling with paintings had become increasingly popu­lar, while visits to summer and winter gardens such as t­ hose at Ranelagh included opportunities to move through circular rotundas or outdoor “rooms” and thoroughfares designed specifically for such perambulations. This rise in the habit of viewing in the round underscored the growing democ­ratization of entertainment in rapidly expanding metropoles like London. New exhibition spaces that ­housed large collections of objects and curios culled from travelers offered both the affluent and t­ hose who had only a small amount of discretionary income a chance to mingle and observe novel and extraordinary items of interest. P ­ eople from diverse backgrounds “rubbed elbows” e­ ither literally or figuratively as they moved around many of the shows and exhibition spaces of the era.9 The densely crowded, popu­lar sites where p ­ eople could “see and be seen” created new challenges for cultural producers in vari­ous arts and media. The Acad­emy of Royal Art’s annual show had grown in size throughout the last de­cades of the eigh­teenth ­century to close to a thousand paintings, leading to a “visually overwhelming” effect—­paintings “stacked floor to ceiling” to cover almost e­ very inch of the room (Bermingham 2001, 127). The size of the crowds and the number of submissions to the acad­emy spurred the opening of Somerset House, a much larger exhibition space that could accommodate ever more objects and p ­ eople.10 For t­hose who attended the crowded art exhibitions in places like Somerset House, viewing paintings all jammed together, frame to frame, floor to ceiling, created the effect of almost circular visual immersion. To garner attention amid the ­jumble of imagery in t­ hese new kinds of sites, an individual painting had to be large, even “colossal,” providing the spectator with the “opportunity to become lost in the portrayal” (128). Ann Bermingham has linked the rise of ­these enormous landscape paintings to the emergence and immediate popularity of pa­noramas, arguing that an increasingly sophisticated metropolitan audience was becoming habituated to sublime and immersive visual spectacles and therefore required new exhibition structures

La Nature à Coup d’Oeil  113

and formats. By the time the first pa­norama rotunda opened in London in 1792, a public mobilized to thrill to large-­scale sights and scenes was readily available to develop the habit of viewing realistically rendered paintings in the round. EDIN BURGH AT A G L AN CE: TH E FI RST PA N ­ O R A M A’ S WAR­T IME AFTE RM ATH S

Chorus: Oh the ­battle was long but the ­people ­were strong You should have been ­there that day. —­John McGrath, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil

When Robert Barker filed the patent for his invention in 1787, the word pa­ norama had not yet been coined.11 With no single word at hand to convey his intention to simulate the experience of entering into a real scene, Barker chose the French phrase La Nature a Coup d’Oeil. To achieve a realistic scene “at a glance,” Barker proposed to “sweep aside” the “conventions of landscape painting” to make an “improvement on painting, Which relieves that sublime Art from a Restraint it has ever labored u ­ nder” (Wilcox 1988, 12 21). Barker’s creation aimed to make its own production and exhibition invisible, plunging the spectator into the “all-­at-­onceness” that condenses “laborious, step-­by-­step procedures” into instantaneous experience (Daston 2008, 108). Barker proposed nothing less than to break the perceptual frame of repre­sen­ta­tion in order to offer the spectator an unpre­ce­dented form of observation—­a perfect 360 degrees as if from the standpoint of a single individual. Learning to “see all” at a glance, however, required some practice. An uneasy tension between the pos­si­ble intentions and desires of the artist-­entrepreneur and the potential and realized experiences of the spectators produced a far more “open” text than the discourse of mastery and optical dominance would credit. The “condensation” of the ­labor of production mingled with the diverse beliefs, affiliations, and experiences of a wide range of spectators. No won­der that many early viewers of pa­noramas reported sensations of dizziness, uneasiness, and confusion, as well as won­der and fascination.13 However, the pa­norama was not simply the enactment of a God’s-­eye view that disciplined spectators through manipulated observation. Although Barker’s panoramic paintings have been linked to both the ingenious engineering of a simulated overview and to celebratory nationalist thematics, a closer inquiry into the history of the early installations destabilizes the primacy and dominance of a synoptic repre­sen­ta­tional practice. As Denise 114 Chapter 3

Oleksijczuk argues in her study of early British pa­noramas, Barker’s Jacobite associations marked his invention as more subversive than the overtly patriotic themes and aesthetic aspirations might other­wise indicate. Reading Barker’s first effort, View of Edinburgh and the Surrounding Country from the Calton Hill, as opening rather than closing “surprising and complex possibilities of interpretation and use,” Oleksijczuk has linked the emergence of panoramic painting to the tensions and violent dispositions that marked the rise of the modern nation-­state (2011, 23). “Nature at a glance,” then, was not only a means for homogeneous spectators to rule the world visually through a singular vantage point. Rather, the panoramic installation proposed to lift viewers figuratively off their feet and, in that sublime experience, instantiate a variety of ways of seeing and sensing. Thus, while the sweeping pa­norama of a modern, expanding Edinburgh situated amid a dramatic landscape could be interpreted as a tribute to the “prosperity and pro­gress” brought about by Scotland’s unification with ­England in 1707, that very landscape engineered and painted by someone like Barker in 1788 also offered an entirely dif­fer­ent storyline to viewers for whom the survival of Jacobite politics and sensibilities remained paramount in an affective war­time aftermath (24). Could the Jacobite uprisings of 1715 and 1745 be seen “at a glance” in the View of Edinburgh and the Surrounding Country from the Calton Hill? Given that Barker had relocated from Ireland to Scotland in 1786 to teach “perspective drawing,” it is pos­si­ble that he responded personally to the undercurrent of re­sis­tance to Hanoverian En­glish rule that ran throughout the Gaelic-­ speaking regions.14 A direct link to the followers of Prince Charles Stuart can be attributed to Barker’s first patrons, particularly Lord Elcho, the son of the Earl of Wemyss, who had been a central figure in the Jacobite elite militia unit known as the “Archers” (Oettermann 1997, 101). Committed Jacobites who contributed major financing to the uprising of 1745, the Wemyss ­family included members who had escaped to France a­ fter the defeat to live out their days in exile, spurring the British authorities to keep an eye on the remaining relatives and the Royal Com­pany of Archers as a ­whole. Barker’s semicircular painting was exhibited at Archers’ Hall in Edinburgh for two months in 1788 and then for the next three months at the New Assembly Rooms in the recently constructed section of the city referred to as “New Town.”15 Archers’ Hall was a relatively new structure, built in 1777 by a group of influential citizens headed by Lord Elcho. Thus, while Barker’s panoramic painting of Edinburgh emphasized the pro­gress made in modernizing the city in the era of British unification, especially the ­great innovation of modern sewage systems and the construction of beautiful Georgian-­style mansions in the New La Nature à Coup d’Oeil  115

Town, it also situated that view in a deeply symbolic terrain and a highly charged exhibition context of war­time aftermaths (see plate 11).16 It is highly probable that Barker’s invention would not have been realized without Jacobite sponsorship. However, open affiliation to what was basically an underground movement headed by a controversial set of po­liti­cal actors was not necessarily a smart move for an ambitious cultural producer with a ­family to support. Strategically, Barker’s panoramic depiction of Edinburgh created both a targeted as well as a generalized audience, drawing together memories and newly nationalized identities for a complex negotiation of living in a unified nation-­state that was still in the pro­cess of becoming Westernized. As Saree Makdisi has argued, in the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries, a “­whole range” of “racial, national, and cultural logics” fell apart and reconstituted themselves through a civilizing proj­ect conducted not only at a distance overseas but also “at home” (2014, x). Thus, a “distinctly new En­glish, white, Occidental form of identity” established itself through the construction of both external and internal “targets,” including “Africans, Arabs, Scottish Highlanders, and the wretched poor of London”—­ all “reviled” in the “same ways and in the same words” (xvi). Along similar lines, in making a power­ful argument for the dif­fer­ent meanings generated by diverse audiences for panoramic paintings, Oleksijczuk has stressed that the unification (and Westernization) of Britain “proceeded through—­not in spite of—­the articulation of cultural difference” (2011, 25). Declared and undeclared wars generated not only differences in the moment but lingering affective aftermaths. As we saw in the case of the First Military Survey of Scotland, following the 1707 Act of Union and the establishment of Hanoverian control in 1714 over the merged kingdoms of Scotland and ­England ­after three centuries of Stuart rule, numerous uprisings between 1715 and 1745 led to a deeply unsettled metropolitan “view” of the region. Barker’s panoramic survey of the city of Edinburgh may appear at first glance to celebrate the modernized New Town built by the Hanoverians following the defeat at Culloden. The exhibition site, the imagery itself, and the accompanying written guide to the content of the painting, however, all point to a strategic reconstruction of sites and symbols linked to Jacobite disposition and memorialization. Viewing the pa­norama as a work produced in and through war­ time aftermaths allows for a tactical recognition of national divisions while si­mul­ta­neously proposing a unified containment of the “­whole.” If we accept that a po­liti­cal, even subversive, intention structured the theme and method of the first patented installation of a panoramic painting, does this mean that all such media incorporated or required a militaristic 116 Chapter 3

national viewpoint (­whether pro-­unification or dissident) or even a singular observational pro­cess of making meaning? Did the need for a relatively covert approach engender a layered or indirect aesthetic, revealing signs and symbols to ­those “in the know” while offering other pleasures and stimuli for more general spectators? Evidence of a cryptic Jacobite message has to be squared with the imperative to gain commercial success that attended a venture like the production of a large-­scale panoramic painting and its installation. In the case of an artist-­entrepreneur like Barker, whose foothold in the ­middle class was somewhat precarious, the need for sponsors and the selling of subscriptions and admission tickets was paramount. In the face of considerable suspicion and frequent rejection, Barker strove mightily (if futilely) to gain recognition for his invention as an aesthetic practice from power­ful cultural gatekeepers. In this challenging po­liti­cal and cultural environment, Barker (or his Jacobite sponsors) apparently remained unsure that the work of turning abstract concepts and diverse viewpoints into a “decipherable visual language” through an immersive coup d’oeil would suffice. Accordingly, Barker prepared a pamphlet to guide spectators in the pro­cess of learning to “see all” at a glance as an intentional set of habits that included reading about the scene to be viewed. This twenty-­five-­page document introduced the concept of the pa­norama in general and the preferred method of viewing, described the prospects in detail, and concluded with a meditation on the significance of this new viewing practice for historical and educational ends. In describing the significant ele­ments of architecture and landscape in Edinburgh and its surroundings, the guide reviewed the accomplishments of the celebrated city replete with famous scientists, phi­los­o­phers, merchants, and other notables, seeming to create an eclectic and unique civic “history” that came to stand, generically, for a meaningful difference within the nation-­state. In offering diverse spectators a guide to the identification and interpretation of specific sites and scenes in the painting, the pamphlet manufactured a narrative that could operate on several levels at once, deconstructing the “glance” into component units while directing a preferred method for moving around the scene. Barker’s first pa­norama required a complicated viewing practice, then: opening and closing meaning as artist-­entrepreneur, sponsors, and viewers produced and engaged visual and written texts in uneven and varied ways. Perhaps u ­ nder pressure from investors, perhaps due to Barker’s own po­liti­cal motivations, the Edinburgh pa­norama offered local spectators a route to collaborative memory and history in a highly overdetermined repre­sen­ta­tion of iconic sites and written explication. Holding the paper pamphlet prepared as a guide to the painting and La Nature à Coup d’Oeil  117

comparing the imagery to that stored in their mind’s eye, if you w ­ ill, spectators could move around the carefully constructed view of the Old and New Towns and the landscape and sea surrounding the city to “revisit—­ and even perform” Edinburgh’s “culture of defeat” as an enduring repre­ sen­ta­tion of a surviving national identity and a qualified triumph (Olek­ sijczuk 2011, 32).17 Over four de­cades ­after the uprising of 1745, Barker explored the question of how and why to remember a formative crisis in national identity and state power through a prototype pa­norama in a city that had become associated with an influential “Scottish Enlightenment” (see plate 12). No contemporaneous spectator could accomplish fully in the “blink of an eye” the kind of ideological tasks invoked by View of Edinburgh and the Surrounding Country from the Calton Hill. However, modern metropolitans had been learning to observe nature and the material world in ways that lent themselves to this new spectatorial operation of “seeing” the “unseen” as well as the “seen” in war­time aftermaths. ­There ­were no bodies lying on the ground in distinctive uniforms at the sites of iconic ­battles in Barker’s pa­norama. Although the guide ostensibly identified and offered a carefully phrased history of the landmarks in the painting, the pa­norama constructed and animated events and locations for which ­there ­were no longer any “vis­i­ble trace” (Oleksijczuk 2011, 37). But in creating an elevated overview, Barker offered a new perspective on national aspiration, mourning, and cultural injury. The “unseen” operated powerfully for ­those with the capacity to sense other­wise even as the “seen” shifted the perspectives of spectators into a unique and startling sensitivity to the power of viewing from an elevated position in the round. THE LON DON PA N ­ ORAM A: I M P ERI AL VAN TA G E PO I N T S

London covered the ­whole Earth, ­England encompassed the Nations; And all the Nations of the Earth ­were seen in the cities of Albion. —­William Blake, Jerusalem

Barker’s next panoramic painting, London from the Roof of the Albion Mills, accomplished what no Jacobite army had been able to achieve—­rather than a military occupation of London, a cultural conquering of the hearts and minds of the metropolitan center of the Hanoverian nation and empire. Fashioned as a sweeping view of London from the roof of the Albion Steam Flour Mill, the controversial symbol of cap­i­tal­ist industrialization, Barker’s London pa­norama was crafted to shock and amaze viewers and bring them back for repeat viewings (and ticket sales) (see plate 13). With each iteration, 118 Chapter 3

as Barker moved closer to achieving a fully circular panoramic installation, he created a unique experience of space and time that mobilized the public’s desire to see “all” as if from the gondola of a balloon. In his panoramic painting of London, Barker aimed for the cartographic realism of the “now ­here” of the bird’s-­eye view while stimulating the sublime effects of aerostation’s “no where” through carefully engineered theatrical design. Buoyed by his success in Edinburgh and a showing in Glasgow, in November 1788 Barker packed up his ­family and moved to London, launching an installation of the Edinburgh pa­norama in the summer of 1789 in a temporary, makeshift rotunda in the new hub of intellectual and commercial activities, the West End. The same group headed by Lord Elcho, who had supported Barker in Edinburgh, made sure to help him get established in London—­years ­later, Barker’s son Henry Aston Barker admitted that Lord Elcho provided “pecuniary assistance” and introductions to influential figures when Barker first arrived in the city (Corner [1857] 2013).18 Lord Elcho was closely connected to another wealthy former Archer, Sir Ashton Lever, who had transformed his private cabinet of curiosities into a museum on Albion Place, crammed full of objects culled from scientific, mercantile, and military expeditions. Scotland’s eighteenth-­century “Enlightenment” had produced a large number of outstanding figures in science, engineering, medicine, and the arts, as well as wealthy landowners and industrialists, many of whom now populated London. As Stana Nenadic has pointed out, much of the ­great London cityscape was “­shaped by Scotsmen,” from “the pavement made from Scottish stone to the church spires designed by Scots-­born architects” (2010, 32). But even the most successful Scots in London could be made to feel like outsiders.19 A long-­standing marginalization of Scots (especially ­those from the Highlands) by the En­glish elite encouraged the tendency of newcomers to build on the “social capital” of ­those already in place.20 Barker seems to have parlayed his Edinburgh contacts in just this way to establish himself in a dauntingly competitive metropolitan scene. However, while Lord Elcho and other wealthy Jacobites may have contributed seed money to Barker’s proj­ect, their partisan politics would have required more subtle negotiation in the nation’s capital than in Edinburgh. Moreover, since Barker’s plans for completely circular paintings would require the building of specially designed rotundas for producing and displaying works of enormous size, he needed to raise a large amount of money. As Erkki Huhtamo has noted, even once a panoramic painting was produced, it would have to be displayed for months or even years to yield a profit; clearly La Nature à Coup d’Oeil  119

such a business “depended on crowds” (2013, 7). Accordingly, no ­matter how deep ­were the pockets of his first patrons, Barker also had to develop his entrepreneurial talents as an impresario who could sell tickets to a previously unknown form of entertainment. To bring in such crowds over a sustained period of time to support an elaborately engineered infrastructure, Barker needed more than novelty and an ideological agenda; he had to do nothing less than promote an entirely new experience of viewing a painting. Barker’s panoramic installation required not just popularity but critical appreciation among the En­glish elite in order to ensure continued investment in the expensive infrastructure of producing and exhibiting paintings at the scale and level of accomplishment that he could imagine. Barker took out advertisements and began to build interest in his invention. Quite quickly, the word spread that something strange and compelling was to be seen at Barker’s establishment in Haymarket. Barker created pa­noramas using his own method of adjusting perspective to account for the curvature of the conjoined canvases.21 He had no formal training and from a very early stage sent his son Henry out to do the preliminary sketches. He had attempted to support himself as a portrait painter and as a drawing instructor, but his greatest talent turned out to be managerial as well as artistic. Conceiving and executing complex proj­ects like panoramic installations required vision and knowledge of engineering and architecture, as well as princi­ples of perspective and draftsmanship and the ability to raise funds and get t­ hings built—­a formidable set of skills and abilities. Nevertheless, Barker deeply desired critical recognition of the aesthetic value of his pa­noramas as paintings. His first approach to Sir Joshua Reynolds resulted in disappointment; Reynolds sent him away with the recommendation to give up the entire venture (Wilcox 1988, 21). The official critical reception of Barker’s panoramic installations remained skeptical and even resistant to the sensational effects made pos­si­ble by the new exhibition format promoted so blatantly outside the exclusive world of art academies and connoisseurship. Some of the reluctance of influential critics and cultural producers like Benjamin West, William Words­worth, and Samuel Coleridge to endorse Barker’s invention can be attributed to classist distaste for popu­lar entertainment—­and the pa­norama, due to Barker’s unabashed hucksterism and a thoroughly commercial infrastructure, as well as its almost mechanically precise rendition of perspective, was at first dismissed as antithetical to “art.”22 Moreover, Markman Ellis argues that the uneven critical reception of the first months of the London exhibition of the Edinburgh pa­norama suggests a “strug­gle to find an adequate language” to describe 120 Chapter 3

Barker’s creation; some spectators understood the pa­norama as a triumph of scientific realism and perspectivalism while o ­ thers experienced it as an entertainingly affective coup d’oeil—­overwhelming the senses with sublime, if deceptive, effects (2008, 136–37). Barker’s pa­norama, like Lunardi’s balloon launches, evoked both passionate advocacy and critical concern about social and po­liti­cal propriety as well as aesthetic taste and quality. If critics ­were not sure at first that Barker’s painting met the criteria of landscape art, the novelty of the work’s extreme realism of perspective and detail created a kind of “virtual travel” that intrigued even the most skeptical observer. Several fair-­minded early reviewers admitted that the painted pa­norama brought the city of Edinburgh and its environs into realistic view (Ellis 2008, 136). Since few Londoners, even royalty, would have braved the difficulties of traveling between the imperial capital and Edinburgh—­still an expensive trip that required many days of journeying by rough roads—­Barker’s pa­norama offered an immediate immersion from a most extraordinary vantage point into a scene that spectators might never have expected to view in their lifetime. As one reviewer wrote, from a visit to the pa­norama, “their Majesties, the Heir Apparent, and several of the Royal F ­ amily,” who “rarely go abroad,” would receive something far superior to “views of distant countries” produced “from the pen of the traveler, geographer, or poet”—­the gratification of the “natu­ral desire” to “behold the scene” (136). But the primary visitors to pa­noramas ­were not aristocrats and royalty (although much was made over royal visits when they did occur) or the artistic and academic elite but the ­middle class, who embraced the “family-­friendly,” educational aspects of the exhibitions. As Gillen D’Arcy Wood argues, in the early de­cades of the nineteenth ­century, a growing desire for “exotic sights and breath-­taking scenery” became “cheaply and con­ve­niently satisfied at the pa­norama” (2001, 103). A highly diverse set of spectators became drawn to the panoramic installations from the very beginning; persons of all ages, both genders, and many classes “rubbed elbows” as they “traveled” to Edinburgh via the partial pa­norama. With respectable middle-­class interest growing in his immersive approach to landscape and metropolitan imagery, Barker began a new painting, once again not a complete 360-­degree circle but closer to three-­quarters around, this time of his newly ­adopted city, London. As George Corner relates, “It was painted in distemper, and was exhibited in the spring of 1792, in a rough building at the back of No. 28, on the eastern side of ­Castle Street, Leicester Square, where Mr. Barker then resided” ([1857] 2013, 6). In his advertisement announcing the opening of his new pa­norama, Barker stressed the size (1,479 square feet) and the realism of his invention: “the Subject at pres­ent La Nature à Coup d’Oeil  121

of the p ­ a­norama, is a view, at one glance, of the cities of london and westminster; comprehending the three Bridges, represented in one painting. . . . ​Which appears as large, and in ­every re­spect the same as real­ ity. The observers of this Picture being by Painting only, so deceived, as to suppose themselves on the Albion Mill, from whence the View was taken” (Ellis 2008, 137). London had been portrayed in any number of bird’s-­eye and wide-­format prints and paintings for many years before Barker’s rendition. Pa­norama historian Hubert J. Pragnell has pointed to the depiction of London’s expansive character in the sixteenth ­century by Wyngaerde as well as wide vistas created by seventeenth-­century artists Visscher and Hollar (1968, 9). Citing the long, horizontal engraving of London produced by the Buck ­brothers in 1749, John Wellsman has argued that London has been an “ideal subject” for panoramic prospects due to its topographical and architectural peculiarities, pointing out that the “­whole town can be viewed from its South Bank” due to its siting on a curve of the Thames (1972, 3). Th ­ ese early horizontal, panoramic views of London’s cityscape gesture ­toward the longue durée of pictorial cartography that combined bird’s-­eye views with town plans to offer practical locational signposts while generating affective identification with the metropolitan heart of the nation (Elliot 1987, 9). What differentiated the early painted pa­noramas like London from the Roof of the Albion Mills from precursor imaginary aerial views lay in the multimedia combination of architecture, art, and showmanship that created an unpre­ce­dented transformation of the visitor’s sense of time and space as well as the shift in the population’s understanding of the subject of the painting in the context of a nation in the midst of military campaigns and imperial expansion. Only an aerial view could transport the viewer into a scene at such an expanded scale. Unlike the vertical bird’s-­eye view, this view had to be angled obliquely and at just the right elevation to si­mul­ta­neously disorient and re­orient the spectator. The London pa­norama plunged the viewer directly into a street scene of lifelike detail only to pull the gaze further and further across the cityscape, sending the focus of the eye into dynamic movement between near and far objects of vision. Barker’s inspired strategy prompted viewers to imagine that they w ­ ere gazing at the vast expanse of the majestic city from the roof of one of the newest architectural symbols of industrial and national might, the enormous factory of Albion Mills. Built in 1784 by Samuel Wyatt, Albion Mills was the first industrial site to be powered completely by a rotary steam engine. The vast mill was designed to operate twenty-­four hours a day to provide fifteen times the average out122 Chapter 3

put of its competitors and, thus, most of London’s milled flour (Mosse 1967, 49; Otto 2007, para. 12). Albion Mills garnered passionate attention from the moment it opened, becoming a tourist attraction in and of itself as well as embodying for many the worst features of a monstrous, industrializing capitalism. Critics argued not only that the working conditions in the huge mill ­were what we would now refer to as “alienated l­abor” but that the new factory would threaten to eliminate the smaller mills while controlling prices to the extent that the poor would become unable to pay for a vital commodity. Perhaps ensuring its iconic reputation in the annals of both class war and industrial design, Albion Mills burned to the ground on March 2, 1791, u ­ nder somewhat mysterious circumstances. The conflagration took place just before the opening of Barker’s panoramic repre­sen­ta­tion of the view of London from the roof of the mill, consigning what might have been intended as a cele­bration of an architectural won­der to a kind of memorial. The Albion Steam Flour Mill came back to life in a most vibrant manner in Barker’s panoramic painting. Numerous commentators have pointed out that the painting’s elevated vantage point from the roof of the mill occupies nearly a quarter of the pa­norama and almost constitutes a virtual viewing platform in and of itself, placing the spectator at a key juncture between a more artisanal past and an industrial f­ uture in the imperial center of po­liti­ cal, economic, and cultural power (see plates 14, 15, and 19) (Oettermann 1997, 22; Otto 2007, 13; Oleksijczuk 2011, 58). As Ellis points out, the mill presented the “highest landmark on the southern bank of the Thames between the cities of London and Westminster, at the foot of Blackfriars Bridge” (2008, 139). Blackfriars Bridge was the newest and, therefore, the most modern bridge in the city, and it was designed, not incidentally, by Scottish architect and civil engineer Robert Mylne (see plate 17). The prominence of this par­tic­u­lar bridge in the painting, as well as Barker’s emphasis on the Thames as a conduit for shipping of all kinds, certainly reinforced the thematic symbolism of Albion Mills as a herald of British industrial pro­gress and the city’s relationship to national and world power (see plate 16). Iconic sites of the sheer “size, power, and novelty” as Blackfriars Bridge and the Albion Mills operated in Barker’s painting as embedded signposts of G ­ reat Britain’s imperial reach in a geo­graph­i­cal imaginary that placed the city of London at the very center of a rapidly expanding empire (Otto 2007, 13). While the triumphalist narrative is a prominent one in London from the Roof of the Albion Mills, once again Barker produced a painted scene that could be viewed and interpreted in multiple ways. If his choice of the roof of the Albion Steam Flour Mill as the primary vantage point of observation La Nature à Coup d’Oeil  123

made pos­si­ble a sweeping view of commercial civic, national, and imperial momentum and movement, the contested nature of the mill and other such technological developments in the build-up to the “industrial revolution” could also be understood to destabilize a narrative of a unified British empire. On the one hand, the painting could be viewed as a masterful embrace of every­thing imperialist; the painting fairly bristled with the masts of the ships that powered the economy. On the other hand, Barker may have chosen this very site ­because it could contain an ambiguous position in relation to the dominating narrative of British mastery. While it is pos­si­ble to argue that the River Thames draws together the many pieces and parts represented in the painting in a unified display of pro­gress, development, and expansion, the site itself and the mode of observation required by the panoramic installation itself engendered dynamic tensions in viewing and experiencing the circular painting. Is it overdetermined that the London pa­norama, while celebrating British military and mercantile mastery, also championed the technological won­der of a state-­of-­the-­art flour mill powered by the steam engine in­ven­ted by Scottish mechanical engineer James Watts or that the painting foregrounded the Leverian Museum founded by Jacobite Archer Ashton Lever (see plate 15)? The Leverian Museum, prominently positioned on Albion Road, attracted large numbers of visitors who w ­ ere drawn to its massive collection, which included many objects from the voyages around the world undertaken by Captain James Cook and o ­ thers. The initial support of Barker’s Jacobite patrons might have influenced his decision to stud his painting with symbols and references to the accomplishments of Scottish architects, engineers, academics, and financiers. But in this case, instead of a commemoration of ­battles and a defeat that led to the subjugation of po­liti­cal and national aspirations, the subject of the painting could be read as an aftermath endorsement of metropolitan integration and influence: as Nenadic puts it, an “emerging formulation of Britishness” (2010, 31) and, even, as Makdisi claims, an occidentalization of the site and its subjects (2014, ix). Indeed, as Oleksijczuk argues, the view from the roof of Albion Mills showed a most specific scene, representing the “aspirations and contributions of Scots in London in a new and progressive guise,” one not so much associated with uprisings and affiliation to warrior clans but “integrated with Enlightenment theories of pro­gress, metropolitan commerce, and an expanding British Empire” (2011, 65). Oettermann has argued that the choice of a vantage point in the early pa­noramas was never “arbitrary” but always highly “symbolic” (1997, 21). 124 Chapter 3

But such symbols are not necessarily universal or consistent no ­matter how dominant they appear to be in the first instance. Leaving specifically Jacobite or Scottish nationalist readings aside for the moment, the oblique elevated view at a glance from the roof of the Albion Mills offered many visitors to the London pa­norama a kind of immersion in what Otto refers to as a “technological sublime” that placed spectators “at the point of fracture between the ­actual and the virtual” (2007, 12). This titillating crack in the surface of the everyday perception of real­ity drew viewers to even a partially realized panoramic iteration like London from the Roof of the Albion Mills. Thus, the first viewers of the London pa­norama grasped Barker’s concept of an immersive, virtual real­ity even if the setting remained less than perfectly realized. Even without a full circle, lacking the exact positioning of the light from above, the crowds began to arrive. PAN ORAMIC PERSP ECTI V ES: N OW H ­ ERE A N D N O WH E R E

Perspective is not in­ter­est­ing ­because it provides realistic pictures; on the other hand, it is in­ter­est­ing ­because it creates complete hybrids: nature is seen as fiction, and fiction seen as nature, with all the ele­ments made so homogeneous in space that it is now pos­si­ble to reshuffle them like a pack of cards. —­Bruno Latour, “Drawing ­Things Together”

The won­der of Barker’s panoramic installations involved at least two primary components: the painting itself and an exhibition space designed to show the artwork in the most optimal manner pos­si­ble. The illusion at the heart of the panoramic experience required that the seams that linked the g­ iant canvases together would be imperceptible and that the inevitable distortion caused by the optical challenge of viewing in the round would be addressed by skillful mathematical calculation. Thanks to the manipulation of lighting, as the spectator moved from complete darkness into brilliant light, the scene would appear to be startlingly “realistic.” Pa­norama historian Scott Wilcox has noted that the View of Edinburgh and the Surrounding Country from the Calton Hill was far from this ideal, reminding us that the “circle was so small that it could only be viewed by parties of six at a time,” while the “distance between the viewers and the painting—an ele­ment crucial to the illusion—­could not have exceeded ten feet” (1988, 19–20). In addition, the painting was lit by lamps instead of the still-­theoretical directed daylight from overhead (20). Similar deficiencies afflicted the first London pa­norama. Hardly the perfect pa­ noramas of Barker’s dreams, what the first two paintings offered to spectators was the thrilling suggestion that a circular pa­norama could transport them in La Nature à Coup d’Oeil  125

the blink of an eye to a simultaneous “now h ­ ere” and “no where,” the folding and unfolding of time and space in new perceptual aspects (Bruno 2002, 177). With each new painting and improved exhibition space, Barker produced panoramic time and space in specific ways. In London from the Roof of the Albion Mills, the sensing of a moment in time took place in a powerfully rendered visual scene. Time appeared frozen in an instant as if the spectator could stop the hands of the clock and observe any and all detail at leisure. For residents of the city used to the chaotic hustle and bustle of the noisy and crowded streets, where all was in constant movement, the pa­norama’s elevated perspective above the scene induced awe and won­der as well as delighted curiosity and recognition as visitors observed a place of “constant, radical change” in utter stillness (Otto 2007, 12). Furthermore, the London pa­norama appears to have been crafted to give the impression of not just any moment in any day but a specific time of day and even a notable date. Ellis has pointed out that the shadows in the painting indicate without any question that it is morning—­the sun is rising in the east, the tide is coming in, and the wind is from the west. Even more particularly, Ellis argues, “it is as if the day is dateable” (2008, 138). In fact, the painting does take place in time—­Henry Aston Barker ­later asserted that the scene depicted November 9, 1789, the exact date of “the Lord Mayor’s pro­cession by ­water to Westminster” (Corner [1857] 2013, 6). This specificity made available to spectators who might have remembered the spectacle of just a few years before a pleating of time and space—­they had, perhaps, experienced the event in the past and now they felt themselves to be t­ here again, reliving the moment in a space of heightened realism. Adding to the perception of “now h ­ ere,” spectators entering the pa­norama ­were presented with a masterful overview of Albion Place and Albion Place Terrace as if they had floated up to the dizzying heights of the roof of the gigantic flour mill and from that spectacular vantage point they received the impression that they could see . . . ​every­thing. As Vittoria Di Palma has argued, the view from above “presupposes a viewer who is in motion,” but the viewer feels motionless and it is the scene below that is vibrantly animated, mobile (2009, 248). Barker’s panoramic view of London impressed con­temporary viewers as a breathtakingly dynamic view of the city. Ellis has described the scene as one in which the “sense of populous detail is palpable” (see plate 16): “A tradesman knocks at the door of the ­house nearest the river, his basket on the pavement, while a w ­ oman looks out of an open first-­floor win­dow. The street is populated by a recognizably wide range of ­people from many stations of life, including a street sweeper, a porter with a 126 Chapter 3

load on his back, two workmen shoveling ­horse manure into a cart, a gentleman greeting a man and ­woman arm in arm. The foreground is detailed, animated, compelling” (2008, 138). It was as if Lunardi’s impression of the city from the basket of a balloon as a “beehive . . . ​frozen in industry” was perfectly realized: a vast and expansive view from an elevated position of a boisterous and dynamic city, rendered in amazing detail, as if life itself had been captured and frozen for a split second, folding time into space in a totally wondrous way (1784, 40). Comment reminds us that London had expanded recently at such a rapid rate that most city-­dwellers no longer had a realistic sense of just how far the metropolis stretched even as the suburban sprawl radically changed conceptions of the distinction between town and country; as he puts it, for many ­people their own city had become a “mysterious place” (1999, 135). For Otto, the London pa­norama produced innumerable signs of “constant, radical change” (2007, 43). The expansion of British empire and continental wars further extended the geography of the nation to an almost unimaginable extent. Barker’s pa­norama referenced t­ hese anxious expansions by first disorienting spectators to the point of complete confusion and then, ­either by careful circumnavigation of the observation platform or by making recourse to the printed guide, slowly guiding them to feel less “lost” and more situated in place. “No where” became integrated into “now ­here” as viewers learned to see from the aerial perspective most conducive to legible interpretation, reestablishing a “center” in a now vastly expanded field of vision; or, at least that was the theory. As Oettermann has remarked, panoramic vision is “primarily a way of ‘getting a grip’ on t­ hings, a grip that leaves what is observed undamaged, but surrounds and seizes the ­whole” (1997, 22). Barker’s first pa­norama of London is often referred to as the ur-­text of this form of repre­sen­ta­tion and embodied spectatorship since it gave viewers a shockingly new scene and attracted so many viewers to come back to see it again and again—­the ­great expanse of the city revealed so “realistically” from an elevated vantage point as if “life-­size” (Wood 2001, 95). The effects that gave so many viewers “thrills and chills,” however, entailed the drawing together of several vantage points in a pro­cess that was not uniformly experienced, leaving open the quite varied affective responses to the view—­not every­one got “a grip,” as it ­were. While some historians of the pa­norama describe the viewing pro­cess as a kind of pivoting around one central point as if the eye w ­ ere a light­house beam sweeping in a continuous circle from a “steady distance,” other accounts describe a much more chaotic and mobile viewing practice (Comment 1999, 112). First-­time viewers, in La Nature à Coup d’Oeil  127

par­tic­u­lar, reported sensations of vertigo and faintness while the emotions of won­der and awe hardly lent themselves to a sense of terra firma. Furthermore, the first London pa­norama was large enough to offer an observational platform that encouraged viewing from dif­fer­ent positions as spectators moved forward and back from the railing and even wandered around or ­counter to the direction proscribed by the guide. By the time Barker was able to build a spacious, permanent rotunda in 1793, with two levels each offering painted pa­noramas to view, spectators ­were very much on the move inside the installation. Some of the ambiguity that surrounded the visual experience of the early panoramic installations can be linked to dif­fer­ent approaches to the operation of linear perspective. Before the Re­nais­sance, Western Eu­ro­pean paintings determined the size and placement of objects thematically or by symbolic importance. Distance was represented by overlapping or clustering ele­ments within the frame of the image. The circulation of translations of Ptolemy’s writings in the early fifteenth ­century provided more than new geographies; the introduction of Ptolomaic geometry introduced triangulation and the practice of representing objects rendered to scale according to their “­actual” size, situating the subjects of art in the spatial field of the painting in such a way as to appear to “reproduce the relations of the vis­i­ble world” (Kern 1983, 140). This “Apollonian” field of vision offered a universalized viewpoint, stemming from one central point, rendering the perception of distance in ways that appeared to be realistic regardless of w ­ hether they ­were demonstrably pos­si­ble (Cosgrove 2001).23 Thus, the Italian Re­nais­sance produced what Keith Moxey has described as a “two-­way street”: “What appears to be a projective device, a system concocted by ­human beings in an effort to make the world intelligible, is claimed to coincide with the way in which real­ity itself is structured” (1995, 778). As Margaret Iversen points out, across the world and even in Western Eu­rope, the way p ­ eople see is not “monocular or static or strictly geometrical” (2005, 196). Barker’s panoramic paintings drew on the basic princi­ples of linear perspective that assume a disembodied, “eternalized eye above temporal duration” that stays in place, anchoring the scene within the frame of the field of vision (Jay 1994, 55). But a circular painting has no horizontal frame, and pa­ norama viewers ­were mobile in new and unique ways. Unlike the spectators at the exhibition sites like Somerset House, where a moving crowd would circulate to view a plethora of framed paintings, each one potentially able to command a specific gaze, the panoramic installation immersed the spectator in one scene as if the viewer was placed into the painting itself. The 128 Chapter 3

uncanny sense of being in something out ­there, however, produced a paradoxical experience of “real­ity” that did not evoke linear perspective’s single-­ point line of sight. As one visitor wrote: “­There is a kind of infinitude in the form of a circle, which excludes beginning and ending; t­here is a kind of real­ity which arises from the spectator’s ability to inspect e­ very part in turn; and to revert to this incident, or the other, a­ fter having contemplated the bearings and effects of dif­fer­ent parts of the circle” (Huhtamo 2013, 4). The perception of “infinitude” was drawn together into the suspended animation of inspecting “­every part.” Spectators like the one quoted above viewed the paintings in panoramic rotundas in a profoundly embodied manner as if si­mul­ta­neously “now h ­ ere” and “no where,” not only moving around and about the platform as if actors in the scene but experiencing unruly and profound emotions akin to “aerostatic spacing,” “seeing all” with the ­whole body, as it ­were.24 Anne Friedberg has argued that the early pa­noramas ­were “building-­ machines” that sought to “transport” rather than “confine” spectators in a “spatial and temporal mobility,” even if it was only an “imaginary illusion” (Friedberg 1993, 20). Rather than an imaginary illusion, however, we might consider the early panoramic installation as a spectacular reminder of the ambiguity of visuality and the possibilities of hybrid or even multiform modes of sensing worlds. The locational specificity of the frozen moment in time offered by the panoramic installation did not simply reestablish linear perspective. As Alexander von Humboldt noted several de­cades ­after the first pa­noramas ­were exhibited in Western Eu­rope, the level of detail in the 360-­degree painting always worked in tension with the propensity of ­viewers to spin around and take in the entire expanse “at a glance,” “pressing together” the available visual data into “one picture” (Daston 2008, 108). Visitors to panoramic installations learned to compact the act of visualization not so much to make vis­i­ble the invisible but to achieve something sensational, what Lorraine Daston calls the “all-­at-­onceness” that collapses multiple perceptions into an “immediate coup d’oeil.” The ­labor of constructing the painting and the rotunda as well as the intense effort of learning to see panoramically became subsumed in a “flash of intuition” that became naturalized as a way of seeing (Daston 2008, 108). It is entirely pos­si­ble that Barker intended his panoramic paintings to emulate the singular standpoint of linear perspective to convey an empirical realism to a population that was becoming familiar with modern genres of landscape art and mathematically surveyed cartography. The elevated, oblique ­angle used to convey the scene could easily have referenced the line of sight La Nature à Coup d’Oeil  129

of the tethered war balloon, aloft but in place, and the Apollonian mastery invoked by the advocates of that mode of observation. However, in drawing together at least eight canvases and pulling them into a circle, adjusting for distortion, and staging the exhibition of the work in a dramatically lit environment, Barker thrust his spectators into sensory intensity that exceeded the relational conventions of single-­point perspective. The sublime resists repre­sen­ta­tion. It is worth considering that in the multiple opportunities to develop a “habit” of viewing in the round that characterized London entertainment in the era as well as inducements to make repeat visits to the pa­norama, rotundas trained spectators to oscillate between the contradictory intensities of certainty and uncertainty, producing new strategies for making sense out of seemingly infinite sensory perceptions. The “opening” of the emotions as spectators circulated the viewing platform could set ­free all manner of ideas and beliefs, including inchoate sensations. However, the built environment tempered and channeled enough of t­ hese unruly intensities to maintain public order while instantiating a pedagogical rationale for the “emotion of motion.” If the panoramic installation, like some aspects of aerostation, troubled the emerging epistemological emphasis on the divide between subject and object, it did not leave the majority of its visitors in an affective stew of indistinguishable sublime sensations. By encouraging repeat visits and offering a textual guide, Barker trained his spectators to “make sense” out of “visual chaos,” to learn to “see ­things” in an ontological pro­cess of arranging and shaping the “­whole” (Daston 2008, 99–100). Over a series of visits, “now ­here” often trumped “no where,” establishing spatial coordinates and relationships that became “real.” COUP D’OEIL: SEEN AN D UN SEEN I N WAR­T I M E T H E M AT I C S

Sometimes the scene of a finished life appears like a beautiful figure on the horizon. For a minute, it’s like a snapshot hangs suspended in the air while we watch, wide-­eyed. But a ­little detail out of place can be a telltale sign of something terribly wrong. Or just funny, quirky, a boink in the perfect scene. ­We’re drawn si­mul­ta­neously to the amazing ­bubble image and to all the ordinary affects that animate it and pull it apart. —­Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects

In moving p ­ eople, literally and figuratively, panoramic installations helped to prepare them for the modern era’s demanding practices of perception and repre­sen­ta­tion. Dividing, identifying, merging, and losing all sense—­ modern spectators of peculiar ­things like pa­noramas developed new skills 130 Chapter 3

in apprehending not only the singular target of the linear gaze but the bend around the curve, as it w ­ ere, to sense other spaces and times, divergent worlds of presence and absence. In an era in which global trade and warfare took place not only beyond the direct line of sight of most citizens of nation-­ states but in sites that w ­ ere difficult to imagine cultural productions like panoramic installations offered a way to learn to connect subjects to events and objects across time and space. Learning to observe near and far si­mul­ ta­neously, modern metropolitan viewers negotiated t­ hese new spatial scales. Drawing distance into sensibility, hybrid objects like pa­noramas came to feel real and increasingly less exceptional, more ordinary. In par­tic­u­lar, the repre­sen­ta­tion of iconic events in British warfare drew spectators to panoramic rotundas throughout the late eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries, offering a view both thrilling and informative to spectators who yearned to “see” the news that traveled from a remote distance, bringing the wars “home.” But in consuming large-­scale imagery of warfare in immersive environments, spectators of early pa­noramas ­were not simply empty vessels that became filled with nationalist fervor. Warfare was so much a part of British life that it was “easy to overlook,” unmarked in many ways (Favret 2010, 12). Panoramic installations of ­battle scenes and sites of territorial aspiration brought events and information that would other­wise circulate in more distanced ways into immediate sensation. Since an elevated view of warfare and imperial might dominates the thematics of early pa­noramas, they have been placed on a continuous through line that runs from the early modern bird’s-­eye views and maps to eighteenth-­ century balloon observation all the way to twentieth-­century aerial reconnaissance and even twenty-­first-­century drone vision. ­There is no question that the pa­noramas for which Robert Barker and his son Henry became most famous in their lifetimes included numerous works that depicted ­Great Britain at war. Starting with their first fully circular painting, View of the Fleet at Spithead, exhibited in 1793 in the newly completed Leicester Square rotunda,25 over the next ten years, approximately half of the Barkers’ output represented major ­battles or strategically located sites abroad, including Position of the British and French fleets, about Nine a.m., the First of June 1794; Admiral Cornwallis’ Naval Engagement with the French; Lord Nel­ son’s Defeat of the French at the Nile; View of Constantinople from the Tower of Galata; View of Constantinople from the Tower of Leander; and Lord Nel­ son’s Attack of Copenhagen. The war­time thematic proved to be enormously popu­lar and was replicated throughout the nineteenth c­ entury by the numerous pa­norama impresarios and producers of dioramas and other related La Nature à Coup d’Oeil  131

entertainments who sprang into being following the tremendous commercial success of the Barkers’ installations.26 Henry Aston Barker’s 1815 pa­ norama, The ­Battle of Waterloo, earned the then-­spectacular sum of 10,000 pounds in a ­matter of months and was viewed by thousands of ­people. Grau tells us that scenes of b ­ attle account for close to 30 ­percent of exhibitions across the entire history of nineteenth-­century panoramic paintings (2003, 91). The panoramic installation became a place to watch a war take place via its most iconic moments, reinforcing the ­great distance between home and ­battle fronts while collapsing space and time to immerse the spectator in the thrilling scene. Some pa­norama historians like Comment argue that Robert Barker curried ­favor with mainstream public opinion, turning the pa­noramas into a “propaganda machine” (1999, 8). This cynical view would suggest that Barker e­ ither abandoned his generous Jacobite sponsors or compromised his own principled politics in order to achieve financial and professional success in the capital city—­a conclusion that might be a ­little too neat. ­There is so l­ittle known about Barker and much of it comes to us from his son Henry, whose prosperous adult life in London varied drastically from his f­ ather’s early strug­gles.27 The son’s politics along with his life experiences might very well have differed quite significantly from his ­father’s and influenced his account—­but ­these are inferences. Without dismissing the critique of imperialist thematics of panoramic paintings, we can also consider the complexity of the war­time aftermaths that are generated so continually in modernity’s endless wars. War so undergirds the modern nation-­state, ordering the economy and dominating politics, that it becomes an almost unmarked category or, when marked, appears to be a ­thing apart from everyday life. Tracing the presence of war and the absences it instantiates so violently cannot be limited to thematics alone. As the first modern military surveys and balloon prospects demonstrate, war infiltrates everyday life and civil society in ways that are so foundational to modernity that it becomes difficult to discover a place or time or way of life in which war is not palpable or pres­ent. In this context, the overt depiction of warships and iconic b ­ attles may distract us from the pervasive war­time sensibilities that operate powerfully in most works produced by a society that is always already at war or in the midst of cumulative aftermaths. The ­great popularity of the pa­noramas that depicted naval victories and demonstrations of military force along with colonial scenes such as landscapes of Constantinople or Cairo certainly speak to an overall environment of almost endless war and colonial territorialization at the turn of the eigh­ 132 Chapter 3

teenth ­century. It would have been difficult for a genre dedicated to the immersive effect of “being ­there” to ignore the events linked to warfare that generated so much interest across British publics. War was integral to the po­liti­cal and cultural infrastructure of the nation-­state. As John Brewer has argued, this extended period of warfare conducted on an ever-­increasing scale since 1688 transformed Britain into a “fiscal-­military state.” As the military became the “largest borrower and spender” as well as the “largest single employer,” civilian enterprises ­were overshadowed if not subsumed (Brewer 1988, 27). A “fiscal-­military state” with imperial aspirations had to raise considerable taxes to maintain and deploy a standing army and navy around the globe. Linda Colley has linked the growing need for not only taxes but h ­ uman “cannon fodder” to the capitulation of the En­glish elite to accept “Celtic outsiders”—­Scots, Anglo-­Irish, and Welshmen—­and, ­later, colonized South Asians into the armed forces, leading to a kind of collateral democ­ratization of society. She also notes that the demands of war­time taxation spurred “po­liti­cal awareness” among the “mass of ordinary Britons” (2009, 370). ­These citizen-­subjects had numerous declared and undeclared wars to “keep an eye on,” as it w ­ ere. In the period during which Robert and Henry Aston Barker produced pa­noramas, Britain embarked on twenty-­five years of almost continuous war with France. During the same period, the French Revolution proceeded violently, alarming British conservatives and generating repressive tactics to ensure public order and national security. Britain also went to war with Spain at the end of the last de­cade of the eigh­ teenth ­century while also engaged in annexing and occupying Ca­rib­bean islands that had been ­under both French and Spanish rule. Major naval ­battles took place as Britain eventually defeated ­every foe and gained an almost “open sea.” In this context it would be almost unthinkable for a cultural production so linked to an emerging realist repre­sen­ta­tional practice as the pa­norama to ignore warfare. Unsurprisingly, then, the enthusiastic embrace of military and imperialist themes in panoramic installations throughout the nineteenth c­ entury has led critics like Comment to argue that spectators ­were manipulated by pa­noramas, reducing their reactions to base “­simple instincts and reflexes” of unthinking patriotism and a lust for vio­lence (1999, 117). Taking a more mea­sured approach, Oleksijczuk points to the era’s profound shift in “dif­fer­ ent temporal and spatial relations” as global trade and constant war combined with the pa­noramas’ immersive techniques to instruct spectators in the “moral benefits” of British imperialism (2011, 21, 20). That is, rather than assume an “intrinsic and self-­evident connection” between pa­noramas La Nature à Coup d’Oeil  133

and imperialism, the “form and subject m ­ atter” worked to “strategically solicit the active participation of its spectators in ways that helped naturalize Britain’s imperialist goals” (7). Grau pushes this point further, however, to argue that pa­noramas operated powerfully to “endow an image with an enduring effect . . . ​irrespective of the social system that exhibits it” (2003, 110). The late eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century pa­noramas ­were neither totally propagandistic nor completely neutral; rather, the format of the pa­ norama made pos­si­ble aesthetics that opened and closed meaning in multiple ways. Pa­noramas could be understood to “channel an unpredictable array of ephemeral currents and charges,” including war­time aftermaths (Joselit 2013, 55). ­These unruly intensities might have adhered to the military topography and mathematical perspective that structured the drafting of the panoramic image or to the animating flash of insight engendered by the coup d’oeil or to signs and symbols of national superiority. War­time aftermaths also incited sensations of grief or fear as well as fury and a desire for revenge. The brilliantly lit visual field of the pa­norama generated as many “unseen” ele­ments as “seen,” offering a route to narrative closure that was never fully accomplished. Rather than blame ­these repre­sen­ta­tions for simply mobilizing imperialist patriotism, then, we can begin to grasp the ways in which panoramic installations worked not just as sublime spectacle but as a format for an unsettled pres­ent, extending war­time into unexpected places. Barker’s method, emulated by all followers for de­cades to come, required preliminary sketches made on location on the exact spot at the specific elevation that would be represented in the final painted version. Most of the first several pa­noramas ­were primarily produced from sketches made by Barker’s first draftsman, his son Henry. Henry Aston Barker traveled widely for the sources of the Barkers’ panoramic proj­ects, not only sketching but also interviewing witnesses of ­battles and other events to gain a kind of ethnographic authenticity (Oettermann 1997, 105–6). But ­after Robert Barker’s death in 1806 and even before, the younger Barker recognized that more assistance was required in order to produce two new, large pa­noramas for the Leicester rotunda almost yearly. Many of the draftsmen and artists who w ­ ere hired to help produce pa­noramas ­were drawn from the military (Bermingham 2001, 131). Topographers trained at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich and attached to the new ordnance surveys under way in British-­controlled territories around the world, as well as t­ hose attached to military units, contributed preliminary sketches from their diverse locations. ­These sketches became a lucrative source of income for moonlighting ordnance survey and military draftsmen as demand increased exponentially 134 Chapter 3

for pa­noramas of topical events and sites.28 Thanks to the sketches and information provided from ­these sources, the ­battle scenes depicted in the pa­ noramas ­were far more accurately tied to their original sites and occasions, contributing to the immersive realism of being ­there. Extreme realism as a hallmark of the panoramic painting generated more than the usual thrills and chills when it came to the repre­sen­ta­tion of ­battles that had taken place not long beforehand. Grau argues that the longer one spent in a panoramic installation, the less transformative ­were the immersive effects, and yet, in the case of ­battle scenes, the emotional intensity endured; feeling oneself in the picture, the spectator moved between “distant prospect and close combat,” experiencing both the elevated “eye of the commander” and the perceptions of the soldier on the ground (2003, 98, 107–8). In his study of the emergence of war spectators in the early nineteenth c­ entury, Jan Mieszkowski traces two distinct responses to the Napoleonic wars: on the one hand, warfare in the period became viewed as total, “influencing e­ very aspect of life,” while on the other hand, ­battles became objects of curiosity and study—­more distant and, therefore, abstract. Mieszkowski argues that while ­people yearned to know more, to feel connected first-­hand to the news and events of the day, they also feared to “witness war” (2009, 1648). The hybrid and elevated perspectives and immersive effects of the panoramic painting offered proximity and distance, realistic immediacy and mimetic repre­sen­ta­tion, specificity and abstraction—­qualities that opened the vistas of warfare to portions of the population who would never experience ­battle or see such degrees of vio­lence in any other way. The boredom and lengthy durations between events and the confusion on the field of ­battle that characterizes most wars ­were condensed in the panoramic painting to the most heightened instant—­the “all-­at-­oneness,” frozen in time—­and presented with staggering clarity and precision as if the spectator w ­ ere ­there, in the moment, in that one place. Oettermann quotes a German journalist who viewed the Barkers’ repre­sen­ta­tion of the ­Battle of Aboukir, Lord Nelson’s Defeat of the French at the Nile, the epic encounter in 1799 between the French fleet and the Royal Navy ­under the command of Admiral Nelson where the Nile meets the Mediterranean: “As soon as you enter, a shiver runs down your spine. The darkness of night is all around, illuminated only by burning ships and cannon fire, and all so deceptively real . . . ​that you imagine you can see far out to sea in one direction and the distant coastline on the other. The sea is churning furiously, stirred up by the hundreds of cannonballs that have missed their mark, the timbers crashing down from above, and (one imagines) the shock waves rending the air” (Oettermann 1997, 107). La Nature à Coup d’Oeil  135

To achieve this experience of “now ­here” in the atmospheric ferment of “no where” so powerfully engineered by the panoramic installations in rotundas, the spectator was positioned as if sharing the commander’s “scopic powers” (Mieszkowski 2009, 1651). ­Here, panoptic surveillance met panoramic spectacle; as Foucault argued, the subject constituted during the Napoleonic wars “looms over every­thing with a single gaze which no detail, however minute, can escape” (1979, 217). Anticipating the rationale of aerial reconnaissance and the incipient arrival of photography, the pa­noramas of ­battle scenes seemed to almost perfectly embody the discursive claims of the coup d’oeil. Working on multiple levels, the ­battle pa­noramas pulled the mobile spectator into the commander’s powerfully constituting glance while offering minute points of recognition for returning veterans who brought ­family and friends to the installations as if to see exactly where they had been and what they had lived through (Comment 1999, 129). Lord Nelson’s Defeat of the French at the Nile and other pa­noramas offered immersive experiences of ­battle as dangerous, even terrifying, preludes to an imminent victory that was known and understood by all, framing the view with the historical certainty of national triumph. The thrilling experience of the coup d’oeil, prolonged into a leisurely practice of moving around the entire image to study it closely from dif­fer­ent vantage points, bolstered the mystique of viewing the dynamic and constantly changing ele­ments of life “at a glance” while generating practices of observation that required time and negotiations of space. As a pedagogical device, the panoramic installation offered British metropolitans the opportunity to sense more openly the ­battles that they paid for quite dearly in both blood and money and to emulate the empowering view as if a commander on a distant hill or from a tethered war balloon, hovering over the scene. The impression of “seeing all” at a glance that underlies the coup d’oeil ­under conditions of b ­ attle, selectively choosing the ele­ments that m ­ atter most to assist in making tactical decisions and leaving the rest unseen, produced a par­tic­u­lar kind of war­time visual culture in the context of art and entertainment. The pa­norama spectator developed a taste for seeing like a commander but ­under conditions far dif­fer­ent from the battlefield. Tethered to the moment on display, disoriented before finding points of orientation, the spectator came to savor the burst of empowerment of the view from above without much consideration of what had to be eliminated in order to deliver the view. Worlds w ­ ere potentially palpable, but only one worldview tended to prevail. Otto has argued that rather than mandating an unwavering realism, the early panoramic paintings generated a “play” between “sight” and “blindness,” leading to a sense of the experienced world as “contingent and 136 Chapter 3

virtual” (2007, 13). Each viewer, according to Otto, traversed a field of “open causality” that could not be fully apprehended; the spectator could only enact a limited set of possibilities contained by the pa­norama (29). Each viewer arranged what ele­ments could be “seen,” leaving endless amounts of pos­si­ ble sights unseen or unsensed. Thus, without dismissing the affective punch of the ­battle scenes or the generation of patriotic—­even racist—­sensibilities through the depictions of colonial sites at a distance, the ways in which pa­ noramas of more bucolic scenes without overt vio­lence also reverberated with the dynamics of the endless war of the era also need to be recognized. ­These seemingly peaceable scenes, like the Edinburgh pa­norama, generated equally power­ful war­time viewing practices, producing nationalist affinities and militarized aftermaths in complex and enduring ways.

La Nature à Coup d’Oeil  137

PLATE 1  ​September 11,

2001. Det. Greg Semendinger, nyc Police Aviation Unit.

PLATE 2  ​Above:

“This one-­meter resolution satellite image of Manhattan, New York, was collected at 11:43 a.m. edt on September 12, 2001, by Space Imaging’s ikonos satellite. The image shows an area of white dust and smoke at the location where the 1,350-­foot towers of the World Trade Center once stood. ikonos travels 423 miles above the earth’s surface at a speed of 17,500 miles per hour.” Image and caption: GeoEye, released on September 13, 2001. Below: Lower Manhattan, September 15, 2001, as seen by ikonos satellite. Image: GeoEye.

Kurgan, New York, September 11, 2001, Four Days ­Later, digital print from ikonos satellite data of September 15, 2001, by Space Imaging Corporation. Scale: 1 pixel = 1 meter. Full printed image mea­sured seventeen by six meters of floor space. PLATE 3  ​Laura

PLATE 4  ​New

York City on September 11, 2001 (from the International Space Station). nasa

PLATE 5  ​The

First Military Survey of Scotland, 1747–55. © British Library Board.

PLATE 6  ​The

First Military Survey of Scotland (section portraying Loch Rannoch and ­Schiehallion). © British Library Board.

PLATE 7  ​The

First Military Survey of Scotland (detail close-up of Schiehallion). © British Library Board.

Baldwin, “A View from the Balloon at Its Greatest Elevation,” in Airopaidia. ­London, 1786, hand-­colored ­etching. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. PLATE 8  ​Thomas

Baldwin, “The Balloon Prospect from above the Clouds,” in Airopaidia. Hand-­ colored ­etching. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. PLATE 9  ​Thomas

Mitchell, Section of the Rotunda in Leicester Square, in which is exhibited the ­Pa­norama, 1801. Courtesy of the British Museum. PLATE 10  ​Robert

PLATE 11  ​John Wells, ­after Robert Barker, View of Edinburgh and the Surrounding Country from the Calton Hill, 1789–90. Courtesy of Edinburgh University Library, via Creative Commons-by license.

Wells, ­after Robert Barker, Pa­norama of Edinburgh from Tower of Calton Hill Observatory, 1789–90, detail. Courtesy of Historic Environment Scotland, © National Museums Scotland. PLATE 12  ​John

PLATE 13  ​Frederick

Birnie, ­after Robert Barker, Panoramic View of London. London, 1792–93, ­hand-­colored aquatint. Yale ­Center for British Art, Paul ­Mellon Collection.

PLATE 14  ​Section 1.

PLATE 15  ​Section 2.

PLATE 16  ​Section 3.

PLATE 17  ​Section 4.

PLATE 18  ​Section 5.

PLATE 19  ​Section 6.

PLATE 20  ​Sykes-­Picot

Agreement map, ca. 1916. United Kingdom National Archives.

PLATE 21  ​Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Painting: Eight Red Rectangles, 1915. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

of Sophie Ristelhueber’s Fait at Knox-­Albright Gallery, 1998. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ars), New York/adagp, Paris. PLATE 22  ​Installation

Ristelhueber, Fait, #20. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ars), New York/adagp, Paris.

PLATE 23  ​Sophie

PLATE 24  ​Fazal

Sheikh, “Earthworks in Preparation for Planting of the Ambassador Forest, along the Al-’Araqib Stream, 200 mm rpa,” October 4, 2011, in Eyal Weizman and Fazal Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline (Gottingen, Germany: Steidl, 2015), 28–29.

CHAPTER 4

M A P P I N G “ M E S O P O TA M I A ” The Emergence of Aerial Photography in Early Twentieth-­Century Iraq

—­

All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavor to find out what you d ­ on’t know by what you do; that’s what I called “guessing what was at the other side of the hill.” —ARTHUR WELLESLEY , 1st Duke of Wellington, “Statement

in Conversation with John Crocker and Crocker’s Wife”

Even without the bad habit of burning fiercely when pierced by tracer bullets, the balloon, while it did give the military commander a “view over the next hill,” could only give that one view. . . . ​But the airplane answered the need for reconnaissance. It not only provided a means of seeing over the hill, but as many hills as necessary, and it made pos­si­ble movement at ­will at any desired height. —­G ROVER HEIMAN , Aerial Photography

Aerial imagery is popularly believed to provide the ultimate objective repre­ sen­ta­tion of what is on the “other side of the hill”—­that is, what is beyond the immediate limit of ­human sight. ­Whether from a satellite, a drone, or a plane, the truth value of photography (now transferred to the digital properties of remote sensing) marks the view from above as beyond question. Interpretation of the bafflingly flattened vertical image, however, requires expertise and standardized guidelines. It is part of the war­time aftermath of Western Eu­ro­pean colonial ventures that ­those standards and guidelines ­were developed in the ­Middle East, particularly in Iraq, during World War I and the Mandate period that immediately followed. War­time aftermaths

obscure the ways in which po­liti­cal vio­lence extends and expands, moving into new wars and stretching out beyond them to f­uture conflicts. In the case of the air wars conducted over what is now geo­graph­i­cally designated as the M ­ iddle East, as well as Africa and parts of South and East Asia, innumerable incidents that could be placed on a timeline stretching from before World War I to the pres­ent moment testify to a linear aftermath that extends across a c­ entury or more of carnage and destruction. But what Derek Gregory terms the “colonial pres­ent” (2004) does not operate only in a linear fashion. The trauma of vio­lence moves around, making its own chaotic time and space, generating its own unruly intensities, so that the force of ­these histories is always “now ­here” even as some events may have moved into the less tangible but still palpable zone of “no where.” The emergence of aerial photography as the new standard of “applied realism” for both war­time reconnaissance and aftermath surveying circulates powerfully throughout Western Eu­ro­pean geopolitics in the ­Middle East but is relatively absent from most accounts.1 As an aftermath technology, this absence is pres­ent nonetheless, animating the ambiguities inherent to mechanical repre­sen­ta­tion of views from above in war­time. The systematic aerial surveying of Iraq was part and parcel of British air control, a particularly violent form of governmentality that followed World War I. ­Under the terms agreed on at the San Remo conference in 1920, the Allied nations working with the League of Nations divided the former ­Ottoman Empire into Class “A” administrative units known as Mandates. Iraq was granted provisional in­de­pen­dence while placed ­under a British administrative Mandate, rationalized as a prelude to nation-­building but realized through force as a way to prop up a regent favorable to Britain’s economic and po­liti­cal interests.2 U ­ nder Ottoman rule, Iraq comprised a loosely linked set of three provinces containing a highly diverse population spread across differentiated terrain and climatic zones (Batatu 2004, 1; Sluglett 2007, 1). The area had been administered lightly from a distance by the Ottomans and, ­until the general time period of World War I, had been considered by both Eu­ro­pean and Turkish interests to pres­ent a formidable terrain for military occupation. High mountains to the north, extensive marshland to the south, desert expanses, and rivers with highly variable depths had all contributed to defending the provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul from invasion by outsiders for long periods of time. The airplane offered to change the balance of power over geo­graph­i­cal impediments as well as resistant populations. New procedures of aerial photography ­were developed rapidly throughout World War I and immediately afterward that, combined with topographical Mapping “Mesopotamia”  139

surveying methods, transformed and made more material the “geo­graph­i­cal imaginaries” of the region (Said 1979, 54; Gregory 2004, 17). The first photo­graphs of war and its environs date from the Crimean War and the U.S. Civil War in the mid-­nineteenth c­ entury, but it is only ­after the advent of powered aviation in the years just prior to World War I that photography began to play a serious role in strategy, reconnaissance, and surveying. Throughout the nineteenth c­ entury, experiments with aerial photography from kites, manned and unmanned balloons, and even pigeons had attached to improvements in the apparatus and developing pro­cess in general. As Bernd Huppauf has observed, during this time period photography seemed to echo the standards and practices of an “objective science,” becoming a “preferred form of repre­sen­ta­tion” since it was believed to be “more mechanical, more removed from subjective variance and intention, and far more instantaneous than prior methods of reproducing an image” (1993, 45). Photography from the air represented the ultimate realization of this approach; as Marie-­Claire Robic puts it, “the synoptic (the gathering of all t­hings into the same space) and panoptic (all ­things becoming vis­ i­ble)” could “merge within the gaze of the aviator or his pictorial double, aerial photography” (2013, 164). Yet, as Huppauf points out, it is precisely this “documentary character” of photography in general that strained the ideology of photographic realism: “It was soon observed that while they do not lie, photo­graphs do not tell the truth e­ ither” (1993, 45). Instead of approaching photo­graphs as transparently “real,” Huppauf argues, they must be seen as part of a “highly complex pro­cess” in which “both photographic techniques and the concept of real­ity have been dissolved” (45). Within this paradoxical context, the lure of a panoramic, precise, mechanical coup d’oeil animated the dreams of an avant-­garde cadre who believed that the combination of the camera and the airplane would transform warfare and its allied arts and sciences. If “seeing all” could be disrupted by the ambiguities of perception, dedicated efforts across the operations of aerial photography and its interpretation would ­settle the prob­lem of reproducing the view from above. Aerial photography in warfare was first introduced three years before the official start of World War I in Libya as Italian forces attacked Ottoman Turkish installations (see fig. 4.1). No editorials appeared on the op-ed pages of world newspapers in early November 1911, to comment on the first time that a Western Eu­ro­pean power used an airplane to wage an attack on a site from the air. The event warranted only a short “News in Brief ” column in the Times of London bearing the headline “The Turco-­Italian War: Bomb Throwing from Aeroplanes” and this description: “The airplanes played an 140 Chapter 4

FIGURE 4.1  ​First

army front: British (upper) and German (lower) front line trenches east of Picantin and le Tilleloy, September 6, 1916. © Imperial War Museum (hu 100394).

active part in ­today’s proceedings, and dropped four shells—­one with ­great effect—­among groups of Arabs in the desert” (1911, 5).3 A slightly longer report accompanied by a photo­graph of the members of the Italian Army Aviation Corps stationed in Tripoli was published in the British magazine Flight. Although no images taken from the air accompanied e­ ither news report, Martin van Creveld has argued that during this short-­lived but significant conflict, a new visual culture and practice of warfare converged to produce a series of originary events: “The first recorded flight by a military aircraft over ­enemy territory (October 22), the first use of aircraft to lay naval gunfire (October 28), the first war­time use of wireless for air-­to-­ground and ground-­to-­air communication, the first war­time attempt at aerial bombing (November 1), the first war­time use of aerial photography (November 23), the first war­time mission flown by night (March 4, 1912), and the first, rather unsuccessful, experiment with nighttime bombing” (2011, 19). It is the proj­ect of this book to demonstrate that the entanglement of ways of seeing from above and modes of warfare begin much earlier than the early twentieth c­ entury and that this visual culture is less monolithic and seamless than the usual account would admit. However, the emergence of vast amounts of mechanically reproduced aerial imagery in the context of a heavi­ly industrialized mode of war marked an intensification in the suturing of aesthetics and politics that characterize the formats of aerial Mapping “Mesopotamia”  141

views in modernity. The inauguration of colonial space in 1911 in Libya as the ideal laboratory for the infrastructural development of t­ hese practices is an impor­tant part of this intensification. The proj­ect to “see all” as a tool in the arsenal of asymmetric warfare that began in Libya expanded rapidly to other zones in Africa and the ­Middle East as well as the North-­West Frontier in South Asia. By the time the Italian Air Force conducted extensive aerial bombing campaigns in North Africa in 1936—­this time in Ethiopia—­Benito Mussolini’s son Vittorio was airborne, remarking that from his vantage point high above the desert he could see the “tribesmen” below him “bursting open like a ­rose” as his bombs fell among them (Boyne 2003, 187).4 Colonial zones served not only as staging grounds and reservoirs of ­human capital for the fighting in Western Eu­rope during World War I. Like parts of North Africa, Iraq was itself a battleground, especially along its rivers and in the air. The vast reach of Western Eu­ro­pean colonialism continued and even deepened through war, encouraging the development of aviation’s infrastructure to cross and connect vast distances as well as the integration of aerial photography into the methodology of topographical surveying. The urgency of war­time needs and requirements accelerated some aspects of ­these technologies and their applications, focusing efforts in testing new ideas and devices. In the shifting registers of time and space that surrounded World War I, then, the view from above was drawn into mechanical reproduction, bringing “nature at a glance” into scientific practices and objects. The supposedly objective properties of photography made Iraq legible to Western Eu­ro­pe­ans, reinforcing a geo­graph­i­cal realism that was grounded in Orientalist research methods and discourses. This was a region that had been regarded by Westerners as a barren wasteland, a monotonous and hostile environment. In the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries, the landscape of “Mesopotamia,” as Westerners came to refer to this large area,5 appeared to t­hose outsiders to contain only scattered settlements and ancient ruins: a region lightly populated and devoid of many landmarks, a place without detailed maps in Eu­ro­pean collections and, therefore, despite centuries of maps produced by Islamic empires, deemed to be inherently “empty.” As information about places mentioned in the Judeo-­Christian Bible began to circulate in Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca, religious pilgrims and antiquity scholars made treks more frequently and began to or­ga­nize more methodical expeditions to locate and excavate sites and move their contents to metropolitan museums and universities.6 Although t­hese activities generated more travel guides and maps in En­glish and Western Eu­ro­pean languages, this cartography remained sketchy and partial, leaving enormous areas of 142 Chapter 4

desert represented as blank space and further consolidating the impression that arid regions contained no life or biological diversity. It took a modern form of warfare to bring the bird’s-­eye view back to Iraq, a major conflict that drew together new and old technologies to remotely sense the desert and bring the region ­under Western imperial control. THE “IN STRUMEN TAL I M AG E” : AI RP OW ER’ S WAR­T IME ARTI FACTS

We can begin with the artifacts, or rather, their approximation. —­Allan Sekula, “The Instrumental Image”

The first photo­graphs taken from war planes in the period leading up to World War I ­were experimental—­transitional iterations that ­were not yet integrated fully into procedure. Yet the very possibility of photo­graphs shot from a plane during armed combat established a link between the moment before such acts ­were imaginable and its aftermath when ­these actions and their object—­the photo­graph—­could be brought into the institutional practices of military aviation. As van Creveld points out, the hand grenades thrown over the side of the Italian warplanes had done relatively ­little damage; the area where the introduction of airplanes could improve on all other existing technologies was reconnaissance—­not only for intelligence on ­enemy positions but for improving and producing maps of Libya (2011, 21). Just as aerial bombardment, while barely realized, became an integral part of the thinking about ­future war, so too aerial photography entered the realm of possibility. Nevertheless, while photography combined with aviation offered an enormous advantage, for several years it remained difficult to achieve. As Charles Stephenson explains, since the camera was mounted ­under the pi­lot’s seat, “the nose of the airplane prevented a clear view of the ground u ­ nder a given ­angle,” rendering the target invisible. Moreover, for ­either accurate bombing or photography of a designated site, the pi­lots had to calculate the length of the interval between losing sight of the objective and releasing the bomb or pushing the trigger of the camera for a successful “hit” (Stephenson 2014, 108). Once achieved, however, the aerial photo­graph could be understood as “world-­ constituting,” that is, productive of information that could be sized up or down, containing both vis­i­ble and invisible kinds of knowledge, generating a “po­liti­cal epistemology” based on the “illusions of repre­sen­ta­tion,” the “mediation of instruments,” and a consolidating form of governmentality (Jimenez 2013, 1–2). Mapping “Mesopotamia”  143

From the first aerial engagement of Ottoman troops in Libya in 1911 to the pres­ent moment, air wars have been productive of war­time aftermaths, folding the past into the fluidly expansive “colonial pres­ent.” The early “apostles” of airpower w ­ ere profoundly influenced by the first aerial operations in North Africa. When Giulio Douhet took command of an Italian aviation unit in 1912, he wrote an influential report on the air campaign in Libya and called for the further development of high-­altitude bombing.7 Douhet ­later wrote in The Command of the Air, the book that became the “bible” of modern airpower between the two world wars: “Aeronautics opened up to men a new field of action, the field of the air” ([1921] 1942, 3). What he learned by studying both the Ottoman-­Italian War and World War I that followed just a few years ­later was that the “field of the air” was a kind of terrain, a “new battlefield” that required innovation in strategies and tactics as well as in technologies (3). Moreover, Douhet predicted that airpower would produce a social and po­liti­cal upheaval that would eradicate distinctions between civilian and combatant that had become ­human rights conventions in the nineteenth ­century.8 Douhet’s doctrine of aggressive offense and complete domination of this new space for b ­ attle became woven into the military mythologies of the twentieth c­ entury, promoting the doctrine that “modern, complex, urban-­based socie­ties are fragile, interdependent,” and therefore particularly “vulnerable to disruption through aerial bombing” (Biddle 2002, 7). The discourse and allied practices of airpower also rationalized and further legitimated the policies and practices of “air control”—­the key component of British efforts to subdue populations and administer colonial territory following World War I.9 Douhet was concerned almost exclusively with the theory and practice of aerial bombardment, but the doctrine of airpower from its first instantiation in 1911 included and came to consider aerial imaging as a full partner in the recording of the new space and time of the “field of the air.” The American apostle of airpower, Brigadier General William Mitchell, described his first flight over the western front in April 1917 in glowing terms, contrasting the ease with which planes could cross the e­ nemy lines to the “immovable, powerless” predicament of armies trapped in trenches for three years, ­going “nowhere.” In their early doctrinal works, Mitchell and Douhet focused on techniques to achieve complete domination of the “field of the air” with very ­little mention of aerial photography or reconnaissance. But Mitchell noted that in his first flight over the front in 1917, he gained a “much clearer impression of how the armies ­were laid out than any amount of traveling on the ground” (1960, 59) (see fig. 4.2). From ­these early years, 144 Chapter 4

FIGURE 4.2  ​World

War I aerial reconnaissance glass plate lantern slide, photographer and date unknown. © Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.

this kind of emphasis on “seeing all” from the warplane, clearly and without obstruction, connected powerfully with the belief in the transparency and simplicity of an aerial view that circulated throughout the late eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries. The discourse of airpower proposed a seamless transfer from eye to photo­graph to map, transforming the science of surveying while si­mul­ta­neously enhancing the practice of photography. In the unfolding aftermaths of the colonial wars, declared and undeclared, the advent of aviation, photography, and new forms of surveying proposed to “fill in” information in registers of previously unimaginable detail, even though the aerial photo­graph erased as much as it entered into the visual field. The power, speed, and mobility associated with aviation and new iterations of photographic techniques could just as easily “remove, white out, read ­people and ­things out of repre­sen­ta­tion” (Weizman and Sheikh 2015, 83). Along ­these lines, Nicholas Saunders reminds us that although aerial reconnaissance imagery of the vast system of trenches on the western front could not “show the dead” due to scale and distance, “they w ­ ere ­there” and an “integral part of the landscape” (2009, 32). If Mitchell’s “clear impression” of the details of the ground did not include the bodies half-­buried in trenches or blown to pieces in “no man’s land,” the analog aerial photo­graph held the information, nonetheless, as unseen, a pres­ent absence. Mapping “Mesopotamia”  145

This complex operation of the aerial photo­graph—­producing the seen as well as unseen in the visual field of warfare—­prompts the question of what lives in the image in the context of use and its aftermath? If World War I was not the exact point of origin of the merging of camera, gun, and airplane, the millions of aerial photo­graphs that ­were produced in the years between 1914 and 1918 speak to a massive intensification of the experiments of the preceding years. The large majority of ­these images ­were discarded or lost ­after their immediate use; indeed, only a relatively small portion of early twentieth-­ century military aerial images have survived to be ­housed in vari­ous archives linked to the standing armies of the era. The status of ­these images as evidence of a “world” at war ranges from historical fragment to commodified souvenir to modernist artwork. In an essay that has come to serve as the foundation of all the critical analy­sis of aerial reconnaissance photography in the years a­ fter 1975, when it was first published, Allan Sekula considered the surviving reconnaissance photography of World War I: “Are they rec­ords, tools, artworks, decorations, commodities, relics?” ([1975] 1984, 33). Specifically, Sekula was responding to the valuation of such imagery in the art market of the 1970s, a value that seemed to be linked in part to the abstract quality insinuated by distance in photo­graphs of this kind, resembling some of the characteristics of modernist painting, and in part to an authorial association with the famous avatar of twentieth-­century photography, Edward Steichen, who had been placed in charge of the American Expeditionary Force’s aerial photographic operations in World War I.10 Sekula was concerned that con­ temporary commodification of ­these kinds of artifacts from the past might only superimpose new meaning and thereby “obscure or mutate all earlier senses of the object” (33). He urged us to acknowledge our engagement with material evidence as an investment in and enactment of politics. To do other­ wise would risk celebrating or mystifying t­hese photographic rec­ords as uncomplicated messages from the past, denying politics and obscuring the divisions of ­labor that produced and circulated the imagery. The instrumental nature of reconnaissance photo­graphs remains both the most obvious and the most vexed aspect of their life as aftermath objects. Sekula quoted the ­great pictorialist Steichen himself on the utilitarian character of the products of his supervisory role during World War I: “The average vertical aerial photographic print is upon first acquaintance as uninteresting and unimpressive a picture as can be i­magined” ([1975] 1984, 42; see also Steichen 1919, 34). But the purpose of the aerial reconnaissance photo­graph, as Sekula reminds us, is separate from the usual complex and evocative attachments of photo­graphs to the past. At least in the analog era, photo­ 146 Chapter 4

graphs ­were almost always understood to represent what happened in e­ ither a recent or a distant time but not the immediate pres­ent. The World War I– era reconnaissance photo­graph aimed to embody the pres­ent, filling it with predictive potential. Aspiring to the instantaneous transparency that digital methods made commonplace many years l­ater, the reconnaissance image was designed for indexical intensity, “­free from higher meaning,” useful only on one level (Sekula [1975] 1984, 35). In this “triumph of applied realism,” the combination of many images, placed next to each other in “mosaics” and produced in assembly-­line conditions, offered an “intensive global coverage”—­a highly mechanized, panoramic coup d’oeil (36). Or, perhaps we should say “appeared” to offer a way to “see all” at a glance; as Sekula put it, “On the one hand, the aerial viewpoint contributes to an illusion of power and knowledge; on the other, ­little can be known and what happened has happened” (45). Aerial photography in the age of the airplane prompted increased speculation about the nature of ­things, the provenance and workings of knowledge, and the complicity of vision in the perception of time and space in modernity. Charles Waldheim has argued that our perception of real­ity, of the world in which we live, is “visually prefabricated through its potential for being seen” (1999, 127). The aerial photo­graph so quickly became associated with governmental, military, or industrial uses and disassociated from creative arts that its dominant narrative emphasized the capacity to “see all,” to totalize while making space in the ser­vice of power­ful ends. This potential can only be realized through mediating technologies and, therefore, remains elusive, partially achieved. Thus, throughout the twentieth c­ entury, aerial photography came to exemplify a historical tension between the “scenic” and the “metric,” the “beautiful” and the “true,” “image” and “instrument”—­a set of binaries that defined the par­ameters of debate about the nature and effect of photography itself from its inception. But as earlier examples have demonstrated, ­these core antinomies do not have to be taken at face value. That is, we can deconstruct ­these divisions to recognize the complicity of the aerial photo­graph with the map as instruments of surveillance and control that nevertheless sense “hidden relationships.” As Waldheim writes: “Aerial imaging over the course of the twentieth c­ entury has effectively shifted the definition of landscape from a premodern, mea­sur­able view to a modern mea­sure that can be viewed”—in other words, “a kind of map” (132). Waldheim’s recognition that visuality is achieved rather than found in aerial photography grounds his argument for new techniques of landscape repre­sen­ta­tion that “mis-­take” the “instrument as image and the image as instrument,” reviving the aesthetic ambiguities of the early military surveys Mapping “Mesopotamia”  147

and the quantifiable and indexical ele­ments of the picturesque (1999, 133– 34). The flattening of objects in the aerial image does not simply obviate a scenic tradition in landscape repre­sen­ta­tion but, by making strange, if you ­will, forces the realization that the ways in which we see landscape are constructed by history and experience. Aerial imagery reminds us that t­ here are “countless possibilities for the critical and con­temporary recovery of landscape” via techniques of remote sensing (136). Photography participated in this pro­cess of mis-­taking the “instrument as image and the image as instrument” in a deeply power­ful way. As Kim Sichel has observed, aerial photo­graphs became contrasted to picturesque landscapes; vertical aerial imagery contained “no Re­nais­sance one-­point perspective, no horizon, no vanishing point, no ­human scale, and few nuances of light and shadow” (2007, 11). The vertical aerial photo­graph offered a strange, unfamiliar perspective—­remote, abstract, and delinked from humanist aesthetics—­resembling cartography, if anything. Yet maps include text, border lines, symbols, and many other graphic forms to assist the viewer in making sense of a “bird’s-­eye view” of terrain. Almost one hundred years before the invention of the chemical pro­cess of photography, military surveys began to incorporate both the aesthetic and the scientific discourses of mea­sure­ment and elevated viewpoints to produce po­liti­cal spaces as occupied territories. Panoramic paintings also played with the “real,” enacting the power of war­time coup d’oeil in immersive settings. The aesthetics of maps and the sciences of art w ­ ere, in many ways, difficult to separate and yet, increasingly, their division became viewed as necessary, even natu­ral. The history of this tension in modernity between aesthetics and science circulates through the ambivalent reception of aerial photography and topographical survey maps. Always already a product of war­time, the making and interpreting of aerial imagery denoted “spectral” presences, unseen but sensed, unsettling, through an inherent abstraction, disturbing the certainties of science.11 AIRPOWER’S “SI D ESH OW S” : M Y TH OL OG I ES O F WORLD WAR I AERI AL P H OTOG RAP H Y

For all the allure of transcendent vision they promise, it is more accurate to describe aerial images as exemplifying the blindspot of western rationality. —­Paula Amad, “From God’s-­eye to Camera-­eye”

The history of airpower in World War I is a vast subfield, always already familiar. Its primary narrative conventions include the colorful history of the hasty but concerted effort to bring the new technology of heavier-­than-­ 148 Chapter 4

air flight into mass production for the war effort, the training of heroic if doomed young men as the first military pi­lots and gunners, the sense of liberation from misery and entombment in the earthen trenches provided by aerial modes of combat, and the growing realization that aerial reconnaissance was a vital component of the war effort that could supersede the traditional cavalry scouts in bringing valuable intelligence into strategic planning and tactical execution of military goals. The culture industry of World War I repeats ­these tropes endlessly to the point that any information about the reach of the conflict in space beyond the borders of Western Eu­rope or in time to earlier iterations of aerial combat and reconnaissance seem like piquant curiosities. Airpower is proposed in most historical works, with few exceptions, as an inherent component of the emergence of aerial life in twentieth-­century modernity, naturalizing a set of practices that w ­ ere 12 heatedly debated and contested in the period in which they arose. Yet the dominant discourse of World War I relies not only on an evacuation of any recognition of the aftermath dynamics of colonial vio­lence over de­cades if not hundreds of years but on a separation of the map between Western and Eastern fronts that mutes the importance of the battlefields of North Africa and the ­Middle East, referring to them dismissively as “sideshows.”13 Although some English-­language histories of air war and aerial reconnaissance photography make brief mention of instances of the use of planes armed with cameras and incendiary weapons in areas colonized by Eu­ro­pean nations or part of the Ottoman Empire, no systematic discussion of the geography of imperialism intrudes on the predominant narrative that celebrates the Euro-­ American exceptionalism of the birth of military aviation. Accordingly, most histories of modern airpower focus almost exclusively on the western front, beginning with the first B ­ attle of the Marne in September 1914 (Virilio 1989, 17; Finnegan 2006, 19–30). Although airpower played a significant role in the arenas of war outside Eu­rope before, during, and ­after World War I, the repre­ sen­ta­tion of the colonial context (with its racialized biopolitics and Orientalist discourses) as an entirely separate ­matter rather than a fundamental ­factor in the historical cause of the conflict, the conduct of its military engagement, and its uneasy and enduring aftermaths demonstrates the powerfully unruly dynamics of this geo­graph­i­cal imaginary’s war­time. The marginalizing of the early history of air war in Libya, Egypt, Morocco, Somalia, Palestine, and Iraq cannot be ameliorated simply by inserting readily available, if ignored, facts into the mainstream Western accounts. The omission of this history is part of a much larger prob­lem of accounting for the complexity of the Ottoman Empire in relation to U.S. and Eu­ro­pean Mapping “Mesopotamia”  149

colonialism and empire (and the under­lying thrum of the story of oil and modern geopolitics) in relation to the conventional narrative of World War I and its linear aftermath. This history is not so much lost—it exists—as it is ignored or marginalized in English-­language historical accounts of soaring aces and festering trenches. Rather than a story about near neighbors struggling over Eu­ro­pean borders and territories, the story of airpower in zones outside Western Eu­rope requires that we pay attention to the efforts of the major colonial powers to hold on to territories in the midst of increasingly effective anticolonial nationalist movements and the instability of the failing Ottoman Empire. The use of aviation and aerial reconnaissance in Iraq, for instance, differed in some key ways from the use of the technologies in Western Eu­rope, but this history is crucial to any understanding of the ways ­these long wars contributed to the cartographically singular worldview that we now take for granted. Indisputably, the airplane transformed the innovative possibilities not only for conducting military and policing operations as countries prepared for the certain advent of war conducted on a previously unimaginable scale but for the practices of observation and recording of imagery. Intentional navigation at dif­fer­ent heights and speeds created a stable platform for planned observation, greatly enabling effective photography. The very first airplanes that got off the ground around 1903, however, ­were not of much use for photography since they ­were not designed for seated pi­lots or large enough for passengers. It is not u ­ ntil 1908 that a French magazine, La vie au ­grand air, published “The First Photo­graph from an Aeroplane” shot by L. P. Bonvillain, who was a passenger on one of Wilbur Wright’s demonstration flights in France that year (see fig. 4.3). That somewhat banal shot of a tilted wing partially blocking a view of the airstrip was followed by several photo­ graphs taken in 1909 by French photographer Meurisse, as well as a series taken in 1910 by British photographer Charles F. Shaw (Newhall 1969, 50). By 1911, when Italian pi­lots began to shoot photo­graphs over Tripoli, vari­ous militaries began to follow suit: a representative of the U.S. Army, Lt. G. E. Kelly, used a borrowed Kodak roll-­film camera to shoot images of San Francisco to demonstrate the value of an aerial vantage point for military purposes, the French started a military photographic ser­vice to make reconnaissance photo­graphs in Morocco, and Louis Philippe Clerc published one of the first military manuals for interpreting aerial photo­graphs (Sichel 2007, 13).14 The combined advent of the first aerial photo­graph created ­under combat conditions with the first “firebomb” dropped from a plane appears to support Virilio’s contention that a new logistics of military perception 150 Chapter 4

FIGURE 4.3  ​L.

P. Bonvillain, photographic still (from the first movie shot from an airplane) published in La vie au ­grand air, 1908.

arose in this era in which a “supply of images would become the equivalent of an ammunition supply”—­a new “weapons system” made pos­si­ble by the combination of “combat vehicle and camera” (1989, 1). However, ac­cep­tance of military aviation and its artifactual products remained uneven in the years before World War I. In the years just preceding the official start of the war, the militaries of the major Eu­ro­pean nations, including the British Commonwealth countries, and the United States studied and debated the ways and means of incorporating aviation into both combat and reconnaissance roles.15 Strenuous objections against the incorporation of aviation continued to be raised well into the war. Advocates of aerial surveying argued that it could be used to update geodetic information contained on paper maps that had been created using traditional mea­sur­ing technologies on the ground. Thanks to uneven and sometimes unsatisfactory iterations, the surveyors who used land-­based methods w ­ ere not universally convinced of the superiority of the new aerial imagery. But the new science evolved at lightning speed with a proliferation of instructional manuals for operating the cameras, developing images in field stations, and interpreting the photo­graphs, as well as applying such images to check the accuracy of existing maps. Increasingly, aerial reconnaissance and its photographic and Mapping “Mesopotamia”  151

interpretive practices became accepted as the best way to conduct surveillance b ­ ehind ­enemy lines. In only a few short years, although still the subject of vigorous debate, aerial photography quickly became the vanguard technology for surveying terrain and updating or creating maps—­a veritable “revolution in military affairs.” The shift in military attitudes ­toward aviation took place during a period of widespread public enthusiasm for all t­hings aerial. The early twentieth-­ century “passion for wings,” as Robert Wohl puts it, echoed the phenomenon of balloonomania of the late eigh­teenth ­century, producing the subjects of what Peter Adey has termed “aerial life”—­the material and discursive awareness of and engagement with objects, practices, and affects linked to twentieth-­century aviation (Corn 1983; Paris 1992; Wohl 1994; Adey 2010; Ramirez 2013). This explosion of “air-­mindedness” coincided with a growing sense of po­liti­cal instability and tension as the imperial empires of the mid- to late nineteenth ­century redoubled their efforts to maintain control of far-­ flung territories in the face of growing in­de­pen­dence movements. As newspapers and magazines pronounced imminent war in Eu­rope itself, public subscriptions ­were held by Germany, France, and Rus­sia to purchase airplanes and train military pi­lots, supposedly in the name of national defense (Fritzsche 1992, 2). The British began to try to catch up with the French and develop their own cameras and planes while similar preparations took place in the United States.16 Once war was declared between Austria-­Hungary and Serbia in late July 1914, followed by numerous declarations of war between over thirty countries in rapid succession, passionate attachment to aviation drew the “aerial-­minded” to the proj­ect of military airpower across a wide spectrum of roles—­from engineers and designers to optical specialists to pi­lots to photographic interpreters. Building on nationalist sentiment, the public conception of pi­lots shifted from glamorous sportsmen to heroic “aces” as “airborne knights” armed with machine g­ uns, dueling in the sky (Wohl 1994, 203).17 Although aerial combat was less impor­tant tactically than other modes, it directed attention away from the terrible conditions endured by the infantries in the trenches and on the march in arid regions that came to symbolize the horror of this par­tic­u­lar war. The British military operations in Iraq, commonly referred to as the “Mesopotamian campaign,” commenced in 1914 and continued to the Armistice in 1918 and, arguably, beyond. Aerial combat, reconnaissance, and surveying was integral to the campaign from the beginning—if underfunded and poorly planned—­and only became more vital to the mission as the war went on. The paucity of discussion of Iraq in World War I in general and aviation in 152 Chapter 4

that war, in par­tic­u­lar in historical works written at least since World War II, raises questions of geopolitics at work in colonial and postcolonial area studies, at the very least. The emphasis in the lit­er­a­ture on airpower on the western front contributes to the vagueness of general accounts about the origins of World War I, leaving us stranded in discussions of treaties and alliances. If we understand that Britain gained po­liti­cal, economic, and cultural control over Iraq and other areas that had been part of the Ottoman Empire through World War I, we can see that the conflict greatly expanded the territorializing operations of the British Empire in the early twentieth c­ entury. Air war and the allied arts of aerial photography and surveying ­were integral to British success in World War I not only on the western front but most definitely in the vast and complex terrain of places like Iraq, zones and operations that cannot be fully recognized in the dismissive term sideshow. UN EN DIN G S TORM : TH E “ M ESOP OTAM I AN C A M PA I G N ”

­Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour? When the storm is ended ­shall we find How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power By the ­favor and contrivance of their kind? —­Rudyard Kipling, “Mesopotamia”

Just over one hundred years ago, the British Army phased out the use of coal and contracted with the Anglo-­Persian Oil Com­pany (now known as bp, British Petroleum) to provide petroleum for its navy. Not long a­ fter, at the start of World War I, troops from the British Indian Army ­were sent thousands of miles to secure the major oil refineries at Abadan in the strategic area where the Euphrates and Tigris rivers meet to flow into the Shatt al-­Arab waterway and on to the Persian Gulf. ­Today, the nation-­states of Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait brush against each other in this narrow area bordering the sea, linked by rivers. In 1914 British operational maps marked ­these zones as “Syrian Desert,” “Persia,” “Arabia,” and “Lower Mesopotamia.” The first war of the “world” created by industrialized, high imperialism extended itself to this specific area as an expedition to secure oil for the British military effort and soon developed its own colonial raison d’être—to push the Ottoman Fourth Army, the Turkish allies of Germany, out of the entire region of Iraq, securing British interests once and for all. The spectacular symbol of success for this goal would be the occupation of Baghdad.18 British strategists envisioned a quick trip north up the rivers from the Gulf, a few skirmishes with an ­enemy presumed to be inherently inferior and therefore easily overcome, Mapping “Mesopotamia”  153

and a triumphant entry into the ancient, fabled city on the Tigris River. In fact, this effort took much longer and exacted far higher costs in h ­ uman lives and finances than planned. The Mesopotamian campaign contributed powerfully to the war­time aftermaths that unfolded over one hundred years.19 As Kristian Coates Ulrichsen has argued, British strategy and tactics in Iraq from the launch of the campaign in 1914 exemplified a mode of Western intervention that has repeated itself at least three times—in 1941, 1991, and 2003 (2014, 119). Along t­ hese lines, in 2004, on the ninetieth anniversary of the start of World War I, Robert Fisk wrote of the British campaign in Iraq, “It is about the past-­made-­present, and our ability to copy blindly and to the very letter the lies and follies of our ancestors. . . . ​For Iraq 1917, read Iraq 2003. For Iraq 1920, read Iraq 2004 or 2005” (2004). This simultaneous folding over and unfolding of war­time and Western occupation packs a rhetorical punch, reminding a Western public, in par­tic­u­lar, of the longue durée of the colonial pres­ent and the affective, dispositional intensity of violent aftermaths. Intrinsic to the rhetorical strategy of linking Iraq to military actions in 1914, 1917, 1920, 1941, 1991, 2003, and so forth is the implication that most Westerners cannot or refuse to remember the roles played by their countries’ militaries in t­ hese interventions. Mohammad Majd points out that although numerous books ­were written in the 1920s and 1930s on the British military campaign and Mandate period in Iraq, by the end of World War II “the subject was practically forgotten” (2006, 1). Such highly active forgetting on a mass scale, corresponding with yet another period in which portions of the M ­ iddle East w ­ ere subject to geopo­liti­ cal remapping, prompts Priya Satia to argue that it is difficult for Westerners to grasp the necessity of understanding “covert empire,” that is, an empire “unseen” rather than “formal” (2008, 331–32). The aftermath politics that structure the history of Iraq for Westerners relies not only on a continual emptying of the conceptual map but on an evacuation of the Western archive of historical memory and documentation. At least ­until recently, popu­lar opinion in Britain and elsewhere viewed the many failures that plagued the Mesopotamian campaign as an unending “muddle” that was endured then and ­will have to be endured now; indeed, among the many “muddles” of the World War I “sideshows,” “the ‘picnic’ in Mesopotamia was prob­ably the biggest muddle of all” (Barker 2009, xxi). The notion of “muddle” dehistoricizes concrete administrative, strategic, and tactical decisions and attributes ­human failures to a vague environmental threat presented by desert warfare rather than enacting historical accountability through both evidentiary material and aesthetic or discursive practices. 154 Chapter 4

Although the British w ­ ere successful over the course of the official span of the war in both protecting the oil fields and expanding their reach far beyond southern Iraq, their strategies and tactics very nearly resulted in a complete military catastrophe. The formidable British Navy was of ­little use in the shallow rivers and marshland, requiring concerted support from land forces to clear both “natu­ral” blockages and ­those created by ­enemy sabotage. With so many troops from G ­ reat Britain mired in trenches in Western Eu­rope, it was deci­ded to draw on the British Indian Army and send them to Iraq as the Indian Expeditionary Force D.20 In order to keep secret the plan to secure the refineries of Abadan, the troops deployed from India ­were not equipped with anything that would suggest a desert campaign. Instead, they arrived in southern Iraq with uniforms and other equipment designed for use on the much colder Western or Eastern fronts. Sent out to the Gulf on ships with metal decks that heated up like ovens, provided with wool uniforms and single fly tents, operating in relatively open terrain that offered ­little shelter or strategic advantage, the Indian Expeditionary Force was decimated by illness. Over 92,000 troops out of a total deployment of 350,000 died during the campaign; many soldiers suffered miserable deaths from heat stroke or dysentery rather than from ­enemy fire (Barker 2009, 373). The Mesopotamian campaign’s noncombat losses ­were considered to be so egregious that a special parliamentary inquiry was conducted near the end of the war.21 In addition to finding that lapses in h ­ uman judgment and leadership had caused a ­needless number of deaths of largely Indian troops, the parliamentary commission report provided support to ­those who argued that aviation would have been a better investment of resources than the costly and inappropriate naval and conventional cavalry units. The need for aviation in the war arena had been apparent to many forward-­ thinking strategists; t­ here ­were British air squadrons in Egypt, Palestine, and other areas as well as in Iraq. But t­ here ­were few airplanes in t­ hese locations at first, and t­ hose that w ­ ere available w ­ ere not designed for the terrain or climate in which they ­were operating. Supplies w ­ ere uneven and inadequate. Peter Mead notes that since the Indian Expedition Force was first deployed for a limited purpose to guard the oilfields and access to the Persian Gulf, large numbers of airplanes had not been part of the plan (1983, 120). Aerial reconnaissance was slower to develop at first in contrast to the western front, and its development relied on almost heroic do-­it-­yourself innovation and dedication to the machines and the mission of air war. At the start of the war, the British forces in Iraq had only five outdated aircraft, unsuited for desert conditions, while the German/Ottoman forces w ­ ere far better equipped. By the Mapping “Mesopotamia”  155

end of 1916, however, the British had reversed the ratio with twenty-­four airplanes and “all the latest bombing and aerial cameras to go with them” (Barker 2009, 260). Thanks to this kind of build-up, the contribution of aviation to the mechanization of the military coup d’oeil was indisputable. As Mead puts it, the commanders ­were “blind without air reconnaissance” (1983, 122). In order to achieve their goal of occupying Baghdad, the British Mesopotamian campaign needed e­ very pos­si­ble form of assistance and luck, including the ability to, in effect, see “over the hill.” The Turkish Army proved to be much more familiar with the terrain and, thanks to long-­established routes of communication and alliances with local sheiks, better able to reconnoiter and manage logistics. The British campaign was plagued by poorly designed objectives, insufficient logistical support, and an administrative system that required strategic decisions to be made in India but approved in London by commanders far removed from the scene who then had to relay ­orders to the Persian Gulf—­a time-­consuming and inefficient system that left officers on the ground with ­little influence. The costs for the British of this awkward and unworkable military structure ­were paid, heavi­ly, in the case of Kut-­al-­Amara. Between December 1915 and April 1916, the British w ­ ere ­under siege in the town, having fallen back in their first push to take Baghdad. Kut-­al-­Amara became a signal disaster for the British and a focus of national anguish. Forced to surrender and sent on an infamous death march, the starving troops became seen by the public at home as martyrs to the cause of empire (see fig. 4.4). Ambitious politicians like Winston Churchill drew on the siege and surrender of Kut-­al-­Amara to demonstrate the terrible vulnerability of ground troops dependent on land and w ­ ater for logistical support and to support the argument for the rational development of airpower. In the case of Iraq, the deployment of more aviation units would eliminate de­pen­dency on the gunboats bogged down in sandbars and reduce the number of troops needed on the ground (fewer to transport, feed, clothe, and bury). If the fall of Kut became a rallying cry for a new kind of military u ­ nder the sign of British patriotic fervor, airpower offered a lower-­cost, efficient solution, especially for desert terrain. In the last two years of the war, the benefits of aerial reconnaissance in par­ tic­u­lar as a component of airpower ­were becoming more and more apparent even to the most recalcitrant cavalry commander. In conditions like ­those found in Iraq, conventional modes of British Army reconnaissance w ­ ere found to be in­effec­tive and dangerous. Specifically, the British found that it was difficult in the flat land surrounding the rivers to find high enough ground for effective observation, and the climate was deadly for ­horses, still the cavalry’s primary mode of transport (Mead 1983, 122). In contrast, from 156 Chapter 4

FIGURE 4.4  ​World

War I aerial reconnaissance, Kut-­al-­Amara, 1916. © ­Imperial War Museum (q 107237).

the air, it was easy to see where the armies ­were based and just how and where they w ­ ere moving. Following the surrender at Kut (which included several pi­lots and planes, reducing the air arm to two planes for a while), British reinforcements included Royal Flying Corps Squadron No. 30 followed in 1917 by Squadron No. 63. Increased coordination between commanders who began to understand the advantage of waging war by air offset the prob­lems of constant illness among the troops and chronic mechanical maintenance prob­ lems.22 Patrols could take place by air with greater powers of surveillance, reconnaissance could be conducted more scientifically, supplies could be delivered in more timely and cost-­saving ways, and war could be waged across greater distances with infinitely fewer casualties. The British and Germans traded air superiority back and forth in the last years of the war, engaging in armed sorties and dog-­fights but, above all, providing unpre­ce­dented amounts of intelligence information. Aerial imagery began to supply the raw data for the kind of maps that could provide military advantage in a desert war. MAPS, MAN UA L S, PACK ETS, AN D G UI D ES: “SEEIN G ALL” I N ARI D Z ON ES

In En­glish, to “desert” means to leave a place deserted, while the Arabic word ashârâ means to go into the desert. The Bedouins knew the locations of springs and wells, and how many days of walking it would take to reach them. Two words, two worlds, or one word alone to construct a world. —­Mounira Khemir, “The Infinitive Image of the Desert and Its Repre­sen­ta­tions” Mapping “Mesopotamia”  157

Historians of desert warfare point out that nearly 20  ­percent of the globe is “covered” by deserts (Watson 1995, 17). In the arid reaches of this kind of topography, the conventional wisdom obtained that nothing could grow and, ­until recently, navigation was believed to be next to impossible. This is, of course, a Western Eu­ro­pean point of view. Colonial discourse had long figured nomads indigenous to the desert as mystical figures who traversed arid spaces more by magic than by any recognizable scientific knowledge; the ability of Bedouins to “melt” into the landscape was a staple of Eu­ro­pean and North American novels, plays, paintings, and, eventually, film.23 The trope of the “unseen” threat from p ­ eople who could attack seemingly out of “nowhere” and dis­appear into a strange and hostile landscape saturated popu­lar and military discourse. This inherent camouflage of desert ­people and places was legendary, therefore, among Eu­ro­pean forces. Occupying militaries believed that they ­were especially vulnerable to attack by “raids” of locals in the seemingly empty, open spaces of desert war.24 The airplane seemed to level the playing field, as it w ­ ere: observing, mapping, and bombing or strafing as needed. Airpower offered liberation from the sweltering flat lands, the unhealthy swamps and fly-­infested camps, and the ele­ment of insecurity caused by local allies of the e­ nemy who appeared to be almost invisible and, therefore, invincible. Aerial observation with the option of weaponization offered a technological solution to the challenge of land-­based surveying of a landscape that many Eu­ro­pe­ans had found to be far too “protean” and “mirage-­ridden” to occupy successfully (Satia 2006, 19). Aerial reconnaissance transformed the terrain from an inhospitable and confusing space to one ideal for the purposes of war—­now the British could penetrate zones that had been considered previously to be inaccessible or hidden. But most importantly, the perspective from the air made “Mesopotamia” viewable as a coherent map and thus imaginable as a region to be controlled. In her study of British air control in the region, Satia has argued that long-­standing Orientalist attitudes created the “irresistible idea” that “Arabia was a place almost destined for aerial surveillance” as a form of governmentality (26). Since Iraq had been a locus for British intelligence agents for several de­cades before World War I, detailed expert knowledge of the region “deemed Mesopotamia peculiarly suitable for air operations, better than Eu­rope, for aesthetic as much as topographical reasons”: “Its presumed flatness promised many landing grounds, ­little cover to insurgents, and the possibility of ‘radiating’ British power throughout the country from a handful of fittingly Spartan bases, while the real­ity of its varied and protean topography, when acknowledged, was held to offer ideal 158 Chapter 4

training for the raf, exposing it to ­every sort of terrain—­mountains in Kurdistan, marshes in the south, riverain territory in between, and so forth” (28). Accordingly, by the end of World War I, Iraq, as well as Palestine and Sinai, in par­tic­u­lar, drew advocates of systematic approaches to the combination of aerial photography to topographic mapping (Collier 1994, 100). As Lt. Col. M. N. ­MacLeod argued in a pre­sen­ta­tion to the British Royal Geo­graph­i­cal Society in 1919, the addition of the airplane to the pro­cess of observation and surveying marked “the beginning of a new era” in determining precise locations and in maintaining the direction of an advance (1919, 396). Drawing on his experience during World War I, ­MacLeod identified “intelligence” and “topography” as linked uses for aerial photography. That is, while the aerial photo­graph could be interpreted to show what was contained in the image, it could also be mined for topographical informational to ascertain precisely where the objects portrayed in the image could be located. ­MacLeod reminded his audience that the need for large-­scale maps had not been foreseen by the British Army before the start of the war, in his view leaving military cartography in a highly uneven and unsatisfactory state while placing troops and military objectives at risk. As Major General Geoffrey Salmond, the commander in charge of the Royal Flying Corps (rfc) in Iraq for the last two years of the war, reminisced in another discussion at the Royal Geo­graph­i­cal Society in 1920, it was the close cooperation between the rfc photographic section and the Survey Department General Headquarters (ghq) that transformed military operations: once the two units began to work together, even moving their offices as close together as pos­si­ble at headquarters, “we never looked back” (Salmond et al. 1920, 371). What united all the participants in ­these early key discussions was the belief that aerial surveying was most appropriate for a very specific set of sites: the tropics and the desert. Major figures in the British Royal Geo­graph­ i­cal Society played a key role in advocating for continued British intervention in the ­Middle East following the end of the war, based on reports by its members on the efficacy of mapping in such an arid region (Heffernan 1996, 504). Throughout the war and in the years immediately ­after, members of the society presented papers and debated rigorously the possibilities and limits of aerial reconnaissance versus ground surveying in general, as well as in relation to specific regions and climates. As the chair of the discussion following Lt. Col. ­MacLeod’s pre­sen­ta­tion opined: “The extreme precision required in the Ordnance Survey may perhaps tell against the photographic method, but t­ here are other parts of the world where the method might be more suitable—in desert regions, for example, that are inexpressible to the Mapping “Mesopotamia”  159

ordinary surveyor, though ­there may be some difficulty about fixed points” (Whitlock et al. 1920, 398). Thus, Lt. Col. Newcombe argued, based on his ser­vice with the Intelligence Staff in Egypt in 1915, “a photo­graph gives far more information and ­really is far more accurate” than “ordinary methods of mapping.” He continued: As regards desert survey, the photo­graphs I saw of the desert ­were most wonderful. They even showed a single camel’s track; one could see where a single camel had been across the sand owing to the shadows being so deeply marked in his footprints. . . . ​In countries like Egypt, Syria, Turkey, or anywhere in the East, where you almost invariably have brilliant sunshine and can guarantee to work, I suppose, the greater part of any day in the year, the aeroplane obviously has a far better chance than h ­ ere. (Whitlock et al. 1920, 398) The reconnaissance photography from the Mesopotamian campaign offered the promise of crystalline views and accurate maps for warfare that would be conducted, increasingly, from the air. But at the start, ­there was ­little with which to work and much to be done. While existing maps of Eu­ rope merely needed to be updated and standardized, the M ­ iddle East, on the other hand, was believed to be missing the entire “framework upon which military mapping could be hung” (Collier 1994, 100; see also Dowson 1921, 365). In strategically located Iraq, the military surveyors believed that the state of ­things was “even worse,” but therein lay an opportunity; the desert terrain was viewed as the “perfect” laboratory for new state-­of-­the art cartographic techniques such as strip-­mapping and methods of linking information from both vertical and oblique imagery (Collier 1994). As Captain H. Hamshaw Thomas explained in a paper delivered to the Royal Geo­graph­i­cal Society in 1920, aerial mapping in France during the war had been difficult due to ground fire and inclement weather: “Straight flying and the production of long series of photo­graphs ­were virtually impossible.” In Palestine, on the other hand, where Thomas flew reconnaissance flights, the “airman” could fly “unhampered,” and thanks to the “close cooperation of the Air Force and Survey Com­pany,” new methods and approaches had been innovated on the spot (1920, 350). In desert regions with clear skies, pi­lots and observers could see “plain as draughts on a board,” as Lt. Col. J. E. Tennant, the commander of Squadron 30 in Iraq, wrote in his memoir (1920, 58). The question faced by both photographic and survey units was how to translate that view from high above into usable cartographic material and how to interpret the information once it was recorded. 160 Chapter 4

FIGURE 4.5  ​Royal

Flying Corps, Air Packet No. 20, March 1916. Explanatory Sheet to Rhine Maps (sheets 1 to 7). United States National Archives.

Air packets represented one of the innovative ways in which aerial reconnaissance photography became translated into cartographic media during World War I. ­Under the direction of the Admiralty Intelligence Division, air packets w ­ ere produced in all theaters of war to assist aerial navigation.25 Based on the latest photographic reconnaissance images, the maps ­were hand-­drawn and colored, then printed. The air packets ­were composed of individually numbered, twelve-­inch square sheets placed in chronological order in an envelope. Placed end to end, the square maps could comprise a long strip of territory (see fig.  4.5). The cover sheet provided a key to Mapping “Mesopotamia”  161

FIGURE 4.6  ​Royal

Flying Corps, Air Packet No. 10, December 1915. Explanatory Sheet to Flying Maps of River Tigris. United States National Archives.

terms, symbols, and abbreviations, a new lexicon that transposed old and new iconography (see fig. 4.6). In his memoir, Tennant recalled that the photographic section at general headquarters in Iraq was “developing and printing far into each night” as the flying corps developed a rigorous daily routine of surveillance and reconnaissance (145). The most recent of ­these packets of maps would be dropped by air sometimes just as units w ­ ere about to go into ­battle. During World War I, “squared” maps became greatly prized for their assistance in the accurate direction of artillery by wireless communications. 162 Chapter 4

In his comments on Captain Thomas’s paper on geo­graph­i­cal reconnaissance in 1920, General Salmond described how commanders became aware of the ways in which aerial photography could greatly improve the detail and accuracy of the squared maps that had become standard on the western front. Th ­ ose maps of trenches in the Eu­ro­pean frontline ­were based on earlier, “accurate” ones, while the squared maps in the theaters of war in the ­Middle East and North Africa had no precursors. As Salmond explained, when he arrived in Egypt in 1915, he found that t­ here was no standardization of scale and cartographic communications. Based on the lack of standards he encountered across the region, he advocated for a “uniform system” to be applied in Iraq and other areas that would correspond to the one in use in Western Eu­rope (Salmond et al. 1920, 372). Although standardization began to overcome the incompatibility of dif­ fer­ent modes of mapping across zones of war, a comparison of air packets of squared maps from Western Eu­rope and Iraq in late 1915 and early 1916 dramatically illustrates the stark differences between repre­sen­ta­tions of terrain even within a drive to systematize and codify topographical ele­ments. For example, sheet number 1 from Air Packet No.  20, “Air Maps of the Rhine,” produced by the Intelligence Division of the Admiralty War Staff in March 1916, shows a section of the course of the Rhine River and the country on ­either side “from the Dutch frontier to Coblentz” that includes the city of Emmerich (see fig. 4.7). This Eu­ro­pean view is densely inscribed to assist the pi­lot or observer in identifying landmarks and sites in close proximity. It is an image that suggests density of population, among other t­ hings. An inset detail view of Emmerich’s harbor with ships ­under sail adds a picturesque ele­ment. On the other hand, sheet number 5 in Air Packet No. 10, “Flying Maps No. 1 to 9 of the River Tigris,” produced in December 1915, portrays scant detail; some ruins, a few towns including the infamous Kut-­al-­Amara sited on its distinctive river bend, ancient canals, and flood plains are noted along with the one road deemed “passable for wheeled traffic” (see fig. 4.8). Graphic and unadorned with “picturesque” inset views, the Iraq air packet maps include text like “liable to flood,” “mud banks,” and the names of tribes linked to specific tracts of land. Winding through the center of each sheet, the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers ground the navigational imperative of the Iraq air packets. Painted in pale aqua-­green, the waterways of Iraq appear on the maps like alluring highways clear of traffic. Yet the gunboats and floatplanes found the rivers to be formidable opponents to their pro­gress north, with vastly varying w ­ ater levels according to season, often dropping to a level impassable by any vessel or flooding to a point that endangered the Mapping “Mesopotamia”  163

FIGURE 4.7  ​Royal

Flying Corps, Air Packet No. 20, March 1916. Sheet 1, ­Emmerich. United States National Archives.

FIGURE 4.8  ​Royal

Flying Corps, Air Packet No. 10, December 1915. Sheet 5, Kut al-­Amara. United States National Archives.

FIGURE 4.9  ​Royal

Flying Corps, Air Packet No. 10, December 1915. Sheet 7, Baghdad. United States National Archives.

ground troops. Sheet 7 depicts one of ­these challenging routes north, from Ctesiphon to Baghdad and then on to approximately the location of present-­ day Tarmiyah (see fig. 4.9). This is one of the most densely annotated maps among the sheets of packets 10 and 11 from December 1915, marking many sites of ruins, “ancient” canals and dams, bridges and “date gardens,” along with the bold black line of the incomplete Berlin-­Baghdad Railway. ­Future resources and ancient ruins preoccupy the Iraq air packets. Empty spaces remain to be filled in as needed with information required for the extraction of resources and control of variable ele­ments such as restive populations, floodwaters, new infrastructure, and so forth, leaving open the possibility of synoptic control over ­future time as well as space. If air packets helped to guide pi­lots aloft, manuals w ­ ere developed for the war theaters, including Iraq, to assist in the interpretation of the reconnaissance imagery that was beginning to pour in. For example, in 1918 the general headquarters staff in Baghdad produced Notes on Aerial Photography, Mapping “Mesopotamia”  165

part II, The Interpretation of Aeroplane Photo­graphs in Mesopotamia. This two-­part manual offered Royal Air Force (raf) fliers and observers one of the most thorough compendia of accrued knowledge to date. The first part concentrated on technical ­matters concerning cameras and the production of usable images. The second part, while drawing on technique, mainly focused on “intelligence” and the interpretation of “Aeroplane Photo­ graphs” for “Military and Survey purposes” by offering exemplary imagery and methods of identifying “objects which are more or less familiar, e.g., trenches, gun positions, towns, camps, ­etc. and in addition, dif­fer­ent ground features characteristic of Mesopotamia” (raf 1918b, iv). Aerial photographic interpretation is only valuable, according to Notes on Aerial Photography, “insofar as the results may be turned to practical account, e­ ither in the way of assisting tactical operations, or of obtaining information regarding the ­Enemy’s intentions and dispositions” (4). Discussions of vertical, oblique, stereoscopic, and mosaic photo­graphs are accompanied by numerous charts, sketch maps, and photo­graphs. The effect of shadows, dif­fer­ent kinds of light, and atmospheric conditions is presented in detail. The manual advised that interpreters should visit features and structures on the ground to familiarize themselves as much as pos­si­ble before attempting to identify objects viewed from above. For example, plate 10 shows the ambiguities and variances of appearance of a mud fort, a tower, a minaret, and a palm tree as they appear from the ground and on an aerial vertical photo­graph (see fig. 4.10). Plate 12, an aerial photo­graph taken from six thousand feet, which shows camps in the critical area of “Samarra,” demonstrates proper annotation of military installations in relation to infrastructure and topography (see fig. 4.11). Plate 15 provides a list of symbols used on maps that is similar to the symbols found on the squared maps in the air packets (see fig. 4.12). Plate 4 illustrates the effective composition of a reconnaissance mosaic of Baghdad, while plate 4a shows a map “compiled” from the mosaic (see figs. 4.13 and 4.14). The instrumental value of aerial reconnaissance for immediate tactical considerations is stressed throughout the manual and reinforced with visual ­matter that reinforces the scientific, standardized methods that the British military had come to endorse. Although offering itself as a general tutorial, Notes on Aerial Photography based most of its discussion of the practical methods of aerial reconnaissance and interpretation on an assertion of difference between Western Eu­ rope and Iraq. In the manual’s preface, the usual argument is offered that “no reliable maps” existed at the start of the war, leading to the creation of an entirely new cartography through “aeroplane photo­graphs” (1918b, iv). 166 Chapter 4

FIGURE 4.10  ​“Diagram

illustrating the reconstruction, from their shadows of objects seen from above.” Plate 10 in Notes on Aerial Photography, part II, The Interpretation of Aeroplane Photo­graphs in Mesopotamia, 1918. © British Library Board.

FIGURE 4.11  ​“Example of an Annotated Photo­graph, Samarra.” Plate 12 in Notes on Aerial Photography, part II, The Interpretation of Aeroplane Photo­graphs in Mesopotamia, 1918. © British Library Board.

of Symbols Used on T.C. Maps.” Plate 15 in Notes on Aerial ­Photography, part II, The Interpretation of Aeroplane Photo­graphs in Mesopotamia, 1918. © British Library Board. FIGURE 4.12  ​“List

FIGURE 4.13  ​“Mosaic

photo­graph of the city of Baghdad.” Plate 4 in Notes on Aerial Photography, part II, The Interpretation of Aeroplane Photo­ graphs in Mesopota­ mia, 1918. © British Library Board.

FIGURE 4.14  ​“Map compiled from photo­graphs shown in Plate No. 4.” Plate 4a in Notes on Aerial Photography, part II, The Interpretation of Aeroplane Photo­graphs in Mesopotamia, 1918. © British Library Board.

Aerial photography “in comparatively flat countries,” according to the manual, produces intelligence more quickly and accurately (3). Section 5 of the manual provides a photographic compendium of dif­fer­ent ground features to be found in this specific locale. For example, plate 26 offers two views: one of “broken ground and ravines” west of Fat-­Hah and one of a “rocky plateau in loop of Euphrates” between Jarifah Island and Baghdad. Other plates in this section document “sandy plains,” “dry gullies,” “smooth-­faced ridges,” “rocky broken ground,” “stream-­beds (dry),” “bitumen grounds,” “undulating ground intersected by gullies,” “ravines,” “signs of cultivation,” “ruins,” “straggling ­houses of town,” and “scrub.” Other compendiums of images in the manual include major towns and cities viewed from above as well as infrastructure such as “Roads and Tracks,” including “Railways, Buried cable, Air lines, and Rivers, Canals, and Wadis.” A manual prepared in the same year for use on the western front differs to a significant degree from Notes on Aerial Photography for Mesopotamia. In Characteristics of the Ground and Landmarks in the ­Enemy Lines Opposite the British Front from the Sea to St. Quentin, prepared by the British Intelligence Section of the ghq wing of the raf, a very dif­fer­ent kind of landscape is portrayed (raf 1918a). This manual is among the objects drawn on by John Welchman in his classic article “­Here, ­There and Other­ wise” to argue that the aerial photo­graph has three “existences” or functions: “Surveillance, survey, and the esthetic—­that is, control, mea­sure­ ment, plea­sure” (Welchman 1988, 17). Welchman is particularly interested in the aesthetic dimension of the manual, especially the descriptors that accompany the photo­graphs of the countryside surrounding the border between France and Belgium that ­were designed to be easily remembered; thus, “Patchwork Quilting” landscape does, indeed, resemble that kind of object (see plate 20). The manual explains: “If t­hese distinctions are memorised, a pi­lot or observer emerging from clouds should be able to tell approximately where he is. Having formed this rough idea, if he has in his mind a picture gained from photo­graphs of the landmarks in his area, he should not be long in finding some spot known to him which w ­ ill give him a definite location” (raf 1918a, n.p.). This “startling reinscription of con­temporary esthetic reference (as a mnemonic device),” as Welchman puts it, depends on thirteen “characteristics” of the countryside stretching from the sea to St. Quentin, France, and into Belgium, including “Honeycomb,” “Crystalline,” “Plantation,” “Futurist,” “Industrial,” “Straggling Villages,” “Woods,” “Swampy Areas,” “Fruit Growing,” and “Cubist” (1988, 18) (see fig. 4.15). 170 Chapter 4

country,” in Royal Air Force, Characteristics of the Ground and Landmarks in the E ­ nemy Lines Opposite the British Front from the Sea to St. Quentin, 1918. Courtesy of Paul Saint-­Amour. FIGURE 4.15  ​“ ‘Cubist’

Looking at ­these images and descriptors close to one hundred years ­after they ­were devised, we have to try to imagine pi­lots studying the nuanced distinctions between them, committing them to memory, to aid their navigation ­behind ­enemy lines. The evocative reference to futurism and cubism in the manual seems to have been reserved for terrain that required more nuanced designation: “futurist country. South of ghent and east of escaut the country combines the features of ‘crystalline’ and ‘patchwork quilting’ without hedges, but the fields are smaller than ­those of ­either type.” “cubist country; open, rolling country between the escaut and the oise. This is another type of ‘patchwork quilting’; fields are much larger, ­houses are few and far between and ­there are considerably fewer roads. In this area, too, the villages are compact” (raf 1918a, n.p.). Did raf personnel in the ghq wing read F. T. Marinetti’s “Technical Mani­ festo of Futurist Lit­er­a­ture” where he writes of the perspective he gained from flying in an airplane? “As I looked at objects from a new point of view,” Marinetti wrote in 1912, “no longer head on or from b ­ ehind, but straight down, foreshortened, that is, I was able to break apart the old shackles of Mapping “Mesopotamia”  171

logic and plumb lines of the ancient way of thinking” (1972, 88–9). At face value, we very well might imagine that the creators of the manual “saw” cubism and futurism from the air; that is, they would have agreed with Stephen Kern’s ­later observation that, viewed from above, the trenches “gave the terrain a Cubist-­like composition of irregular geometricized forms” (1983, 305). Kern quotes Gertrude Stein’s comment that World War I, unlike any previous wars, was itself a composition, “the composition of cubism” (287–88). Welchman muses on ­these ascriptions of avant-­garde art movement terms to landscape ­behind ­enemy lines and concludes: “Almost from the beginning of its history, then, the (airplane) aerial photo­graph was fastidiously associated with the vocabulary of Modernism, abstraction to abstraction, unreality to unlike” (1988, 18). Considering the same images, Paul Saint-­Amour cautions against an overly literal interpretation of t­ hese terms in an instructional manual from the past. If ­these terms have any denotative relevance, in his view, it stems from the way in which aerial photo­graphs perform modernism; that is, the practice of producing a photo mosaic from overlapping images mimics the kind of “severe manipulations and counter-­distortions” that ­these kinds of photo­graphs had to be subjected to in order to make them legible through the conventions of cadastral maps (2011, 254–55). Therefore, ­these “rectification techniques” required a “set of exaggerated claims about the accuracy, transparency, and self-­decryption of the medium—as a rhetorical counter-­distortion” (255). Saint-­Amour is drawing our attention to the intensely manipulated and composed qualities of stereoscopic and photomosaic images used for military purposes. The manuals that ­were produced ­toward the end of the war both reveal and deny the intensity and variety of techniques and practices that are needed to make and interpret the imagery of aerial reconnaissance. The raf manual for the western front “from the Sea to St. Quentin” asserted that aerial photography could reveal the “nature of the ground” between areas—in some cases, only a few miles apart—as inherently distinct to the point that “a line can, with a ­great degree of accuracy, be drawn round areas representing vari­ous types of terrain” (raf 1918a, n.p.). Yet, despite this construction of aerial imagery as the best and most verifiable form of visual information, the raf manual for Iraq admits that this kind of imagery is ­really only intelligible in context: “It must be remembered that one photo­ graph may itself give ­little definite information, but read in conjunction with other photo­graphs, intelligence summaries, prisoners’ statements, ­etc., much valuable information of e­ ither a positive or negative character may be obtained” (1918b, 26). Welchman reminds us that “the neo-­encyclopedic 172 Chapter 4

euphoria of photogrammetry (mea­sur­ing and mapping from photo­graphs)” that ensued as the declared war wound down and the undeclared war­time of the Mandate period unspooled represented an affective attachment to seeing all, generating artifacts that purport to display “all t­ here is to be seen (but not all ­there is to be known) in depth” (1988, 18). The contrast between the air packets and manuals prepared for Western Eu­rope and Iraq returns us to the impor­tant question of the instrumentality of remote photographic and topographical repre­sen­ta­tion in colonial zones. Do ­these artifacts show all that ­there was to be viewed or do they show all that was needed to be seen for a specific task? The operation of aerial reconnaissance purported to represent a total and complete view by selectively interpreting necessarily abstract and ambiguous imagery. Air packets, manuals, and other maps and guides produced in the era of World War I participated in the discourse of “applied realism” but proved by their very existence the abstraction and illegibility of aerial imagery. Yet both the maps and the photography became symbols of objective truth in the compilation of geo­ graph­i­cal knowledge. Maps of Iraq, then, created the absences and elisions that they ­were designed to address. The idea that in Iraq and other places like it the entire infrastructure for mapping was missing is a colonial fantasy that is easily recuperated even in some well-­meaning “postcolonial” scholarship.26 Sara Pursley has linked the “empty map” argument in relation to Iraq to the colonial discourse of the “artificial state,” one of the ways in which both the British and some nationalists came to portray the nation of Iraq as a purely Eu­ro­pean creation out of incommensurable ele­ments. In this “borders by committee” approach, the map of Iraq is believed to have been created out of ­whole cloth by the British and Iraqi national identity and, therefore, must also be credited as a British po­liti­cal proj­ect. Pursley argues, first, that British maps like the one usually presented as accompanying the 1916 Sykes-­Picot Agreement (the infamous plan between Britain and France that divvied up areas in the ­Middle East) are based almost exactly on existing Ottoman maps of the area in question and, second, that, among the many maps consulted by and even produced by the British, the maps w ­ ere “never empty”: “They took many ­things into account: mountains, deserts, rivers, and ports; known and suspected oil deposits; population densities; existing Ottoman borders, both international and provincial; previous treaty agreements and current diplomatic relations and balances of power; military strategies, gains, and losses, especially given the active wars over several of the borders through the late 1920s; and perceived local desires, demands, and conflicts as well as perceived ethnicities, languages, and religious sects” (Pursley 2015). Mapping “Mesopotamia”  173

The borders of Iraq ­were produced through the same kind of “slow and arduous pro­cess of resolving competing claims to territory” that produced the maps of the United Kingdom, the United States, France, ­Kenya, Bolivia, or ­Korea (Pursley 2015). Pursley cautions us not to confuse the map for the terrain or even for the politics. The relationship between map and location develops with and through perceptions of time and space; some are provisional, experimental, and some come to be codified as seemingly permanent. Thus, the argument that Iraq was an “artificial state,” composed of ungovernable subjects who needed to be controlled and disciplined into citizenship in a client state, is not supported by the cartographic history of the region. The “empty map” argument evacuates any coherent po­liti­cal history of the nation before World War I and produces aftermath politics in no small part through continuities of aerial imagery as a key component of air war. How does this critique of the “empty map” approach temper our understanding of the claims of British aerial surveyors during and a­ fter World War I that the spaces of Iraq and other arid or desert terrains w ­ ere empty and “almost unmappable,” requiring extensive aerial photography and surveying? In many ways, the history of aerial photography and its allied surveying practices supports Latour’s (1990) contention that the technologies that endure, at least for a time, are t­ hose that not only operate satisfactorily but ­help their advocates win their arguments. The rise of the map as an instrument in Western Eu­rope cannot only be attributed to a widespread agreement that a paper map solved navigation prob­lems. Rather, the map became a power­ful instrument of “applied realism,” drawing together technologies of photography and surveying along with practices of interpretation for the states that sponsored their creation. As the British moved to “fill in” their new maps of the ­Middle East and North Africa, they created the politics they wished to enact along with the aesthetics to support t­hose aims. The maps disseminated war­time colonial discourses then and now, reminding us nonetheless that if we accept the British my­thol­ogy of both “empty map” and “artificial state,” we take maps and photo­graphs as naturalized truths rather than as tools to use in the ser­vice of history and politics. A MAN DATE FOR COL ON I AL V I O L ­ EN CE: AIR CON TROL V I EW S “ M ESOP OTAM I A”

An uneasy silence has fallen over the vio­lence of colonialism. Whereas the era of decolonization was marked by fierce polemics over the scope and scale of colonial brutality, the post-­independence period has seen the issue of colonial

174 Chapter 4

vio­lence relegated to the margins of socio-­historical inquiry. . . . ​Colonial domination is usually accounted for as a lingering remnant from a premodern age, a throwback to a bygone era, the survival of which tells us much about the past but ­little about the pres­ent. In this way, the history of colonialism is written as a wayward footnote to the history of Western modernity. —­Daniel Neep, Occupying Syria ­under the French Mandate

Postwar mapping took place during a period of undeclared war. In Mandate Iraq ­there was no consistent “peacetime”; aerial bombardment assisted by aerial reconnaissance and surveying persisted u ­ ntil in­de­pen­dence in 1932. British support for this approach, called “control without occupation,” saved money and “boots on the ground,” offering an efficient streamlining of the model for “small wars” and territorial policing (Lindqvist 2001, 43).27 This strategy involved unpre­ce­dented levels of vio­lence in metropolitan as well as rural sites.28 The advocates of airpower in Eu­rope and the United States had argued that it was more moral to plan for massive bombing raids on cities ­because the scale of vio­lence would force an early surrender, potentially saving large numbers of lives. Although greatly anticipated and feared, since this kind of firepower had not yet been unleashed on Eu­ro­pean or American metropoles, the debate remained at the level of theory. Beau Grosscup has pointed out, however, that while this debate ground on in the West, ­there was no “moral or ­legal taboo” to prevent the bombing of largely civilian populations in colonized or Mandate zones (2006, 27). The “peacetime” that followed the Armistice in 1918 saw British bombing raids in India, Egypt, Af­ghan­i­stan, Somaliland, Iraq, and South West Africa while Spain bombed Morocco, France fought anticolonial groups from the air in Syria, and Italy continued its air war in North Africa—­unleashing war­time aftermaths of particularly violent intensities (56).29 The very term air control suggests a successful mode of governmentality. The first “apostles” of aerial warfare stressed the strategic importance of policing from the air in relation to the morale of populations: e­ ither light bombardment to “soften up” opposition or full-­scale “terror bombing” to demoralize both civilians and military forces to the point of complete capitulation. The aerial campaign in Iraq at the close of World War I and the early years of the Mandate period operated on multiple levels, from “soft” control to “terror.”30 The embrace of air control over sending a much larger force of ground troops not only relieved the drained coffers of the British trea­sury but also provided a kind of laboratory for practicing air war before the next much larger confrontation that many pundits believed Mapping “Mesopotamia”  175

to be inevitable (Catherwood 2004, 74). With the formation in 1918 of the Royal Air Force out of the combined Royal Flying Corps and navy aerial units, new forms of administration and technical training ­were required. The clear skies and mostly open terrain of Iraq was believed to offer a relatively safe space for the bureaucratic and technical implementation of one of the first in­de­pen­dent air wings of a standing army. Air control also offered a concrete means of managing a population that the British ­were somewhat surprised to find far more rebellious than most of their advisors had predicted. The situation in Iraq in the early 1920s seemed to British commanders and planners to call for practical mea­sures to increase mapping and surveillance and to make recourse to aerial bombardment. Th ­ ese activities ­were accompanied by a burgeoning of archaeological and other forms of civilian aerial surveying that further imbricated military and academic modes of research and development. The fledgling air force was tested early in the summer of 1920 when angry responses to the new British tax policy led swiftly to a general insurrection of not insignificant numbers. Omissi writes that at the height of the unrest, approximately 131,000 tribesmen, mainly representing groups who had been allies of the Turks and Germans, w ­ ere involved (1990, 22). Although the raf planes proved to be effective for “reconnaissance, close support, pursuit, rapid communication and demonstration,” skeptics voiced concern over the ability of planes in and of themselves to manage situations better suited to the operations of ground forces. Defending his air force, Churchill argued: “The ­enemy ­were bombed and machine-­gunned with effect by airplanes which cooperated with the troops” (23). Accordingly, Churchill continued to push for a strategy that combined “military repression with a search for po­liti­cal allies” (27). Air control, officially inaugurated in the fall of 1922 and including eight squadrons of aircraft, fulfilled the military repression part of the effort. As the de­cade progressed, “indirect rule” of Iraq was judged by most British commentators to be a success “due to the power of the bomber” (35). With Iraqi in­de­pen­dence in 1932, the raf remained pres­ent in the country as a reminder of British imperial might and as a deterrent to rebellion against the pro-­British, Sunni-­dominated government. Although air control of regions like Iraq promised perfection of per­for­ mance, its practice was uneven: visibility was often a prob­lem and pi­lots would become disoriented, many targets ­were completely missed, and with enough warning the “­enemy” had ­little trou­ble evading the supposedly “omniscient” sight of the airplane observers. Nevertheless, since only the British forces had aircraft, the aerial strafing and bombardment had a huge 176 Chapter 4

FIGURE 4.16  ​Khama village bombing, Iraq, December 12, 1924. Edwin Newman Collection.

Courtesy of the San Diego Air and Space Museum.

impact on the emotional as well as the physical state of the population on the ground.31 As Satia argues, the “accuracy issue was moot”; aircraft ­were presumed to be always already overhead, creating a “moral effect” of surveillance and, for most, compliance (2006, 33). Thus, “terror was the scheme’s under­lying princi­ple . . . ​achieved through interference with its victim’s daily lives, through destruction of homes, villages, fuel, crops, and livestock.” Aerial “peacekeeping” was violent: “Entire villages ­were bombed for ‘general recalcitrance’—­refusal to submit to government—­and for harboring wanted rebel leaders” (34) (see fig. 4.16). Toby Dodge points out that air control provided a rapid means of meting out punishment: “retribution for misdeeds could fall from the skies within twelve to twenty-­four hours of the act” (2003, 148). In bombing the tax-­resistant town of Samawah in 1923, the raf chose a strategy of severe bombardment over two days and nights of the sort that years ­later would be nicknamed “shock and awe.” The effects of this sustained bombing raid surprised the tribesmen it targeted. It also induced awe of bombing’s destructive powers in ­those who had ordered the attack. The novel deployment of night bombing caught villa­gers returning home ­after hiding from daylight raids. . . . ​ Night bombing heightened the audiovisual spectacle of air power, making Mapping “Mesopotamia”  177

it apparent to tribes in a wide area, imposing upon them an understanding of the new might and reach of the state. A further technological innovation increased the planes’ destructive power: incendiary bombs. With the huts of southern Iraq being constructed from reeds, the effect of night bombing was to spread fires throughout the target villages. (153) The raf determined that the best way to ensure efficient bombing runs and to effectively subdue entire communities in relatively remote areas like Samawah was to map first. Operations maps produced through aerial surveying in advance of offensive operations improved the accuracy and effectiveness of bombing raids. Casualties ­were heavy (for a major attack of the sort described above at least one hundred inhabitants of all ages ­were massacred), but the imposition of terror had mixed results. British Air Command desired immediate results, but the “peacekeeping” tactics led to deep-­rooted hostility ­toward Britain. Undeterred by this deepening local re­sis­tance and criticism from some quarters at home, the advantage for the British of an investment in air control was the proliferation of more accurate maps and surveys of a region due for significant industrial development by oil companies, geopo­liti­cal stability, and a population bombed into subdued if restive compliance. In their study of Mandate-­era air control, James Corum and Wray Johnson argue that the raf learned to couch their casualty reports in vague terms in order to avoid criticism from the War Ministry (which had ceded supervision of the region to the new air arm with some degree of reluctance) as well as the general public (2003, 59). While the scale and effect of the attacks w ­ ere traumatic, the ­battles ­were so one-­sided that they hardly constituted practice for a full-­scale war. Reports issued by the raf emphasized successes and savings, portraying air control in a “romanticized, if inaccurate, way” (66). A series of reports published in venues like the Royal Geo­graph­i­cal Society’s Geo­graph­i­cal Journal throughout the 1920s and 1930s contributed to the evacuation of vio­lence from the public face of British air control as archaeologists and geographers rigorously discussed the possibilities of aerial surveying the ­Middle East and elsewhere. The avatar of British aerial archaeology, O. G. S. Crawford—­a former Royal Flying Corps pi­lot, archaeological officer of the Ordnance Survey, and founding editor of the influential journal Antiquity—­ argued in a 1929 paper delivered before the Royal Geo­graph­i­cal Society that archaeological aerial photography was deeply tied to the proj­ect of furthering geo­graph­i­cal knowledge as a valuable scientific field. Describing his journey by air across a “thousand miles of country and five thousand years of h ­ uman 178 Chapter 4

pro­gress,” Crawford positioned Iraq and Syria as zones most valuable for what they could provide for the ­human sciences (1929, 498). In the images that accompanied Crawford’s article, only the remains of empires that ended centuries ago are pictured in the midst of empty deserts devoid of roads or any sign of recent habitation. A ­ fter almost a de­cade of Mandate administration, the “ideal laboratory” of Iraq’s airspace seems fully established for Crawford and his colleagues, ready for the study of the past and the development of the ­future while turning away from the ugly truths of the colonial pres­ent. The remote sensing of Iraq that took place through the combination of camera, airplane, and surveying technologies contributed exponentially to the geo­graph­i­cal legibility of the modern nation-­state. As Rashad Salim has written, Iraq is “one of the most extensively mapped and imaged areas on the face of the planet” (2013, 236). Considering the “despotic power of airplanes” in the early twentieth c­ entury in a place like Iraq u ­ nder Ottoman and then British rule, the enduring aftermaths are not hard to imagine for anyone who reads a newspaper (Dodge 2003, 132). For, as Salim has charged, almost anything “named and identified” on t­hese innumerable maps has been “disrupted, damaged, destroyed, or occupied” (2013, 236). Moreover, the mapping continues, relentlessly, in the era of the “war on terror”—­now in digital formats—to “maintain the status quo and reinscribe indigenous or non-­state-­sanctioned lands as ‘barren,’ ‘wasteland,’ or simply ‘blank’ ” (­Piper 2002, 172). The discursive oscillation between unmapped and mapped, blank and detailed, past and ­future, ruin and development, wasteland and bountiful structures the colonial pres­ent of Iraq’s war­time aftermaths. The aerial view of Iraq generated and regenerated surveillance, control, and the plea­sure of aesthetics across the twentieth c­ entury, unfolding into the twenty-­first. Without repeating historical injuries by focusing only on ruin and devastation, the challenge for con­temporary critics of aerial imagery is to work with the power­ful ambiguities of the form over and against the instrumentalized cartographies of “applied realism.” Therefore, it is to con­temporary engagements with the aesthetic format of aerial photography in the colonial pres­ ent that this study now turns for, in the face of endless war, as Salim asserts, “creativity between beauty and power, between truth and lies, got us ­here and we have nothing ­else to take us elsewhere” (2013, 236).

Mapping “Mesopotamia”  179

CHAPTER 5

THE POLITICS OF THE SENSIBLE Aerial Photography’s War­time Aftermaths

—­

I speak ­here of curiosity, and above I spoke of attention. ­These are in fact affects that blur the false obliviousness of strategic schemata; they are dispositions of the body and mind where the eye does not know in advance what it sees and thought does not know what it should make of it. Their tension also points ­towards a dif­fer­ent politics of the sensible—­a politics based on the variation of distance, the re­sis­tance of the vis­i­ble and the uncertainty of effects. —­J ACQUES RANCIÈRE , The Emancipated Spectator

On the cusp of World War II, the opening scene of the film La Grande Illu­ sion spoke to the enduring paradoxical imperative of the aerial image; unable to decipher a section of a reconnaissance photo­graph of the World War I western front, the aristocratic Captain de Boeldieu insists that Lieutenant Maréchal give up his scheduled leave and take him up for a fresh look to “clear up the mystery.” In an exchange that instigates the travails and tragedies that ensue, three officers of the French Escadrille debate what can and cannot be seen “below the road” in the “­little gray spot” on the photo­graph: “That’s a canal, not a road,” opines one; “No, a roadway,” insists another; “It was misty,” declares Maréchal (who took the photo). De Boeldieu sums up the dilemma wryly, “Such una­nim­i­ty is a tribute to our photography.”1 The “illusion” evoked by the film’s title recurs in conversation throughout the film as the characters encounter situations that prompt them to question the meaning of war itself along with the purpose of class, racial, ethnic, and national divides as well as the politics of geography. In the last scene in the film, as

Maréchal and his companion Rosenthal, ­after a harrowing escape from their final prisoner of war camp, approach the Swiss border and the promise of sanctuary, they rather desperately half-­joke about the absurdity of the visual and the meaning of terrain. “­You’re sure that’s Switzerland?” asks Maréchal as Rosenthal consults their battered, homemade map. “I’m sure of it,” replies Rosenthal. “It’s all so alike,” expostulates Maréchal, gazing out at the mountains and valleys covered in snow that lie before them. “Of course,” replies his companion, “frontiers ­were in­ven­ted by men, not by nature.” Reconnaissance imagery operates powerfully in terms of what Jacques Rancière has linked to a “dif­fer­ent politics of the sensible” (2011, 105)—­variations of scale and temporality, uncertainty, and the obdurate retention of some ­thing or ­things unrepresentable or impossible to sense. ­These qualities are not just pretensions of modernist abstraction, as in “art for art’s sake,” but circulate throughout everyday life, in our instruments of work as well as our forms of leisure. The aerial reconnaissance image that is so tied to instrumental realism, to scientific effort, and to a militarized pursuit of precise accuracy is, nevertheless, often mysterious. Like the reconnaissance photo­graph that triggers the narrative in La Grande Illusion, aerial images act, produce relationships, and construct evidence in constant tension with their peculiar blind spots. Although reconnaissance photography is conventionally categorized as a utilitarian, scientific, or mechanical form of representation—­over and against the aura of the auteur or personal image—it is nonetheless animated through attention and curiosity as well as by attachments to the “politics of the sensible.” Thus, reconnaissance photography does not simply sit on one side or the other between studium and punctum (pace Barthes) or, to use other terms, the division between evidence and affect, intention and accident, fact and aura (Barthes 1981, 26–27). Although reconnaissance imagery emerged as an or­ga­nized military application at the beginning of the twentieth ­century, the format has refused to “stay put,” as it w ­ ere, moving around in culture and disturbing the par­ ameters of the genre of aerial photography. Usually invoked as signs of the objective truth of documentary evidence, like other geo­graph­i­cal imaginaries, aerial images have also pushed back against the strictures of “applied realism.” Distant and abstract, requiring expert interpretation to become even marginally intelligible, the aerial or satellite image most often requires the kind of infrastructure that can only be provided by nation-­states or major corporations. But this does not mean that reconnaissance photography cannot be marshaled for other politics—­the “dif­fer­ent” politics that Rancière provokes—or drawn into solely apo­liti­cal aesthetics or commodified contexts. The Politics of the Sensible  181

Aerial reconnaissance photography has been used for all kinds of purposes throughout the last ­century and, in an era of instant messaging and social media, circulates in a dizzying array of iterations too numerous to cata­log. Reconnaissance imagery is all around us in the con­temporary world, generating politics through the tension between evidentiary certitude and ambiguity. This chapter explores three con­temporary examples of cultural production that engage the format of reconnaissance photography not only in formal or thematic terms but also in relation to the status of visual evidence and the operation of politics in forums of social justice. ­These are works that trou­ble the bound­aries that separate objective science, documentary realism, and auratic art. Like Sandby’s aftermath aesthetics made palpable in a military survey or Baldwin’s quarto of balloon perspectives, the contingent dispositions of aerial photography draw together the instrumental power of the state as well as the innumerable unruly ways in which that state power fails or is incompletely achieved. The emotions generated by motion infuse ­these practices of remote sensing; the image may be still but, like the panoramic painting or the photo­graph itself, all the ways in which the image was created along with its histories of reception and use reverberate insistently. The reconnaissance image cannot be freed from historical context, but it can be opened up through use to yield many more kinds of meaning than might at first seem evident. DESERT S CREE N : TH E AESTH ETI CS OF D I SA PPE A R A N C E IN THE PERS IAN G UL F WARS

“Is not the world just a magic lantern?” wondered Schopenhauer, nearly two centuries ago. Due to the Gulf Crisis, a conjuring trick executed before our eyes, for several months we have not seen a ­great deal of this world ­there on our tele­vi­sion screens. Obscured, on the one side, is the Saudi desert, with the ­great black-­out ordered by the Pentagon; on the other side is Saddam Hussein and his army that has become invisible. But also obscured is all of what, from near or far, could undermine the morale of the ­people concerning the conflict: recession, unemployment, urban riots, the balkanization of Eastern Eu­rope and the almost complete disappearance of po­liti­cal debates. —­Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb

The war that is most often invoked as commensurate with the transformative logics of World War I is the first U.S.-­Iraq Persian Gulf War of 1990–91. In accounts of this brief but significant war, the technofetishism of newly computerized networks of communication tend to dominate, obscuring the critical forensic and politicized aesthetics that emerged si­mul­ta­neously 182 Chapter 5

through the very same technologies. For example, addressing the 1990–91 war in both Desert Screen (2002) and The Aesthetics of Disappearance (1991), Paul Virilio called our attention to the transformative influence of visual information technologies in an era of “desert wars.” In t­ hese and other works, Virilio has argued that the innovation of televisual data along with their strategic circulation by militaries for propaganda purposes has altered the po­liti­cal landscape of modernity as much as the bombs that fell on Iraq destroyed infrastructure and ­human lives. In the 1990s, Virilio charged, the most recent “strategies of deception”—­a pattern of disinformation—­utilized by the United States and its allies in the context of a relatively brief but relentless air war w ­ ere changing the con­temporary battlefront yet again, sending it back to Earth, even underground. In this reconfiguration of the field of war, Virilio singled out the desert—­that space that seemingly provides no cover and reveals all to the “eyes” in the sky—as the paradigmatic space of disinformation’s “known” lies. In the desert, he argued, stealth overcomes speed—­the status of visibility becomes renewed as paramount. Who can be detected and who can escape such identification? Above all, stealth overtakes truth; ­there is no possibility of “genuine knowledge,” he argues, when deception has moved beyond conventional camouflage to operational virtuality. As Virilio and other critics have argued, the First Persian Gulf War ­inaugurated a new kind of conflict, one of total control not only over the battlefield but also over public reception through televisual informatics.2 However, years ­after a second U.S.-­led Gulf War and several de­cades into the installation of digital platforms throughout commercial and military domains, the hegemony of “electro-­optic perception,” as Virilio put it, now seems less totalizing and more unevenly practiced (2002, 107). In the second de­cade of the twenty-­first ­century, we know now that civilian airplanes can be marshaled to bring down skyscrapers and that so-­called irregular warfare allows for even the most sophisticated drones to circle without accurately sensing their intended target. The strategies devised for desert or open spaces can be stymied or challenged by urban density or the underground bunkers of con­temporary war (Virilio 1994a; Weizman 2007; Graham 2010; Bishop 2011). Social networking both relies on globalized media infrastructures and evades complete control (at least, so far). But t­ here is yet another way ­these two wars that supposedly transformed perceptual logics designated other possibilities as impossible. If the continuities of air war over desert regions are made impossible in the narrative of the fields of perception generated by the “­Great War” at the beginning of the twentieth ­century, then the ways in which empire operates through vio­lence are The Politics of the Sensible  183

rendered unimaginable and unaccountable. When empire’s vio­lence cannot be known, its impossible nature structures the pos­si­ble, our always unfolding colonial pres­ent. But to acknowledge empire’s vio­lence through missionary information-­retrieval or the substitution of one set of facts by another ­will only reiterate repre­sen­ta­tion as war (Spivak 1988). In this nexus of repre­sen­ta­tional critical engagement, the First Persian Gulf War does serve as a meaningful example. Emblematic of the late twentieth-­ century “revolution in military affairs” (rma) that signaled a shift to computerized operations, it was the first U.S. war to incorporate the newly coordinated satellite navigation and guidance systems with geo­graph­i­cal data banks: the global positioning system (gps) and the geo­graph­i­cal information system (gis).3 The conflict also remains notable for the limited release to the public of imagery of “precision” bombing, footage that many of the missiles themselves—­the so-­called smart bombs—­produced as they attacked targets. This next iteration of a “tv war” for a post-­Vietnam generation brought a seeming realism to t­ hose watching at home: simulated real-­time action with spectacular visual effects. As Douglas Kellner recalls, the videos of attacks carefully edited and released by the military “­were replayed for days, producing the image of precise bombing and coding the destruction as positive,” promoting the affective realization that war was “fun, aesthetic, and fascinating” (1992, 159). Yet, thanks to severe limits placed on journalist access, battlefield imagery was tightly controlled by the governments on both sides of the conflict, offering a packaged “realism” that signaled the limits of repre­sen­ta­tion. ­Those journalists who w ­ ere “embedded”—­officially attached to military units—­found their actions heavi­ly curtailed and information managed by military public relations units. The entire edifice of modern photojournalism, based on the exploits of iconic figures like Robert Capa and which had reached its apex during the Vietnam War, was eroded. For most journalists, the First Persian Gulf War was as “virtual” as for the rest of us consuming media at “home.” As Ian Walker has observed: For in many ways the journalists who w ­ ere “­there” ­were no more “­there” than we w ­ ere in front of our screens. They ­either sat in Saudi Arabia, attending press conferences being shown precision hits by smart bombs, or they sat on ships in the Gulf watching the Cruise missiles being fired, or they stood on their h ­ otel balcony in Baghdad watching t­ hose missiles come down the street and turn left at the traffic lights. Or they sat in front of their tele­vi­sion sets like the rest of us, and reported the war from t­ here. In other words, they could not get at the war. (1995, 237) 184 Chapter 5

If the journalists could not get at the lived experience of the war as it was in pro­gress, their cameras could not get t­here ­either; ­there was no significant photojournalism of, as Walker termed it, “the carnage” (237). Although estimates of Iraqi dead in that war number in the hundreds of thousands, in the West, at least, t­ here ­were very few “close-­ups.” A war that was conducted primarily as an air war offered mostly aerial images of remote, arid landscapes. This war, then, unlike the heavi­ly mythologized conventions of combat photojournalism associated with World War II and Vietnam, presented U.S. televisual spectators with a very dif­fer­ent aesthetic mediascape: one of absence and distance rather than on-­location proximity reporting accompanied by spectacular or sentimental imagery to trigger the conventional nationalist response. The quandary for critics of Gulf War repre­sen­ta­tional practices could be located right on the line between realism and abstraction, reportage and art. W ­ ere ­there advantages for critical thinking in the absence of what had become expected genuflections t­oward the intimate view of the horrors of warfare? Or, did the abstraction of the remote viewpoint only reinforce and recuperate the perspective of the military? The politics of repre­sen­ta­tional practices ­were very much at the heart of the discussion on both a popu­lar and a scholarly level. It should not surprise us, therefore, that one of the enduring artworks produced in relation to the First Persian Gulf War engaged the war at a distance through the abstract properties of the aerial image. THE DESERT T H AT I S N O L ON G ER A D ESERT: SOPHIE RISTE L H UEB ER’ S FAI T

—­Are we on Mars or what? . . . ​ —­That’s just it; you can never work out the scale with her. —­But ­here, ­these roads, ­these fires, this black sky, this is Earth, alas, this is definitely planet Earth. —­Bruno Latour, “Introduction: ‘She Leans ­Towards the Truth, Our Sophie’ ”

Sophie Ristelhueber’s photography trou­bles the quest for documentary realism, certainty, and sentimental subjects that so often defines the repre­ sen­ta­tional practices of modern warfare in con­temporary media. At the close of the First Persian Gulf War, Ristelhueber, a French artist, traveled to Kuwait’s border with Iraq and photographed areas she was able to reach by he­li­cop­ter or on foot. Out of this body of work, seventy-­one photo­graphs, exhibited as Fait in Eu­rope and as Aftermath in the UK and North Amer­i­ca, cite with subtle complexity the conventions of landscape and aerial imagery of a war­time colonial pres­ent: ruins and reconnaissance, architecture and The Politics of the Sensible  185

target, vistas and maps. The distancing effect of ­these largely aerial photo­ graphs places viewers in an aesthetic zone that can take some time to engage. Ristelhueber’s photography emphatically avoids the repre­sen­ta­tion of embodied carnage and the conventions of realist documentary that structure conflict photojournalism. Drawing on the visual tradition of twentieth-­ century aerial photography that si­mul­ta­neously constructs and destabilizes scientific certainty, Fait also references modernist art practices that trou­ble both realist and picturesque approaches to landscape and the h ­ uman form. As Rancière has written of Ristelhueber’s photography, in Fait, she “effects a displacement of the exhausted affect of indignation to a more discreet affect, an affect of indeterminate effect—­curiosity, the desire to see closer up” (2011, 104). In ­these images, the format of aerial photography grounds and also releases histories of repre­sen­ta­tion, offering po­liti­cal possibilities without all the usual identitarian attachments. Across numerous publications and interviews since the early 1990s, Ristelhueber has reiterated a dual starting point for Fait that poses the tension between documentary realism and modernist aesthetics. As she has related: “In February 1991, during the first Gulf war, I saw a photo­graph in Time magazine showing the impact of French bombs on the Kuwait desert. The idea of ­doing a work about this wounded land became an obsession. In October, I fi­nally got a visa and went out t­ here” (2010). The black-­and-­white aerial photo­graph noticed by Ristelhueber accompanied a Time cover story, “The Air War: How Targets Are Chosen,” written by Bruce W. Nelan and published in the February  25 issue (see fig.  5.1). The article addressed the “tragic” incident in which “laser-­guided, 2,000-lb. bombs” fired from Stealth fighter-­bombers hit a bunker “filled with Iraqi civilians” who had “taken refuge ­there from nighttime raids on the capital.” Since ­there is no question that the munitions “hit their mark with pinpoint accuracy,” the controversy around this event swirled around the prob­lem of intelligence—­was the bunker an “ordinary civilian shelter,” as “the Iraqis insist,” or a “former shelter recently converted to military use,” as the “U.S. command insists”? (Nelan 1991). The rest of the article described “painstaking” efforts on the part of the U.S. military to achieve precision: “Fighter-­bomber pi­lots have divided the battlefield into small, lettered squares on the map called ‘killing zones.’ Working their way across the desert, sector by sector, spotters direct strike planes onto specific targets on the ground. Electronic warfare planes black out ground-­based Iraqi radar, as airborne tankers circle lazily to refuel the fighters that line up b ­ ehind them. The w ­ hole armada is choreographed by controllers in awacs radar planes, who see every­thing in the air for more 186 Chapter 5

FIGURE 5.1  ​“The

Air War: How Targets Are Chosen,” Time, February 25, 1991, 27.

than 200 miles in any direction” (Nelan 1991). In this textbook description of the God’s-­eye control of the “field of the air,” as Douhet would have put it, the painstaking nature of the compilation of priority targets appears designed to assuage any doubt that civilian casualties ­were kept to a minimum. The official line was that targets in this war ­were military. Thus, the caption ­under the photo­graph that accompanied this discussion of “collateral damage” reads: “French Jaguar fighters bomb Iraq’s Republican Guard.” The photo­graph that struck Ristelhueber as so in­ter­est­ing as she was leafing through Time magazine at a newsstand in Paris was of a very dif­fer­ent nature from many of the other photo­graphs from the Gulf War in that issue. The other cover story, “War of Images,” presented seven color photo­graphs of both damaged buildings and bodies along with the following introductory text: For weeks, the dominant image of the gulf b ­ attle was a grainy video clip, cross hairs bouncing slightly as a tiny bomb headed for a tiny building and (slight pause) a tiny puff of smoke exploded across the screen. The The Politics of the Sensible  187

pictures make the war seem remote and bloodless. But last week Saddam Hussein discovered the power of images. Photog­raphers ­were allowed access to the tragedy that resulted when the allies bombed a building in Baghdad where hundreds had taken refuge. Th ­ ose pictures—­and the ones on t­ hese pages from elsewhere in Baghdad and from Basra—­put the ­human impact of the war into focus. But they cannot tell the ­whole story. They do not show Saddam’s destruction of Kuwait, where no photog­ raphers can go. And they do not show the large areas of Baghdad (like the mosque at left) that have remained untouched throughout the carefully targeted air campaign. (Nelan and Dowell 1991) Captions that accompany t­hese full-­color images include “A young boy nurses his crudely mended leg ­after being injured by shrapnel ­after playing on a Basra street”; “An Iraqi boy sells produce in front of bombed shops and homes near Baghdad’s Ministry of Justice”; “Two survivors of a bombing raid in Baghdad’s Aimer district that Iraqis said killed eight p ­ eople”; and “One of a row of shops flattened by allied bombs in Baghdad; across the street, life goes on” (Nelan and Dowell 1991). Perhaps the black-­and-­white aerial photo­graph of French Jaguar fighters dropping bombs in Kuwait—­ “remote and bloodless”—­was placed in relation to ­these other images to underscore not only the participation of allies like France or the paradoxical tension between extreme firepower and precision that exemplifies airpower discursivity but another component of the “war of images” in modernity, the co-­constitution of documentary realism and modernist aesthetics. Ristelhueber has related that the aerial photo­graph in Time magazine immediately put her in mind of Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp’s Élevage de poussière (Dust Breeding), a Dadaist work from 1920 (see fig. 5.2). Dust Breeding is an unruly work, playful and enigmatic. As the story goes, Man Ray photographed the back of Duchamp’s famous piece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even—­also known as Large Glass (1915–23), which the artist had left lying flat on its face for a year while he was out of the country. The accumulated dust is captured in Man Ray’s photo­graph but then became incorporated into Large Glass itself by Duchamp. Dust Breeding “exists only in its photographic rec­ord,” thereby playing with the concept of the ephemeral while exposing the “ambivalence of repre­sen­ta­tion” (Hindry 1998, 74; Mayer 2008).4 When Dust Breeding appeared in 1922 in the Dadaist magazine Littéra­ ture, Duchamp amped up the ele­ment of what we would ­today call “camp,” signaling the presence of his cross-­dressing persona Rrose Sélavy, her very 188 Chapter 5

Ray (1890–1976), Dust Breeding, 1920, printed ca. 1967. Gelatin silver print, 23.9 × 30.4 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Photography in the Fine Arts Gift, 1969 (69.521). Image copyright © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Courtesy of Art Resource, New York. FIGURE 5.2  ​Man

name a play on both “eros” and c’est la vie.5 ­There are two sets of captions ­under the photo­graph. The first, on the left, reads “Voici la domaine de Rrose Sélavy; Comme elle est aride; Comme elle est fertile; Comme elle est joyeux; Comme elle est triste!” (­Here is the domain of Rrose Sélavy—­how arid it is—­how fertile—­how joyful—­how sad!). The second caption, on the right, “Vue prise en aéroplane” (View taken from an airplane), clearly links Man Ray’s photo­graph of Duchamp’s dust to this still-­new and compelling mode of perception—­the aerial photo­graph. As David Hopkins has noted, Man Ray himself referred to the way that the dust on the work “resembled some strange landscape seen from a bird’s-­eye view” (Ray [1963] 1988, 78–79; Hopkins 2013, 136). Only a few years a­ fter the “applied modernism” of the images of “cubist” and “futurist” landscapes in the aviation manuals of World War I, Dust Breeding engaged the problematics of aesthetics in a multidisciplinary mode, full of affect, irony, and, even, dirt. In this work, the complex dispositions and materialities of joy, aridity, fertility, mobility, and the view from above are drawn together for an arresting inquiry into the aftermath politics of the sensible. Dust Breeding is not a bloodless or cold engagement with remote sensing. Even high modernist Kazimir Malevich, who pared down repre­sen­ta­tion to The Politics of the Sensible  189

essential geometric forms, embraced aerial views not for their disconnection from affect but for their figuration of the world as a “ ‘desert’ in which nothing can be perceived but feeling” ([1927] 1959, 67) (see plate 21). The achievement of early twentieth-­century art movements like Malevich’s “non-­objective Suprematism” would be based on an emptying out of the usual contextual ele­ments. “The appropriate means of repre­sen­ta­tion,” Malevich wrote in 1927, “is always the one which gives fullest pos­si­ble expression to feeling as such and which ignores the familiar appearance of objects” (24–25). In this way, modernists developed their own Orientalist figuration, drawing on the spatial properties of the Westerner’s “desert” to connect the artist and the viewer through feeling to sensory perception. This kind of fantasy of negative, open space can only persist in an era that both literally and figuratively removed or evacuated life forms from the terrain, filling the space with abstract geometrical forms that served military as well as aesthetic or spiritual ends. By the late twentieth c­ entury, this desert is a fully flattened ontology, a screen, a singular Western world, drawing in and compressing every­thing modern to transmit a surface image of emptiness. This “desert” is always already a component of Orientalist discourse: highly aestheticized, powerfully negating, filling anticipated meanings in the context of asymmetrical warfare. The First Persian Gulf War of 1990–91 both intensified and destabilized this Western tendency to create fantastic deserts in order to control the terrain. Without denying the historically constructed allure of such a space, the ambiguities and limits of repre­sen­ta­tion became more apparent, less masked. This moment drew Ristelhueber; as she remembered, “I was obsessed by the idea of a desert that was no longer a desert” (Brutvan 2001, 129; original French in Guerrin 1992). ­After trying for months to get a visa, Ristelhueber fi­nally received permission to enter Kuwait seven months ­after the official cessation of warfare. Working her way ­toward the border with Iraq but unable to venture very far into the country, Ristelhueber found herself among many photojournalists all angling for stories and viewpoints. However, unlike the photojournalists, Ristelhueber turned away from action and narrative and t­oward the stillness of near artifacts and remote perspectives. She hired he­li­cop­ters and walked the terrain on foot, recording very small instances at widely varying scales. As she has described this work: “I was not d ­ oing something functional. I was making a fiction. For me that work is not about information and it’s not about that war. It’s only a work about scars” (2009). From the air, without a horizon line or orienting landmarks, the eye is drawn to the marks, the lines, the patterns on the ground. This perspective, akin to the aerial view, infuses the photo­graphs in Fait (see plate 22). As Marc Mayer has observed, 190 Chapter 5

“Fait refers to the brief and telling factuality of perishable marks in the desert. The dumb fact of the willful mark, the elusive ur-­sign of art and language, is the point of departure for most of her work” (2008). Although many of the images that comprise Fait are indeed aerial photo­ graphs, the work also includes many examples of close proximity (see plate 23). Ristelhueber has described the objects left ­behind in the sensorial aftermath of both air and ground war at close range: “I found a collection of shaving brushes, razors, and ­little mirrors that must have formed part of the soldiers’ kits. Th ­ ere ­were personal diaries and tartan blankets like ­those of my childhood. I got the feeling I could physically sense the soldiers’ crazed flight northwards. I was deeply disturbed by this twofold abandon of both man and object. Such ‘still lifes’ highlight the prosaic side of warfare. At the same time, once divorced from their purposes, objects too become abstractions” (Brutvan 2001, 137, 147; original French in Guerrin 1992). The physical separation of the possession from the possessor transforms every­thing, abstraction signifying what comes ­after death. In the photo­graphs themselves it is hard to tell the difference between high aerial views and ground-­level close-­ups. Wandering through a border zone deeply marked by warfare, oil wells destroyed by the retreating army and still smoking months ­later, produces a view off-­kilter, out of whack. Death is everywhere, palpable but unseen, filling the space. Empty trenches, cast-­off armaments, a lost shoe, ravaged landscape—­these are not natu­ral phenomena. This is a terrain that has been forcefully and deliberately made, c’est fait. In French, fait means “fact” and it also connotes the completion of an action or “something that is done.” In considering the title of Ristelhueber’s work, Walker has noted, as do other Anglophone critics, that fait does not translate easily into En­glish. Although fait and “fact” have the same Latin root (facere: to do), the French word conveys the completion of a task while the En­glish term has come to signify stability and objective truth. Yet, Walker cautions us, facts are made and not found; they have histories: “a fact always has a cause, and one can hardly understand it without knowing how it came to be a ‘fact’ ” (1995, 244–45). Ristelhueber’s Fait demands that we acknowledge both the factual nature of the war and its unspooling, unruly ambiguities, its “rogue intensities,” its aftermaths. Walker does not much care for the En­glish term aftermath that has come to be used as the title for installations of Fait outside France—­“sounds rather doom-­laden and elegiac”—­preferring “evidence” in an open-­ended sense of the word: “­Here is the evidence, Ristelhueber’s images seem to say; work out what happened—if you can” (245). James Ketchum has pointed out that by invoking aerial photography, Ristelhueber chose to work with a format that raises the expectation in the The Politics of the Sensible  191

viewer that they are “about to see more and with greater clarity” (2005, 187). Drawing most heavi­ly, although not exclusively, on the view from above, Ristelhueber’s work triggers cultural assumptions about what can and cannot be seen by the ­human eye as well as through the mediation of the camera. David Joselit has commented that the format of an artwork is part of the “strategy for activating the space between what an image shows and what an image does.” That is, the format of the work is more than the medium, signaling “how an image is situated within a set of relations,” its “heterogeneity” of “components” (which can include “the means of production of the image, the ­human effort that brought it into being, its mode of circulation, the historical events that condition it, ­etc.”). In arguing that formats “attract attention and exercise power,” Joselit reminds us that an artwork “almost always contains vestiges of what might be called roots—or infrastructural extensions—of its entanglements in the world” (2015). The aerial image is an active format, making vis­i­ble the “connective tissue” between the “entanglements” of artwork and world. ­These two “components”—­modern military imagery and high modernist abstraction—­could be situated as antinomies in a social field of disciplinary divisions in media studies. But t­hese divisions do deliberate work in Ristelhueber’s photo­graphs, establishing relations of repre­sen­ta­tion that operate not only within the images but as supplemental excess. That is, to paraphrase Joselit, if one must think about what is folded into images as well as what extends out from them, then Fait’s compelling force can be linked to its active engagement with its format. Vio­lence wells up from ­these images in insidious ways, as the viewer strains to see while dreading the sight. The evacuation of photojournalistic conventions—no blasted bodies, no keening figures—­forces the viewer to try to make sense out of abstractions and ambiguities, to figure out not only what is ­there to be seen but “what it is to see” (Latour 1990, 30). The disappearance of ­human scale in ­these images also mirrors the difficulty faced by war correspondents to rec­ord the events, places, and ­people involved in current conflicts. Both Margot Norris and Sarah James have pointed to the paucity of images of war dead in the rec­ord of the First Persian Gulf War as part of its amorality; its transformation in perceptual logics, they argue, resulted in multiple complicities with the war machine, a situation in which aesthetics is posed over and against evidence (Norris 1994, 290; James 2013, 127). Building on Elaine Scarry’s argument in The Body in Pain (1985) that distance dehumanizes and undermines capacities for intimacy, in relation to work like Ristelhueber’s, James critiques the “beautiful” emptiness of Ristelhueber’s imagery: “Picturing a depopulated 192 Chapter 5

military sublime can only perpetuate the myth that the sublime, and therefore terror, is inhuman, something neo-­liberal states and technocrats want us to believe” (2013, 125). Remote abstraction is the culprit in ­these critiques. But a classic, idealist notion of aesthetics is also adjudged to be a prob­lem in relation to the “intolerable image” of war. In par­tic­u­lar, critics like James charge that Ristelhueber’s images are so beautiful that they evacuate any possibility of the po­ liti­cal critique that should be raised by the site and subject of the photography. Documentary conventions are hardly devoid of aesthetics but they openly participate in the arena of high art at their risk—­only select photog­ raphers produce work that enters the marketplace of museums and galleries without losing their association with ­human rights social movements, usually through appeals to universalist, humanist values. The twentieth-­century documentary tradition incorporates photography to see more, deeply and thoroughly, as if to vanquish time by recording every­thing. This version of “seeing all” meets the histories of aerial viewing with ambivalence. The distancing effects and even automation of parts of the mechanical pro­cess of capturing the image do not always fit comfortably with the ethos of h ­ uman rights or social justice documentation. In Fait, as in other works, Ristelhueber tries not to document this war but to “make a statement about how l­ittle we see” (Monegal 2016, 261). Turning away from historical reportage seems to be a choice that firmly links the artists to an apo­liti­cal artistic tradition. Produced slowly, requiring thoughtful, close examination even in a gallery setting, the photo­graphs in Fait are without a doubt insistently aestheticized. They appeared at first in a small chapbook (part of a series of such books full of photo­graphs of conflict zones that Ristelhueber has published over many years) and then entered a specific installation context that is often discussed as much as the photo­graphs themselves. To see the images in person is to view them in an intentionally created aura, an almost panoramic immersion. Ristelhueber has explained that she gilded by hand the boxes that frame the photo­graphs, turning them into “objects that ­were at once precious and much like camouflage,” such that it appears that the images are “linked together by a set of glowing halos” (2009). The seventy-­one “glowing” photo­graphs that comprise Fait are displayed in ways that trigger embodied responses. Mayer links the exhibition experience of Fait to a pa­norama that overwhelms the senses of the viewer: “A dizzying array of flat images arranged in a way that fractures our point of view, it might cause a kind of artificially induced vertigo akin to the Stendhal Syndrome: a map-­de-­mer view of a war-­riven desert” (2008). Fait’s instigation The Politics of the Sensible  193

of vertigo is referenced as well by Cheryl Brutvan in her discussion of the installation: “Enveloped by the shifting planes, confused by the absence of recognizable scale and loss of perspective in ­these intentionally abstract details, the viewer is left to his own conclusions” (2001, 151). Mayer emphasizes that the “aerial views” are never any one t­ hing, demanding that the viewer constantly “re­orient” in relation to the ground, a lateral distance close-up (2008). The aerial perspective at work in Fait, then, is neither fully militarized nor purely aestheticized. Rather, Fait calls attention to the space between, the historical construction and highly mediated objective real­ity of photographic repre­sen­ta­tion in the age of aerial reconnaissance imagery. Fait shows us the ground from above as historical evidence, but it reveals a topographical nightmare of evacuated meaning. In ­these photo­ graphs, flattened landscapes of violent acquisition engage war­time aftermaths, recalling the ways colonial maps emptied deserts and created wastelands in the quest for oil and archaeological trea­sure. In the context of photographic exhibition, however, Fait spurs us to distrust or become curious about scale, to try to discern what has happened, to register the difficulty of seeing a loss that cannot be fully perceived—­the physical challenge repeating the ideological politics of the history of repre­sen­ta­tion of ­these places and times. In Fait, what do we see? A moonscape? A line of fortifications? Grids of landscapes? Burning oil wells? Tracks in sand? This photography flattens its views and disturbs the relations of scale and proportion. The images remind us of the continual emptying and loss of presence and meaning that any repre­sen­ta­tion entails, always dividing between this ­thing and that to develop legibility. All repre­sen­ta­tion relies on a difference between what ­will or can be seen and what ­will not or cannot be viewed, filling the scene with information of all kinds. The tricky ele­ment of this pro­cess is that we do not know how to sense what has been left out by framing, by focus, among many techniques, and even by our own optical and interpretive capacities. Fait’s sparse landscapes are brimming with interdisciplinary historical and cultural references and citations that draw us beyond the frame, as it w ­ ere, while also drawing us in closer. ­These images are not just floating in ahistorical time and space, celebrating a nomadic alterity. Rather, Ristelhueber’s photo­graphs are so full of pos­si­ble meaning that many kinds of connections are generated. In Fait the flattened logic of the fact mingles with the unspooling history of the photographic artifact to generate the disturbances of time and space of war­time aftermaths. If Fait’s aerial perspective evades the fascist sensibility that accompanies the sublime spectacularization of war as well as the sentimental nationalisms that are incorporated into the 194 Chapter 5

realist documentary conventions of war reportage, it remains committed to negotiating distance and destabilizing relations of scale. As Walker argues, Fait’s “post-­reportage” strategy “suggests not what photography cannot do, but what it can” (1995, 240). SHADOW SITE S: J AN AN N E AL - A ­ N I ’ S AERI A L PE R S P E C T I VE S

In their indeterminacies, ­these surfaces anchor vectors of looking and ­those of seeing. They cohere objects, directing movements, specifying positions and distances. They frame places, locating and affecting their viewing and their views. Through the shadows cast upon them, surfaces mark time. In singularities of contact, points of impact, memories come into view, sudden moments of insight surface to attention. —­Ella Chmielewska, “Vectors of Looking”

In London-­based artist Jananne al-­Ani’s most recent multipart proj­ect, The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land without ­People, she has moved into filming from the air, focusing on the southern Jordanian desert.6 She has described this frontier zone as “an extraordinary place” that draws her ­because of its “pivotal position, in-­between incredibly contentious and contested locations—­just east of Israel and occupied Palestine, and sharing borders with Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Syria.” This desert “crossroads” is a site full of traces of past events and inhabitants, liminal presences that can be sensed from vari­ous ­angles and in dif­fer­ent lights (see fig. 5.3). Past events and absent presence operate on multiple levels in al-­Ani’s work. As she has stated in a recent interview, she is preoccupied with the “ways that the evidence of atrocity and genocide haunts the often beautiful landscapes into which the bodies of victims dis­appear.” Her work, she argues, “needs” to “represent that subtle under­lying presence and not make a travesty of it” (R. Withers 2011). Survival, redemption, living become pos­si­ble in the sensory imaging of landscape as affective material.7 Al-­Ani’s engagement with aerial reconnaissance photography is not haphazard. She borrows “Shadow Sites,” the appellation of a two-­part moving image component of The Aesthetics of Disappearance, from the title of Kitty Hauser’s book on the influence of aerial photography on British archaeology and national landscape. In her work, Hauser reminds us that “sites” are places “where ­things have occurred” and in which “individuals or groups have inhabited or passed through” (2007, 2). Like O. G. S. Crawford and the other aerial archaeologists who are discussed in Hauser’s text, al-­Ani is drawn to the proj­ect of detecting “where something once was,” the “agglomeration The Politics of the Sensible  195

al-­Ani, “Aerial V,” production still from Shadow Sites II, 2001, single-­ channel digital video. Courtesy of the Artist and Abraaj Capital Art Prize. Photography by Adrian Warren. FIGURE 5.3  ​Jananne

of traces of past actions, pro­cesses, and occurrences” (2). Shadow sites reveal just such agglomerations, but they can only be seen when the slanting rays of the sun early or late in the day cast shadows across the landscape. As Hauser explains, the basic princi­ple of aerial archaeology “rests upon the fact that once soil has been disturbed . . . ​that disturbance is essentially virtually ineradicable, no m ­ atter how long ago it took place” (163). ­These disturbances can be discerned by the aerial camera in specific ways, as soil and crop marks that become vis­i­ble “after-­math”—­that is, in specific times of year ­after harvests or at times of low growth or at par­tic­u­lar times of day as shadow sites. As al-­Ani writes: “When you are up in the air and the sun is just rising or setting in the sky, ­these very slight undulations that ­wouldn’t be pres­ent on the ground reveal the site as a drawing from above b ­ ecause of the shadows. The ground itself becomes a kind of latent photographic image of a past event embedded in the landscape” (Binkovitz 2012). Thinking of the “ground itself ” as a “latent photographic image” of past events creates a power­ful relationship between al-­Ani’s aerial camera and arid terrain. Inspired by the forensic archaeology of Margaret Cox, who has been called on to detect mass graves, al-­Ani has remarked that often in war’s aftermath the “bodies of civilians or victims have dis­appeared into the landscape” in ways that are “subtle and hard to find” but that traces of this absence are always discernible in the disturbance of the surface of the ground viewed from the air (al-­Ani 2011).8 196 Chapter 5

Although the techniques of aerial forensics inform al-­Ani’s practice, like Ristelhueber, she is drawn to the “scars” and traces of life that can be discerned in the desert filmed from above more for their abstraction of form than as an operation of forensis. ­C ounter to the Orientalist myth of the desert as an empty space promulgated by O. G. S. Crawford and so many o ­ thers, al-­Ani approaches this landscape as full of traces of occupation, presence and absence—­all signs that can be sensed, even partially, from the air. Maymanah Farhat has described this effect in the installation of al-­Ani’s Shadow Sites II at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. in 2012: A large, suspended screen shows a sequence of barren aerial shots that ­ ere taken from multiple altitudes. As the camera moves in for close-­ w ups of what ­little evidence of ­human activity is shown, edifices begin to morph into dif­fer­ent compounds, signaling the passage of time (in reverse) or a visual excavation that unfolds before the artist’s lens. A military base vanishes as the outline of a home emerges, which then dissolves when ancient ruins begin to surface. Ambient visuals continue as new items are introduced, including sprawling livestock facilities and agricultural fields. Positioned from such elevation, the camera captures a landscape that is nearly abstracted, alternating between the gray and white of shadows and light, stark but always yielding to life. An added key component is the loud hum of a plane’s motor, which tends to resemble the sound of a drone overhead. (Farhat 2012) The Sackler Gallery placed Shadow Sites II in counterpoint to an exhibition of Ernst Herzfeld’s early twentieth-­century photo­graphs of archaeological sites in Iraq. Herzfeld was a German archaeologist, surveyor, and expert on Islamic art who was stationed in Iraq during World War I. In his iconic panoramic photo­graph of Ctesiphon, his shadow can be seen rising in an ephemeral but definite manner in the center of the image. Frederick Bohrer has commented that in this photo­graph, Herzfeld, a “paradigm of the scientific, object-­minded inquirer,” has created something more akin to a portrait that conveys a “point of view” (2011, 18). When the image was published, however, the shadow figure was removed, leaving a pristine, empty landscape marked only by a ruin. Al-­Ani’s engagement with aerial archaeology places her imagery in a dynamic counterpoint to Herzfeld’s pres­ent absent and absent pres­ent self-­portrait. Commenting more broadly but in ways that could also address Herzfeld’s own aesthetic of disappearance, she has stated: “I was interested in the idea of the disappearance of the body in the landscape through crime, genocide and massacre but also in the The Politics of the Sensible  197

idea of the artist trying to remove himself or his presence from the image” (Binkovitz 2012). In a similar vein, Bohrer has written that archaeological ways of seeing produce “crime scenes,” “photographed to understand the dynamics of destruction” and to “allow a reconstruction of the object” (2011, 11). Along ­these same lines, Hauser argues that aerial archaeology constitutes a redemptive historiography since it provides evidence that the past is recoverable. Latent traces can always be discerned if the right conditions, subjects, and technologies are brought together. The “romance” of aerial archaeology, Hauser admits, is based on its transformation of culture into nature; that is, the image of the past reappears only through the natu­ral cycle of agricultural aftermath—­the site must be viewed at specific times of year in certain light, and so forth (2007, 176–77). Al-­Ani’s concern with the recovery of what has dis­appeared, however, is always subverted by the limits of aerial photography and the ambiguities of evidence. Rather than being redemptive in a humanist framework, al-­Ani’s aerial imagery engages war­time aftermaths, committed to a past that can only ever be partially known if at all but marvelous in its sudden appearance in certain light in the right season. As Virilio has written of Georges Méliès’s first experiments in stop-­motion photography, “what he shows of real­ity is what reacts continually to the absences of the real­ity which has passed” (1991, 17). Al-­Ani’s drawing together of airplane, camera, air, and ground makes pos­si­ble the “in-­between state” that makes forms vis­i­ble, illuminating the “non-­seen of the lost moments” (17). AERIAL IMAGE RY AS CRI TI CAL FOREN SI S: S H E I KH AN D WEIZMAN ’ S TH E CON FL I CT SH OREL I N E

Politics starts in the animated inhabitation of ­things, not way downstream in the vari­ous dreamboats and horror shows that get moving. —­Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects

Can aerial imagery assist social justice proj­ects by providing topographical evidence of displacements, occupations, erasures, and unlawful habitation? Does the abstraction of the aerial image, its “unnatural” perspective, make pos­si­ble new meanings or foreclose historical analy­sis? Along ­these lines, John Beck has considered the “slippery” nature of aerial imagery’s abstraction, its “ambiguity and indeterminacy,” in relation to its links to the “military-­industrial optic of capture and command,” to ask ­whether this technology screens or camouflages “content that is best hidden” or exposes and interrogates the ways remote sensing works (2013, 47–48). Since the aerial 198 Chapter 5

image generates a tension between ambiguity and certainty, it calls attention to its construction—it is a t­ hing, like the Swiss border that the French soldiers in La Grande Illusion could not “see” but knew to be a real and transformative force in their lives if they could survive to cross it. Ryan Bishop and John Phillips refer to this tension as the “hinge” between the aesthetic and the functional, an animated and dynamic division that “creates new ground and new conditions that in turn force new divisions” (2011, 7–8). This par­tic­u­lar divide, they argue, stretches back through the Western classical tradition’s opposition between praxis and poiesis. Aristotle delineated poiesis as the end product of the making of something and praxis as the action itself. Bishop and Phillips note that in the modern period, the action of making inherent to aesthetics has been narrowed to a connotation of “useless beauty” while the functional has become dominant through a “range of calculative, pragmatic, techno-­logical princi­ples” (7). The prob­lem of perception in modernity, then, is not so much a conflict between abstraction and precise identification in repre­sen­ta­tion but that the construction of this division is mystified. The “hinge” allows for the management of this dynamic oscillation; as Bishop and Phillips put it: “The hinge thus offers a choice: the real­ity ­behind vis­i­ble ­things can be made vis­i­ble or the making vis­i­ble of the real­ity ­behind vis­i­ble ­things reveals that it cannot be made vis­i­ble” (2011, 9). The conceptual tool of the hinge allows us to understand the simultaneous aspects of technologies like aerial imaging then not as reducible to e­ ither the same or radical difference but as deeply connected. Spectatorship proceeds as if ­there is no crafting, no poiesis, and thus the possibility of innumerable t­ hings unseen or unsensed in the visual object. In the logic of the hinge, which allows for both connection and disconnection, seeing and unseeing, presence and absence, the military “operates with an aesthetics it often refuses to admit”; “the very constitution of the aesthetic is what makes the military and its functional instrumentalism pos­si­ble” (15). Along similar lines, Beck concludes that the aerial photo­graph, ­whether produced by and for the military or for completely dif­fer­ent uses, holds all t­ hose practices in tension with each other. As he writes, “it is the awareness of hiddenness that the aerial photo­graph makes pos­si­ble by generating the oscillation of perception between the indexical and the abstract” (2013, 65). In a series of linked proj­ects over the last several years, Fazal Sheikh and Eyal Weizman have drawn on aerial imagery in just this hinged, connective sense to delve into layers of landscape in violently militarized spaces (see plate 24). In 2010 American-­born artist Fazal Sheikh began a five-­year photographic proj­ect in Israel and the West Bank. This work, which was The Politics of the Sensible  199

published in 2015 as The Erasure Trilogy, began as an inquiry into the “events and legacy of the 1948 Arab-­Israeli War” and continued as a kind of archaeological search for the sites of “former Palestinian villages” (Sheikh 2015). In Sheikh’s introduction to the notes that accompany the aerial photo­graphs compiled as Desert Bloom (one of the three works in The Erasure Trilogy), as well as in Eyal Weizman’s lengthy essay published in The Conflict Shoreline (a work conceived collaboratively with Sheikh that includes many of his photo­graphs), the power­ful dynamics of aerial imagery are fully considered and utilized. Particularly in the northern Negev Desert, which has been emptied of Bedouin inhabitants by the Israeli government and which is now slated for significant development, documentation to support indigenous land claims is e­ ither lacking or exists in formats that are not recognized by the Israeli ­legal system. Sheikh explains his recourse to aerial photography in the following context: Frustrated by my ability to fully visualize the situation on the ground, I deci­ded it was necessary to see the land from above. I wanted a sense of how this area of radical upheaval fitted into the broad sweep of the desert. I hired a small plane to overfly the area and began to study the land, attempting to isolate the clues it had to offer. I was fortunate in having an Israeli pi­lot who was willing to share his knowledge of the desert’s history with me. Gradually I began to assem­ble the pieces of an interconnected puzzle. From above, the desert offered multilayered evidence of its geo­graph­ i­cal, historical, and po­liti­cal evolution. I could distinguish closed military zones, the traces of former unrecognized villages, the spread of afforestation, and the fields and buildings of Bedouin villages u ­ nder threat, as well as the growing sprawl of Israeli settlements and the new military training camps and bases that had been moved to the area to protect them. (2015) In their collaborative proj­ect The Conflict Shoreline (2015), Sheikh and Weizman bring to our attention the strug­gle of one Bedouin community, the al-’Uqbi tribe, to inhabit the land they have considered to be their own for generations, land that is now denied to them ­under Israeli law. Following the creation of the state of Israel, the al-’Uqbi ­were ordered to leave their village of al-’Araqib and its surroundings for what was supposed to be a temporary displacement to accommodate a military training exercise. When the Israeli authorities refused to allow the community to return a­ fter the training period ended, they moved back anyway, initiating a staggering number of returns and expulsions—­almost seventy between the late 1940s and ­today. As the army demolished any al-’Uqbi tents or built structures, the 200 Chapter 5

tribe, ­under the leadership of Sheikh Suleiman Muhammad al-’Uqbi, would return and try to rebuild—­a pro­cess that has been less than peaceful. The case of the al-’Uqbi and the village of al-’Araqib revolves around the history and meaning of “Bedouin,” “cultivation,” “desert,” and “dwelling,” to name only a few of the complex ele­ments at work in this biopo­liti­cal contest. Weizman stresses the politics at work in this “systematic state campaign” that seeks to remove an entire incon­ve­nient population from the “fertile northern threshold of the desert” and relocate them to areas far more arid (2015, 9). The line of contest is only vis­i­ble as a “seam between two climatic conditions”—­the “subtropical Mediterranean climate zone” and the “arid ­belt”—­a “climatic threshold that stretches continuously for more than 7,500 kilo­meters, from along the northern edge of the Sahara over the g­ reat Arabian Desert to the Gobi” (9). The al-’Uqbi tribe is not the first or the last group to fight against the colonizing tactic of removal backed by military force. They join approximately eighty thousand Bedouins who have refused to be settled into townships far away from the lands to which they seek to return. Their case has been ­adopted by the Forensic Architecture group and other nongovernmental organ­izations for adjudication in the Eu­ro­pean High Court. Aerial photo­graphs are at the heart of Sheikh and Weizman’s efforts to assist the al-’Uqbi’s case. Aerial photo­graphs have been an impor­tant part of the debate about contested land in the Negev Desert and elsewhere in Israel/Palestine. For example, Neve Gordon’s website (2016) linked to his 2008 book Israel’s Occupation includes aerial imagery as documentary evidence along with maps, reports, and other artifacts. Sheikh’s photo­graphs in The Conflict Shoreline provide a more continuous and considered rec­ord than the haphazard collection of disparate artifacts that usually comprise the social justice archive, bridging the museum/gallery zones where work like Ristelhueber’s Fait would be installed and the more haphazard print and online activist spaces. His beautifully rendered photo­graphs, shot at specific times and in designated locations (not unlike their military counter­parts), develop an aesthetic strategy to inform us of the ways late industrial changes in climate have contributed to the dispossession of Bedouin land, as terrain on the threshold of aridity first became designated as “dead land”—­uncultivated—­while its inhabitants became labeled as “nomadic” in ste­reo­typical ways that belied their patterns of habitation and cultivation. The layers of inquiry that the photo­ graphs make perceptible include the artificial irrigation of confiscated land that made the desert “bloom” so famously post-1948, dividing the terrain between arid wasteland and state-­sponsored garden. Engineering climate as The Politics of the Sensible  201

well as populations, the Israeli state’s colonizing proj­ect fixed what had been “a shifting and elusive meteorological borderline” into a “fixed cartographic line,” producing a “zone of expropriation” through “cartographic and territorial vio­lence” (Weizman and Sheikh 2015, 10). Sheikh’s aerial photo­graphs make ­these events legible through the very components of the format itself. As Weizman writes: For t­hose willing and able to read the photo­graphs closely, the surface of the desert at this time can reveal not only what is pres­ent, but also the subtle traces of what has been erased: traces of ruined homes, small agricultural installations to fields that are no longer, watering holes, and the stains of long removed livestock pens. . . . ​In ­these images the surface of the earth appears as if it was itself a photo­graph, exposed to direct and indirect contact, physical use, and climatic conditions in a similar way in which a film is exposed to the sun’s rays. Sheikh’s aerial images must thus be studied as photo­graphs of photo­graphs. (14–15) ­These aerial images operate in multifarious ways: as evidentiary artifacts in Bedouin land claims and other ­legal cases, ­human rights proj­ects, and ecological assessments. As “instrumental artifacts” they link historical, cultural, ­legal, and economic components to a po­liti­cal pro­cess that works inside but also outside and beyond the state, resonating with Ariella Azoulay’s reworking of the “civil contract” of photography as relations of governance ­under conditions of in­equality (2008, 17). Weizman’s aim is to “bring new material and aesthetic sensibilities to bear upon the ­legal and po­liti­cal implications of state vio­lence, armed conflict, and climate change” across a “multiplicity of forums, po­liti­cal and juridical, institutional and informal” (2014, 9). In fashioning a critical instrumental practice of “forensis” as distinct from the forensic activities of the state, Weizman recognizes that “­things” like a landscape can be brought into dialogue in the populist “forum” of politics and given form through imaging in ways not completely outside yet not reduced solely to judicial, ­legal, and legislative requirements. Acknowledging the limits of h ­ uman rights l­egal frameworks and the ambiguities of h ­ uman testimony, a critical practice of forensis may embrace remote sensing in its widest sense as a variety of historical and con­temporary methods and genres, not as an ideal alternative but as a pragmatic tactic. ­There is no benevolent liberal state in this formulation, only power­ful combines of government, industry, and academia that act together to “inflict vio­lence and deny that they have done so” through “forensic warfare” (11–12). 202 Chapter 5

Weizman focuses his analy­sis on the “frontier zones” that are “outside established state jurisdiction and established frames of criminal justice, where sovereign jurisdiction is unclear . . . ​disintegrated . . . ​or suspended and ­under siege” (2014, 11). In other words, Weizman identifies the areas disrupted and now defined by colonial occupation that continue to be subject to vio­lence in the “colonial pres­ent” as sites where critical forensis is needed to c­ ounter the long war of imperial state forensics. In this kind of aftermath proj­ect, often urgently initiated ­under conditions of extreme or even muted but per­sis­tent vio­lence, aerial imagery is artifactual, indexical, and fully engaged in a politics where its limits and possibilities ­matter. Thus, the war­ time aftermaths politics of the colonial pres­ent can participate in a pro­cess of forensis by drawing on both the archival material of over one hundred years of remote sensing in the “frontier zones” of deserts, tropics, and highlands along with the forensic investigation of more recent aerial images.9 Warfare leaves artifactual materials that can be repurposed and drawn into new registers of sensory interpretation. In areas marked by intensities of vio­lence over so many years, remote sensing can reveal strategies of underreporting and suppression of data, as well as assertions of rupture or newness (that resemble what has been termed in the field of literary analy­sis “strong misreadings”).10 ­These gaps, erasures, and misprisions can be recognized and engaged by collaborative aesthetic practices that do not rely solely on h ­ uman witnesses but on the “sensorial capacity of m ­ atter itself,” or, according to Weizman, “the ways in which “­matter can detect, register, and respond not only to contact and impact, but to influences in its environment and to remote presence” (14–15). In this way, historical and con­temporary maps and aerial photo­graphs can be animated in relation to each other, remaking connections as temporal and spatial ele­ments become vis­i­ble in new coordinates and configurations. A primary challenge for Sheikh and Weizman lay in the nature of the material traces of h ­ uman usage of desert places and the limits of repre­sen­ta­ tional technologies. As Weizman explains: “Mobilized against the claimants was the fact that Bedouin life leaves only gentle marks on the territory, and the inability of film to render t­hese marks clearly” (Weizman and Sheikh 2015, 77). This dual dimension—­the very light impression left on the ecol­ ogy of the terrain in question and the repre­sen­ta­tional capacities of remote sensing—­leads Sheikh and Weizman to work with the format of aerial imagery, layering con­temporary imagery with historical documents, including military photo­graphs and maps. ­There are two time zones of par­tic­u­ lar interest: the summer of 1918 and the winter of 1945—­toward the end The Politics of the Sensible  203

of the declared world wars, in dif­fer­ent seasons (“arid and in bloom”) (15). Layered or superimposed over Sheikh’s con­temporary images, much can be gleaned: “Taken together, t­hese photo­graphs pres­ent us with a palimpsest in which evidence of earlier patterns of habitation and agricultural use have been overlaid by successive settlements, military zones, and areas of cultivation” (16). The layered aesthetics of the “before” and “­after” photo­graphs resurrect the early practices of the technology in the nineteenth c­ entury when the length of time needed for a successful exposure required absolute stillness on the part of ­human subjects. Photo­graphs of live “events” would entail several exposures; the event itself could not be captured rapidly in a legible form. For this very reason, from the beginning, war photography was always already “aftermath.” Fenton’s Crimean battlefields are eerily empty of ­humans yet not devoid of the aura of danger—­Richard Pare reminds us that t­hese still and s­ ilent landscapes could be photographed only over a relatively long exposure that left the photographer in the “same deadly circumstances” of risk from ­enemy fire (1987, 8). For similar technical reasons, American Civil War photo­graphs show only the landscape of the already slain. In relation to this limitation of mid-­nineteenth-­century photography, Anthony Lee has argued that photo­ graphs are like “dead ­things” in that they are “repre­sen­ta­tions of past or even lost ­things,” triggering our melancholic recognition that “we can only see, very provisionally, the ghostly t­hings within them” (2007, 31). Or perhaps, nineteenth-­century photography reminds us that “ghostly ­things” remained in between the iterations of images as well as within them; the shadows and traces of past events and lives dis­appeared and reappeared, never fully u ­ nder the control of the photographer or the viewer or the photographic medium. Aerial imagery assists in the per­sis­tent fantasy that the truth lives on—­ that anything can be revealed by the retrieval of a view in “real time.” In their chapter “Before and ­After,” Eyal and Ines Weizman suggest that this fantasy also wishes for the “reversibility of time,” to show what happened, to hold perpetrators accountable and provide justice for t­ hose harmed (2014, 122). In between the two images—­one taken in an everyday moment “before” and the other, perhaps more purposely, produced “­after”—­the event itself is always already missing from repre­sen­ta­tion. The rec­ord of the event, then, remains incomplete, indeterminate, ambiguous. In the case of violent events, trauma and grief reverberate inside the interval between before and ­after, disturbing time and space. In this “reservoir” that is sometimes actively forgotten while at other times partially recollected, some histories become sensible or legible as they are placed into new contexts and conjunctions (109). Photography 204 Chapter 5

appears to offer a perfectly realized moment—­the past captured in a full and complete manner. But the photographic image is always disturbed by literal or figurative “befores” and “­afters” that disturb any satisfaction with the image. The absences and ellipses that characterize analogue photography also operate in more con­temporary pro­cesses; for example, technically sophisticated satellite images are limited by orbit times, introducing inevitable gaps in coverage in remote sensing. Even newer aerial observation platforms like drones and powered reconnaissance balloons that can hover over scenes rather than proceed through geostationary orbit cannot be everywhere all the time (and their images are also hybrid combinations of vari­ous formats).11 No ­matter how critically staged, to engage in critical forensics via something like an aerial photo­graph is to assume that evidence can be sensed, that “­things happen, traces are left ­behind, and disputes ensue about the meaning of ­those traces,” what they “testify to” (Keenan 2014, 52). But evidence is not waiting, fully and perfectly formed, to be viewed as if through a telescope. Evidence is, Thomas Keenan reminds us, not in and of itself a fact, or “true” (44). In his introduction to Forensis, Weizman has argued that artifacts like aerial photo­graphs serve as instruments in a critical inquiry into both “the production of evidence and the querying of the practice of evidence making” (2014, 12). This self-­reflexive capacity of aerial photographic evidence cannot be fetishized as naturalized truth. As Weizman notes, “Photo­graphs are not an unmediated copy of the world, they are a relation between material objects—­one celluloid (plastic coated with gelatin emulsion containing silver halide crystals) and the other of stone, earth, and vegetation—­mediated by the climate between them” (Weizman and Sheikh 2015, 77). Proj­ects like The Conflict Shoreline demonstrate that the format of aerial photography can provide a specific kind of evidence in investigative proj­ects intended for public deliberation, official and unofficial. This kind of evidence seeks traces of presence but inevitably marks absence as well. That is, when something is sensed remotely and therefore can be recorded, it moves into perceptibility but does not lose all of its properties of imperceptibility. Evidence is always moving around in the space created by “before” and “­after,” drawn into intensities of disputes as needed only to recede into banality or the status of the nonuseful. This character of the reconnaissance image only underscores the use-­value of this kind of material evidence. As the hinge swings between figurative and nonfigurative, decidable and undecidable, clear and abstract, near and far, useful and nonuseful, even the hinge becomes perceptible as a necessary figment, a device that keeps tenable the illusion of The Politics of the Sensible  205

a unified world. The vio­lence of the operations of repre­sen­ta­tion that have brought us such a power­ful instrumental practice as aerial imagery precludes anything but the either/or, the before and ­after, pulling ­matter into endless divisions, an infinity of sets of twos. Yet we sense something (or somethings)—­ghostly, multiple, past, ­future, simultaneous—in the remote that also exists in the ­here and now. If the First Persian Gulf War ushered in an era in which the documentary repre­sen­ta­tion of warfare underwent a crisis, inducing critics to decry the simulated illusion of digital imagery and the evacuation of ­human subjects from the “desert screen,” the use of the format of aerial reconnaissance photography by artists and cultural critics is worthy of note. The areas that have been photographed and engaged by Ristelhueber, al-­Ani, Sheikh, and Weizman have been deeply disturbed by the actions of ­human beings, changing over time as successive wars and occupations have left layers of evidence in the ground itself. Drawing on the apparatus of the military, the governmental and academic surveyors, and the conventions of landscape repre­sen­ta­tion linked to aerial views, ­these photographic works neither recuperate nor repudiate such historical conventions and techniques. Working with the format of aerial photography, the range of their approaches recognizes the import of events and makes sensible their evidentiary traces to make pos­si­ble historical and po­liti­cal accountability. In their dif­fer­ent but linked ways, Ristelhueber, al-­Ani, Sheikh, and Weizman probe the simultaneous eradication and evidentiary traces of life forms in arid zones at geopo­liti­cal, climatic, and cultural risk. In their choice to sense remotely they acknowledge that, as Rancière has put it, “­every distance is a factual distance” (2011, 11). To see “all” is impossible. In the space between ignorance and knowledge, the format of aerial photography generates evidence of worlds imperceptible and potentially sensible.

206 Chapter 5

AFTERWORD Sensing Distance

—­

Distance is not an evil to be abolished, but the normal condition of any communication. —­J ACQUES RANCIÈRE , The Emancipated Spectator

This is a book that has been written during a period of per­sis­tent yet undeclared war, a war that can be figured in some ways as only as old as my ­daughter and in other ways reaching back to my grand­mother’s youth or perhaps even further into the past. Thinking about aerial views, I have been unable to elude ­these wars or the uneven reverberations of other conflicts less well known to me—­nor do I want to. I have tried to develop my capacity to become curious about war and to explore the ways in which it makes the world around me and limits my perception of any other pos­si­ble worlds. It is a sad business, to be sure. Yet, as I learn more about the dispositional power of war and how far it reaches into everyday life, ­these discoveries have only intensified my curiosity and inspired more questions. It is, nevertheless, time to close this book and move on to the next cluster of inquiries. So, it is to the war­time that is unfolding right now that I would like to turn in the effort to open up rather than foreclose further questions about aerial aftermaths. Many lengthy books have been and w ­ ill be written on the “war on terror.” In what must necessarily remain a brief afterword I would simply like to think through a ­little more the ways in which the uneven history of views from above “reconfigure the landscape of what can be seen and what can be thought” in what Gregory calls the “colonial pres­ent” (2004; Rancière 2011, 49).

If you follow the lit­er­a­ture on con­temporary visual culture and military technologies, you ­will be familiar with the arguments that locate the First Persian Gulf War as a major point of innovation in the linear development of the violent surveillant capacities of the “eye in the sky”—­militarized vision. It was in that war that the United States and its allies seemed to perfect the omniscient overview, providing a material conduit for the intuitive powers of the coup d’oeil through an electronic integration of aerial observation and navigation. ­These apparently new abilities to “see all” in “real t­ ime” in greater precise detail and further than ever before thanks to the convergence of satellite remote sensing and digital computation ­were promoted as a technological triumph and understood to be the cornerstone of a mode of warfare that would be always already crushingly asymmetrical. For a moment in the early 1990s it appeared that no standing armies or insurgent groups could possibly withstand this apotheosis of airpower. Once again, the arid climate and topography of Iraq provided the ideal laboratory for new methods of aerial imaging and mapping. To the long-­range strategic bombardment that had characterized air wars since World War II, the United States added the global positioning system (gps), a network of twenty-­four satellites that produced new registers of precision in navigation and targeting. In just over a month’s time, the United States and its allies defeated a large, modern, standing army—­destroying Iraq’s defensive infrastructure and obliterating its air force.1 Right-­wing politicians as well as cultural critics on the Left ­either celebrated or decried “Operation Desert Storm” as a major “transformation in the nature of warfare” (Hallion 1992, 1). It would be fair to say that each time the United States goes in to a major conflict, declared or undeclared, the animation of massive infrastructures of finance, logistics, and technological innovation produces significant shifts materially and conceptually. One layer in this pro­cess in the 1990s had to be the emergence of the Internet and digital culture as power­ful economic, cultural, and po­liti­cal engines just as “heavy” industry was once and for all headed “offshore.” The “annihilation of distance” inherent to air war in general combined with the time and space compression of “cyber culture” marked this moment not so much as an eruption of something new as an intensification of ele­ments already dominant in U.S. modernity. The post–­ World War II dream of a seamless “closed ­world” that would combine cybernetics and artificial intelligence for po­liti­cal dominance boosted the dependence of the military on computerized information systems (Edwards 1997). If “Operation Desert Storm” signified the virtues of the new “revolution in military affairs” (rma) in a postatomic age, the dominance of networked air 208 Afterword

war perpetuated the my­thol­ogy of asymmetrical warfare as “frictionless,” eliminating uncertainty. To avoid nuclear war yet prevail in other forms of warfare, “super power” militaries came to lean more and more in ­favor of “continual technological innovation, increasing speed and lethality, the militarization of technology and science, more intimate human-­machine systems (cyborgization), the fetishization of information, and ever-­increasing fear” (Gray 2005, 27). The doctrines and practices of the rma remain the most prevalent ways in which visuality is understood in relation to current modes of warfare. The conventional narrative traces a line that runs from the techno culture of the First Persian Gulf War through nato’s campaign in Kosovo and the growing utilization of satellite imagery in the era of Google Earth to the post-9/11 escalation of war across a broad range of territories and the increasing reliance on unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) to assist in reconnaissance and attack (in par­tic­u­lar the form of warfare now termed “targeted killings”). Yet each of ­these modes of viewing from above does not operate in isolation from other components of military operations. It might surprise us to recall ­today that in the First Persian Gulf War the use of fax machines on the battlefield to support communications between field officers and Central Command seemed to augur an amazing technological breakthrough commensurate with the increased precision of the new laser-­guided and heat-­ sensing “smart bombs” (Schwartz 1998, 164). In a more general vein, no air wars can take place without extensive, complex systems of ground support and logistics at the very least and are usually accompanied by large-­scale ground operations. The “God’s-­eye” through line can create a highly selective, mystified narrative of modern war. ­Whether the starting point is figured as an observational war balloon in the B ­ attle of Fleurus in 1794 or the feed from the video-­guided bombs dropped over Iraq in 1991, it is fair to say that the visual is only one part of the apparatuses and practices at work in warfare. We remember the video feed from the smart bombs and not the fax machines (in large part ­because U.S. tele­vi­sion viewers ­were shown that feed on repetitive loops throughout the conflict as a sign of the success of the U.S. Air Force’s tactical bombardments). With this caution in mind, however, visuality remains an intriguing and compelling aspect of perception. The dominance of vision over and against other senses in modernity is more culturally specific and uneven than a brief discussion can adequately credit (Crary 1990; Jay 1994; Mirzoeff 2011). However, like most generalizations ­there is more than a grain of truth to the ­matter. The energetic merging of photography and early mass media in the nineteenth ­century combined Afterword   209

with the global circulation of film and tele­vi­sion in the twentieth provides a sturdy base for the web-­based entertainments we enjoy ­today. Without ignoring sound, touch, and smell, it is necessary to consider carefully the ways in which vision works with other senses and on its own in making meaning.2 The challenge for t­ hose of us who study the history of visuality in relation to military technologies is to avoid remythologizing and promoting the narratives generated by colonial occupations and asymmetrical warfare. In this context, the ways in which unmanned aerial vehicles or “drones” have come to signify the latest apotheosis of airpower’s alienated and distanced view is instructive. Closely associated with the Obama administration’s commitment to low-­risk asymmetrical warfare, the number of drones operated by the cia and the Department of Defense has increased dramatically since 2008. According to the Bureau of Investigative Reporting’s “Drone Wars” database, since the first official targeted strike by a U.S.-­operated unmanned aerial vehicle took place in February 2002, by spring 2017 ­there had been approximately 2,250 strikes for an estimated 6,200 to 9,000 killed (over 1,000 of ­these casualties recorded as civilians) in Af­ghan­i­stan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen (Bureau of Investigative Journalism 2017). Reconnaissance operations by drones are more difficult to quantify. A recent article reported that the U.S. Air Force operates 160 mq-1 Predators and 140 mq-9 Reapers (Whittle 2015). Since each Combat Air Patrol requires three to four aircraft to conduct twenty-­four-­hour surveillance over one designated space—­“one flying the patrol, another on its way to take the first one’s place, a third returning to base for maintenance and refueling, and a fourth already on the ground and being serviced”—­the air force can fly approximately sixty-­five to seventy-­five armed drone patrols a day (Whittle 2015). As ­these numbers suggest, on any given day as we go about our daily lives in the United States, many drones are in operation over foreign terrain, conducting surveillance and launching attacks. The allure of drones in asymmetric warfare is based on the very qualities that also cause ­people to fear them. Operating at the extreme end of the remote sensing that characterizes any mechanical imaging procedure, drones seem to most laypersons to epitomize the God’s-­eye omniscient gaze “from nowhere.” Unlike satellite remote sensing, which is dictated by the intervals of orbit, the drone is able to hover in a stationary mode if necessary to provide real-­time imaging around the clock without interruption. Drones are most often active at night, providing “eyes in the skies” ­under conditions that would have proved to be impossible in other eras. Weaponization of drones turns them into hybrid creatures right out of the Virilian playbook—­ready to 210 Afterword

pursue attacks or direct armed engagements in concert with reconnaissance and surveillance. The “always on” aspect of drone warfare gives a hefty advantage to the air force, bringing the constant, terrifying threat of attack into the lives of the target population.3 In addition to the seemingly limitless powers of “drone sight,” the extended network that brings full operational capacity to this mode of reconnaissance and warfare generates its own mystique. The popu­lar ste­reo­type of the lone drone operator at work in a trailer in Nevada or California who pushes a button to send a missile to exterminate a “bad guy” many thousands of miles away and then goes home to play with his or her kids at the end of the shift is a power­ful reminder of the hegemonic support in the United States for distance warfare. Protected by a buffer of continents and vast oceans, the United States wages war in such a way that most ­people at home do not have to think about geopolitics or casualty figures at all while ­those professionals who do the killing remain safe and sound. ­These are ridicu­lous ste­reo­types but they are grounded in several hundred years of attitudes promoted by nation-­state democracies about the risks and benefits of war at a distance and the ways in which cameras (or sensors) combine with aviation to offer security through airpower. If I have learned anything from spending time with examples from the eigh­teenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, it is to view t­ hese certainties about the powers of aerial views with skepticism. Accordingly, we should ask, what do we mean by “drone sight”; do drones ­really “see all”? The Predators first tested by nato in the Kosovo campaign and then developed further as the wars in Iraq and Af­ghan­i­stan ramped up ­after 2001 offer a relatively narrow range that often frustrates the expectations and needs of their users. Derek Gregory has described the ways in which drone pi­lots and sensor operators toggle back and forth between the full-­motion video of “Predator View,” a Windows-­based mapping tool called ‘ “Falcon View,” and Google Earth to try to eliminate the effect of “looking through a straw’ ”(2014). Moreover, Gregory reminds us that the Predator View involves far more senses and operations than that allowed by the ste­reo­type of the bombardier looking into a World War II–­era bombsight.4 Radio transmissions and chat/ texts are part of the communications feeds with which sensor operators and pi­lots work along with sensing data from “conventional aircraft” such as ac-130s, b-1 bombers, f-­15e strike aircraft and attack he­li­cop­ters (Gregory 2014). Satellite communications play a vital role in t­ hese operations as well. Most importantly for any deconstruction of discourses of views from above, all ­these communications networks introduce “major uncertainties into the supposedly ‘precise’ targeting pro­cess” (Gregory 2015). It is impor­tant to Afterword   211

keep in mind that the high-­tech enhancements of vision that this conglomeration of technologies and practices offer do not eliminate completely the “fog of war” or the inherent tension between what a ­human “sees” and what they “know” (Berger 1972, 7). As Patrick Lichty has argued, “drones complicate the concept of the remote eye” (2013). Moreover, like all machines, they are fallible.5 Yet military intelligence interests pursue the “utopian proj­ect of per­sis­tent surveillance” as if it is, indeed, achievable (Crampton, Roberts, and Poorthuis 2013, 206). Innovations in remote sensing and mapping are always on the horizon or in the works, offering what seem to be continually updated and improved powers of range, perception, and precision. At the moment, U.S. unmanned vehicle operations are incorporating a wide-­area airborne surveillance system dubbed “Gorgon Stare” into the aerial ­battle space over Af­ghan­i­stan. Gorgon Stare, described by the Sierra Nevada Corporation that produces it as “The usaf’s only operational day/night per­sis­tent wide-­area motion imagery (wami) capability” (Sierra Nevada Corporation 2014). Basically, this means that Gorgon Stare greatly expands the range of observation (at least fourfold in area coverage and a twofold improvement in resolution) beyond the more narrow field that has been used by standard drones since the late 1990s (Jennings 2015). In its latest iteration, Gorgon Stare Increment II, two “massive” sensor balls that contain 368 cameras produce an intelligible sensory field of over sixty miles (Rogoway 2015). If we remain tethered to the discourse of the cosmic powers of the God’s eye, this monster camera in the sky would seem invincible. Could this be the ultimate machine to secure certain victory over an ­enemy that has no air force at all and whose only military advantage appears to be the camouflaging propensities of mountainous terrain or urban density? Armin Krishnan has raised the concern that a “few drones” equipped and networked with Gorgon Stare sensors could “surveil entire populations across large territories” (2015, 20). Indeed, Gorgon Stare and nonmilitary versions like the Eu­ro­pean Border Surveillance program (eurosur), New York City’s Domain Awareness System, and Baltimore’s adoption of an aerial surveillance system point to a profound expansion of the ways in which geo­ graph­i­cal knowledge is generated and utilized by intelligence and policing communities.6 The turn is away from the two-­dimensional cartographies that control contiguous blocks of horizontal space and t­ oward the conceptualization of vertical volumes of area that require entirely dif­fer­ent modes of remote sensing (Weizman 2002; Graham 2004; Crampton 2010; Adey, Whitehead, and Williams 2011; Feldman 2011; Elden 2013, 35). In order to understand 212 Afterword

this shift to a vertical and volumetric conceptualization of military engagement and geo­graph­i­cal knowledge, we have to return to the pivotal moment of the First Persian Gulf War. As Stephen Graham has reminded us, in the mid-1990s some analysts argued that the electronic gadgetry represented by rma advocates as decisive ­factors in the swift resolution of the 1991 war was less impor­tant than the reliance on Cold War–­era “air and land b ­ attle” strategies (2004, 13; see also Peters 1996, 2). ­Those older conventions emphasized a “horizontal projection of power over and above open plains” that assumed “contiguous territories” in an other­wise “featureless geopo­liti­cal space”—in other words, the kind of flat and arid terrain that facilitated rapid tank advances and precision bombing (Graham 2004, 13). Even accounting for the increased use of satellites and sophisticated forms of aerial surveillance in the First Persian Gulf War, the “key vector of power” remained more horizontal than vertical. In the years immediately following the war, analysts like Ralph Peters argued that the next wars would most likely be fought in more vertically or­ga­nized urbanized terrain, necessitating an understanding of spheres of ­battle action that would reach up through the built environment into the sky as well as down into the city’s infrastructure underground (1996, 2; see also Graham 2004, 14; Bishop 2011). The strategic doctrines and tactics of airpower would have to adjust to this three-­dimensional ­battle space that would now include tunnels, bunkers, sewer systems, and buried infrastructures as well as street and house-­to-­house combat in cities understood in a racialized, Orientalist framework to pres­ent formidable obstacles to “clear sight” just as pernicious as mountain and desert terrain. The new emphasis on stacked verticality and volumetric spatialization led to two major trends: a shift from identifying fixed, precise locations to “situational awareness” in relation to a “field of motion” and an intensification of preemptive capacities (Crampton, Roberts, and Poorthuis 2014, 206). As Jeremy Crampton, Susan Roberts, and Ate Poorthuis have put it: “The prob­ lem is not so much to find a needle in a haystack. Rather the issue is how to track thousands of moving ­needles in haystacks that themselves are not static and to identify which ­needles are likely to pose a threat” (206). Commenting on this emergent, mobile post-9/11 format of governmentality and securitization, Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede have drawn on the Foucauldian distinction between the disciplinary structure of surveillance that “predicts, surveys, and prohibits” and the “security apparatus” that “preempts, visualizes, and opens to circulation” (2008, 174; see also Foucault 2007, 44–45). The security apparatus that has been increasingly operationalized over the last de­cade and a half opens the airpower practices of surveillance to wider Afterword   213

and deeper spaces of per­sis­tent inquiry. More and more it is patterns of be­ hav­ior and electronic transactions that trigger “suspicion” and deeper modes of surveillance than the other way around. As Andrea Miller has argued, ­under ­these war­time conditions, thoughts and ideas that had been characterized as “interior” and “unknowable” can now be “rendered actionable and criminal,” racializing targets through a “recursive relationship between science and imagination” (2017, 113, 114). In this kind of vertical security apparatus, what happens to vision and imagery? Do the operations of becoming legible that drones participate in r­ eally require “sight”? We have already rejected the idea that drones are singular machines that “see all” via the conventions of linear perspective. Gregory makes a persuasive argument consonant with our awareness of the dispersed and networked security apparatus that t­ here are “multiple viewing positions involved in networked military vio­lence” (2014). To ­these oscillations and variations we have to consider that the activities of drones participate in and help to generate a much wider environment than b ­ attle space per se. Lisa Parks has argued that the drone’s “mediating work” takes place through a vast “vertical field” that “extends from the earth’s surface, including the geological layers below and built environments upon it, through the domains of the spectrum and the air to the outer limits of orbit” (Parks 2017, 136; see also Massumi 2015, 40). Remote sensing mediated in the vertical field of drone operations makes material and sensory change in the perceptible world. As Parks writes: “As a drone flies through the sky it alters the chemical composition of the air. As it hovers above the earth it can change movements on the ground. As it proj­ects announcements through loudspeakers it can affect thought and be­hav­ior. And as it shoots Hellfire missiles it can turn homes into holes and the living into the dead” (2017, 136). Thus, the drone is not just a machine, a technology, or a way of seeing but a violently dispositional agent of change (Bridle 2013). Drones are power­ful not so much as fetishized techno-­objects but as part of the stacked, simultaneous operations of the visual and cartographic survey as well as the algorithmic, preemptive “politics of possibility” that intervene in the f­ uture from a distance (Amoore 2013, 153). Some ­things are difficult to see, and distance insinuates increasing scales of uncertainty. When the first aeronauts launched themselves into the sky in hot air or hydrogen balloons in the late eigh­teenth ­century, one of their hopes was to improve their understanding of the composition of clouds and their perception of air itself. Immersing themselves directly into clouds, capturing air in glass jars for further examination, ­these erstwhile mete­ orologists tried to see and therefore know more about ­things that ­were, in 214 Afterword

many ways, imperceptible. Jody Berland has reminded us that before the incorporation of telescopic imaging technologies in satellites, ­people ­were not able to see “air, wind, or temperature” as “vis­i­ble ­matter” (2009, 251). Thermal and other forms of remote sensing create a “virtual photo” from a “three-­dimensional environment influx” that is itself a virtual surface (251). The truth value of ­these digital images is as certain (or uncertain) as their analog cousin even if the techniques that produce each form of image differ considerably. As Berland argues, the veracity of digital imagery is a “function of rhe­toric, not reference” since the images are produced by means “brazenly in­de­pen­dent of their referents” (251). The ambiguity of images always operates in and through the challenges of remote sensing—­always pres­ent are the distances introduced through time and space. Vertically mediated, transformative of environments, productive of war­time dispositions, the ways in which the sensory data of the security apparatus of the era of the “war on terror” become legible remain tied, even partially or aspirationally to some degree, to the repre­sen­ta­tional format of the image. Throughout the proj­ect that has come together in this book, I have been concerned with the prob­lem of historicizing visual content generated by the production and circulation of geo­graph­i­cal knowledge derived from views from above in relation to warfare. In returning always to the visual and the image in the age of electronic signals and affective environments, I have no desire to reify or recuperate an anachronistic medium. I am interested in the image along the lines of David Joselit’s definition: a “quantum of visual content” that can “assume a variety of formats” (2013, xv). Formats are dynamically heterogeneous: their components include “aesthetics, data, history, the scene of an action” (Joselit 2015). In this sense, visual formats remain a power­ful part of the security apparatus that strives to “know all” if not “see all.” Even the most three-­dimensional or dispersed evocations of presence retain or remediate traces of repre­sen­ta­tional pre­ce­dents. The reconfiguring ele­ments of visual formats, transformations in military practice, and geopo­liti­cal shifts among other instantiations of difference have required caution in constructing any kind of through line or declaring any form of cohesive medium for aerial views. Like a good subject of my time period, I have looked for patterns, the equivalent of collecting “suspicious packages,”7 in my historical examples in order to make links between ­things without reestablishing a full-­fledged narrative arc. I have been guided by an autobiographically grounded sense of the ways in which war makes ­things move—­bodies, emotions, sight—­reconfiguring distances. For me, remote sensing is not just a geospatial instrument or simply another term Afterword   215

for photography. I have taken the concept of remote sensing as a source of inspiration for inquiring into the malleable and uneven perception of worlds as wars have unfolded over centuries, making presence or loss more or less pos­si­ble or impossible in sensible ways. Rancière has called for a politics of the sensible based on the “variation of distance, the re­sis­tance of the vis­i­ble and the uncertainty of effects” (2011, 105). As I have worked on this proj­ect I have linked this call to Derek McCormack’s inquiry into the affective forms of historical geo­graph­i­cal knowledge that must always already be sensed remotely, “without direct contact or touch” (2010, 641). Living in the United States during a long war that seems to figure in the public life of the nation only as patriotic sloganeering or security state fear-­mongering, I have been deeply touched by Mary Favret’s theorization of war­time as a mediated, “dislocated experience”: “of time and times unmoored, of feeling intensified but also adrift” (2010, 9). Rather than insist that my compatriots see more clearly or in closer intimacy the victims of our power­ful geopolitics and weaponry in this long war of our time, I hope that thinking through the politics of the sensible as war­time aftermaths prompts a more constructive if unbearably painful path to politics—to move beyond commonsense platitudes, hand-­wringing guilt, or superficial sentiment to a greater critical accountability for our blindness to the continuities of colonial territorial ambitions and enduring legacies of vio­lence. My country kills ­people directly, and indirectly, from close proximity as well as from afar. This moment of recognition is full of pos­si­ble connections, connections that are as profoundly dangerous as they are constitutive of politics and ways of being. Vio­lence looms at “home” as well as “away.” Writing from ­here, the amorphous U.S. “home front,” my job is not to impersonate the universal view from “no where” or to succumb to numb defeatism. I have been working ­toward Favret’s third alternative to the abstractions and anomie of war­time in the colonial metropolis—­a more “productive” response, “suspended between abstraction and numbness,” to explore some of the visual formats of war­time aftermaths (2010, 9–10). Artifacts of distance like aerial images circulate in profusion in our everyday life. They exist and they are familiar to us. If we consider that they are always already connecting us to places and times at a distance from us, we may become sensible to other possibilities—­places, times, ­people, living and inanimate ­things. Aerial views make pos­si­ble and impossible the arts of war in unfolding aftermaths—­worlding and unworlding, disturbing the peace.

216 Afterword

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1 Marshall Berman expressed, soon ­after the collapse of the towers, the sentiment held by many critics of the World Trade Center: “By now, if we ‘speak what we feel, not what we ­ought to say,’ we should be able to face the fact that they ­were the most hated buildings in town. They ­were brutal and overbearing, designed on a scale of monuments to some modern Ozymandias. They ­were an expression of an urbanism that disdained the city and its ­people. They loomed over Downtown and blotted out the sky” (2002, 6–7). On the other hand, if elite ­architects, community organizers, and Marxist social theorists despised the tower complex, Mark Wigley finds it significant that “­people loved the buildings”: “And the deeply felt affection for ­these buildings cannot be casually dismissed as the delusions of an exploited public ­under the manipulative sway of corporate image-­makers. At some level, an extraordinary identification with the buildings took place that exceeded the expectations of both the boosters of the proj­ect . . . ​and the architectural critics. . . . ​­People experienced the buildings not as part of some distant power but as an intimate and tangible part of the domestic life of a dispersed global community” (2002, 74). 2 For example, Virilio has argued: “Since 11 September 2001, as ­we’ve all been able to observe, the media coverage of acts of vio­lence has everywhere expanded. From local delinquency to the global hyperviolence of terrorism, no one has managed to escape this escalating extremism for long. And the accumulation of felonies of a dif­fer­ent nature has ­little by ­little given the impression that all forms of protection collapsed at the same time as the World Trade Center” (2007, 20). 3 In a piece written soon ­after the attacks, Barbara Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett proudly embraced the term 9/11 as a sign of community and resilience, noting that “9/11 is a way of saying September 11 American-­style, with the month first,” while also referencing the phone number for emergencies (2003, 12).

Yet the ubiquitous shorthand 9/11 often seems too glib a way to refer to the complex, transnational ele­ments that came together on that early autumn day. As Dana Heller has argued, the term 9/11 has “attained the cultural function of a trademark,” one that “symbolizes a new kind of national identification—or national branding awareness” (2005, 3). In this introductory chapter, I ­will adopt the shorthand term on occasion, but, more often, I ­will opt for the longer version of referring to the events that took place that day in order to resist, however insufficiently, the commodification and American exceptionalism signified by the shorter term. 4 Lisa Parks points to the emergence in the 1980s of the French com­pany spot (Satellite Pour l’Observation de la Terra) and the Soviet com­pany Soyuzkarta as part of a major shift in the dissemination of satellite imagery. Both Parks and Laura Kurgan date a significant transformation in policy from August 1995, when the Clinton administration shared classified satellite and aerial photo­graphs of mass graves and execution sites to the United Nations Security Council and selected three images for circulation to the press. The archive of Cold War corona satellite images had just been opened up, generating public interest in satellite views and, as Kurgan puts it, not only “a reasonable working assumption that major events could be monitored from outer space, but that traces of that surveillance would appear in the public sphere” (2013, 22; see also Parks 2005, 79–80). 5 Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas have argued that the September 11 attacks constitute a “prime example of a traumatic historical event that was and continues to be witnessed through the image in all its many forms.” In par­tic­u­lar they point to the “repeated return within televisual repre­sen­ta­tion of the event to the video footage of the planes’ initial impact and the collapse of the World Trade Center.” Significantly, Guerin and Hallas argue that still photography “played an even greater role”—­from the images in missing persons’ posters to the massive collections like the ­Here Is New York exhibit, as well as the production of “emblematic” photo­graphs that have become heavi­ly associated with the events and their aftermath (2007, 5–6). 6 The intensity of the impulse to document the event through photography in a moment before the widespread integration of smartphones is reflected in part by the reported rush to purchase single-­use cameras at the Duane Reade drugstore located not far from the World Trade Center (the man­ag­er reported that he sold sixty to one hundred such cameras throughout the first day) (Heller 2005, 8). The result of this desire not only to consume images but to produce them has resulted in the often-­repeated opinion that the attacks on September 11, 2001, are “said to be the most photographed disaster in history” (Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett 2003, 12). 7 Slavoj Žižek pointed to the intensity of the effect of constant repetition in the media of the same images over and over: “When, days ­after 11 September 2001, our gaze was transfixed by the images of the plane hitting one of the World Trade Center towers, all of us ­were forced to experience what the ‘compulsion 218  Notes to Introduction

to repeat’ and jouissance beyond the plea­sure princi­ple are: we wanted to see it again and again, the same shots ­were repeated ad nauseam, and the uncanny satisfaction we got from it was jouissance at its purest” (2002, 226–27). 8 Con­temporary aftermath aesthetics include highly commodified practices. Heller has pointed to the “dazzling profusion of 9/11 tie-in products, commemorative artifacts, mass media narratives, memorabilia, and kitsch.” Beyond the direct reference to 9/11, Heller argues that “products long available to American consumers ­were refilled with new meanings in the context of the ­attacks and their aftermath, as in the case of American flag lapel pins and automobile decals, duct tape, and ‘I ❤ NY’ T-­shirts.” Hoarding of items connected to the World Trade Center towers, a flooding of New York City souvenirs, postcards that featured the towers, and a flurry of activity on eBay marked the spectacular aftermath of the attacks as deeply as the visual practices (Heller 2005, 3). 9 Among the many responses to the commercialization and conservative tilt to the interpretation of 9/11 imagery, Žižek argued that this national consolidation of a viewing practice of spectacular scenes of horror may reflect the kind of popu­lar taste developed over the previous several de­cades for disaster movies (2002, 226). The lure of experiences that are thrillingly disorienting, even sublime, may stretch back earlier, before mechanization, to the kind of panoramic spectatorship defined by Alison Griffiths as “immersive” (2008, 2–3). This “overall recognition of the visual appeal of the attacks” may also signal, as Andrew Hill postulates, that such directed vio­lence by networked, nonstate actors broadly understood to be “terrorists” played out as an extreme expression of the objective of twentieth-­century art; that is, ­these acts, in their capacity “to shock and to produce a radical disruption of everyday life,” thereby “overshadow and threaten to subsume the work of art” (2009, 10). 10 Nadar recorded his exhaustive preparations and many futile efforts in his memoir, When I Was a Photographer ([1900] 2015). ­After numerous attempts, Nadar realized that the sulfur in the gas issuing from the neck of the balloon was interfering with the chemistry of the photographic pro­cess. Once he closed the valve to eliminate the exhaust, aerial photography was born. 11 In a particularly trenchant piece, Catherine Lutz reflected that “we” in the United States “have been doubly haunted . . . ​­because ­after all of the killing, the bodies are hidden away and denied” (2002, 290). 12 Samuel Weber has pointed out that Freud’s discussion of the chaos of war marks the transformative realization in the modern period of the end of progressive history as “succession is replaced by simultaneity”: “One could say for Freud, war can be considered to be the continuation of the ‘destiny’ of the drive, which consists in a strug­gle to ‘occupy’ and control targets that it is nevertheless ready to forsake and replace at any moment. The ‘destiny’ of the drive thus knows neither lasting victory nor enduring peace; but only ongoing strug­gle marked by an occasional truce” (2005, 50–51). Notes to Introduction   219

13 See also Terry Smith’s (2006) discussion of the World Trade Center towers and the aftermath of 9/11. 14 For many ­people who became attached to watching the news on tele­vi­sion (commercial-­free for almost a week following the attacks), the “nonstop” nature of the coverage and the cessation of any but the most urgent tasks all contributed to the altered time and space following the funeral of a loved one or the anomie of intense shock. As Lynn Spigel has argued, the alteration of tele­vi­sion’s “normal routines—­its everyday schedule and ritualized flow” disoriented many viewers almost as much as the events themselves (2005, 121). 15 W. J. T. Mitchell has argued that since the princi­ple mediation of Ground Zero is “pictorial,” the repetition of the display and circulation of such images and ensuing familiarity ­causes the images to “fail” at a certain level, to leave ­things open-­ended and, therefore, unresolved or unhealed, melancholic. This inability to “let go, to bury the dead” is not so much “incapable of being represented” as overrepresented: “too many repre­sen­ta­tions, too many images and bad dreams, and no way to arrive at a consensus, a communal ac­cep­tance” (2010, 81). 16 Gregory explains his usage of the phrase: “In speaking of the colonial pres­ent, I ­don’t mean to imply that nothing has changed since the nineteenth ­century. It may have been long, as historians are always telling us, but not that long. But I do mean to resist ­those histories punctuated by sharp breaks from one period to another, with their homogenizing sense of Time—­always in the singular—­and ­those narratives that celebrate History—­always with that imperial capital—as the unambiguous advance of Reason. History is always more complicated than that: always plural, always contested, and shot through with multiple temporalities and spatialities. I speak about the colonial—­rather than the imperial—­pres­ent ­because I want to retain the active sense of the verb ‘to colonize’: the constellations of power, knowledge, and geography that I describe ­here continue to colonize lives all over the world” (2004, xiv–­xv). 17 I ­will not go into an extended discussion ­here of the authorial indeterminacy of the photo­graphs attributed to Semendinger, but it is impor­tant to note that another nypd detective, Dave Fitzpatrick, took photos during much of the same time period from another he­li­cop­ter and the nist may have blurred the lines between the two photog­raphers’ output when they released images in 2010. In fact, contrary to the media hype around the release of the Semendinger/nist images, a large coffee-­table-­style trade book was published by the New York City Police Foundation with Viking Penguin as early as 2002, titled Above Hallowed Ground: A Photographic Rec­ord of September 11, 2001 and edited by Christopher Sweet (Sweet and nypd 2002). The book is filled with numerous aerial images taken from several nypd he­li­cop­ters in the air that day, including ­those shot by Dave Fitzpatrick. Most interestingly, Greg Semendinger is not credited or mentioned in Above Hallowed Ground. Conspiracy buffs like “Matt” at 911conspiracytv Weblog argue that the official nypd and nist accounts are full 220  Notes to Introduction

of suspicious gaps and contradictions: ­there are blocks of time that are unaccounted for, numerous other photog­raphers in police he­li­cop­ters at the scene whose images have not been made available, and other variables that render the official accounts incomplete at best and obscurantist at worst. See Matt’s blog entry, “Case of the Missing He­li­cop­ter Photos” (2014). 18 Spigel reminds us that the “everydayness of tele­vi­sion itself was disrupted by news of something completely ‘alien’ to the usual patterns of domestic tv viewing” (2005, 120–21). This disruption and alteration of time and patterns of daily media consumption is reflected in David Foster Wallace’s account of his morning on September 11, 2001. In “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s,” he describes watching the first reports on cbs news with his el­derly landlady and her friends in Bloomington, Indiana: “I remember when I came in every­body was staring in transfixed horror at one of the very few pieces of video cbs never reran, which was a distant wide-­angle shot of the North Tower and its top floors’ exposed steel lattice in flames and of dots detaching from the building and moving through smoke down the screen, which then that jerky tightening of the shot revealed to be a­ ctual ­people in coats and ties and skirts with their shoes falling off as they fell, some hanging onto ledges or girders and then letting go, upside-­down or writhing as they fell and one ­couple almost seeming (unverifiable) to be hugging each other as they fell all ­those stories and shrank back to dots as the camera then all of a sudden pulled back to the long view—­I have no idea how long the clip took—­after which Rather’s mouth seemed to move for a second before any sound emerged, and every­one in the room sat back and looked at one another with expressions that seemed somehow both childlike and horribly old. I think one or two p ­ eople made some sort of sound. It’s not clear what ­else to say.” Wallace recounts his distrust of his memory ­after only a few days and his recognition that his senses are altered—­both more heightened and less palpable or functional: “Is it normal not to remember ­things very well a­ fter only a ­couple days, or at any rate the order of ­things? I know at some point for a while ­there was the sound of somebody mowing his lawn, which seemed totally bizarre, but I ­don’t remember if anyone said anything. Sometimes it seems like nobody speaks and sometimes like every­body’s talking at once” (2001, 132). 19 In “The Instrumental Image,” Allan Sekula notes the tension between “­human presence” and mimetic realism in the practices of aerial photography that emerged in World War I. As reconnaissance images ­were captured at one thousand feet above the earth, “the ­human figure has to be searched out, dragged out of the image”: “The anonymity of the combatants and civilians teeters on the edge of invisibility. . . . ​The ­human content of the event is valued for both humane and voy­eur­is­tic reasons, and yet this content is virtually unknowable. Herein lies the pathos of one sort of estheticized reading. The image consumer experiences a kind of cognitive dissonance in having been caught between the false power and the impotence of the pornographic spectator. Notes to Introduction   221

On the one hand, the aerial viewpoint contributes to an illusion of power and knowledge; on the other, ­little can be known and what­ever happened has happened” ([1975] 1984, 45). CHAPTER 1: SURVEYING WAR­T IME AFTERMATHS

1 In the interest of brevity, I ­will refer to the First Military Survey of Scotland simply as the Military Survey throughout most of this chapter. 2 The first draft of the Military Survey was only just barely completed when the Seven Years’ War began in 1755 and resources ­were hastily diverted (Oliver 1993, 9). William Roy received a commission in the army and was transferred to the Continent to assist in surveying proj­ects ­there as well as to advise on the defense of the British Isles from attack by sea. The maps ­were held by David Watson ­until his death, at which point they ­were given to the Royal Library (and eventually transferred to the British Museum in the early nineteenth c­ entury). The National Library of Scotland has an excellent online site with a section titled “Roy Military Survey of Scotland, 1747–1755” that includes the entire map with gazetteers. See http://­maps​.­nls​.­uk​/­roy​/­originals​.­html, accessed April 13, 2017. 3 The Military Survey had been placed ­under the purview of the British Board of Ordnance, a complicated entity described by J. B. Harley as “one of the more ancient institutions of the country” as well as a “shambling, complex, and even contradictory organ­ization.” The Board of Ordnance came into being in the ­Middle Ages as part of the Royal Arsenal at the Tower of London, charged to “act as a custodian of the lands, depots and forts required for the defense of the realm and its overseas possessions, and as a supplier of munitions and equipment to both the Army and the Navy” (Harley 1980, 2). “Ordnance” is a shortened version of “ordinance,” a word that has many connotations and meanings derived from the impulse to order or to ordain. As Rachel Hewitt reminds us, the word’s specifically military connotation is linked to the French word ordonnance, which “denoted an army’s arrangement in ranks or lines and most importantly, the ‘ordinantia ad bellum,’ the military equipment, guns, cannons and explosives” that became the objects of the board’s management (2010, 8). During the Tudor period, the board’s primary activities concerned “fortification and harbor improvement” to protect the country from coastal invasion (Harley 1980, 2). By the eigh­teenth ­century, with the rise of extended deployment of British troops on the Continent and the continuing concern, despite the acknowledged prowess of the Royal Navy, of invasion from the sea, the responsibilities and purview of the Board of Ordnance expanded and began to include a much greater emphasis on the arts and sciences of military topography. 4 At the time of the Military Survey of Scotland, mapping occupied very l­ittle of the Board of Ordnance’s interest or activities beyond ­battle maps for immediate use. Once topographical intelligence became more established as a valuable pursuit not only for reconnaissance but for infrastructural nation-­building, corps cadets as young as eleven years old ­were trained in copying topographical maps and 222  Notes to Introduction

fortification plans in the drawing room of the Tower of London. By the beginning of the nineteenth c­ entury, as Sudipta Sen has pointed out, the curriculum for survey draftsmen had advanced to the point that both artists and the “gentleman-­ soldier” w ­ ere “schooled in similar techniques of the landscape,” establishing the “art of sketching” as a “necessary tool in the art of warfare” (2002, 67). But before the 1740s, the number of draftsmen at work in the Tower Drawing Room numbered less than five (Marshall 1980, 21). 5 Although the surveyors aimed to incorporate the kind of scientific standards that would become integral to Board of Ordnance Corps training, in keeping with the tradition of the military sketch map and owing perhaps as much to lack of personnel, the youth of the surveyors and draf­ters, and inadequate funding, the Military Map of Scotland was not a fully trigonometrical survey. The Military Survey personnel would have triangulated as best they could using the equipment available, which included a perambulator (surveyor’s wheel), mea­sur­ing chains, and a ­simple version of a theodolite (an alidade attached to a compass) that mea­sured the ­angle of the sightline between landmarks (Hewitt 2010, 21–22). Required to work as quickly as pos­si­ble, however, the surveyors triangulated only major landscape ele­ments such as roads, rivers, coastlines, and well-­known lakes, leaving all other ele­ments to be sketched by sight or transferred from earlier maps (Fleet, Wilkes, and Withers 2011, 88). This approach mixed the “traverse” or “route” surveying of major thoroughfares with rough sketching by sight of more distant objects like mountains and some lakes, a method that gave reasonable approximations but also produced a “proliferation” of errors “over large distances” (Hewitt 2010, 23, 40). While Jessica Christian notes that the surveying of the waterways was particularly accurate, con­temporary geographers find that the Military Survey is characterized generally by “inconsistencies and omissions”; many field bound­aries are approximate or simply absent, property owner­ship is not noted, settlements are often only roughly indicated, places-­names are inconsistently listed, and several planned structures such as Fort George at Ardersier are placed on the map long before they ­were ever constructed (Christian 1990, 19; Fleet, Wilkes, and Withers 2011, 88). Years ­later, Roy himself referred to the survey of Scotland that he conducted as a young man as a “magnificent military sketch” rather than a “very accurate map of the country” (Hewitt 2010, 23). 6 The origin of the role of the Board of Ordnance in national defense can obscure that the fact that the organ­ization has been si­mul­ta­neously and separately both a civil and military entity. Marshall states unequivocally that ­until the early eigh­ teenth ­century the Board of Ordnance was “an institution completely separated from the army,” administered by an in­de­pen­dent board of governors (1980, 21; see also Henshaw 2014, 180). The board existed for several hundred years before the creation of a standing army in 1685, and it was run at times by a military officer and at ­others by a civilian. The ambiguity of the board’s relationship to the military—­independent or a branch—­might be better understood as a reminder Notes to Chapter 1   223

that the emergence of a standing army in the seventeenth ­century and the proj­ ect of national unification ­were linked endeavors that produced entirely new institutions as well as shifts in existing entities. By the mid-­eighteenth ­century, the Board of Ordnance had formed its own corps—­which included a section each for artillery and engineers—­with its own blue uniforms, thereby establishing itself as in­de­pen­dent of the British Army (Harley 1980, 2). The autonomy of the Ordnance Corps was achieved, in part, through specific training of cadets in board-­run academies that employed both military and civilian instructors (significantly including foreigners). The Ordnance Corps was regarded by some to be more intellectually oriented, even cosmopolitan, in outlook in comparison to the British Army. As Harley notes, due to the kind of education and training they received, a large percentage of Ordnance Corps officers contributed to the “scientific life of the nation,” often appearing to maintain “stronger links with the Royal Society than with the Army” (3). 7 ­Here we can draw on Brian Massumi’s notion of “ontopower” and the production of “affective facts.” Although Massumi’s theorization pivots around the war on terror ­after the September 11, 2001, attacks on sites in the United States, his elaboration of the ways in which threats of ­future action not only prompt but also justify and legitimate preemptive strategies and tactics can be traced back to proj­ects like the First Military Survey of Scotland in the mid-­eighteenth ­century. Ontopower does not cause ­things to happen or set ­things in motion “in any traditional sense.” As he writes, “It conditions. It reconditions the field of emergence, in order to modulate and orient what becomingly unfolds from it. The conditional logic that the operative onto-­logic of preemption brings to the fore can be summed up in the formula: ‘could have, would have, just as good as was.’ In other words, even if a threat did not eventuate into an ­actual danger, it always could have, so preemptive action ­will always have been right. This is a tautological logic, but one that does not self-­destruct. Instead, it produces: affective facts” (2015, 240). 8 In his study of the Jacobite uprising of 1745, Rebellion and Savagery, Geoffrey Planck writes: “Historians have been unusually meticulous in trying to count the number of Jacobite prisoners who ­were executed, banished, or transported across the ocean. It is impossible, however, to be si­mul­ta­neously comprehensive and precise. The number executed exceeded one hundred, and a comparable number died in prison or on shipboard. At least six hundred went to Amer­i­ca as bound servants, and approximately two hundred more ­were sent simply into exile. Hundreds of ­others are unaccounted for in the historical rec­ord” (2006, 51). 9 In her book Extrastatecraft, Easterling is intent to define infrastructural space as a form that is not determined by master narratives like “neoliberalism,” or “Capital,” or militarization, arguing that the “pyrotechnics of war may distract from other more insidious forms of vio­lence” (2014, 22). However, her inquiry into the everyday forms of vio­lence, the “less sensational or less totalizing” histories, is exactly what many scholars of colonial and postcolonial discourses and 224  Notes to Chapter 1

practices are striving to highlight as part of the history of warfare. It is impossible to read Easterling’s most recent work and not recognize many points of congruence between her formulation of dispositional vio­lence and Mary Favret’s (2010) war­time, for example. It is precisely Easterling’s emphasis on the less spectacular and quotidian media, forms, and spaces of infrastructure that works against simplistic ideological critiques and for interdisciplinary critical inquiries into the ways in which technologies and institutions act and make worlds. 10 Gregory has situated the postcolonial as integrally constituted through coexisting “multiple temporalities”: “histories and geographies are always compound, at once conjectural and foliated” (2004, 7). 11 William Roy continued to advocate for state-­sponsored surveying proj­ects throughout his life and is credited as the leading advocate of the British Ordnance Survey, which was initiated in 1791, a year ­after his death. A passionate antiquarian, Roy was a Fellow of the Royal Society and counted many of the major scientists of the age among his close colleagues and friends. 12 For a fuller discussion of Ptolemy and the development of chorography in Western Eu­rope, see Cosgrove’s “Mapping New Worlds” (1992). 13 For a fuller discussion and representative maps, see Library of Congress, “Military ­Battles and Campaigns,” accessed April 13, 2017, http://­www​.­loc​.­gov​ /­collections​/­military​-­battles​-­and​-­campaigns​/­. 14 Fleet, Wilkes, and Withers point to the following time periods as moments when Scotland was “the theatre for the playing out of ­these new military technologies and the distinctive forms of cartographic depiction which accompanied them”: the “Rough Wooing” of the 1540s, the Cromwellian Protectorate of the 1650s, and the most intense period of Jacobite uprisings in 1708, 1715–16, and 1745–46 (2011, 75–76). 15 Despite per­sis­tent mythologization, neither “Highlanders” nor the “Highlands” ­were easily contained within the bound­aries of their supposedly innate characteristics. Recent scholarship argues that the Highlands hardly comprises a uniform region—­differences of religion, language, occupation, rank, and terrain among many other variables contributed to a complex society that came together in uneven ways around issues of po­liti­cal sovereignty and economic in­de­pen­dence as well as religion (Trevor-­Roper 1983; C. Withers 1992; Planck 2006, 15). Planck points out that the ste­reo­type of Highlanders who raided rival clans and lived by feudal customs was overgeneralized. By the ­middle of the eigh­teenth ­century, he argues, many Highlanders availed themselves of emerging financial and ­legal institutions that obviated the need for the clan system, and their society offered many other pursuits beyond herding ­cattle (2006, 9). 16 For example, Fernand Braudel’s ecological geography situates mountain regions as rebel space, the “refuge of liberty, democracy, and peasant republics” (1972, 39–40). In this account, Celtic p ­ eople ­were forced to compete with invaders from the south for the fertile lands of the plains and, faced with a choice Notes to Chapter 1   225

to remain in the Lowlands as subjugated ­people, chose to move up into the harsher and less hospitable Highlands. According to Braudel, the supposed “inaccessibility” of the highlands inculcates an insular purity of bloodline as well as re­sis­tance to centralized authority (although ­there is ample evidence of continual contact between “high” and “low” lands in the case of Scotland, at the very least at the level of economic exchange) while the Lowlands became associated with a healthy mixture of ­peoples and occupations, generating thriving economies and a complex civilization (Hechter 1999, 51). Another theory of racialized difference posits that Celtic ­people are indigenous to the region, having lived in the Highlands for thousands of years, developing their own race and culture in isolation (53). ­Either scenario assumes a foundational ground truth that becomes fused with a culturalist my­thol­ogy of obstinate and ferocious Highland clans formed through geologically based isolation and ecologically derived underdevelopment—­the bedrock of both racist state and nationalist in­de­pen­dence discourses. 17 In Braudel’s binary formulation, mountainous regions are a “world apart from civilizations”: “The mountains are as a rule a world apart from civilizations, which are an urban and lowland achievement. Their history is to have none, to remain almost always on the fringe of the ­great waves of civilization, even the longest and most per­sis­tent, which may spread over ­great distances in the horizontal plane but are powerless to move vertically when faced with an obstacle of a few hundred meters” (1972, 34). 18 T. C. Smout notes that just ­under a third of the population of ­Great Britain, approximately 2.3 million ­people, lived in northern Britain in the year 1700, and half of ­those inhabitants ­were located in the Highlands. By contrast, by the late 1990s, when he was writing his environmental history, only one-­quarter of north Britain’s population lived in Scotland. Specifically, “the biggest relative decline has been in the Scottish Highlands” (Smout 2000, 10). 19 John Law argues that well-­meaning, liberal postcolonial anthropology has maintained the “Eu­ro­pean” or “Northern” conception of real­ity or way of thinking that “the world carries on by itself ”: “­People ­don’t perform it. It’s outside us and ­we’re contained by it. But that’s not true for Aboriginal ­people. The idea of a reified real­ity out ­there, detached from the world and the rituals that constantly re-­enact it, makes no sense. . . . ​Are we dealing with ­matters of belief? Are we simply saying that white ­people believe one ­thing and Aboriginal ­people believe something dif­fer­ent? Or is something dif­fer­ent ­going on? The new post-­colonial response is that the differences are not simply ­matters of belief. They are also a ­matter of reals. What the world is, is also at stake” (2011, 1–2). 20 The concept of maps as “desocializing” agents derives from J. B. Harley’s impor­ tant essay “Maps, Knowledge, and Power”: “Maps as an impersonal type of knowledge tend to ‘desocialize’ the territory they represent. They foster the notion of a socially empty space. The abstract quality of the map, embodied as much in the lines of a fifteenth-­century Ptolemaic projection as in the 226  Notes to Chapter 1

c­ on­temporary images of computer cartography, lessens the burden of conscience about ­people in the landscape. Decisions about the exercise of power are removed from the realm of immediate face-­to-­face contacts” (1988, 303). 21 Thomas Sandby was eight years se­nior to Paul and had a head start in the world, working as a draftsman with the Board of Ordnance in both London and Edinburgh and serving as the personal draftsman and chief engineer to William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, in the wars on the Continent that followed the Jacobite rebellion. It is assumed that it was Thomas Sandby’s influence with the Duke of Cumberland that insured Paul Sandby’s appointment to the Military Survey. The elder Sandy remained in the employ of the Duke of Cumberland or members of the royal ­family for the rest of his life while Paul Sandby left the Board of Ordnance in 1752, once the surveying of the Highlands was completed. See E. Robertson 1985, 9. 22 Sandby is firmly linked not only to the emergent realism of military surveying and the picturesque tradition of landscape art but to the subject of chapter 3, the immersive panoramic painting. Late in his life, in the 1790s, Sandby accepted a commission to create a painted “room of illusion” at Drakelowe Hall, the Derbyshire seat of Sir Nigel Bowyer Gresley, the scion of a ­family whose wealth stemmed from coal mining and extensive landholdings in Staffordshire. As Luke Hermann describes this work (which was created in a ­great room approximately forty feet long with a ceiling that was painted to appear to be open sky and reached twenty-­two feet at its greatest height): “Working in distemper on plaster, Sandy decorated all the walls of the room to emulate a clearing in a forest encircled by paling, and having at one end a view over a valley, which is very Welsh in feeling and possibly represents Dolbadern ­Castle in its fine setting on Llyn Peris, with Snowdon beyond. The coloring suggests autumn and the mood is one of harmonious tranquility” (1986, 54). Oliver Grau speculates that since Sandby was a member of the Royal Acad­emy and lived in London, he must have seen the new form of circular painting on display in Robert Barker’s rotunda in Leicester Square. Sandby’s “wild and romantic” landscape at Drakelowe Hall, presented “without framing ele­ments,” certainly blurred the bound­aries between the “real” and the “space of illusion” (Grau 2003, 54). Yet in the display of minerals and ore in the faux terrain (real objects placed strategically around the room to enhance the effect of realism and troupe l’oeil), Sandby provided iconic evidence of the divisions of ­labor and inequities of class that created the spectacular wealth of his patrons. ­These objects could be taken as scientific curios, sources of ­family riches, or signals of class warfare . . . ​but ­there are no miners to be seen. 23 In their history of Scottish landscape repre­sen­ta­tion, James Holloway and Lindsay Errington discuss a watercolor sketch made by Sandby for Watson in 1748 that accompanied a report on the condition and potential cost of repair of remote c­ astles in the region of Argyll: “The style of drawing and coloring in the preliminary watercolor of the south view of Duart ­Castle shows how Sandby adapted the map-­making technique to his own topographical ends—­the Notes to Chapter 1   227

conventional colors of the ordnance maps, blue green for w ­ ater and yellow for land u ­ nder cultivation are repeated in Sandby’s landscape views. The military practice of showing the shape of a mountain by aligning brush stroke with the direction of the slope was one that the artist also ­adopted” (1978, 34). 24 Ian Mitchell tells us that before Pont made his survey, information on Scottish mountains in written sources was almost non­ex­is­tent. In Pont’s survey, approximately 350 hills and mountains are “drawn and named,” generally the most “prominent and noticeable,” such as Ben Nevis, Schiehallion, Stuic a’ Chroin, and An Teallach (Mitchell 2001, 93). Mitchell singles out the depiction of Schiehallion to argue that Pont himself sketched the mountains from his own or a close aide’s personal experience of the heights, surmising that the purpose of the detailed characteristics of such repre­sen­ta­tions was “directional,” that is, “allowing the observer to locate places in the peak’s environs not vis­i­ble from the point of observation.” He concludes that Pont had “more experience and knowledge of the mountains of Scotland than any person”—­ with the pos­si­ble exception of William Roy of the First Military Survey close to 150 years ­later (104). 25 Not incidentally, the mountain played a key role in the 1770s in Nevil Maskelyne’s inquiry into the “attraction of mountains” in relation to efforts to estimate the mass of the earth. Charles Mason was chosen by the Royal Society to oversee the proj­ect, and he chose Schiehallion for this groundbreaking experiment ­because of the symmetrical shape of its cone and its relative isolation from other peaks and objects. ­After Mason bowed out, Maskelyne was forced to oversee the mea­sure­ments himself over the course of some months, during which he was visited by none other than his friend William Roy. Roy assisted in some of the procedures and wrote his own report for the Royal Society on the reliability of barometric mea­sure­ments (Hewitt 2010, 61). 26 See Marisol de la Cadena’s “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes” for an engagement with the work of Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and Jacques Rancière (among ­others) in relation to emerging po­liti­cal practices in the context of crises in colonialism and neoliberalism: “The ‘­things’ that indigenous movements are currently ‘making public’ (cf. Latour) in politics are not simply nonhumans, they are also sentient entities whose material existence—­and that of the worlds to which they belong—is currently threatened by the neoliberal wedding of capital and the state. Thus, when mountains—­say Quilish or Ausangate—­break into po­liti­cal stages, they do so as earth-­beings. . . . ​I propose that ­these objects are contentious ­because their presence in politics disavows the separation between ‘Nature’ and ‘Humanity,’ on which the po­liti­cal theory our world abides by was historically founded” (2010, 342). See also de la Cadena’s Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds (2015). 27 Jens Jager explains that picturesque landscapes occupied a space between the beautiful and the sublime, with formal ele­ments of “roughness, irregularity, a mixture of lights and shades, contrast and diversity.” Resembling the aesthetic 228  Notes to Chapter 1

aspects of ancient architecture, the picturesque connoted a “rough but not unpleasant nature” (2003, 123). 28 Jessica Christian explains that the Military Survey was created in four “clearly defined” stages and that Sandby would have been involved in three of ­those: “To start with, the original protraction of the north was drawn, referred to by Roy as the ‘manuscript’ map. It consists of 85 numbered rolls. Each is a strip, generally ­running north-­south, of regular shape but irregular size, and some are made up from much smaller sheets. The scale—­although not stated—is 1 inch to 1,000 yards. Degree of finish varies considerably” (1990, 19). 29 I refer interested readers to Avery Gordon’s Ghostly M ­ atters: Haunting and the So­cio­log­i­cal Imagination (2008) as well as Benjamin D’Harlingue’s (2015) work on “haunted tourism” in relation to the prison industrial complex, the plantation, and other spectral sites and scenes of the production of racial and ethnic in­equality. CHAPTER 2: BALLOON GEOGRAPHY

1 Simon Schama argues that, along with new modes of exhibition and spectatorship, early balloon launches contributed to a “reordering of po­liti­cal life,” a democ­ratization led by a broadening interest in and practice of science, commerce, and art (1990, 124). Each launch was not just a singular event, then, but part of a multitude of “overlapping events, activities, debates, literary texts, and endless paraphernalia” (Keen 2006, 508). As Paul Keen describes the cultural moment in Eu­ro­pean metropoles, an “unruly blend of audiences” experienced aerostation as a drawing together of the spectacle of the balloon flights with all manner of educational, commercial, and entertainment pursuits, from “indoor displays to scientific treatises to real and fictitious travelogues to fashion trends to broadsheet ballads to satirical prints to novels, poems and plays” (508). 2 The public embrace of aerostation can be situated in relation to the rise of ideologies of nationalism in the period; as Anne Godlewska has argued, the kind of national identity that was emerging in the period surrounding the French Revolution amounted to a “collective illusion” tied to the belief in the “coherence and superiority of the French social and po­liti­cal order, French civilization and French science.” This ideology promoted the “domination of neighboring ­peoples who, once conquered, would not only no longer pose a threat but would share in the benefits of French rule and French science and technology while expanding the power of France and the depth of French civilization” (1994, 35). Clearly, the association of aerostation with French science and technology tied it firmly to this emergent nationalist ideology and folded it securely into the dynamics of modern war­time. 3 The Montgolfier ­family traced its connections to papermaking to an ancestor who had taken part in the last Crusade and, while captured and held in Damascus, “discovered” the “secret” of the pro­cess. On returning to the Auvergne, the former crusader established a paper mill, producing “Carta Damascena” with his own innovation—­using cheap rags instead of expensive cotton (Rolt 2006, Notes to Chapter 2   229

26). A fortune was amassed, and papermaking occupied the ­family from the ­fourteenth into the nineteenth ­century. 4 Thanks to his dedication to the new science of aerostation, Jean-­Francois Pilâtre de Rozier was doomed to live a short life. Born in 1756, he was a professor of physics and chemistry at Reims. Rozier was involved in many of the earliest launches and experiments, only to perish in 1785 along with Pierre Roman when their attempt to cross the En­glish Channel ended in a terrible crash. See Kotar and Gessler 2011, 17–18, 40–46. 5 According to Charles Coulston Gillespie, once Joseph Montgolfier had successfully concluded his initial experiments and obtained official notice of his efforts in this regard by the diocesan assembly in Annonay, his ­brother Étienne was dispatched to Paris to work his more metropolitan contacts in academia and po­liti­cal circles to gain support from the scientific establishment for further experiments. Another ­brother, Jean-­Pierre, wrote to Étienne to suggest that he make a call on an influential ­family connection, “the ­father of the ambassador to Constantinople,” to emphasize that the “attempted conquest of Gibraltar had motivated the machine” and that the Montgolfier invention might be “a way of providing military assistance without seeming to intrude upon Turkish affairs” (Gillespie 1983, 16). Both the strategic politicking of some members of the Montgolfier ­family and the military rationale are usually elided from the predominant version of aerostation’s invention. 6 The authoritative con­temporary scholarly account of this version of aviation’s inception is related in Charles Coulston Gillespie’s study, based on a story “told in much ­later years” by Joseph Montgolfier to his friend the phi­los­o­pher Joseph Degérando, who “incorporated it in a funeral oration” in 1814: “One eve­ning in November 1782 . . . ​he was idly contemplating a print on the wall of his sitting room depicting the long siege of Gibraltar. From the time of the Spanish entry into the war of American in­de­pen­dence in 1779 ­until the peace negotiations of 1783, the fortress was invested by Spanish forces. In vain. Impregnable by land, impregnable by sea—­might not Gibraltar be taken from the air? The eve­nings ­were growing cool in Avignon. A fire burned in the grate. Surely the force that carried particles of smoke up the flue could be confined and harnessed to lift conveyances and float men above the surface of the earth” (Degérando, quoted in Gillespie 1983, 16). According to Gillespie, Joseph Montgolfier was in Avignon with another ­brother, the abbé Alexandre, by some accounts to study law (although he was already middle-­aged) or perhaps to take advantage of favorable tax conditions. Gillespie cites ­family letters to prove that Joseph was in Avignon (not in Vidalon), in a ­house “that still exists at 18, rue Saint-Étienne,” where he experimented successfully not with paper but with taffeta and a thin wood frame, writing to Étienne: “Get in a supply of taffeta and of cordage, quickly, and you ­will see one of the most astonishing sights in the world” (17). 7 It is not taking anything away from the achievements of the Montgolfiers to situate their “invention” in relation to diverse precursors including Archimedes, Gali230  Notes to Chapter 2

leo, Francesco Lana, Cyrano de Bergerac, as well as Chinese and South American technologies. Aviation historian Tom Crouch argues that the Montgolfiers merely drew on princi­ples that had been known for centuries. For example, in the late 1970s, one group of scientists launched a balloon using only the materials and techniques that had been available to the ancient Incas. Many Western travelers to China returned with stories about small hot air balloons made out of paper stretched over lightweight frames of bamboo. Crouch also refers to a second-­century bc Chinese text that described a way to send a hollowed egg shell up into the air, a trick that turned up in Eu­rope as early as the late sixteenth ­century (1983, 18; see also Needham 1965, 163). Archival evidence has revealed that the Montgolfier ­brothers’ ­father, Pierre, told his ­family about his own ­father’s trick involving a hollowed egg that could, if suspended above a flame, “float up to the ceiling” (Gillespie 1983, 24). Suffice it to say that the Montgolfiers did not invent the method of floating a light envelope through inflation with hot air but that they applied this method with ­great rigor, using materials at a larger scale, to make pos­si­ble ­human flight. 8 Aumont attributes the phrase feverish for real­ity to Peter Galassi. But in Galassi’s Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography, the quotation belongs to Beaumont Newhall, who had written, “The fever for real­ity was ­running high” (Newhall 1964, 12; Galassi 1981, 12). 9 See Clare Brant’s insightful discussion (2011, 76–77). 10 As Martin Jay has written in relation to the rise of vision’s cultural dominance in Western modernity, “Domination did not mean uniformity” (1994, 45). Philosophical disagreement over the relationship between the mind and the eye, ideal and empirical, kept vision and its generic ele­ments such as the “sublime” and “beauty” the subject of intense debate. 11 For example, a contemporaneous reviewer wrote: “Our readers ­will judge, from the above short quotation, that this writer is in ­little danger of becoming obscure by aiming at brevity. . . . ​The language is in general animated, but not ­free from affectation, nor always correct; nor ­will the singularity of writing constantly ‘woud, coud, shoud, throu’ . . . ​make any ­great addition to his literary character” (Monthly Review 1786, 223). Continuing the sardonic assessment, ­after admitting to some “plea­sure” in reading parts of Airopaidia, another reviewer wrote that “we may be allowed to laugh a ­little at our aeronaut’s peculiarities” while concluding that “errors are intimately mixed with truth, and just observation with visionary remarks” (Critical Reviewer 1786, 96, 98). 12 ­Until the last few years, Baldwin was often confused with the late nineteenth-­ century North American aeronaut Thomas S. Baldwin or his son, Thomas Jr., left out of the history of aerostation altogether, or cursorily dismissed. In his History of Aeronautics in ­Great Britain, J. E. Hodgson wrote of the author of Airopaidia: “nothing is known beyond his printed account” (1924, 131). ­There is no mention of Baldwin in popu­lar histories of aviation that include significant chapters on aerostation, such as Hallion’s Taking Flight (2003) or Neville Duke Notes to Chapter 2   231

and Edward Lanchbery’s The Saga of Flight (1964). In The Balloonists, L. T. C. Rolt is one of the few to credit Baldwin with producing “the first aerial views ever printed,” although he complains that the accompanying text is “extravagant, prolix, and boring” (2006, 75). Before the turn of the twenty-­first ­century, only two scholars gave Baldwin much consideration: Christopher Hatton Turnor discussed Baldwin’s flight in Astra Castra in his chapter on the year 1785 (1865, 91–92), while Barbara Maria Stafford referred to Airopaidia throughout her monumental work Voyage into Substance (1984, esp. 149 and 222–23). However, over the years, I have noticed a steady uptick in references to Baldwin (perhaps encouraged by the ready availability of Airopaidia’s images and text online): from passing mentions such as a brief footnote in the chapter on balloons in Shelby McCloy’s French Inventions of the Eigh­teenth ­Century (2015, 17) to an excerpt from Airopaidia included in Duffy and Howell’s Cultures of the Sublime (2011, 187–88) to three pages of discussion in Martyn Barber’s A History of Aerial Photography and Archaeology (2011, 10–13) or Marie Thébaud-­Sorger’s (2013, 46–65) entire chapter on color in Airopaidia in Mark Dorrian and Frédéric Pousin’s Seeing from Above. It might be safe to say that the situation has reversed itself such that now any general history of aviation or ballooning must mention Baldwin at least in passing or include a reproduction of images from Airopaidia; thus, Richard Holmes reproduces one of Baldwin’s images in The Age of Won­der: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (2008) and devotes two pages to Baldwin’s text in Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air (2013). While working on this book I was prompted to think seriously about Baldwin and Airopaidia’s imagery ­after reading a fascinating blog post by Jen Southern (2010). That same year, in collaboration with Jacques Attali, Ron Kenley created Arpeggio, a beautiful and thought-­provoking short video that traces Baldwin’s route using con­temporary aerial and satellite imagery. Thanks to Jen’s blog post and our subsequent conversations, my own “balloonomania” came to include lengthy engagements with Baldwin’s text, including my 2013 chapter in Adey, Whitehead, and Williams’s From Above (Kaplan 2013). 13 I came across Baldwin’s letter in a folder in the British Library when I was searching for the proposal for the naval air balloon in a collection of loose documents from the region that includes Chester. I was stunned to turn over a page to find three pages of correspondence dated December 30, 1784, and addressed from Baldwin in Chester to Thomas Pennant at Downing Hall in Flintshire. I was even more surprised to read of Baldwin’s claims for an original design similar to the vehicle that carried Pilâtre de Rozier and Pierre Romain to their deaths as they attempted to cross the Channel from France to ­England on June 15, 1785. Charles Dollfus’s description of the Rozier-­Romain aerostat as a “beautiful hydrogen balloon surmounting a small cylindrical hot-­air balloon” (1961, 47) corresponds closely to language used in Baldwin’s printed proposal from the same month in 1784 for a “­Grand Naval Air-­Balloon” “furnished with a double cover” consisting of a “globe and cylinder” (both Baldwin’s letter and the proposal can be found 232  Notes to Chapter 2

in the British Library Rare Books and Manuscript Reading Room, cup. 21.g. 36/23). As Dollfus points out in his account of this notorious attempt to cross the Channel, the doubled configuration was designed to “permit safe changes in altitude without the use of ballast or safety valves” (47). Baldwin may or may not have been robbed of credit for this innovation, but his inability to raise the funds to build his own balloon of this design may have saved his life. As Dollfus writes, “It was a valid idea, but dangerous to put into effect” (48). De Rozier and Romain died ghastly deaths as their contraption blew up over the Channel, horrifying spectators. 14 Indeed, in the same letter of December 30, 1784, cited above, Baldwin related to Pennant that he “thought of laying the ­whole scheme before the Royal Society,” but “their advertisement ‘not to give their opinion, as a body, on any subject’ forbade it.” 15 Trained as a pharmacist but working across numerous literary and scientific fields, Tytler suffered from alcoholism and was in a bankrupt condition most of his life. Born into poverty in a remote area of Scotland, Tytler’s accomplishments are all the more extraordinary in the context of his strug­gle to gain an education and to pursue scientific experimentation on the scale required by aerostation. He had to beg and borrow, improvising to an astonishing degree, to get his rather crudely manufactured bags of air aloft. But he knew what he was d ­ oing, and he accomplished what many ­others who ­were similarly inspired could not, lifting off successfully on August 27, 1784, and making other uneven attempts and ascents in the months that followed. James Sadler was a steadier figure than Tytler, and he is better known as a significant contributor to the development of both aviation and steam locomotion. The son of a pastry chef who owned a shop in Oxford, Sadler was able to gain an education in chemistry and pursue his interests in a rural milieu that was, nonetheless, a cultural hub due to the proximity of the ­great, elite university. Sadler flew both hot air and hydrogen-­powered balloons and gained re­spect among the scientifically minded (Rolt 2006, 79). A less colorful character than Tytler or Vincenzo Lunardi and Francesco Zambeccari (the two Italian pioneers of British aerostation), Sadler’s accomplishments nonetheless required similar levels of almost obsessive dedication, sheer bravery, and entrepreneurial acumen as well as scientific knowledge. 16 Leslie Gardiner puts Lunardi in Liverpool for a flight on August 9 that took him to Tarporley “in Cheshire” and mentions that he “hired out” his balloon to a “Mr. Baldwin,” so we can deduce that Lunardi was in the district for several weeks (1963, 90). 17 Clouds (and weather) ­were very much one of the primary objects of study for the first aerialists. The nature of the air and phenomena like clouds ­were still not fully understood, and travel into ­these substances was believed to be one way to ascertain with greater certainty their composition and characteristics. Clouds ­were particularly confounding and fascinating. As Richard Hamblyn has described this area of study and encounter: “Clouds and weather, perhaps Notes to Chapter 2   233

more than any other world phenomena, show clearly that ­there is no moment in nature when nothing can be said to be happening. As clouds race ­towards their own release from form, they are replenished by the mutable pro­cesses which created them. They drift, not into continuity, but into other, temporary states of being, all of which eventually decompose to melt into the surrounding air. They rise and fall like vaporous civilizations, and the challenge to early meteorology was to reveal their hidden dynamics to our sight” (2001, 11). 18 This epigraph concludes with a line from Joseph Addison’s 1704 poem “The Campaign,” commemorating the ­Battle of Blenheim, a key event in the War of the Spanish Succession: “So when an angel by divine command / With rising tempests shakes a guilty land, / Such as of late ­o’er pale Britannia past, / Calm and serene he drives the furious blast; / And, pleas’d th’ Almighty ­orders to perform, / Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm” (Addison 1722, 59). 19 Franklin, like many other astute commentators at the time, also echoed Joseph Montgolfier’s initial idea that balloons could be used to transport troops b ­ ehind ­enemy lines at a considerable savings over more conventional modes of travel: “Five thousand balloons, capable of raising two men each, could not cost more than five ships of the line, and where is ­there a prince who could afford to cover his country with troops for its defense as that ten thousand men descending from the clouds might not in places do an infinite amount of damage?” (Christopher 2004, 15). 20 Godlewska links technical and theoretical developments in eighteenth-­century warfare to the eventual blossoming of what becomes known as the “Napoleonic” strategies and tactics in the nineteenth ­century. She points to the growing importance of the “rapid movement of troops in smaller units” that required their guidance through “rough and irregular terrain” and their “reuniting for combat en masse” along with the “development of lighter and more accurate artillery,” all of which gave “cartography and road construction” much greater importance and value (1994, 35). 21 The En­glish translation of this inaugural war balloon’s moniker has been drawn on ever since, from Lowe’s U.S. Civil War–­era balloon to the tele­vi­sion and movie Star Trek series “star ship,” The Enterprise. 22 Aviation historian Richard Hallion writes that ­there is “no evidence that he ever had more than a passing interest in military ballooning” (2003, 65). John Christopher argues more forcefully that Napoleon’s deep ties to the cavalry (the operational unit most threatened by successful aerostatic scouting and reconnaissance observation) turned his relative disinterest in balloons to a “downright hatred” (2004, 27). Also in an invested vein, Rolt writes: “Thus was a promising experiment brought to a premature end by one vain and short-­sighted man. It had been said, prob­ably with truth, that Napoleon spurned the tactical aid of the new arm as unbecoming a man who, in his own opinion, was an inspired military genius” (2006, 164–65). The history of airpower is often fashioned as a tale of official disinterest, po­liti­cal infighting, and even ­career or technical sabo234  Notes to Chapter 2

tage (not to mention nationalist posturing and competition between countries). Napoleon’s lack of serious support, apocryphal or not, is certainly an ur-­text. 23 At the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, several balloonists offered their ser­vices to the Union Army, including Thaddeus Lowe and John La Mountain. Lowe put on an impressive trial demonstration for President Lincoln and received the assignment to form a Balloon Corps (which had up to six tethered balloons at the height of its operations) (Christopher 2004, 32–33). La Mountain found his own ave­nues to launch an observation effort, competing openly and bitterly with Lowe as the Confederates attempted to develop their own aerostatic corps despite a severe lack of materials and resources (giving rise to the “silk dress” patchwork balloon). By 1863, logistical prob­lems and po­liti­cal infighting doomed the Union aerostatic program and the experiment in war balloons came to an end. Extensive discussion of aerostation and the U.S. Civil War can be found in Tom Crouch’s The Ea­gle Aloft: Two Centuries of the Balloon in Amer­i­ca (1983, 335–463); Stephen Poleskie’s The Balloonist: The Story of T. S. C. Lowe (2007); and Charles S. Evans’s The War of the Aeronauts: A History of Ballooning in the Civil War (2002). See also John Christopher, Balloons at War: Gasbags, Flying Bombs, and Cold War Secrets (2004, 29–39). 24 Although balloons proved to be extraordinarily helpful during the siege of Paris in the Franco-­Prussian war over the fall and winter of 1870–71, they ­were used exclusively to lift key personnel and messages out of the city and over ­enemy lines—in other words, for transport and communications rather than for aerial observation. The balloonists faced considerable peril due to the difficulties of aerostatic navigation; several ended up in the freezing ocean far to the west or ­were blown by storms into Germany or even farther north. See John Fisher’s detailed history, Airlift 1870: The Balloon and Pigeon Post in the Siege of Paris (1965), and chapter 4 in Christopher’s Balloons at War (2004, 40–50). For a mid-­ nineteenth-­century perspective on the debates surrounding militarized aerostatic flight, see Turnor’s Astra Castra, chapter VIII, “War Balloons” (1865, 279–98). CHAPTER 3: LA NATURE À COUP D’OEIL

1 Barker did not use the word pa­norama in his application for a patent for his method of exhibiting a perfectly circular painting, opting for the French descriptor La Nature a Coup d’Oeil. According to Stephan Oettermann, no one knows exactly who coined the term, although it appears to have come into use in the En­glish language between 1787 and 1795, “but most prob­ably not before 1792” (1997, 6). The word itself is composed of two Greek words: pan (all) and horama (view). Bernard Comment points to the rise in interest in classical Greece in the period and the emerging fashion for new words drawing on Greek roots (1999, 7), while Oettermann suggests that Barker and his associates might have been familiar with Bentham’s neologism panopticon (1997, 41). 2 ­After his first two pa­noramas of Edinburgh and London, respectively, Barker depicted numerous naval victories and colonial sites and scenes, often drawing on sketches created by military topographers. As Barker became successful and Notes to Chapter 3   235

could commission work from ­others, he and his son Henry Aston Barker, as well as their successors, the ­father and son team of John and Robert Burford, exhibited pa­noramas at the Leicester rotunda that ­were created by a number of military officers (Hyde 1988, 60). 3 See also Lily Ford’s online essay “ ‘Unlimiting the Bounds’: The Pa­norama and the Balloon View” (2016), and Erkki Huhtamo’s discussion of “Virtual Voyaging with the Balloon Pa­norama” (2013, 112–20). 4 While Comment distinguishes Barker’s pa­noramas as unique and specifically modern in conception and execution, he discusses a number of “prefigurations” stretching from antiquities such as the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii or the rock paintings of Lascaux to the Bayeux Tapestry and the Italian Re­nais­sance decorations in the camera picta or studiolo as well as enlarged views such as Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fourteenth-­century painting Good Government (Comment 1999, 77). Comment argues that paintings that endeavored to “extend the horizon line” along with t­ hose that depicted “attractive, recognizable . . . ​natu­ral spots, cities, squares, or streets” contributed to the ele­ments that eventually influenced the emergence of the pa­norama’s 360-­degree vista (77–78). Most importantly, according to Comment, it was the rise of the technique of “integrating or incorporating the spectator into the fictional space of a painting” that led not only to moderns imagining themselves “in the m ­ iddle of the landscape” and thus to a new aesthetic, the picturesque, but to the properties of the sublime (78–79). Oettermann opens his history of pa­noramas by citing Theodor Adorno on the inutility of attempts to reduce modern art to what came before it. He argues instead that pa­noramas emerge as a distinct break with the tradition of Baroque theater painting, a rejection of a feudal art form that had “grown obsolete” (1997, 23). It is worth pointing out, however, that Oettermann’s book is filled with examples of earlier works that contributed, technically and aesthetically, to the emergence of modern panoramic paintings. Oliver Grau argues contra Oettermann that the early pa­noramas must be situated in relation to many precursors as well as multimedia formats that followed; rather than completely unique, the pa­norama is “the most sophisticated 360-­degree illusion space created with the means of traditional painting” (Grau 2003, 62). 5 Lunardi’s balloon was not the only such sight on display. Richard Altick notes: “Fantastic new ‘aerostatic machines’ at once competed with Lunardi’s at other London showplaces. At the ­Great Room in the King’s Arms Tavern, Cornhill, in July 1785, was displayed a ‘flying fish’—­a fifty-­foot structure designed, according to the inventor, ‘to imitate, as near as can be, in the Air the Motion of that Animal in the ­Water. It is covered in Persian Silk, colored ­after Nature’ ” (1978, 85, quoting an advertisement in the Daily Universal Register, July 5, 1785). 6 In Dark ­Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne has brilliantly reconceptualized the panopticon through a reading of the architectural plans of the slave ship Brooks as a way to deconstruct the politics of generic surveillance studies by way of black feminist scholarship. She notes that in 1785, when Jeremy Bentham 236  Notes to Chapter 3

was traveling from ­England to Rus­sia to visit his ­brother Samuel (the same visit that resulted in the first conceptualization of the panopticon), one part of his journey required embarking on a Turkish ship with “24 passengers on the deck” and “18 young Negresses (slaves) ­under the hatches” (2015, 32). The liberal social reformer passed no other comment on ­those who did not count as “passengers” and who ­were captive below deck. Browne draws Bentham’s slight mention of the bodies of black female slaves in a letter to his ­father into a reconsideration of the Foucauldian canon on panoptic surveillance, quoting Marcus Rediker to remind us that the slave ship was a “mobile, seagoing prison at a time when the modern prison had not yet been established on land” (Rediker 2007, 45; Browne 2015, 42). 7 While the strongest challenge to the single-­author narrative of the panoramic installation’s invention comes from a claim made by the German painter Johan Adam Breysig, in most histories of pa­noramas Barker remains credited alone. For example, Comment dismisses Breysig in just a few lines, arguing that written rec­ords demonstrate that the German theater designer’s plans never included any “attempt to regulate the distance accorded the spectator” (1999, 51). While Evelyn Fruitema and Paul Zoetmulder admit that Breysig’s ideas w ­ ere similar to Barker’s in many re­spects, they assert (without any historical evidence) that he “pretended” to have conceived them. In their view, since Breysig never filed a patent application, “it can, therefore, hardly be doubted,” they argue, “that the credit for the invention is due to the Irishman” (1981, 15). In ­these and other accounts, Barker’s originality is supported on the basis of his filing a patent—an impor­tant act but hardly the only way to understand the emergence of new ideas, arts, or technologies. It is just as likely that Barker’s prevalence in the historical rec­ord is due to the very skillful management of his business and cultural legacy by his equally talented son Henry Aston Barker (and the duration of the patent—­fourteen years—­which prevented ­others from developing any serious competition). Rather than parse the question of the authorship of the panoramic installation, it is more in­ter­est­ing to explore the notion that views in the round ­were increasingly pos­si­ble—­not only through the rise in popularity of metropolitan entertainment but also via the experience of viewing aerostatic launches and participating in the discursive environment of “balloonomania” across its scientific, artistic, military, and consumer attachments. 8 In one of the more intriguing storylines of disputed claims for the invention of pa­noramas, Oettermann mentions that Barker was in the same prison at the same time as Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat and other notable feats of engineering. Barker and Fulton ­were both struggling artists in London, offering their ser­vices as portrait paint­ers but unable to pay their bills. One version of the story claims that Fulton in­ven­ted the idea for a pa­norama while in prison and demonstrated the idea to a French visitor. Advocates of this account would claim that Barker “stole” Fulton’s idea, patented it, and brought it into material form. Since Fulton received an import license to construct the first pa­norama in Paris in 1799, and given his abilities in both painting and engineering, it is not Notes to Chapter 3   237

hard to imagine his keen interest in this new kind of multimedia nor his need to raise funding for his many ambitious proj­ects ­whether or not he was the original “inventor.” As the case of Breysig demonstrates, any number of ­people ­were thinking and even working along similar lines during the 1780s. Official history has tended to recognize the successful filer of patents while o ­ thers have dropped into obscurity (Oetterman 1997, 39–40, 143; Comment 1999, 29). 9 As David Solkin has argued, ­these shows and huge exhibitions generated a profoundly “social experience” and, by their collective nature, produced numerous and diverse perspectives and opinions, including habits of viewing (2001, 4). Much to the dismay of many critics and connoisseurs, ­these spectatorial practices loosened the dominance of elite “aesthetics” in ­favor of an “imaginative liberty.” Moreover, t­ hese multiple viewpoints created the architectural space and m ­ ental possibility of a “mobility of vision” that expanded the restrictions of classical Re­nais­sance linear perspective (Brewer 2007, 233). Thus, Solkin argues that the crowded conditions that included less than optimal sight lines for works hung “below the line”—­that is, below the height of a typical adult person’s direct gaze—­ mitigated against the conventions of exhibition viewing of the past. This new viewing environment created a new tolerance or even taste for distortion leaning ­toward abstraction and a novel demand for paint­ers to accommodate the challenges to perspective posed by “­Great Rooms” such as the one at Somerset House. Most significantly, perhaps, spectators interiorized their viewing, exercising “their imaginations in dif­fer­ent ways,” and developed urban habits of individualized perception that did not require the experience of nature or solitude (Solkin 2001, 3). 10 In the late eigh­teenth ­century, ­England’s Royal Acad­emy of the Arts built a very ­grand new site for its annual exhibitions, opening Somerset House in 1780 (­after twelve years in less than ideal surroundings). Designed by William Chambers, the new building became the epicenter of British academic art, and the annual show (which ran across several months in the spring and early summer) became a fash­ion­able and highly popu­lar event. Somerset House exhibitions generated critique and debate as the ­great numbers of works and the innovative exhibition practices drew large crowds and invited diverse viewing practices. 11 Barker’s patent was granted on June 19, 1787 (“Apparatus for Exhibiting Pictures,” British patent no. 1612). 12 Barker elaborated on his ingenious design in his patent application: “Now know ye, that by my invention, called La nature à coup d’oeil, is intended, by drawing and painting, and a proper disposition of the ­whole, to perfect an entire view of any country or situation, as it appears to an observer turning quite round; to produce which effect, the painter or drawer must fix his station, and delineate correctly and connectedly ­every object which pres­ents itself to his view as he turns round, concluding his drawing by a connection with where he began. He must observe the lights and shadows, how they fall, and perfect his piece to the best of his abilities. ­There must be a circular building or framing erected, on which this drawing or painting may be performed; or the same may be done 238  Notes to Chapter 3

on canvas, or other materials, and fixed or suspended on the same building or framing, to answer the purpose complete. It must be lighted entirely from the top, ­either by a glazed dome or other­wise, as the artist may think proper. ­There must be an inclosure within the said circular building or framing, which s­ hall prevent an observer ­going too near the drawing or painting, so as it may, from all parts it can be viewed, have its proper effect. This inclosure may represent a room, or platform, or any other situation, and may be any form thought most con­ve­nient, but the circular form is particularly recommended. Of what­ever extent this inside inclosure may be, ­there must be over it (supported from the bottom, or suspended from the top), a shade or roof; which, in all directions, should proj­ect so far beyond this inclosure, as to prevent an observer seeing above the drawing or painting, when looking up; and ­there must be without this inclosure another interception, to represent a wall, paling, or other interception, as the natu­ral objects represented, or fancy, may direct, so as effectually to prevent the observer from seeing below the bottom of the drawing or painting, by means of which interception nothing can be seen on the outer circle, but the drawing or painting intended to represent nature. The entrance to the inner inclosure must be from below, a proper building or framing being erected for that purpose, so that no door or other interruption may disturb the circle on which the view is to be represented” (The Repertory of Arts and Manufactures 1796, 165–66). 13 Dizziness is linked to the view from a height across a long history. As Mark Dorrian has written: “Vertigo is dizziness, and not at first sight connected to heights at all: it is etymologically linked to the Latin vertext—­whirl, whirl­pool, vortext—­and to vertere to turn. But the Latin vertext also signifies the crown of the head—­the point of growth outward from which the hair spirals—­and by extension the top, summit or highest point of something. And hence vertical, as naming that which passes through the vertext, and also—­I suppose—­the implication of the vertical as an axis around which ­things turn” (2009, 89). 14 Barker was born in 1739 in Kells, County Meath, Ireland. Oettermann writes: “­Little is known about his life before his invention of the pa­norama, except that he tried his luck as a painter in Dublin for several years even though he had no formal training. Since not only artistic success but even a bare living proved elusive ­there, he moved to Edinburgh some time around 1780, where he supported himself as a portrait and miniature painter and drawing teacher” (1997, 99). Oleksijczuk mentions that Barker married the ­daughter of a well-­known physician in Dublin: “Although at the beginning of his ­career he strug­gled financially and even spent time in a debtors’ prison, it seems fair to assume from the fact that he married an educated ­woman from an established ­family, and from the ease with which he presented himself as an artist and inventor to patrons in Edinburgh and to famous artists in London . . . ​that his manners and bearing ­were ­those of a gentleman” (2011, 27). 15 Edinburgh’s New Town signified a more modern urban design and rational mode of living. As Michael Fry puts it: “A prime feature of the Old Town had been how Notes to Chapter 3   239

dif­fer­ent social classes lived cheek by jowl. ­There was room for every­body, only on dif­fer­ent levels: the lower class at the bottom or top, the ­middle class in the ­middle (together with such of the upper class as kept a pied à terre in the capital). Before long anybody who could afford it moved to the New Town. . . . ​­Those then occupying the New Town embraced the idea of an ordered society ­because they would sit at its summit. Their sentiment found one expression in the grid’s symmetry, the long, broad thoroughfares and commodious squares” (2010, 227). 16 Oleksijczuk notes that Barker had scheduled the exhibition to open on New Year’s Eve of 1788, “the centennial of the end of King James’ reign,” but delays in the completion of the painting led to a new date that also resonated with Jacobite meaning: January 31, “the day that Prince Charles Edward Stuart died in Rome” (2011, 42). 17 Wolfgang Schivelbusch has argued that postwar culture is ­shaped profoundly by the defeated as well as by the victors. Oleksijczuk draws upon Schivelbusch’s discussion of Scottish Jacobites and Romanticism to argue that the pa­norama was an “instrument in the production of a culture of defeat,” creating a shared imaginary of war­time aftermaths through nostalgic grief and commemoration (Oleksijczuk 2011, 24, 45; Schivelbusch 2001, 312) 18 “ ‘To Lord Elcho (son of the Earl of Wemyss),’ Mr Barker continues, ‘I believe my ­father was indebted for pecuniary assistance, as well as for introductions to persons of rank in London. Thus was he enabled to follow up and extend his plans for bringing out a view of Edinburgh on a complete circle, for which purpose I was sent again to the Observatory, and began to take outlines of the entire view’ ” (Corner [1857] 2013, 5). 19 The perception of Saxon superiority over Celts persisted over a long period of time. T. C. Smout points out that as late as the 1790s, denigratory caricatures such as “ ‘Sauny,’ the itchy, lousy, sneaky Scot” remained stock figures for En­glish cartoonists (2005, 4). 20 Drawing on the social capital network theory of Nan Lin in her study of Scots in eighteenth-­century London, Nenadic points out: “To be successful, Scots in London had to rely on good advance organ­ization and an ability to tap into existing social networks to share information, exert influence, reinforce identity, and advance the individual’s social credentials” (2010, 26; see also Lin 1999, 28). 21 It is worth quoting at length from Oettermann’s lucid explanation of Barker’s technique of producing a panoramic painting: “To produce a round painting with a full 360 degrees, one must start by making a number of flat sketches—­let us say eight—­and attaching them to one another. (Each sketch ­will of necessity be in central perspective.) Now the eight flat surfaces, meeting at a­ ngles, form an octagon at their base; each side of the octagon can be pictured as a geometrical chord of a circular horizon. Theoretically, such a picture combining eight dif­fer­ent points of sight can be viewed not by one, but by eight ­people at a time. The next step in constructing the pa­norama is to combine the eight pictures attached at their edges into one by bending them and making a circle out of the octagon. (At this point 240  Notes to Chapter 3

the distortions in perspective produced by the bending ­will require correction.) The one step from octagon to circle might also be ­imagined as many smaller steps in which the number of sides in the polygon is increased from 8 to n; the length of each side decreases as the number of sides (and therefore the number of points of sight) increases. As the polygonal base approaches the shape of a perfect circle (and the picture approaches a cylinder), the number of points of sight (n) ­approaches infinity: they blend to form the line of the horizon” (1997, 31). 22 Simulation, however, no ­matter how artfully wrought, did not please ­every viewer. Romantic writers and artists recorded the most adverse reactions to the commercial and artificial staging of “real­ity” offered by the panoramic installations. In several sections of The Prelude, especially in his treatment of the pa­norama in section 7, Words­worth contrasted the sublime transport of the mind made pos­si­ble by mountain or hilltop prospects, achieved in solitude and over time, to the instantaneous shock of the hyperrealist scene viewable in the constrained space of the pa­norama rotunda while rubbing elbows with crowds of other spectators (Words­worth [1799] 1907, 181). As Gillen D’Arcy Wood notes, for Words­worth and ­others, the early pa­norama’s visual field resisted interiorization and remained always already an “­enemy to imaginative power” (2001, 109–10). According to this argument, the pa­norama’s virtuoso display of technique inspired spectators to won­der not so much at nature itself but at the cleverness of the rendition, emphasizing the mechanical or clinical delivery of a constructed real­ity made available not for sublime rapture but for cheap sensation. 23 As Martin Kemp summarizes this line of argument: “The way we think about space, consciously and unconsciously, is profoundly associated at the deepest structural level with the way that space has come to be represented in Western art from the time of the invention of linear perspective in the Re­nais­sance. The dominant schema of visualization is what might be called the cubic unit, potentially extensible to infinity, but for the most part related to the finite spaces we inhabit inside the predominantly urban environments that ­house increasing numbers of the world’s population. It is a form of ordering that we also show a marked propensity to impose on more rural topographies for a variety of visual, psychological, and functional reasons. It is a schema which has pervasively entered world cultures which traditionally have represented space in very dif­fer­ ent ways, if at all. The entry has been affected partly by the spread of perspectival depiction within the realm of art, much as it diffused in an apparently inexorable manner from fifteenth-­century Florence into virtually ­every Eu­ro­pean state in the early modern era” (2006, 13). 24 Oleksijczuk discusses ­these perspectival dynamics throughout her book on the first pa­noramas; see especially 78–88, citing Jonathan Crary’s (1990, 72) argument that a new understanding of vision as internal rather than external to the body arose in this time period. As she writes, “Within the Pa­norama’s enclosed space, perspectival illusionism had the potential to fuse with the body’s sensual apprehensions” (2011, 86). Notes to Chapter 3   241

25 The ­great British fleet had been gathered to head to the Black Sea to try to convince Catherine the ­Great to make peace with the Ottoman Empire in an unpop­u­lar gambit orchestrated by William Pitt, the British prime minister. Pitt was unable to prevail, and the fleet was not deployed. As Oleksijczuk notes, the Barkers’ pa­norama of the so-­called Rus­sian Armament in waiting at Spithead was exhibited soon ­after Britain had declared war on France in February 1793, demonstrating the formidable force of the British Navy (2011, 69). 26 Hyde notes: “In all between the 1780s and 1860s over 150 pa­noramas ­were painted and exhibited by Robert Barker, H. A. Barker, and T. E. Barker, and their successors John Burford and Robert Burford” (1988, 60). Large, wide-­ format landscapes like Robert Dodd’s Campus Nautica and Robert Ker Porter’s Storming of Seringapatam ­were exhibited in the late 1790s, introducing themes of ­battle, British imperialism, and national superiority. Once Barker’s patent expired in 1802, competitors sprang into action in earnest. Barker’s own eldest son, Thomas, who seems to have been estranged from his ­father and younger ­brother, opened a two-­tiered rotunda in the Strand, which he ran with Richard Reinagle ­until they sold the property to Henry Aston Barker (Comment 1999, 25). The young but already famous landscape painter Thomas Girtin opened his 270-­degree view of London, Eidometropolis, in 1802. Panoramic rotundas ­were built in most world capital cities and the paintings themselves circulated for exhibition ­until they fell apart or ­were painted over. 27 Henry Aston Barker studied at the Royal Acad­emy of Arts and came to know celebrated artists such as Thomas Girton and J. M. W. Turner. ­After marrying the eldest ­daughter of Admiral William Bligh, the infamous captain of the hms Bounty, he became familiar with many figures in military circles. Closely linked to his ­father’s proj­ects from childhood, Henry Aston produced his own pa­noramas and supervised the production of pa­noramas executed by ­others following his ­father’s death in 1806, retiring in 1826 when he passed the business on to John and Robert Burford. He died in 1856. 28 Ralph Hyde offers the following sources for preliminary drawings: “by the archaeologist Frederick Catherwood (‘Jerusalem,’ ‘Thebes,’ and ‘Baalbec’); by the roving artist, Augustus Earle (‘Sydney,’ and ‘The Bay of Islands, New Zealand’); by explorers, Capt John Ross (‘Boothia’) and Lt Browne (‘Polar Regions’); and by such serving naval and military officers as Lt W. Smyth rn (‘Lima’), Cpt Robert Smith re (‘Benares’ and ‘Delhi’), Lt F. J. White re (‘Hong Kong’), and Cpt Verschoyle (‘Sebastopol’)” (1988, 60). CHAPTER 4: MAP P I N G “ M ESOP OTAM I A”

1 Grover Heiman, the retired U.S. Air Force col­o­nel and “reconnaissance specialist” who wrote Aerial Photography: The Story of Aerial Mapping and Reconnais­ sance, mentions in passing that the new technology was used “with excellent results in Egypt and other areas in the ­Middle East” (1972, 41). In Peter Mead’s classic work The Eye in the Air, air war and aerial reconnaissance in 242  Notes to Chapter 3

Mesopotamia receives a ­little more than four pages out of a brief chapter on “The Sideshows” (that also included short sections on “Gallipoli,” “German East Africa,” “Salonika,” “Italy,” and “Palestine”), but this is still more commentary than is found in most histories of aerial reconnaissance and surveying written by British or U.S. historians (Mead 1983, 111–25). 2 The British searched for an appropriate dynastic line to help achieve the unification of disparate provinces into one nation-­state and settled, ­after considerable po­liti­cal turmoil and uncertainty, on Faysal al-­Awwal ibn al-­Husayn ibn ‘Ali al-­Hashimi (Sluglett 2007, 18, 37). Then-­emir Faysal had assisted the Allies during World War I and had led the Arab del­e­ga­tion to the Paris Peace Conference, counting both T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell as supporters. In 1920 Faysal was declared King of Greater Syria but was soon expelled by the French when the region was granted to them by the League of Nations Mandate. The following year, although Faysal had no ­family ties to or close knowledge of Mesopotamia, he was positioned by the British to lead the country as its king. King Faysal died in 1933 at the age of forty-­eight ­under suspicious circumstances and was succeeded by his son, Ghazi. See Dodge 2003; Sluglett 2007. 3 In History in the Arab Skies, Gerald Butt relates: “On November 1st Lieut. Gavotti (Etrich) flew over the ­enemy, carry­ing four bombs, carried in a leather bag; the detonator he had in his pocket. When above the Turkish camp, he took a bomb on his knees, prepared it and let it drop. He could observe the disastrous results. He returned and circled over the camp, ­until he had thrown the remaining three bombs. The length of his flight was altogether about 100 kiloms. The bombs contained picrato of potassa, type Cipelli” (Flight, November 11, 1911, 989). Writing home to his ­father, Lieutenant Gavotti related that he had been chosen to try out aerial bombardment: “­Today I have deci­ded to throw bombs from the aeroplane. It is the first time that we ­will try this and if I succeed, I ­will be ­really pleased to be the first person to do it” (Butt 2011, 38). 4 This anecdote, which apparently derives from Vittorio Mussolini’s memoir, Vita con mio Papa (1957), begins to circulate in discussions of airpower and visual culture following Allan Sekula’s mention of it in his iconic essay, “The Instrumental Image: Steichen at War” ([1975] 1984, 46). Virilio, citing Sekula, draws on Mussolini’s description to emphasize the cinematic intent of the bomber/viewer: “one form suddenly dissolves before the war pi­lot’s eyes, and in an extraordinary fade-­out/fade-in another form appears and reconstitutes itself. He has created it, just as a director working on a viewer can edit a scene in an aesthetically pleasing manner” (1989, 19). 5 ­Under the Ottoman Empire, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, what became the nation of Iraq began to form as a consortium of three provinces that radiated out from the cities of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra: “The term al-­‘Iraq (meaning the shore of a g­ reat river along its length, as well as the grazing land around it) had been used since at least the eighth ­century by Arab geographers to refer to the ­great alluvial plan of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, a region known in Eu­rope Notes to Chapter 4   243

as Mesopotamia” (Tripp 2010, 8). For Western Orientalists and archaeologists, Mesopotamia came into usage in the mid-­nineteenth ­century as the preferred term for this large area between and around the two ­great rivers that symbolized the so-­called ancient cradle of civilization, and the British continued to use this nomenclature far into the twentieth ­century. Zainab Bahrani argues that the term Mesopotamia refers to an “atemporal rather than geo­graph­i­cal entity,” promulgated by Eu­ro­pean Orientalists: “This civilization had to be entirely dissociated, by name, from the local inhabitants and con­temporary culture in order to facilitate the portrayal of the history of ­human civilization as a single evolutionary pro­cess with its natu­ral and ideal outcome in the modern West” (1998, 165). When I am referring to historical materials or events that use the word Mesopotamia, I w ­ ill retain the term. Other­wise, I ­will refer to the region and the nation as Iraq. 6 The role of archaeology in the development of the Orientalist geo­graph­i­cal imaginary as well as in the emergence of Western military objectives in the region requires an entire discussion in and of itself. Archaeological interest in sites and artifacts did not abate even during war—­both German and Allied pi­lots took photo­graphs over Iraq not only for reconnaissance purposes but to document ruins and locations of academic and scientific interest. Rebecca Wexler’s 2006 Cambridge University master’s thesis, “Heightened Histories: Aerial Archaeology and British Nationalism in ­England and Iraq,” is meticulously researched and stands as one of the best sources of information and analy­sis on the topic. See also Beazeley 1919; 1920; Hogarth et al. 1920; Dowson 1921; Crawford 1929; Reeves 1936; Silberman 1989; Meskell 1998; ­Moscrop 2000; Bernhardsson 2005; Gerster 2005; Hauser 2007; Malley 2008; Satia 2008; Stichelbaut et al. 2009; Barber 2011; Bohrer 2011; Ramirez 2009. 7 Italy’s investment in aerial surveying and attack for the purposes of colonial control was amplified during Italo Balbo’s terms as undersecretary and minister of the Italian Royal Air Force and then as governor of Libya (Lana 1996, 9–11). See also Karen ­Piper’s chapter “Air Control, Zerzura, and the Mapping of the Libyan Desert” in her Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race, and Identity (2002, 95–127). 8 In The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian, Helen Kinsella argues that the distinction between civilian and combatant becomes more pronounced as warfare becomes industrialized and widespread during the twentieth ­century, generating an international “protocol” (2011, 7). In this context, airpower produced the conditions for dividing populations into civilian and combatant even as the advent of air war gave rise to expressions of panic and heightened concern about the blurring of the boundary. As air control in colonized and Mandate administrative regions ­amply demonstrates, ­human rights objections against undeclared air war operating as population control and management as disproportionate harm against civilians can ignore the ways the separation between civilian and combatant makes no sense in a widespread re­sis­tance to asymmetric warfare. 244  Notes to Chapter 4

9 See James Corum and Wray Johnson’s Airpower in Small Wars: Fighting Insur­ gents and Terrorists for a cogent discussion of the ways in which air control replaced the tradition of expensive and slower-­moving practices of British Army punitive expeditions in colonial zones (2003, 51–86). 10 Sekula eviscerates the authorial mystique of the reconnaissance photo­graphs ascribed to Steichen: “Edward Steichen commanded 55 officers and 1,111 enlisted men. Obviously he was not a combat photographer, although he did go for rides over the front lines with Billy Mitchell on occasion. Steichen’s job was that of a middle-­to-­ high level military bureaucrat. He or­ga­nized production, attended Rodin’s funeral, and is said to have been especially good at solving procurement prob­lems ­because of his intimacy with France” ([1975] 1983, 39). A more generous view on Steichen in the war zone is put forward in Von Hardesty’s Camera Aloft: Edward Steichen in the ­Great War (although Hardesty refers to Steichen as a “nonflying officer,” confirming that the photographer did not himself shoot any film in the air) (2015, 66). 11 Jeanne Haffner explains that French reconnaissance photography interpreters ­were trained during World War I to “connect vis­i­ble topographical information obtained from photographic surveys with invisible knowledge of German defense practices and customs.” Accordingly, ­those best suited for interpretation ­were “architects, photog­raphers, or other artists” who could “discipline their imagination” in relation to their understanding of the German system of defense (2013, 13; see also Carlier 1921, 131). 12 David Omissi’s (1990) history of British air control following World War I continues to stand, if not alone, very much as a pioneer engagement with the legacies of colonialism and military aviation. Both Sven Lindqvist’s (2001) and Beau Grosscup’s (2006) studies of the history of aerial bombardment offer impor­tant discussions of air war in colonial zones. For a detailed history of air war in Iraq during World War I and the Mandate period, Priya Satia’s groundbreaking work is required reading (2006, 2008). See also Corum and Johnson 2003; Dodge 2003, 131–56. 13 In order to avoid the deadlock generated by trench warfare on the western front, some se­nior British military officials headed by Winston Churchill argued for an “eastern” approach to defeating the Germans by moving through the straits of the Dardanelles to capture the center of power of the Turkish allies, Constantinople. The strategy involved drawing German and Austro-­Hungarian troops to protect areas farther away from Western Eu­rope, exhausting and diminishing resources (Heffernan 1996, 512). The expansion of the war zones soon included anywhere the Turkish forces wielded power and influence across a ­great expanse of North Africa and the ­Middle East. Interestingly, in May 1915, only five months ­after the approval of the “eastern” option, the first mobile photography labs and cameras with greatly improved lenses ­were operationalized, expanding the range and quality of war photography, particularly aerial imaging (Amad 2012, 69). 14 In his authoritative account of World War I aerial photography, Terrence Finnegan underscores the alacrity with which the French embraced research and Notes to Chapter 4   245

development into military aviation and photogrammetry particularly in relation to interpretation of aerial images in order to develop and enhance information on an already existing map. In general, the command staff of the French Army fully supported the role of aviation in military strategy and tactics from a very early point in contrast to a more uneven adoption by the British (Finnegan 2006, 9). 15 In History in the Arab Skies, Gerald Butt discusses the avid interest on the part of air-­minded Eu­ro­pe­ans to experiment with distance and elevation by testing airplanes in North Africa and the ­Middle East in this period before World War I. He points to the pivotal moment in 1913 when Roland Garros, the famous French aviator, became the first person to fly across the Mediterranean. Much like the effect produced when Louis Blériot flew across the En­glish Channel in 1909, changing forever the geo­graph­i­cal sense of security previously provided by Britain’s status as an island nation, Garros’s crossing destabilized long-­standing geo­graph­i­cal assumptions about space and time. As Butt writes: “It meant that henceforth the grip of the Eu­ro­pean colonial powers over the countries of North Africa and the ­Middle East would be even tighter. Lines of fast communication and transport could be established between Eu­ro­pean capitals and colonial outposts; and personnel and equipment could be moved quickly to any spot in the colonies where an insurrection might occur. Conversely, any nationalist movement seeking to challenge colonial rule would now have to take account of the Eu­ro­pean powers’ command of the air” (2011, 29). 16 Beaumont Newhall depicts the major Western powers as caught a bit off guard. Thus, in his history of aerial photography, the French spring into action only ­after they discover a camera suitable for reconnaissance in the wreckage of a German zeppelin in the early days of the war. Accordingly, this “led the French to hastily reactivate the photographic section of the air ser­vice, which had been deactivated at the close of the Moroccan crisis.” Newhall describes the hurried mobilization of Louis Philippe Clerc from his civilian position as professor of photographic science at the University of Paris to develop a manual of procedures for aerial reconnaissance. He also notes that at the start of the war, the British Royal Flying Corps had “no air cameras, no materials, and no pro­cessing facilities,” so the pi­lots who ­were advocates of aerial reconnaissance took their own personal cameras with them on observation flights (Newhall 1969, 52). With the pos­si­ble exception of the Germans, all of the standing armies had to cobble together their photographic sections in the first years of the war. Yet this kind of account belies the serious testing of photographic reconnaissance by not only the military in colonial zones but also fledgling commercial and academic aerial surveying proj­ects that Newhall himself chronicles in other chapters of his book. This kind of cognitive dissonance in the history of early airpower in relation to an asynchronous account of colonial policing plagues most of the English-­language scholarship on this topic. 17 In her study of “aces” and the “American imagination,” Linda Robertson argues that the air war “came to symbolize the older, chivalric conception of the warrior 246  Notes to Chapter 4

as the embodiment of all that was best in civilization—­constraint ­under pressure, fairness to one’s enemies, skilled combat, and a willingness to sacrifice one’s life on behalf of king and country,” leading to an idealistic conception of “civilized vio­lence” (2003, xviii). 18 The ill-­considered and drastically underresourced nature of the Mesopotamian campaign was well documented by the close of the war. In The Long Road to Baghdad, Edmund Candler, correspondent throughout the war for the Manches­ ter Guardian and self-­described “official witness,” wrote: “The policy of penetrating Mesopotamia, in the first place, beyond the Shatt-­al-­Arab and Karun was of doubtful wisdom. . . . ​Po­liti­cal reasons ­were urged for ­going on; but it is a sound axiom that po­liti­cal reasons should wait upon strategical, since they are ultimately deci­ded by them. In Mesopotamia the penalty exacted for the reversal of this order was the more heavy as our policy was one of opportunism. . . . ​But we wanted Baghdad” (1919, 1–3). 19 Taking a wider time frame into consideration in the interests of establishing an Iraqi national identity, Mohammad Gholi Majd argues that the region has been conquered four times since the thirteenth ­century: “the Mongol conquests of the 13th and 14th centuries, the Ottoman conquest of the 16th ­century, the British conquest in World War I, and the American-­British invasion and occupation in 2003” (2006, 1). 20 Ian Sumner writes that the Indian Army was the “largest volunteer army in the world” at the start of World War I (2001, 3). It represented at that time a consolidation by the British of three previous militaries, each linked to their region (Bengal, Bombay, and Madras), brought together not only to integrate resources but to serve on the troubled North-­West Frontier to defend against a feared Rus­sian invasion through Af­ghan­i­stan. With the outbreak of World War I, the Indian Army counted 150,000 men in its ranks and offered to send troops where needed. Expeditionary Force A was sent to the western front, where the infantry division served for a year ­until it was withdrawn to Egypt in 1915. The cavalry unit of Force A remained in France ­until 1918. Indian soldiers ­were also sent to East Africa as Force B. The largest group to serve outside India was Expeditionary Force D, which was deployed to Iraq. 21 Prompted by horrifying reports from both Mesopotamia and the Dardanelles, an official Commission of Inquiry conducted an investigation into the Indian Expeditionary Forces throughout 1916 and into 1917. The final report revealed gross incompetence in oversight and planning and a disastrous administrative structure directly responsible for deaths, injuries, and grave losses of territory and damaged military objectives. Following the publication of the report, the Secretary of State for India, Austen Chamberlain, resigned, and a year ­later, apparently as a result of public shaming, the Commander-­in-­Chief of the Indian Army, General Beauchamp Duff, who had been relieved of command at the start of the inquiry, committed suicide. The far-­reaching effects of the inquiry led to a “widespread reor­ga­ni­za­tion of operational, administrative and logistical Notes to Chapter 4   247

responsibility and paved the way for the resumption of the advance [on Baghdad] ­after months of soul-­searching” (Ulrichsen 2014, 136–37). 22 The following passage from J. E. Tennant’s memoir, In the Clouds above Bagh­ dad, gives some sense of the less than favorable conditions for airpower in late 1916: “The Aircraft Park, at Tanooma, on the other side of Busrah harbor, was a collection of palm-­leaf huts with a few iron-­roofed brick sheds, surrounded by desert. ­Here such arrears of work had accumulated that it was hard to know where to begin, and the men who ­were left had ­little life in them. It was only pos­si­ble to work in the hours of dawn, for by nine ­o’clock the sun was getting up, and any remaining energy was necessary for bare existence. A large percentage of our staff ­were sick, the hospitals ­were overflowing, and very few reinforcements arriving in the country ever reached their units, but went sick in Busrah, taking up valuable room in hospital that was needed for men evacuated from the front. Lack of ­labour was seriously holding up the unlading of stores urgently required by the force up river; coolies ­were few and difficult, and troops ­were not to be spared from drafts for the fighting forces, fifty ­percent of whom had gone sick. The congestion of shipping in Busrah harbor, as a result of this, was serious at a time when all the Empire’s resources in tonnage ­were necessary to fight the submarine menace. Some ships had been lying in harbor for months, and it was said that ­others had returned to India, having only cleared a portion of their cargo in order not to waste time when ­there was any space available. Nine new airplanes which had been waiting a month to be unloaded ­were not got ashore till several weeks ­later. The base at Busrah seems to be congested with stores of ­every description, yet owing to lack of ­labour and shallow draft river transport, the fighting force ­were hard pressed to maintain themselves” (1920, 12–13). 23 For example, Philip MacDonald’s popu­lar, if xenophobic, novel Patrol (1927) was based on the author’s ser­vice in Iraq during World War I and was first made into a ­silent film, Lost Patrol, in 1929 and then remade as The Lost Patrol by producer Merian C. Cooper and director John Ford for rko in 1934. The basic premise was reworked in the 1936 Soviet film The Thirteen set in the desert of Central Asia, adapted again in 1943 as Sahara and set in the African desert, only to be revamped as The Last of the Comanches in 1953, with a remake of Sahara in 1995. The imdb entry for the 1934 film sums up the plot nicely: “A dozen British soldiers, lost in a Mesopotamia desert during World War I, are menaced by unseen Arab enemies.” Internet Movie Database, “The Lost Patrol,” accessed October 29, 2015, http://­www​.­imdb​.­com​/­title​/­tt0025423​/­. 24 Although the military insisted that the area was “blank” and in need of extensive cartography, surveying of Iraq had begun several years before the official start of the “­Great War,” continuing the mapping proj­ects linked to earlier and ongoing archaeological expeditions and geo­graph­i­cal socie­ties. At the end of the eigh­teenth ­century, the region had begun to be perceived as a strategic node for overland travel between Eu­rope and India (Fagan 2007, xi). As routes by land and sail began 248  Notes to Chapter 4

to be explored, archaeological interest in ancient biblical sites such as Nineveh, Nimrod, and Babylon drew excavators from all the major Western Eu­ro­pean countries as well as the United States. As Magnus Bernhardsson argues, archaeology played a pivotal role in the politics of Iraq, first contributing to “Eu­ro­pean interest in the land, then eventually to the British delineation of the country, and fi­nally to the affirmation of the Iraqi nation’s sovereignty, in­de­pen­dence, and identity” (2005, 4). In her work on the rise of British aerial photography as an academic science that became imbricated with military aims and practices, Wexler has shown that aerial imagery eventually assisted the British in claiming a primary owner­ship of the archaeological heritage of Iraq, while emptying the conceptual and figurative map of the country, with the result that the inhabitants ­were seen to be detached from their own history (Wexler 2006, 53; see also Silberman 1989, 2). When considered in relation to the existence of Ottoman and other maps of the area before World War I, it is not so much that ­there ­were no maps of Iraq. Rather, the ways in which the British, for example, wanted to “see” Iraq ­were not yet available and required an infrastructure and full-on “applied realism” to come into view. 25 British air units in Mesopotamia during World War I consisted of squadrons from the Royal Flying Corps as well as an “Australian Half-­Flight” from the Australian Flying Corps (so-­named ­because the new flying unit was so small it could fill only half the usual flight regiment). ­These groups ­were joined by a small number of Royal Navy Air Ser­vice floatplanes (Lambert 2003, 46). 26 An excellent discussion of the “evolution” of the ­Middle East as a “geopo­liti­ cal concept” as well as a set of geo­graph­i­cal constructs can be found in Bonine, Amanat, and Gasper 2012. 27 Sven Lindqvist tells us that, at the close of the war, Winston Churchill built his argument for air control based on the success of the plan operationalized by the commander-­in-­chief of the air force, Hugh Trenchard, against Mohammed A. Hassan and his forces in Somaliland; Hassan “had long been a thorn in the British lion’s paw. Countless expeditions had failed to punish him.” The newly formed, postwar raf bombed Hassan, his ­family, and his followers over the course of a week, securing a surrender. “Total cost: 77,000 pounds—­chicken shit compared to what the army had asked for.” Completely convinced by the economics, Churchill offered the raf “six million pounds to take over control of the Iraq operation from the army.” The raf ­were assigned to “replace fifty-­one battalions,” which was “what the army needed to control a country that, during the First World War, had freed itself from centuries of Turkish rule and now refused to accept the British as their new masters” (Lindqvist 2001, 42–43). 28 Although the raf claimed that tribes would be warned and that the attacks on villages ­were punitive actions that focused solely on property, the commanders preferred to bomb without warning in order to create the most panic and achieve the “greatest moral effect.” Heavy casualties resulted (Corum and Johnson 2003, 63; see also Omissi 1990, 155). Notes to Chapter 4   249

29 In contrast to the British, the French focused for the most part on aerial reconnaissance rather than bombing their colonies. Daniel Neep notes that France did not establish an Air Ministry ­until 1928, and the French Air Force did not become an in­de­pen­dent armed ser­vice ­until 1933. Air attacks took place regularly but they did not constitute a doctrine of airpower; rather, they operated as tactical support for ground troops (Neep 2012, 123; see also Young 1974, 57–63). Colonial rule in French colonies was enforced violently but in dif­fer­ent discursive registers—­a distinction of small comfort to ­those subject to its practices of torture and repression. 30 Corum and Johnson point out that on October 1, 1922, when all military forces in Iraq ­were formally put ­under the aegis of the raf, “it was the first time that an airman had been placed in control of all military operations in a country” (2003, 56; see also Omissi 1990, 31). As they note further: “Henceforth, the military garrison in Iraq would consist of eight raf squadrons and four raf armored car companies. ­There ­were fifteen thousand local Iraqi levies and police, five thousand of whom ­were ­under British command and or­ga­nized as the core of the Iraqi Army. ­These local forces would be British equipped, officered, and trained and supported by the revenues of the Iraqi state” (Corum and Johnson 2003, 56). 31 As Peter Sluglett relates, “It was deci­ded at the Cairo Conference that, in broad terms, defense should be undertaken jointly by the British and Iraqi governments, the Iraqis providing an army and the British a detachment of the Royal Air Force” (2007, 182). Further, as Corum and Johnson note, although the British public was informed that all British ground forces would be withdrawn, in fact they ­were simply replaced by Indian Army brigades (paid for by the Indian government rather than the British War Department)—­a technicality. Thus, they argue, “although Iraq was held up as an example of a country garrisoned by airpower, ­there was a significant army force on hand throughout the ­whole period of the British mandate ­until Iraq was granted full in­de­pen­dence in 1932” (2003, 57). In the original agreement, Britain was to withdraw all parts of its military by in­de­pen­dence. This did not happen, as Sluglett observes, “­because the oilfields and the Empire air route ­were considered too impor­tant to be left unprotected” and “raf bases ­were maintained in Iraq ­until 1958” (2007, 183). CHAPTER 5: THE P OL I TI CS OF TH E SEN SI B L E

1 La Grande Illusion (1937) was directed by Jean Renoir, written by Charles Spaak and Renoir with cinematography by Christian Matras, and edited by Marthe Huguet and Marguerite Renoir. The ensemble cast is headed by Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay, Erich von Stroheim, Marcel Dalio, and Dita Parlo. Gabin and Fresnay’s characters are shot down over e­ nemy lines and sent to a series of German prisoner of war camps as they continue to try to escape and return home. 2 Virilio has rehearsed this argument across many works (see, e.g., 1989, 1991, 1994b, 1997, 2002). See also Baudrillard 1995; Duffield 2011; Armitage and Bishop 2013. 3 I have discussed the import of the global positioning system in relation to the rma in Kaplan 2006, 2007, 2010. 250  Notes to Chapter 4

4 In an interview with Ristelhueber, curator Cheryl Brutvan explored the valence of Man Ray’s photo­graph of the back of Duchamp’s multimedia work for the photographic proj­ect that became Fait: “It appeared to be a landscape, albeit an inhospitable one; but, without readable scale, depth, or perspective, it struck her as incomprehensible. The only obvious ele­ments within it ­were demarcations on a surface: a repetition of lines without obvious patterning, equally indecipherable if read as a detail or as an im­mense scene. As a photo­graph it was to be believed, yet it was filled with contradictions; revealing and mysterious; easily dismissed and fascinating” (2001, 17). 5 As David Hopkins has written: “ ‘Rrose Sélavy’ was the alter ego Duchamp had in­ven­ted for himself in a series of photo­graphs and readymade gestures from the early 1920s, in other words around the time that Dust Breeding was created. The Paris Dada group had heard of this mysterious creation of the New York-­ based Duchamp by 1922, not least from Duchamp himself who had been in Paris in the l­ ater part of 1921, and may have pondered how her name (which as well as punning on the phrase ‘eros c’est la vie’ [‘love is life’], also suggests ‘arrosez la vie’ [‘­water—or sprinkle—­life’]) in par­tic­u­lar resonated with Duchamp’s reputation for being a ‘dry type’ ” (2013, 137–38). Hopkins also points to a “more ironic deadly subtext” that always accompanied Rrose: “Her first appearance in his work had been in Fresh ­Widow of 1920, where her name appeared with one R on the base of the miniaturized French win­dows, produced by a New York carpenter. It seems likely that the war was obliquely at issue ­here, since the pun surely derives its impetus from a salacious nod to the sexual availability of newly widowed w ­ omen in France in the years following World War I” (143). 6 Al-­Ani left Iraq with her ­father, who is Iraqi, and her ­mother, who is Irish, when she was thirteen. She has stated that she prefers not to be labeled as an “Iraqi artist,” but she has returned to the subject of events and sites in and near Iraq throughout her work. 7 The first U.S.-­Iraq Persian Gulf War influenced al-­Ani’s early work. For example, Untitled (Gulf War Work) included formal photo­graphs of her ­family, news images, and reproductions of ancient ruins composed into a series of twenty small black-­and-­white images. As al-­Ani moved into video and sound work, she continued to explore diasporic connections and disconnections with Iraq with a sensitivity to the war­time aesthetics of a landscape of unfolding aftermath. By incorporating sound as well as imagery, al-­Ani now mobilizes a wider sensorium. In The Visit, a two-­part video installation screened in 2005 at the Tate Modern in London, al-­Ani counterposed a large-­scale projection work, Muse, with Echo, a multiscreen piece in which a group of w ­ omen discuss their feelings about an unnamed visitor. In Muse, a male figure waits in a seemingly vast, arid landscape (shot along the Iraq-­Jordan border), always already separated from the female sphere. 8 Margaret Cox has located and excavated mass graves in Rwanda and Iraq using a variety of forensic techniques. Cox’s first case took place in Kosovo, where she Notes to Chapter 5   251

followed a specific butterfly to its “host plant,” a par­tic­u­lar wildflower that only grows in disturbed soil—in this case, the ground had been affected by the burial of large numbers of ­people. As Harriet Warner of The In­de­pen­dent has written in relation to Cox’s work: “But the dead are not that easy to hide. They leach into the soil, raise the nutrient level, feed the weeds, lure the butterflies” (2004). 9 Along similar lines but in relation to the U.S. Southwest, Shiloh Krupar has argued that the discourse of the desert as wasteland “obscures the ­actual richness of resources in the West in order to justify relentless plunder through extremely environmentally destructive technologies. . . . ​The mass destruction of the homelands of indigenous cultures, as well as the ­silent casualties of millions of soldiers, armament workers, and downwind civilians, is naturalized in the landscape of the West largely as an invisible, secret holocaust” (2013, 88). 10 Across a series of publications from the early 1970s, Yale University literary critic Harold Bloom developed a theory of the modernist creative pro­cess based on an “anxiety of influence” that produced in writers a tendency to break with the past in ­favor of asserted originality. Integral to the vari­ous manifestations of this response is “clinamen,” the often unconscious misreading that overpowers anxiety enough to allow for a correction of the precursor (Bloom 1973). 11 While ­there is an exhaustive lit­er­a­ture on this topic, I would point interested readers to W. J. T. Mitchell 1992; Parks 2005, 2009, 2016; Campbell 2013; Kaplan 2014. AFTERWORD

1 Citing figures from the U.S. Air Force, Richard Schwartz has summarized the conflict in ­these terms: “The Iraqi Army lost about 76 ­percent of its tanks, 55 ­percent of its armored personnel carriers, and 90 ­percent of its artillery. About 1,430 Iraqi personnel carriers and 700 tanks managed to escape. On the other hand, the allies destroyed about 3,700 tanks, took over 70,000 prisoners, and rendered 33 Iraqi divisions in­effec­tive. Approximately 20,000 to 30,000 Iraqi soldiers ­were killed from bombings and ground combat, and many o ­ thers died from diseases and other desert-­related illnesses. . . . ​By contrast the co­ali­tion forces suffered fewer than 300 combat fatalities” (1998, 7). In a controversial but carefully researched study, Beth Daponte estimated that 205,500 ­people died during and immediately following the war (1993, 65). As she writes: “­There ­were relatively few deaths (approximately 56,000 to military personnel and 3,500 to civilians) from direct war effects. Postwar vio­lence accounted for 35,000 deaths. The largest component of deaths in this reconstruction derives from the 111,000 attributable to postwar adverse health effects. Of the total excess deaths in the Iraqi population, approximately 109,000 ­were to men, 23,000 to ­women, 74,000 to ­children” (65). 2 For an eloquent consideration of the complex sensory dynamic of drone strikes, see Nasser Hussain 2013. 3 Although the doctrine of “targeted killing” legalizes precision assassination of individuals on the official watch list and must be vetted by military counsel, the ­great number of documented deaths of ­people deemed noncombatants has led many to conclude that the general population in Waziristan and parts of Yemen 252  Notes to Chapter 5

and Somalia are not “grievable” and are therefore dispensible collateral damage. See Butler 2010; Parks 2016; Gregory 2017; Tahir 2017. 4 Gregory quotes Trevor Paglen: ”What is particularly in­ter­est­ing to me are the ways in which ‘seeing like a drone’ is and is not like seeing through a standard bombsight: the techno-­optical regime through which conventional bombing has been conducted differs from the high-­resolution full-­motion video feeds that inform (and misinform) the networked bombing of late modern war. ­Those feeds significantly compress the imaginative distance between the air and the ground, but they do so in a highly selective fashion” (2012). 5 Drones crash now and then. News stories rarely report on the limits or fallibility of unmanned aerial vehicles, stressing instead their technological innovations and cyborgian powers. However, a 2015 article in the New York Post called attention to the limited role of drones in the effort to defeat the Islamic State insurgency. As the author Richard Whittle pointed out, by early spring 2015 only a “handful of the more than 5,500 air strikes carried out by the US and allies against isis ­were conducted by remote-­control drones” (2015). Since only approximately 300 drones are weaponized and ­those weapons are not heavy firepower, Whittle argues that even Predators and Reapers cannot attack “big targets” and remain primarily instruments of aerial surveillance. 6 Frontex, the eu agency that administers the eurosur program, describes its mission and mode of organ­ization at http://­frontex​.­europa​.­eu​/­intelligence​ /­eurosur​/­, accessed September 7, 2016. The New York City press release that announced the implementation of the Domain Awareness System described it as a “state-­of-­the-­art law enforcement technology that aggregates and analyzes existing public safety data streams in real time to provide a comprehensive view of potential threats and criminal activity” (Office of the Mayor 2012). In January 2016 the city of Baltimore police department began a covert program to surveil and track crimes in pro­gress. Using a Cessna equipped by the Ohio-­based com­pany Per­sis­tent Surveillance Systems with four to six industrial imaging cameras that transmit images at the rate of one per second, the remote sensing system produces a “searchable, constantly updating photographic map” that can be stored on hard drives (Reel 2016). Per­sis­tent Surveillance Systems has modified military technology for more commercial, domestic applications in order to sell the idea to police forces around the United States. 7 Responding to the ubiquity of injunctions to report “suspicious packages” in the post-9/11 era, Javier Arbona, Bryan Finoki, and Nick Sowers of the Demilit group argue that random, seemingly abandoned, objects have a “capacity to instigate action; they change the pace and tempo of the city” (Arbona, Finoki, and Sowers 2016). Instead of spending untold resources to sweep cities of the presence of “suspacks” in the name of security, “thinking with” such objects might help us “discover pathways in which making cannot be instantly categorized into the definable knowledge that underlies what the state uses to establish suspicion.”

Notes to Afterword   253

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INDEX

Page numbers followed by f indicate illustrations. Abadan, 153, 155 Aberfeldy, 59, 61 absence, 7, 15–20, 25–26, 37–39, 46, 106, 130–32, 139, 145, 173, 194–99, 205, 223n5 abstraction, 2–4, 21, 199, 205–6, 238n9; aerial views or image, 14, 32–33, 88, 107, 148, 172–73, 185, 190–94, 197, 198–99; cartographic, 22, 226–27n20; concrete, 52; modernist, 146, 181, 172, 192; panoramic, 56, 135; prompting confusion, 14, 97; war­ time and military, 21, 148, 216 Act of Union (1707), 116 Admiral Cornwallis’ Naval Engagement with the French (Barker), 131 aerial, the: 3–15, 20–23, 26–36, 39, 42, 48, 52, 56, 69–72, 76–79, 84–88, 94–104, 108, 110, 122, 127, 131, 136–216. See also imagery; observation; photography; reconnaissance; and other specific terms Aerial V (al-­Ani), 196f aeronaut, 31, 70–97, 102–3, 106–9, 214, 231n11, 231–32n12, 235n23 aerostatic corps: Meudon, 12, 100–101 aerostatic spacing, 76–79, 88, 92, 94–95, 101, 107, 129 aerostation, 13–14, 30–31, 68–109, 119, 129–30, 229n1–2, 230n4–5, 231–232n12, 233n15,

234–35n22, 235n23–24, 236n5, 237n7. See also balloon aesthetics, 9, 21–22, 31, 51, 55–57, 69, 72, 103, 154, 158, 181–82, 189–90, 193–94, 199, 201–4, 215, 228–29n27, 238n9; aerial, 179; aftermath, 65, 182, 219n8; of disappearance, 183, 195–97; humanist, 148; in landscapes, maps, and surveys, 58, 63–66, 147–48, 170, 174, 236n4; modernist, 4, 141–42, 186, 188; observational, 104; panoramic, 115, 117, 121, 134, 236n4; and technofetishism, 182–83; war­time and military, 184–86, 192, 199, 221–22n19, 243n4, 251n7 Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land ­without ­People, The (al-­Ani), 182–83, 195–96 affect, 12, 19–22, 27, 31, 34, 37–39, 55–58, 61, 65–67, 70–72, 78–79, 82, 96, 115–16, 121–22, 127, 130, 137, 152, 154, 173, 180–90, 195, 215–16, 217n1, 224n7, 231n11 Af­ghan­i­stan, 16, 28, 175, 210–12, 247n20 Africa, 32, 116, 139, 142, 144, 149, 163, 174–75, 242–43n1, 245n13, 246n15, 247n20, 248n23 Aftermath (Ristelheuber). See Fait ­(Ristelheuber), 185–86

aftermath, 6, 25–27, 37, 42, 47, 124, 139, 143–46, 149–50, 154, 174, 185–86, 189, 204, 218n5, 220n13, 251n7; aerial, 207; aesthetics, 65, 182, 219n8; affective, 116, 191; cultural, 198; linear, 139, 150; sensibility, 55; spectacular, 7–8, 15–16, 21, 23, 219n8; war­time and military, 16–18, 30–32, 35, 38–39, 41, 48–51, 56–58, 63, 66–67, 70, 76, 96, 103–6, 115–18, 132, 134, 137–38, 144, 175, 179, 194–96, 203, 216, 240n17 Aftermath: Unseen 9/11 Photos by a New York City Cop (Botte), 6–7 Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive (Meyero­witz), 6–7 air, 1, 6, 8, 10, 23, 34–35, 69–79, 83–84, 90–103, 130, 140–41, 158, 175, 196, 198, 214, 220–21n17, 230–31n7, 232n12, 233n15, 233–34n17, 236n5, 253n4; lighter-­than, 13. See also air control; aircraft; air packet; airplane; airpower; balloon; observation; reconnaissance; space: air; strike; war; and other specific terms The Air Balloon: Or, a Treatise on the Aerostatic Globe Lately In­ven­ted by the Celebrated Mons. Montgolfier of Paris, 98 Airborne Camera (Newhall), 8–9. See also Newhall, Beaumont air control, 32, 139, 144, 158, 174–79, 219n12, 244nn7–8, 245n9, 245n12, 249n27 aircraft, 28, 141, 155, 176–77, 210; ac-130, 211; b-52, 28; b-1, 211; Cessna, 253; f-15e, 211; reconnaissance, 29, 102. See also airplane Air Force (U.S.). See United States Armed Forces: Air Force air map. See map: air Airopaidia (Baldwin), 31, 69, 80–83, 86–97, 103, 231n11, 231–32n12 air packet, 161–66, 173, 175 airplane, 4, 13, 26, 68, 72, 138–51, 155–59, 171–72, 176–79, 183, 189, 246n15, 248n22 airpower, 14, 27–33, 70–71, 75–76, 96, 99, 105, 143–58, 175, 188, 208–14, 234–35n22, 243n4, 244n8, 245n9, 246n16, 248n22, 250n29 air war, 16, 26, 96, 139, 144, 149, 153, 155, 174–76, 183–86, 187f, 208–9, 242–43n1, 244n8, 245n12, 246–47n17. See also war al-­Ani, Jananne, 32–33, 195–98, 206, 251n6–7

278 index

al-’Araqib, 200–201 Albion: Place, 119, 126; Place Terrace, 126; Steam Flour Mill, 118, 122–26 Algonquin Lenape, 17 Alps, the, 56 alterity, 3, 194–95 al-’Uqbi, Sheikh Suleiman Muhammad, 200–201 al-’Uqbi tribe, 200–201 ambiguity, 4–5, 20, 32, 124, 128–29, 139–40, 147, 166, 173, 179, 182, 191–92, 198–99, 202, 204, 215, 220n16, 223–24n6 American Expeditionary Force, 146 American War of In­de­pen­dence, 70 analog, 145–46, 205, 215 Anglo-­Persian Oil Com­pany, 153 Annales School, 50 Antiquity (journal), 178–79 applied realism. See realism: applied Arab (person), 17, 243n2, 243–44n5, 248n23 Arabia, 158 archaeology, 33, 176–78, 194–200, 232n12, 242n28, 243–44n5, 244n6, 248–49n24 Archers, the, 115, 119 Archers’ Hall, 115 Archimedes, 230–31n7; princi­ple, 91 architecture, 2, 15, 17, 24, 98, 110–12, 117–24, 185–86, 217n1, 228–29n27, 236–37n6, 238n9, 245n11. See also built environment archive, 3, 6–7, 15, 58, 81, 90, 146, 154, 201, 203, 218n4, 231n7 aridity, 33, 143, 152, 147–59, 174, 185, 189, 196, 201, 206, 208, 213, 251n7. See also desert; wasteland armistice (WWI). See World War I: armistice Arpeggio (film, 2012), 231–32n12 art, 4, 9, 12, 14, 31, 36, 39, 56–71, 76, 80–82, 85, 107–29, 134, 136, 140, 146–48, 172, 181–200, 206, 219n9, 222n3, 222–23n4, 227n22, 227–28n23, 229n1, 236n4, 237nn7–8, 238n10, 238–39n12, 239n14, 241nn22–23, 242nn26–28, 245n11, 251n6 artifact, 7, 38, 143, 146, 151, 173, 190, 194, 201–5, 216, 219n8, 244n6 artillery, 97–98, 101, 162, 223–24n6, 234n20, 252n1

Asia: Central, 28, 248n23; East, 139; South, 48, 133, 142 assemblage, 14, 66, 69, 81, 102, 108 asymmetry. See warfare: asymmetrical atmosphere, 17, 20, 22, 64, 69, 75–76, 78, 80, 84–85, 91, 108, 136, 166 Attali, Jacques, 232n12 Augustus, William. See Cumberland, Duke of (William Augustus) authenticity, 7–8, 66, 80, 134 avant-­garde, 172; military, 31, 140 aviation, 4, 9, 11–14, 29, 68–69, 76, 230n6, 230–31n7, 231–32n12, 233n15; military and police, 3, 22–24, 140–45, 149–56, 189, 211, 234n22, 245n12, 245–46n14, 246n15 Babylon, 248–49n24 Baghdad, 28, 139, 153, 156, 165–66, 169f, 170, 184, 188, 243n5, 247n18 Balbo, Italo, 244n6 Baldwin, Thomas, 31, 69–70, 81–96, 103, 106–9, 182, 231–32n12, 232–33n13, 233n14, 233n16 Baldwin, Thomas, Jr., 231–32n12 Baldwin, Thomas S., 231–32n12 balloon, 2, 9–14, 31–32, 36, 68–109, 113, 119, 121, 127, 131–32, 138, 152, 182, 214, 219n10, 229n1, 230–31n7, 231–32n12, 232–33n13, 233nn15–16, 236n3, 236n5; war and reconnaissance, 29–30, 71, 83–84, 98–103, 130, 136, 140, 205, 209, 234n19, 234n21, 234–35n22, 235nn23–24. See also aerostation balloonomania, 70, 72–74, 84, 107, 152, 232n13 “Balloon over Helsbye Hill in Cheshire, The” (Baldwin), 89, 89f Banks, Joseph, 74 Barker, Henry Aston, 119, 126, 132–34, 235–36n2, 237n7, 242nn26–27 Barker, Robert, 31–32, 104–11, 114–35, 227n22, 235n1, 235–36n2, 236n4, 237n7, 237–38n8, 238n11, 238–39n12, 239n14, 240n16, 240n18, 240–41n21, 242nn25–26 Barker, T. E., 242n26 Basra, 139, 188, 243–44n5

Bataille de Fleurus gagnée par l’Armée ­Française le 8 Messidor d l’an 2 (Le Beau), 100f battlefield, 19–20, 56, 70, 96–103, 144, 149, 183–86, 204, 209 ­Battle of Aboukir, 135 ­Battle of Fleurus, 12–13, 99–101, 209 ­Battle of the Marne, 149 ­Battle of Waterloo, The (Barker), 132 beauty, 8, 52, 58, 72, 77, 80, 85–86, 90, 130, 147, 179, 192–95, 199, 228–29n27, 231n10, 231–32n12, 232–33n13 Bedouin, 33, 157–58, 200–203 Belgium, 99, 170 Bell, Gertrude, 243n2 Bentham, Jeremy, 110–12, 235n1, 236–37n6 Berlin-­Baghdad Railway, 165 b-52. See aircraft biopolitics, 32, 149, 201 bird’s-­eye view, 4, 9, 12, 21, 30, 35–36, 39, 52–56, 63–64, 90, 95–99, 119, 122, 131, 143, 148, 189; utopic, 53. See also God’s eye Black, James Wallace, 12–13 Blackfriars Bridge, 123 Blaeus (­family), 45–46 body, 9–10, 14–15, 24, 78–79, 85, 91, 103, 111, 129, 180, 192, 197–98, 241n24. See also embodiment bomb, 235n23, 243n3; atomic, 5; b-52, 28; bomber, 243n4; bombing, 16–17, 26, 32, 140–44, 155–58, 175–78, 183–88, 208–13, 245n12, 249nn27–28, 250n29, 252n1; bombsight, 253n4; firebomb, 150–51; smart bomb, 28, 184, 209 Bonvillain, L. P., 150, 151f border, 43, 47–50, 54, 70, 76, 148–50, 153, 173–74, 181, 185, 190–91, 195, 198–202, 212, 251n7. See also boundary Boston, 12, 13f Botte, John, 6–7 boundary, 17, 47–50, 80, 85, 88, 182, 223n5, 225n15, 227n22, 244n8. See also border bp (British Petroleum), 153 Breysig, Johan Adam, 237n7, 237–38n8 Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, The (Duchamp), 188 Britain. See ­Great Britain

index   279

British Army, 31, 39–42, 51, 153, 156, 159, 223–24n6, 245n9 British Board of Ordnance, 31, 35, 39–42, 50, 57–59, 65, 222n3, 222–23n4, 223n5, 223–24n6, 227n21 British Commonwealth, 151 British Indian Army, 153, 155 British Museum, 10f, 222n2 British Ordnance Survey, 35, 39–43, 50, 59, 64, 66, 134, 159–60, 178 British Petroleum (bp), 153 British Royal Geo­graph­i­cal Society, 159, 178 British Royal Society, 224n6, 225n11, 228n25, 233n14 British War Department, 250n31 Buck ­brothers, 122 built environment, 17, 23–24, 51, 60, 62, 64, 79, 87–88, 107–9, 121, 130, 187–88, 200, 213–14, 217n1, 221n18, 238n10, 238–39n12. See also architecture; infrastructure; and specific terms buoyancy, 71, 91 Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 210 Burford, John, 235–36n2, 242n26 Burford, Robert, 235–36n2, 242nn26–27 Burt, Edmund, 62–63, 67 cadastral map, 54, 172. See also map Cairo, 132, 250n31 Calton Hill, 111, 115, 118, 125 camera, 8–9, 15, 23, 27, 87, 102, 140, 143, 146–52, 156, 166, 179, 185, 192, 196–98, 211–12, 218n6, 221n18, 236n4, 245n10, 245n13, 246n16, 253n6 camouflage, 14–15, 158, 183, 193, 198, 212 Candler, Edmund, 247n18 Capa, Robert, 184 capital, 118, 224n9, 228n26; ­human, 142; social, 119, 240n20 Carta Damascena, 229–230n3 cartography, 2, 4, 226–27n20; and aerial view, 35, 44, 55, 68, 119; and art, 57, 63, 65, 81–82; of borders, 47–52, 70, 148, 153, 173–74, 202; colonial, 31, 36, 48, 56, 66, 202, 244n7; history of, 44, 67; of Iraq (Mesopotamia), 138–79, 248–49n24; military, 48–52, 56, 159, 225n14, 234n20; modern and scientific,

280 index

34–41, 54, 67, 71, 92, 95, 129; and photography, 142–48, 165–74; pictorial, 122; of Scotland, 34–67; singular worldview, 150; style, 61–66; technologies of, 160. See also air packet; chorography; map; survey cavalry, 13, 98, 101, 149, 155–56, 234n22, 247n20 Celtic (­people), 40, 133, 225–26n16, 240n19 Central Intelligence Agency (cia), 210 chaos, 7, 37, 126–27, 130, 139, 219n12 Characteristics of the Ground and Landmarks in the ­Enemy Lines Opposite the British Front from the Sea to St. Quentin, 170, 171f Charles, Jacques Alexandre César, 73, 77, 83 Charles Edward Stuart, Prince, 39, 115, 240n16 chemistry, 4, 73–74, 83, 219n10, 230n4, 233n15 Chester, 82–88, 92, 94, 232n13 China, 9, 97, 231n7 chorography, 36, 43f, 44–47, 51, 53–54, 81, 225n12 Churchill, Winston, 156, 176, 245n13, 249n27 cia (Central Intelligence Agency), 210 Ciccone, Jim, 23 circularity, 31, 85–86, 104–13, 119, 124–25, 128, 131, 227n22, 235n1, 238–39n12, 240–41n21. See also round, in the city. See urban civilian, 28, 36, 55, 133, 144, 175–76, 183, 186–87, 196, 210, 221–22n19, 223–24n6, 244n8, 246n16, 252n9, 252n1 civilization, 40, 50, 116, 225–26n16, 226n17, 229n2, 233–34n17, 243–44n5, 246–47n17 Civil War, U.S., 13, 102, 140, 204, 234n21, 235n23 clans, 39–40, 124, 225n15, 225–26n16 class (social and economic), 40, 74–75, 105, 108, 116–17, 120–21, 123, 180, 227n22, 239–40n15 Clausewitz, Carl von, 52, 55 Clerc, Louis Philippe, 250, 246n16 climate, 50, 87, 155–56, 159, 201–2, 205, 208 Clinton administration, 218 cloud, 24–25, 62–62, 72, 77–79, 85–94, 106–7, 170, 214–15, 233–34n17, 234n19, 248n22. See also aerostation; meteorology cnn, 28 Cold War, 213, 218n4, 235n23

collateral damage, 187, 252–53n3 Coleridge, Samuel, 120 colonialism, 9, 16, 20, 27–33, 56, 61, 66, 103, 132, 137–45, 149–54, 158, 173–75, 179, 184–85, 194, 203, 207, 210, 216, 220n16, 224–25n9, 228n26, 235–36n2, 244n7, 245n9, 245n12, 246nn15–16, 250n29 combat, 28, 135, 143, 149–52, 155, 185, 213, 234n20, 245n10, 246–47n17, 252n1 Combat Air Patrol, 210 combatant, 144, 221n19, 244n8; noncombatant, 19, 252–53n3 commander, the, 29, 36, 38, 42, 52, 55, 95–102, 135–38, 156–60, 163, 176 Command of the Air, The (Douhet), 144 Commission of Inquiry (Dardanelles and Mesopotamia, 1916), 247n21 communication: via balloon, 96, 102, 235n24; computerized or networked, 182, 209–12; as infrastructure, 41, 43, 63, 246n15; military, 98, 101–2, 141, 162–63, 176 Confederate Army (U.S. Civil War), 13, 235n23 Conflict Shoreline, The (Sheikh and Weizman), 33, 198–206 Constantinople, 131–32, 230n5 Constant Storm. See Schiehallion; Sidh Chailleann Conté, Nicolas-­Jacques, 100 Cook, Captain James, 124 Cooper, Merian C., 248n23 Le Corbusier (pseud. for Charles-­Édouard Jeanneret), 14 corporeality, 90–91. See also body, the; embodiment cosmopolitanism, 11, 224n6 coup d’oeil, 31–32, 36, 55–56, 67, 72, 97–99, 102, 104–37, 140, 147, 156, 208, 221n18, 235n1, 238n12. See also intuition Coutelle, Jean-­Marie-­Joseph, 100–101 Cox, Margaret, 196, 251–51n8 Crawford, O. G. S., 178–79, 195–97, 244n6 Crimean War, 140, 204 Crusades, the, 229–30n3 Ctesiphon, 164–65, 197 cubism, 170–72, 189. See also modernism Culbertson, Frank, 27–28 Culloden moor, 20, 39–41, 70, 116

cultivation, 50–51, 64, 90, 170, 201, 227–28n13 “cult of the detail,” 14 culture, 1, 3–4, 8–11, 18, 20, 22, 26, 29–34, 40, 44, 49, 62, 69–71, 82, 84, 104–5, 113, 116–20, 123, 131, 133, 136, 141, 153, 181–82, 194, 202–9, 217–18n3, 225–26n16, 229n1, 231n10, 233n15, 237n7, 241n23, 243–44n5; indigenous, 252n9; industry, 4, 149; nature and, 14, 198; postwar, 240n17; surveillance and, 110. See also mass culture; visual culture Cumberland, Duke of (William Augustus), 39, 42, 227n21 Dadaism, 188, 251n5. See also modernism Damascus, 229–30n3 Dardanelles, 245n13, 247n21 data, 14–15, 22, 55, 65, 69, 94–95, 129, 157, 183–84, 203, 211, 215, 253n6; database, 210 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 9 death, 7, 15–16, 19, 38, 47, 102, 155–56, 191, 232–33n13, 247n21, 252n1, 252–53n3 de’ Barbari, Jacopo, 53, 53f debatable lands, 49–50 Debbieg, Hugh, 42 deception: strategies of, 183 De Certeau, Michel, 1–3 deconstruction, 11, 32, 66, 117, 147, 211, 236–37n6 defense, 31, 99, 152, 222nn2–3, 223n6, 234n19, 245n11, 250n31 delirium, 78–80 democracy, 7, 70, 74, 80, 110, 113, 133, 211, 225n16, 229n1 Department of Defense (dod), 210 desert, 49, 139–43, 153–60, 173–74, 179, 182–86, 190–97, 200–203, 206, 213, 244n7, 248nn22–23, 252n9, 252n1. See also Operation Desert Storm; warfare desert Desert Bloom (Sheikh), 200 desire, 3, 7, 34, 51, 68, 78–79, 90, 95, 97, 102, 110, 113–14, 119–21, 134, 173, 186, 218n6 development, 36, 42, 51, 57, 63, 66, 124, 142, 176 Dibdin, Thomas Frognall, 106–7 digital, the, 5, 8, 14–15, 23, 138, 147, 179, 183, 196, 206, 208, 215

index   281

disappearance, 23, 51–52, 92–93, 105–6, 158, 182–83, 192, 195–98, 204 disembodiment, 2, 56, 128. See also embodiment disorder, 40, 75 disorientation, 55, 63, 67, 106, 136, 176, 219n9, 220n14 displacement, 16–17, 30, 39, 46, 51, 61, 186, 198, 200 disposition, 16, 26, 35–37, 41, 48, 52, 67, 96, 103, 112, 115, 116, 154, 166, 180, 182, 189, 207, 214–15, 224–25n9, 238n12 distance, 145–47, 157, 180–81, 185–86, 192–95, 206–11, 214–16, 217n1, 221n18, 223n5, 226n17, 237n7, 246n15, 253n4. See also remote dizziness, 20, 105, 114, 126, 182, 193, 239n13. See also disorientation; vertigo documentary, 7, 140, 181–82, 185–88, 193, 195, 201 dod (Department of Defense), 210 Domain Awareness System, 212, 253n6 domestic, the, 19, 21, 40, 50, 62, 217n1, 221n18, 253n6 Douhet, Giulio, 144, 187 drone, 33, 131, 138, 183, 197, 205, 209–14, 252n2, 253nn3–4. See also mq-1 Predator drone; mq-9 Reaper drone; unmanned aerial vehicle (uav) Duchamp, Marcel, 188–89, 251nn4–5 Duff, General Beauchamp, 247n21 Dundas, David, 42 duration, 7, 18, 37, 70, 135 earth, 8–14, 21–24, 27, 34–37, 42, 44, 48–49, 53, 62, 72, 78, 81, 85, 88–95, 107–8, 118, 183, 185, 202, 205, 214, 221–22n19, 228nn25–26, 230n6 East Asia. See Asia: East Eastern Front (WWI), 149, 155. See also World War I Echo (al-­Ani), 251n7 ecol­ogy, 54, 63, 225–26n16 economy, 16–17, 40, 70, 123–24, 132, 139, 153, 202, 208, 225n15, 226n16, 249n17 Edinburgh, 32, 39, 58, 65, 111, 114–21, 125, 137, 227n21, 235–36n2, 239n14, 239–40n15, 240n18 Egypt, 17, 101, 149, 155, 160, 163, 175, 242–43n1, 247n20

282 index

Eidometropolis (Girtin), 242n26 Elcho, Lord, 115, 119, 240n18. See also ­Archers, the Élevage de poussière (Dust Breeding) (Man Ray and Duchamp), 188 elevation, 4, 9, 11, 22, 24, 31, 40, 52, 55, 62, 64, 68–69, 76, 86, 88, 91, 97–98, 101, 104, 106, 108, 111, 118, 122–31, 134–35, 148, 197, 246n15 El Greco, 9 embodiment, 2, 4, 10, 12, 19, 36, 48, 51–52, 55–56, 62, 69, 72, 78–79, 86, 88, 94, 101, 102, 127–29, 186, 193, 226n20 Emmerich, 163–64 emotion, 12, 18, 25–26, 31–32, 38, 50, 56, 68, 71–74, 77, 80, 82, 89, 94, 103–7, 128–30, 135, 177, 182, 215. See also affect; and specific emotions emotion of motion, 72, 103–7, 130 empire, 7, 21–22, 27–28, 35, 110–11, 118, 123–24, 127, 139, 142, 149–56, 179, 183–84, 242n25, 243–44n5, 248n22, 250n31 empiricism, 34, 52, 68, 81, 108, 110, 129, 231n10 engineering, 50–51, 62–63, 74–77, 81, 83, 96, 109–10, 114, 119–20, 123–124, 152, 201–2, 223–24n6, 227n21, 237n8 ­England, 17–19, 31, 39, 43–49, 56–59, 62, 65, 70, 76–82, 115–20, 133, 142, 232–33n13, 236–37n6, 238n10, 240n19, 244n6 En­glish (language), 18, 52, 56, 79–82, 98, 149, 157, 191, 234n21, 235n1, 246n16 Enlightenment, the, 11, 51, 68, 71, 78, 81, 95, 118–19, 124 entertainment, 4, 31, 104–5, 108, 110–13, 120–21, 131–32, 136, 210, 229n1, 237n7 L’Entreprenant, 99–101 environment, 8, 14, 20, 38, 56–58, 69–70, 78–79, 86, 95–96, 105, 110, 117, 132, 142, 154, 203, 214–15, 226n18, 237n7, 238n9, 241n23, 256n9 erasure, 7, 198, 203 Erasure Trilogy, The (Sheikh), 199–200 Euphrates River, 153, 163, 170, 243–44n5 Eu­rope, 2, 4, 11, 27, 30, 33, 36, 44, 47, 53–54, 70, 73, 79–80, 97–98, 110, 128–29, 138–42,

149–52, 155, 158, 163, 173–75, 182, 185, 201, 212, 225n12, 226n19, 230–31n7, 241n23, 243–44n5, 245n13, 246n15, 248–49n24. See also specific countries and place-­names European Border Surveillance program (eurosur), 212, 253n6 Eu­ro­pean High Court, 201 eurosur (Eu­ro­pean Border Surveillance program). See Eu­ro­pean Border Surveillance program (eurosur) everyday, the, 1–4, 8, 16–21, 35, 41, 70, 80, 96, 125, 132, 191, 204, 207, 210, 216, 219n9, 220n14, 224–25n9 evidence: absence of or ambiguity, 25, 40, 185–95, 198, 205–6; aerial views as, 23, 31, 69, 95, 146, 181, 191, 180–206; versus aesthetics, 192; forensic, 33, 198–206; material, 146, 194; sensory, 39, 205; vis­i­ble, 37, 182 exceptionalism, American or national, 7–9, 149, 217–18n3 Expérience aërostatique faite à Versailles le 19 septembre 1783 par Messieurs de ­Mongolfier, 73f experiment, scientific, 12, 70–71, 74–77, 83–85, 90–91, 99–102, 109, 111, 140–43, 146, 174, 198, 228n25, 230nn4–6, 233n15, 234–35n22, 235n23, 246n15 “Explanatory Print, The” (Baldwin), 92 eye: and the camera, 148; of the commander, 135; ­human, 15, 29, 38, 56, 63, 85–87, 90, 101–2, 104, 122, 127–30, 145, 180, 190, 192, 231n10; inward, 36, 55; mind’s, 10, 39, 57, 72, 118; of the pi­lot, 243n4; remote, 212; in the sky, 22, 183, 208, 210, 242–43n1. See also bird’s-­eye view; God’s eye; optics Fairy Hill of the Caledonians, 61. See also Schiehallion; Sidh Chailleann Fait (Ristelbueber), 32–33, 185–95, 201, 251n4 Faysal, Ghazi ibn, 243n2 fear, 7, 50, 52, 62, 65–66, 70, 72, 74, 77–78, 134–35, 175, 209–10, 216, 247n20 feminist scholarship, 30, 236–37n6 Fenton, Roger, 204 First Military Survey of Scotland, 30–32, 35–44, 48, 50, 52, 55–69, 116, 222nn1–4, 223n5, 224n7, 227n21, 228n24, 229n28

First Persian Gulf War, 28, 32, 182–86, 190, 192, 206, 208–9, 213, 251n7, 252n1 First Photo­graph from an Aeroplane, The (Bonvillain), 150 Fitzpatrick, Dave, 220n17 Fleurus (Belgium), 12, 99–100, 209. See also ­Battle of Fleurus Flight (magazine), 141 flight, 4, 8–16, 29–31, 36, 68–97, 101–3, 107–9, 141, 144, 149–50, 160, 191, 229n1, 231n7, 231–32n12, 233n16, 235n24, 243n3, 246n16, 249n25 Ford, John, 248n23 Forensic Architecture, 201 forensics, 196, 201 forensis, 7, 197–98, 202–5 Forlani, Paolo, 47f format, 32–39, 48, 52, 57–58, 104–6, 120, 134, 179–82, 186, 191–92, 202–6, 215 Fort Augustus, 41–43 Fort George, 223n5 fortress mentality, 70 France, 12, 39, 70, 74–76, 83, 99, 101, 115, 131–36, 150, 152, 160, 170, 172–75, 180, 186–88, 191, 199, 218n4, 229n2, 232–33n13, 242n25, 243n2, 245nn10–11, 245–46n14, 246n16, 247n20, 250n29, 251n5 Franco-­Prussian War, 235n24 Franklin, Benjamin, 74, 96, 234n19 Freedom of Information Act (foia), 3 French Air Force, 250n29 French Air Ministry, 250n29 French Revolution, 9, 70, 99, 133, 229n2 Fresh ­Widow (Duchamp), 251n5 Freud, Sigmund, 15, 19, 219n12 Friedrich, Caspar David, 9 fright. See fear Frontex, 253n6. See also Eu­ro­pean Border Surveillance program (eurosur) frontier, 142, 163, 181, 195, 203, 247n20 Fulton, Robert, 237n8 ­future, the, 1–2, 10, 15, 18–21, 40, 45, 53, 56, 58, 60, 65–69, 76, 95–96, 103–4, 123, 138–39, 143, 165, 170–72, 179, 189, 206, 214, 224n7 futurism, 170–72, 189. See also modernism

index   283

Gaelic, 40, 45, 61, 115 Galileo, 230–31n7 Gallipoli, 242–43n1 Garros, Roland, 246n15 Gavotti, 1st Lieut., 243n3 gaze, the, 15, 27, 82, 85, 90, 94, 105–6, 110, 122, 128, 136, 140, 218n7; Apollonian, 9, 11, 29, 68; cosmological, 77–78; forensic, 7; linear, 131, 238n9; naturalist-­geographical, 56; from nowhere, 210 gender, 30, 40, 62, 107, 121, 126–27, 236–37n6, 239n14, 251n5, 252n1 genocide, 195, 197–98 genre, 4–5, 59–60, 69–70, 129–30, 132–33, 181, 202 Geographia (Ptolemy), 44 geo­graph­i­cal information system (gis). See gis (geo­graph­ic­ al information system) Geo­graph­i­cal Journal (Royal Geo­graph­i­cal Society), 178 geo­graph­i­cal knowledge, 34–41, 45, 48–55, 63, 81, 92–99, 228n24. See also information; knowledge geo­graph­i­cal positioning system (gps). See gps (geo­graph­i­cal positioning system) geography, 34, 40, 44, 49, 51, 82, 127, 149, 220n16, 225–26n16; balloon, 69, 71, 81, 92; politics of, 180–81; reconnaissance, 92, 94 geology, 49–50, 63, 214, 225–26n16 geometry, 51, 88, 97, 128, 172, 190, 240–41n21 George II, King, 39 German East Africa, 242–43n1 Germany, 102, 141f, 152–57, 176, 197, 235n24, 244n6, 245n11, 245n13, 246n16, 250n1 ghosts, 17–18, 21, 67, 204, 406, 229n29 Gibraltar, siege of, 75–76 Girtin, Thomas, 242n26 gis (geo­graph­ic­ al information system), 184 Glaisher, James, 89 glance, the, 31–32, 35, 40, 42, 52–56, 64–67, 71, 78–79, 86, 90, 92, 97–98, 102–5, 114–17, 122, 125, 129, 136, 142, 147. See also coup d’oeil global, 1, 5–6, 11, 19–20, 22, 30, 54, 131, 133, 147, 183–84, 208, 210, 217n1–2, 250n3 God’s eye, 2, 5, 9, 21, 25, 35, 44, 66, 70, 102, 114, 148, 187, 209–12. See also bird’s-­eye view; eye

284 index

Good Government (Lorenzetti), 236n4 Google Earth, 8, 209, 211 Gordon, James, 46 Gordon, Neve, 201 Gordon, Robert, 46 Gordon Riots, 74–75 Gorgon Stare, 212 governance, 54, 174, 202 governmentality, 90, 139, 143, 158, 213 gps (geo­graph­ic­ al positioning system), 184, 208, 250n3 Grampian range, 49, 58 Grande Illusion, La (film, 1937), 180–81, 198–99, 250n1 ­Great Britain, 19–20, 31, 38–42, 48, 58, 61, 63, 66, 74–75, 83–84, 107, 109, 116, 123, 131–34, 139, 153–55, 173, 178, 226n18, 231–32n12, 242n25, 246n15, 250n13 Greece, 9, 82, 235n1 Green, Valentine, 110f Gresley, Sir Nigel Bowyer, 227n22 grief, 17–19, 35, 134, 204, 240n17 grievable, the, 253n3 ground, 3, 6, 14, 21, 34–39, 48, 52, 59, 70, 78–79, 86, 92, 94,166, 170, 171f, 190–91, 194–200, 206; troops, operations, and support, 39, 156, 175–76, 209, 250n29; truth, 7, 34–35, 48, 50, 52, 225–26n16; war, 191 Ground Zero, 6–7, 22, 220n15 Gulf War. See First Persian Gulf War gun, 146, 163, 222n3; gunboats, 156, 163; gunfire, 141; gunpowder, 97; machine, 152, 176 Hadrian’s Wall, 49 Hanoverian regime, 39, 42, 60, 115–18 haptic, 68. See also touch Hassan, Mohammed A., 249n27 haunting, 16, 19, 37, 58, 61, 65, 67, 195, 215n11, 229n29. See also ghosts; spectral; uncanny Heiman, Grover, 138, 242n1 he­li­cop­ter, 3, 6, 22–23, 30, 72, 185, 190, 211, 220–21n17 Hellfire missile. See missile: Hellfire Helsbye Hill, 89–90 ­Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photo­ graphs (George et al.), 7, 218n5 Herzfeld, Ernst, 197

Hesketh, Robert, 84 Highlander, 38, 49, 116, 225n15 Highlands, Scottish, 37, 40–42, 46–51, 57–58, 61–63, 65–66, 119, 225n15, 225–26n16, 226n18, 227n21. See also Scotland; and specific place-­names hinge, the, 199, 205 Hiroshima, 5, 5f, 6f history: of airpower and aerial views, 2–4, 14, 33, 70, 86, 96–97, 103, 148–50, 174, 207, 231–32n12, 234–35n22, 235nn23–24, 239n13, 243n3, 245n12, 246nn15–16; cartographic, 44, 46, 64, 174; colonial and imperial, 16, 54, 175, 220n16; and the desert, 200–201; ­legal, 27; military and war­time, 26, 29, 31–32, 67, 172, 210, 219n12, 224–25n9, 244n8; and pa­noramas, 106, 114, 132, 236n4, 237–38n8 Hollar, Wenceslaus, 122 home, 19–20, 33, 62, 75, 83, 106–7, 116, 131–32, 156, 177–78, 184, 197, 202, 211, 214, 216, 250n1, 252n9 homeland security, 19 horizontal, 78, 84, 87, 122, 128, 212–13 House of Stuart, 39, 116 humanism, 6, 193, 198 humanity, 7, 85, 228n26 ­human rights, 144, 193, 202, 244n8 Humboldt, Alexander von, 9, 129 Hussein, Saddam, 182, 187–88 ideology, 7, 23, 81, 118, 120, 140, 224–25n9, 229n2 illusion, 37, 64, 105, 125, 129, 143, 147–48, 181, 198–99, 205–6, 221–22n19, 227n22, 229n2, 236n4, 241n24, 250n1 imagery: 9/11, 2–33, 218–19nn5–9, 220n15, 220n17; aftermath, 7–8, 15, 26, 146–48, 198, 204–5; Airopaidia (Baldwin), 68–69, 82–95, 231–32n12; of clouds, 91–92; constructed, 64, 192, 198–99; conventions, 61, 215; digital, 206, 215; documentary, 6–7; drone, 210–14; as evidence, 146, 159, 198–206; fake, 15; instrumental, 143–48, 221–22n19; limits of, 26, 146, 191–92, 214–15; photographic, 12, 14, 138–206; reconnaissance, 5, 14, 32, 138–79, 181–82, 194, 205, 221–22n19; remote, 22, 206,

253n6; satellite, 5, 8, 14, 22, 24–26, 181, 205, 209–10, 215, 218n4, 231–32n12; smart bomb, 184; as weapon, 151. See also abstraction; aerial; bird’s-­eye view; cartography; painting; pa­norama; photography imaginary, 12, 30, 35, 52–53, 64, 97, 122, 129, 240n17; cultural, 62; geo­graph­ic­ al, 123, 149, 244n6; territorial, 39 immateriality, 22, 91 immersion, 8, 32, 78, 92–95, 104–5, 108, 113, 117, 121, 125, 131–36, 148, 193, 214–15, 219n9, 227n22. See also pa­norama imperialism, 7, 19–22, 28, 33, 54, 56, 66, 82, 102–3, 106, 121–24, 131–34, 143, 149, 152–53, 157, 176, 203, 220n16, 242n26 impossible, the, 28, 48, 51, 53, 67, 83, 90, 106, 158–60, 181–84, 206, 210–11, 215–16, 224n8 Inca, the, 230–31n7 India, 45, 153–56, 175, 247n20, 247–48n21, 248n22, 248–49n24, 250n31 Indian Army, 153, 155, 247n20, 247–48n21, 250n31 Indian Expeditionary Force, 155, 247–48n21 indigeneity, 17, 58, 158, 179, 200, 225–26n16, 228n26, 252n9 individual, the, 5–9, 55, 82, 110, 114, 195–96, 238n9, 240n20 industry, 4, 8, 10, 13, 74–75, 83, 118–19, 122–24, 141–42, 147, 153, 170–71, 178, 198, 201, 229n29, 253n6 infinitude, 57, 129–30, 240–41n21, 241n23 information: cartographic, 165; fetishized, 209; geodetic, 151; geo­graph­ic­ al, 34–41, 45, 48–55, 63, 81, 92–99, 228n24; reconnaissance, 172–73; retrieval, 184; systems, 208; technologies, 182–84; topographical, 159, 245–46n14; visual, 23, 105–6, 142–45, 151, 157–60, 190, 194. See also geo­graph­ic­ al knowledge infrastructure: aerostation, 69, 74; aviation, 142; everyday (Easterling), 224–25n9; globalized media, 183; mapping, 173; militarized, 76; military, 22–23, 165–66; panoramic, 120; repre­sen­ta­tion of, 170; security, 22–23; state, 35–37, 41–42, 48–57, 62–63, 90, 103, 133, 181, 208, 248–49n24; urban, 213. See also space: infrastructural

index   285

intelligence: artificial, 208–9; ­human, 15, 55, 68, 82, 106, 119; military and state, 45, 96–97, 143, 149, 157–63, 166, 170, 172–73, 186, 212, 222n4, 253n6 Intelligence Division of the Admiralty War Staff, 163 Interior of the Pantheon, Oxford Street, ­London, The (Jukes and Green), 110f International Space Station, 22 interpretation: aerial reconnaissance image, 138, 140, 165–66, 167f, 168f, 169f, 172, 181, 245n11, 245–46n14; geo­graph­ic­ al, 40, 174; legible, 127; methods of, 14, 38, 115; 9/11 imagery, 219n9; sensory, 203 interwar period, 14, 32. See also mandate period intimacy: distanced, 20, 92, 192, 216; of warfare, 20–22; of war­time, 57 intuition, 31, 52, 55–56, 129, 208. See also coup d’oeil invasion: of Af­ghan­i­stan, 16; airborne, 76; of ­England, 36, 47–48, 65–66, 222n3; of Iraq, 139, 247nn19–20 invention: of aerostation, 73–76, 230n5, 230–31n7; Barker’s patent, 31, 111, 114, 235n1, 237nn7–8, 238nn11–12, 242n26; of the Highlands, 40, 49; of panoramic painting, 107–9, 114–17, 237n7, 237–38n8; of photography, 12, 231n8 invisibility, 37, 84, 114, 129, 143, 158, 182, 221–22n19, 245n11, 252n9. See also visibility Iran, 28, 153. See also Persia Iraq, 17, 28, 32, 138–39, 142–43, 150–66, 172–76, 177f, 178–79, 182–90, 195, 197, 208–11, 243–44n5, 244n6, 245n12, 247nn19–20, 248n23, 248–49n24, 249n27, 250nn30–31, 251nn6–7, 251–52n8, 252n1. See also invasion: of Iraq; Mesopotamia Ireland, 39, 111, 115, 133, 237n7, 239n14, 251n6 Islam, 17, 142, 197 Islamic State, 253n5 Israel, 32–33, 195, 199–202 Israel/Palestine, 201. See also Israel; Palestine Italian Army Aviation Corps, 141 Italy, 83, 175, 242–43n1, 244n7; Royal Air Force, 244n7 Inverness, 39–40, 43

286 index

Jacobite rebellion of 1745–46, 31, 35, 227n21 Jacobites, 20, 31, 35–42, 50–51, 57–62, 65–66, 114–19, 124–25, 132, 224n8, 225n14, 227n21, 240nn16–17 James VI, King, 45 Jordan, 195, 251n7 Jourdan, General Jean-­Baptiste, 99–100 journalism, 135, 184–85, 210. See also photojournalism joy, 69–72, 77, 82, 85, 103, 105, 189 Jukes, Francis, 110f Kelly, Lt. G. E., 150 Kenley, Ron, 232n12. See also Arpeggio (film, 2012) Khama, 177f killing, 211, 219n11; zone, 186. See also targeted killing knowledge, 19–22, 26, 46, 78–80, 105, 110, 120, 143, 147, 158, 166, 183, 200, 206, 220n16, 221–22n19, 233n15, 243n2, 245n11, 253n7; geo­graph­ic­ al, 30–35, 38–41, 45, 48, 51–52, 66, 69, 81–82, 173, 178–79, 212–16, 226–227n20; maritime, 99; topographical, 97–98, 103, 228n24. See also geo­graph­ic­ al knowledge; information kosmos, 9 Kosovo, 209, 211, 251–52n8 Kraich. See Schiehallion; Sidh Chailleann Kurgan, Laura, 18, 24–26, 218n4 Kut al-­Amara, 156–57, 157f, 163, 164f Kuwait, 153, 185–90 ­labor, 83–84, 114, 123, 129, 146 Lana, Francesco, 230–31n7 Lancashire, 82–83, 94 land: claims, 33, 200–202; communal, 51; dead, 201; landowners, 37, 45, 119; no man’s, 145; and population, 51–52, 56–57. See also debatable: lands; earth; landscape; territory; topography; warfare: land; wasteland landscape(s), 37, 79–81, 147–48, 206; affective, 195–98; art, 4, 14, 31, 36, 58–66, 80, 82, 105, 121; versus cartography, 31, 37, 53, 63–64, 66, 69; desert, 142–43, 156–70, 185, 293; domesticated, 50; haunted, 67; and

infrastructure, 51, 223n5; of Iraq (Mesopotamia), 142–43, 156–70; and modernism, 171–72, 186, 189; mountainous, 62–65, 203; panoramic, 104–37, 236n4, 242n26; photography, 4, 7, 204; picturesque, 58–61, 63, 81, 89, 148, 195, 227n22, 228–29n27; Romanticism, 49, 227n22; rural, 51, 58, 104; sketch, 80, 222–23n4, 227–28n23; uncanny, 50; wild or waste, 50, 62, 142, 179, 201. See also prospect Large Glass (Duchamp), 188 Last of the Comanches, The (film, 1953), 248n23 law, 27, 33, 111, 175, 198, 200, 202, 225n15, 230n6 Lawrence, T. E., 243n2 League of Nations, 139, 243n2 Leicester, 121, 131, 134, 227n22, 235–36n2 Lever, Ashton, 119, 124 Leverian Museum, 124 liberalism, 20–21, 110, 192–93, 202–3, 226n19, 236–37n6. See also neoliberalism Libya, 32, 140–44, 244n7 lidar (Light Detection and Ranging), 22 life: everyday, 2, 8, 19–20, 70, 96, 132, 181, 188, 207, 216, 219n9 Light Detection and Ranging (lidar), 22 linear: aftermath, 139, 150; timeline, 21, 30, 33, 37–38, 44. See also sight: lines of; perspective Littérature (magazine), 188–89 Loch Ness, 42 Loch Rannoch, 43f, 59f, 59–61 logistics, 47, 70, 96, 150–51, 156, 208–9, 235n23, 247–48n21. See also infrastructure; and specific terms London, 31–32, 39, 65, 75, 82, 84, 89f, 106–9, 110f, 112–14, 118–32, 156, 195, 222n2, 222–23n4, 227n21, 235–36n2, 236n5, 237–38n8, 239n14, 240n18, 240n20, 242n26, 251n7 London from the Roof of the Albion Mills (Barker), 118, 123–26 Lord Nelson’s Attack of Copenhagen (Barker), 131–32 Lord Nelson’s Defeat of the French at the Nile (Barker), 135–36

Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, 236n4 Lost Patrol (film, 1929), 248n23 Lost Patrol, The (film, 1934), 248n23 Lowe, Thaddeus, 102, 234n21, 235n23 Lowlands, 39–42, 46–51, 225–26n16, 226n17. See also Highlands; Scotland; and specific place-­names Lunardi, Vincenzo, 72, 82–85, 106–9, 113, 121, 127, 233nn15–16, 236n5 machine, 15, 33, 95–96, 129, 155, 212, 214, 230n5, 236n5; and empire, 27; and the ­human, 209; propaganda, 132; war, 29, 192; watching, 29. See also gun: machine MacDonald, Philip, 248n23 ­Macleod, Lt. Col. M. N., 159–60 Maiden’s Pap, the. See Schiehallion; Sidh Chailleann Malevich, Kazimir, 189–90 Manchester Guardian, 247n17 mandate period, 32, 138–39, 244n8; in Iraq, 154, 172–79, 243n2, 245n12, 250n31 Manhattan, 1, 3, 6–7, 15, 17, 24, 27 Man Ray (pseud. for Emmanuel Radnitzky), 188–89, 189f, 251n4 map, 4, 9, 12, 22, 29–69, 76–77, 80–81, 86–87, 92–93, 97–98, 103, 131, 142–54, 158–81, 185–86, 193–94, 201, 203, 208, 211–12, 222n2, 222–23n4, 223n5, 225nn12–13, 226–27n20, 227–28n23, 229n28, 242n1, 244n7, 246–47n14, 248–49n24, 253n6. See also cadastral map; cartography; chorography; ­Pont-­Gordon-­Blaeu maps Map of Tuscany and the Chiana Valley (da Vinci), 9 Maréchal, Lieutenant (character), 180–81 Marinetti, F. T., 171–72 Maskelyne, Nevil, 228n25 Mason, Charles Monck, 88–89, 228n25 mass culture, 8, 209, 219n8 materiality, 9, 12, 22, 33, 37, 44, 52, 56, 58, 61–66, 70, 74, 83, 91, 108, 118, 139–40, 146, 152, 160, 189, 195, 202–5, 208, 214, 228n26, 230–31n7, 235n23, 237–38n8, 238–39n12, 243–44n5, 246n16 mathe­matics, 36–39, 44, 56–57, 74, 81, 125, 129–30, 134. See also geometry

index   287

mea­sure­ment, 30–31, 34, 37–40, 48, 50–51, 55–56, 64–65, 69, 77, 147–48, 223n5, 228n25 mechanical, the, 4, 15, 85, 120, 124, 139–41, 147, 156–57, 181, 193, 210, 219n9, 241n22; reproduction, 14, 65, 142 media: and airpower, 27; cartographic, 161; consumption, 221; globalized, 5–6, 19, 30, 183; mainstream, 7; mass, 209; militarized, 4; mediascape, 185; social, 182–83; spectacle, 7, 27, 184, 217n2, 218–19n7, 219n8; studies, 192; visual, 36, 67, 113, 116, 185. See also military-­industrial-­media-­entertainment network; multimedia medieval period. See ­Middle Ages, the Mediterranean: climate, 201; culture, 44; Sea, 135, 246n15 melancholia, 19, 21, 204, 220n15 Méliès, Georges, 198 memorialization, 5–8, 18, 25, 123 memory, 25, 37, 117–18, 154, 171, 221n18 mercantilism, 17, 40, 119, 124 Mesopotamia, 138–79, 242–43n1, 243n2, 243–44n5, 247n18, 247n21, 248n23, 249n25. See also Iraq Mesopotamian campaign, 154–55, 160, 247n18 meteorology, 83, 202, 233–34n17 metropolitan, the, 46, 57–58, 61–62, 66, 83–84, 107, 113–24, 131, 175, 230n5, 237n7 Meurisse, Henri, 150 Meyero­witz, Joel, 6–7 ­Middle Ages, the, 44, 49–50, 95, 97, 222n3 ­Middle East, 28, 32, 138–39, 142, 154, 159–60, 163, 173–74, 178, 242–43n1, 245n13, 246n15, 249n26 militarism, 7, 31 militarization, 56, 76, 224–25n9 military, 4–5, 9, 12–13, 22, 29–44, 48–72, 76, 81–82, 95–105, 108–11, 116–19, 122, 124, 132–34, 138–60, 166, 172–76, 181–93, 198–215, 222nn1–3, 223n5, 223–24n6, 224n7, 225nn13–14, 227nn21–22, 227–28n23, 228n24, 229n28, 230n5, 234n22, 235–36n2, 237n7, 242nn27–28, 244n6, 245n10, 245nn12–13, 245–46n14, 246n16, 247–48n21, 248–49n24, 250nn30–31, 252n1, 252–53n3, 253n6

288 index

military-­industrial-­media-­entertainment network, 4 military survey. See First Military Survey of Scotland missile, 211; cruise, 28, 184, Hellfire, 214 Mitchell, Brigadier General William, 144–45, 245n10 mobility, 1–2, 16, 22, 24–27, 53, 68–69, 80, 82, 94, 96, 101–3, 107–8, 113–14, 118–19, 126–29, 134, 145, 189, 203, 213, 219n8, 236–37n6, 238n9, 245n13, 246n16, 251n7 modernism, 4, 146, 172, 181, 186–90, 252n10 modernity, 2–4, 8–18, 22, 26, 29–30, 33–40, 45– 56, 61–62, 65–71, 75–82, 86–87, 90–98, 103–6, 110, 113–18, 123, 129–32, 141–43, 146–150, 175, 179, 183–85, 188–92, 199, 208–9, 217n1, 219n12, 229n2, 231n10, 236n4, 236–37n6, 239–40n15, 241n23, 243–44n5, 253n4 money, 9, 74, 119, 136, 175 Money, Major General, 101 Montgolfier, Abbé Alexandre, 230n6 Montgolfier, Étienne, 76, 230n5. See also Montgolfier ­brothers Montgolfier, Jean-­Pierre, 230n5. See also Montgolfier ­brothers Montgolfier, Joseph, 75–76, 96, 98, 230nn5–6, 234n19. See also Montgolfier ­brothers Montgolfier, Pierre, 230–231n7. See also Montgolfier ­brothers Montgolfier ­brothers, 73, 73f, 83, 96, 229n3, 230–31n7. See also specific names Montgolfière, 11, 83 Morocco, 149–50, 175, 246n16 Mosul, 139, 243–44n5 motion, 2, 9–11, 31, 36–37, 47, 56, 64–65, 68, 72, 103, 106, 122–26, 130, 138, 182, 198, 211–14, 224n7, 233n15, 234n20, 236n5, 253n4 mountain, 2–3, 8, 12, 16, 38, 42, 46–47, 50–51, 56–65, 68, 77–79, 87–92, 96, 100–103, 111, 139, 158–59, 173, 195, 212–13, 223n5, 225–26n16, 226n17, 227–28n23, 228nn24– 26, 241n22 Mountain, John La, 235n23 mourning, 6–7, 16–19, 118 movement (po­liti­cal and discursive), 67, 103, 116, 150, 152, 190, 193, 228n26, 246n15. See also motion

mq-9 Reaper drone, 210, 253n5. See also drone; unmanned aerial vehicle (uav) mq-1 Predator drone, 210–11, 253n5. See also drone; unmanned aerial vehicle (uav) multimedia, 33, 104, 112, 236n4, 237–38n8, 251n4 Munro, 61–62 Muse (al-­Ani), 251n7 museum, 6–7, 113, 119, 124, 142, 193, 197, 201, 222n2 Mussolini, Benito, 142, 243n4 Mussolini, Vittorio, 142, 243n4 Mylne, Robert, 123 my­thol­ogy, 36, 49, 66, 70–71, 102–3, 144, 174, 185, 208–10, 225n15, 225–26n16 Nadar. See Tournachon, Félix (pseud. Nadar) Napoleon, 55, 101, 234–35n22. See also war: Napoleonic nasa (National Aeronautics and Space ­Administration), 22 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (nasa). See nasa (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) National Institute of Standards and Technology (nist), 3, 8–9, 220–21n17 nationalism, 7, 17, 80, 102–3, 114, 125, 131, 137, 150, 152, 173, 194–95, 225–26n16, 229n2, 234–35n22, 244n6, 246n15 National Library of Scotland, 38, 43f, 47f, 64, 222n2 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (noaa), 22 National September 11 Memorial and Museum, 6 nation-­state, 40, 45, 66, 70, 98, 115–17, 132–33, 153, 179, 181, 211, 243n2. See also state, the nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organ­ization), 209, 211 naturalism, 56, 80 nature, 3–5, 11–19, 32, 37, 40–41, 44–45, 49, 56, 63, 66, 85–91, 102–5, 108–9, 115, 118, 123–25, 142, 146–47, 172, 181, 183–84, 187, 191, 198, 203, 208, 217n2, 220n14, 228n26, 228–29n27, 233–34n17, 236n5, 238n9, 238–39n12, 241n22, 247n18

Nature à Coup d’Oeil, La (Barker), 31–32, 111, 114, 235n1 navigation, 12–13, 30–31, 44, 68, 79, 84, 90, 102, 150, 158, 163, 174, 184, 208, 235n24 Navy (U.S.). See United States Armed Forces: Navy Negev Desert, 200–201 Nelan, Bruce W., 186–87 Nelson, Admiral, 135–36 neoliberalism, 224n9, 228n6 network, 2–6, 28–30, 45, 51, 57–58, 63, 66–67, 182–83, 208–14, 219n9, 240n20, 253n4 Newcombe, Lt. Col., 160 Newhall, Beaumont, 8–10, 53, 78, 150, 231n8, 246n16 New Town (Edinburgh), 115–18, 239–40n15 New York City, 1–3, 6–7, 25, 27, 218n5, 219n8, 220n17, 251n5, 253n6 New York Police Department (nypd), 3, 6, 22–23, 220n17 New York, September 11th, 2001, Four Days ­Later (Kurgan), 25 Nile River, 131, 135–36 Nimrod, 248–49n24 9/11. See September 11, 2001 911conspiracytv Weblog, 220–21n17 1948 Arab-­Israeli War, 199–200 Ninevah, 248–49n24 nist (National Institute of Standards and Technology). See National Institute of Standards and Technology (nist) noaa (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), 22 norad (North American Aerospace ­Defense Command), 22 North Africa, 32, 142, 144, 149, 163, 174–75, 245n13, 246n15. See also specific place-­names North Amer­i­ca, 22–48, 142, 158, 185, 185–86, 231n12. See also specific place-­names North American Aerospace Defense Command (norad), 22 North Atlantic Treaty Organ­ization (nato). See nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organ­ization) North Britain, 42, 226n18. See also ­England; ­Great Britain

index   289

North-­West Frontier (South Asia), 142, 247n20 Notes on Aerial Photography, part II, The Interpretation of Aeroplane Photo­graphs in Mesopotamia, 165–66, 167f, 168f, 169f, 170 “nowhere” and “now ­here,” 53–54, 90, 119, 125–30, 135–36, 139 nypd (New York Police Department). See New York Police Department (nypd) Obama administration, 210 object, 1–4, 14, 21, 26–27, 30–31, 35, 48, 51, 58, 63–65, 72, 80, 84–94, 105, 109–13, 119, 122, 124, 128–31, 135, 142–43, 146–48, 152, 166–67, 170–71, 190–99, 205, 214, 223n5, 227n22, 228nn25–26, 233n17, 238–39n12, 253n7 objectivity, 12–14, 22, 31, 34–35, 38, 55, 63–64, 79, 138, 140, 142–43, 173, 181–82, 191, 194 observation, 1–4, 12–14, 33, 36–37, 44, 48–57, 63, 67–71, 77, 81, 85, 88, 95–99, 101–5, 108–17, 123–24, 127–31, 136, 150, 159, 212, 218n4, 228n24, 231n11, 235n23, 246n16; aerial and balloon, 3–4, 13, 29, 99, 101, 108, 131, 158, 208–9, 235n24; geo­graph­ic­ al, 82; military and warfare, 4, 31, 111; reconnaissance, 98, 234–35n22 occupation: colonial, 16, 70, 197, 198, 203, 206, 210; military, 31, 35–39, 66; of Iraq, 139, 153–58, 247n19; of Scotland, 47–48, 66; territorial, 46, 56, 60, 70 omniscience, 15–16, 29, 31, 35, 37, 176–77, 208–10 ontology, 130, 190 Operation Desert Storm, 208–9. See also First Persian Gulf War optics, 4, 29, 48, 78, 95, 114, 125, 152, 183, 194, 198, 253n4. See also panopticism; seeing; synoptic; vision Orientalism, 28, 142, 149, 158, 190, 197, 213, 243–44n5, 244n6 Other, the, 20, 27, 54 Ottoman Empire, 28, 139–40, 143–44, 149–50, 153, 155, 173, 179, 242n25, 243–44n5, 247n19, 248–49n24 Ottoman Fourth Army, 153 Ottoman-­Italian War, 140–44

290 index

pacification, 40, 42, 51, 56 paintings, 4, 80–81, 113, 120, 122, 128, 158, 236n4, 237–38n8, 238–39n12; landscape, 59–64, 105, 113–14; modernist, 146; panoramic, 2, 30–31, 104–36, 148, 182, 227n22, 235n1, 236n4, 240n16, 240n21, 242n26. See also pa­norama paintings Pakistan, 16, 210 Palestine, 17, 32–33, 149, 155, 159–60, 195, 199–201, 242–43n1 panopticism, 2, 21, 79, 95, 110–13, 136, 140, 235n1, 236–37n6 pa­norama paintings, 2–4, 30–32, 104–37, 242n26; antecedents, 122, 236n4; and balloons, 106–9, 236n3; critical reception, 120–21, 241n22; Edinburgh, 114–18; etymology, 114, 235n1; guide, 117–18, 130; immersion, 105–6, 125; installation, 104, 108, 110, 114–15, 125, 128–29; Jacobite influence, 115–19, 124, 132; London, 118–25; military draftsmen, 134–35, 235n2; origins, 111, 237nn7–8; patriotic or imperialist thematics, 118, 123–24, 131–37; perspective, 120, 125, 127–30, 240–41n21, 241n24; and photography, 182; scale, 107, 113–14, 121; realism, 121, 130, 134–35, 148; rotundas, 110–12, 129, 131, 242n26; Sandby, 227n22; “seeing all” at a glance (coup d’oeil), 122, 126, 129–30, 136; spectatorship, 105; technological sublime, 125, 134; time and space, 125–27, 129, 133; vertigo and confusion, 105, 114, 127–28, 135; visual ambiguity 128–29; war­time aftermaths, 134–37. See also titles of individual paintings panoramic vistas, 52, 56, 77–78, 107, 126, 140, 147–48, 219n9 Pantheon, 109–10 Paris, 11–12, 73, 96–102, 187, 230n5, 235n12, 237–38n8, 243n2, 246n16, 251n5 past, the, 1–2, 10, 17–19, 33, 39–41, 49–50, 53, 69, 76, 103, 123, 126, 144, 146, 154, 172, 175, 179, 195–98, 204–7, 234n18, 238n9, 252n10 patriotism, 7–8, 15, 20, 106, 133–34, 137, 156, 216 Patrol (MacDonald), 248n23

peace, 4, 7, 16, 18, 21, 59, 137, 200–201, 216, 219n12, 230n6, 242n25, 243n2; peacekeeping, 177–78; peacetime, 175 Pennant, Thomas, 84, 232n13, 233n14 perception, 2–4, 9–11, 15–16, 19–21, 26–28, 32–41, 47–56, 61, 67–72, 79–82, 88, 94–105, 114, 125–30, 135, 147, 150–51, 173–74, 183, 189–94, 199–201, 205–9, 212–16, 238n9, 240n19, 248–49n24 Persia, 153, 236. See also Iran Persian Gulf, 28, 32, 153, 155, 182–85, 190, 192, 206–9, 213, 251n7. See also First Persian Gulf War Per­sis­tent Surveillance Systems, 253n6 perspectivalism, 121, 241nn23–24 perspective, 9, 15, aerial, 10–11, 29, 56, 96, 127, 158, 190, 194, 195–98; aerostatic (balloon), 68–70, 78–80, 18; drawing, 111, 115; elevated, 4, 9, 52, 118, 126, 135; linear, 9, 32, 53, 63, 79–80, 88, 90, 105, 108, 128–31, 208, 214, 238n9, 241n23; loss of, 148, 194, 251n4; multiple, 70, 79–80, 94, 106, 135, 238n9; new, 10, 77, 85, 171; panoramic, 120–21, 125; partial, 104; unfamiliar, 90, 148; unnatural, 198; universal, 9, vertical, 30, 64, 86. See also scale Perth, 61 Perthshire, 43f, 58–59, 60f phenomenology, 72 photogrammetry, 172–73, 245–46n14 photography, 4, 8, 26, 195, 204–5, 209; aerial, 5, 12, 22, 32–33, 138–206, 219n10; aesthetics, 179, 193; antecedents, 136; archaeological, 178, 195–98, 249n4; civil contract of, 202; collodion, 12; documentary, 140, 185, 193; evidence, 203–6; invention of, 12; landscape, 4, 7, 147; for mapping, 142, 145, 147, 159, 163, 174, 242n1; objectivity, 142, 148, 173, 181; and planes, 150; realism, 139, 221n19, 231n8; reconnaissance, 4, 30, 32–33, 146–47, 160, 181–82, 195, 206; science, 147–48; spectral, 148; still, 33, 218n5; stop-­motion, 198; truth-­value, 32, 138, 173; unruly, 148; war, 139–41, 149, 153, 204, 245n13, 245–46n14, 246n16; world-­constituting, 143 photojournalism, 5–8, 15, 22, 25, 184–86, 190, 192

Picantin, 141f picturesque, the, 8, 36, 49, 57–59, 63, 66–67, 80–81, 86, 89–90, 147–48, 163, 186, 227n22, 228–29n27, 236n4. See also landscape(s) pi­lot, 3, 11, 27–28, 143, 148–52, 156–57, 160, 163, 165, 170–71, 176, 186, 200, 211, 243n4, 244n6, 246n16; ace, 150 Pitt, William, 242n25 Plan of Venice (de’ Barbari), 53f plea­sure, 1–2, 63, 106–7, 117, 170, 179, 218–19n7, 231n11 Pleydell, John, 58 pluriverse, 54 police, 3, 24f, 150, 175, 212, 220–21n17, 246n16, 250n30, 253n6 politics, 2, 9, 11–12, 16, 19–21, 35, 39–41, 45–49, 70, 74–75, 82, 99, 102–3, 112, 116–21, 124, 132–33, 138–53, 156, 173–78, 182–83, 186, 193–94, 198–203, 206, 208, 211, 213, 215, 225n15, 228n26, 229nn1–2, 230n5, 234–35n22, 235n23, 243n2, 247n17, 248–249n24; and aftermath, 38, 154, 174, 189, 203; of geography and location, 22; Jacobite, 112, 116, 180; preemptive, 214; of presence, 7; of rebellion, 63; repre­sen­ ta­tional, 30, 185; of the sensible, 32–33, 180–81, 216; of surveillance studies, 236–37n6; of war and war­time, 51. See also biopolitics Pont, Timothy, 43f, 44–46, 58–61, 228n24 Pont-­Gordon-­Blaeu maps, 46 population, 16, 20, 39, 46–47, 50–53, 63, 70–73, 112, 122, 129, 135, 139, 144, 163, 165, 173–78, 201–2, 211–12, 226n18, 241n23, 244n8, 252n1, 252–53n3 Porter, Robert Ker, 242n26 portraiture, 6–7, 12, 65, 67, 120, 197, 237–38n8, 239n14 Position of the British and French fleets, about Nine a.m., the First of June 1794 (Barker), 131 pos­si­ble, the, 1, 3, 41, 48, 51, 54, 61, 67, 109, 184, 206–7, 216. See also impossible, the postcolonial studies, 27, 30, 56, 152–53, 173, 224–25n9, 225n10, 226n19 potential, 28, 50, 58, 65–66, 99, 102, 114, 136, 147, 205, 241n24, 253n6

index   291

power, 2–3, 7, 20–23, 27, 29, 39–42, 48–49, 57, 60, 72, 74, 82–83, 96, 118, 123–24, 139–40, 145–48, 153, 158, 173, 179, 192, 209, 213, 217n1, 220n16, 226–27n20, 229n2, 241n22, 245n13, 246nn15–16; and art, 65; of the bomber and bombing, 176–78; colonial, 150, 246n15; cyborgian, 253n5; disciplinary, 110–11; dispositional, 207; firepower, 96, 175, 188; of images, 188; of observation and sight, 14, 52, 55, 68, 105, 112, 118, 136, 157, 182, 208, 211–14, 221–22n19; ontopower, 224n7. See also airpower precision, 14, 31, 37, 44, 56, 64, 79, 88, 90, 120, 135, 140, 159, 181, 184, 186, 199, 208–13, 224n8, 242–43n3 Predator drone. See mq-1 Predator drone Predator View, 211. See also imagery preemption, 65–66, 213–14, 224n7 premodernity, 55, 147, 175 presence, 3, 7, 17, 20, 24, 40, 52, 58, 61, 63–66, 105, 131–32, 148, 188–89, 194–99, 203, 205, 215–16, 221–22n19, 228n26, 253n7 pres­ent, the, 2, 15–21, 25–26, 30, 37, 40–41, 52–53, 61, 66, 76, 132, 134, 139, 144–47, 165, 175–76, 197, 202, 215; colonial, 154, 179, 184–85, 203, 220n16 pro­gress, 11, 14, 21, 41, 67, 71, 97, 103, 115, 123–24, 163, 178–79, 219n12 property, 36–37, 40, 52, 60, 79–80, 223n5, 242n26, 249n28 Proposal at Large, for the Construction of a ­Grand Naval Air-­Balloon (Baldwin), 83–84, 232–33n13 prospect, 4, 31, 37, 67, 71, 77–80, 85–91, 94–95, 104, 106, 117, 122, 132, 135, 241n22 proximity, 5–6, 17–18, 20, 22, 135, 163, 185, 191, 216 Ptolemy, Claudius, 9, 44, 225n12, 226–27n20 public, 3–5, 22–26, 31, 72–77, 82–83, 93, 106–9, 114, 118–19, 130–33, 152, 156, 178, 183–84, 205, 216, 217n1, 218n4, 228n26, 229n2, 247–48n21, 250n31, 253n6 punctum, 181. See also studium race, 49, 63, 137, 149, 180–81, 213–14, 226n16, 229n29 radar, 186–87

292 index

radio, 23, 211 raf (Royal Air Force). See Royal Air Force (raf) Ranelagh, 113 rationality, 7, 38, 54, 72, 81, 85, 90, 95, 139, 144, 148, 156, 239–40n15. See also reason realism, 3–4, 30, 36, 53, 59–60, 66, 71, 74, 79, 90, 94, 104–6, 108, 112–14, 121–22, 125–29, 133–36, 221–22n19, 227n22, 241n22; applied, 32, 139, 173–74, 179, 181, 184, 248–49n24; documentary, 182, 185–88, 194–95; geo­graph­i­cal, 142; photographic, 12, 119, 140 real­ity, 8, 18–19, 27, 46, 78, 80, 89, 91, 107, 125, 128–29, 140, 147, 158–59, 172, 194, 198–99, 226n19, 231n8, 241n22 Reaper drone. See mq-9 Reaper drone reason, 74, 220n16. See also rationality rebellion, 36; Jacobite, 31, 35, 41, 224n8, 227n21. See also revolt reconnaissance, 4–5, 12–14, 29–33, 55, 71, 92–99, 102, 136–40, 143–52, 156–63, 166, 172, 175–76, 180–82, 185–86, 194–95, 205–6, 209–11, 221n19, 222–23n4, 242–43n1, 244n6, 245nn10–11, 246n16. See also photography reconnaissance a vue, 55 Reinagle, Richard, 242n26 religion, 44–45, 49, 68, 142, 173, 225n15 remote, the, 2, 6, 8, 20–21, 34, 38–43, 52, 54, 61, 65–66, 131, 148, 173, 185–88, 190, 193, 203–6, 212, 227–28n23, 233n15, 253n5. See also distance; remote sensing remote sensing, 22, 29–30, 35–38, 55–56, 67, 79, 92, 94, 96–97, 102, 138, 243, 148, 182, 189, 198, 202–6, 210, 212, 214, 215–16, 253n6 Re­nais­sance, 9, 44, 79, 88, 105, 128, 148, 236n4, 238n9, 241n23 Renoir, Jean, 250n1 repre­sen­ta­tion, 2, 7, 9–12, 15–19, 26, 30–39, 44–54, 57–69, 79–80, 92, 94–95, 98, 103–8, 114, 117, 123, 127, 130–35, 139–48, 163, 173, 181, 184–94, 199, 203–6, 215, 218n5, 220n15, 227–28n23, 228n24 re­sis­tance, 2–3, 13, 22, 33, 40, 60, 66, 115, 139, 177–78, 180, 216, 217–18n3, 220n16, 225–26n16, 244n8 revolution, 4, 9, 70, 99, 124, 133, 229n2

revolution in military affairs (rma), 152, 184, 208–9 Revolutionary War. See American War of In­de­pen­dence Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 120 rfc (Royal Flying Corps). See Royal Flying Corps (rfc) Rhine Maps, 161, 163 Rhine River, 161, 163 rights. See ­human rights Ristelhueber, Sophie, 32, 185–94, 197, 201, 206, 251n4 River Dee, 87 River Thames, 123–24 River Tweed, 49 rma (revolution in military affairs) See revolution in military affairs (rma) roads, 36, 41–43, 46, 51, 57–59, 62–64, 87–90, 93, 121, 124, 163, 170–71, 179–80, 185, 223n5, 234n20. See also infrastructure Robert ­brothers, 73, 83 Roman, Pierre, 230n4 Romanticism, 2–3, 19, 21, 43, 49, 55–56, 67, 75, 90, 178, 198, 227n22, 231–32n12, 240n17, 241n22. See also landscape(s) rotunda, 4, 105–14, 119, 128–34, 227n22, 235–36n2, 241n22, 242n26. See also pa­norama Rough Wooing, the, 47, 225n14 round, in the, 105–14, 118, 125, 130, 237n7. See also circularity; pa­norama Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 74, 112 Roy, William, 38, 41–43, 48, 64, 222n2, 223n5, 225n11, 228nn24–25, 229n28 Royal Acad­emy of the Arts, 61, 113, 227n22, 238n10, 242n27 Royal Air Force (raf), 158–59, 165–66, 170–72, 175–78, 249nn27–28, 250nn30–31 Royal Flying Corps (rfc), 157, 159, 175–76, 178, 246n16, 249n25 Royal Military Acad­emy at Woolwich, 42, 61, 134 Royal Navy, 135, 333n3; Air Ser­vice, 249n25 de Rozier, Jean-­Francois Pilâtre, 11, 75, 230n4, 232–33n13 Rrose Sélavy, 188–89, 251n5. See also Duchamp, Marcel

ruins, 6, 142, 163, 165, 170, 179, 185–86, 197, 202, 244n6, 251n7 rural, the, 51, 58, 75, 104, 175, 233n15, 241n23. See also landscape Rus­sia, 27, 152, 235n24, 236–37n6, 242n25, 247n20 Sadler, James, 83, 233n15 Sahara (film, 1943), 248n23 Sahara (film, 1995), 248n23 Sahara Desert, 201 St. Quentin, 170, 171f, 172 Salmond, Major General Geoffrey, 159, 163 Samarra, 166, 168f Samawah, 177–78 Sandby, Paul, 42, 57–67, 182, 227nn21–22, 227–28n23, 229n28 Sandby, Thomas, 59, 227n21 San Remo conference, 139 satellite, 5–6, 11, 14–15, 21–30, 102, 138, 181, 184, 205, 208–15, 218n4, 231–32n12. See also imagery Satellite Pour l’Observation de la Terre (spot). See spot (Satellite Pour l’Observation de la Terre) Saudi Arabia, 184, 195 de Saussure, Horace-­Benedict, 56 scale, 5–6, 11, 16–19, 22–25, 29, 32, 35, 39, 42, 51, 64–65, 68–69, 87–88, 94–95, 106–7, 113–14, 117, 120, 122, 128, 131, 133, 145, 148, 150, 154, 159, 163, 174–75, 178, 181, 185, 190, 192–95, 209, 214, 217n1, 229n28, 231n7, 233n15, 251n4, 251n7. See also perspective scenery, 57, 62–63, 86, 121. See also landscape(s); and specific attributes science, 12, 31, 34, 48–57, 62, 68–76, 80–85, 92, 95, 99, 103, 119, 140, 145, 148, 151, 179, 182, 209, 222n3, 226–27n20, 229nn1–2, 230n4, 246n16, 248–49n24 Schiehallion, 43f, 60f, 60–65, 228nn24–25 Scot, Sir John, 46 Scotia: Regno di Scotia (Forlani), 47f Scotland, 30–32, 34–51, 57–64, 66–67, 69, 115–16, 119, 222n1, 222–23n4, 223n5, 224n7, 225n14, 225–26n16, 226n18, 228n24, 233n15 screen, the, 8, 182–84, 187–88, 190, 197–99, 206, 221n18, 251n7

index   293

security, 2, 19, 22, 27, 76, 133, 158, 211–18, 246n15, 253n7 seeing: Af­ghan­i­stan, 16, 28; all, 1, 9, 31, 36, 66, 102, 104–37, 140, 145, 157–74, 193; constructed nature of, 8, 70; like a drone, 253n4; less or selectively, 102, 118, 194, 199, 253n4; and seen, 1–2, 118; like a state, 52–57, 97; ways of, 4, 9, 15, 36, 48, 53–55, 66–67, 69, 105, 115, 129, 141, 198, 214. See also sight; unseen; vision Sekula, Allan, 143, 146–47, 221n19, 243n4, 245n10 Semendinger, Greg, 3, 8–9, 22–23, 24f, 26, 30, 220–21n17 sense making, 36–37 senses, the, 50, 80, 105, 121, 193. See also sight; sound; touch; vision sensible, the, 9, 32–39, 48, 55, 66, 69–72, 76, 78, 101, 105, 180–81, 189, 191, 203–4, 206, 212–16, 251n7, 252n2. See also politics: of the sensible; sensibility; sensing sensibility, 103, 106, 131, 194, 202 sensing, 19, 33–35, 54, 56, 77–78, 98, 102, 105–8, 112, 115, 126, 129, 183, 211; heat, 209. See also remote sensing; sense making sensor, 25, 211–12 September 11, 2001, 3–9, 15–27, 30, 209, 213, 217n2, 217–18n3, 218nn5–6, 218–19n7, 219nn8–9, 220n13, 220–21n17, 221n18, 224n7, 253n7. See also aftermath; imagery settlements: Israeli, 200–201, 204 Shadow Sites II (film, 2011), 195–197 Shatt al-­Arab waterway, 153, 247n18 Shaw, Charles F., 150 Sheikh, Fazal, 32–33, 145, 198–206 shock: and awe, 177 Sidh Chailleann, 61. See also Schiehallion Sierra Nevada Corporation, 212 sight, 8–10, 32, 54–55, 68, 77–81, 85–88, 91–93, 102, 105–14, 215; bomb and drone, 211, 214, 253n4; embodied, 86; gun or target, 87; limits to, 63, 67, 88, 92, 137–38, 143, 176, 213–14, 233–34n17; lines of, 1, 38, 53, 62, 67, 89, 95, 98, 104, 110, 129, 131, 223n5, 238n9, 240–41n21; tourist or entertainment, 1, 121, 236n5; unsettled, 109, 136–37. See also seeing; senses, the; vision

294 index

simulation, 104–8, 114, 184, 206, 241n22 situational awareness, 96–97 sketching, 3–4, 31, 36, 39, 47, 52–55, 58–61, 64, 66, 80–81, 92, 97–98, 120, 134–35, 142–43, 166, 222–23n4, 223n5, 227–28n23, 228n24 sky: eye(s) in the, 22, 183, 208; skyline, 1; skyscraper, 3, 183; view from the, 36, 48 slavery, 17, 110, 236–37n6 small war. See war: small social, the, 26, 40, 50, 56, 80, 83, 107–8, 112, 119, 121, 134, 144, 192, 226n20, 229n2, 238n9, 239–40n15 social justice, 182, 193, 198, 201 social network, 5–6, 182–83, 240n20 social science, 26, 34, 95, 217n1, 240n20 society, 27, 45, 76, 82, 108, 225n15, 239–40n15; civil, 31, 96, 132–33 soil, 6, 16, 19–20, 50, 70, 196, 251–52n8 Somalia, 149, 210, 252–53n3 Somaliland, 175, 249n27 Somerset House, 113, 128, 238nn9–10 sound, 85, 107, 197, 210, 221n18, 251n7. See also senses, the South Asia. See Asia: South Soviets, 16, 218n4, 248n23 Soyuzkarta, 218n4 space, 7, 10–11, 18–21, 30–38, 46, 51–55, 58, 61–62, 67–71, 76–82, 90–98, 106, 122, 125–27, 131–32, 136, 139–44, 147–49, 158, 165, 174, 176, 183, 190–94, 204–10, 215, 220n14, 225–26n16, 227n22, 238n9, 241n23, 246n15; and aesthetics, 9, 236n4; airspace, 3, 179; ­battle and war, 98, 144, 194, 199, 212–14; colonial, 142; exhibition and gallery, 108, 110–13, 118–19, 125–26, 241n22, 241n24; infrastructural, 41, 48, 56–57, 66, 224–25n9; online, 201; outer, 8, 22, 25–28, 30, 87, 218n4; urban, 2, 17 Space​.­com, 27 Space Imaging Corporation, 26 Spain, 133, 175, 230n6, 234n18 spectacular, the, 1–2, 7–8, 15–18, 21, 23, 26–27, 73–74, 77, 85, 100, 102, 105, 107, 113, 126, 129, 132–36, 153, 177–78, 184–85, 194–95, 219nn8–9, 224–25n9, 227n22, 229n1

spectatorship, 2, 31–32, 70, 74–77, 87, 90, 104–9, 113–37, 185, 199, 219n9, 221–22n19, 232–33n13, 236n4, 237n7, 238n9, 241n22 spectral. See ghosts; haunting speed, 94, 145, 150–51, 183, 209 spot (Satellite Pour l’Observation de la Terre), 218n4 standardization, 3, 35, 38–39, 48, 53–55, 66, 80, 97, 138–40, 160, 163, 166, 212, 223n5, 253n4 state, the, 2, 4, 7, 9, 14, 17, 22, 27–28, 31–41, 45–48, 51–57, 62–67, 70, 74–75, 81–83, 97–100, 103, 107, 115–18, 131–33, 153, 173–74, 177–82, 193, 200–203, 211, 216, 219n9, 225n11, 225–26n16, 228n26, 241n23, 243n2, 250n30, 253n7. See also nation-­state; and specific countries Steichen, Edward, 147, 243n4, 245n10 Stein, Gertrude, 172 Storming of Seringapatam (Porter), 242n26 Strand, the, 109, 242n26 stratospheric, the, 28–29 strike: air, 186, 253n5; drone and targeted, 210, 252n2 studium, 181. See also punctum subject, 9, 13–16, 22, 27, 48–50, 62, 74, 80, 83, 110–12, 121–24, 128–33, 136, 152, 174, 185, 193, 198, 204, 215 subjective, the, 13–14, 22, 140 sublime, the, 8, 12, 23, 25, 31, 51–52, 57, 63, 66, 69, 71, 76, 79, 85–86, 101, 113–15, 119, 121, 125, 130, 134, 194, 219n9, 228–29n27, 231n10, 231–32n12, 241n22; military, 192–93; technological, 125 Suprematism (non-­objective), 190 surface, 11, 14, 48, 64–65, 72, 112, 125, 190, 195–96, 215, 240–41n21, 251n4; earth’s or ground, 21, 36, 49, 56–57, 88, 91, 196, 202, 214, 230n6 surveillance, 5, 25, 29–30, 71, 97, 102, 110–12, 136, 147, 151–52, 157, 162, 170, 176–79, 208–14, 218n4, 236–37n6, 253nn5–6 survey, 2, 4–5, 79–82, 97–98, 102, 116, 129, 134, 140, 142, 145, 152–53, 158–60, 170, 174–79, 197, 206, 213–14, 225n11, 228n24, 248n24; aerial, 32, 139, 151, 159, 174–78, 244n7, 246n16; aftermath, 139; equipment, 223n5; military, 12, 30–31, 35–69, 104, 132, 147–48,

160, 166, 182, 222nn1–3, 222–23n4, 223n5, 224n7, 227nn21–22, 229n28, 242–43n1, 245n11 Survey Department General Headquarters (ghq, Mesopotamia), 159 Survey Party at Kinloch Rannoch, Perthshire. See View near Loch Rannoch (Sandby), 59 Suy-­Challen. See Schiehallion; Sidh Chailleann Switzerland, 180–81, 198–99 synoptic, the, 54, 56, 68, 96–98, 105, 114–15, 140, 165 Syria, 17, 160, 175, 178–79, 195, 243n2 Syrian Desert, 153 Syrian Quarter (NY), 17 Taliban, 28 target, 16, 26–29, 36, 74, 87, 95, 116, 130–31, 177–78, 183–88, 214, 219n12 targeted killing, 19, 209–11, 252–53n3, 253n5 Tarmiyah, 165 Tarrant, Charles, 58, 64 Tate Modern, 251n7 techno-­determinism, 11 technofetishism, 182–83 technology, 3–4, 26, 30, 32, 15, 69–76, 79, 82, 102–3, 108, 124, 142, 144, 148–49, 151, 174, 178, 198, 203–4, 208–10, 212, 224–25n9, 225n14, 229n2, 230–31n7, 237n7, 252n9; aftermath, 139; of observation, reconnaissance, and remote sensing, 22, 67, 101, 112, 143, 147, 150, 152, 158, 179, 182–83, 198–99, 208, 214–15, 242–43n1, 253n5–6; transportation, 9–10 teleology, 67, 103 tele­vi­sion, 3, 28, 182–85, 209–10, 218n5, 220n14, 221n18, 234n21 temporality. See time Tennant, Lt. Col. J. E., 160, 162, 248n22 terrain, 9, 15–16, 20, 31–40, 43–59, 63–67, 75, 79, 92–98, 139, 144, 148, 152–60, 176, 190–91, 196, 201, 203, 210–13, 227n22, 234n20; affective and symbolic, 38, 116, 181 territory, 11, 17, 31–32, 35–48, 52–57, 60, 66–67, 70, 81–82, 98–99, 102, 131–33, 141, 144, 159, 161, 173–75, 203, 209, 212–13, 216, 226–27n20, 247–48n21

index   295

terror, 16, 50, 57, 72, 175–78, 192–93, 231– 32n12; terrorism, 217n2; terrorist, 219n9, 245n9. See also war on terror theater, 112–13, 236n4, 237n7; of war, 161, 163, 165 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum sive Atlas Novus I, 45–46 Third Fleet (U.S. Navy), 28 Thirteen, The (film, 1937), 248n23 Thomas, Captain H. Hamshaw, 160, 163 Tigris River, 153–54, 162f, 163, 243–44n5 Tilleloy, le, 144f Time (magazine), 186–88 time, 9, 18–23, 29–41, 46–47, 53–55, 58, 67–72, 90–94, 104–8, 111, 119–22, 125–33, 139, 142–47, 165, 174, 181, 186, 193–98, 201–6, 208, 215–16, 220n14, 220n16, 220–21n17, 221n18, 225n10, 225n14, 240n19, 241n22, 246n15, 247n19, 248n22; timeless, 49, 88, 243–44n5; real-­time, 101, 184, 208, 210, 253n6. See also ­future, the; past, the; peace: peacetime; pres­ent, the; war­time Times of London, 75, 140 topography, 37, 44–47, 54, 57–61, 65–69, 79–80, 92, 95–98, 103, 105, 108, 122, 134, 139–40, 142, 148, 158–59, 163, 166, 173, 194, 198, 208, 222n3, 222–23n4, 227–28n23, 235–36n2, 241n23, 245n11 touch, 22, 52, 210, 216. See also haptic tourism, 72, 80, 84, 123, 229n29 Tournachon, Félix (pseud. Nadar), 12, 219n10 Tower of London, 222n3, 222–23n4 trace, 25, 28, 33–34, 37, 57–58, 66, 92, 94, 106, 118, 195–209, 215, 218n4 trade, 40, 126, 131, 133 transcendence, 9, 31, 148 transportation, 9–12, 63, 75–76, 83, 94, 108, 156–57, 224n8, 234n19, 235n24, 246n15, 248n22 trauma, 5–6, 17, 21, 25, 28, 37–38, 77, 139, 178, 204, 218n5 travel, 29–30, 50, 57–62, 78–81, 91, 113, 121, 131, 144–45, 185, 231n8, 233n17, 234n19, 236–37n6, 248–49n24; guides and travelogues, 142, 229n1 Trenchard, Hugh, 249n27 Tripoli, 141, 150

296 index

truth, 7, 14, 16, 32, 34, 41, 55, 81, 138, 140, 173–74, 179–83, 191, 204–5, 209–10, 215, 231n11, 234–35n22. See also ground: truth Turkestan, 28 Turkey, 139–40, 153, 156, 176, 230n5, 236–37n6, 243n3, 245n13, 249n27 Turner, J. M. W., 242n27 Tytler, James, 83, 233n15 uav (unmanned aerial vehicle). See ­unmanned aerial vehicle (uav) uncanny, 20, 50–51, 79, 85, 128–29, 218–19n7 unification, 39–42, 57, 115–17, 223–24n6 Union Army (U.S. Civil War), 13, 101–2, 235n23 United Nations Security Council, 218n4 United States, 5, 15–16, 21, 27–28, 96, 102, 149–52, 174–75, 182–86, 208–12, 216, 219n11, 224n7, 248–49n24, 252n9, 253n6. See also United States Armed Forces; and specific places United States Armed Forces, 186; Air Force, 209–10, 242–43n1, 252n1; Army, 150; Navy, 28 universalism, 9, 15, 39, 88, 125, 128, 151, 193, 216 unmanned aerial vehicle (uav), 33, 209–10, 243n5. See also drone unruly, 2, 18–20, 31, 34, 37–38, 41, 50, 74, 78, 129–30, 134, 139, 149, 182, 188, 191, 229 unseen, 2–7, 14–17, 21, 27, 106, 118, 134–37, 145–48, 154, 158, 191, 199, 248n23. See also politics: of the sensible; seeing: lesser or selectively; sensing; sight: limits to Untitled (Gulf War Work) (al-­Ani), 251n7 urban, 2, 8, 12, 23, 66, 104, 144, 182–83, 212–13, 217n1, 226n17, 238n9, 241n23; planning and design, 4, 239–40n15; suburban, 127 U.S. War Department, 5–6 value, 15, 19, 47–48, 51, 101, 146, 150, 166, 221–22n19, 234n20; aesthetic, 120; historical, 4; humanist, 193; symbolic, 44; truth, 32, 34, 138, 215; use-­, 205 Venice, 53 verticality, 14, 26, 30–31, 64, 71, 78, 86–87, 91, 122, 138, 146–48, 160, 166, 212–15, 226n17, 239n13

vertigo, 78, 127–28, 193–94, 239n13 virtual, the, 53, 90, 102, 108, 121–25, 137, 183–84, 215, 236n3 Vie au ­grand air, La (magazine), 150, 151f Vietnam War, 184–85 view from above, 2–4, 8–13, 29, 31, 35–36, 39, 52, 71–72, 79, 82, 94–97, 104, 126, 138, 140, 142, 189, 191–92. See also aerial views; observation: aerial View near Loch Rannoch (Sandby), 59f, 59–60 View of Constantinople from the Tower of Galata (Barker), 131 View of Constantinople from the Tower of Leander (Barker), 131 View of Edinburgh and the Surrounding Country from the Calton Hill (Barker), 111, 115, 118, 125 View of the Fleet at Spithead (Barker), 131 View of Toledo (El Greco), 9 Villette, André Giroud de, 96 vio­lence, 2–7, 17–22, 28–32, 38–41, 47–48, 51, 57, 60, 67, 132–39, 149, 154, 174–78, 183–84, 192, 194, 199, 202–8, 216, 217n2, 219n9, 246–47n17, 250n29, 252n1; dispositional, 16, 26, 35, 96, 103, 115, 214, 224–25n9 Virilio, Paul, 4, 29, 102, 149–50, 182–83, 198, 210–11, 217n2, 243n4, 250n2 Visscher, Claes, 122 visibility, 2, 8, 12, 22–27, 37, 46, 58, 62, 78, 112, 114, 118, 128, 143, 176, 180, 183, 192, 196–203, 215–16, 228n24, 245n11. See also invisibility vision, 1–4, 8–11, 16, 21–22, 27, 54–57, 66, 71, 78–80, 88, 98–102, 120, 122, 128, 147–48, 209–14, 231n10, 238n9, 241n24; aerial, 97; drone, 131; militarized, 96, 208; panoramic, 127. See also seeing; senses, the; sight Visit, The (film, 2005), 251n7 visual culture, 1, 4, 7, 26, 30–33, 69, 82, 104–5, 136, 141, 207–8, 243n4 Wade, General George, 42–43, 51, 58–59, 62 Wales, 60–61, 87, 133, 227n22 war, 4, 7, 12–41, 49, 51, 57–58, 61, 67–71, 76, 82–84, 96–103, 105–6, 127, 130–66, 178–216, 219n12, 224n9, 227n21, 234n21, 235n23, 242n25, 243n4, 244n6, 246n16, 247n18, 249n27, 250n1, 251n5, 252n1; class,

123, 227n22; declared v. undeclared, 4, 16, 20, 27, 30–35, 41, 116, 133, 145, 152, 172–75, 203–4, 207–8, 242n25, 244n8; fog of, 55, 101, 212; late modern, 253n4; maps, 4, 12; postwar, 32, 175, 240n17, 249n27, 252n1; small, 70, 175, 245n9; world, 144, 203–4; zone, 163, 245n10, 245n13. See also air war; ground: war; warfare; war on terror; war­time; and specific conflicts warfare, 4, 12–14, 20, 27, 31, 33, 39, 47–48, 56–57, 70–71, 96, 98, 102–3, 131–35, 140–41, 143, 146, 160, 185, 191, 206, 208–9, 215, 225n9, 234n20; aerial, 175; art of, 222–23n4; asymmetrical, 32, 142, 190, 209–10, 244n8; class, 227n22; desert, 154, 158; distance and drone, 210–11; electronic, 186; forensic, 202–3; irregular, 183; land, 97, 99; Napoleonic, 55, 103; trench, 245n13 war on terror, 2, 5, 30, 33, 179, 207, 215, 224n7 war­time, 4, 15–23, 26, 29–32, 34–41, 48–51, 56–57, 63, 66–67, 70, 76, 96, 103, 106, 115–18, 131–49, 154, 172–75, 179, 185–86, 194, 198, 207, 214–16, 224–25n9, 229n2, 240n17, 251n7. See also aftermath Washington, DC, 15, 197 wasteland, 38, 43–44, 50, 57, 62–63, 142, 179, 194, 201–2, 252n9 watchtower, 29–30, 33, 97–99, 102 watercolor, 58–61, 227–28n23. See also map; painting Watson, David, 41–43, 48, 222n2, 227–28n23 Watts, James, 124 weaponization, 158, 210–11, 253n5. See also imagery: as weapon Weizman, Eyal, 32–33, 199–206 Welchman, John, 170–72 Wemyss, Earl of, 115, 240n18 West, Benjamin, 120 West, the, 4, 9–19, 22, 27–28, 32, 36, 44, 49, 70, 97–98, 116, 128–29, 138–43, 148–50, 154–55, 158, 163, 166, 173–75, 185, 190, 199, 225n12, 230–31n7, 231n10, 241n23, 243–44n5, 244n6, 245n13, 246n16, 248–49n24, 252n9 West Bank, 199–200 West End (London), 119

index   297

Western Front, 144–45, 149, 153, 155, 170, 172, 180, 245n13, 247n20. See also World War I Westminster, 121–23, 126 When I Was a Photographer (Nadar), 219n10 Williams, John, 42 ­women, 40, 251n5, 251n6, 252n1 Words­worth, William, 120, 241n22 world, 1, 3, 8, 17–19, 22, 32, 34, 37, 43–48, 54–55, 57, 67, 80, 153, 157, 207–8, 226n17, 226n19, 241n23, 247n20; and aerial views/ imagery, 11, 13–15, 21, 56, 71, 76–77, 82, 84, 87, 91–93, 103, 143, 146–47, 150, 159–60, 182, 189–92, 205–6, 230n6; colonial, 20, 220n16; and modernity, 10, 12; and ­panopticism, 112; and pa­noramas, 104, 106, 109–11, 115, 118, 123–24, 128–31, 136; picture and target, 26–29; and remote

298 index

sensing, 214–16; world-­making, 26, 29, 143, 216, 224–25n9, 228n26 World Trade Center towers, 1–3, 7, 15–18, 23–26, 30, 217nn1–2, 218nn5–6, 218–19n7, 219n8, 220n13 World War I, 13, 19, 28, 32, 138–54, 157f, 158–63, 172–75, 180, 182–84, 189, 197, 221n19, 243n2, 245nn10–12, 245–46n14, 247nn18–20, 248n23, 248–49n24, 249n25, 249n27, 251n5 World War II, 14, 26, 153–54, 180, 185, 208, 211 Wright, Wilbur, 150 Wyatt, Samuel, 122 Wyngaerde, Anton van den, 122 Yemen, 210, 252–53n3 Zambecari, Francesco, 233n15 zkm (art gallery), 25